When she returned, Robert Monteith sat asleep over his paper in his easy-chair. It was his wont at night when he returned from business. Frida cast one contemptuous glance as she passed at his burly, unintelligent form, and went up to her bedroom.
But all that night long she never slept. Her head was too full of Bertram Ingledew.
Yet, strange to say, she felt not one qualm of conscience for their stolen meeting. No feminine terror, no fluttering fear, disturbed her equanimity. It almost seemed to her as if Bertram\'s kiss had released her by magic, at once and for ever, from the taboos of her nation. She had slipped out from home unperceived, that night, in fear and trembling, with many sinkings of heart and dire misgivings, while Robert and Phil were downstairs in the smoking-room; she had slunk round, crouching low, to Miss Blake\'s lodgings: and she had terrified her soul on the way with a good woman\'s doubts and a good woman\'s fears as to the wrongfulness of her attempt to say good-bye to the friend she might now no longer mix with. But from the moment her lips and Bertram\'s touched, all fear and doubt seemed utterly to have vanished; she lay there all night in a fierce ecstasy of love, hugging herself for strange delight, thinking only of Bertram, and wondering what manner of thing was this promised freedom whereof her lover had spoken to her so confidently. She trusted him now; she knew he would do right, and right alone: whatever he advised, she would be safe in following.
Next day, Robert went up to town to business as usual. He was immersed in palm-oil. By a quarter to two, Frida found herself in the fields. But, early as she went to fulfil her tryst, Bertram was there before her. He took her hand in his with a gentle pressure, and Frida felt a quick thrill she had never before experienced course suddenly through her. She looked around to right and left, to see if they were observed. Bertram noticed the instinctive movement. “My darling,” he said in a low voice, “this is intolerable, unendurable. It\'s an insult not to be borne that you and I can\'t walk together in the fields of England without being subjected thus to such a many-headed espionage. I shall have to arrange something before long so as to see you at leisure. I can\'t be so bound by all the taboos of your country.”
She looked up at him trustfully. “As you will, Bertram,” she answered, without a moment\'s hesitation. “I know I\'m yours now. Let it be what it may, I can do what you tell me.”
He looked at her and smiled. He saw she was pure woman. He had met at last with a sister soul. There was a long, deep silence.
Frida was the first to break it with words. “Why do you always call them taboos, Bertram?” she asked at last, sighing.
“Why, Frida, don\'t you see?” he said, walking on through the deep grass. “Because they ARE taboos; that\'s the only reason. Why not give them their true name? We call them nothing else among my own people. All taboos are the same in origin and spirit, whether savage or civilised, eastern or western. You must see that now: for I know you are emancipated. They begin with belief in some fetich or bogey or other non-existent supernatural being; and they mostly go on to regard certain absolutely harmless—nay, sometimes even praiseworthy or morally obligatory—acts as proscribed by him and sure to be visited with his condign displeasure. So South Sea Islanders think, if they eat some particular luscious fruit tabooed for the chiefs, they\'ll be instantly struck dead by the mere power of the taboo in it; and English people think, if they go out in the country for a picnic on a tabooed day, or use certain harmless tabooed names and words, or inquire into the historical validity of certain incredible ancient documents, accounted sacred, or even dare to think certain things that no reasonable man can prevent himself from thinking, they\'ll be burned for ever in eternal fire for it. The common element is the dread of an unreal sanction. So in Japan and West Africa the people believe the whole existence of the world and the universe is bound up with the health of their own particular king or the safety of their own particular royal family; and therefore they won\'t allow their Mikado or their chief to go outside his palace, lest he should knock his royal foot against a stone, and so prevent the sun from shining and the rain from falling. In other places, it\'s a tree or a shrub with which the stability and persistence of the world is bound up; whenever that tree or shrub begins to droop or wither, the whole population rushes out in bodily fear and awe, bearing water to pour upon it, and crying aloud with wild cries as if their lives were in danger. If any man were to injure the tree, which of course is no more valuable than any other bush of its sort, they\'d tear him to pieces on the spot, and kill or torture every member of his family. And so too, in England, most people believe, without a shadow of reason, that if men and women were allowed to manage their own personal relations, free from tribal interference, all life and order would go to rack and ruin; the world would become one vast, horrible orgy; and society would dissolve in some incredible fashion. To prevent this imaginary and impossible result, they insist upon regulating one another\'s lives from outside with the strictest taboos, like those which hem round the West African kings, and punish with cruel and relentless heartlessness every man, and still more every woman, who dares to transgress them.”
“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, ............