The British Barbarians

III

On the way to church, the Monteiths sifted out their new acquaintance.

“Well, what do you make of him, Frida?” Philip asked, leaning back in his place, with a luxurious air, as soon as the carriage had turned the corner. “Lunatic or sharper?”

Frida gave an impatient gesture with her neatly gloved hand. “For my part,” she answered without a second's hesitation, “I make him neither: I find him simply charming.”

“That's because he praised your dress,” Philip replied, looking wise. “Did ever you know anything so cool in your life? Was it ignorance, now, or insolence?”

“It was perfect simplicity and naturalness,” Frida answered with confidence. “He looked at the dress, and admired it, and being transparently naif, he didn't see why he shouldn't say so. It wasn't at all rude, I thought—and it gave me pleasure.”

“He certainly has in some ways charming manners,” Philip went on more slowly. “He manages to impress one. If he's a madman, which I rather more than half suspect, it's at least a gentlemanly form of madness.”

“His manners are more than merely charming,” Frida answered, quite enthusiastic, for she had taken a great fancy at first sight to the mysterious stranger. “They've such absolute freedom. That's what strikes me most in them. They're like the best English aristocratic manners, without the insolence; or the freest American manners, without the roughness. He's extremely distinguished. And, oh, isn't he handsome!”

“He IS good-looking,” Philip assented grudgingly. Philip owned a looking-glass, and was therefore accustomed to a very high standard of manly beauty.

As for Robert Monteith, he smiled the grim smile of the wholly unfascinated. He was a dour business man of Scotch descent, who had made his money in palm-oil in the City of London; and having married Frida as a remarkably fine woman, with a splendid figure, to preside at his table, he had very small sympathy with what he considered her high-flown fads and nonsensical fancies. He had seen but little of the stranger, too, having come in from his weekly stroll, or tour of inspection, round the garden and stables, just as they were on the very point of starting for St. Barnabas: and his opinion of the man was in no way enhanced by Frida's enthusiasm. “As far as I'm concerned,” he said, with his slow Scotch drawl, inherited from his father (for though London-born and bred, he was still in all essentials a pure Caledonian)—“As far as I'm concerned, I haven't the slightest doubt but the man's a swindler. I wonder at you, Frida, that you should leave him alone in the house just now, with all that silver. I stepped round before I left, and warned Martha privately not to move from the hall till the fellow was gone, and to call up cook and James if he tried to get out of the house with any of our property. But you never seemed to suspect him. And to supply him with a bag, too, to carry it all off in! Well, women are reckless! Hullo, there, policeman;—stop, Price, one moment;—I wish you'd keep an eye on my house this morning. There's a man in there I don't half like the look of. When he drives away in a cab that my boy's going to call for him, just see where he stops, and take care he hasn't got anything my servants don't know about.”

In the drawing-room, meanwhile, Bertram Ingledew was reflecting, as he waited for the church people to clear away, how interesting these English clothes-taboos and day-taboos promised to prove, beside some similar customs he had met with or read of in his investigations elsewhere. He remembered how on a certain morning of the year the High Priest of the Zapotecs was obliged to get drunk, an act which on any other day in the calendar would have been regarded by all as a terrible sin in him. He reflected how in Guinea and Tonquin, at a particular period once a twelvemonth, nothing is considered wrong, and everything lawful, so that the worst crimes and misdemeanours go unnoticed and unpunished. He smiled to think how some days are tabooed in certain countries, so that whatever you do on them, were it only a game of tennis, is accounted wicked; while some days are periods of absolute licence, so that whatever you do on them, were it murder itself, becomes fit and holy. To him and his people at home, of course, it was the intrinsic character of the act itself that made it right or wrong, not the particular day or week or month on which one happened to do it. What was wicked in June was wicked still in October. But not so among the unreasoning devotees of taboo, in Africa or in England. There, what was right in May became wicked in September, and what was wrong on Sunday became harmless or even obligatory on Wednesday or Thursday. It was all very hard for a rational being to understand and explain: but he meant to fathom it, all the same, to the very bottom—to find out why, for example, in Uganda, whoever appears before the king must appear stark naked, while in England, whoever appears before the queen must wear a tailor's sword or a long silk train and a headdress of ostrich-feathers; why, in Morocco, when you enter a mosque, you must take off your shoes and catch a violent cold, in order to show your respect for Allah; while in Europe, on entering a similar religious building, you must uncover your head, no matter how draughty the place may be, since the deity who presides there appears to be indifferent to the danger of consumption or chest-diseases for his worshippers; why certain clothes or foods are prescribed in London or Paris for Sundays and Fridays, while certain others, just equally warm or digestible or the contrary, are perfectly lawful to all the world alike on Tuesdays and Saturdays. These were the curious questions he had come so far to investigate, for which the fakirs and dervishes of every land gave such fanciful reasons: and he saw he would have no difficulty in picking up abundant examples of his subject-matter everywhere in England. As the metropolis of taboo, it exhibited the phenomena in their highest evolution. The only thing that puzzled him was how Philip Christy, an Englishman born, and evidently a most devout observer of the manifold taboos and juggernauts of his country, should actually deny their very existence. It was one more proof to him of the extreme caution necessary in all anthropological investigations before accepting the evidence even of well-meaning natives on points of religious or social usage, which they are often quite childishly incapable of describing in rational terms to outside inquirers. They take their own manners and customs for granted, and they cannot see them in their true relations or compare them with the similar manners and customs of other nationalities.