The British Barbarians

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.

“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.”