Chapter V - Page 2

Frida'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 organised. Frida 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 mourning 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 fetich," 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. "They're queer things, these death-taboos. Sometimes people cover their heads with filth or ashes; and sometimes they bedizen 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 fetiches 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 mourning 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 bread-winner. I wonder it doesn't occur to them that this is absolutely wrong, and that they oughtn't to prefer the meaningless fetich to their clear moral duty."

"They're afraid of what people would say of them," Frida ventured to interpose. "You see, we're all so frightened