“Can’t go in there?  Oh, nonsense,” Bertram answered, with a merry laugh, vaulting the gate like a practised athlete.  “Mrs. Monteith 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 mayn’t 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 Longden, 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 bogeys.  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 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 fetich, you and I, Mrs. Monteith.  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.