The British Barbarians

“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.”

XI

Never in her life had Frida enjoyed anything so much as those first four happy days at Heymoor. She had come away with Bertram exactly as Bertram himself desired her to do, without one thought of anything on earth except to fulfil the higher law of her own nature; and she was happy in her intercourse with the one man who could understand it, the one man who had waked it to its fullest pitch, and could make it resound sympathetically to his touch in every chord and every fibre. They had chosen a lovely spot on a heather-clad moorland, where she could stroll alone with Bertram among the gorse and ling, utterly oblivious of Robert Monteith and the unnatural world she had left for ever behind her. Her soul drank in deep draughts of the knowledge of good and evil from Bertram’s lips; she felt it was indeed a privilege to be with him and listen to him; she wondered how she could ever have endured that old bad life with the lower man who was never her equal, now she had once tasted and known what life can be when two well-matched souls walk it together, abreast, in holy fellowship.

The children, too, were as happy as the day was long. The heath was heaven to them. They loved Bertram well, and were too young to be aware of anything unusual in the fact of his accompanying them. At the little inn on the hill-top where they stopped to lodge, nobody asked any compromising questions: and Bertram felt so sure he could soon complete his arrangements for taking Frida and the children “home,” as he still always phrased it, that Frida had no doubts for their future happiness. As for Robert Monteith, that bleak, cold man, she hardly even remembered him: Bertram’s first kiss seemed almost to have driven the very memory of her husband clean out of her consciousness. She only regretted, now she had left him, the false and mistaken sense of duty which had kept her so long tied to an inferior soul she could never love, and did wrong to marry.

And all the time, what strange new lessons, what beautiful truths, she learned from Bertram! As they strolled together, those sweet August mornings, hand locked in hand, over the breezy upland, what new insight he gave her into men and things! what fresh impulse he supplied to her keen moral nature! The misery and wrong of the world she lived in came home to her now in deeper and blacker hues than ever she had conceived it in: and with that consciousness came also the burning desire of every wakened soul to right and redress it. With Bertram by her side, she felt she could not even harbour an unholy wish or admit a wrong feeling; that vague sense of his superiority, as of a higher being, which she had felt from the very first moment she met him at Brackenhurst, had deepened and grown more definite now by closer intercourse; and she recognised that what she had fallen in love with from the earliest beginning was the beauty of holiness shining clear in his countenance. She had chosen at last the better part, and she felt in her soul that, come what might, it could not be taken away from her.

In this earthly paradise of pure love, undefiled, she spent three full days and part of another. On the morning of the fourth, she sent the country girl they had engaged to take care of the children, out on the moor with the little ones, while she herself and Bertram went off alone, past the barrow that overlooks the Devil’s Saucepan, and out on the open ridge that stretches with dark growth of heath and bracken far away into the misty blue distance of Hampshire. Bertram had just been speaking to her, as they sat on the dry sand, of the buried chieftain whose bones still lay hid under that grass-grown barrow, and of the slaughtered wives whose bodies slept beside him, massacred in cold blood to accompany their dead lord to the world of shadows. He had been contrasting these hideous slaveries of taboo-ridden England, past or present, with the rational freedom of his own dear country, whither he hoped so soon with good luck to take her, when suddenly Frida raised her eager eyes from the ground, and saw somebody or something coming across the moor from eastward in their direction.

All at once, a vague foreboding of evil possessed her. Hardly quite knowing why, she felt this approaching object augured no good to their happiness. “Look, Bertram,” she cried, seizing his arm in her fright, “there’s somebody coming.”

Bertram raised his eyes and looked. Then he shaded them with his hands. “How strange!” he said simply, in his candid way: “it looks for all the world just like the man who was once your husband!”

Frida rose in alarm. “Oh, what can we do?” she cried, wringing her hands. “What ever can we do? It’s he! It’s Robert!”

“Surely he can’t have come on purpose!” Bertram exclaimed, taken aback. “When he sees us, he’ll turn aside. He must know of all people on earth he’s the one least likely at such a time to be welcome. He can’t want to disturb the peace of another man’s honeymoon!”

But Frida, better used to the savage ways of the world she had always lived in, made answer, shrinking and crouching, “He’s hunted us down, and he’s come to fight you.”

“To fight me!” Bertram exclaimed. “Oh, surely not that! I was told by those who ought best to know, you English had got far beyond the stage of private war and murderous vendetta.”

“For everything else,” Frida answered, cowering down in her terror of her husband’s vengeance, not for herself indeed so much as for Bertram. “For everything else, we have; but NOT for a woman.”

There was no time just then, however, for further explanation of this strange anomaly. Monteith had singled them out from a great distance with his keen, clear sight, inherited from generations of Highland ancestors, and now strode angrily across the moor, with great wrathful steps, in his rival’s direction. Frida nestled close to Bertram, to protect her from the man to whom her country’s laws and the customs of her tribe would have handed her over blindfold. Bertram soothed her with his hand, and awaited in silence, with some dim sense of awe, the angry barbarian’s arrival.

He came up very quickly, and stood full in front of them, glaring with fierce eyes at the discovered lovers. For a minute or two his rage would not allow him to speak, nor even to act; he could but stand and scowl from under his brows at Bertram. But after a long pause his wrath found words. “You infernal scoundrel!” he burst forth, “so at last I’ve caught you! How dare you sit there and look me straight in the face? You infernal thief, how dare you? how dare you?”

Bertram rose and confronted him. His own face, too, flushed slightly with righteous indignation; but he answered for all that in the same calm and measured tones as ever: “I am NOT a scoundrel, and I will not submit to be called so even by an angry savage. I ask you in return, how dare you follow us? You must have known your presence would be very unwelcome. I should have thought this was just the one moment in your life and the one place on earth where even YOU would have seen that to stop away was your imperative duty. Mere self-respect would dictate such conduct. This lady has given you clear proof indeed that your society and converse are highly distasteful to her.”

Robert Monteith glared across at him with the face of a tiger. “You infamous creature,” he cried, almost speechless with rage, “do you dare to defend my wife’s adultery?”

Bertram gazed at him with a strange look of mingled horror and astonishment. “You poor wretch!” he answered, as calmly as before, but with evident contempt; “how can you dare, such a thing as you, to apply these vile words to your moral superiors? Adultery it was indeed, and untruth to her own higher and purer nature, for this lady to spend one night of her life under your roof with you; what she has taken now in exchange is holy marriage, the only real and sacred marriage, the marriage of true souls, to which even the wiser of yourselves, the poets of your nation, would not admit impediment. If you dare to apply such base language as this to my lady’s actions, you must answer for it to me, her natural protector, for I will not permit it.”

At the words, quick as lightning, Monteith pulled from his pocket a loaded revolver and pointed it full at his rival. With a cry of terror, Frida flung herself between them, and tried to protect her lover with the shield of her own body. But Bertram gently unwound her arms and held her off from him tenderly. “No, no, darling,” he said slowly, sitting down with wonderful calm upon a big grey sarsen-stone that abutted upon the pathway; “I had forgotten again; I keep always forgetting what kind of savages I have to deal with. If I chose, I could snatch that murderous weapon from his hand, and shoot him dead with it in self-defence—for I’m stronger than he is. But if I did, what use? I could never take you home with me. And after all, what could we either of us do in the end in this bad, wild world of your fellow-countrymen? They would take me and hang me; and all would be up with you. For your sake, Frida, to shield you from the effects of their cruel taboos, there’s but one course open: I must submit to this madman. He may shoot me if he will.... Stand free, and let him!”

But with a passionate oath, Robert Monteith seized her arm and flung her madly from him. She fell, reeling, on one side. His eyes were bloodshot with the savage thirst for vengeance. He raised the deadly weapon. Bertram Ingledew, still seated on the big round boulder, opened his breast in silence to receive the bullet. There was a moment’s pause. For that moment, even Monteith himself, in his maniac mood, felt dimly aware of that mysterious restraining power all the rest who knew him had so often felt in their dealings with the Alien. But it was only for a moment. His coarser nature was ill adapted to recognise that ineffable air as of a superior being that others observed in him. He pulled the trigger and fired. Frida gave one loud shriek of despairing horror. Bertram’s body fell back on the bare heath behind it.

XII

Mad as he was with jealousy, that lowest and most bestial of all the vile passions man still inherits from the ape and tiger, Robert Monteith was yet quite sane enough to know in his own soul what deed he had wrought, and in what light even his country’s barbaric laws would regard his action. So the moment he had wreaked to the full his fiery vengeance on the man who had never wronged him, he bent over the body with strangely eager eyes, expecting to see upon it some evidence of his guilt, some bloody mark of the hateful crime his own hand had committed. At the same instant, Frida, recovering from his blow that had sent her reeling, rushed frantically forward, flung herself with wild passion on her lover’s corpse, and covered the warm lips with hot, despairing kisses.

One marvellous fact, however, impressed them both with a vague sense of the unknown and the mysterious from the very first second. No spot nor trace of blood marred the body anywhere. And, even as they looked, a strange perfume, as of violets or of burning incense, began by degrees to flood the moor around them. Then slowly, while they watched, a faint blue flame seemed to issue from the wound in Bertram’s right side and rise lambent into the air above the murdered body. Frida drew back and gazed at it, a weird thrill of mystery and unconscious hope beguiling for one moment her profound pang of bereavement. Monteith, too, stood away a pace or two, in doubt and surprise, the deep consciousness of some strange and unearthly power overawing for a while even his vulgar and commonplace Scotch bourgeois nature. Gradually, as they gazed, the pale blue flame, rising higher and higher, gathered force and volume, and the perfume as of violets became distinct on the air, like the savour of a purer life than this century wots of. Bit by bit, the wan blue light, flickering thicker and thicker, shaped itself into the form and features of a man, even the outward semblance of Bertram Ingledew. Shadowy, but transfigured with an ineffable glory, it hovered for a minute or two above the spot on the moor where the corpse had lain; for now they were aware that as the flame-shape formed, the body that lay dead upon the ground beneath dissolved by degrees and melted into it. Not a trace was left on the heath of Robert Monteith’s crime: not a dapple of blood, not a clot of gore: only a pale blue flame and a persistent image represented the body that was once Bertram Ingledew’s.

Again, even as they looked, a still weirder feeling began to creep over them. The figure, growing fainter, seemed to fade away piecemeal in the remote distance. But it was not in space that it faded; it appeared rather to become dim in some vaguer and far more mysterious fashion, like the memories of childhood or the aching abysses of astronomical calculation. As it slowly dissolved, Frida stretched out her hands to it with a wild cry, like the cry of a mother for her first-born. “O Bertram,” she moaned, “where are you going? Do you mean to leave me? Won’t you save me from this man? Won’t you take me home with you?”

Dim and hollow, as from the womb of time unborn, a calm voice came back to her across the gulf of ages: “Your husband willed it, Frida, and the customs of your nation. You can come to me, but I can never return to you. In three days longer your probation would have been finished. But I forgot with what manner of savage I had still to deal. And now I must go back once more to the place whence I came—to THE TWENTY-FIFTH CENTURY.”

The voice died away in the dim recesses of the future. The pale blue flame flickered forward and vanished. The shadowy shape melted through an endless vista of to-morrows. Only the perfume as of violets or of a higher life still hung heavy upon the air, and a patch of daintier purple burned bright on the moor, like a pool of crimson blood, where the body had fallen. Only that, and a fierce ache in Frida’s tortured heart; only that, and a halo of invisible glory round the rich red lips, where his lips had touched them.

XIII

Frida seated herself in her misery on the ice-worn boulder where three minutes earlier Bertram had been sitting. Her face was buried in her bloodless hands. All the world grew blank to her.

Monteith, for his part, sat down a little way off with folded arms on another sarsen-stone, fronting her. The strange and unearthly scene they had just passed through impressed him profoundly. For the first few minutes a great horror held him. But his dogged Scottish nature still brooded over his wrongs, in spite of the terrible sight he had so unexpectedly evoked. In a way, he felt he had had his revenge; for had he not drawn upon his man, and fired at him and killed him? Still, after the fever and torment of the last few days, it was a relief to find, after all, he was not, as this world would judge, a murderer. Man and crime were alike mere airy phantoms. He could go back now to the inn and explain with a glib tongue how Mr. Ingledew had been hurriedly called away to town on important business. There was no corpse on the moor, no blabbing blood to tell the story of his attempted murder: nobody anywhere, he felt certain in his own stolid soul, would miss the mysterious Alien who came to them from beyond the distant abyss of centuries. With true Scotch caution, indeed, even in the midst of his wrath, Robert Monteith had never said a word to any one at Brackenhurst of how his wife had left him. He was too proud a man, if it came to that, to acknowledge what seemed to him a personal disgrace, till circumstances should absolutely force such acknowledgment upon him. He had glossed it over meanwhile with the servants and neighbours by saying that Mrs. Monteith had gone away with the children for their accustomed holiday as always in August. Frida had actually chosen the day appointed for their seaside journey as the fittest moment for her departure with Bertram, so his story was received without doubt or inquiry. He had bottled up his wrath in his own silent soul. There was still room, therefore, to make all right again at home in the eyes of the world—if but Frida was willing. So he sat there long, staring hard at his wife in speechless debate, and discussing with himself whether or not to make temporary overtures of peace to her.