Grant Allen

“ 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 Ninon here, but fresh cheeks like the peach-blossom where the sun has kissed it: no casual fruition of loveless, joyless harlots, but life-long 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 vigour. Its perfect freshness and perpetual fount of youth keep your age from withering. ”

“ Bertram answered with masculine confidence. “No, you needn't blush, Frida; you can't deceive me.... My darling, you love me, and you know I love you. Why should we two make any secret about our hearts any longer?” He laid his hand on her face again, making it tingle with joy. “Frida,” he said solemnly, “you don't love that man you call your husband.... You haven't loved him for years.... You never really loved him.” ”

“ 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, 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? ”

“ 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 Monteith had never said a word to any one at Brackenhurst of how his wife had left him. ”

“ And the oxygen of the hill-tops 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. Nascent and ever renascent, 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 for ever. 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. ”

“ 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 Hill-top Novels, it will be simply this: “Act as I think right, for the highest good of human kind, 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. ”

“ 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 civilised and cultivated man when he himself is boiling with indignation. He feels its superiority an affront on his barbarism. ”

“ Frida 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-course 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're all at home most sensitively anxious not to meddle, to interfere, or even to criticise. ”

“ 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, fetich-worship, religious rites, 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. ”

“ 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 Frida, “is not mere civilisation (though, of course, we value that too, in its meet degree, because without civilisation and co-operation no great thing is possible) , but rationality and tenderness. We think reason the first good—to recognise 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 fetiches or phantoms ”

“ We have tired of their stuffy atmosphere, their dazzling jets, their weary ways, their gaudy dresses; we shun the sunken cheeks, the lack-lustre 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 stage-carpenter! Your studied dalliance with your venal muses is little to our taste. Your halls are too stifling with carbonic acid gas; for us, we breathe oxygen. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 small distinction in society, else surely he would not have come up and spoken with such engaging frankness and ease of manner. ”

“ 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 Christy 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Brackenhurst prided itself, indeed, on being a most well-bred and distinguished neighbourhood; people of note grew as thick there as heather or whortleberries. 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 a soul loomed in sight in either direction. Whence, then, could the man in the grey suit have emerged? ”

“ I shall call you Frida if I choose; it's your name, and I like you. Why let this funny taboo of one's own real name stand in the way of reasonable friendship? In many savage countries a woman's never allowed to call her husband by his name, or even to know it, or, for the matter of that, to see him in the daylight. In your England, the arrangement's exactly reversed: no man's allowed to call a woman by her real name unless she's tabooed for life to him—what you Europeans call married to him. ”

“ 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 rights. 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. ”

“ 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 Frida Monteith, and saw at the first glance she was a woman to be desired, a soul high-throned, very calm and beautiful. ”

“ 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 waxlike. They take her out in solemn guise and show her the sun, the sky, the land, the water, the trees, the flowers, and tell her all their names, as if to a newborn creature. ”

“ 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; they're 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 spinney. It's a universal right of which no country and no law can possibly deprive us.” ”

“ The door opened at once, and Frida entered.
She was pale as a ghost, and she stepped light with a terrified tread. Bertram could see at a glance she was profoundly agitated. For a moment he could hardly imagine the reason why: then he remembered all at once the strict harem rules by which married women in England are hemmed in and circumvented. To visit an unmarried man alone by night is contrary to tribal usage. He rose, and advanced towards his visitor with outstretched arms. “Why, Frida,” he cried,—“Mrs. Monteith—no, Frida—what's the matter? ”

“ The essence of them all lies in the erroneous idea that if certain contingencies occur, such as breaking an image or deserting a faith, some terrible evil will follow to one man or to the world, which evil, as a matter of fact, there's no reason at all to dread in any way. Sometimes, as in ancient Rome, Egypt, Central Africa, and England, the whole of life gets enveloped at last in a perfect mist and labyrinth of taboos, a cobweb of conventions. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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 ”

“ So South Sea Islanders think, if they eat some particular luscious fruit tabooed for the chiefs, they'll be instantly struck dead by the mere power of the taboo in it; and English people think, if they go out in the country for a picnic on a tabooed day, or use certain harmless tabooed names and words, or inquire into the historical validity of certain incredible ancient documents, accounted sacred, or even dare to think certain things that no reasonable man can prevent himself from thinking, they'll be burned for ever in eternal fire for it. ”