Classic Audiobook Collection - The British Barbarians by Grant Allen ~ Full Audiobook [comedy]

Episode Date: January 18, 2023

The British Barbarians by Grant Allen audiobook. Genre: comedy After Civil Servant Philip Christy crosses paths with the mysterious Bertram Ingledew in the respectable suburb of Brackenhurst, Philip and his sister Frida, married to the wealthy Scot Robert Monteith, become friends with the stranger. Bertram has some unconventional concepts about society, and as the story unfolds, his beliefs and actions cause much disruption in the family and the neighbourhood. Who is Bertram? Where does he come from? Allen explores some interesting ideas about society, some of which are curiously relevant today. The story is preceded by an introduction which, although it may appear to have no connection with the story itself, the reader is earnestly besought by the author to read. The introduction begins as a diatribe against publishers, and develops into a philosophical justification of Allen's writing, and may, if desired, be omitted by the listener who is only interested in the story. For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 00 (00:23:17) Chapter 01 (00:50:44) Chapter 02 (01:19:17) Chapter 03 (01:28:11) Chapter 04 (02:06:58) Chapter 05 (02:34:38) Chapter 06 (02:54:10) Chapter 07 (03:11:14) Chapter 08 (03:44:20) Chapter 09 (04:04:58) Chapter 10 (04:30:03) Chapter 11 (04:45:43) Chapter 12 (04:53:09) Chapter 13 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The British Barbarians by Grant Allen, introduction, which every reader of this book is requested to read before beginning the story. This is a hilltop novel. I dedicate it to all who have heart enough, brain enough and soul enough to understand it. What do I mean by a hilltop novel? Well, of late we have been flooded with stories of evil, tendencies. A hill-top novel is one which raises a protest in favour of purity. Why have not novelists raised the protest earlier? For this reason.

Hitherto, owing to the stern necessity laid upon the modern seer for earning his bread, and incidentally for finding a publisher to assist him in promulgating his prophetic opinions, it has seldom happened that writers of exceptional aims have been able to proclaim to the world at large the things which they conceived to be best worth their telling it. Especially has this been the case in the province of fiction. Let me explain the situation. Most novels nowadays have to run as serials through magazines or newspapers, and the editors of these periodicals are timid to a-obeyed to a series. a degree which outsiders would hardly believe with regard to the fiction they admit into their pages.

Endless spells surround them. This story or episode would annoy their Catholic readers. That one would repel their Wesleyan Methodist subscribers. Such an incident is unfit for the perusal of the young person. Such another would drive away the offended British. matron. I do not myself believe there is any real ground for this excessive, and, to be quite frank, somewhat ridiculous timidity. Incredible as it may seem to the ordinary editor, I am of opinion that it would be possible to tell the truth, and yet preserve the circulation. A first-class journal does not really suffer because two or three formalists, or two or two or three bigots, among its thousands of subscribers, give it up for six weeks in a pet of ill

temper, and then take it on again. Still the effect remains. It is almost impossible to get a novel printed in an English journal, unless it is warranted to contain nothing at all, to which anybody, however narrow, could possibly object, on any grounds whatever, religious, political, social, moral or aesthetic. The romance that appeals to the average editor must say or hint at nothing at all that is not universally believed and received by everybody everywhere in this realm of Britain. But literature, as Thomas Hardy says with truth, is mainly the expression of souls in revolt. hence the antagonism between literature and journalism.

Why then publish one's novels serially at all? Why not appeal at once to the outside public which has few such prejudices? Why not deliver one's message direct to those who are ready to consider it, or at least to hear it? Because, unfortunately, the serial rights of a novel at the present day are three times as valuable in money worth as the final book writes. A man who elects to publish direct, instead of running his story through the columns of a newspaper, is forfeiting, in other words, three quarters of his income. This loss that profit who cares for his mission could cheerfully endure, of course,

if only the diminished income were enough for him to live upon. But in order to write, he might, must first eat. In my own case, for example, up till the time when I published the woman who did, I could never live on the proceeds of direct publication. Nor could I even secure a publisher who would consent to aid me in introducing to the world what I thought most important for it. Having now found such a publisher, having secured my mountain, I am prepared to go on delivering my message from its top, as long as the world will consent to hear it. I will willingly forego the serial value of my novels, and forfeit three-quarters of the

amount I might otherwise earn, for the sake of uttering the truth that is in me, boldly and openly, to a perverse generation. For this reason, and in order to mark the distinction between these books which are really mine, my own in thought, in spirit, in teaching, and those which I have produced sorely against my will to satisfy editors, I propose in future to add the words a hilltop novel, to every one of my stories which I write of my own accord, simply and solely for the sake of embodying and enforcing my own opinions. Not that, as critics have sometimes supposed me to mean, I ever wrote a line even in fiction, contrary to my own profound beliefs.

I have never said a thing I did not think, but I have sometimes had to abstain from saying many things I did think. When I wished to purvey strong meat for men, I was condemned to provide milk for babes. In the Hilltop novels, I hope to reverse all that, to say my say in my own way, representing the world as it appears to me, not as editors and formalists would like me to represent it. The Hilltop novels, however, will not constitute in the ordinary sense a series. I shall add the name as a trademark to any story by whomsoever published, which I have written as the expression of my own individuality.

Nor will they necessarily appear in the first instance in volume form. If ever I should be lucky enough to find an editor sufficiently bold and sufficiently righteous to venture upon running a hilltop novel as a serial through his columns, I will gladly embrace that mode of publication. But while editors remain as pusillanimous and as careless of moral progress as they are at present, I have little hope that I shall persuade any one of them to accept a work written with a single eye to the enlightenment and bettering of humanity. Whenever, therefore, in future, the words, a hilltop novel, appear on the title

page of a book by me, the reader who cares for truth and righteousness may take it for granted that the book represents my own original thinking, whether good or bad, on some important point in human society or human evolution. Not again that any one of these novels will deliberately attempt to prove anything. I have been amused at the allegations brought by certain critics against the woman who did that it failed to prove the practicability of unions such as Herminus and Allens. The famous Scotsman in the same spirit objected to Paradise Lost

that it proved nothing. But his criticism has not been generally endorsed as valid. To say the truth, it is absurd to suppose a work of imagination can prove or disprove anything. The author holds the strings of all his puppets and can pull them as he likes for good or evil. He can make his own.

experiments turn out well or ill. He can contrive that his unions should end happily or miserably. How then can his story be said to prove anything? A novel is not a proposition in Euclid. I give due notice beforehand to reviewers in general that if any principle at all is proved by any of my hilltop novels, it will be simply this. Act as I think right, for the highest good of humankind and you will infallibly and inevitably come to a bad end for it not to prove anything but to suggest ideas to arouse emotions is i take it the true function of fiction one wishes to make one's readers think about problems they have never considered feel with sentiments they have disliked or hated the novelist as prophet has his duty defined for him in those divine words of Shelley's. Singing songs unbidden till the world is wrought to sympathy,

with hopes and fears it he did not. That too is the reason that impels me to embody such views as these in romantic fiction, not in deliberate treatises. Why so your ideas broadcast, many honest critics say, in novels where mere boys and girls can read them. Why not formulate them in serious and argumentative books where wise men alone will come across them? The answer is because wise men are wise already.

It is the boys and girls of a community who stand most in need of suggestion and instruction. Women in particular are the chief readers of fiction, and it is women whom one mainly desires to arouse to interest in profound problems by the aid of this vehicle. Especially should one arouse them to such living interest while they are still young and plastic, before they have crystallised and hardened into the conventional marionettes of polite society. Make them think while they are young. Make them feel while they are sensitive.

it is then alone that they will think and feel, if ever. I will venture, indeed, to enforce my views on this subject by a little apologue which I have somewhere read or heard or invented. A revolutionist desired to issue an election address to the working men of Bermondsey. The rector of the parish saw it at the printers, and came to him much perturbed. Why write it in English? he asked. It will only inflame the minds of the lower orders. Why not allow me to translate it into Ciceronian Latin? It would then be comprehensible to all university men. Your logic would be duly and deliberately weighed,

and the tanners and tinkers, who are so very impressionable, would not be poisoned by it. my friend said the revolutionist it is the tanners and tinkers i want to get at my object is to win this election university graduates will not help me to win it the business of the preacher is above all things to preach but in order to preach he must first reach his audience the audience in this case consists in large part of women and girls who are most simply and easily reached by fiction Therefore fiction is today the best medium for the preacher of righteousness who addresses humanity. Why, once more, this particular name, a Hilltop novel? For something like this reason. I'm writing in my study on a heather-clad hilltop. When I raise my eye from my sheet of foolscap, it falls upon miles and miles of broad, open moorland.

my window looks out upon unsullied nature everything around is fresh and pure and wholesome through the open casement the scent of the pines blows in with the breeze from the neighbouring fir-wood keen airs sigh through the pine-needles grasshoppers chirp from deep tangles of bracken the song of a skylark drops from the sky like soft rain in summer in the evening a night-jar croons to us his monotonously passionate love-wale from his perch on the gnarled boughs of the wind-swept larch that crowns the upland but away below in the valley as night draws on a lurid glare reddens the northeastern horizon it marks the spot where the great wen of london heaves and festers up here on the free hills the sharp air blows in upon us limpid and clear from a thousand leagues of open ocean down there in the crowded town it stagnates and ferments polluted with the diseases and vices of centuries this is an urban age the men of the villages alas are leaving behind them the green fields and purple moors of their childhood are foolishly crowding into the narrow lanes and purlieus of the great cities. Strange, decadent sins and morbid pleasures entice them thither.

But I desire in these books to utter a word once more in favour of higher and purer ideals of life and art. Those who sicken of the foul air and lurid light of towns may still wander side by side with me on these heathery highlands. Far, far below, the theatre and the music-hall spread their garish gas-lamps. Let, who will, heed them? But here, on the open hill-top, we know fresher and more wholesome delights. Those feverish joys allure us not. O decadence of the town, we have seen your sham idyll.

your tinsel Arcadias. We have tired of their stuffy atmosphere, their dazzling jets, their weary ways, their gaudy dresses. We shun the sunken cheeks, the lackluster eyes, the heart-sick souls of your painted goddesses. We love not the fetid air, thick and hot with human breath, and reeking with tobacco smoke, of your modern parnassus, a parnassus whose crags were reared and shaped by the hands of the sage carpenter. Your study dalliance with your venal muses is little to our taste. Your halls are too stifling with carbonic acid gas. For us, we breathe oxygen. And the oxygen of the hilltops is purer, keener, rarer, more ethereal.

It is rich in ozone. Now ozone stands to common oxygen itself as the clean-cut metal to the dull and leaden exposed surface. Nacent and ever re-nacent, it has electrical attraction. It leaps to the embrace of the atom it selects, but only under the influence of powerful affinities. and what it clasps once, it clasps forever. That is the pure air which we drink in on the heather-clad heights,

not the venomous air of the crowded casino, nor even the close air of the middle-class parlour. It thrills and nerves us. How we smile, we who live here, when some dweller in the mists and smoke of the valley confounds our delicate atmosphere, redolent of honey, and echoing the manifold murmur of bees, with that stifling miasma of the gambling hell and the dancing saloon. Trust me, dear friend, the moorland air is far other than you fancy.

You can wander up here along the purple ridges, hand locked in hand with those you love, without fear of harm to yourself or your comrade. No bloom of Nenon here, but fresh cheeks like the peach blossom where the sun has kissed it. No casual fruition of loveless, joyless harlots, but lifelong saturation of your own heart's desire in your own heart's innocence. Ozone is better than all the champagne in the strand or piccadilly. If only you will believe it, It is purity and life and sympathy and vigor.

Its perfect freshness and perpetual fount of use Keep your age from withering. It crimsons the sunset and lives in the afterglow. If these delights thy mind may move, Leave, oh leave the meretricious town And come to the airy peaks. such joy is ours unknown to the squalid village which spreads its swamps where the poet silver thames runs dull and leaden have we never our doubts though up here on the hill-tops ay marry have we are we so sure that these gospels we preach with all our hearts are the true and final ones who shall answer that question

for myself as i lift up my eyes from my paper once more my gaze falls first on the golden bracken that waves joyously over the sandstone ridge without and then within on a little white shelf where lies the greatest book of our greatest philosopher i open it at random and consult its sorties what comfort and counsel has herbert spencer for those who venture to see otherwise than the mass of their contemporaries. Quote, whoever hesitates to utter that which he thinks the highest truth, lest it should be too much in advance of the time, may reassure himself by looking at his acts from an impersonal point of view. Let him duly realize the fact that opinion is the agency

through which character adapts external arrangements to its sense. that his opinion rightly forms part of this agency, is a unit of force constituting with other such units the general power which works out social changes, and he will perceive that he may properly give full utterance to his innermost conviction, leaving it to produce what effect it may. It is not for nothing that he has in him these sympathies with with some principles and repugnances to others. He, with all his capacities and aspirations and beliefs, is not an accident, but a product of the time.

He must remember that while he is a descendant of the past, he is a parent of the future, and that his thoughts are as children born to him, which he may not carelessly let die. He, like every other man, may properly consider himself as one of the myriad agencies through whom works the unknown cause. And when the unknown cause produces in him a certain belief, he is thereby authorised to profess and act out that belief. For to render in their highest sense the words of the poet.

Nature is made better by no mean, but nature makes that mean. Over that art which you say adds to nature is an art that nature makes. Not as adventitious, therefore, will the wise man regard the faith which is in him. The highest truth he sees he will fearlessly utter,

knowing that let what may come of it, he is thus playing his right part in the world knowing that if he can affect the change he aims at well if not well also though not so well end quote that passage comforts me these then are my ideas they may be right they may be wrong but at least they are the sincere and personal convictions of an honest man, warranted in him by that spirit of the age of which each of us is but an automatic mouthpiece. End of the introduction. Chapter 1 of the British Barbarians. This is a Librivox recording.

All Librevox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librevox.org. THE BRUTH Goulding The British Barbarians by Grant Allen Chapter 1 The time was Saturday afternoon The place was Surrey The person of the drama was Philip Christie

He had come down by the early fast train to Brackenhurst All the world knows Brackenhurst, of course, the greenest and leafiest of our southern suburbs. It looked even pretty, prettier than its wont just then, that town of villas, in the first fresh tenderness of its one spring foliage, the first full flush of lilac, laburnum, horse chestnut, and gelder rose. The air was heavy with the odour of May and the hum of bees. Philip paused a while at the corner by the ivied cottage, admiring it silently.

He was glad he lived there, so very arid. What joy to glide direct on the enchanted carpet of the southeastern railway, from the gloom and din and bustle of Cannon Street, to the breadth and space and silence and exclusiveness of that upland village. For Philip Christie was a gentlemanly clerk in Her Majesty's civil service. as he stood there, admiring it all with roving eyes, he was startled after a moment by the sudden, and, as it seemed to him, unannounced apparition, of a man in a well-made grey-tweed suit, just a yard or two in front of him.

He was aware of an intruder. To be sure, there was nothing very remarkable at first sight either in the stranger's dress, appearance, or manner. all that philip noticed for himself in the newcomer's mean for the first few seconds was a certain distinct air of social superiority an innate nobility of gait and bearing so much at least he observed at a glance quite instinctively but it was not this quiet and unobtrusive tone as of the best society that surprised and astonished him brackenhurst prided itself indeed on being a most well-bred and distinguished neighbourhood people of note grew as thick there as heather or wortellberries what puzzled him more was the abstruser question where on earth the stranger could have come from so suddenly philip had glanced up the road and down the road just two minutes before and was prepared to swear when he withdrew his eyes not as soul loomed in sight in either direction.

Whence, then, could the man in the grey suit have emerged? Had he dropped from the clouds? No gate opened into the road on either side for two hundred yards or more. Fort Brackenhurst is one of those extremely respectable villa neighbourhoods, where every house, an eligible family residence, stands in its own grounds of at least six acres. now philip could hardly suspect that so well-dressed a man of such distinguished exterior would be guilty of such a gross breach of the recognised code of brackenhurstian manners as was implied in the act of vaulting over a hedgerow so he gazed in blank wonder at the suddenness of the apparition more than half inclined to satisfy his curiosity by inquiring of the stranger how the dickens

he had got there. A moment's reflection, however, sufficed to save the ingenuous young man from the pitfall of so serious as social solacism, it would be fatal to accost him. For Mark U, no matter how gentlemanly and well-tailored a stranger may look, you can never be sure nowadays, in these topsy-turvy times of subversive radicalism, whether he is or is not really a gentleman. That makes acquaintanceship a dangerous luxury. If you begin by talking to a man, be it ever so casually, he may desire to thrust his company upon you, willy-nilly in future.

And when you have ladies of your family living in a place, you really cannot be too particular what companions you pick up there, were it even in the most informal and momentary fashion. Besides, the fellow might turn out to be one of your social superiors and not care to know you, in which case, of course, you would only be letting yourself in for a needless snubbing. In fact, in this modern England of ours, this fatherland of snobdom, one passes one's life in a seesaw of doubt, between the scylla and shiribdis of those two antithetical social dangers. You are always afraid you may get to know somebody you yourself do not want to know, or may try to know somebody who does not want to know you.

Guided by these truly British principles of ancestral wisdom, Philip Christie would probably never have seen anything more of the distinguished-looking stranger, had it not been for a passing accident of muscular action over which his control was distinctly precarious, he happened in brushing past to catch the stranger's eye. It was a clear blue eye, very deep and truthful. It somehow succeeded in riveting for a second Philip's attention. And it was plain, the stranger was less afraid of speech. It was, and than Philip himself was, for he advanced with a pleasant smile on his open countenance, and waved one gloveless hand in a sort of impalpable or half-checked salute,

which impressed his new acquaintance as a vaguely polite, continental gesture. This affected Philip favourably. The newcomer was a somebody then, and knew his place. for just in proportion as Philip felt afraid to begin conversation himself with an unplaced stranger, did he respect any other man who felt so perfectly sure of his own position that he shared no such middle-class doubts or misgivings? A Duke is never afraid of accosting anybody. Philip was strengthened, therefore, in his first idea

that the man in the grey suit was a person of no person of no person, small distinction in society. Else surely he would not have come up and spoken with such engaging frankness and ease of manner. "'I beg your pardon,' the stranger said, addressing him in pure and limpid English, which sounded to Philip like the dialect of the very best circles, yet with some nameless difference of intonation or accent, which certainly was not foreign, still little. less provincial or scotch or Irish. It seemed rather like the very purest well of English undefiled Philip had ever heard,

only, if anything, a little more so. I beg your pardon, but I am a stranger hereabouts, and I should be so very much obliged, if you could kindly direct me to any good lodgings. His voice and accent attracted Philip even more now he stood near at hand than his appearance had done from a little distance. It was impossible indeed to say definitely in set terms what there was about the man that made his personality and his words so charming.

But from that very first minute Philip freely admitted to himself that the stranger in the grey suit was a perfect gentleman nay so much did he feel it in his ingenuous way that he threw off at once his accustomed cloak of dubious reserve and standing still to think answered after a short pause well we've a great many very nice furnished houses about here to let but not many lodgings brackenhurst's are cut above lodgings don't you know it's a residential quarter but i should think miss blake's at heathercliff house would perhaps be just the sort of thing to suit you oh thank you the stranger answered with a deferential politeness which charmed philip once more by its graceful expressiveness and could you kindly direct me to them i don't know my way about at all you see as yet in this country with pleasure philip replied quite delighted at the chance of solving the mystery of where the stranger had dropped from i'm going that way myself and can take you past her door it's only a few steps then you're a stranger in england the newcomer smiled a curious self-restrained smile. He was both young and handsome. Yes, I'm a stranger in your England, he answered gravely, in the tone of one who wishes to

avoid an awkward discussion. In fact, an alien. I only arrived here this very morning. From the continent? Philip inquired, arching his eyebrows slightly. The stranger smiled again. "'No, not from the continent,' he replied, with provoking evasiveness. "'I thought you weren't a foreigner,' Philip continued in a blandly suggestive voice. "'That is to say,' he went on after a second's pause, during which the stranger volunteered no further statement. "'You speak English like an Englishman.' "'Do I?' the stranger answered.

"'Well, I'm glad of that. It'll make intercourse with your Englishmen so much more easy.' "'By this time Philip's curiosity was thoroughly whetted.' "'But you're not an Englishman, you say?' he asked with a little natural hesitation. "'No, not exactly what you call an Englishman,' the stranger replied, as if he didn't quite care for such clumsy attempts to examine his antecedents. As I tell you, I am an alien. But we always spoke English at home, he added with an afterthought, as if ready to vouchsafe all the other information that lay in his power.

You can't be an American, I'm sure, Philip went on unabashed, his eagerness to solve the question at issue, once raised, getting the better for the moment of both reserve and politeness. No, I'm certainly not an American, the stranger answered, with a gentle courtesy in his tone that made Philip feel ashamed of his rudeness in questioning him. Nor a colonist, Philip asked once more, unable to take the hint. Nor a colonist either, the alien replied curtly.

and then he relapsed into a momentary silence which threw upon philip the difficult task of continuing the conversation the member of her britannic majesty's civil service would have given anything just that minute to say to him frankly well if you're not an englishman and you're not an american and you're not a colonist and you are an alien and yet you talk english like a native and have always talked it why what in the name of goodness do you want us to take you for but he restrained himself with difficulty there was something about the stranger that made him feel by instinct it would be more a breach of etiquette to question him closely than to question any one he had ever met with. They walked on along the road for some minutes together, the stranger admiring all the way the golden tresses of the laburnum and the rich perfume of the lilac, and talking much as he went of the quaintness and prettiness of the suburban houses. Philip thought them pretty, too, or rather important, but failed to see for his own part where the quaintness came in. nay he took the imputation as rather a slur on so respectable a neighbourhood for to be quaint is to be picturesque and to be picturesque and to be picturesque is to be old-fashioned

but the stranger's voice and manner were so pleasant almost so ingratiating that philip did not care to differ from him on the abstract question of a qualifying epithet after all there's nothing positively in insulting in calling a house quaint, though Philip would certainly have preferred himself to hear the eligible family residences of that aristocratic neighbourhood, described in auctioneering phrase as imposing, noble, handsome, or important-looking. Just before they reached Miss Blake's door, the alien paused for a second. He took out a loose handful of money, gold and silver together from his. trouser pocket. One more question, he said, with that pleasant smile on his lips,

if you'll excuse my ignorance, which of these coins is a pound now, and which is a sovereign? Why, a pound is a sovereign, of course, Philip answered briskly, smiling the genuine British smile of unfamed astonishment that anybody should be ignorant of a minor detail in the kind of life he had always lived among. To be sure, he would have asked himself with equal simplicity what was the difference between a 20-franc piece, a Napoleon and a Louis, or would have debated as to the precise numerical relation between 25 cents and a quarter of a dollar, but then those are mere foreign coins, you see, which no fellow can be expected to understand unless he happens to have lived in the country they are used in.

the others are british and necessary to salvation that feeling is instinctive in the thoroughly provincial english nature no englishman ever really grasps for himself the simple fact that england is a foreign country to foreigners if strangers happen to show themselves ignorant of any petty matter in english life he regards their ignorance as silly and childish not to be compared for a moment to his own natural unfamiliarity with the absurd practices of foreign nations the alien indeed seemed to have learned beforehand this curious peculiarity of the limited english intellect for he blushed slightly as he replied i know your currency as a matter of arithmetic of course twelvepence make one shilling twenty shillings make one pound of course philip echoed in a tone of perfect conviction it would never have occurred to him to doubt for a moment that everybody knew intuitively those beggarly elements of the inspired british monetary system though they are singularly awkward units of value for any one accustomed to a decimal coinage so unreasonable and illogical the stranger continued blandly turning over the various pieces with a dubious air of distrust and uncertainty i beg your pardon philip said drawing himself up very stiff and scarcely able to believe his ears he was an official of her britannic majesty's government and unused to such blasphemy do i understand you to say-you-to-saying you consider pounds, shillings, and pence, unreasonable?

He put an emphasis on the last word that might fairly have struck terror to the stranger's breast, but somehow it did not. Why, yes, the alien went on with imperturbable gentleness. No order or principle, you know, no rational connection, A mere survival from barbaric use, a score and a dozen. The score is one man, ten fingers and ten toes.

The dozen is one man with shoes on, fingers and feet together. Twelve pence make one shilling, twenty shillings one pound. How very confusing! And then the nomenclature is so absurdly difficult. which of these is half a crown, if you please, and which is a florin? And what are their respective values in pence and shillings? Philip picked out the coins and explained them to him separately. The alien, meanwhile, received the information with evident interest,

as a traveller in that vast tract that is called abroad, might note the habits and manners of some savage treacher. tribe that dwells within its confines, and solemnly wrapped each coin up in paper, as his instructor named it for him, writing the designation and value outside in a peculiarly beautiful and legible hand. It's so puzzling, you see, he said in explanation, as Philip smiled another superior and condescending British smile at this infantile proceeding. the currency itself has no congruity or order, and then even these queer unrelated coins haven't for the most part their values marked in words or figures upon them.

Everybody knows what they are, Philip answered lightly. Though for a moment taken aback by the novelty of the idea, he almost admitted in his own mind that to people who had the misfortune to be born foreigners, there was perhaps a slight initial difficulty in this unlettered system. But then you cannot expect England to be regulated throughout for the benefit of foreigners. Though to be sure, on the one occasion when Philip had visited the Rhine in Switzerland, he had grumbled most consumedly from Ostend to Grindelwalt at those very decimal coins which the stranger seemed to admire so much, and had one reasoned,

why the deuce belgium germany holland and switzerland could not agree among themselves upon a uniform coinage it would be so much more convenient to the british tourist for the british tourists of course is not a foreigner on the doorstep of miss blake's furnished apartments for families and gentlemen the stranger stopped again one more question he interposed in that same suave voice if i'm not trespassing too much on your time and patience for what sort of term by the day month year does one usually take lodgings my by the week of course philip answered suppressing a broad smile of absolute surprise at the man's childish ignorance and how much shall i have to pay the alien went on quietly have you any fixed rule about it of course not philip answered unable any longer to restrain his amusement everything in england was of course to philip you pay according to the sort of accommodation you require the number of your rooms and the nature of the neighbourhood i see the alien replied imperturbably polite in spite of philip's condescending manner and what do i pay per room in this latitude and longitude for twenty seconds philip half suspected his new acquaintance of a desire to chaff him but as at the same time the alien drew from his pocket a sort of combined compass and chronometer which he gravely consulted for his geographical bearings philip came to the conclusion he must be either a sea-faring man

or an escaped lunatic. So he answered him to the point. "'I should think,' he said quietly, "'as Miss Blake's are extremely respectable lodgings "'in a first-rate quarter and with a splendid view, "'you'll probably have to pay somewhere about three guineas.' "'Three what?' the stranger interposed, "'with an inquiring glance at the little heap of coins

"'he still held before him.' philip misinterpreted his glance perhaps that's too much for you he suggested looking severe for if people cannot afford to pay for decent rooms they have no right to invade an aristocratic suburb and bespeak the attention of its regular residence oh that's not it the alien put in reading his tone aright the money doesn't matter to me as long as i can get a tidy room with sun and air i don't mind what i pay it's the guinea i can't quite remember about for the moment i looked it up i know in a dictionary at home but i'm afraid i've forgotten it let me see it's twenty-one pounds to the guinea isn't it then i'm to pay about sixty-three pounds a week for my lodgings this was the right spirit he said it so simply so simply so seriously, so innocently, that Philip was quite sure he really meant it. He was prepared, if necessary, to pay sixty-odd pounds a week in rent. Now, a man like that is the proper kind of man for a respectable neighbourhood.

He'll keep a good saddle-horse, join the club, and play billiards freely. Philip briefly explained to him the nature of his mistake. pointing out to him that a guinea was an imaginary coin unrepresented in metal but reckoned by prescription at twenty-one shillings the stranger received the slight correction with such perfect nonchalance that philip at once conceived a high opinion of his wealth and solvency and therefore of his respectability and moral character it was clear that pounds and shillings were all won to him philip had been right no doubt in his first diagnosis of his queer acquaintance as a man of distinction for wealth and distinction are practically synonyms in england for one and the same quality possession of the wherewithal as they parted the stranger spoke again still more at sea "'And are there any special ceremonies to be gone through on taking up lodgings?' "'He asked quite gravely.

"'Any religious rights, I mean to say, any pooh-ja or so forth?' "'That is,' he went on as Philip's smile broadened, "'is there any taboo to be removed or appeased "'before I can take up residence in the apartments?' "'By this time Philip was a moment. really convinced he had to do with a madman, perhaps a dangerous lunatic. So he answered rather testily, no, certainly not. How absurd! You must see that's ridiculous. You're in a civilised country, not among Australian savages. All you'll have to do is to take the rooms and pay for them.

I'm sorry, I can't be of any further use to you, but I'm pressed for time today. So now, good morning. as for the stranger he turned up the path through the lodging-house garden with curious misgivings his heart failed him it was half-past three by mean solar time for that particular longitude then why had this young man said so briskly good-morning at three-thirty p m as if on purpose to deceive him was he laying a trap was this some while and guile of the English medicine men. End of chapter one. Chapter 2 of the British Barbarians. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Ruth Golding.

The British Barbarians by Grant Allen. Chapter 2. Next day was, not unnaturally, Sunday. At half-past ten in the morning, according to his wont, Philip Christie was seated in the drawing-room at his sister's house, smooth silk hat in gloved hand, waiting for Frida and her husband, Robert Montice, to go to church with him. As he sat there twiddling his thumbs, or beating

the devil's tattoo on the red Japanese table, the housemaid entered. "'A gentleman to see you, sir?' she said, handing Philip a card. The young man glanced at it curiously, a visitor to call at such an early hour, and on Sunday morning too! How extremely odd! This was really most irregular! So he looked down at the card with a certain vague sense of inarticulate disapproval, but he noticed at the same time it was finer and clearer and more delicately engraved than any other card he had ever yet come across. It bore, in simple, unobtrusive letters, the unknown name, Mr. Bertram Engeldew.

Though he had never heard it before, name and engraving, both tended to mollify Philip's nascent dislike. "'Show the gentleman in, Martha,' he said in his most grandiose tone, and the gentleman entered. Philip started at sight of him. it was his friend the alien. Philip was quite surprised to see his madman of last night, and what was more disconcerting still, in the self-same grey-tweed homespun suit he had worn last evening. Now, nothing can be more gentlemanly, don't you know,

than a grey homespun, in its proper place. But its proper place, Philip Christie felt, was certainly not in a respectable suburb on a Sunday morning. I beg your pardon, he said frigidly, rising from his seat with his sternest official air, the air he was wont to assume in the ante-room at the office, when outsiders called and wished to interview his chief on-important public business.

To what may I owe the honour of this visit? for he did not care to be hunted up in his sister's house at a moment's notice by a most casual acquaintance whom he suspected of being an escaped lunatic bertram ingledew for his part however advanced towards his companion of last night with the frank smile and easy bearing of a cultivated gentleman he was blissfully unaware of the slight he was putting upon the respectability of brackenhurst by appearing on Sunday in his grey to eat suit. So he only held out his hand as to an ordinary friend with the simple words, You were so extremely kind to me last night, Mr. Christie, that as I happened to know nobody here in England,

I ventured to come round and ask your advice in unexpected circumstances that have since arisen. When Bertram Ingled you looked at him, Philip once more relented. The man's eye was so captivating. To say the truth, there was something taking about the mysterious stranger, a curious air of unconscious superiority, so that the moment he came near, Philip felt himself fascinated. He only answered, therefore, in as polite a tone as he could easily muster, why, how did you get to know my name, or to trace me to my sisters.

"'Oh, Miss Blake told me who you were, and where you lived,' Bertram replied most innocently. His tone was pure candour. And when I went round to your lodgings just now, they explained that you were out, but that I should probably find you at Mrs. Montief's, so of course I came on here.' Philip denied the applicability of that naive,

of course in his inmost soul but it was no use being angry with mr bertram ingle d'u so much he saw at once the man was so simple-minded so transparently natural one could not be angry with him one could only smile at him a superior cynical london-bred smile for an unsophisticated foreigner so the civil servant asked with a condescending air. Well, what's your difficulty? I'll see if, per adventure, I can help you out of it. For he reflected to himself in a flash that, as Ingle-Dew had apparently a good round sum in gold and notes in his pocket yesterday, he was not likely to come borrowing money this morning.

It's like this, you see, the alien answered with charming simplicity. I haven't got any luggage. Not got any luggage? Philip repeated awe-struck, letting his jaw fall short and stroking his clean-shaven chin with one hand. He was more doubtful than ever now as to the man's sanity or respectability.

If he was not a lunatic, then surely he must be this celebrated Perpignon murderer whom everybody was talking about and whom the French police were just then engaged in hunting down for extradition. No, I brought none with me on purpose. Mr. Inglejew replied, as innocently as ever. I didn't feel quite sure about the ways or the customs or the taboos of England. So I had just this one suit of clothes made,

after an English pattern of the present fashion, which I was lucky enough to secure for a result of a few hundred thousand. a collector at home and I thought I'd buy everything else I wanted when I got to London. I brought nothing at all in the way of luggage with me. Not even brush and comb, Philip interposed, horrified. Oh, yes, naturally just the few things one always takes in a Vardémecum, Bertram Engelieu answered, with a gracefully deprecatory wave of the hand, which Philip sought pretty enough, but extremely foreign.

Beyond that, nothing. I felt it would be best, you see, to set oneself up in things of the country, in the country itself, one's surer, then, of getting exactly what's worn in the society one mixes in. For the first and only time, as he said those words, the stranger struck a chord that was familiar to Philip. Oh, of course, the civil servant answered with brisk acquiescence. If you want to be really up to date in your dress, you must go to first-rate houses in London for everything. Nobody anywhere can cut like a good London tailor. Bertram Ingledew bowed his head.

It was the acquiescent bow of the utter outsider, who gives no opinion at all on the subject under discussion, because he does not possess any. As he probably came, in spite of his disclaimer, from America or the colonies, which are belated places, toiling in vain far in the rear of Bond Street, Philip thought this an exceedingly proper display of bashfulness, especially in a man who had only landed in England yesterday. But Bertram went on, half musingly. "'And you had told me,' he said, "'I'm sure not meaning to mislead me. There were no formalities or taboos of any kind

on entering into lodgings. However, I found, as soon as I'd arranged to take the rooms and pay four guineas a week for them, which was a guinea more than she asked me, Miss Blake would hardly let me come in at all, unless I could at once produce my luggage. He looked comically puzzled. I thought at first, he continued, gazing earnestly at Philip, the good lady was afraid I wouldn't pay her what I'd agreed, and would go away and leave her in the lurch without a penny,

which was naturally a very painful imputation. But when I offered to let her, have three weeks rent in advance, I saw that wasn't all. There was a taboo as well. She couldn't let me in without luggage, she said, because it would imperil some luck or talisman to which she frequently alluded as the respectability of her lodgings. This respectability seems a very great fetish. I was obliged at last, in order to ensure a knight's lodging of any sort, to appease it by promising I'd go up to London by the first train to-day, and fetch down my luggage. Then knew things at Charing Cross in the cloak-room, perhaps, Philip suggested, somewhat

relieved, for he felt sure Bertram Ingaldew must have told Miss Blake it was he who had recommended him to Heathercliff house for furnished apartments. Oh dear, no, nothing, Bertram responded cheerfully. Not a sack to my back. I've only what I stand up in. And I called this morning, just to ask as I passed, if you could kindly direct me to an emporium in London, where I could set myself up in all that's necessary. Oh, what?

Philip interposed, catching, at the unfamiliar word with blank english astonishment and more than ever convinced in spite of denial that the stranger was an american an emporium bertram answered in the most matter-of-fact voice a magazine don't you know a place where they supply things in return for money i want to go up to london at once this morning and buy what i require there "'Oh, a shop, you mean,' Philip replied, putting on at once his most respectable British sabbatarian air. "'I can tell you of the very best tailor in London, whose cart is perfect. A fine flower of tailors, but not to-day. You forget you're in England, and this is Sunday.

On the continent it's different, but you'll find no decent shops here open today in town or country. Bertram Ingletew drew one hand over his high white brow with a strangely puzzled air. "'No more I will,' he said slowly, like one who by degrees half recalls with an effort some forgotten fact from dim depths of his memory. I ought to have remembered, of course, why I knew that long ago. I read it in a book on the habits and manners of the English people. But somehow one never recollects these taboo days, wherever one may be,

till one's pulled up short by them in the course of one's travels. Now what on earth am I to do? A box, it seems, is the open sesame of the situation. Some mystic value is attached to it as a moral amulet. I don't believe that excellent Miss Blake would consent to take me in, for a second night, without the guarantee of a portmanteau to respect oblise me. We all have moments of weakness, even the most irreproachable Philistine among us,

and as Bertram said those words in rather a piteous voice, it occurred to Philip Christie that the loan of a portmanteau would be a Christian act, which might perhaps simplify matters for the handsome and engaging stranger. Besides, he was sure, after all mystery or no mystery, Bertram Ingledew was somebody. That nameless charm of dignity and distinction impressed him more and more the longer he talked with the alien. Well, I think perhaps I could help you.

He hazarded after a moment in a dubious tone, though to be sure if he lent the portmanteau it would be like cemented, the friendship for good or for evil, which Philip, being a prudent young man, felt to be, in some ways, a trifle dangerous. For who borrows a portmanteau must needs bring it back again, which opens the door to endless contingencies. I might be able—' At that moment their colloquy was suddenly interrupted by the entry of a lady who immediately riveted Burk, Burk's ingledew's attention she was tall and dark a beautiful woman of that riper and truer beauty in face and form that only declares itself as character develops her features were clear cut rather delicate than regular her eyes were large and lustrous her lips not too thin but rich and tempting her brow was high and surmounted by a luscious wealth of glossy black hair, which Bertram never remembered to have seen equaled before, for its silkiness of texture and its strange blue sheen like a plate of steel, or the grass of the prairies.

Gliding Grace distinguished her when she walked. Her motion was equable. As once the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair, and straightway coveted them, Even so, Bertram Ingledew looked on freedom on teeth, and saw at the first glance, she was a woman to be desired, a soul high-throwned, very calm and beautiful. She stood there for a moment and faced him, half in doubt, in her flowing, oriental or morresque robe, for she dressed, as Philip would have said, artistically, waiting to be introduced the way and taking good heed as she waited of the handsome stranger. As for Philip, he hesitated, not quite certain in his own mind on the point of etiquette,

say rather of morals, whether one ought or ought not to introduce the ladies of one's family to a casual stranger picked up in the street, who confesses he has come on a visit to England without a letter of introduction, or even that, that, irreducible minimum of respectability, a portmante. Frida, however, had no such scruples. She saw the young man was good-looking and gentlemanly, and she turned to Philip with the hasty sort of glance that says as plainly as words could say it, Now then, introduce me. Thus mutely exhorted, though with a visible effort, Philip murmured half inarticulately, in a stifled undertone.

My sister, Mrs. Montice, Mr. Bertram ingledew, and then trembled inwardly. It was a surprise to Bertram that the beautiful woman with the soul in her eyes should turn out to be the sister of the very commonplace young man with the boiled fish expression he had met by the corner. But he disguised his astonishment, and only interjected,

as if it were the most natural remark in the world, I'm pleased to meet you. What a lovely gown, and how admirably it becomes you. Philip opened his eyes aghast. But Frida glanced down at the dress with a glance of approbation. The stranger's frankness,

though quaint, was really refreshing. I'm so glad you like it, she said, taking the compliment with quiet dignity as simply as it was intended it's all my own taste i chose the stuff and designed the make of it and i know who this is phil without your troubling to tell me it's the gentleman you met in the street last night and were talking about at dinner you're quite right philip answered with a deprecating look as who should say aside i really couldn't help it he he's he he's he's a very he's a very couldn't help it he he's a very he's a very he rather in a difficulty. And then he went on to explain, in a few hurried words, to Frieda, with sundry shrugs and nods of profoundest import, that the supposed lunatic or murderer or foreigner or fool had gone to Miss Blake's without luggage of any sort, and that, perhaps, very dubitatively,

a portmanteau or bag might help him out of his temporary difficulties. Why, of course, Frieda cried impulsively with prompt decision. Robert's Gladstone bag and my little brown trunk would be the very things for him. I could lend them to him at once, if only we can get a Sunday cab to take them. Not before service, surely, Philip interposed, scandalised. If he were to take them now, you know, he'd meet all the church people. Is it taboo, then? to face the clergy with a Gladstone bag?

Bertram asked quite seriously, in that childlike tone of simple inquiry that Philip had noticed more than once before in him. Your bonzes object to meet a man with luggage? They think it unlucky. Frida and Philip looked at one another with quick glances and laughed. Well, it's not exactly tabooed, "'Freda answered gently.

"'And it's not so much the rector himself, you know, "'as the feelings of one's neighbours. "'This is a very respectable neighbourhood, "'oh, quite dreadfully respectable, "'and people in the houses about "'might make a talk of it "'if a cab drove away from the door "'as they were passing.

"'I think, Phil, you're right. "'He'd better wait till the church people are finished.' "'Respectability of you. seems to be a very great object of worship in your village, Bertram suggested in perfect good faith. Is it a local cult, or is it general in England? Freda glanced at him half puzzled. Oh, I think it's pretty general, she answered with a happy smile. But perhaps the disease is a little more epidemic about here than elsewhere.

It affects the suburb. and my brother's got it just as badly as anyone as badly as anyone bertram repeated with a puzzled air then you don't belong to that creed yourself you don't bend the knee to this embodied abstraction it's your brother who worships her i suppose for the family yes he's more of a devotee than i am frieda went on quite frankly but not a little surprised at so much freedom in a stranger. Though we're all of us tarred with the same brush, no doubt. It's a catching complaint, I suppose, respectability. Bertram gazed at her dubiously. A complaint, did she say?

Was she serious or joking? He hardly understood her. But further discussion was cut short for the moment by Frida good-humouredly running upstairs to see after the Gladstone. bag and brown portmanteau, into which she crammed a few useless books and other heavy things to serve as make-wates for Miss Blake's injured feelings. You'd better wait a quarter of an hour after we go to church, she said, as the servant

brought these necessaries into the room where Bertram and Philip was seated. By that time, nearly all the church people will be safe in their seats, and Phil's conscience will be satisfied. tell Miss Blake you've brought a little of your luggage to do for today, and the rest will follow from town tomorrow morning. Oh, how very kind you are! Bertram exclaimed, looking down at her gratefully. I'm sure I don't know what I should ever have done in this crisis without you. He said it with a warmth which was certainly unconventional. Freda coloured and looked embarrassed. There was no denying he was certainly.

a most strange and untrammeled person. And if I might venture on a hint, Philip put on, with a hasty glance at his companion's extremely unsubatical costume, it would be that you shouldn't try to go out much today in that suit you're wearing. It looks peculiar, don't you know, and might attract attention. Oh, is that a taboo, too? the stranger put in quickly with an anxious air. Now, that's awfully kind of you, but it's curious as well,

for two or three people passed my window last night, all Englishmen as I judged, and all with suits almost exactly like this one, which was copied as I told you from an English model. "'Last night?' "'Oh, yes,' Philip answered. "'Last night was Saturday. that makes all the difference the suit's right enough in its way of course very neat and gentlemanly but not for sunday you are expected on sundays to put on a black coat and waistcoat you know like the ones i'm wearing

bertram's countenance fell and if i'm seen in the streets like this he asked will they do anything to me will the guardians of the people the police, I mean, arrest me? Frida laughed a bright little laugh of genuine amusement. Oh, dear, no, she said merrily. It isn't an affair of police at all, not so serious as that. It's only a matter of respectability. I see, Bertram answered. Respectability is a religious or popular, not an official or guiseach.

governmental taboo. I quite understand you. But those are often the most dangerous sort. Will the people in the street who adore respectability be likely to attack me or mob me for disrespect to their fetish? Certainly not, Frieda replied, flushing up. He seemed to be carrying a joke too far. This is a free country. Everybody. wears and eats and drinks just what he pleases well that's all very interesting to me the alien went on with a charming smile that disarmed her indignation for i've come here on purpose to collect facts and notes about english taboos and similar observances i'm secretary of a nomological society at home which is interested in goaders, topes and joss houses, and I've been travelling in Africa and in the South Sea Islands for a long time past, working at materials for a history of taboo, from its earliest beginnings

in the savage stage to its fully developed European complexity. So, of course, all you say comes home to me greatly. Your taboos, I foresee, will prove a most valuable and illustrative study. I beg your pardon, Philip interposed stiffly, now put upon his metal. We have no taboos at all in England. You're misled, no doubt, by a mere playful fashion de parley which society indulges in. England, you must remember, is a civilised country, and taboos are institutions that belong to the lowest and most degraded savages. But Bertram Ingletew gazed at him in the blankest astonishment. No taboos, he exclaimed, taken aback. Why, I've read of hundreds. Among nomological students, England has always been regarded with the greatest interest,

as the home and centre of the highest and most evolved taboo development and you yourself he added with a courteous little bar have already supplied me with quite half a dozen but perhaps you call them by some other name among yourselves though in origin and essence of course they are precisely the same as the other taboos i've been examining so long in asia and africa however i'm afraid i'm detaining you from the function of your joss house you wish no doubt to make your genuflections in the temple of respectability and he reflected silently on the curious fact that the english give themselves by law fifty-two weekly holidays a year and compel themselves by custom to waste them entirely in ceremonial observance end of chapter two chapter three of the british barbarians this librivox recording is in the public domain recording by ruse golding the british barbarians by grant allen chapter three on the way to church the monteth sifted out their new acquaintance well what do you make of him frieda philip asked leaning back in his place with a luxurious air a soon as the carriage had turned the corner. Lunatic or sharper?

Frieder gave an impatient gesture with her neatly gloved hand. For my part, she answered without a second's hesitation. I make him neither. I find him simply charming. That's because he praised your dress, Philip replied, looking wise. Did ever you know anything so cool in your life, was it ignorance now or insolent? It was perfect simplicity and naturalness, Frieda answered with confidence.

He looked at the dress and admired it, and being transparently naive, he didn't see why he shouldn't say so. It wasn't at all rude, I thought, and it gave me pleasure. He certainly has in some ways charming manners. Philip went on more slowly. He manages to impresses,

one if he's a madman which i rather more than half suspect it's at least a gentlemanly form of madness his manners are more than merely charming frieda answered quite enthusiastic for she had taken a great fancy at first sight to the mysterious stranger they've such absolute freedom that's what strikes me most in them they're like the best english aristocratic manners without the insolkratiress or the freest American manners without the roughness. He's extremely distinguished, and, oh, isn't he handsome? He is good-looking, Philip assented grudgingly. Philip owned a looking-glass, and was therefore accustomed to a very high standard of manly beauty. As for Robert Monteth, he smiled the grim smile of the wholly unvaccinated. He was a dour businessman of Scot descent, who had made his money in palm oil in the city of London,

and having married Frida as a remarkably fine woman with a splendid figure to preside at his table, he had very small sympathy with what he considered her high-flown fads and nonsensical fancies. He had seen but little of the stranger, too, having come in from his weekly stroll or tour of inspection, round the garden and stables, just as they were on the very point of starting for St. Barnabas, and his opinion of the man was in no way enhanced by Frida's enthusiasm. "'As far as I'm concerned,' he said, with his slow Scot drawl inherited from his father, for though London born and bred he was still in all essentials of pure Caledonian. As far as I'm concerned, I haven't the slightest doubt but the man's a swindler.

I wonder at you, Frieder, that you should leave him alone in the house just now with all that silver. I stepped round before I left, and warned Martha privately not to move from the hall till the fellow was gone, and to call up Cook and James if he tried to get out of the house with any of our property. But you never seemed to suspect him. and to supply him with a bag too to carry it all off in well women are reckless hullo there policeman stop price one moment i wish you'd keep an eye on my house this morning there's a man in there i don't half like the look of when he rides away in a cab that my boy's going to call for him just see where he stops and take care he hasn't got anything my servants don't know about in the drawing-room meanwhile bertram ingledew was reflecting as he waited for the church people to clear away how interesting these english clothes taboos and day taboos promised to prove besides some similar customs he had met with or read of in his investigations elsewhere he remembered how on a certain morning of the year the high priest of the zapatex was obliged to get drunk

an act which on any other day in the calendar would have been regarded by all as a terrible sin in him. He reflected how in Guinea and Tongquin at a particular period once a twelve-month, nothing is considered wrong and everything lawful, so that the worst crimes and misdemeanors go unnoticed and unpunished. He smiled to think how some days are tabooed in certain countries, so that whatever you do on them, where it only a game of tennis, is accounted wicked, while some days are periods of absolute license, so that whatever you do on them where it murder itself becomes fit and holy.

To him and his people at home, of course, it was the intrinsic character of the act itself that made it right or wrong, not the particular day or week or month on which one happened to do it. What was wicked in June was wicked still in October. But not so among the unreasoning devotees of taboo in Africa or in England. There, what was right in May became wicked in September, and what was wrong on Sunday became harmless or even obligatory on Wednesday or Thursday. It was all very hard for a rational being to understand and explain.

but he meant to fathom it all the same to the very bottom, to find out why, for example, in Uganda, whoever appears before the king must appear stark naked, while in England, whoever appears before the queen must wear a tailor's sword, or a long silk train and a headdress of ostrich feathers. Why, in Morocco, when you enter a mosque, you must take off your shoes and catch a violent cold

in order to show your respect for Allah. While in Europe, on entering a similar religious building, you must uncover your head, no matter how draughty the place may be, since the deity who presides there appears to be indifferent to the danger of consumption or chest diseases for his worshippers. Why certain clothes or foods are prescribed in London or Paris

for Sundays and Fridays, while certain others, just equally warm or digestible, or the contrary, are perfectly lawful to all the world alike on Tuesdays and Saturdays. These were the curious questions he had come so far to investigate, for which the fakirs and dervishes of every land gave such fanciful reasons, and he saw he would have no difficulty in picking up abundant examples of his subject matter everywhere in England. as the metropolis of taboo, it exhibited the phenomena in their highest evolution. The only thing that puzzled him was how Philip Christie, an Englishman-born and evidently a most devout observer of the manifold taboos and juggernauts of his country, should actually deny their very existence.

It was one more proof to him of the extreme caution necessary in all anthropological investigation. before accepting the evidence even of well-meaning natives on points of religious or social usage, which they are often quite childishly incapable of describing in rational terms to outside inquirers. They take their own manners and customs for granted, and they cannot see them in their true relations or compare them with the similar manners and customs of other nationalities.

End of Chapter 3. chapter four of the british barbarians this librivox recording is in the public domain recording by ruth goulding the british barbarians by grant allen chapter four whether philip christie liked it or not the monteths and he were soon fairly committed to a tolerably close acquaintance with bertram ingledew for as chance would have it on the monday morning bertram went up to town in the very same with Philip and his brother-in-law to set himself up in necessaries of life for a six or eight months stay in England. When he returned that night to Brackenhurst with two large trunks full of underclothing and so forth, he had to come round once more to the Montees, as Philip anticipated, to bring back the Gladstone bag and the brown portmanteau. He did it with so much graceful and gracious courtesy, and such much,

manly gratitude for the favour done him, that he left still more deeply than ever on Frieder's mind the impression of a gentleman. He had found out all the right shops to go to in London, he said, and he had ordered everything necessary to social salvation at the very best tailors, so strictly in accordance with Philip's instructions that he thought he should now transgress no more the sumptuary rules in that matter made and established, as long as long as he remained in this realm of England. He had commanded a black cutaway coat, suitable for Sunday morning, and a curious garment called a frock coat, buttoned tight over the chest to be worn in the afternoon, especially in London, and a still quainter coat made of

shiny broadcloth with strange tails behind, which was considered respectable after 7pm, for a certain restricted class of citizens. Those who paid a particular impost known as income tax, as far as he could gather from what the tailor told him. Though the classes who really did any good in the state, the working men and so forth, seemed exempted by general consent from wearing it. Their dress, indeed, he observed, was, strange to say,

the least cared for and evidently the least costly of anybody, bodies. He admired the Montief children so unaffectedly, too, telling them how pretty and how sweet-mannered they were to their very faces, that he quite won Frieda's heart, though Robert did not like it. Robert had evidently some deep-seated superstition about the matter, for he sent Mamie, the eldest girl out of the room at once, she was four years old, and he took little Archie, the two-year-old, on his knee, as if to guard him from some moral or social contagion. Then Bertram remembered how he had seen African mothers beat or pinch their children till they made them cry, to avert the evil omen when he praised them to their faces.

And he recollected, too, that most fetishistic races believe in nemesis, that is to say in jealous gods, who, if they see you love a child too much, much, or admire it too greatly, will take it from you or do it some grievous bodily harm, such as blinding it or maiming it, in order to pay you out for thinking yourself too fortunate. He did not doubt, therefore, but that in Scotland, which he knew by report to be a country exceptionally given over to terrible superstitions, the people still thought their sanguinary Calvinistic deity, fashioned by a race of stern John Knoxes in their own image, would do some harm to an over-praised child to wean them from it. He was glad to see, however, that

Frida at least did not share this degrading and hateful belief, handed down from the most fiendish of savage conceptions. On the contrary, she seemed delighted that Bertram should pat little Mamie on the head, and praise her sunny smile and her lovely hair, just like her mothers. To Philip, this was all a rather serious matter. He felt he was responsible for having introduced a mysterious alien, however unwillingly, into the bosom of Robert Montief's family. Now, Philip was not rich, and Frida was supposed to have made a good match of it, that is to say, she had married a man a great deal wealthier than her own upbringing. So Philip, after his kind, thought much of the Montief connection.

He lived in lodgings at Brackenhurst, at a highly inconvenient distance from town, so as to be near their house, and catch whatever rays of reflected glory might fall upon his head, like a shadowy halo, from their horses and carriages, their dinners and garden parties. he did not like therefore to introduce into his sister's house anybody that robert monteth that moneyed man of oil in the west african trade might consider an undesirable acquaintance but as time wore on and bertram's new clothes came home from the tailors it began to strike the civil servant's mind that the mysterious alien though he excited much comment and conjecture in brackenhurst was accepted on the whole by local society as rather an acquisition to its ranks than otherwise he was well off he was well dressed he had no trade or profession and brackenhurst undermanned hailed him as a godsend for afternoon teas and informal tennis parties that ineffable air of distinction as of one royal born which philip had noticed at once the first evening they met, seemed to strike and impress almost everybody who saw him.

People felt he was mysterious, but at any rate he was someone. And then he had been everywhere except in Europe, and had seen everything except their own society. And he talked agreeably when he was not on to boos, and in suburban towns, don't you know, an outsider who brings fresh blood into the field, who has anything to say we do not all know beforehand, is always welcome. So Brackenhurst accepted Bertram Engle-Due before long as an eccentric but interesting and romantic person. Not that he stopped much in Brackenhurst itself. He went up to town every day almost as regularly as Robert Montice and Philip Christie. He had things he wanted to observe there, he said, for the work he was engaged upon.

And the work clearly occupied the best part of his energies. Every night he came down to Brackenhurst with his notebook crowned full of modern facts and illustrative instances. He worked most of all in the East End, he told Frida confidentially. There he could see best the remote results of certain painful English. customs and usages he was anxious to study. Still, he often went west, too, for the West End taboos, though not in some cases so distressing as the East End ones, were at times much more curiously illustrative and ridiculous.

He must master all branches of the subject alike. He spoke so seriously that after a time, Frieder, who was just at first inclined to laugh, at his odd way of putting things, began to take it all in the end quite as seriously as he did. He felt more at home with her than with anybody else at Brackenhurst. She had sympathetic eyes,

and he lived on sympathy. He came to her so often for help in his difficulties that she soon saw he really meant all he said, and was genuinely puzzled, in a very queer way, by many varied hours. aspects of English society. In time the two grew quite intimate together, but on one point Bertram would never give his new friend the slightest information, and that was the whereabouts

of that mysterious home he so often referred to. Oddly enough, no one ever questioned him closely on the subject. A certain singular reserve of his, which alternated curiously with his perfect frankness, prevented them from trespassing so far on his individuality. People felt they must not. Somehow, when Bertram Ingaldew let it once be felt he did not wish to be questioned on any particular point, even women managed to restrain their curiosity, and he would have been either a very bold or a very insensitive man who would have ventured to continue questioning him any further. So, though many people hazarded guesses as to where he had come from, nobody ever asked him the point-blank question, Who are you, if you please? And what do you want here?

The alien went out a great deal with the Montees. Robert himself did not like the fellow, he said. One never quite knew what the juice he was driving at. But Frida found him always more and more charming, so full of information, while Philip admitted he was excellent form and such a capital tennis player. So whenever Philip had a day off in the country, they three went out in the fields together, and Frida at least thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated the freedom and freshness of the newcomer's conversation.

On one such day they went out, as it chanced, into the meadows that stretch up the hill behind Brackenhurst. Frieder remembered it well afterwards. It was the day when an annual saturnalia of vulgar vice usurps and pollutes the open downs at Epsom. Bertram did not care to see it, he said. The rabble of a great town turned loose to desecrate the open face of nature, even regarded as a matter of popular custom. He had looked on at much the same orgies before, in New Guinea and on the Zambezi,

and they only depressed him, so he stopped at Brackenhurst and went for a walk instead in the fresh summer meadows. Robert Montief, for his part, had gone to the Derby, so they call that orgy, and Philip had meant to accompany him in the dog-cart, but remained behind at the last moment to take care of Frida, for Frida, being a lady at heart, always shrank from the pollution of vulgar assemblies. As they walked together across the lush green fields, thick with Campion and yellow rattle, they came to a dense copse with a rustic gate, above which a threatening notice board frowned them straight in the face, bearing the usual selfish and anti-social inscription,

trespassers will be prosecuted. Let's go in here and pick orchids, Bertram suggested, leaning over the gate. Just see how pretty they are. The scented white butterfly. "'It loves moist bogland. "'Now, Mrs. Montice, wouldn't a few long sprays of that lovely thing "'look charming on your dinner-table?' "'But it's preserved,' Philip interposed with an awe-struck face. "'You can't go in there. It's Sir Lionel Longdon's, and he's awfully particular.'

"'Can't go in there? Oh, nonsense!' Bertram answered with a merry laugh, vaulting the gate like a practised athlete. Mrs. Montice can get over easily enough, I'm sure. She's as light as a fawn. May I help you over? And he held one hand out. But it's private, Philip went on, in a somewhat horrified voice. And the pheasants are sitting. Private? How can it be? there's nothing sown here it's all wild wood we can't do any damage if it was growing crops of course one would walk through it not at all or at least very carefully but this is pure woodland

are the pheasants tabooed then or why meant we go near them they're not tabooed but they're preserved philip answered somewhat testily, making a delicate distinction without a difference, after the fashion dear to the official intellect. "'This land belongs to Sir Lionel Longdon, I tell you, and he chooses to lay it all down in pheasants. He bought it and paid for it, so he has a right, I suppose, to do as he likes with it.' "'That's the funniest thing of all about these taboos,' Bertram mused as if half to himself. the very people whom they injure and inconvenience the most the people whom they hamper and cramp and debar don't seem to object to them but believe in them and are afraid of them

in samoa i remember certain fruits and fish and animals and so forth were tabooed to the chiefs and nobody else ever dared to eat them they thought it was wrong and said if they did some nameless evil would at once overtake them these nameless terrors these bodiless superstitions are always the deepest people fight hardest to preserve their bogies they fancy some appalling unknown dissolution would at once result from reasonable action i tried one day to persuade a poor devil of a fellow in samoa and who'd caught one of these fish and who was terribly hungry, that no harm would come to him if he cooked it and ate it. But he was too slavishly frightened to follow my advice. He said it was taboo to the God-descended chiefs. If a mortal man tasted it, he would die on the spot,

so nothing on earth would induce him to try it. Though to be sure even there, nobody ever went quite so far as to taboo the very soil of earth itself. Everybody might till and hunt where he liked. It's only in Europe where evolution goes furthest that taboo has reached that last silly pitch of injustice and absurdity. "'Well, we're not afraid of the fetish, you and I, Mrs. Montice. "'Jump up on the gate. I'll give you a hand over.' And he held out one strong arm as he spoke to aid her. Frida had no such fanatical respect for the bogey of vested interests as her superstitious brother,

so she mounted the gate gracefully. She was always graceful. bertram took her small hand and jumped her down on the other side while philip not liking to show himself less bold than a woman in this matter climbed over it after her though with no small misgivings they strolled on into the wood picking the pretty white orchids by the way as they went for some little distance the rich mould underfoot was thick with sweet woodruff and trailing strife. Every now and again, as they stirred the lithe brambles that encroached upon the path, a pheasant rose from the ground with a loud whirr before them. Philip felt most uneasy. You'll have the keepers after you in a minute, he said with a deprecating shrug. This is just full nesting time. They're down upon anybody who disturbs the pheasants.

But the pheasants can't belong to anyone, Bertram cried with a greatly amused face. You may taboo the land, I understand that's done. But surely you can't taboo a wild bird that can fly as it likes, from one piece of ground away into another. Philip enlightened his ignorance by giving him offhand a brief and profoundly servile account of the English game laws, interspers with sundry anecdotes of poachers and poaching. Percham listened with an interested but gravely disapproving face. And do you mean to say, he asked at last, they send men to prison as criminals for catching or shooting hairs and

pheasants. I certainly, Philip answered. It's an offence against the law and also a crime against the rights of property. Against the law, yes, but how on earth can it be a crime against the rights of property? Obviously the pheasants, the property of the man who happens to shoot it. How can it belong to him and also to the fellow who taboos the particular piece of ground it was snared on it doesn't belong to the man who shoots it at all philip answered rather angrily it belongs to the man who owns the land of course and who chooses to preserve it oh i see bertram replied then you disregard the rights of property altogether and only consider the privileges of taboo as a principle that intelligible one sees its consistent but how is it that you all allow these chiefs landlords don't you call them to taboo the soil and prevent you all from

even walking over it don't you see that if you chose to combine in a body and insist upon the recognition of your natural rights if you determined to make the landlords give up their taboo and cease from injustice, they'd have to yield to you, and then you could exercise your native right of going where you pleased, and cultivate the land in common for the public benefit, instead of leaving it as now to be cultivated anyhow, or turned into waste for the benefit of the taboers. But it would be wrong to take it from them. Philip cried, growing fiery red and half losing his temper, for he really believed it.

It would be sheer confiscation, the lands their own. They either bought it or inherited it from their fathers. If you were to begin taking it away, what guarantee would you have left for any of the rights of property generally? You didn't recognise the rights of property of the fellow who killed the pheasant, though, Bertram interposed laughing and imperturbably good-humoured. But that's always the way with these taboos everywhere. They subsist just because the vast majority, even of those who are obviously wronged and injured by them, really believe in them.

They think they're guaranteed by some divine prescription. The fetish guards them. In Polynesia, I recollect, some chiefs could taboo almost anything they liked, even a girl or a woman or fruit and fish and animals and houses. And after the chief had once said, it is taboo, everybody else was afraid to touch them. Of course the fact that a chief or a landowner has bought and paid for a particular privilege or species of taboo, or has inherited it from his father's, doesn't give him any better moral claim to it. The question is, is the claim in itself right and reasonable? For a wrong is only all

the more a wrong for having been long and persistently exercised. The Central Africans say, This is my slave. I bought her and paid for her. I have a right if I like to kill her and eat her. The king of Ebo on the West Coast had a hereditary right to offer up as a human sacrifice the first man he met every time he quitted his palace, and he was quite surprised audacious free thinkers should call the morality of his right in question. If you English were all in a body to see through this queer land taboo now, which drives your poor off the soil, and prevents you all from even walking at liberty over the surface of the waste in your own country, you could easily—

"'Oh, Lord, what shall we do?' Philip interposed in a voice of abject terror. "'If here isn't Sir Lionel!' And sure enough, right across the narrow path in front of them, stood a short, fat, stumpy, unimpressive little man with a very red face and a Norfolk jacket, boiling over with anger. "'What are you people doing here?' he cried undeterred by the presence of a lady and speaking in the insolent supercilious voice of the english landlord in defence of his pheasant preserves this is private property you must have seen the notice at the gate trespassers will be prosecuted yes we did see it bertram answered with his unruffled smile and thinking it an uncalled-for piece of aggressive churlishness both in form and substance why we took the liberty to disregard it sir lionel glared at him in that servile neighbourhood almost entirely inhabited by the flunkies of villardom it was a complete novelty to him to be thus bearded in his day

He gasped with anger. Do you mean to say? He gurgled out, growing purple to the neck. You came in here deliberately to disturb my pheasants, and then brazen it out to my face like this, sir? Go back the way you came, or I'll call my keepers. No, I will not go back the way I came. Bertram responded deliberately,

with perfect self-control, and with a side glance at Frida. Every human being has a natural right to walk across this copse, which is all waste ground and has no crop sown in it. The pheasants can't be yours, their common property. Besides, there's a lady. We mean to make our way across the copse at our leisure, picking flowers as we go,

and come out into the road on the other side of the spinny. it's a universal right of which no country and no law can possibly deprive us sir lionel was livid with rage strange as it may appear to any reasoning mind the man really believed he had a natural right to prevent people from crossing that strip of wood where his pheasants were sitting his ancestors had assumed it from time immemorial and by dint of never being questioned had come to regard the absurd usurpation as quite fair and proper he placed himself straight across the narrow path blocking it up with his short and stumpy figure. "'Now look here, young man,' he said with all the insolence of his cast. "'If you try to go on, I'll stand here in your way. And if you dare to touch me, it's a common assault, and by George, you'll have to answer at law for the consequences.' Bertram Engelieu for his part was all sweet reasonableness. He raised one deprecating hand.

Now, before we come to open hostilities, he said in a gentle voice with that unfailing smile of his let's talk the matter over like rational beings let's try to be logical this copse is considered yours by the actual law of the country you live in your tribe permits it to you you're allowed to taboo it very well then i make all possible allowances for your strange hallucinations for your strange hallucin You've been brought up to think you had some mystic and intangible claim to this corner of earth, more than other people, you're even Christians. That claim, of course, you can't logically defend, but failing arguments you want to fight for it. Wouldn't it be more reasonable now to show you had some right or justice in the matter? I'm always reasonable. If you can convince me of the propriety and equity of your claim,

I'll go back as you wish by the way I entered. If not, well, there's a lady here, and I'm bound as a man to help her safely over. Sir Lionel almost choked. I see what you are. He gasped out with difficulty. I've heard this sort of rubbish more, than once before, you're one of these damned land-nationalizing radicals.'

"'On the contrary,' Bertram answered, "'Urbane as ever, with charming politeness of tone and manner. "'I'm a born conservative. "'I'm tenacious to an almost foolishly sentimental degree "'of every old custom or practice or idea, "'unless, indeed, it's either wicked or silly, like most of your English ones. He raised his hat and made as if he would pass on.

Now, nothing annoys an angry savage or an uneducated person so much as the perfect coolness of a civilized and cultivated man when he himself is boiling with indignation. He feels its superiority an affront on his barbarism. So, with a vulgar oath, Sir Lionel flung himself point-blank in the way. Damn it all! No, you won't, sir!

He cried. I'll soon put a stop to all that I can tell you. You shan't go on one step without committing an assault upon me. And he drew himself up, four square, as if for battle. Oh, just as you like, Bertram answered coolly, never losing his temper. I'm not afraid of taboos. I've seen too many of them. And he gazed at the fat, little angry man

with a gentle expression of mingled contempt and amusement. For a minute, Frida thought they were really going to fight and drew back in horror to await the contest. But such a warlike notion never entered the man of peace's head. He took a step backward for a second, and calmly surveyed his antagonist with a critical scrutiny. Sir Lionel was short and stout and puffy. Bertram Ingle-Dew was tall and strong and well-knit and athletic. After an instant's pause, during which the doughty baronet stood doubling

his fat fists and glaring silent wrath at his lither opponent, Bertram made a sudden dart forward, seized the little stout man bodily in his stalwart arms, and lifting him like a sudden, a baby, in spite of kicks and struggles, carried him a hundred paces to one side of the path, where he laid him down gingerly without unnecessary violence on a bed of young bracken. Then he returned quite calmly, as if nothing had happened, to Frida's side, with that quiet little smile on his unruffled countenance. Frida had not quite approved of all this small episode, for she too believed in the righteousness of taboo like most other English women, and devoutly accepted the common

priestly doctrine that the earth is the landlords and the fullness thereof. But still, being a woman and therefore an admirer of physical strength in men, she could not help applauding to herself the masterly way in which her squire had carried his antagonist captive. when he returned she beamed upon him with friendly confidence, but Philip was very much frightened indeed. You'll have to pay for this, you know, he said. This is a law-abiding land. He'll bring an action against you for assault and battery,

and you'll get three months for it. I don't think so, Bertram answered, still placid and unruffled. There were three of us who saw him. and it was a very ignominious position indeed for a person who sets up to be a great chief in the country. He won't like the little boys on his own estate to know the great Sir Lionel was lifted up against his will, carried about like a baby, and set down in a bracken bed. Indeed, I was more than sorry to have to do such a thing to a man of his years. But you see, he would have it.

It's the only way to deal with these tabooing chiefs. You must face them and be done with it. In the Caroline Islands once, I had to do the same thing to a Cazique, who was going to cook and eat a very pretty young girl of his own retainers. He wouldn't listen to reason. The law was on his side, so being happily not a law-abiding person myself,

I took him up in my arms and walked off with him, him bodily, and was obliged to drop him down into a very painful bed of stinging plants like nettles, so as to give myself time to escape with the girl clear out of his clutches. I regretted having to do it so roughly, of course, but there was no other way out of it. As he spoke, for the first time it really came home to Frieda's mind that Bertram Ingaldioux, standing there before her, regarded in very truth the Polynesian chief and Sir Lionel Longdon as much about the same sort of unreasoning people. Savages to be argued with and cajoled if possible, but if not, then to be treated with calm firmness and force, as an English officer

on an exploring expedition might treat a wrathful central African kinglet. And in a dim sort of way, too, it began to strike her by degrees that the analogy was a true one. That Bertram Inglejew, among the Englishmen with whom she was accustomed to mix, was like a civilized being in the midst of barbarians, who feel and recognise but dimly and half-unconsciously his innate superiority. By the time they had reached the gate on the other side of the hangar, Sir Lionel overtook them, boiling over with indignation. "'Your card, sir!' he gasped out inarticulately to the calmly innocent alien.

"'You must answer for all this. Your card, I say, instantly.' Bertram looked at him with a fixed gaze. Sir Lionel, having had good proof of his antagonist's strength, kept his distance cautiously. "'Certainly not, my good friend,' Bertram replied in a firm tone. Why should I, who am the injured and insulted party, assist you in identifying me? It was you who aggressed upon my free individuality. If you want to call in the aid of an unjust law to back up an unjust and irrational taboo, you must find out for yourself who I am and where I come from. but I wouldn't advise you to do anything so foolish.

Three of us here saw you in the ridiculous position into which by your obstinacy you compelled me to put you, and you wouldn't like to hear us recount it in public, with picturesque details to your brother magistrates. Let me say one thing more to you, he added after a pause, in that peculiarly soft and melodious voice of his. Don't you think on reflection,

even if you're foolish enough and illogical enough really to believe in the sacredness of the taboo by virtue of which you try to exclude your fellow tribesmen from their fair share of enjoyment of the soil of England? Don't you think you might at any rate exercise your imaginary powers over the land you arrogate to yourself with a little more gentleness and common politeness. How petty and narrow it looks to use even an undoubted right, far more a tribal taboo, in a tyrannical and needlessly aggressive manner. How mean and small and low and churlish!

The damage we did your land, as you call it, if we did any at all, was certainly not a hapenny worth. Was it consonant with your dignity as a chief in the tribe to get so hot and angry about so small a value? How grotesque to make so much fuss and noise about a matter of a heapenie! we who were the aggrieved parties we whom you were tempted to debar by main force from the common human right to walk freely over earth wherever there's nothing so nor planted and who were obliged to remove you as an obstacle out of our path at some personal inconvenience

he glanced to scantz at his clothes crumpled and soiled by sir lionel's unseemly resistance we didn't lose our tempers or attempt to revile you we were cool and collected but a taboo must be on its very last legs when it requires the aid of terrifying notices at every corner in order to preserve it and i think this of yours must be well on the way to abolition still as i should like to part friends he drew a coin from his pocket and held it out between his finger and thumb with a courteous bow towards sir lionel i gladly tender you a hepenny in compensation for any supposed harm we may possibly have done your imaginary rights by walking through the wood here. End of Chapter 4. Chapter 5 of the British Barbarians. This Librivox recording is in the public domain,

recording by Ruth Golding. The British Barbarians by Grant Allen. Chapter 5. For a day or two after this notable encounter between tabooer and taboo breaker, Philip moved about in a most uneasy state of mind. he lived in constant dread of receiving a summons as a party to an assault upon a most respectable and respected landed proprietor who preserved more pheasants and owned more ruinous cottages than anybody else except the duke round about brackenhurst indeed so deeply did he regret his involuntary part in this painful escapade that he never mentioned a word of it to robert monteth nor did frieda either

to say the truth husband and wife were seldom confidential one with the other but to philip's surprise bertram's prediction came true they never heard another word about the action for trespass or the threat of prosecution for assault and battery. Sir Lionel found out that the person who had committed the gross and unheard-of outrage of lifting an elderly and respectable English landowner like a baby in arms on his own estate, was a lodger at Brackenhurst, variously regarded by those who knew him best, as an escaped lunatic and as a foreign nobleman in disguise, fleeing for his life from a charge of complicity in a nihilist conspiracy. He wisely came to the conclusion, therefore,

that he would not be the first to divulge the story of his own ignominious defeat, unless he found that damned radical chap was going boasting around the countryside how he had bought Sir Lionel. And as nothing was further than boasting from Bertram Ingaldew's gentle nature, and as Philip and Frieda both held their peace for good reasons of their own, the baronet never attempted in any way to rake up the story of his grotesque disgrace on what he considered his own property. All he did was to double the number of keepers on the borders of his estate,

and to give them strict notice that whoever could succeed in catching the damned radical, in flagrante delicto, as trespass of, or poacher, should receive most instant reward and promotion. During the next few weeks, accordingly, nothing of importance happened from the point of view of the Brackenhurst chronicler, though Bertram was constantly round at the Monteith's garden for afternoon tea or a game of Lawn Tennis. He was an excellent player. Lawn tennis was most popular at home, he said, in that same mysterious and non-committing phrase he so often made use of. Only he found the rackets and balls, very best London make,

rather clumsy and awkward. He wished he had brought his own along with him when he came here. Philip noticed his style of service was particularly good, and even wondered at times he did not try to go in for the All-England Championship. But Bertram surprised him by answering, with a quiet smile that though it was an excellent amusement, he had too many other things to do with his time to make a serious pursuit of it. One day towards the end of June, the strange young man had gone round to the Grange. That was the name of Frieda's house, for his usual relaxation after a very tiring and distressing day in London on important business. The business, whatever it was, had evidently harrowed his feelings not a little, for he was sensitively organized.

Freda was on the tennis lawn. She met him with much lamentation over the unpleasant fact that she had just lost a sister-in-law, whom she had never cared for. Well, but if you never cared for her, Bertram answered, looking hard into her lustrous eyes, "'It doesn't much matter.' "'Oh, I shall have to go into morning all the same,' "'frida continued somewhat pettishly, "'and waste all my nice new summer dresses.

"'It's such a nuisance.' "'Why do it, then?' Bertram suggested, "'watching her face very narrowly. "'Well, I suppose because of what you would call a fetish,' "'frida answered, laughing. I know it's ridiculous, but everybody expects it, and I'm not strong-minded enough to go against the current of what everybody expects of me. You will be by and by, Bertram answered with confidence.

There are queer things these death taboos. Sometimes people cover their heads with filth or ashes, and sometimes they bedizzen them with crape and white streamers. In some countries the survivors are bound to shed so many tears to measure in memory of the departed. And if they can't bring them up naturally in sufficient quantities, they have to be beaten with rods or pricked with thorns or stung with nettles, till they've filled to the last drop the regulation bottle. In Swaziland, too, when the king dies, so the queen told me,

Every family of his subjects has to lose one of its sons or daughters, in order that they may all truly grieve at the loss of their sovereign. I think there are more horrible and cruel devices in the way of death taboos and death customs than anything else I've met in my researches. Indeed, most of our nomologists at home believe that all taboos originally arose out of ancestral ghost worship, and sprang from the craven fear of dead kings or dead relatives. They think fetishes and gods and other imaginary supernatural beings were all in the last resort developed out of ghosts, hostile or friendly, and from what I see abroad I incline to agree with

them. But this morning superstition now, surely it must do a great deal of harm in poor households in England. People who can very ill afford to throw away good dresses must have to give them up and get new black ones, and that often at the very moment when they're just deprived of the aid of their only support and breadwinner. I wonder it doesn't occur to them, that's a that this is absolutely wrong, and that they oughtn't to prefer the meaningless fetish to their clear moral duty. They're afraid of what people would say of them, Frieda ventured to interpose. You see, we're all so frightened of breaking through an established custom. Yes, I notice that always, wherever I go in England, Bertram answered.

There's apparently no clear idea of what's right and wrong at all in the ethical sense, as apart from what's usual. I was talking to a lady up in London today about a certain matter I may perhaps mention to you by and by when occasion serves, and she said she'd been always brought up to think so and so. it seemed to me a very queer substitute indeed for thinking i never thought of that frieda answered slowly i've said the same thing a hundred times over myself before now and i see how irrational it is but there mr ingled you that's why i always like talking with you so much you make one take such a totally new view of things she looked down and was silent a minute her breast heaved and fell she was a beautiful woman very tall and queenly bertram looked at her and paused then he went on hurriedly just to break the awkward silence and this dance at exeter then i suppose you won't go to it "'Oh, I can't, of course,' Frieda answered quickly.

"'And my two other nieces, Robert sighed, you know, "'who have nothing at all to do with my brother Tom's wife out there in India. "'They'll be so disappointed. "'I was going to take them down to it. "'Nasty thing! How annoying of her! "'She might have chosen some other time to go and die, I'm sure, "'than just when she knew I wanted to go to Exeter.' "'Well, if it was...

would be any convenience to you, Bertram put in with a serious face. I'm rather busy on Wednesday, but I could manage to take up a portmanteau to town with my dress things in the morning, meet the girls at Paddington, and run down by the evening express, in time to go with them to the hotel you meant to stop at. There are those two pretty blondes I met here at tea last Sunday, aren't they? Frieda looked at him, half-increder He was very nice, she knew, and very quaint and fresh and unsophisticated and unconventional. But could he be really quite so ignorant of the common usages of civilised society as to suppose it possible he could run down alone with two young girls to stop by themselves without even a chaperon at an hotel at Exeter?

She gazed at him curiously. "'Oh, Mr. Ingle-Dew,' she said. "'No, you're really too ridiculous.' Bertram coloured up like a boy. If she had been in any doubt before, as to his sincerity and simplicity, she could be so no longer. "'Oh, I forgot about the taboo,' he said. "'I'm so sorry I hurt you.

I was only thinking what a pity those two nice girls should be cheated out of their expected pleasure by a silly question of pretended mourning, where even you yourself, who have got to wear it, don't assume that you feel the slightest tinge of sorrow. I remember now, of course, what a lady told me in London the other day. Your young girls aren't even allowed to go out travelling alone without their mother or brothers, in order to taboos them absolutely beforehand for the possible husband who may someday marry them. It was a pitiful tale. I thought it all most painful and shocking. But you don't mean to say, Frieda. cried, equally shocked and astonished in her turn,

that you'd let young girls go out alone anywhere with unmarried men? Goodness gracious, how dreadful! Why not? Bertram asked, with transparent simplicity. Why just consider the consequences? Frieda exclaimed with a blush after a moment's hesitation. there couldn't be any consequences unless they both liked and respected one another bertram answered in the most matter of coarse voice in the world and if they do that we think at home it's nobody's business to interfere in any way with the free expression of their individuality in this the most sacred and personal matter of human intercourse

it's the one point of private conduct about which we are all at home most sensitively anxious not to meddle to interfere or even to criticise we think such affairs should be left entirely to the hearts and consciences of the two persons concerned who must surely know best how they feel towards one another But I remember having met lots of taboos among other barbarians in much the same way, to preserve the mere material purity of their women, a thing we at home wouldn't dream of even questioning. In New Ireland, for instance, I saw poor girls confined for four or five years in small wicker-work cages where they're kept in the dark. and not even allowed to set foot on the ground on any pretext they're shut up in these prisons when they're about fourteen and there they're kept strictly to booed till they are just going to be married

i went to see them myself it was a horrid sight the poor creatures were confined in a dark close hut without air or ventilation in that stuart stifling climate, which is as unendurable from heat as this one is from cold and damp and fogginess. And there they sat in cages, coarsely woven from broad leaves of the pandanus trees, so that no light could enter, for the people believed that light would kill them. No man might see them because it was close to boo, but at last with great difficulty. I persuaded the chief and the old lady who guarded them to let them come out for a minute to look at me. A lot of beads and cloth overcame these people's scruples, and with great reluctance they opened the cages. But only the old woman looked, the chief was afraid and turned his head the other way, mumbling charms to his fetish.

Out they stole one by one, poor souls, ashamed and frightened, hiding their faces in their hands, thinking I was going to hurt them or eat them, just as your nieces would do if I propose today to take them to Exeter. And a dreadful sight they were, cramped with long sitting in one close position, and their eyes all blinded by the glare of the sight, sunlight after the long darkness. I've seen women shut up in pretty much the same way in other countries, but I never saw quite so bad a case as this of New Ireland. Well, you can't say

with anything answering to that in England, Frieda put in, looking across at him with her frank, open countenance. No, not quite like that in detail, perhaps. but pretty much the same in general principle bertram answered warmly your girls here are not cooped up in actual cages but they're confined in barrack schools as like prisons as possible and they are repressed at every turn in every natural instinct of play or society they mustn't go here or they mustn't go there they mustn't talk to this one or to that one they mustn't do this or that or the other their whole life is bound round i am told by a closely woven web of restrictions and restraints which have no other object or end in view than the interests of a purely hypothetical husband the chinese cramp their women's feet to make them small and useless you cramp your women's brains for the selfsame purpose even lights excluded, for they mustn't read books that would make them think. They mustn't be allowed to suspect the bare possibility that the world may be otherwise than as their

priests and nurses and grandmothers tell them, though most even of your own men know it well to be something quite different. Why, I met a girl at that dance I went to in London the other evening, who told me she wasn't allowed to read a book called Tess of the Derbervilles that I'd read myself, and that seemed to me one of which every young girl and married woman in England ought to be given a copy. It was the one true book I had seen in your country. And another girl wasn't allowed to read another book, which I've since looked at, called Robert Ellesmere. An ephemeral thing enough in its way, I don't doubt, but proscribed in her case, for no other reason on earth, than because it expressed some mild disbelief as to the exact

literary accuracy of those lower Syrian pamphlets to which your priests attach such immense importance. Oh, Mr. Ingle-Dew, Frieda cried, trembling, yet profoundly interested if you talk like that any more i shan't be able to listen to you there it is you see bertram continued with a little wave of the hand you've been so blinded and bedimmed by being deprived of light when a girl that now when you see even a very faint ray it dazzles you and frightens you you. That mustn't be so. It needn't. I feel confident. I shall have to teach you how to bear the light. Your eyes I know are naturally strong. You were an eagle-born. You'd soon get used to it. Frieda lifted them slowly, those beautiful eyes, and met his own with genuine pleasure. "'Do you think so?' she asked half-whispering.

"'In some dim, instinctive way, "'she felt this strange man was a superior being, "'and that every small crumb of praise from him "'was well worth meriting. "'Why, Frieder, of course I do,' he answered, "'without the least sense of impertinence. "'Do you think if I did, I'd have taken so much trouble to try and educate you, for he had talked to her much in their walks on the hillside.

Frida did not correct him for his bold application of her Christian name, though she knew she ought to. She only looked up at him and answered gravely, I certainly can't let you take my nieces to Exeter. I suppose not. he replied hardly catching at her meaning one of the girls at that dance the other night told me a great many queer facts about your taboos on these domestic subjects so i know how stringent and how unreasoning they are and indeed i found out a little bit for myself for there was one nice girl there to whom i took a very great fancy and i was just going to kiss her, as I said good-night, when she drew back suddenly, almost as if I'd struck her, though we'd been talking together quite confidentially a minute before.

I could see she thought I really meant to insult her. Of course I explained it was only what I'd have done to any nice girl at home under similar circumstances, but she didn't seem to believe me. And the oddest part of it all was that all the time we were dancing, I had my arm round her waist, as all the other men had theirs round their partners. And at home, we consider it a much greater proof of confidence and affection to be allowed to place your arm round a lady's waist than merely to kiss her. "'Freda felt the conversation was beginning to travel beyond her ideas of propriety. "'So she checked its excursions by answering gravely,

"'Oh, Mr. Ingle-Dew, you don't understand our code of morals. "'But I'm sure you don't find your East End, young ladies, so fearfully particular.' "'They certainly haven't quite so many taboos,' Bertram answered quietly. but that's always the way in tabooing societies these things are naturally worst among the chiefs and great people i remember when i was stopping among the otdanoms of borneo the daughters of chiefs and great son descended families were shut up at eight or ten years old in a little cell or room as a religious duty and cut off from all intercourse with the outside world for many years together. The cells dimly lit by a single small window placed high in the wall,

so that the unhappy girl never sees anybody or anything, but passes her life in almost total darkness. She meant leave the room on any pretext whatever, not even for the most pressing and necessary purposes. None of her family may see her family, may see her, but a single slave-woman's appointed to accompany her and wait upon her. Long want of exercise stunts her bodily growth, and when at last she becomes a woman and emerges from her prison,

her complexion has grown wan and pale and wax-like. They take her out in solemn guise, and show her the sun, the sky, the land, the water, the tides, trees the flowers, and tell her all their names, as if to a newborn creature. Then a great feast is made, a poor crouching slave is killed with a blow of the sword, and the girl is solemnly smeared with his reeking blood by way of initiation. But this is only done, of course, with the daughters of wealthy and powerful families. and I find it pretty much the same in England.

In all these matters, your poorer classes are relatively pure and simple and natural. It's your richer and worse and more selfish classes, among whom sex taboos are strongest and most unnatural. Frieda looked up at him a little pleadingly. Do you know, Mr. Ingledew? she said in a trembling voice. I'm sure you don't mean it for intentional rudeness,

but it sounds to us very like it when you speak of our taboos and compare us openly to these dreadful savages. I'm a woman, I know, but I don't like to hear you speak so about my England. The words took Bertram fairly by surprise. he was wholly unacquainted with that rank form of provincialism which we know as patriotism he leaned across towards her with a look of deep pain on his handsome face oh mrs montes he cried earnestly if you don't like it i'll never again speak of them as taboos in your presence i didn't dream you could object it seemed to you don't like it i'll never again speak of them as taboos in your presence i didn't dream you could object it seemed

so natural to us well to describe like customs by like names in every case but if it gives you pain why sooner than do that i'd never again say a single word while i live about an english custom his face was very near hers and he was a son of adam like all the rest of us not a being of another sphere as frieda was so much sometimes half tempted to consider him. What might next have happened he himself hardly knew, for he was an impulsive creature, and Frida's rich lips were full and crimson, had not Philip's arrival with the two Miss Hardys to make up a set, diverted for the moment the nascent possibility of a leading incident. End of Chapter 5

Chapter 6 of the British Barbarians. This Librevox recording is in the public domain, recording by Ruth Golding. The British Barbarians by Grant Allen. Chapter 6 It was a Sunday afternoon in full July, and a small party was seated under the spreading mulberry tree on the Monteith's lawn. General Claviger was of the number, that well-known constructor of scientific frontiers in India or Africa.

And so was Dean Chalmers, the popular preacher, who had come down for the day from his London house to deliver a sermon on behalf of the society for superseding the existing superstitions of China and Japan by the dying ones of Europe. Philip was there, too, enjoying himself thoroughly in the midst of such good company. and so was Robert Montief, bleak and grim as usual, but deeply interested for the moment in dividing metaphysical and theological cobwebs with his friend the dean, who, as a brother Scotsman, loved a good discussion,

better almost than he loved a good discourse. General Claviger, for his part, was congenially engaged in describing to Bertram his pet idea for a campaign against the Mardi and his men in the interior of the Sudan. Bertram rather yawned through that technical talk. He was a man of peace, and schemes of organized bloodshed interested him no more than the details of a projected human sacrifice given by a central African chief with native gusto

would interest an average European gentleman. At last, however, the general happened to Sague. casually. I forget the exact name of the place, I mean. I think it's Malolo, but I have a very good map of all the district at my house down at Wannborough. What, Wambara in Northamptonshire? Bertram exclaimed with sudden interest. Do you really live there? I'm Lord of the Manor, General Klaverger answered, with a little access of dignity. The clavagers or claviors were a Spanish family of Andalusian origin, who settled down at Wannborough under Philip and Mary, and retained the manner, no doubt by conversion to the Protestant side, after the accession of Elizabeth. That's interesting to me, Bertram answered, with his frank and fearless truthfulness. "'Because my people came originally from Wanderer before—well, before they emigrated.'

Philip, listening askance, pricked up his ears eagerly at the tell-tale phrase, after all then a colonist. But they weren't anybody distinguished, certainly not Lords of the Manor. He added hastily, as the General turned a keen eye. on him are there any ingledews living now in the Wanborough district one likes as a matter of scientific heredity to know all one can about one's ancestors and one's county and one's collateral relatives well there are some ingledews just now at Wanborough the general answered with some natural hesitation surveying the tall handsome young man from head to foot, not without a faint touch of soldierly approbation.

But they can hardly be your relatives, however remote. They're people in a most humble sphere of life. Unless, indeed— Well, we know the vicissitudes of families. Perhaps your ancestors and the ingledews that I know drifted apart a long time ago. Is he a cobbler? Bertram inquired, without a trace of Mourves'aunt. The general nodded.

Well, yes, he said politely. That's exactly what he is, though, as you seem to be asking about presumed relations, I didn't like to mention it. Oh, then, he's my ancestor, Bertram put in, quite pleased at the discovery. That is to say, he added after a curious pause, my ancestors descendant almost all my people a little way back you see were shoemakers or cobblers he said it with dignity exactly as he might have said they were dukes or lord chancellor's but philip could not help pitying him not so much for being descended from so mean a lot as for being fool enough to acknowledge it on a gentleman's lawn at brackenhurst why with manners like his if he had not given himself away one might easily have taken him for a descendant of the plantagenet's so the general seemed to think too for he added quickly but you're very like the duke and the duke sir bertram is he also a relative the young man coloured slightly yes he answered hesitating

but were not very proud of the Bertram connection. They never did much good in the world's, the Bertram's. I bear the name, one may almost say, by accident, because it was handed down to me by my grandfather Ingledew, who had Bertram blood, but was a vast deal a better man than any other member of the Bertram family. I'll be seeing the Duke on Wednesday, the general put in with marked politeness and i'll ask him if you like about your grandfather's relationship who was he exactly and what was his connection with the present man or his predecessor

oh don't please bertram put in half-pleadingly it is true but still with that same ineffable and indefinable air of a great gentleman that never for a moment deserted him the duke would never have heard of my ancestors i am sure and i particularly don't want to be mixed up with the existing bertrams in any way he was happily innocent and ignorant of the natural interpretation the others would put upon his reticence after the true english manner but still he was vaguely aware from the silence that ensued for a moment after he ceased that he must have broken once more some important taboo, or offended once more some much-reveered fetish. To get rid of the awkwardness he turned quietly to Frida. What do you say, Mrs. Monteth, he suggested, to a game of tennis.

As bad luck would have it, he had floundered from one taboo headlong into another. The dean looked up, open-mouthed, the sharp glance of inquiry. Did Mrs. Montief, then, permit such frivolities on the Sunday? "'You'll forget what day it is, I think,' Frida interposed gently with a look of warning. Bertram took the hint at once. "'So I did,' he answered quickly. "'At home, you see, we let no-man judge us of days and of weeks,

and of times and of seasons, it puzzles us so much. With us, what's wrong today can never be right and proper to-morrow. But surely, the dean said, bristling up, some day is set apart in every civilised land for religious exercises. Oh, no, Bertram replied, falling in cautiously into the trap. We do right every day of the week alike, and never do puja of any sort at any time. 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 a little bit. 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 dickens. tone that seemed natural to him whenever anyone 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. Inglejew, 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 fantasies. How beautiful those lilies are! Mrs. Monti's 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.

may and 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 lowly 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. Ingle-Dew,' 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 cast 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. had met with elsewhere, the casts 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, were to act in any other way than the one prescribed, some nameless misfortune or terrible evil would surely overtakes 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 frieda 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 sepulchus. 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 end of chapter six chapter seven of the british barbarians this libravox recording is in the public domain recording by ruth golding the british barbarians by grant allen chapter seven as soon as he was gone a sigh of relief ran half unawares through the little square party they felt some unearthly presence had been removed from their midst general claviger turned to monteth that's a curious sort of chap he said slowly in his military

way. Who is he, and where does he come from? Ah, where does he come from? That's just the question. Monteth answered, lighting a cigar and puffing away dubiously. Nobody knows. He's a mystery. He poses in the role. You'd better ask Philip. It was he who brought him here. I met him accidentally in the street, Philip answered, with an apologetic shrug, by no means well pleased at being thus held responsible for all the stranger's moral and social vagaries. It's the merest chance acquaintance.

I know nothing of his antecedents. I, er, I lent him a bag, and he's fastened himself upon me ever since like a leech, and come constantly to my sisters. But I haven't the remotest idea who he is, or where he hails from. He keeps his business wrapped up from all of us in the profoundest mystery. "'He's a gentleman, anyhow,' the general put in with military decisiveness. "'How manly of him to acknowledge at once about the cobbler being probably a near relation. "'Most men, you know, Christy, would have tried to hide it.

"'He didn't for a second. "'He admitted his ancestors had all been cobblers till quite a recent period.' philip was astonished at this verdict of the generals for he himself on the contrary had noted with silent scorn that very remark as a piece of supreme and hopeless stupidity on bertram's part no fellow can help having a cobbler for a grandfather of course but he need not be such a fool as to volunteer any mention of the fact spontaneously yes i sort it bold of him montice answered almost bolder than was necessary for he didn't seem to think we should be at all surprised at it the general mused to himself he's a fine soldierly fellow he said gazing after the tall retreating figure i should like to make a dragoon of him he's the very man for a saddle he'd "'dash across country in the face of heavy guns any day with the best of them.' "'He rides well,' Philip answered,

"'and has a wonderful seat. "'I saw him on that Bay Mayor of Wilders in town the other afternoon, "'and I must say he rode much more like a gentleman than a cobbler.' "'Oh, he's a gentleman,' the general repeated with unshaken conviction. "'A thoroughbred gentleman.' "'And he scanned Philip up and down. with his keen grey eye, as if internally reflecting that Philip's own right to criticise and classify that particular species of humanity was a trifle doubtful.

I should much like to make a captain of Hazars of him. He'd be splendid as a leader of irregular horse, the very man for a scrimmage. For the General's one idea when he saw a fine specimen of our common race was the Zulus or the Red Indians. what an admirable person he would be to employ in killing and maiming his fellow creatures. He'd be better engaged, so, the dean murmured reflectively, than in diffusing these horrid, revolutionary and atheistical doctrines. For the church was as usual in accord with the sword. Theoretically all peace, practically all bloodshed and rapid,

and aggression, and anything that was not his own opinion envisaged itself always to the Dean's crystallized mind as revolutionary and atheistic. "'He's very like the Duke, though,' General Clavager went on, after a moment's pause, during which everybody watched Bertram and Frieder disappearing down the walk round a clump of syringers. "'Very like the Duke.' and you saw he admitted some sort of relationship though he didn't like to dwell upon it you may be sure he's a by-blow of the family somehow one of the bertrams perhaps the old duke who was out in the crimea may have formed an attachment for one of these ingledew girls the cobbler's sisters i dare say they were no better in their conduct than they ought to be and this may be the consequence

i'm afraid the old duke was a man of loose life and doubtful conversation the dean put in with a tone of professional disapprobation for the inevitable transgressions of the great and the high placed he didn't seem to set the example he ought to have done to his poorer brethren oh he was a thorough old rip the duke if it comes to that general claviger responded, twirling his white moustache. And so's the present man a rip of the first water. They're a regular bad lot, the Bertram's root and stock. They never set an example of anything to anybody, bar horse-breeding, as far as I'm aware. And even at that their trainers have always fairly cheated them. The present dukes are most exemplary churchmen.

The dean interposed with Christian charity. for a nobleman of position. He gave us a couple of thousand last year for the Cathedral Restoration Fund. And that would account, Philip put in, returning abruptly to the previous question, which had been exercising him meanwhile, for the peculiarly distinguished air of birth and breeding

this man has about him. For Philip respected a duke from the bottom of his heart, and cherished the common Britannic delusion that a man who has been elevated to that highest degree in our barbaric rank system must acquire at the same time a nobler type of physique and countenance, exactly as a Jew changes his Semitic features for the European shape on conversion and baptism. Oh dear no, the general answered in his most decided voice. The Bertrams were never much to look at in any way, and as for the old Duke, he was as insignificant a little monster of red-haired ugliness as ever you'd see in a day's march anywhere. If he hadn't been a Duke, with a rent-roll of forty-odd thousand a year, he'd never have got that beautiful Lady Camilla to consent to marry him. But, bless you, women'll do anything for the strawberry leaves.

it isn't from the bertrams this man gets his good looks it isn't from the bertram's old ingledew's daughters are pretty enough girls if their aunts were like him it's there your young friend got his air of distinction we never know whose who nowadays the dean murmured softly being himself the son of a small scott tradesman brought up in the free kirk and elevated into his presently present exalted position by the early intervention of a bailiol scholarship and a student-ship of Christchurch, he felt at liberty to moralise in such non-committing terms on the gradual decay of aristocratic exclusiveness. "'I don't see it much matters what a man's family was,' the General said stoutly. "'So long as he's a fine, well-made soldierly fellow, like this ingold you body, capable of fighting for his queen and country. He is an Australia, I suppose. What tall chaps they do send

home, to be sure. Those Australians are going to lick us all round the field, presently. That's the curious part of it, Philip answered. Nobody knows what he is. He doesn't even seem to be a British subject. He calls himself an alien, and he speaks most disrespectfully at times. Well, not exactly perhaps of the queen in person, but at any rate of the monarchy. Utterly destitute of any feeling of respect for any power of any sort, human or divine, the dean remarked with clerical severity. For my part, Monteth interposed, knocking his ash off savagely. I think the man's a swindler, and the more a see of him the less I like him.

He's never explained to us how he came here at all, or what the Dickens he came for. He refuses to say where he lives, or what's his nationality. He poses as a sort of unexplained Casper Hauser. In my opinion, these mystery men are always impostors. He had no letters of introduction to anybody at Brackenhurst, and he thrust himself upon Philip in a most peculiar way, ever since which he's insisted upon coming to my house almost daily. I don't like him myself. It's Mrs. Montith who insists upon having him here. He fascinates me, the general said frankly. I don't at all wonder the

women like him. As long as he was by, though I don't agree with one word he says, I have couldn't help looking at him and listening to him intently. So he does me, Philip answered, since the general gave him the cue. And I notice it's the same with people in the train. They always listen to him, though sometimes he preaches the most extravagant doctrines. Oh, much worse than anything he's said here this afternoon. He's really quite eccentric. What sort of doctrines?

Dean inquired with language zeal. Not, I hope, irreligious. Oh, dear, no, Philip answered. Not that so much. He troubles himself very little, I think, about religion. Social doctrines, don't you know? Such very queer views about women and so forth. Indeed, the Dean said quickly, drawing himself up very stiff.

for you touch the Ark of God for the modern cleric when you touch the question of the relations of the sexes. And what does he say? It's highly undesirable men should go about the country inciting to rebellion on such fundamental points of moral order in public railway carriages. For it is a peculiarity of minds constituted like the deans, say ninety-nine percent of the population, to hold that the more important a subject is to our

general happiness, the less ought we all to think about it and discuss it. Why, he has very queer ideas, Philip went on, slightly hesitating, for he shared the common vulgar inability to phrase exposition of a certain class of subjects in any but the crudest and ugliest phraseology. He seems to think, don't you know, that recognized forms of vice? Well, what all young men do. You know what I mean. Of course it's not right, but still they do them.

The dean nodded a cautious acquiescence. He thinks they're horribly wrong and distressing. But he makes nothing at all of the virtue of decent girls and the peaceings. of families. If I found a man preaching that sort of doctrine to my wife or my daughters, Monteth said savagely, I know what I do. I'd put a bullet through him. And quite right, too, the general murmured approvingly. Professional considerations made the dean refrain from endorsing this open expression of murderous sentiment in its fullest form. A clergyman ought always to keep up some decent semblance of respect for the gospel and the

ten commandments, or at least the greater part of them. So he placed the tips of his fingers and thumbs together in the usual deliberative clerical way, gazed blankly through the gap, and answered with mild and perfunctory disapprored. probation. A bullet would perhaps be an unnecessarily severe form of punishment to meet out. But I confess I would excuse the man who was so far carried away by his righteous indignation as to duck the fellow in the nearest horse-pond. Well, I don't know about that, Philip replied, with an outburst of unwonted courage and originality, for he was beginning to like, and he had always from the first respected Bertram.

There's something about the man that makes me feel, even when I differ from him most, that he believes it all, and is thoroughly in earnest. I dare say I'm wrong, but I always have a notion he's a better man than me, in spite of all his nonsense, higher and clearer and differently constituted, and that if only I could climb to just where he has got, perhaps I should see things in the same light that he does. It was a wonderful speech for Philip, a speech above himself, but all the same by a fetch of inspiration he actually made it. intercourse with bertram had profoundly impressed his feeble nature but the dean shook his head a very undesirable young man for you to see too much of i'm sure mr christie he said with marked disapprobation for in the dean's opinion it was a most dangerous thing for a man to think especially when he's young thinking is of course so likely to unsettle him

the general on the other hand nodded his stern grey head once or twice reflectively he's a remarkable young fellow he said after a pause a most remarkable young fellow a most remarkable young fellow As I said before, he somehow fascinates me. I'd immensely like to put that young fellow into a smart, Hazar uniform, mount him on a good charger of the Punjab breed, and send him helter-skelter, pull-devil, pull baker, among my old friends the Durrani's on the northwest frontier. End of Chapter 7. Chapter 8 of the British Barbarians.

Librevox recording is in the public domain, recording by Ruth Golding. The British Barbarians by Grant Allen, Chapter 8. While the men talked thus, Bertram Ingle Dew's ears ought to have burned behind the bushes, but to say the truth, he cared little for their conversation, for had he not turned aside down one of the retired gravel paths in the garden alone with Frida? "'That general claviger of Herat, I suppose,' he said in a low tone, as they retreated out of earshot beside the clump of syringas. "'What a stern old man he is, to be sure, with what a stern old face!

"'He looks like a person capable of doing or ordering all the strange things I've read of him in the papers.' "'Oh, yes!' Frieda answered, misunderstanding for the moment her companion's meaning. He's a very clever man, I believe, and a most distinguished officer. Bertram smiled in spite of himself. Oh, I didn't mean that, he cried, with the same odd gleam in his eyes Frida had so often noticed there. I meant he looked capable of doing or ordering all the horrible crimes he's credited with in history. You remember it was he, who was employed in massacring the poor savage Zulus in their last stand at bay, and in driving the Afghan women and children to die of cold and starvation on the mountain-tops

after the taking of Kabul. A terrible fighter indeed, a terrible history. But I believe he's a very good man in private life, Frida put in apologetically, feeling compelled to say the best she could for her husband's I don't care for him much myself, to be sure, but Robert likes him, and he's awfully nice, everyone says, to his wife and stepchildren. How can he be very good? Bertram answered in his gentlest voice. If he hires himself out indiscriminately to kill or maim whoever he's told to,

irrespective even of the rights and wrongs of the private. or public quarrel he happens to be employed upon. It's an appalling thing to take a fellow creature's life, even if you're quite sure it's just and necessary. But fancy contracting to take anybody's and everybody's life you're told to, without any chance even of inquiring whether they may not be in the right after all, and your own particular king or people most unjust and cruel and blood-stained aggressors? Why it's horrible to contemplate.

Do you know, Mrs. Monteth, he went on with his far-away air. It's that that makes society here in England so difficult to me. It's so hard to mix on equal terms with your paid high-house. priests and your hired slaughterers and never display openly the feelings you entertain towards them fancy if you had to mix so yourself with the men who flogged women to death in Hungary with the governors and jailers of some Siberian prison that's the worst of travel when I was in Central Africa I sometimes saw a poor black woman tortured or killed before my very eyes. And if I tried to interfere in her

favour, to save or protect her, I'd only have got killed myself, and probably have made things all the worse in the end for her. And yet it's hard indeed to have to look on at or listen to such horrors as these without openly displayed. laying one's disgust and disapprobation. Whenever I meet your famous generals, or your judges and your bishops, I burn to tell them how their acts affect me. Yet I'm obliged to refrain, because I know my words could do no good and might do harm,

for they could only anger them. My sole hope of doing anything to mitigate the vigour of your cruel customs is to take as little notice of them as possible in any way whenever I find myself in unsympathetic society. Then you don't think me unsympathetic, Frida murmured with a glow of pleasure. Oh, Frieda! The young man cried, bending forward

and looking at her. You know very well. You are the only person here I care for in the least, or have the slightest sympathy with. Frida was pleased he should say so. He was so nice and gentle. But she felt constrained, nonetheless, to protest, for form's sake at least,

against his calling her once more so familiarly by her Christian name. "'Not, Frida, to you, if you please, Mr. Ingledew,' she said as stiffly as she could manage. "'You know it isn't right. Mrs. Monteth, you must call me.' But she wasn't as angry somehow at the liberty he had taken as she would have been in anybody else's case. He was so very peculiar. Bertram Engelieu paused and checked himself. You think I do it on purpose, he said with an apologetic air.

I know you do, of course, but I assure you I don't. It's all pure forgetfulness. The fact is nobody can possibly call to mind all the intricacies of your English and European customs at once. unless he's to the manner born and carefully brought up to them from his earliest childhood, as all of you yourselves have been. He may recollect them after an effort when he thinks of them seriously, but he can't possibly bear them all in mind at once, every hour of the day and night by a pure toureder force of mental concentration.

You know it's the same with you. your people in other barbarous countries. Your own travellers say it themselves about the customs of Islam. They can't learn them and remember them all at every moment of their lives, as the Mohammedans do. And to make one slip there is instant death to them. Frieda looked at him earnestly. But I hope, she said, with an air of deprecation, pulling a rose. to pieces petal by petal nervously as she spoke.

You don't put us on quite the same level as Mohammedans. We are so much more civilised, so much better in every way. Do you know, Mr. Ingledew? And she hesitated for a minute. I can't bear to differ from you or blame you in anything, because you always appear to me so wise and good and kind of. hearted and reasonable. But it often surprises me and even hurts me when you seem to talk of us all as if we were just so many savages. You're always speaking about taboo and casts and

puja and fetishes, as if we weren't civilized people at all, but utter barbarians. Now don't you think, don't you admit yourself, it's a wee bit of unreasonable, or at any rate, impolite of you. Bertram drew back with a really pained expression on his handsome features. Oh, Mrs. Montief, he cried. Frieda, I'm so sorry if I've seemed rude to you. It's all the same thing, pure human inadvertence, inability to throw myself into so unfamiliar an accident.

I forget every minute that you do not recognize the essential identity of your own taboos and poohas and fetishes with the similar and often indistinguishable taboos and poohas and fetishes of the savages generally. They all come from the same source and often retain to the end, as in your temple superstitions and your marriage. superstitions, the original features of their savage beginnings. And as to your being comparatively civilized, I grant you that at once. Only it doesn't necessarily make you one bit more rational, certainly not one bit more humane or moral or brotherly in your actions. I don't understand you! Frida cried astonished.

But there, I often don't understand you. Only I know when you've explained things, I shall see how right you are. Bertram smiled a quiet smile. You're certainly an apt pupil, he said with brotherly gentleness, pulling a flower as he went, and slipping it softly into her bosom.

Why, what I means just this. Civilization, after all, in the stage in which you possess it, is only the ability to live together in great organized communities. It doesn't necessarily imply any higher moral status or any greater rationalities than those of the savage. All it implies is greater cohesion, more unity, higher division of functions. But the functions themselves,

like those of your priests and judges and soldiers, may be as barbaric and cruel, or as irrational and unintelligent as any that exist among the most primitive peoples. Advance in civilization doesn't necessarily involve either advance in real knowledge of one's relations to the universe, or advance in moral goodness and personal culture. Some highly civilized nations of historic times have been more cruel and barbarous than many

quite uncultivated ones. For example, the Romans, at the height of their civilization, went mad, drunk with blood at their gladiatorial shows. The Athenians of the Age of Pericles and Socrates offered up human sacrifices at the Thagalia, like the various savages. And the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, the most civilized commercial people of the world in their time, as the English are now, gave their own children to be burnt alive as victims to bail. The Mexicans were far more civilized than the ordinary North American Indians of their own. day, and even in some respects than the Spanish Christians who conquered, converted, enslaved and tortured them. But the Mexican religion was full of such horrors as I could hardly even name to you.

It was based entirely on cannibalism, as yours is on mammon. Human sacrifices were common, commoner even than in modern England, I fancy. Newborn babies were killed by the priests when the corn was sown, children when it had sprouted, men when it was full grown, and very old people when it was fully ripe. How horrible, Frieda exclaimed. Yes, horrible! horrible, Bertram answered, like your own worst customs. It didn't show either gentleness or rationality, you'll admit, but it showed what's the one thing essential to civilization.

Great coherence, high organization, much division of function. Some of the rights these civilized Mexicans performed Would have made the blood of kindly savages run cold with horror They sacrificed a man at the harvest festival by crushing him like the corn between two big flat stones Sometimes the priests skinned their victim alive and wore his raw skin as a mask or covering, and danced hideous dances so disguised, in honour of the hateful deities whom their fancies had created. Deities even more hateful and cruel, perhaps, than the worst of your own Christian Calvinistic fancies. I can't see myself that civilised people

are one whit the better in all these respects than the uncivilised barbarian. They pull together better, that's all, but war, bloodshed, superstition, fetish worship, religious rights, castes, class distinctions, sex taboos, restrictions on freedom of thought, on freedom of action, on freedom of speech, on freedom of knowledge, are just as common in their midst as among the utterly uncivilised. Then what you yourself aim at? Frieda said, looking hard at him, for he spoke very earnestly.

What you yourself, Amat, is? Bertram's eyes came back to solid earth with a bound. Oh, what we at home aim at, he said, smiling that sweet, soft smile of his that so captivated Frieder. Is not mere civilisation, though of course we value that too in its meet degree, because without civilization and cooperation no great thing is possible. but rationality and tenderness. We think reason the first good, to recognize truly your own place in the universe, to hold your head up like a man

before the face of high heaven, afraid of no ghosts or fetishes or phantoms, to understand that wise and right and unselfish action, are the great requisites in life, not the service of non-existent and misshapen creatures of the human imagination. Knowledge of facts, knowledge of nature, knowledge of the true aspects of the world we live in,

these seem to us of first importance. After that, we prize next reasonable and reasoning goodness. for mere rule of thumb goodness which comes by rote and might so easily degenerate into formalism or superstition has no honour among us but rather the contrary if any one were to say with us after he had passed his first infancy that he always did such and such a thing because he had been told it was right by his parents or teachers still more because pre-lawful priests or fetish men had commanded it, he would be regarded not as virtuous, but as feeble or wicked, a sort of moral idiot, unable to distinguish rationally for himself between good and evil. That's not the sort of conduct we consider right or befitting the dignity of a grown man or woman, an ethical unit in an enlightened community.

rather is it their prime duty to question all things to accept no rule of conduct or morals as sure till they have thoroughly tested it mr ingledew freda 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 frieda he said with that transparent glance of his. Now don't look so vexed. I shall call you Frieda 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.

of that to see him in the daylight. In your England the arrangements 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 of your customs, one of you. would 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 anthropithicus 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 frieda 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, Frieda, what we mean by life.

We mean a set of simultaneous and consecutive changes going on in a complex mass of organized 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, one place we really know, varying as much as from the oak to the cuttlefish, from the palm to the tiger, from man to the fern, the seaweed 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 interact. 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,' Frieda answered thoughtfully, for though English she was not wholly impervious to logic. "'L likely, of course not,' Bertram went on with conviction.

"'Planatoscopists are agreed upon it. "'And above all, why should one suppose the living organisms, or 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 circling. in its history. We differ only as births 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 book 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, mind. so different in every way from all other men, that for a moment Frieda 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 country women 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 Monteth.

I must needs respect his seal set upon. you. And he drew a deep sigh of enforced resignation. Frieda sighed in return. These problems are so hard, she said. Bertram smiled a strange smile. There are no problems, he answered confidently. You make them yourselves. You saw you. surround life with taboos, and then you talk despairingly of the problems with which your own taboos alone have saddled you. End of Chapter 8. Chapter 9 of the British Barbarians.

This Librevox recording is in the public domain, recording by Ruth Golding. The British Barbarians by Grant Allen. Chapter 9 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 one.

women's faces and bird's 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 Harim 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, Frieda, he cried. Mrs. Monteth.

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 oh 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 goodbye to you, just this once, forever.

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 frieda 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 are 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 slid 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 frieda 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 agonized 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 frieda 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, Ingledu, who's chosen to voice himself upon us,

holds opinions and sentiments which entirely unfit him from being proper comfort. 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 oh frieda how kind of you frieda 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 oh frieda how could i be vexed you poor child i'm so pleased so glad so grateful frieda 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, Frieder. You can't deceive me. My darling, you love me, and you know I love you.

Why should we to make any secret about our hearts any longer? He laid his hand on her face again, making it tingle with joy. Frieda, 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 freda you can't look me in the face and tell me you love him no not since the first few months freda 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 "'Freda,' 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 Montiefs. 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 Montiefs, and everywhere among civilized 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 fetish, 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 arms 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 cortisans 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 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. Oh, 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 Monteth, a free woman at last, clung there many minutes, with no vile inherited sense of shame or wrongfulness. I can't bear to do that. go, she cried, still clinging to him and clutching him tight. I'm so happy here, Bertram. Oh, so happy, so happy. So happy. Then why go away at all? Bertram asked quite simply. Frieda 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 council 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 you? me. Can't come here, you know, Frieda 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 Montief's proprietary claim on your life and freedom, I'm beginning to understand now that it's. 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, Frieda, we too 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 Montief's, my freedom. So now, good night till Monday at two,

beside the style 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. End of Chapter 9. Chapter 10 of the British Barbarians. This Librevox recording is in the public domain,

recording by Ruth Golding. The British Barbarians by Grant Allen. Chapter 10 When she returned, Robert Montief 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, English. you. 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 forever 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 wrong. wrongfulness of her attempt to say goodbye 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, Frieda found herself in the fields.

But early as she went to fulfil her trist, 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, coarse suddenly through her. She looked round to right and left to see if they were, 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 born 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 have to, 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 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. Frieda was the first to break it with words. Why do you always call them to booze, 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 civilized eastern or western. You must see that now, for I know you are emancipated. They begin with belief in some fetish 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 condigned 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 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 forever 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. think I see what you mean, Frieda 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 peoples. To me, from the very first, they seem 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 eye. 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, and the whole of life gets enveloped at last in a perfect mist and labyrinth of taboos, a cobweb of conventions.

The Flamendialis 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 Wheaton flour or leavened bread. He mightn't look at or even mention by name Such unlucky things as a goat, a dog, raw meat, Harico 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?

Frieda 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 civilized races so that for fear of i know not what ridiculous bogie 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. Oh, 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 disgust. than ought you can conceive. In order that the rest of you may be safely tabooed, each are made intact for the man who weds her. It's the hatefulest taboo of all the hateful taboes 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 away. 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, t'was 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. "'Freda,' 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.' "'Freda's face in turn waxed Rosie Red, "'but she answered only in a very low voice. "'Thank you, Bircham.' "'Would you, 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? Frieda'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 doubts 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 frieda he said it's right of course to go the thing that's wrong is to stop with that man one minute longer than that's a man one minute longer than that's right of course to go the thing that's wrong is to stop with that man one minute longer than is 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 careful? 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, Monteth, 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 frieda looked up at him with admiration in her big black eyes she had found the truth and the truth had made her free oh 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 monteth 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 frieda 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 freda asked a little tremulous for the reply

i couldn't bear to leave them even for you dear bircham i could never desert them bertram gazed at her dismayed leave them why fried of course you could never desert them 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, Frieda. "'Long before the law of England, 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, Frieda 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. End of Chapter 10 Chapter 11 of the British Barbarians This Librevox recording is in the public domain Recording by Ruth Golding

The British Barbarians by Grant Allen Chapter 11 Never in her life had Frida enjoyed anything So much as those first four happy days at Haymoor She had come away with Bertram exactly as Bertram himself desired her to do, without one thought of anything on earth except to fulfil the higher law of her own nature.

And she was happy in her intercourse with the one man who could understand it, the one man who had waked it to its fullest pitch, and could make it resound sympathetically to his touch in every cord and every fibre. they had chosen a lovely spot on a heather-clad moorland where she could stroll alone with bertram among the gorse and ling utterly oblivious of robert monteth and the unnatural world she had left for ever behind her her soul drank in deep draughts of the knowledge of good and evil from bertram's lips she felt it was indeed a privilege to be with him and listen to him.

She wondered how she could ever have endured that old, bad life with the lower man who was never her equal. Now she had once tasted and known what life can be when two well-matched souls walk it together abreast in holy fellowship. The children too were as happy as the day was long. The heath was heaven to them. They loved Bertram well, and were too young to be aware of anything unusual

in the fact of his accompanying them. At the little inn on the hilltop where they stopped at a lodge, nobody asked any compromising questions, and Bertram felt so sure he could soon complete his arrangements for taking Frida and the children home, as he still always phrased it, that frieda had no doubts for their future happiness as for robert monteth that bleak cold man she hardly even remembered him bertram's first kiss seemed almost to have driven the very memory of her husband clean out of her consciousness she only regretted now she had left him the false and mistaken sense of duty

which had kept her so long tied to an inferior soul she could never love and did wrong to marry and all the time what strange new lessons what beautiful truths she learned from bertram as they strolled together those sweet august mornings hand locked in hand over the breezy upland what new insight he gave him gave her into men and things. What fresh impulse he supplied to her keen moral nature. The misery and wrong of the world she lived in came home to her now in deeper and blacker hues than ever she had conceived it in, and with that consciousness came also the burning desire of every wakened soul to write and redress it. With burying, by her side she felt she could not even harbour an unholy wish or admit a wrong feeling that vague sense of his superiority as of a higher being which he had felt from the very first moment she met him at brackenhurst had deepened and grown more definite now by closer intercourse and she recognized that what she had fallen in love with from the earliest beginning was the beauty of holiness shining clear in his countenance

she had chosen at last the better part and she felt in her soul that come what might it could not be taken away from her in this earthly paradise of pure love undefiled she spent three full days and part of another. On the morning of the fourth, she sent the country girl they had engaged to take care of the children out on the moor with the little ones, while she herself and Bertram went off alone, past the barrow that overlooks the devil's saucepan,

and out on the open ridge that stretches with dark growth of heath and bracken far away into the misty blue distance of Hampshire. Bertram had just been speaking to her as they sat on the dry sand, of the buried chieftain whose bones still lay hid under that grass-grown barrow, and of the slaughtered wives whose bodies slept beside him, massacred in cold blood to accompany their dead lord to the world of shadows. He had been contrasting these hideous slaveries of taboo-ridden English,

past or present, with the rational freedom of his own dear country, whither he hoped so soon with good luck to take her, when suddenly Frida raised her eager eyes from the ground and saw somebody or something coming across the moor from eastward in their direction. All at once a vague foreboding of evil possessed her. Hardly quite knowing why she felt this approaching obvious, object augured no good to their happiness. "'Look, Bertram!' she cried, seizing his arm in her fright.

"'There's somebody coming!' Bertram raised his eyes and looked. Then he shaded them with his hands. "'How strange!' he said simply in his candid way. "'It looks for all the world just like the man who was once your husband.' frieda rose in alarm oh what can we do she cried wringing her hands whatever can we do it's he it's robert surely he can't have come on purpose bertram exclaimed taken aback when he sees us he'll turn aside he must know of all people on earth he's the one least likely at such a time to be well he can't want to disturb the peace of another man's honeymoon but frieda better used to the savage ways of the world she had always lived in made answer shrinking and crouching he's hunted us down and he's come to fight you to fight me bertram exclaimed oh surely not that i was told

told by those who ought best to know, you English had got far beyond the stage of private war and murderous vendetta. For everything else, Frieda answered, cowering down in her terror of her husband's vengeance. Not for herself, indeed so much as for Bertram. For everything else we have, but not for a woman. there was no time just then however for further explanation of this strange anomaly monteth had singled them out from a great distance with his keen clear sight inherited from generations of highland ancestors and now strode angrily across the moor with great wrathful steps in his rival's direction frieda nestled close to bertram to protect her from the the man to whom her country's laws and the customs of her tribe would have handed her over blindfold.

Bertram soothed her with his hand, and awaited in silence with some dim sense of awe, the angry barbarian's arrival. He came up very quickly and stood full in front of them, glaring with fierce eyes at the discovered lovers. For a minute or two his rage would not allow him to speak, nor even to act. He could but stand and scowl from under his brows at Bertram. But after a long pause, his wrath found words. You infernal scoundrel! He burst forth.

So at last I've caught you! How dare you sit there and look me straight in the face! You infernal thief! How dare you! How dare you? Bertram rose and confronted him. His own face too flushed slightly with righteous indignation, but he answered for all that in the same calm and measured tones as ever. I am not a scoundrel, and I will not submit to be called so even by an angry. angry savage. I ask you in return, how dare you follow us? You must have known your

presence would be very unwelcome. I should have thought this was just the one moment in your life and the one place on earth where even you would have seen that to stop away was your imperative duty. Mere self-respect would dictate such conduct. This lady has given you clear proof indeed that your society and converse are highly distasteful to her. Robert Monteth glared across at him with the face of a tiger. You infamous creature! He cried, almost speechless with rage. Do you dare to defend my wife's adultery?

Bertram gazed at him with a strange look of mingled horror and astonishment. "'You poor wretch,' he answered, as calmly as before, but with evident contempt. "'How can you dare such a thing as you to apply these vile words to your moral superiors? Adultery it was indeed, and untruth to her own higher and purer nature, for this lady to spend one night of her life under your roof with you. What she has taken now in exchange is holy marriage, the only real and sacred marriage, the marriage of true souls, to which even the wiser of yourselves, the poets of your nation,

would not admit impediment. if you dare to apply such base language as this to my lady's actions you must answer for it to me her natural protector for i will not permit it at the words quick as lightning monteth pulled from his pocket a loaded revolver and pointed it full at his rival with a cry of terror frieda flung her herself between them, and tried to protect her lover with the shield of her own body. But Bertram gently unwound her arms, and held her off from him tenderly. "'No, no, darling,' he said slowly, sitting down with wonderful calm upon a big grey sarsen stone that abutted upon the pathway. "'I had forgotten again. I keep always forgetting what

kind of savages I have to deal with. If I chose, I could snatch that murderous weapon from his hand and shoot him dead with it in self-defence, for I'm stronger than he is. But if I did, what use? I could never take you home with me. And after all, what could we either of us do in the end in this bad, wild world of your fellow-countrymen. They would take me and hang me, and all would be up with you. For your sake, Frida, to shield you from the effects of their cruel taboos, there's but one course open. I must submit to this madman.

He may shoot me if he will. Stand free and let him. but with a passionate oath robert montief seized her arm and flung her madly from him she fell reeling on one side his eyes were bloodshot with the savage thirst for vengeance he raised the deadly weapon bertram ingledew still seated on the big round boulder opened his breast in silence to receive the bullet there was a moment's pause for that moment even monteth himself in his maniac mood felt dimly aware of that mysterious restraining power all the rest who knew him had so often felt in their dealings with the alien But it was only for a moment. His coarser nature was ill-adapted to recognise that ineffable air as of a superior being that others observed in him. He pulled the trigger and fired.

Frieda gave one loud shriek of despairing horror. Bertram's body fell back on the bare heath behind it. End of Chapter 11 Chapter 12 of the British Barbarians This Librevox recording is in the public domain Recording by Ruth Golding The British Barbarians by Grant Allen Chapter 12

Mad as he was with jealousy That lowest and most bestial of all the vile passions Man still inherits from the ape and tiger Robert Montith was yet quite sane enough to know in his own soul what deed he had wrought, and in what light even his country's barbaric laws would regard his action. So the moment he had reeked to the full his fiery vengeance on the man who had never wronged him, he bent over the body with strangely eager eyes, expecting to see upon it some evidence, of his guilt, some bloody mark of the hateful crime his own hand had committed.

At the same instant, Frieda, recovering from his blow that had sent her reeling, rushed frantically forward, flung herself with wild passion on her lover's corpse, and covered the warm lips with hot, despairing kisses. One marvellous fact, however, impressed them both with a vague sense of the unknown and the mysterious from the very first second. No spot nor trace of blood marred the body anywhere. And even as they looked, a strange perfume as of violets or of burning incense began by degrees to flood the moor around them. Then, slowly, while they watched, a faint blue flame seemed to issue from the wound in Bertram's right side, and rise, lambent, into the air above the murdered body. Frieda drew back and gazed at it, a weird thrill of mystery and unconscious hope, beguiling for one moment her profound pang of bereavement.

monteth too stood away a pace or two in doubt and surprise the deep consciousness of some strange and unearthly power overawing for a while even his vulgar and commonplace scotch bourgeois nature gradually as they gazed the pale blue flame rising higher and higher gathered force and volume and the perfumers of violets became distinct on the air like the savour of a purer life than this century what's of bit by bit the wan blue light flickering thicker and thicker shaped itself into the form and features of a man even the outward semblance of bertram shadowy but transfigured with an ineffable glory it hovered for a minute or two above the spot on the moor where the corpse had lain for now they were aware that as the flame-shape formed the body that lay dead upon the ground beneath dissolved by degrees and melted into it not a trace was left on the heath of robert monteth's crime not a dapple of blood not a clot of gore only a pale blue flame and a persistent image represented the body that was once bertram ingledews again even as they looked a still weirder feeling began to creep

over them. The figure, growing fainter, seemed to fade away piecemeal in the remote distance. But it was not in space that it faded. It appeared rather to become dim in some vaguer and far more mysterious fashion. Like the memories of childhood or the aching abysses of astronomical calculation. As it slowly dissolved, Frida stretched out her hands to it with a wild cry, like the cry of a mother for her firstborn. Oh, Bertram! she moaned.

Where are you going? Do you mean to leave me? Won't you save me from this man? Won't you take me home with you? dim and hollow as from the womb of time unborn a calm voice came back to her across the gulf of ages your husband willed it frieda and the customs of your nation you can come to me but i can never return to you in three days longer your probation would have been finished, but I forgot with what manner of savage I had still to deal. And now I must go back once more to the place whence I came to the 25th century. The voice died away in the dim recesses of the future.

The pale blue flame flickered forward and vanished. The shadowy shape melted through an endless vista of tomorrows. Only the perfume as of violets or of a higher life still hung heavy upon the air. And a patch of daintier purple burned bright on the moor like a prune pool of crimson blood where the body had fallen. Only that, and a fierce ache in Frieda's tortured heart. Only that, and a halo of invisible glory round the rich red lips, where his lips had touched them. End of Chapter 12. Chapter 13 of the British Barbarians. This Librevox recording is in the public domain.

Recording by Ruth Golding. The British Barbarians by Grant Allen. Chapter 13. Freda seated herself in her misery on the ice-worn boulder, where three minutes earlier Bertram had been sitting. Her face was buried in her bloodless hands. All the world grew blank to her. Monteth, for his part, sat down a little way off

with folded arms on another Sarsen stone, fronting her. The strange and unearthly scene they had just passed through impressed him profoundly. For the first few minutes a great, horror held him. But his dogged Scottish nature still brooded over his wrongs, in spite of the terrible sight he had so unexpectedly evoked. In a way he felt he had had his revenge, for had he not drawn upon his man, and fired at him and killed him. Still after the fever and torment of the last few days, a relief to find, after all, he was not, as this world would judge, a murderer.

Man and crime were alike mere airy phantoms. He could go back now to the inn, and explain with a glib tongue how Mr. Ingledew had been hurriedly called away to town on important business. There was no corpse on the moor, no blabbing blood to tell, the story of his attempted murder. Nobody anywhere he felt certain in his own stolid soul would miss the mysterious alien who came to them from beyond the distant abyss of centuries. With true Scotch caution indeed, even in the midst of his wrath, Robert Montice had never said a word to anyone at Brackenhurst of how his wife had left him. he was too proud a man if it came to that to acknowledge what seemed to him a personal disgrace till circumstances should absolutely force such acknowledgment upon him

he had glossed it over meanwhile with the servants and neighbours by saying that mrs monteth had gone away with the children for their accustomed holiday as always in august Frieda had actually chosen the day appointed for their seaside journey as the fittest moment for her departure with Bertram, so his story was received without doubt or inquiry. He had bottled up his wrath in his own silent soul. There was still room, therefore, to make all right again at home in the eyes of the world, if but Frida was. willing. So he sat there long, staring hard at his wife in speechless debate, and discussing

with himself whether or not to make temporary overtures of peace to her. In this matter, his pride itself fought hard with his pride. That is the wont of savages. Would it not be better? now Bertram Ingaldew had fairly disappeared forever from their sphere, to patch up a hollow truce, for a time at least, with Frieda, and let all things be to the outer eye exactly as they had always been. The bewildering and brain-staggering occurrences of the last half-hour indeed had struck deep and far into his hard-scotch nature. The knowledge that the man who had stolen his wife from him, as he phrased it to himself in his curious, belated medieval phraseology, was not a real, live man of flesh and blood at all, but an evanescent phantom of the 25th century made him all the more ready to patch up for the time being a nominal reconciliation. His nerves, for even he had nerves, were still trembling to the core with the mystic events of that wizard morning.

But clearer and clearer still it dawned upon him each moment that if things were ever to be set right at all, they must be set right then and there, before he returned to the inn, and before Frieda once more went back to their children. children. To be sure it was Frieda's place to ask forgiveness first and make the first advances, but Frida made no move. So after sitting there long, salving his masculine vanity with the flattering thought that after all his rival was no mere man at all but a spirit, an avatar, a thing of pure imagination, he raised his head at last. He raised his head at large. and looked inquiringly towards Frida. Well, he said slowly. Frida raised her head from her hands

and gazed across at him scornfully. I was thinking. Monteth began feeling his way with caution, but with a magnanimous air. That, perhaps, after all, for the children's sense, With a terrible look, his wife rose up and fronted him. Her face was red as fire. Her heart was burning. She spoke with fierce energy. Robert Monteth, she said firmly, not even deigning to treat him as one who had once been her husband.

For the children's sake, or for my own sake, or for any power on earth, Do you think, poor, empty soul, after I've spent three days of my life with him, I'd ever spend three hours again with you? If you do, then this is all. Murderer that you are, you mistake my nature. And turning on her heel, she moved slowly away towards the far edge of the moor with a queenly gesture. Monteth followed her up a step or two. She turned and waved him back.

He stood glued to the ground, that weird sense of the supernatural once more overcoming him. For some seconds he watched her without speaking a word. Then at last he broke out. "'What are you going to do, Frida?' he asked almost anxiously. Frida turned and glanced back at him with scornful eyes. Hermann was resolute. The revolver with which he had shot Bertram Ingledew laid close by her feet among the bracken on the heath

where Montice had flung it. She picked it up with one hand, and once more waved him backward. I'm going to follow him, she answered solemnly in a very cold voice, where you have sent him, but alone by myself, not here before you.

And she brushed him away as he tried to seize it, with regal dignity monteth abashed turned back without one word and made his way to the inn in the little village but frieda walked on by herself in the opposite direction across the open moor and through the purple heath towards black despair and the troutponds at broughton End of the British Barbarians by Grant Allen