The British Barbarians

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.”