The British Barbarians

“But it’s private,” Philip went on, in a somewhat horrified voice; “and the pheasants are sitting.”

“Private? How can it be? There’s nothing sown here. It’s all wild wood; we can’t do any damage. If it was growing crops, of course, one would walk through it not at all, or at least very carefully. But this is pure woodland. Are the pheasants tabooed, then? or why mayn’t we go near them?”

“They’re not tabooed, but they’re preserved,” Philip answered somewhat testily, making a delicate distinction without a difference, after the fashion dear to the official intellect. “This land belongs to Sir Lionel Longden, I tell you, and he chooses to lay it all down in pheasants. He bought it and paid for it, so he has a right, I suppose, to do as he likes with it.”

“That’s the funniest thing of all about these taboos,” Bertram mused, as if half to himself. “The very people whom they injure and inconvenience the most, the people whom they hamper and cramp and debar, don’t seem to object to them, but believe in them and are afraid of them. In Samoa, I remember, certain fruits and fish and animals and so forth were tabooed to the chiefs, and nobody else ever dared to eat them. They thought it was wrong, and said, if they did, some nameless evil would at once overtake them. These nameless terrors, these bodiless superstitions, are always the deepest. People fight hardest to preserve their bogeys. They fancy some appalling unknown dissolution would at once result from reasonable action. I tried one day to persuade a poor devil of a fellow in Samoa who’d caught one of these fish, and who was terribly hungry, that no harm would come to him if he cooked it and ate it. But he was too slavishly frightened to follow my advice; he said it was taboo to the god-descended chiefs: if a mortal man tasted it, he would die on the spot: so nothing on earth would induce him to try it. Though to be sure, even there, nobody ever went quite so far as to taboo the very soil of earth itself: everybody might till and hunt where he liked. It’s only in Europe, where evolution goes furthest, that taboo has reached that last silly pitch of injustice and absurdity. Well, we’re not afraid of the fetich, you and I, Mrs. Monteith. Jump up on the gate; I’ll give you a hand over!” And he held out one strong arm as he spoke to aid her.

Frida had no such fanatical respect for the bogey of vested interests as her superstitious brother, so she mounted the gate gracefully—she was always graceful. Bertram took her small hand and jumped her down on the other side, while Philip, not liking to show himself less bold than a woman in this matter, climbed over it after her, though with no small misgivings. They strolled on into the wood, picking the pretty white orchids by the way as they went, for some little distance. The rich mould underfoot was thick with sweet woodruff and trailing loosestrife. Every now and again, as they stirred the lithe brambles that encroached upon the path, a pheasant rose from the ground with a loud whir-r-r before them. Philip felt most uneasy. “You’ll have the keepers after you in a minute,” he said, with a deprecating shrug. “This is just full nesting time. They’re down upon anybody who disturbs the pheasants.”

“But the pheasants can’t BELONG to any one,” Bertram cried, with a greatly amused face. “You may taboo the land—I understand that’s done—but surely you can’t taboo a wild bird that can fly as it likes from one piece of ground away into another.”

Philip enlightened his ignorance by giving him off-hand a brief and profoundly servile account of the English game-laws, interspersed with sundry anecdotes of poachers and poaching. Bertram listened with an interested but gravely disapproving face. “And do you mean to say,” he asked at last “they send men to prison as criminals for catching or shooting hares and pheasants?”

“Why, certainly,” Philip answered. “It’s an offence against the law, and also a crime against the rights of property.”

“Against the law, yes; but how on earth can it be a crime against the rights of property? Obviously the pheasant’s the property of the man who happens to shoot it. How can it belong to him and also to the fellow who taboos the particular piece of ground it was snared on?”

“It doesn’t belong to the man who shoots it at all,” Philip answered, rather angrily. “It belongs to the man who owns the land, of course, and who chooses to preserve it.”

“Oh, I see,” Bertram replied. “Then you disregard the rights of property altogether, and only consider the privileges of taboo. As a principle, that’s intelligible. One sees it’s consistent. But how is it that you all allow these chiefs—landlords, don’t you call them?—to taboo the soil and prevent you all from even walking over it? Don’t you see that if you chose to combine in a body and insist upon the recognition of your natural rights,—if you determined to make the landlords give up their taboo, and cease from injustice,—they’d have to yield to you, and then you could exercise your native right of going where you pleased, and cultivate the land in common for the public benefit, instead of leaving it, as now, to be cultivated anyhow, or turned into waste for the benefit of the tabooers?”

“But it would be WRONG to take it from them,” Philip cried, growing fiery red and half losing his temper, for he really believed it. “It would be sheer confiscation; the land’s their own; they either bought it or inherited it from their fathers. If you were to begin taking it away, what guarantee would you have left for any of the rights of property generally?”

“You didn’t recognise the rights of property of the fellow who killed the pheasant, though,” Bertram interposed, laughing, and imperturbably good-humoured. “But that’s always the way with these taboos, everywhere. They subsist just because the vast majority even of those who are obviously wronged and injured by them really believe in them. They think they’re guaranteed by some divine prescription. The fetich guards them. In Polynesia, I recollect, some chiefs could taboo almost anything they liked, even a girl or a woman, or fruit and fish and animals and houses: and after the chief had once said, ‘It is taboo,’ everybody else was afraid to touch them. Of course, the fact that a chief or a landowner has bought and paid for a particular privilege or species of taboo, or has inherited it from his fathers, doesn’t give him any better moral claim to it. The question is, ‘Is the claim in itself right and reasonable?’ For a wrong is only all the more a wrong for having been long and persistently exercised. The Central Africans say, ‘This is my slave; I bought her and paid for her; I’ve a right, if I like, to kill her and eat her.’ The king of Ibo, on the West Coast, had a hereditary right to offer up as a human sacrifice the first man he met every time he quitted his palace; and he was quite surprised audacious freethinkers should call the morality of his right in question. If you English were all in a body to see through this queer land-taboo, now, which drives your poor off the soil, and prevents you all from even walking at liberty over the surface of the waste in your own country, you could easily—”

“Oh, Lord, what shall we do!” Philip interposed in a voice of abject terror. “If here isn’t Sir Lionel!”

And sure enough, right across the narrow path in front of them stood a short, fat, stumpy, unimpressive little man, with a very red face, and a Norfolk jacket, boiling over with anger.

“What are you people doing here?” he cried, undeterred by the presence of a lady, and speaking in the insolent, supercilious voice of the English landlord in defence of his pheasant preserves. “This is private property. You must have seen the notice at the gate, ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted.’”

“Yes, we did see it,” Bertram answered, with his unruffled smile; “and thinking it an uncalled-for piece of aggressive churlishness, both in form and substance,—why, we took the liberty to disregard it.”

Sir Lionel glared at him. In that servile neighbourhood, almost entirely inhabited by the flunkeys of villadom, it was a complete novelty to him to be thus bearded in his den. He gasped with anger. “Do you mean to say,” he gurgled out, growing purple to the neck, “you came in here deliberately to disturb my pheasants, and then brazen it out to my face like this, sir? Go back the way you came, or I’ll call my keepers.”

“No, I will NOT go back the way I came,” Bertram responded deliberately, with perfect self-control, and with a side-glance at Frida. “Every human being has a natural right to walk across this copse, which is all waste ground, and has no crop sown in it. The pheasants can’t be yours; they’re common property. Besides, there’s a lady. We mean to make our way across the copse at our leisure, picking flowers as we go, and come out into the road on the other side of the spinney. It’s a universal right of which no country and no law can possibly deprive us.”

Sir Lionel was livid with rage. Strange as it may appear to any reasoning mind, the man really believed he had a natural right to prevent people from crossing that strip of wood where his pheasants were sitting. His ancestors had assumed it from time immemorial, and by dint of never being questioned had come to regard the absurd usurpation as quite fair and proper. He placed himself straight across the narrow path, blocking it up with his short and stumpy figure. “Now look here, young man,” he said, with all the insolence of his caste: “if you try to go on, I’ll stand here in your way; and if you dare to touch me, it’s a common assault, and, by George, you’ll have to answer at law for the consequences.”

Bertram Ingledew for his part was all sweet reasonableness. He raised one deprecating hand. “Now, before we come to open hostilities,” he said in a gentle voice, with that unfailing smile of his, “let’s talk the matter over like rational beings. Let’s try to be logical. This copse is considered yours by the actual law of the country you live in: your tribe permits it to you: you’re allowed to taboo it. Very well, then; I make all possible allowances for your strange hallucination. You’ve been brought up to think you had some mystic and intangible claim to this corner of earth more than other people, your even Christians. That claim, of course, you can’t logically defend; but failing arguments, you want to fight for it. Wouldn’t it be more reasonable, now, to show you had some RIGHT or JUSTICE in the matter? I’m always reasonable: if you can convince me of the propriety and equity of your claim, I’ll go back as you wish by the way I entered. If not—well, there’s a lady here, and I’m bound, as a man, to help her safely over.”

Sir Lionel almost choked. “I see what you are,” he gasped out with difficulty. “I’ve heard this sort of rubbish more than once before. You’re one of these damned land-nationalising radicals.”

“On the contrary,” Bertram answered, urbane as ever, with charming politeness of tone and manner: “I’m a born conservative. I’m tenacious to an almost foolishly sentimental degree of every old custom or practice or idea; unless, indeed, it’s either wicked or silly—like most of your English ones.”

He raised his hat, and made as if he would pass on. Now, nothing annoys an angry savage or an uneducated person so much as the perfect coolness of a civilised and cultivated man when he himself is boiling with indignation. He feels its superiority an affront on his barbarism. So, with a vulgar oath, Sir Lionel flung himself point-blank in the way. “Damn it all, no you won’t, sir!” he cried. “I’ll soon put a stop to all that, I can tell you. You shan’t go on one step without committing an assault upon me.” And he drew himself up, four-square, as if for battle.

“Oh, just as you like,” Bertram answered coolly, never losing his temper. “I’m not afraid of taboos: I’ve seen too many of them.” And he gazed at the fat little angry man with a gentle expression of mingled contempt and amusement.

For a minute, Frida thought they were really going to fight, and drew back in horror to await the contest. But such a warlike notion never entered the man of peace’s head. He took a step backward for a second and calmly surveyed his antagonist with a critical scrutiny. Sir Lionel was short and stout and puffy; Bertram Ingledew was tall and strong and well-knit and athletic. After an instant’s pause, during which the doughty baronet stood doubling his fat fists and glaring silent wrath at his lither opponent, Bertram made a sudden dart forward, seized the little stout man bodily in his stalwart arms, and lifting him like a baby, in spite of kicks and struggles, carried him a hundred paces to one side of the path, where he laid him down gingerly without unnecessary violence on a bed of young bracken. Then he returned quite calmly, as if nothing had happened, to Frida’s side, with that quiet little smile on his unruffled countenance.

Frida had not quite approved of all this small episode, for she too believed in the righteousness of taboo, like most other Englishwomen, and devoutly accepted the common priestly doctrine, that the earth is the landlord’s and the fulness thereof; but still, being a woman, and therefore an admirer of physical strength in men, she could not help applauding to herself the masterly way in which her squire had carried his antagonist captive. When he returned, she beamed upon him with friendly confidence. But Philip was very much frightened indeed.

“You’ll have to pay for this, you know,” he said. “This is a law-abiding land. He’ll bring an action against you for assault and battery; and you’ll get three months for it.”

“I don’t think so,” Bertram answered, still placid and unruffled. “There were three of us who saw him; and it was a very ignominious position indeed for a person who sets up to be a great chief in the country. He won’t like the little boys on his own estate to know the great Sir Lionel was lifted up against his will, carried about like a baby, and set down in a bracken-bed. Indeed, I was more than sorry to have to do such a thing to a man of his years; but you see he WOULD have it. It’s the only way to deal with these tabooing chiefs. You must face them and be done with it. In the Caroline Islands, once, I had to do the same thing to a cazique who was going to cook and eat a very pretty young girl of his own retainers. He wouldn’t listen to reason; the law was on his side; so, being happily NOT a law-abiding person myself, I took him up in my arms, and walked off with him bodily, and was obliged to drop him down into a very painful bed of stinging plants like nettles, so as to give myself time to escape with the girl clear out of his clutches. I regretted having to do it so roughly, of course; but there was no other way out of it.”

As he spoke, for the first time it really came home to Frida’s mind that Bertram Ingledew, standing there before her, regarded in very truth the Polynesian chief and Sir Lionel Longden as much about the same sort of unreasoning people—savages to be argued with and cajoled if possible; but if not, then to be treated with calm firmness and force, as an English officer on an exploring expedition might treat a wrathful Central African kinglet. And in a dim sort of way, too, it began to strike her by degrees that the analogy was a true one, that Bertram Ingledew, among the Englishmen with whom she was accustomed to mix, was like a civilised being in the midst of barbarians, who feel and recognise but dimly and half-unconsciously his innate superiority.

By the time they had reached the gate on the other side of the hanger, Sir Lionel overtook them, boiling over with indignation.

“Your card, sir,” he gasped out inarticulately to the calmly innocent Alien; “you must answer for all this. Your card, I say, instantly!”

Bertram looked at him with a fixed gaze. Sir Lionel, having had good proof of his antagonist’s strength, kept his distance cautiously.

“Certainly NOT, my good friend,” Bertram replied, in a firm tone. “Why should I, who am the injured and insulted party, assist YOU in identifying me? It was you who aggressed upon my free individuality. If you want to call in the aid of an unjust law to back up an unjust and irrational taboo, you must find out for yourself who I am, and where I come from. But I wouldn’t advise you to do anything so foolish. Three of us here saw you in the ridiculous position into which by your obstinacy you compelled me to put you; and you wouldn’t like to hear us recount it in public, with picturesque details, to your brother magistrates. Let me say one thing more to you,” he added, after a pause, in that peculiarly soft and melodious voice of his. “Don’t you think, on reflection—even if you’re foolish enough and illogical enough really to believe in the sacredness of the taboo by virtue of which you try to exclude your fellow-tribesmen from their fair share of enjoyment of the soil of England—don’t you think you might at any rate exercise your imaginary powers over the land you arrogate to yourself with a little more gentleness and common politeness? How petty and narrow it looks to use even an undoubted right, far more a tribal taboo, in a tyrannical and needlessly aggressive manner! How mean and small and low and churlish! The damage we did your land, as you call it—if we did any at all—was certainly not a ha’pennyworth. Was it consonant with your dignity as a chief in the tribe to get so hot and angry about so small a value? How grotesque to make so much fuss and noise about a matter of a ha’penny! We, who were the aggrieved parties, we, whom you attempted to debar by main force from the common human right to walk freely over earth wherever there’s nothing sown or planted, and who were obliged to remove you as an obstacle out of our path, at some personal inconvenience”—(he glanced askance at his clothes, crumpled and soiled by Sir Lionel’s unseemly resistance)—“WE didn’t lose our tempers, or attempt to revile you. We were cool and collected. But a taboo must be on its very last legs when it requires the aid of terrifying notices at every corner in order to preserve it; and I think this of yours must be well on the way to abolition. Still, as I should like to part friends”—he drew a coin from his pocket, and held it out between his finger and thumb with a courteous bow towards Sir Lionel—“I gladly tender you a ha’penny in compensation for any supposed harm we may possibly have done your imaginary rights by walking through the wood here.”