Vain oblations

by Katharine Fullerton Gerould

For the sake of moral values I ought to wish, I suppose, that Paramore had been a more conspicuous figure. There is moral significance in the true tale of Paramore—the tale which has been left to me in trust by Hoyting. I cursed Hoyting when he did it; for Paramore’s reputation was nothing to me, and what Paramore knew or didn’t know was in my eyes unspeakably unimportant. I wish it clearly understood, you see, that if Paramore deliberately confused exogamy and endogamy in the Australian bush, it doesn’t in the least matter to me. Paramore is only a symbol. As a symbol, I am compelled to feel him important. That is why I wish that his name were ringing in the ears and vibrating on the lips of all of you. His bad anthropology doesn’t matter—a dozen big people are delightedly setting that straight—but the adventure of his soul immensely does. Rightly read, it’s as sound as a homily and as dramatic as Euripides. The commonest field may be chosen by opposing generals to be decisive; and in a day history is born where before only the quiet wheat has sprung. Paramore is like that. The hostile forces converged by chance upon his breast.

I have implied that Paramore was never conspicuous. That is to be more merciful than just. The general public cares no more, I suppose, than I do about the marriage customs of Australian aborigines. But nowadays the general public has in pay, as it were, an army of scientists in every field. We all expect to be told in our daily papers of their most important victories, and have a comfortable feeling that we, as the age, are subsidizing research. By the same token, if they deceive us, we—the age—are personally injured and fall to “muck-raking.” It is typical that no one had been much interested in Paramore until he was discredited, and that then, quite without intelligible documents, we all began to despise him. The situation, for that matter, was not without elements of humor. The facts, as I and the general public knew them, were these—before Hoyting, with his damnable inside information, came into it.

Paramore sprang one day, full-armed, from some special academic obscurity. He had scraped together enough money to bury himself in the Australian bush and grapple face to face with primitive religion in its most concrete form. Each to his taste; and I dare say some casual newspaper readers wished him godspeed. There followed the proper interval of time; then an emaciated Paramore suddenly emerging, laden with note-books; then the published volume, very striking and revolutionary, a treasure-house of authentic and indecent anecdote. He could write, too, which was part of his evil fate; so that a great many people read him. That, however, was not Paramore’s fault. His heart, I believe, was in Great Russell Street, where the Royal Anthropologists have power to accept or reject. He probably wanted the alphabet picturesquely arranged after his name. At all events, he got it in large measure. You see, his evidence completely upset a lot of hard-won theories about mother-right and group-marriage; and he didn’t hesitate to contradict the very greatest. He actually made a few people speak lightly of The Golden Bough. No scientist had ever spent so long at primitive man’s very hearth as Paramore had. It was a tremendous achievement. He had data that must have been more dangerous to collect than the official conversation of nihilists. It was his daring that won him the momentary admiration of the public to which exogamy is a ludicrously unimportant noun. Very soon, of course, every one forgot.

It was not more than two years after his book was printed that the newspapers took him up again. Most of them appended to the despatch a brief biography of Paramore. No biographies were needed in Great Russell Street. This was the point where the comic spirit decided to meddle. A few Germans had always been protesting at inconsistencies in Paramore’s book, and no one had paid any attention to them. There is always a learned German protesting somewhere. The general attitude among the great was: any one may challenge or improve Paramore’s conclusions—in fact, it’s going to be our delightful task for ten years to get more out of Paramore than he can get out of himself—but do get down on your knees before the immense amount of material he has taken the almost fatal trouble to collect for us. No other European was in a position to discredit Paramore. It took an Australian planter to do that. Whitaker was his quite accidentally notorious name. The comic spirit pushed him on a North German Lloyder at Melbourne, to spend a few happy months in London. It was perfectly natural that people who talked to him at all should mention Paramore. The unnatural thing was that he knew all about Paramore. He didn’t tell all he knew—as I learned afterward—but he told at least enough to prove that Paramore hadn’t spent so much time in the bush as would have been absolutely necessary to compile one-quarter of his note-books. Whitaker was sufficiently reticent about what Paramore had been doing most of the time; but he knew for a fact, and took a sporting interest in proving it, that Paramore had never been west of the Musgrave Range. That in itself sufficed to ruin Paramore. It was perfectly easy, then, for the little chorus from Bonn, Heidelberg, etc., to prove in their meticulous way that both his cribbing and lying (his whole treatment of Spencer and Gillen was positively artistic) had all been mere dust-throwing. Of course, what Paramore really had achieved ceased from that moment to count. He had blasphemed; and the holy inquisition of science would do the rest. It all took a certain amount of time, but that was the net result.

Paramore made no defence, oddly enough. Some kind people arranged an accidental encounter between him and Whitaker. The comic spirit was hostess, and the newspapers described it. It gave the cartoonists a happy week. Then an international complication intervened, and the next thing the newspapers found time to say about him was that he had gone to the Upper Niger, still on folk-lore bent. That fact would have been stupendous if it hadn’t been so unimportant. Two years later, the fickle press returned to him just long enough to say that he had died. I certainly thought then that we had heard the last of him. But the comic spirit had laid her inexorable finger on Hoyting. And suddenly, as if in retribution for my spasmodic interest in Paramore’s beautiful fraud, Hoyting sent for me.

I went to one of the rue de Rivoli hotels and met him by appointment. Of course, he hadn’t told me what it was about. Hoyting never writes; and he puts as little into a telegram as a frugal old maid. Any sign from Hoyting, however, would have sufficed to bring me to Paris; and I stayed in my hotel, never budging even for the Salon, so close at hand, until Hoyting appeared in my sitting-room.

I asked Hoyting no questions. I hadn’t an idea of what he wanted. It might, given Hoyting, be anything. He began without preliminaries—except looking frightfully tired. That, for Hoyting, was a rather appalling preliminary.

“Three months ago I was in Dakar. I don’t know just why I had drifted to Sénégal, except that I’ve come to feel that if there must be colonial governments they had better be French. If there was any special thing that pushed me, I’ve forgotten it.

“They were decentish people, those French officers and their wives. A little stiff always, never expatriated, never quite at ease in their African inn, but not half so likely to go fantee as the romantic Briton. And once a fortnight the little boats from Bordeaux would come in, bringing more of them. I rather liked them; but, even so, there wasn’t any particular reason for my staying so long in Dakar. I hung on like an alarm that has been set. I couldn’t go off—or on—until the moment I was set for. I don’t suppose the alarm-clock knows until the vibration begins within it. Something kept me there in that dull, glaring, little official town, with its dry dock and torpedo basin, which, of course, they had managed to endow with the flavor of provincial France. They do that everywhere—you’ll have noticed?

“I used to go up sometimes in the comparative cool of the evening to dine with the Fathers. It isn’t that I hold with them much—Rome was introduced to me in my childhood as the Scarlet Woman—but all travellers have the same tale to tell. They are incomparable missionaries. And it stands to reason that they can get on better with savages than the rest of you. You can meet magic only with magic. It was they who introduced me to Paramore.”