“Then where do you come from?” the Dean asked severely, pouncing down upon him like a hawk. “I've always understood the very lowest savages have at least some outer form or shadow of religion.”
“Yes, perhaps so; but we're not savages, either low or otherwise,” Bertram answered cautiously, perceiving his error. “And as to your other point, for reasons of my own, I prefer for the present not to say where I come from. You wouldn't believe me, if I told you—as you didn't, I saw, about my remote connection with the Duke of East Anglia's family. And we're not accustomed, where I live, to be disbelieved or doubted. It's perhaps the one thing that really almost makes us lose our tempers. So, if you please, I won't go any further at present into the debatable matter of my place of origin.”
He rose to stroll off into the gardens, having spoken all the time in that peculiarly grave and dignified tone that seemed natural to him whenever any one tried to question him closely. Nobody save a churchman would have continued the discussion. But the Dean was a churchman, and also a Scot, and he returned to the attack, unabashed and unbaffled. “But surely, Mr. Ingledew,” he said in a persuasive voice, “your people, whoever they are, must at least acknowledge a creator of the universe.”
Bertram gazed at him fixedly. His eye was stern. “My people, sir,” he said slowly, in very measured words, unaware that one must not argue with a clergyman, “acknowledge and investigate every reality they can find in the universe—and admit no phantoms. They believe in everything that can be shown or proved to be natural and true; but in nothing supernatural, that is to say, imaginary or non-existent. They accept plain facts: they reject pure phantasies. How beautiful those lilies are, Mrs. Monteith! such an exquisite colour! Shall we go over and look at them?”
“Not just now,” Frida answered, relieved at the appearance of Martha with the tray in the distance. “Here's tea coming.” She was glad of the diversion, for she liked Bertram immensely, and she could not help noticing how hopelessly he had been floundering all that afternoon right into the very midst of what he himself would have called their taboos and joss-business.
But Bertram was not well out of his troubles yet. Martha brought the round tray—Oriental brass, finely chased with flowing Arabic inscriptions—and laid it down on the dainty little rustic table. Then she handed about the cups. Bertram rose to help her. “Mayn't I do it for you?” he said, as politely as he would have said it to a lady in her drawing-room.
“No, thank you, sir,” Martha answered, turning red at the offer, but with the imperturbable solemnity of the well-trained English servant. She “knew her place,” and resented the intrusion. But Bertram had his own notions of politeness, too, which were not to be lightly set aside for local class distinctions. He could not see a pretty girl handing cups to guests without instinctively rising from his seat to assist her. So, very much to Martha's embarrassment, he continued to give his help in passing the cake and the bread-and-butter. As soon as she was gone, he turned round to Philip. “That's a very pretty girl and a very nice girl,” he said simply. “I wonder, now, as you haven't a wife, you've never thought of marrying her.”
The remark fell like a thunderbolt on the assembled group. Even Frida was shocked. Your most open-minded woman begins to draw a line when you touch her class prejudices in the matter of marriage, especially with reference to her own relations. “Why, really, Mr. Ingledew,” she said, looking up at him reproachfully, “you can't mean to say you think my brother could marry the parlour-maid!”
Bertram saw at a glance he had once more unwittingly run his head against one of the dearest of these strange people's taboos; but he made no retort openly. He only reflected in silence to himself how unnatural and how wrong they would all think it at home that a young man of Philip's age should remain nominally celibate; how horrified they would be at the abject misery and degradation such conduct on the part of half his caste must inevitably imply for thousands of innocent young girls of lower station, whose lives he now knew were remorselessly sacrificed in vile dens of tainted London to the supposed social necessity that young men of a certain class should marry late in a certain style, and “keep a wife in the way she's been accustomed to.” He remembered with a checked sigh how infinitely superior they would all at home have considered that wholesome, capable, good-looking Martha to an empty-headed and useless young man like Philip; and he thought to himself how completely taboo had overlaid in these people's minds every ethical idea, how wholly it had obscured the prime necessities of healthy, vigorous, and moral manhood. He recollected the similar though less hideous taboos he had met with elsewhere: the castes of India, and the horrible pollution that would result from disregarding them; the vile Egyptian rule, by which the divine king, in order to keep up the so-called purity of his royal and god-descended blood, must marry his own sister, and so foully pollute with monstrous abortions the very stock he believed himself to be preserving intact from common or unclean influences. His mind ran back to the strange and complicated forbidden degrees of the Australian Blackfellows, who are divided into cross-classes, each of which must necessarily marry into a certain other, and into that other only, regardless of individual tastes or preferences. He remembered the profound belief of all these people that if they were to act in any other way than the one prescribed, some nameless misfortune or terrible evil would surely overtake them. Yet, nowhere, he thought to himself, had he seen any system which entailed in the end so much misery on both sexes, though more particularly on the women, as that system of closely tabooed marriage, founded upon a broad basis of prostitution and infanticide, which has reached its most appalling height of development in hypocritical and puritan England. The ghastly levity with which all Englishmen treated this most serious subject, and the fatal readiness with which even Frida herself seemed to acquiesce in the most inhuman slavery ever devised for women on the face of this earth, shocked and saddened Bertram's profoundly moral and sympathetic nature. He could sit there no longer to listen to their talk. He bethought him at once of the sickening sights he had seen the evening before in a London music-hall; of the corrupting mass of filth underneath, by which alone this abomination of iniquity could be kept externally decent, and this vile system of false celibacy whitened outwardly to the eye like Oriental sepulchres: and he strolled off by himself into the shrubbery, very heavy in heart, to hide his real feelings from the priest and the soldier, whose coarser-grained minds could never have understood the enthusiasm of humanity which inspired and informed him.
Frida rose and followed him, moved by some unconscious wave of instinctive sympathy. The four children of this world were left together on the lawn by the rustic table, to exchange views by themselves on the extraordinary behaviour and novel demeanour of the mysterious Alien.