“Mr. Ingledew,” Frida exclaimed, “do you know, when you talk like that, I always long to ask you where on earth you come from, and who are these your people you so often speak about. A blessed people: I would like to learn about them; and yet I'm afraid to. You almost seem to me like a being from another planet.”
The young man laughed a quiet little laugh of deprecation, and sat down on the garden bench beside the yellow rose-bush.
“Oh, dear, no, Frida,” he said, with that transparent glance of his. “Now, don't look so vexed; I shall call you Frida if I choose; it's your name, and I like you. Why let this funny taboo of one's own real name stand in the way of reasonable friendship? In many savage countries a woman's never allowed to call her husband by his name, or even to know it, or, for the matter of that, to see him in the daylight. In your England, the arrangement's exactly reversed: no man's allowed to call a woman by her real name unless she's tabooed for life to him—what you Europeans call married to him. But let that pass. If one went on pulling oneself up short at every one of your customs, one'd never get any further in any question one was discussing. Now, don't be deceived by nonsensical talk about living beings in other planets. There are no such creatures. It's a pure delusion of the ordinary egotistical human pattern. When people chatter about life in other worlds, they don't mean life—which, of a sort, there may be there:—they mean human life—a very different and much less important matter. Well, how could there possibly be human beings, or anything like them, in other stars or planets? The conditions are too complex, too peculiar, too exclusively mundane. We are things of this world, and of this world only. Don't let's magnify our importance: we're not the whole universe. Our race is essentially a development from a particular type of monkey-like animal—the Andropithecus of the Upper Uganda eocene. This monkey-like animal itself, again, is the product of special antecedent causes, filling a particular place in a particular tertiary fauna and flora, and impossible even in the fauna and flora of our own earth and our own tropics before the evolution of those succulent fruits and grain-like seeds, for feeding on which it was specially adapted. Without edible fruits, in short, there could be no monkey; and without monkeys there could be no man.”
“But mayn't there be edible fruits in the other planets?” Frida inquired, half-timidly, more to bring out this novel aspect of Bertram's knowledge than really to argue with him; for she dearly loved to hear his views of things, they were so fresh and unconventional.
“Edible fruits? Yes, possibly; and animals or something more or less like animals to feed upon them. But even if there are such, which planetoscopists doubt, they must be very different creatures in form and function from any we know on this one small world of ours. For just consider, Frida, what we mean by life. We mean a set of simultaneous and consecutive changes going on in a complex mass of organised carbon compounds. When most people say 'life,' however,—especially here with you, where education is undeveloped—they aren't thinking of life in general at all (which is mainly vegetable), but only of animal and often indeed of human life. Well, then, consider, even on this planet itself, how special are the conditions that make life possible. There must be water in some form, for there's no life in the desert. There must be heat up to a certain point, and not above or below it, for fire kills, and there's no life at the poles (as among Alpine glaciers), or what little there is depends upon the intervention of other life wafted from elsewhere—from the lands or seas, in fact, where it can really originate. In order to have life at all, as WE know it at least (and I can't say whether anything else could be fairly called life by any true analogy, until I've seen and examined it), you must have carbon, and oxygen, and hydrogen, and nitrogen, and many other things, under certain fixed conditions; you must have liquid water, not steam or ice: you must have a certain restricted range of temperature, neither very much higher nor very much lower than the average of the tropics. Now, look, even with all these conditions fulfilled, how diverse is life on this earth itself, the one place we really know—varying as much as from the oak to the cuttle-fish, from the palm to the tiger, from man to the fern, the sea-weed, or the jelly-speck. Every one of these creatures is a complex result of very complex conditions, among which you must never forget to reckon the previous existence and interaction of all the antecedent ones. Is it probable, then, even a priori, that if life or anything like it exists on any other planet, it would exist in forms at all as near our own as a buttercup is to a human being, or a sea-anemone is to a cat or a pine-tree?”
“Well, it doesn't look likely, now you come to put it so,” Frida answered thoughtfully: for, though English, she was not wholly impervious to logic.
“Likely? Of course not,” Bertram went on with conviction. “Planetoscopists are agreed upon it. And above all, why should one suppose the living organisms or their analogues, if any such there are, in the planets or fixed stars, possess any such purely human and animal faculties as thought and reason? That's just like our common human narrowness. If we were oaks, I suppose, we would only interest ourselves in the question whether acorns existed in Mars and Saturn.” He paused a moment; then he added in an afterthought: “No, Frida; you may be sure all human beings, you and I alike, and thousands of others a great deal more different, are essential products of this one wee planet, and of particular times and circumstances in its history. We differ only as birth and circumstances have made us differ. There IS a mystery about who I am, and where I come from; I won't deny it: but it isn't by any means so strange or so marvellous a mystery as you seem to imagine. One of your own old sacred books says (as I remember hearing in the joss-house I attended one day in London), 'God hath made of one blood all the nations of the earth.' If for GOD in that passage we substitute COMMON DESCENT, it's perfectly true. We are all of one race; and I confess, when I talk to you, every day I feel our unity more and more profoundly.” He bent over on the bench and took her tremulous hand. “Frida,” he said, looking deep into her speaking dark eyes, “don't you yourself feel it?”
He was so strange, so simple-minded, so different in every way from all other men, that for a moment Frida almost half-forgot to be angry with him. In point of fact, in her heart, she was not angry at all; she liked to feel the soft pressure of his strong man's hand on her dainty fingers; she liked to feel the gentle way he was stroking her smooth arm with that delicate white palm of his. It gave her a certain immediate and unthinking pleasure to sit still by his side and know he was full of her. Then suddenly, with a start, she remembered her duty: she was a married woman, and she OUGHT NOT to do it. Quickly, with a startled air, she withdrew her hand. Bertram gazed down at her for a second, half taken aback by her hurried withdrawal.
“Then you don't like me!” he cried, in a pained tone; “after all, you don't like me!” One moment later, a ray of recognition broke slowly over his face. “Oh, I forgot,” he said, leaning away. “I didn't mean to annoy you. A year or two ago, of course, I might have held your hand in mine as long as ever I liked. You were still a free being. But what was right then is wrong now, according to the kaleidoscopic etiquette of your countrywomen. I forgot all that in the heat of the moment. I recollected only we were two human beings, of the same race and blood, with hearts that beat and hands that lay together. I remember now, you must hide and stifle your native impulses in future: you're tabooed for life to Robert Monteith: I must needs respect his seal set upon you!”
And he drew a deep sigh of enforced resignation.