IX
At half-past nine one evening that week, Bertram was seated in his sitting-room at Miss Blake’s lodgings, making entries, as usual, on the subject of taboo in his big black notebook. It was a large bare room, furnished with the customary round rosewood centre table, and decorated by a pair of green china vases, a set of wax flowers under a big glass shade, and a picture representing two mythical beings, with women’s faces and birds’ wings, hovering over the figure of a sleeping baby. Suddenly a hurried knock at the door attracted his attention. “Come in,” he said softly, in that gentle and almost deferential voice which he used alike to his equals and to the lodging-house servant. The door opened at once, and Frida entered.
She was pale as a ghost, and she stepped light with a terrified tread. Bertram could see at a glance she was profoundly agitated. For a moment he could hardly imagine the reason why: then he remembered all at once the strict harem rules by which married women in England are hemmed in and circumvented. To visit an unmarried man alone by night is contrary to tribal usage. He rose, and advanced towards his visitor with outstretched arms. “Why, Frida,” he cried,—“Mrs. Monteith—no, Frida—what’s the matter? What has happened since I left? You look so pale and startled.”
Frida closed the door cautiously, flung herself down into a chair in a despairing attitude, and buried her face in her hands for some moments in silence. “O Mr. Ingledew,” she cried at last, looking up in an agony of shame and doubt: “Bertram—I KNOW it’s wrong; I KNOW it’s wicked; I ought never to have come. Robert would kill me if he found out. But it’s my one last chance, and I couldn’t BEAR not to say good-bye to you—just this once—for ever.”
Bertram gazed at her in astonishment. Long and intimately as he had lived among the various devotees of divine taboos the whole world over, it was with difficulty still he could recall, each time, each particular restriction of the various systems. Then it came home to him with a rush. He removed the poor girl’s hands gently from her face, which she had buried once more in them for pure shame, and held them in his own. “Dear Frida,” he said tenderly, stroking them as he spoke, “why, what does all this mean? What’s this sudden thunderbolt? You’ve come here to-night without your husband’s leave, and you’re afraid he’ll discover you?”
Frida spoke under her breath, in a voice half-choked with frequent sobs. “Don’t talk too loud,” she whispered. “Miss Blake doesn’t know I’m here. If she did, she’d tell on me. I slipped in quietly through the open back door. But I felt I MUST—I really, really MUST. I COULDN’T stop away; I COULDN’T help it.”
Bertram gazed at her, distressed. Her tone was distressing. Horror and indignation for a moment overcame him. She had had to slip in there like a fugitive or a criminal. She had had to crawl away by stealth from that man, her keeper. She, a grown woman and a moral agent, with a will of her own and a heart and a conscience, was held so absolutely in serfdom as a particular man’s thrall and chattel, that she could not even go out to visit a friend without these degrading subterfuges of creeping in unperceived by a back entrance, and talking low under her breath, lest a lodging-house crone should find out what she was doing. And all the world of England was so banded in league with the slave-driver against the soul he enslaved, that if Miss Blake had seen her she could hardly have come in: while, once in, she must tremble and whisper and steal about with muffled feet, for fear of discovery in this innocent adventure. He held his breath with stifled wrath. It was painful and degrading.
But he had no time just then to think much of all this, for there sat Frida, tremulous and shivering before his very eyes, trying hard to hide her beautiful white face in her quivering hands, and murmuring over and over again in a very low voice, like an agonised creature, “I couldn’t BEAR not to be allowed to say good-bye to you for ever.”
Bertram smoothed her cheek gently. She tried to prevent him, but he went on in spite of her, with a man’s strong persistence. Notwithstanding his gentleness he was always virile. “Good-bye!” he cried. “Good-bye! why on earth good-bye, Frida? When I left you before dinner you never said one word of it to me.”
“Oh, no,” Frida cried, sobbing. “It’s all Robert, Robert! As soon as ever you were gone, he called me into the library—which always means he’s going to talk over some dreadful business with me—and he said to me, ‘Frida, I’ve just heard from Phil that this man Ingledew, who’s chosen to foist himself upon us, holds opinions and sentiments which entirely unfit him from being proper company for any lady. Now, he’s been coming here a great deal too often of late. Next time he calls, I wish you to tell Martha you’re not at home to him.’”
Bertram looked across at her with a melting look in his honest blue eyes. “And you came round to tell me of it, you dear thing!” he cried, seizing her hand and grasping it hard. “O Frida, how kind of you!”
Frida trembled from head to foot. The blood throbbed in her pulse. “Then you’re not vexed with me,” she sobbed out, all tremulous with gladness.
“Vexed with you! O Frida, how could I be vexed? You poor child! I’m so pleased, so glad, so grateful!”
Frida let her hand rest unresisting in his. “But, Bertram,” she murmured,—“I MUST call you Bertram—I couldn’t help it, you know. I like you so much, I couldn’t let you go for ever without just saying good-bye to you.”
“You DON’T like me; you LOVE me,” Bertram answered with masculine confidence. “No, you needn’t blush, Frida; you can’t deceive me.... My darling, you love me, and you know I love you. Why should we two make any secret about our hearts any longer?” He laid his hand on her face again, making it tingle with joy. “Frida,” he said solemnly, “you don’t love that man you call your husband.... You haven’t loved him for years.... You never really loved him.”
There was something about the mere sound of Bertram’s calm voice that made Frida speak the truth more plainly and frankly than she could ever have spoken it to any ordinary Englishman. Yet she hung down her head, even so, and hesitated slightly. “Just at first,” she murmured half-inaudibly, “I used to THINK I loved him. At any rate, I was pleased and flattered he should marry me.”
“Pleased and flattered!” Bertram exclaimed, more to himself than to her; “great Heavens, how incredible! Pleased and flattered by that man! One can hardly conceive it! But you’ve never loved him since, Frida. You can’t look me in the face and tell me you love him.”
“No, not since the first few months,” Frida answered, still hanging her head. “But, Bertram, he’s my husband, and of course I must obey him.”
“You must do nothing of the sort,” Bertram cried authoritatively. “You don’t love him at all, and you mustn’t pretend to. It’s wrong: it’s wicked. Sooner or later—” He checked himself. “Frida,” he went on, after a moment’s pause, “I won’t speak to you of what I was going to say just now. I’ll wait a bit till you’re stronger and better able to understand it. But there must be no more silly talk of farewells between us. I won’t allow it. You’re mine now—a thousand times more truly mine than ever you were Monteith’s; and I can’t do without you. You must go back to your husband for the present, I suppose,—the circumstances compel it, though I don’t approve of it; but you must see me again… and soon… and often, just the same as usual. I won’t go to your house, of course: the house is Monteith’s; and everywhere among civilised and rational races the sanctity of the home is rightly respected. But YOU yourself he has no claim or right to taboo; and if I can help it, he shan’t taboo you. You may go home now to-night, dear one; but you must meet me often. If you can’t come round to my rooms—for fear of Miss Blake’s fetich, the respectability of her house—we must meet elsewhere, till I can make fresh arrangements.”
Frida gazed up at him in doubt. “But will it be RIGHT, Bertram?” she murmured.
The man looked down into her big eyes in dazed astonishment. “Why, Frida,” he cried, half-pained at the question, “do you think if it were WRONG I’d advise you to do it? I’m here to help you, to guide you, to lead you on by degrees to higher and truer life. How can you imagine I’d ask you to do anything on earth unless I felt perfectly sure and convinced it was the very most right and proper conduct?”
His arm stole round her waist and drew her tenderly towards him. Frida allowed the caress passively. There was a robust frankness about his love-making that seemed to rob it of all taint or tinge of evil. Then he caught her bodily in his arms like a man who has never associated the purest and noblest of human passions with any lower thought, any baser personality. He had not taken his first lessons in the art of love from the wearied lips of joyless courtesans whom his own kind had debased and unsexed and degraded out of all semblance of womanhood. He bent over the woman of his choice and kissed her with chaste warmth. On the forehead first, then, after a short interval, twice on the lips. At each kiss, from which she somehow did not shrink, as if recognising its purity, Frida felt a strange thrill course through and through her. She quivered from head to foot. The scales fell from her eyes. The taboos of her race grew null and void within her. She looked up at him more boldly. “O Bertram,” she whispered, nestling close to his side, and burying her blushing face in the man’s curved bosom, “I don’t know what you’ve done to me, but I feel quite different—as if I’d eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.”
“I hope you have,” Bertram answered, in a very solemn voice; “for, Frida, you will need it.” He pressed her close against his breast; and Frida Monteith, a free woman at last, clung there many minutes with no vile inherited sense of shame or wrongfulness. “I can’t bear to go,” she cried, still clinging to him and clutching him tight. “I’m so happy here, Bertram; oh, so happy, so happy!”
“Then why go away at all?” Bertram asked, quite simply.
Frida drew back in horror. “Oh, I must,” she said, coming to herself: “I must, of course, because of Robert.”
Bertram held her hand, smoothing it all the while with his own, as he mused and hesitated. “Well, it’s clearly wrong to go back,” he said, after a moment’s pause. “You ought never, of course, to spend another night with that man you don’t love and should never have lived with. But I suppose that’s only a counsel of perfection: too hard a saying for you to understand or follow for the present. You’d better go back, just to-night: and, as time moves on, I can arrange something else for you. But when shall I see you again?—for now you belong to me. I sealed you with that kiss. When will you come and see me?”
“I can’t come here, you know,” Frida whispered, half-terrified; “for if I did, Miss Blake would see me.”
Bertram smiled a bitter smile to himself. “So she would,” he said, musing. “And though she’s not the least interested in keeping up Robert Monteith’s proprietary claim on your life and freedom, I’m beginning to understand now that it would be an offence against that mysterious and incomprehensible entity they call RESPECTABILITY if she were to allow me to receive you in her rooms. It’s all very curious. But, of course, while I remain, I must be content to submit to it. By-and-by, perhaps, Frida, we two may manage to escape together from this iron generation. Meanwhile, I shall go up to London less often for the present, and you can come and meet me, dear, in the Middle Mill Fields at two o’clock on Monday.”
She gazed up at him with perfect trust in those luminous dark eyes of hers. “I will, Bertram,” she said firmly. She knew not herself what his kiss had done for her; but one thing she knew: from the moment their lips met, she had felt and understood in a flood of vision that perfect love which casteth out fear, and was no longer afraid of him.
“That’s right, darling,” the man answered, stooping down and laying his cheek against her own once more. “You are mine, and I am yours. You are not and never were Robert Monteith’s, my Frida. So now, good-night, till Monday at two, beside the stile in Middle Mill Meadows!”
She clung to him for a moment in a passionate embrace. He let her stop there, while he smoothed her dark hair with one free hand. Then suddenly, with a burst, the older feelings of her race overcame her for a minute; she broke from his grasp and hid her head, all crimson, in a cushion on the sofa. One second later, again, she lifted her face unabashed. The new impulse stirred her. “I’m proud I love you, Bertram,” she cried, with red lips and flashing eyes; “and I’m proud you love me!”
With that, she slipped quietly out, and walked, erect and graceful, no longer ashamed, down the lodging-house passage.
X
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, that your own people, as you know, taboo even the fair and free discussion of this the most important and serious question of life and morals. They make it, as we would say at home, a refuge for enforced ignorance. For it’s well known that early tribes hold the most superstitious ideas about the relation of men to women, and dread the most ridiculous and impossible evils resulting from it; and these absurd terrors of theirs seem to have been handed on intact to civilised races, so that for fear of I know not what ridiculous bogey of their own imaginations, or dread of some unnatural restraining deity, men won’t even discuss a matter of so much importance to them all, but, rather than let the taboo of silence be broken, will allow such horrible things to take place in their midst as I have seen with my eyes for these last six or seven weeks in your cities. O Frida, you can’t imagine what things—for I know they hide them from you: cruelties of lust and neglect and shame such as you couldn’t even dream of; women dying of foul disease, in want and dirt deliberately forced upon them by the will of your society; destined beforehand for death, a hateful lingering death—a death more disgusting than aught you can conceive—in order that the rest of you may be safely tabooed, each a maid intact, for the man who weds her. It’s the hatefullest taboo of all the hateful taboos I’ve ever seen on my wanderings, the unworthiest of a pure or moral community.”
He shut his eyes as if to forget the horrors of which he spoke. They were fresh and real to him. Frida did not like to question him further. She knew to what he referred, and in a dim, vague way (for she was less wise than he, she knew) she thought she could imagine why he found it all so terrible.
They walked on in silence a while through the deep, lush grass of the July meadow. At last Bertram spoke again: “Frida,” he said, with a trembling quiver, “I didn’t sleep last night. I was thinking this thing over—this question of our relations.”
“Nor did I,” Frida answered, thrilling through, responsive. “I was thinking the same thing.... And, Bertram, ‘twas the happiest night I ever remember.”
Bertram’s face flushed rosy red, that native colour of triumphant love; but he answered nothing. He only looked at her with a look more eloquent by far than a thousand speeches.
“Frida,” he went on at last, “I’ve been thinking it all over; and I feel, if only you can come away with me for just seven days, I could arrange at the end of that time—to take you home with me.”
Frida’s face in turn waxed rosy red; but she answered only in a very low voice: “Thank you, Bertram.”
“Would you go with me?” Bertram cried, his face aglow with pleasure. “You know, it’s a very, very long way off; and I can’t even tell you where it is or how you get there. But can you trust me enough to try? Are you not afraid to come with me?”
Frida’s voice trembled slightly.
“I’m not afraid, if that’s all,” she answered in a very firm tone. “I love you, and I trust you, and I could follow you to the world’s end—or, if needful, out of it. But there’s one other question. Bertram, ought I to?”
She asked it, more to see what answer Bertram would make to her than from any real doubt; for ever since that kiss last night, she felt sure in her own mind with a woman’s certainty whatever Bertram told her was the thing she ought to do; but she wanted to know in what light he regarded it.
Bertram gazed at her hard.
“Why, Frida,” he said, “it’s right, of course, to go. The thing that’s WRONG is to stop with that man one minute longer than’s absolutely necessary. You don’t love him—you never loved him; or, if you ever did, you’ve long since ceased to do so. Well, then, it’s a dishonour to yourself to spend one more day with him. How can you submit to the hateful endearments of a man you don’t love or care for? How wrong to yourself, how infinitely more wrong to your still unborn and unbegotten children! Would you consent to become the mother of sons and daughters by a man whose whole character is utterly repugnant to you? Nature has given us this divine instinct of love within, to tell us with what persons we should spontaneously unite: will you fly in her face and unite with a man whom you feel and know to be wholly unworthy of you? With us, such conduct would be considered disgraceful. We think every man and woman should be free to do as they will with their own persons; for that is the very basis and foundation of personal liberty. But if any man or woman were openly to confess they yielded their persons to another for any other reason than because the strongest sympathy and love compelled them, we should silently despise them. If you don’t love Monteith, it’s your duty to him, and still more your duty to yourself and your unborn children, at once to leave him; if you DO love me, it’s your duty to me, and still more your duty to yourself and our unborn children, at once to cleave to me. Don’t let any sophisms of taboo-mongers come in to obscure that plain natural duty. Do right first; let all else go. For one of yourselves, a poet of your own, has said truly:
‘Because right is right, to follow right
Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.’”
Frida looked up at him with admiration in her big black eyes. She had found the truth, and the truth had made her free.
“O Bertram,” she cried with a tremor, “it’s good to be like you. I felt from the very first how infinitely you differed from the men about me. You seemed so much greater and higher and nobler. How grateful I ought to be to Robert Monteith for having spoken to me yesterday and forbidden me to see you! for if he hadn’t, you might never have kissed me last night, and then I might never have seen things as I see them at present.”
There was another long pause; for the best things we each say to the other are said in the pauses. Then Frida relapsed once more into speech: “But what about the children?” she asked rather timidly.
Bertram looked puzzled. “Why, what about the children?” he repeated in a curious way. “What difference on earth could that make to the children?”
“Can I bring them with me, I mean?” Frida asked, a little tremulous for the reply. “I couldn’t bear to leave them. Even for you, dear Bertram, I could never desert them.”
Bertram gazed at her dismayed. “Leave them!” he cried. “Why, Frida, of course you could never leave them. Do you mean to say anybody would be so utterly unnatural, even in England, as to separate a mother from her own children?”
“I don’t think Robert would let me keep them,” Frida faltered, with tears in her eyes; “and if he didn’t, the law, of course, would take his side against me.”
“Of course!” Bertram answered, with grim sarcasm in his face, “of course! I might have guessed it. If there IS an injustice or a barbarity possible, I might have been sure the law of England would make haste to perpetrate it. But you needn’t fear, Frida. Long before the law of England could be put in motion, I’ll have completed my arrangements for taking you—and them too—with me. There are advantages sometimes even in the barbaric delay of what your lawyers are facetiously pleased to call justice.”
“Then I may bring them with me?” Frida cried, flushing red.
Bertram nodded assent. “Yes,” he said, with grave gentleness. “You may bring them with you. And as soon as you like, too. Remember, dearest, every night you pass under that creature’s roof, you commit the vilest crime a woman can commit against her own purity.”