The British Barbarians

“Not just now,” Frida answered, relieved at the appearance of Martha with the tray in the distance. “Here’s tea coming.” She was glad of the diversion, for she liked Bertram immensely, and she could not help noticing how hopelessly he had been floundering all that afternoon right into the very midst of what he himself would have called their taboos and joss-business.

But Bertram was not well out of his troubles yet. Martha brought the round tray—Oriental brass, finely chased with flowing Arabic inscriptions—and laid it down on the dainty little rustic table. Then she handed about the cups. Bertram rose to help her. “Mayn’t I do it for you?” he said, as politely as he would have said it to a lady in her drawing-room.

“No, thank you, sir,” Martha answered, turning red at the offer, but with the imperturbable solemnity of the well-trained English servant. She “knew her place,” and resented the intrusion. But Bertram had his own notions of politeness, too, which were not to be lightly set aside for local class distinctions. He could not see a pretty girl handing cups to guests without instinctively rising from his seat to assist her. So, very much to Martha’s embarrassment, he continued to give his help in passing the cake and the bread-and-butter. As soon as she was gone, he turned round to Philip. “That’s a very pretty girl and a very nice girl,” he said simply. “I wonder, now, as you haven’t a wife, you’ve never thought of marrying her.”

The remark fell like a thunderbolt on the assembled group. Even Frida was shocked. Your most open-minded woman begins to draw a line when you touch her class prejudices in the matter of marriage, especially with reference to her own relations. “Why, really, Mr. Ingledew,” she said, looking up at him reproachfully, “you can’t mean to say you think my brother could marry the parlour-maid!”

Bertram saw at a glance he had once more unwittingly run his head against one of the dearest of these strange people’s taboos; but he made no retort openly. He only reflected in silence to himself how unnatural and how wrong they would all think it at home that a young man of Philip’s age should remain nominally celibate; how horrified they would be at the abject misery and degradation such conduct on the part of half his caste must inevitably imply for thousands of innocent young girls of lower station, whose lives he now knew were remorselessly sacrificed in vile dens of tainted London to the supposed social necessity that young men of a certain class should marry late in a certain style, and “keep a wife in the way she’s been accustomed to.” He remembered with a checked sigh how infinitely superior they would all at home have considered that wholesome, capable, good-looking Martha to an empty-headed and useless young man like Philip; and he thought to himself how completely taboo had overlaid in these people’s minds every ethical idea, how wholly it had obscured the prime necessities of healthy, vigorous, and moral manhood. He recollected the similar though less hideous taboos he had met with elsewhere: the castes of India, and the horrible pollution that would result from disregarding them; the vile Egyptian rule, by which the divine king, in order to keep up the so-called purity of his royal and god-descended blood, must marry his own sister, and so foully pollute with monstrous abortions the very stock he believed himself to be preserving intact from common or unclean influences. His mind ran back to the strange and complicated forbidden degrees of the Australian Blackfellows, who are divided into cross-classes, each of which must necessarily marry into a certain other, and into that other only, regardless of individual tastes or preferences. He remembered the profound belief of all these people that if they were to act in any other way than the one prescribed, some nameless misfortune or terrible evil would surely overtake them. Yet, nowhere, he thought to himself, had he seen any system which entailed in the end so much misery on both sexes, though more particularly on the women, as that system of closely tabooed marriage, founded upon a broad basis of prostitution and infanticide, which has reached its most appalling height of development in hypocritical and puritan England. The ghastly levity with which all Englishmen treated this most serious subject, and the fatal readiness with which even Frida herself seemed to acquiesce in the most inhuman slavery ever devised for women on the face of this earth, shocked and saddened Bertram’s profoundly moral and sympathetic nature. He could sit there no longer to listen to their talk. He bethought him at once of the sickening sights he had seen the evening before in a London music-hall; of the corrupting mass of filth underneath, by which alone this abomination of iniquity could be kept externally decent, and this vile system of false celibacy whitened outwardly to the eye like Oriental sepulchres: and he strolled off by himself into the shrubbery, very heavy in heart, to hide his real feelings from the priest and the soldier, whose coarser-grained minds could never have understood the enthusiasm of humanity which inspired and informed him.

Frida rose and followed him, moved by some unconscious wave of instinctive sympathy. The four children of this world were left together on the lawn by the rustic table, to exchange views by themselves on the extraordinary behaviour and novel demeanour of the mysterious Alien.

VII

As soon as he was gone, a sigh of relief ran half-unawares through the little square party. They felt some unearthly presence had been removed from their midst. General Claviger turned to Monteith. “That’s a curious sort of chap,” he said slowly, in his military way. “Who is he, and where does he come from?”

“Ah, where does he come from?—that’s just the question,” Monteith answered, lighting a cigar, and puffing away dubiously. “Nobody knows. He’s a mystery. He poses in the role. You’d better ask Philip; it was he who brought him here.”

“I met him accidentally in the street,” Philip answered, with an apologetic shrug, by no means well pleased at being thus held responsible for all the stranger’s moral and social vagaries. “It’s the merest chance acquaintance. I know nothing of his antecedents. I—er—I lent him a bag, and he’s fastened himself upon me ever since like a leech, and come constantly to my sister’s. But I haven’t the remotest idea who he is or where he hails from. He keeps his business wrapped up from all of us in the profoundest mystery.”

“He’s a gentleman, anyhow,” the General put in with military decisiveness. “How manly of him to acknowledge at once about the cobbler being probably a near relation! Most men, you know, Christy, would have tried to hide it; HE didn’t for a second. He admitted his ancestors had all been cobblers till quite a recent period.”

Philip was astonished at this verdict of the General’s, for he himself, on the contrary, had noted with silent scorn that very remark as a piece of supreme and hopeless stupidity on Bertram’s part. No fellow can help having a cobbler for a grandfather, of course: but he need not be such a fool as to volunteer any mention of the fact spontaneously.

“Yes, I thought it bold of him,” Monteith answered, “almost bolder than was necessary; for he didn’t seem to think we should be at all surprised at it.”

The General mused to himself. “He’s a fine soldierly fellow,” he said, gazing after the tall retreating figure. “I should like to make a dragoon of him. He’s the very man for a saddle. He’d dash across country in the face of heavy guns any day with the best of them.”

“He rides well,” Philip answered, “and has a wonderful seat. I saw him on that bay mare of Wilder’s in town the other afternoon, and I must say he rode much more like a gentleman than a cobbler.”

“Oh, he’s a gentleman,” the General repeated, with unshaken conviction: “a thoroughbred gentleman.” And he scanned Philip up and down with his keen grey eye as if internally reflecting that Philip’s own right to criticise and classify that particular species of humanity was a trifle doubtful. “I should much like to make a captain of hussars of him. He’d be splendid as a leader of irregular horse; the very man for a scrimmage!” For the General’s one idea when he saw a fine specimen of our common race was the Zulu’s or the Red Indian’s—what an admirable person he would be to employ in killing and maiming his fellow-creatures!

“He’d be better engaged so,” the Dean murmured reflectively, “than in diffusing these horrid revolutionary and atheistical doctrines.” For the Church was as usual in accord with the sword; theoretically all peace, practically all bloodshed and rapine and aggression: and anything that was not his own opinion envisaged itself always to the Dean’s crystallised mind as revolutionary and atheistic.

“He’s very like the duke, though,” General Claviger went on, after a moment’s pause, during which everybody watched Bertram and Frida disappearing down the walk round a clump of syringas. “Very like the duke. And you saw he admitted some sort of relationship, though he didn’t like to dwell upon it. You may be sure he’s a by-blow of the family somehow. One of the Bertrams, perhaps the old duke who was out in the Crimea, may have formed an attachment for one of these Ingledew girls—the cobbler’s sisters: I dare say they were no better in their conduct than they ought to be—and this may be the consequence.”

“I’m afraid the old duke was a man of loose life and doubtful conversation,” the Dean put in, with a tone of professional disapprobation for the inevitable transgressions of the great and the high-placed. “He didn’t seem to set the example he ought to have done to his poorer brethren.”

“Oh, he was a thorough old rip, the duke, if it comes to that,” General Claviger responded, twirling his white moustache. “And so’s the present man—a rip of the first water. They’re a regular bad lot, the Bertrams, root and stock. They never set an example of anything to anybody—bar horse-breeding,—as far as I’m aware; and even at that their trainers have always fairly cheated ‘em.”

“The present duke’s a most exemplary churchman,” the Dean interposed, with Christian charity for a nobleman of position. “He gave us a couple of thousand last year for the cathedral restoration fund.”

“And that would account,” Philip put in, returning abruptly to the previous question, which had been exercising him meanwhile, “for the peculiarly distinguished air of birth and breeding this man has about him.” For Philip respected a duke from the bottom of his heart, and cherished the common Britannic delusion that a man who has been elevated to that highest degree in our barbaric rank-system must acquire at the same time a nobler type of physique and countenance, exactly as a Jew changes his Semitic features for the European shape on conversion and baptism.

“Oh, dear, no,” the General answered in his most decided voice. “The Bertrams were never much to look at in any way: and as for the old duke, he was as insignificant a little monster of red-haired ugliness as ever you’d see in a day’s march anywhere. If he hadn’t been a duke, with a rent-roll of forty odd thousand a year, he’d never have got that beautiful Lady Camilla to consent to marry him. But, bless you, women ‘ll do anything for the strawberry leaves. It isn’t from the Bertrams this man gets his good looks. It isn’t from the Bertrams. Old Ingledew’s daughters are pretty enough girls. If their aunts were like ‘em, it’s there your young friend got his air of distinction.”

“We never know who’s who nowadays,” the Dean murmured softly. Being himself the son of a small Scotch tradesman, brought up in the Free Kirk, and elevated into his present exalted position by the early intervention of a Balliol scholarship and a studentship of Christ Church, he felt at liberty to moralise in such non-committing terms on the gradual decay of aristocratic exclusiveness.

“I don’t see it much matters what a man’s family was,” the General said stoutly, “so long as he’s a fine, well-made, soldierly fellow, like this Ingledew body, capable of fighting for his Queen and country. He’s an Australian, I suppose. What tall chaps they do send home, to be sure! Those Australians are going to lick us all round the field presently.”

“That’s the curious part of it,” Philip answered. “Nobody knows what he is. He doesn’t even seem to be a British subject. He calls himself an Alien. And he speaks most disrespectfully at times—well, not exactly perhaps of the Queen in person, but at any rate of the monarchy.”

“Utterly destitute of any feeling of respect for any power of any sort, human or divine,” the Dean remarked, with clerical severity.

“For my part,” Monteith interposed, knocking his ash off savagely, “I think the man’s a swindler; and the more I see of him, the less I like him. He’s never explained to us how he came here at all, or what the dickens he came for. He refuses to say where he lives or what’s his nationality. He poses as a sort of unexplained Caspar Hauser. In my opinion, these mystery men are always impostors. He had no letters of introduction to anybody at Brackenhurst; and he thrust himself upon Philip in a most peculiar way; ever since which he’s insisted upon coming to my house almost daily. I don’t like him myself: it’s Mrs. Monteith who insists upon having him here.”

“He fascinates me,” the General said frankly. “I don’t at all wonder the women like him. As long as he was by, though I don’t agree with one word he says, I couldn’t help looking at him and listening to him intently.”

“So he does me,” Philip answered, since the General gave him the cue. “And I notice it’s the same with people in the train. They always listen to him, though sometimes he preaches the most extravagant doctrines—oh, much worse than anything he’s said here this afternoon. He’s really quite eccentric.”

“What sort of doctrines?” the Dean inquired, with languid zeal. “Not, I hope, irreligious?”

“Oh, dear, no,” Philip answered; “not that so much. He troubles himself very little, I think, about religion. Social doctrines, don’t you know; such very queer views—about women, and so forth.”

“Indeed?” the Dean said quickly, drawing himself up very stiff: for you touch the ark of God for the modern cleric when you touch the question of the relations of the sexes. “And what does he say? It’s highly undesirable men should go about the country inciting to rebellion on such fundamental points of moral order in public railway carriages.” For it is a peculiarity of minds constituted like the Dean’s (say, ninety-nine per cent. of the population) to hold that the more important a subject is to our general happiness, the less ought we all to think about it and discuss it.

“Why, he has very queer ideas,” Philip went on, slightly hesitating; for he shared the common vulgar inability to phrase exposition of a certain class of subjects in any but the crudest and ugliest phraseology. “He seems to think, don’t you know, the recognised forms of vice—well, what all young men do—you know what I mean—Of course it’s not right, but still they do them—” The Dean nodded a cautious acquiescence. “He thinks they’re horribly wrong and distressing; but he makes nothing at all of the virtue of decent girls and the peace of families.”

“If I found a man preaching that sort of doctrine to my wife or my daughters,” Monteith said savagely, “I know what I’d do—I’d put a bullet through him.”

“And quite right, too,” the General murmured approvingly.

Professional considerations made the Dean refrain from endorsing this open expression of murderous sentiment in its fullest form; a clergyman ought always to keep up some decent semblance of respect for the Gospel and the Ten Commandments—or, at least, the greater part of them. So he placed the tips of his fingers and thumbs together in the usual deliberative clerical way, gazed blankly through the gap, and answered with mild and perfunctory disapprobation: “A bullet would perhaps be an unnecessarily severe form of punishment to mete out; but I confess I could excuse the man who was so far carried away by his righteous indignation as to duck the fellow in the nearest horse-pond.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” Philip replied, with an outburst of unwonted courage and originality; for he was beginning to like, and he had always from the first respected, Bertram. “There’s something about the man that makes me feel—even when I differ from him most—that he believes it all, and is thoroughly in earnest. I dare say I’m wrong, but I always have a notion he’s a better man than me, in spite of all his nonsense,—higher and clearer and differently constituted,—and that if only I could climb to just where he has got, perhaps I should see things in the same light that he does.”

It was a wonderful speech for Philip—a speech above himself; but, all the same, by a fetch of inspiration he actually made it. Intercourse with Bertram had profoundly impressed his feeble nature. But the Dean shook his head.

“A very undesirable young man for you to see too much of, I’m sure, Mr. Christy,” he said, with marked disapprobation. For, in the Dean’s opinion, it was a most dangerous thing for a man to think, especially when he’s young; thinking is, of course, so likely to unsettle him!

The General, on the other hand, nodded his stern grey head once or twice reflectively.

“He’s a remarkable young fellow,” he said, after a pause; “a most remarkable young fellow. As I said before, he somehow fascinates me. I’d immensely like to put that young fellow into a smart hussar uniform, mount him on a good charger of the Punjaub breed, and send him helter-skelter, pull-devil, pull-baker, among my old friends the Duranis on the North-West frontier.”

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.