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............