Herland
his wife, you know,” I urged, feeling at the moment a sudden burst of
sympathy for poor Terry. For a man of his temperament--and habits--it
must have been an unbearable situation.
But Ellador, for all her wide intellectual grasp, and the broad sympathy
in which their religion trained them, could not make allowance for
such--to her--sacrilegious brutality.
It was the more difficult to explain to her, because we three, in our
constant talks and lectures about the rest of the world, had naturally
avoided the seamy side; not so much from a desire to deceive, but from
wishing to put the best foot foremost for our civilization, in the face
of the beauty and comfort of theirs. Also, we really thought some things
were right, or at least unavoidable, which we could readily see would be
repugnant to them, and therefore did not discuss. Again there was much
of our world’s life which we, being used to it, had not noticed as
anything worth describing. And still further, there was about these
women a colossal innocence upon which many of the things we did say had
made no impression whatever.
I am thus explicit about it because it shows how unexpectedly strong
was the impression made upon Ellador when she at last entered our
civilization.
She urged me to be patient, and I was patient. You see, I loved her so
much that even the restrictions she so firmly established left me much
happiness. We were lovers, and there is surely delight enough in that.
Do not imagine that these young women utterly refused “the Great New
Hope,” as they called it, that of dual parentage. For that they had
agreed to marry us, though the marrying part of it was a concession
to our prejudices rather than theirs. To them the process was the holy
thing--and they meant to keep it holy.
But so far only Celis, her blue eyes swimming in happy tears, her
heart lifted with that tide of race-motherhood which was their supreme
passion, could with ineffable joy and pride announce that she was to
be a mother. “The New Motherhood” they called it, and the whole country
knew. There was no pleasure, no service, no honor in all the land that
Celis might not have had. Almost like the breathless reverence with
which, two thousand years ago, that dwindling band of women had watched
the miracle of virgin birth, was the deep awe and warm expectancy with
which they greeted this new miracle of union.
All mothers in that land were holy. To them, for long ages, the approach
to motherhood has been by the most intense and exquisite love and
longing, by the Supreme Desire, the overmastering demand for a child.
Every thought they held in connection with the processes of maternity
was open to the day, simple yet sacred. Every woman of them placed
motherhood not only higher than other duties, but so far higher that
there were no other duties, one might almost say. All their wide mutual
love, all the subtle interplay of mutual friendship and service,
the urge of progressive thought and invention, the deepest religious
emotion, every feeling and every act was related to this great central
Power, to the River of Life pouring through them, which made them the
bearers of the very Spirit of God.
Of all this I learned more and more--from their books, from talk,
especially from Ellador. She was at first, for a brief moment, envious
of her friend--a thought she put away from her at once and forever.
“It is better,” she said to me. “It is much better that it has not come
to me yet--to us, that is. For if I am to go with you to your country,
we may have ‘adventures by sea and land,’ as you say [and as in truth we
did], and it might not be at all safe for a baby. So we won’t try again,
dear, till it is safe--will we?”
This was a hard saying for a very loving husband.
“Unless,” she went on, “if one is coming, you will leave me behind. You
can come back, you know--and I shall have the child.”
Then that deep ancient chill of male jealousy of even his own progeny
touched my heart.
“I’d rather have you, Ellador, than all the children in the world. I’d
rather have you with me--on your own terms--than not to have you.”
This was a very stupid saying. Of course I would! For if she wasn’t
there I should want all of her and have none of her. But if she went
along as a sort of sublimated sister--only much closer and warmer than
that, really--why I should have all of her but that one thing. And I
was beginning to find that Ellador’s friendship, Ellador’s comradeship,
Ellador’s sisterly affection, Ellador’s perfectly sincere love--none
the less deep that she held it back on a definite line of reserve--were
enough to live on very happily.
I find it quite beyond me to describe what this woman was to me. We talk
fine things about women, but in our hearts we know that they are very
limited beings--most of them. We honor them for their functional powers,
even while we dishonor them by our use of it; we honor them for their
carefully enforced virtue, even while we show by our own conduct how
little we think of that virtue; we value them, sincerely, for the
perverted maternal activities which make our wives the most comfortable
of servants, bound to us for life with the wages wholly at our own
decision, their whole business, outside of the temporary duties of such
motherhood as they may achieve, to meet our needs in every way. Oh, we
value them, all right, “in their place,” which place is the home, where
they perform that mixture of duties so ably described by Mrs. Josephine
Dodge Daskam Bacon, in which the services of “a mistress” are carefully
specified. She is a very clear writer, Mrs. J. D. D. Bacon, and
understands her subject--from her own point of view. But--that
combination of industries, while convenient, and in a way economical,
does not arouse the kind of emotion commanded by the women of Herland.
These were women one had to love “up,” very high up, instead of down.
They were not pets. They were not servants. They were not timid,
inexperienced, weak.
After I got over the jar to my pride (which Jeff, I truly think, never
felt--he was a born worshipper, and which Terry never got over--he
was quite clear in his ideas of “the position of women”), I found that
loving “up” was a very good sensation after all. It gave me a queer
feeling, way down deep, as of the stirring of some ancient dim
prehistoric consciousness, a feeling that they were right somehow--that
this was the way to feel. It was like--coming home to mother. I don’t
mean the underflannels-and-doughnuts mother, the fussy person that waits
on you and spoils you and doesn’t really know you. I mean the feeling
that a very little child would have, who had been lost--for ever so
long. It was a sense of getting home; of being clean and rested;
of safety and yet freedom; of love that was always there, warm like
sunshine in May, not hot like a stove or a featherbed--a love that
didn’t irritate and didn’t smother.
I looked at Ellador as if I hadn’t seen her before. “If you won’t go,”
I said, “I’ll get Terry to the coast and come back alone. You can let me
down a rope. And if you will go--why you blessed wonder-woman--I would
rather live with you all my life--like this--than to have any other
woman I ever saw, or any number of them, to do as I like with. Will you
come?”
She was keen for coming. So the plans went on. She’d have liked to wait
for that Marvel of Celis’s, but Terry had no such desire. He was crazy
to be out of it all. It made him sick, he said, _sick;_ this
everlasting mother-mother-mothering. I don’t think Terry had what the
phrenologists call “the lump of philoprogenitiveness” at all well
developed.
“Morbid one-sided cripples,” he called them, even when from his window
he could see their splendid vigor and beauty; even while Moadine, as
patient and friendly as if she had never helped Alima to hold and bind
him, sat there in the room, the picture of wisdom and serene strength.
“Sexless, epicene, undeveloped neuters!” he went on bitterly. He sounded
like Sir Almwroth Wright.
Well--it was hard. He was madly in love with Alima, really; more so than
he had ever been before, and their tempestuous courtship, quarrels, and
reconciliations had fanned the flame. And then when he sought by that
supreme conquest which seems so natural a thing to that type of man, to
force her to love him as her master--to have the sturdy athletic furious
woman rise up and master him--she and her friends--it was no wonder he
raged.
Come to think of it, I do not recall a similar case in all history or
fiction. Women have killed themselves rather than submit to outrage;
they have killed the outrager; they have escaped; or they have
submitted--sometimes seeming to get on very well with the victor
afterward. There was that adventure of “false Sextus,” for instance,
who “found Lucrese combing the fleece, under the midnight lamp.” He
threatened, as I remember, that if she did not submit he would slay her,
slay a slave and place him beside her and say he found him there. A poor
device, it always seemed to me. If Mr. Lucretius had asked him how he
came to be in his wife’s bedroom overlooking her morals, what could he
have said? But the point is Lucrese submitted, and Alima didn’t.
“She kicked me,” confided the embittered prisoner--he had to talk to
someone. “I was doubled up with the pain, of course, and she jumped on
me and yelled for this old harpy [Moadine couldn’t hear him] and they
had me trussed up in no time. I believe Alima could have done it alone,”
he added with reluctant admiration. “She’s as strong as a horse. And
of course a man’s helpless when you hit him like that. No woman with a
shade of decency--”
I had to grin at that, and even Terry did, sourly. He wasn’t given to
reasoning, but it did strike him that an assault like his rather waived
considerations of decency.
“I’d give a year of my life to have her alone again,” he said slowly,
his hands clenched till the knuckles were white.
But he never did. She left our end of the country entirely, went up into
the fir-forest on the highest slopes, and stayed there. Before we left
he quite desperately longed to see her, but she would not come and he
could not go. They watched him like lynxes. (Do lynxes watch any better
than mousing cats, I wonder!)
Well--we had to get the flyer in order, and be sure there was enough
fuel left, though Terry said we could glide all right, down to that
lake, once we got started. We’d have gone gladly in a week’s time, of
course, but there was a great to-do all over the country about
Ellador’s leaving them. She had interviews with some of the leading
ethicists--wise women with still eyes, and with the best of the
teachers. There was a stir, a thrill, a deep excitement everywhere.
Our teaching about the rest of the world has given them all a sense
of isolation, of remoteness, of being a little outlying sample of a
country, overlooked and forgotten among the family of nations. We had
called it “the family of nations,” and they liked the phrase immensely.
They were deeply aroused on the subject of evolution; indeed, the whole
field of natural science drew them irresistibly. Any number of them
would have risked everything to go to the strange unknown lands and
study; but we could take only one, and it had to be Ellador, naturally.
We planned greatly about coming back, about establishing a connecting
route by water; about penetrating those vast forests and civilizing--or
exterminating--the dangerous savages. That is, we men talked of that
last--not with the women. They had a definite aversion to killing
things.
But meanwhile there was high council being held among the wisest of them
all. The students and thinkers who had been gathering facts from us all