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 whichseems 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.
