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?" Adifficult 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 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.
