Herland
and the open beauty of their groves and hills. Second, it gave these
numerous little centers of wisdom where the least wise could go to the
most wise and be helped.
“It is beautiful!” I cried enthusiastically. “It is the most practical,
comforting, progressive religion I ever heard of. You _do_ love one
another--you _do_ bear one another’s burdens--you _do_ realize that a
little child is a type of the kingdom of heaven. You are more Christian
than any people I ever saw. But--how about death? And the life
everlasting? What does your religion teach about eternity?”
“Nothing,” said Ellador. “What is eternity?”
What indeed? I tried, for the first time in my life, to get a real hold
on the idea.
“It is--never stopping.”
“Never stopping?” She looked puzzled.
“Yes, life, going on forever.”
“Oh--we see that, of course. Life does go on forever, all about us.”
“But eternal life goes on _without dying_.”
“The same person?”
“Yes, the same person, unending, immortal.” I was pleased to think
that I had something to teach from our religion, which theirs had never
promulgated.
“Here?” asked Ellador. “Never to die--here?” I could see her practical
mind heaping up the people, and hurriedly reassured her.
“Oh no, indeed, not here--hereafter. We must die here, of course, but
then we ‘enter into eternal life.’ The soul lives forever.”
“How do you know?” she inquired.
“I won’t attempt to prove it to you,” I hastily continued. “Let us
assume it to be so. How does this idea strike you?”
Again she smiled at me, that adorable, dimpling, tender, mischievous,
motherly smile of hers. “Shall I be quite, quite honest?”
“You couldn’t be anything else,” I said, half gladly and half a little
sorry. The transparent honesty of these women was a never-ending
astonishment to me.
“It seems to me a singularly foolish idea,” she said calmly. “And if
true, most disagreeable.”
Now I had always accepted the doctrine of personal immortality as
a thing established. The efforts of inquiring spiritualists, always
seeking to woo their beloved ghosts back again, never seemed to me
necessary. I don’t say I had ever seriously and courageously discussed
the subject with myself even; I had simply assumed it to be a fact.
And here was the girl I loved, this creature whose character constantly
revealed new heights and ranges far beyond my own, this superwoman of a
superland, saying she thought immortality foolish! She meant it, too.
“What do you _want_ it for?” she asked.
“How can you _not_ want it!” I protested. “Do you want to go out like a
candle? Don’t you want to go on and on--growing and--and--being happy,
forever?”
“Why, no,” she said. “I don’t in the least. I want my child--and my
child’s child--to go on--and they will. Why should _I_ want to?”
“But it means Heaven!” I insisted. “Peace and Beauty and Comfort
and Love--with God.” I had never been so eloquent on the subject of
religion. She could be horrified at Damnation, and question the justice
of Salvation, but Immortality--that was surely a noble faith.
“Why, Van,” she said, holding out her hands to me. “Why Van--darling!
How splendid of you to feel it so keenly. That’s what we all want, of
course--Peace and Beauty, and Comfort and Love--with God! And Progress
too, remember; Growth, always and always. That is what our religion
teaches us to want and to work for, and we do!”
“But that is _here_,” I said, “only for this life on earth.”
“Well? And do not you in your country, with your beautiful religion of
love and service have it here, too--for this life--on earth?”
None of us were willing to tell the women of Herland about the evils of
our own beloved land. It was all very well for us to assume them to
be necessary and essential, and to criticize--strictly among
ourselves--their all-too-perfect civilization, but when it came to
telling them about the failures and wastes of our own, we never could
bring ourselves to do it.
Moreover, we sought to avoid too much discussion, and to press the
subject of our approaching marriages.
Jeff was the determined one on this score.
“Of course they haven’t any marriage ceremony or service, but we can
make it a sort of Quaker wedding, and have it in the temple--it is the
least we can do for them.”
It was. There was so little, after all, that we could do for them. Here
we were, penniless guests and strangers, with no chance even to use
our strength and courage--nothing to defend them from or protect them
against.
“We can at least give them our names,” Jeff insisted.
They were very sweet about it, quite willing to do whatever we asked, to
please us. As to the names, Alima, frank soul that she was, asked what
good it would do.
Terry, always irritating her, said it was a sign of possession. “You are
going to be Mrs. Nicholson,” he said. “Mrs. T. O. Nicholson. That shows
everyone that you are my wife.”
“What is a ‘wife’ exactly?” she demanded, a dangerous gleam in her eye.
“A wife is the woman who belongs to a man,” he began.
But Jeff took it up eagerly: “And a husband is the man who belongs to
a woman. It is because we are monogamous, you know. And marriage is the
ceremony, civil and religious, that joins the two together--‘until death
do us part,’” he finished, looking at Celis with unutterable devotion.
“What makes us all feel foolish,” I told the girls, “is that here we
have nothing to give you--except, of course, our names.”
“Do your women have no names before they are married?” Celis suddenly
demanded.
“Why, yes,” Jeff explained. “They have their maiden names--their
father’s names, that is.”
“And what becomes of them?” asked Alima.
“They change them for their husbands’, my dear,” Terry answered her.
“Change them? Do the husbands then take the wives’ ‘maiden names’?”
“Oh, no,” he laughed. “The man keeps his own and gives it to her, too.”
“Then she just loses hers and takes a new one--how unpleasant! We won’t
do that!” Alima said decidedly.
Terry was good-humored about it. “I don’t care what you do or don’t do
so long as we have that wedding pretty soon,” he said, reaching a strong
brown hand after Alima’s, quite as brown and nearly as strong.
“As to giving us things--of course we can see that you’d like to, but
we are glad you can’t,” Celis continued. “You see, we love you just for
yourselves--we wouldn’t want you to--to pay anything. Isn’t it enough to
know that you are loved personally--and just as men?”
Enough or not, that was the way we were married. We had a great triple
wedding in the biggest temple of all, and it looked as if most of the
nation was present. It was very solemn and very beautiful. Someone had
written a new song for the occasion, nobly beautiful, about the New Hope
for their people--the New Tie with other lands--Brotherhood as well as
Sisterhood, and, with evident awe, Fatherhood.
Terry was always restive under their talk of fatherhood. “Anybody’d
think we were High Priests of--of Philoprogenitiveness!” he protested.
“These women think of _nothing_ but children, seems to me! We’ll teach
’em!”
He was so certain of what he was going to teach, and Alima so uncertain
in her moods of reception, that Jeff and I feared the worst. We tried to
caution him--much good that did. The big handsome fellow drew himself up
to his full height, lifted that great chest of his, and laughed.
“There are three separate marriages,” he said. “I won’t interfere with
yours--nor you with mine.”
So the great day came, and the countless crowds of women, and we three
bridegrooms without any supporting “best men,” or any other men to back
us up, felt strangely small as we came forward.
Somel and Zava and Moadine were on hand; we were thankful to have them,
too--they seemed almost like relatives.
There was a splendid procession, wreathing dances, the new anthem I
spoke of, and the whole great place pulsed with feeling--the deep awe,
the sweet hope, the wondering expectation of a new miracle.
“There has been nothing like this in the country since our Motherhood
began!” Somel said softly to me, while we watched the symbolic marches.
“You see, it is the dawn of a new era. You don’t know how much you mean
to us. It is not only Fatherhood--that marvelous dual parentage to
which we are strangers--the miracle of union in life-giving--but it is
Brotherhood. You are the rest of the world. You join us to our kind--to
all the strange lands and peoples we have never seen. We hope to know
them--to love and help them--and to learn of them. Ah! You cannot know!”
Thousands of voices rose in the soaring climax of that great Hymn of The
Coming Life. By the great Altar of Motherhood, with its crown of fruit
and flowers, stood a new one, crowned as well. Before the Great Over
Mother of the Land and her ring of High Temple Counsellors, before that
vast multitude of calm-faced mothers and holy-eyed maidens, came forward
our own three chosen ones, and we, three men alone in all that land,
joined hands with them and made our marriage vows.
CHAPTER 11.
Our Difficulties
We say, “Marriage is a lottery”; also “Marriages are made in
Heaven”--but this is not so widely accepted as the other.
We have a well-founded theory that it is best to marry “in one’s class,”
and certain well-grounded suspicions of international marriages, which
seem to persist in the interests of social progress, rather than in
those of the contracting parties.
But no combination of alien races, of color, of caste, or creed, was
ever so basically difficult to establish as that between us, three
modern American men, and these three women of Herland.
It is all very well to say that we should have been frank about it
beforehand. We had been frank. We had discussed--at least Ellador and
I had--the conditions of The Great Adventure, and thought the path
was clear before us. But there are some things one takes for granted,
supposes are mutually understood, and to which both parties may
repeatedly refer without ever meaning the same thing.
The differences in the education of the average man and woman are
great enough, but the trouble they make is not mostly for the man; he
generally carries out his own views of the case. The woman may have
imagined the conditions of married life to be different; but what she
imagined, was ignorant of, or might have preferred, did not seriously
matter.
I can see clearly and speak calmly about this now, writing after a lapse
of years, years full of growth and education, but at the time it was
rather hard sledding for all of us--especially for Terry. Poor Terry!
You see, in any other imaginable marriage among the peoples of the
earth, whether the woman were black, red, yellow, brown, or white;
whether she were ignorant or educated, submissive or rebellious, she
would have behind her the marriage tradition of our general history.
This tradition relates the woman to the man. He goes on with his
business, and she adapts herself to him and to it. Even in citizenship,
by some strange hocus-pocus, that fact of birth and geography was waved
aside, and the woman automatically acquired the nationality of her
husband.
Well--here were we, three aliens in this land of women. It was small in
area, and the external differences were not so great as to astound us.
We did not yet appreciate the differences between the race-mind of this
people and ours.
In the first place, they were a “pure stock” of two thousand
uninterrupted years. Where we have some long connected lines of
thought and feeling, together with a wide range of differences, often
irreconcilable, these people were smoothly and firmly agreed on most of
the basic principles of their life; and not only agreed in principle,
but accustomed for these sixty-odd generations to act on those
principles.