The British Barbarians

When she returned, Robert Monteith sat asleep over his paper in his easy-chair.  It was his wont at night when he returned from business.  Frida cast one contemptuous glance as she passed at his burly, unintelligent form, and went up to her bedroom.

But all that night long she never slept.  Her head was too full of Bertram Ingledew.

Yet, strange to say, she felt not one qualm of conscience for their stolen meeting.  No feminine terror, no fluttering fear, disturbed her equanimity.  It almost seemed to her as if Bertram’s kiss had released her by magic, at once and for ever, from the taboos of her nation.  She had slipped out from home unperceived, that night, in fear and trembling, with many sinkings of heart and dire misgivings, while Robert and Phil were downstairs in the smoking-room; she had slunk round, crouching low, to Miss Blake’s lodgings:  and she had terrified her soul on the way with a good woman’s doubts and a good woman’s fears as to the wrongfulness of her attempt to say good-bye to the friend she might now no longer mix with.  But from the moment her lips and Bertram’s touched, all fear and doubt seemed utterly to have vanished; she lay there all night in a fierce ecstasy of love, hugging herself for strange delight, thinking only of Bertram, and wondering what manner of thing was this promised freedom whereof her lover had spoken to her so confidently.  She trusted him now; she knew he would do right, and right alone:  whatever he advised, she would be safe in following.

Next day, Robert went up to town to business as usual.  He was immersed in palm-oil.  By a quarter to two, Frida found herself in the fields.  But, early as she went to fulfil her tryst, Bertram was there before her.  He took her hand in his with a gentle pressure, and Frida felt a quick thrill she had never before experienced course suddenly through her.  She looked around to right and left, to see if they were observed.  Bertram noticed the instinctive movement.  “My darling,” he said in a low voice, “this is intolerable, unendurable.  It’s an insult not to be borne that you and I can’t walk together in the fields of England without being subjected thus to such a many-headed espionage.  I shall have to arrange something before long so as to see you at leisure.  I can’t be so bound by all the taboos of your country.”

She looked up at him trustfully.  “As you will, Bertram,” she answered, without a moment’s hesitation.  “I know I’m yours now.  Let it be what it may, I can do what you tell me.”

He looked at her and smiled.  He saw she was pure woman.  He had met at last with a sister soul.  There was a long, deep silence.

Frida was the first to break it with words.  “Why do you always call them taboos, Bertram?” she asked at last, sighing.

“Why, Frida, don’t you see?” he said, walking on through the deep grass.  “Because they are taboos; that’s the only reason.  Why not give them their true name?  We call them nothing else among my own people.  All taboos are the same in origin and spirit, whether savage or civilised, eastern or western.  You must see that now:  for I know you are emancipated.  They begin with belief in some fetich or bogey or other non-existent supernatural being; and they mostly go on to regard certain absolutely harmless—­nay, sometimes even praiseworthy or morally obligatory—­acts as proscribed by him and sure to be visited with his condign displeasure.  So South Sea Islanders think, if they eat some particular luscious fruit tabooed for the chiefs, they’ll be instantly struck dead by the mere power of the taboo in it; and English people think, if they go out in the country for a picnic on a tabooed day, or use certain harmless tabooed names and words, or inquire into the historical validity of certain incredible ancient documents, accounted sacred, or even dare to think certain things that no reasonable man can prevent himself from thinking, they’ll be burned for ever in eternal fire for it.  The common element is the dread of an unreal sanction.  So in Japan and West Africa the people believe the whole existence of the world and the universe is bound up with the health of their own particular king or the safety of their own particular royal family; and therefore they won’t allow their Mikado or their chief to go outside his palace, lest he should knock his royal foot against a stone, and so prevent the sun from shining and the rain from falling.  In other places, it’s a tree or a shrub with which the stability and persistence of the world is bound up; whenever that tree or shrub begins to droop or wither, the whole population rushes out in bodily fear and awe, bearing water to pour upon it, and crying aloud with wild cries as if their lives were in danger.  If any man were to injure the tree, which of course is no more valuable than any other bush of its sort, they’d tear him to pieces on the spot, and kill or torture every member of his family.  And so too, in England, most people believe, without a shadow of reason, that if men and women were allowed to manage their own personal relations, free from tribal interference, all life and order would go to rack and ruin; the world would become one vast, horrible orgy; and society would dissolve in some incredible fashion.  To prevent this imaginary and impossible result, they insist upon regulating one another’s lives from outside with the strictest taboos, like those which hem round the West African kings, and punish with cruel and relentless heartlessness every man, and still more every woman, who dares to transgress them.”

“I think I see what you mean,” Frida answered, blushing.

“And I mean it in the very simplest and most literal sense,” Bertram went on quite seriously.  “I’d been among you some time before it began to dawn on me that you English didn’t regard your own taboos as essentially identical with other people’s.  To me, from the very first, they seemed absolutely the same as the similar taboos of Central Africans and South Sea Islanders.  All of them spring alike from a common origin, the queer savage belief that various harmless or actually beneficial things may become at times in some mysterious way harmful and dangerous.  The essence of them all lies in the erroneous idea that if certain contingencies occur, such as breaking an image or deserting a faith, some terrible evil will follow to one man or to the world, which evil, as a matter of fact, there’s no reason at all to dread in any way.  Sometimes, as in ancient Rome, Egypt, Central Africa, and England, the whole of life gets enveloped at last in a perfect mist and labyrinth of taboos, a cobweb of conventions.  The Flamen Dialis at Rome, you know, mightn’t ride or even touch a horse; he mightn’t see an army under arms; nor wear a ring that wasn’t broken; nor have a knot in any part of his clothing.  He mightn’t eat wheaten flour or leavened bread; he mightn’t look at or even mention by name such unlucky things as a goat, a dog, raw meat, haricot beans, or common ivy.  He mightn’t walk under a vine; the feet of his bed had to be daubed with mud; his hair could only be cut by a free man, and with a bronze knife; he was encased and surrounded, as it were, by endless petty restrictions and regulations and taboos—­just like those that now surround so many men, and especially so many young women, here in England.”

“And you think they arise from the same causes?” Frida said, half-hesitating:  for she hardly knew whether it was not wicked to say so.

“Why, of course they do,” Bertram answered confidently.  “That’s not matter of opinion now; it’s matter of demonstration.  The worst of them all in their present complicated state are the ones that concern marriage and the other hideous sex-taboos.  They seem to have been among the earliest human abuses; for marriage arises from the stone-age practice of felling a woman of another tribe with a blow of one’s club, and dragging her off by the hair of her head to one’s own cave as a slave and drudge; and they are still the most persistent and cruel of any—­so much so, that your own people, as you know, taboo even the fair and free discussion of this the most important and serious question of life and morals.  They make it, as we would say at home, a refuge for enforced ignorance.  For it’s well known that early tribes hold the most superstitious ideas about the relation of men to women, and dread the most ridiculous and impossible evils resulting from it; and these absurd terrors of theirs seem to have been handed on intact to civilised races, so that for fear of I know not what ridiculous bogey of their own imaginations, or dread of some unnatural restraining deity, men won’t even discuss a matter of so much importance to them all, but, rather than let the taboo of silence be broken, will allow such horrible things to take place in their midst as I have seen with my eyes for these last six or seven weeks in your cities.  O Frida, you can’t imagine what things—­for I know they hide them from you:  cruelties of lust and neglect and shame such as you couldn’t even dream of; women dying of foul disease, in want and dirt deliberately forced upon them by the will of your society; destined beforehand for death, a hateful lingering death—­a death more disgusting than aught you can conceive—­in order that the rest of you may be safely tabooed, each a maid intact, for the man who weds her.  It’s the hatefullest taboo of all the hateful taboos I’ve ever seen on my wanderings, the unworthiest of a pure or moral community.”

He shut his eyes as if to forget the horrors of which he spoke.  They were fresh and real to him.  Frida did not like to question him further.  She knew to what he referred, and in a dim, vague way (for she was less wise than he, she knew) she thought she could imagine why he found it all so terrible.

They walked on in silence a while through the deep, lush grass of the July meadow.  At last Bertram spoke again:  “Frida,” he said, with a trembling quiver, “I didn’t sleep last night.  I was thinking this thing over—­this question of our relations.”

“Nor did I,” Frida answered, thrilling through, responsive.  “I was thinking the same thing. . . .  And, Bertram, ’twas the happiest night I ever remember.”

Bertram’s face flushed rosy red, that native colour of triumphant love; but he answered nothing.  He only looked at her with a look more eloquent by far than a thousand speeches.

“Frida,” he went on at last, “I’ve been thinking it all over; and I feel, if only you can come away with me for just seven days, I could arrange at the end of that time—­to take you home with me.”

Frida’s face in turn waxed rosy red; but she answered only in a very low voice:  “Thank you, Bertram.”

“Would you go with me?” Bertram cried, his face aglow with pleasure.  “You know, it’s a very, very long way off; and I can’t even tell you where it is or how you get there.  But can you trust me enough to try?  Are you not afraid to come with me?”

Frida’s voice trembled slightly.

“I’m not afraid, if that’s all,” she answered in a very firm tone.  “I love you, and I trust you, and I could follow you to the world’s end—­or, if needful, out of it.  But there’s one other question.  Bertram, ought I to?”

She asked it, more to see what answer Bertram would make to her than from any real doubt; for ever since that kiss last night, she felt sure in her own mind with a woman’s certainty whatever Bertram told her was the thing she ought to do; but she wanted to know in what light he regarded it.

Bertram gazed at her hard.

“Why, Frida,” he said, “it’s right, of course, to go.  The thing that’s wrong is to stop with that man one minute longer than’s absolutely necessary.  You don’t love him—­you never loved him; or, if you ever did, you’ve long since ceased to do so.  Well, then, it’s a dishonour to yourself to spend one more day with him.  How can you submit to the hateful endearments of a man you don’t love or care for?  How wrong to yourself, how infinitely more wrong to your still unborn and unbegotten children!  Would you consent to become the mother of sons and daughters by a man whose whole character is utterly repugnant to you?  Nature has given us this divine instinct of love within, to tell us with what persons we should spontaneously unite:  will you fly in her face and unite with a man whom you feel and know to be wholly unworthy of you?  With us, such conduct would be considered disgraceful.  We think every man and woman should be free to do as they will with their own persons; for that is the very basis and foundation of personal liberty.  But if any man or woman were openly to confess they yielded their persons to another for any other reason than because the strongest sympathy and love compelled them, we should silently despise them.  If you don’t love Monteith, it’s your duty to him, and still more your duty to yourself and your unborn children, at once to leave him; if you do love me, it’s your duty to me, and still more your duty to yourself and our unborn children, at once to cleave to me.  Don’t let any sophisms of taboo-mongers come in to obscure that plain natural duty.  Do right first; let all else go.  For one of yourselves, a poet of your own, has said truly: 

’Because right is right, to follow right Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.’”

Frida looked up at him with admiration in her big black eyes.  She had found the truth, and the truth had made her free.

“O Bertram,” she cried with a tremor, “it’s good to be like you.  I felt from the very first how infinitely you differed from the men about me.  You seemed so much greater and higher and nobler.  How grateful I ought to be to Robert Monteith for having spoken to me yesterday and forbidden me to see you! for if he hadn’t, you might never have kissed me last night, and then I might never have seen things as I see them at present.”

There was another long pause; for the best things we each say to the other are said in the pauses.  Then Frida relapsed once more into speech:  “But what about the children?” she asked rather timidly.

Bertram looked puzzled.  “Why, what about the children?” he repeated in a curious way.  “What difference on earth could that make to the children?”

“Can I bring them with me, I mean?” Frida asked, a little tremulous for the reply.  “I couldn’t bear to leave them.  Even for you, dear Bertram, I could never desert them.”

Bertram gazed at her dismayed.  “Leave them!” he cried.  “Why, Frida, of course you could never leave them.  Do you mean to say anybody would be so utterly unnatural, even in England, as to separate a mother from her own children?”

“I don’t think Robert would let me keep them,” Frida faltered, with tears in her eyes; “and if he didn’t, the law, of course, would take his side against me.”

“Of course!” Bertram answered, with grim sarcasm in his face, “of course!  I might have guessed it.  If there is an injustice or a barbarity possible, I might have been sure the law of England would make haste to perpetrate it.  But you needn’t fear, Frida.  Long before the law of England could be put in motion, I’ll have completed my arrangements for taking you—­and them too—­with me.  There are advantages sometimes even in the barbaric delay of what your lawyers are facetiously pleased to call justice.”

“Then I may bring them with me?” Frida cried, flushing red.

Bertram nodded assent.  “Yes,” he said, with grave gentleness.  “You may bring them with you.  And as soon as you like, too.  Remember, dearest, every night you pass under that creature’s roof, you commit the vilest crime a woman can commit against her own purity.”