Herland
He said, rather lamely, that women were not built for heavy work.
She looked out across the fields to where some women were working,
building a new bit of wall out of large stones; looked back at the
nearest town with its woman-built houses; down at the smooth, hard road
we were walking on; and then at the little basket he had taken from her.
“I don’t understand,” she said quite sweetly. “Are the women in your
country so weak that they could not carry such a thing as that?”
“It is a convention,” he said. “We assume that motherhood is a
sufficient burden--that men should carry all the others.”
“What a beautiful feeling!” she said, her blue eyes shining.
“Does it work?” asked Alima, in her keen, swift way. “Do all men in all
countries carry everything? Or is it only in yours?”
“Don’t be so literal,” Terry begged lazily. “Why aren’t you willing to
be worshipped and waited on? We like to do it.”
“You don’t like to have us do it to you,” she answered.
“That’s different,” he said, annoyed; and when she said, “Why is it?” he
quite sulked, referring her to me, saying, “Van’s the philosopher.”
Ellador and I talked it all out together, so that we had an easier
experience of it when the real miracle time came. Also, between us, we
made things clearer to Jeff and Celis. But Terry would not listen to
reason.
He was madly in love with Alima. He wanted to take her by storm, and
nearly lost her forever.
You see, if a man loves a girl who is in the first place young and
inexperienced; who in the second place is educated with a background
of caveman tradition, a middle-ground of poetry and romance, and a
foreground of unspoken hope and interest all centering upon the one
Event; and who has, furthermore, absolutely no other hope or interest
worthy of the name--why, it is a comparatively easy matter to sweep
her off her feet with a dashing attack. Terry was a past master in this
process. He tried it here, and Alima was so affronted, so repelled, that
it was weeks before he got near enough to try again.
The more coldly she denied him, the hotter his determination; he was
not used to real refusal. The approach of flattery she dismissed with
laughter, gifts and such “attentions” we could not bring to bear, pathos
and complaint of cruelty stirred only a reasoning inquiry. It took Terry
a long time.
I doubt if she ever accepted her strange lover as fully as did Celis
and Ellador theirs. He had hurt and offended her too often; there were
reservations.
But I think Alima retained some faint vestige of long-descended feeling
which made Terry more possible to her than to others; and that she had
made up her mind to the experiment and hated to renounce it.
However it came about, we all three at length achieved full
understanding, and solemnly faced what was to them a step of measureless
importance, a grave question as well as a great happiness; to us a
strange, new joy.
Of marriage as a ceremony they knew nothing. Jeff was for bringing them
to our country for the religious and the civil ceremony, but neither
Celis nor the others would consent.
“We can’t expect them to want to go with us--yet,” said Terry sagely.
“Wait a bit, boys. We’ve got to take ’em on their own terms--if at all.”
This, in rueful reminiscence of his repeated failures.
“But our time’s coming,” he added cheerfully. “These women have never
been mastered, you see--” This, as one who had made a discovery.
“You’d better not try to do any mastering if you value your chances,”
I told him seriously; but he only laughed, and said, “Every man to his
trade!”
We couldn’t do anything with him. He had to take his own medicine.
If the lack of tradition of courtship left us much at sea in our
wooing, we found ourselves still more bewildered by lack of tradition of
matrimony.
And here again, I have to draw on later experience, and as deep an
acquaintance with their culture as I could achieve, to explain the gulfs
of difference between us.
Two thousand years of one continuous culture with no men. Back of that,
only traditions of the harem. They had no exact analogue for our word
_home_, any more than they had for our Roman-based _family_.
They loved one another with a practically universal affection, rising
to exquisite and unbroken friendships, and broadening to a devotion to
their country and people for which our word _patriotism_ is no
definition at all.
Patriotism, red hot, is compatible with the existence of a neglect of
national interests, a dishonesty, a cold indifference to the
suffering of millions. Patriotism is largely pride, and very largely
combativeness. Patriotism generally has a chip on its shoulder.
This country had no other country to measure itself by--save the few
poor savages far below, with whom they had no contact.
They loved their country because it was their nursery, playground,
and workshop--theirs and their children’s. They were proud of it as a
workshop, proud of their record of ever-increasing efficiency; they had
made a pleasant garden of it, a very practical little heaven; but most
of all they valued it--and here it is hard for us to understand them--as
a cultural environment for their children.
That, of course, is the keynote of the whole distinction--their
children.
From those first breathlessly guarded, half-adored race mothers, all
up the ascending line, they had this dominant thought of building up a
great race through the children.
All the surrendering devotion our women have put into their private
families, these women put into their country and race. All the loyalty
and service men expect of wives, they gave, not singly to men, but
collectively to one another.
And the mother instinct, with us so painfully intense, so thwarted by
conditions, so concentrated in personal devotion to a few, so bitterly
hurt by death, disease, or barrenness, and even by the mere growth
of the children, leaving the mother alone in her empty nest--all this
feeling with them flowed out in a strong, wide current, unbroken through
the generations, deepening and widening through the years, including
every child in all the land.
With their united power and wisdom, they had studied and overcome the
“diseases of childhood”--their children had none.
They had faced the problems of education and so solved them that their
children grew up as naturally as young trees; learning through every
sense; taught continuously but unconsciously--never knowing they were
being educated.
In fact, they did not use the word as we do. Their idea of education was
the special training they took, when half grown up, under experts. Then
the eager young minds fairly flung themselves on their chosen subjects,
and acquired with an ease, a breadth, a grasp, at which I never ceased
to wonder.
But the babies and little children never felt the pressure of that
“forcible feeding” of the mind that we call “education.” Of this, more
later.
CHAPTER 9.
Our Relations and Theirs
What I’m trying to show here is that with these women the whole
relationship of life counted in a glad, eager growing-up to join the
ranks of workers in the line best loved; a deep, tender reverence for
one’s own mother--too deep for them to speak of freely--and beyond that,
the whole, free, wide range of sisterhood, the splendid service of the
country, and friendships.
To these women we came, filled with the ideas, convictions, traditions,
of our culture, and undertook to rouse in them the emotions which--to
us--seemed proper.
However much, or little, of true sex-feeling there was between us, it
phrased itself in their minds in terms of friendship, the one purely
personal love they knew, and of ultimate parentage. Visibly we were not
mothers, nor children, nor compatriots; so, if they loved us, we must be
friends.
That we should pair off together in our courting days was natural to
them; that we three should remain much together, as they did themselves,
was also natural. We had as yet no work, so we hung about them in their
forest tasks; that was natural, too.
But when we began to talk about each couple having “homes” of our own,
they could not understand it.
“Our work takes us all around the country,” explained Celis. “We cannot
live in one place all the time.”
“We are together now,” urged Alima, looking proudly at Terry’s stalwart
nearness. (This was one of the times when they were “on,” though
presently “off” again.)
“It’s not the same thing at all,” he insisted. “A man wants a home of
his own, with his wife and family in it.”
“Staying in it? All the time?” asked Ellador. “Not imprisoned, surely!”
“Of course not! Living there--naturally,” he answered.
“What does she do there--all the time?” Alima demanded. “What is her
work?”
Then Terry patiently explained again that our women did not work--with
reservations.
“But what do they do--if they have no work?” she persisted.
“They take care of the home--and the children.”
“At the same time?” asked Ellador.
“Why yes. The children play about, and the mother has charge of it all.
There are servants, of course.”
It seemed so obvious, so natural to Terry, that he always grew
impatient; but the girls were honestly anxious to understand.
“How many children do your women have?” Alima had her notebook out now,
and a rather firm set of lip. Terry began to dodge.
“There is no set number, my dear,” he explained. “Some have more, some
have less.”
“Some have none at all,” I put in mischievously.
They pounced on this admission and soon wrung from us the general fact
that those women who had the most children had the least servants, and
those who had the most servants had the least children.
“There!” triumphed Alima. “One or two or no children, and three or four
servants. Now what do those women _do?_”
We explained as best we might. We talked of “social duties,”
disingenuously banking on their not interpreting the words as we did; we
talked of hospitality, entertainment, and various “interests.” All the
time we knew that to these large-minded women whose whole mental outlook
was so collective, the limitations of a wholly personal life were
inconceivable.
“We cannot really understand it,” Ellador concluded. “We are only half
a people. We have our woman-ways and they have their man-ways and their
both-ways. We have worked out a system of living which is, of course,
limited. They must have a broader, richer, better one. I should like to
see it.”
“You shall, dearest,” I whispered.
“There’s nothing to smoke,” complained Terry. He was in the midst of a
prolonged quarrel with Alima, and needed a sedative. “There’s nothing to
drink. These blessed women have no pleasant vices. I wish we could get
out of here!”
This wish was vain. We were always under a certain degree of
watchfulness. When Terry burst forth to tramp the streets at night he
always found a “Colonel” here or there; and when, on an occasion of
fierce though temporary despair, he had plunged to the cliff edge with
some vague view to escape, he found several of them close by. We were
free--but there was a string to it.
“They’ve no unpleasant ones, either,” Jeff reminded him.
“Wish they had!” Terry persisted. “They’ve neither the vices of men, nor
the virtues of women--they’re neuters!”
“You know better than that. Don’t talk nonsense,” said I, severely.
I was thinking of Ellador’s eyes when they gave me a certain look, a
look she did not at all realize.
Jeff was equally incensed. “I don’t know what ‘virtues of women’ you
miss. Seems to me they have all of them.”
“They’ve no modesty,” snapped Terry. “No patience, no submissiveness,
none of that natural yielding which is woman’s greatest charm.”
I shook my head pityingly. “Go and apologize and make friends again,