VIII
While the men talked thus, Bertram Ingledew's ears ought to have
burned behind the bushes. But, to say the truth, he cared little
for their conversation; for had he not turned aside down one of the
retired gravel paths in the garden, alone with Frida?
"That's General Claviger of Herat, I suppose," he said in a low
tone, as they retreated out of ear-shot beside the clump of
syringas. "What a stern old man he is, to be sure, with what a
stern old face! He looks like a person capable of doing or ordering
all the strange things I've read of him in the papers."
"Oh, yes," Frida answered, misunderstanding for the moment her
companion's meaning. "He's a very clever man, I believe, and a most
distinguished officer."
Bertram smiled in spite of himself. "Oh, I didn't mean that," he
cried, with the same odd gleam in his eyes Frida had so often
noticed there. "I meant, he looked capable of doing or ordering all
the horrible crimes he's credited with in history. You remember, it
was he who was employed in massacring the poor savage Zulus in
their last stand at bay, and in driving the Afghan women and
children to die of cold and starvation on the mountain-tops after
the taking of Kabul. A terrible fighter, indeed! A terrible
history!"
"But I believe he's a very good man in private life," Frida put in
apologetically, feeling compelled to say the best she could for her
husband's guest. "I don't care for him much myself, to be sure, but
Robert likes him. And he's awfully nice, every one says, to his
wife and step-children."
"How CAN he be very good," Bertram answered in his gentlest voice,
"if he hires himself out indiscriminately to kill or maim whoever
he's told to, irrespective even of the rights and wrongs of the
private or public quarrel he happens to be employed upon? It's an
appalling thing to take a fellow-creature's life, even if you're
quite, quite sure it's just and necessary; but fancy contracting to
take anybody's and everybody's life you're told to, without any
chance even of inquiring whether they may not be in the right after
all, and your own particular king or people most unjust and cruel
and blood-stained aggressors? Why, it's horrible to contemplate.
Do you know, Mrs. Monteith," he went on, with his far-away air,
"it's that that makes society here in England so difficult to me.
It's so hard to mix on equal terms with your paid high priests and
your hired slaughterers, and never display openly the feelings you
entertain towards them. Fancy if you had to mix so yourself with
the men who flogged women to death in Hungary, or with the
governors and jailors of some Siberian prison! That's the worst of
travel. When I was in Central Africa, I sometimes saw a poor black
woman tortured or killed before my very eyes; and if I'd tried to
interfere in her favour, to save or protect her, I'd only have got
killed myself, and probably have made things all the worse in the
end for her. And yet it's hard indeed to have to look on at, or
listen to, such horrors as these without openly displaying one's
disgust and disapprobation. Whenever I meet your famous generals,
or your judges and your bishops, I burn to tell them how their acts
affect me; yet I'm obliged to refrain, because I know my words
could do no good and might do harm, for they could only anger them.
My sole hope of doing anything to mitigate the rigour of your cruel
customs is to take as little notice of them as possible in any way
whenever I find myself in unsympathetic society."
"Then you don't think ME unsympathetic?" Frida murmured, with a
glow of pleasure.
"O Frida," the young man cried, bending forward and looking at her,
"you know very well you're the only person here I care for in the
least or have the slightest sympathy with."
Frida was pleased he should say so; he was so nice and gentle: but
she felt constrained none the less to protest, for form's sake at
least, against his calling her once more so familiarly by her
Christian name. "NOT Frida to you, if you please, Mr. Ingledew,"
she said as stiffly as she could manage. "You know it isn't right.
Mrs. Monteith, you must call me." But she wasn't as angry, somehow,
at the liberty he had taken as she would have been in anybody
else's case; he was so very peculiar.
Bertram Ingledew paused and checked himself.
"You think I do it on purpose," he said with an apologetic air; "I
know you do, of course; but I assure you I don't. It's all pure
forgetfulness. The fact is, nobody can possibly call to mind all
the intricacies of your English and European customs at once,
unless he's to the manner born, and carefully brought up to them
from his earliest childhood, as all of you yourselves have been.
He may recollect them after an effort when he thinks of them
seriously; but he can't possibly bear them all in mind at once
every hour of the day and night by a pure tour de force of mental
concentration. You know it's the same with your people in other
barbarous countries. Your own travellers say it themselves about
the customs of Islam. They can't learn them and remember them all
at every moment of their lives, as the Mohammedans do; and to make
one slip there is instant death to them."
Frida looked at him earnestly. "But I hope," she said with an
air of deprecation, pulling a rose to pieces, petal by petal,
nervously, as she spoke, "you don't put us on quite the same level
as Mohammedans. We're so much more civilised. So much better in
every way. Do you know, Mr. Ingledew," and she hesitated for a
minute, "I can't bear to differ from you or blame you in anything,
because you always appear to me so wise and good and kind-hearted
and reasonable; but it often surprises me, and even hurts me, when
you seem to talk of us all as if we were just so many savages.
You're always speaking about taboo, and castes, and poojah, and
fetiches, as if we weren't civilised people at all, but utter
barbarians. Now, don't you think--don't you admit, yourself, it's
a wee bit unreasonable, or at any rate impolite, of you?"
Bertram drew back with a really pained expression on his handsome
features. "O Mrs. Monteith!" he cried, "Frida, I'm so sorry if
I've seemed rude to you! It's all the same thing--pure human
inadvertence; inability to throw myself into so unfamiliar an
attitude. I forget every minute that YOU do not recognise the
essential identity of your own taboos and poojahs and fetiches with
the similar and often indistinguishable taboos and poojahs and
fetiches of savages generally. They all come from the same source,
and often retain to the end, as in your temple superstitions and
your marriage superstitions, the original features of their savage
beginnings. And as to your being comparatively civilised, I grant
you that at once; only it doesn't necessarily make you one bit more
rational--certainly not one bit more humane, or moral, or brotherly
in your actions."
"I don't understand you," Frida cried, astonished. "But there! I
often don't understand you; only I know, when you've explained
things, I shall see how right you are."
Bertram smiled a quiet smile.
"You're certainly an apt pupil," he said, with brotherly gentleness,
pulling a flower as he went and slipping it softly into her bosom.
"Why, what I mean's just this. Civilisation, after all, in the
stage in which you possess it, is only the ability to live together
in great organised communities. It doesn't necessarily imply any
higher moral status or any greater rationality than those of the
savage. All it implies is greater cohesion, more unity, higher
division of functions. But the functions themselves, like those of
your priests and judges and soldiers, may be as barbaric and cruel,
or as irrational and unintelligent, as any that exist among the most
primitive peoples. Advance in civilisation doesn't necessarily
involve either advance in real knowledge of one's relations to the
universe, or advance in moral goodness and personal culture. Some
highly civilised nations of historic times have been more cruel and
barbarous than many quite uncultivated ones. For example, the
Romans, at the height of their civilisation, went mad drunk with
blood at their gladiatorial shows; the Athenians of the age of
Pericles and Socrates offered up human sacrifices at the Thargelia,
like the veriest savages; and the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, the
most civilised commercial people of the world in their time, as the
English are now, gave their own children to be burnt alive as
victims to Baal. The Mexicans were far more civilised than the
ordinary North American Indians of their own day, and even in some
respects than the Spanish Christians who conquered, converted,
enslaved, and tortured them; but the Mexican religion was full of
such horrors as I could hardly even name to you. It was based
entirely on cannibalism, as yours is on Mammon. Human sacrifices
were common--commoner even than in modern England, I fancy.
New-born babies were killed by the priests when the corn was sown;
children when it had sprouted; men when it was full grown; and very
old people when it was fully ripe."
"How horrible!" Frida exclaimed.
"Yes, horrible," Bertram answered; "like your own worst customs. It
didn't show either gentleness or rationality, you'll admit; but it
showed what's the one thing essential to civilisation--great
coherence, high organisation, much division of function. Some of
the rites these civilised Mexicans performed would have made the
blood of kindly savages run cold with horror. They sacrificed a man
at the harvest festival by crushing him like the corn between two
big flat stones. Sometimes the priests skinned their victim alive,
and wore his raw skin as a mask or covering, and danced hideous
dances, so disguised, in honour of the hateful deities whom their
fancies had created--deities even more hateful and cruel, perhaps,
than the worst of your own Christian Calvinistic fancies. I can't
see, myself, that civilised people are one whit the better in all
these respects than the uncivilised barbarian. They pull together
better, that's all; but war, bloodshed, superstition, fetich-
worship, religious rites, castes, class distinctions, sex taboos,
restrictions on freedom of thought, on freedom of action, on
freedom of speech, on freedom of knowledge, are just as common in
their midst as among the utterly uncivilised."
"Then what you yourself aim at," Frida said, looking hard at him,
for he spoke very earnestly--"what you yourself aim at is--?"
Bertram's eyes came back to solid earth with a bound.
"Oh, what we at home aim at," he said, smiling that sweet, soft
smile of his that so captivated Frida, "is not mere civilisation
(though, of course, we value that too, in its meet degree, because
without civilisation and co-operation no great thing is possible),
but rationality and tenderness. We think reason the first good--to
recognise truly your own place in the universe; to hold your head
up like a man, before the face of high heaven, afraid of no ghosts
or fetiches or phantoms; to understand that wise and right and
unselfish actions are the great requisites in life, not the service
of non-existent and misshapen creatures of the human imagination.
Knowledge of facts, knowledge of nature, knowledge of the true
aspects of the world we live in,--these seem to us of first
importance. After that, we prize next reasonable and reasoning
goodness; for mere rule-of-thumb goodness, which comes by rote, and
might so easily degenerate into formalism or superstition, has no
honour among us, but rather the contrary. If any one were to say
with us (after he had passed his first infancy) that he always did
such and such a thing because he had been told it was right by his
parents or teachers--still more because priests or fetich-men had
commanded it--he would be regarded, not as virtuous, but as feeble
or wicked--a sort of moral idiot, unable to distinguish rationally
for himself between good and evil. That's not the sort of conduct
WE consider right or befitting the dignity of a grown man or woman,
an ethical unit in an enlightened community. Rather is it their
prime duty to question all things, to accept no rule of conduct or
morals as sure till they have thoroughly tested it."
"Mr. Ingledew," Frida exclaimed, "do you know, when you talk like
that, I always long to ask you where on earth you come from, and
who are these your people you so often speak about. A blessed
people: I would like to learn about them; and yet I'm afraid to.
You almost seem to me like a being from another planet."
The young man laughed a quiet little laugh of deprecation, and sat
down on the garden bench beside the yellow rose-bush.
"Oh, dear, no, Frida," he said, with that transparent glance of
his. "Now, don't look so vexed; I shall call you Frida if I choose;
it's your name, and I like you. Why let this funny taboo of one's
own real name stand in the way of reasonable friendship? In many
savage countries a woman's never allowed to call her husband by his
name, or even to know it, or, for the matter of that, to see him in
the daylight. In your England, the arrangement's exactly reversed:
no man's allowed to call a woman by her real name unless she's
tabooed for life to him--what you Europeans call married to him.
But let that pass. If one went on pulling oneself up short at every
one of your customs, one'd never get any further in any question
one was discussing. Now, don't be deceived by nonsensical talk
about living beings in other planets. There are no such creatures.
It's a pure delusion of the ordinary egotistical human pattern.
When people chatter about life in other worlds, they don't mean
life--which, of a sort, there may be there:--they mean human life--
a very different and much less important matter. Well, how could
there possibly be human beings, or anything like them, in other
stars or planets? The conditions are too complex, too peculiar, too
exclusively mundane. We are things of this world, and of this world
only. Don't let's magnify our importance: we're not the whole
universe. Our race is essentially a development from a particular
type of monkey-like animal--the Andropithecus of the Upper Uganda
eocene. This monkey-like animal itself, again, is the product of
special antecedent causes, filling a particular place in a
particular tertiary fauna and flora, and impossible even in the
fauna and flora of our own earth and our own tropics before the
evolution of those succulent fruits and grain-like seeds, for
feeding on which it was specially adapted. Without edible fruits,
in short, there could be no monkey; and without monkeys there could
be no man."
"But mayn't there be edible fruits in the other planets?" Frida
inquired, half-timidly, more to bring out this novel aspect of
Bertram's knowledge than really to argue with him; for she dearly
loved to hear his views of things, they were so fresh and
unconventional.
"Edible fruits? Yes, possibly; and animals or something more or
less like animals to feed upon them. But even if there are such,
which planetoscopists doubt, they must be very different creatures
in form and function from any we know on this one small world of
ours. For just consider, Frida, what we mean by life. We mean a set
of simultaneous and consecutive changes going on in a complex mass
of organised carbon compounds. When most people say 'life,'
however,--especially here with you, where education is undeveloped--
they aren't thinking of life in general at all (which is mainly
vegetable), but only of animal and often indeed of human life.
Well, then, consider, even on this planet itself, how special are
the conditions that make life possible. There must be water in some
form, for there's no life in the desert. There must be heat up to
a certain point, and not above or below it, for fire kills, and
there's no life at the poles (as among Alpine glaciers), or what
little there is depends upon the intervention of other life wafted
from elsewhere--from the lands or seas, in fact, where it can
really originate. In order to have life at all, as WE know it at
least (and I can't say whether anything else could be fairly called
life by any true analogy, until I've seen and examined it), you
must have carbon, and oxygen, and hydrogen, and nitrogen, and many
other things, under certain fixed conditions; you must have liquid
water, not steam or ice: you must have a certain restricted range
of temperature, neither very much higher nor very much lower than
the average of the tropics. Now, look, even with all these
conditions fulfilled, how diverse is life on this earth itself, the
one place we really know--varying as much as from the oak to the
cuttle-fish, from the palm to the tiger, from man to the fern, the
sea-weed, or the jelly-speck. Every one of these creatures is a
complex result of very complex conditions, among which you must
never forget to reckon the previous existence and interaction of
all the antecedent ones. Is it probable, then, even a priori, that
if life or anything like it exists on any other planet, it would
exist in forms at all as near our own as a buttercup is to a human
being, or a sea-anemone is to a cat or a pine-tree?"
"Well, it doesn't look likely, now you come to put it so," Frida
answered thoughtfully: for, though English, she was not wholly
impervious to logic.
"Likely? Of course not," Bertram went on with conviction.
"Planetoscopists are agreed upon it. And above all, why should one
suppose the living organisms or their analogues, if any such there
are, in the planets or fixed stars, possess any such purely human
and animal faculties as thought and reason? That's just like our
common human narrowness. If we were oaks, I suppose, we would only
interest ourselves in the question whether acorns existed in Mars
and Saturn." He paused a moment; then he added in an afterthought:
"No, Frida; you may be sure all human beings, you and I alike, and
thousands of others a great deal more different, are essential
products of this one wee planet, and of particular times and
circumstances in its history. We differ only as birth and
circumstances have made us differ. There IS a mystery about who I
am, and where I come from; I won't deny it: but it isn't by any
means so strange or so marvellous a mystery as you seem to imagine.
One of your own old sacred books says (as I remember hearing in the
joss-house I attended one day in London), 'God hath made of one
blood all the nations of the earth.' If for GOD in that passage we
substitute COMMON DESCENT, it's perfectly true. We are all of one
race; and I confess, when I talk to you, every day I feel our unity
more and more profoundly." He bent over on the bench and took her
tremulous hand. "Frida," he said, looking deep into her speaking
dark eyes, "don't you yourself feel it?"
He was so strange, so simple-minded, so different in every way from
all other men, that for a moment Frida almost half-forgot to be
angry with him. In point of fact, in her heart, she was not angry
at all; she liked to feel the soft pressure of his strong man's
hand on her dainty fingers; she liked to feel the gentle way he was
stroking her smooth arm with that delicate white palm of his. It
gave her a certain immediate and unthinking pleasure to sit still
by his side and know he was full of her. Then suddenly, with a
start, she remembered her duty: she was a married woman, and she
OUGHT NOT to do it. Quickly, with a startled air, she withdrew her
hand. Bertram gazed down at her for a second, half taken aback by
her hurried withdrawal.
"Then you don't like me!" he cried, in a pained tone; "after all,
you don't like me!" One moment later, a ray of recognition broke
slowly over his face. "Oh, I forgot," he said, leaning away. "I
didn't mean to annoy you. A year or two ago, of course, I might
have held your hand in mine as long as ever I liked. You were still
a free being. But what was right then is wrong now, according to
the kaleidoscopic etiquette of your countrywomen. I forgot all that
in the heat of the moment. I recollected only we were two human
beings, of the same race and blood, with hearts that beat and hands
that lay together. I remember now, you must hide and stifle your
native impulses in future: you're tabooed for life to Robert
Monteith: I must needs respect his seal set upon you!"
And he drew a deep sigh of enforced resignation.
Frida sighed in return. "These problems are so hard," she said.
Bertram smiled a strange smile. "There are NO problems," he
answered confidently. "You make them yourselves. You surround life
with taboos, and then--you talk despairingly of the problems with
which your own taboos alone have saddled you."
