Herland
could--but that he despised them nonetheless.
And all those stern grave mothers did not seem to mind his despising
them, not in the least.
It was a long trial, and many interesting points were brought out as to
their views of our habits, and after a while Terry had his sentence. He
waited, grim and defiant. The sentence was: “You must go home!”
CHAPTER 12.
Expelled
We had all meant to go home again. Indeed we had _not_ meant--not by
any means--to stay as long as we had. But when it came to being turned
out, dismissed, sent away for bad conduct, we none of us really liked
it.
Terry said he did. He professed great scorn of the penalty and the
trial, as well as all the other characteristics of “this miserable
half-country.” But he knew, and we knew, that in any “whole” country we
should never have been as forgivingly treated as we had been here.
“If the people had come after us according to the directions we left,
there’d have been quite a different story!” said Terry. We found out
later why no reserve party had arrived. All our careful directions had
been destroyed in a fire. We might have all died there and no one at
home have ever known our whereabouts.
Terry was under guard now, all the time, known as unsafe, convicted of
what was to them an unpardonable sin.
He laughed at their chill horror. “Parcel of old maids!” he called them.
“They’re all old maids--children or not. They don’t know the first thing
about Sex.”
When Terry said _Sex_, sex with a very large _S_, he meant the male
sex, naturally; its special values, its profound conviction of being
“the life force,” its cheerful ignoring of the true life process, and
its interpretation of the other sex solely from its own point of view.
I had learned to see these things very differently since living with
Ellador; and as for Jeff, he was so thoroughly Herlandized that he
wasn’t fair to Terry, who fretted sharply in his new restraint.
Moadine, grave and strong, as sadly patient as a mother with a
degenerate child, kept steady watch on him, with enough other women
close at hand to prevent an outbreak. He had no weapons, and well knew
that all his strength was of small avail against those grim, quiet
women.
We were allowed to visit him freely, but he had only his room, and a
small high-walled garden to walk in, while the preparations for our
departure were under way.
Three of us were to go: Terry, because he must; I, because two were
safer for our flyer, and the long boat trip to the coast; Ellador,
because she would not let me go without her.
If Jeff had elected to return, Celis would have gone too--they were the
most absorbed of lovers; but Jeff had no desire that way.
“Why should I want to go back to all our noise and dirt, our vice and
crime, our disease and degeneracy?” he demanded of me privately. We
never spoke like that before the women. “I wouldn’t take Celis there for
anything on earth!” he protested. “She’d die! She’d die of horror and
shame to see our slums and hospitals. How can you risk it with Ellador?
You’d better break it to her gently before she really makes up her
mind.”
Jeff was right. I ought to have told her more fully than I did, of all
the things we had to be ashamed of. But it is very hard to bridge the
gulf of as deep a difference as existed between our life and theirs. I
tried to.
“Look here, my dear,” I said to her. “If you are really going to my
country with me, you’ve got to be prepared for a good many shocks. It’s
not as beautiful as this--the cities, I mean, the civilized parts--of
course the wild country is.”
“I shall enjoy it all,” she said, her eyes starry with hope. “I
understand it’s not like ours. I can see how monotonous our quiet life
must seem to you, how much more stirring yours must be. It must be
like the biological change you told me about when the second sex
was introduced--a far greater movement, constant change, with new
possibilities of growth.”
I had told her of the later biological theories of sex, and she
was deeply convinced of the superior advantages of having two, the
superiority of a world with men in it.
“We have done what we could alone; perhaps we have some things better
in a quiet way, but you have the whole world--all the people of the
different nations--all the long rich history behind you--all the
wonderful new knowledge. Oh, I just can’t wait to see it!”
What could I do? I told her in so many words that we had our unsolved
problems, that we had dishonesty and corruption, vice and crime, disease
and insanity, prisons and hospitals; and it made no more impression on
her than it would to tell a South Sea Islander about the temperature of
the Arctic Circle. She could intellectually see that it was bad to have
those things; but she could not _feel_ it.
We had quite easily come to accept the Herland life as normal, because
it was normal--none of us make any outcry over mere health and peace
and happy industry. And the abnormal, to which we are all so sadly well
acclimated, she had never seen.
The two things she cared most to hear about, and wanted most to see,
were these: the beautiful relation of marriage and the lovely women
who were mothers and nothing else; beyond these her keen, active mind
hungered eagerly for the world life.
“I’m almost as anxious to go as you are yourself,” she insisted, “and
you must be desperately homesick.”
I assured her that no one could be homesick in such a paradise as
theirs, but she would have none of it.
“Oh, yes--I know. It’s like those little tropical islands you’ve told me
about, shining like jewels in the big blue sea--I can’t wait to see the
sea! The little island may be as perfect as a garden, but you always
want to get back to your own big country, don’t you? Even if it is bad
in some ways?”
Ellador was more than willing. But the nearer it came to our really
going, and to my having to take her back to our “civilization,” after
the clean peace and beauty of theirs, the more I began to dread it, and
the more I tried to explain.
Of course I had been homesick at first, while we were prisoners, before
I had Ellador. And of course I had, at first, rather idealized my
country and its ways, in describing it. Also, I had always accepted
certain evils as integral parts of our civilization and never dwelt on
them at all. Even when I tried to tell her the worst, I never remembered
some things--which, when she came to see them, impressed her at once, as
they had never impressed me. Now, in my efforts at explanation, I began
to see both ways more keenly than I had before; to see the painful
defects of my own land, the marvelous gains of this.
In missing men we three visitors had naturally missed the larger part
of life, and had unconsciously assumed that they must miss it too. It
took me a long time to realize--Terry never did realize--how little it
meant to them. When we say _men, man, manly, manhood_, and all the
other masculine derivatives, we have in the background of our minds a
huge vague crowded picture of the world and all its activities. To grow
up and “be a man,” to “act like a man”--the meaning and connotation is
wide indeed. That vast background is full of marching columns of men,
of changing lines of men, of long processions of men; of men steering
their ships into new seas, exploring unknown mountains, breaking
horses, herding cattle, ploughing and sowing and reaping, toiling at
the forge and furnace, digging in the mine, building roads and bridges
and high cathedrals, managing great businesses, teaching in all the
colleges, preaching in all the churches; of men everywhere, doing
everything--“the world.”
And when we say _women_, we think _female_--the sex.
But to these women, in the unbroken sweep of this two-thousand-year-old
feminine civilization, the word _woman_ called up all that big
background, so far as they had gone in social development; and the word
_man_ meant to them only male--the sex.
Of course we could _tell_ them that in our world men did everything;
but that did not alter the background of their minds. That man, “the
male,” did all these things was to them a statement, making no more
change in the point of view than was made in ours when we first faced
the astounding fact--to us--that in Herland women were “the world.”
We had been living there more than a year. We had learned their limited
history, with its straight, smooth, upreaching lines, reaching higher
and going faster up to the smooth comfort of their present life. We
had learned a little of their psychology, a much wider field than the
history, but here we could not follow so readily. We were now well used
to seeing women not as females but as people; people of all sorts, doing
every kind of work.
This outbreak of Terry’s, and the strong reaction against it, gave us
a new light on their genuine femininity. This was given me with great
clearness by both Ellador and Somel. The feeling was the same--sick
revulsion and horror, such as would be felt at some climactic blasphemy.
They had no faintest approach to such a thing in their minds, knowing
nothing of the custom of marital indulgence among us. To them the one
high purpose of motherhood had been for so long the governing law of
life, and the contribution of the father, though known to them, so
distinctly another method to the same end, that they could not, with all
their effort, get the point of view of the male creature whose desires
quite ignore parentage and seek only for what we euphoniously term “the
joys of love.”
When I tried to tell Ellador that women too felt so, with us, she drew
away from me, and tried hard to grasp intellectually what she could in
no way sympathize with.
“You mean--that with you--love between man and woman expresses itself in
that way--without regard to motherhood? To parentage, I mean,” she added
carefully.
“Yes, surely. It is love we think of--the deep sweet love between two.
Of course we want children, and children come--but that is not what we
think about.”
“But--but--it seems so against nature!” she said. “None of the creatures
we know do that. Do other animals--in your country?”
“We are not animals!” I replied with some sharpness. “At least we
are something more--something higher. This is a far nobler and more
beautiful relation, as I have explained before. Your view seems to us
rather--shall I say, practical? Prosaic? Merely a means to an end! With
us--oh, my dear girl--cannot you see? Cannot you feel? It is the last,
sweetest, highest consummation of mutual love.”
She was impressed visibly. She trembled in my arms, as I held her close,
kissing her hungrily. But there rose in her eyes that look I knew so
well, that remote clear look as if she had gone far away even though
I held her beautiful body so close, and was now on some snowy mountain
regarding me from a distance.
“I feel it quite clearly,” she said to me. “It gives me a deep sympathy
with what you feel, no doubt more strongly still. But what I feel, even
what you feel, dearest, does not convince me that it is right. Until I
am sure of that, of course I cannot do as you wish.”
Ellador, at times like this, always reminded me of Epictetus. “I will
put you in prison!” said his master. “My body, you mean,” replied
Epictetus calmly. “I will cut your head off,” said his master. “Have I
said that my head could not be cut off?” A difficult person, Epictetus.
What is this miracle by which a woman, even in your arms, may withdraw
herself, utterly disappear till what you hold is as inaccessible as the
face of a cliff?
“Be patient with me, dear,” she urged sweetly. “I know it is hard for
you. And I begin to see--a little--how Terry was so driven to crime.”
“Oh, come, that’s a pretty hard word for it. After all, Alima was