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.

This is one thing which we did not understand--had made no allowance

for. When in our pre-marital discussions one of those dear girls had

said: “We understand it thus and thus,” or “We hold such and such to be

true,” we men, in our own deep-seated convictions of the power of love,

and our easy views about beliefs and principles, fondly imagined that

we could convince them otherwise. What we imagined, before marriage, did

not matter any more than what an average innocent young girl imagines.

We found the facts to be different.

It was not that they did not love us; they did, deeply and warmly. But

there are you again--what they meant by “love” and what we meant by

“love” were so different.

Perhaps it seems rather cold-blooded to say “we” and “they,” as if we

were not separate couples, with our separate joys and sorrows, but our

positions as aliens drove us together constantly. The whole strange

experience had made our friendship more close and intimate than it would

ever have become in a free and easy lifetime among our own people.

Also, as men, with our masculine tradition of far more than two thousand

years, we were a unit, small but firm, against this far larger unit of

feminine tradition.

I think I can make clear the points of difference without a too painful

explicitness. The more external disagreement was in the matter of “the

home,” and the housekeeping duties and pleasures we, by instinct and

long education, supposed to be inherently appropriate to women.

I will give two illustrations, one away up, and the other away down, to

show how completely disappointed we were in this regard.

For the lower one, try to imagine a male ant, coming from some state of

existence where ants live in pairs, endeavoring to set up housekeeping

with a female ant from a highly developed anthill. This female ant might

regard him with intense personal affection, but her ideas of parentage

and economic management would be on a very different scale from his.

Now, of course, if she was a stray female in a country of pairing ants,

he might have had his way with her; but if he was a stray male in an

anthill--!

For the higher one, try to imagine a devoted and impassioned man trying

to set up housekeeping with a lady angel, a real wings-and-harp-and-halo

angel, accustomed to fulfilling divine missions all over interstellar

space. This angel might love the man with an affection quite beyond his

power of return or even of appreciation, but her ideas of service and

duty would be on a very different scale from his. Of course, if she was

a stray angel in a country of men, he might have had his way with her;

but if he was a stray man among angels--!

Terry, at his worst, in a black fury for which, as a man, I must have

some sympathy, preferred the ant simile. More of Terry and his special

troubles later. It was hard on Terry.

Jeff--well, Jeff always had a streak that was too good for this world!

He’s the kind that would have made a saintly priest in parentagearlier

times. He accepted the angel theory, swallowed it whole, tried to force

it on us--with varying effect. He so worshipped Celis, and not only

Celis, but what she represented; he had become so deeply convinced of

the almost supernatural advantages of this country and people, that he

took his medicine like a--I cannot say “like a man,” but more as if he

wasn’t one.

Don’t misunderstand me for a moment. Dear old Jeff was no milksop or

molly-coddle either. He was a strong, brave, efficient man, and an

excellent fighter when fighting was necessary. But there was always this

angel streak in him. It was rather a wonder, Terry being so different,

that he really loved Jeff as he did; but it happens so sometimes, in

spite of the difference--perhaps because of it.

As for me, I stood between. I was no such gay Lothario as Terry, and no

such Galahad as Jeff. But for all my limitations I think I had the habit

of using my brains in regard to behavior rather more frequently than

either of them. I had to use brain-power now, I can tell you.

The big point at issue between us and our wives was, as may easily be

imagined, in the very nature of the relation.

“Wives! Don’t talk to me about wives!” stormed Terry. “They don’t know

what the word means.”

Which is exactly the fact--they didn’t. How could they? Back in their

prehistoric records of polygamy and slavery there were no ideals of

wifehood as we know it, and since then no possibility of forming such.

“The only thing they can think of about a man is _Fatherhood!_” said

Terry in high scorn. “_Fatherhood!_ As if a man was always wanting to

be a _father!_”

This also was correct. They had their long, wide, deep, rich experience

of Motherhood, and their only perception of the value of a male creature

as such was for Fatherhood.

Aside from that, of course, was the whole range of personal love, love

which as Jeff earnestly phrased it “passeth the love of women!” It did,

too. I can give no idea--either now, after long and happy experience of

it, or as it seemed then, in the first measureless wonder--of the beauty

and power of the love they gave us.

Even Alima--who had a more stormy temperament than either of the others,

and who, heaven knows, had far more provocation--even Alima was patience

and tenderness and wisdom personified to the man she loved, until

he--but I haven’t got to that yet.

These, as Terry put it, “alleged or so-called wives” of ours, went right

on with their profession as foresters. We, having no special learnings,

had long since qualified as assistants. We had to do something, if only

to pass the time, and it had to be work--we couldn’t be playing forever.

This kept us out of doors with those dear girls, and more or less

together--too much together sometimes.

These people had, it now became clear to us, the highest, keenest, most

delicate sense of personal privacy, but not the faintest idea of that

_solitude à deux_ we are so fond of. They had, every one of them, the

“two rooms and a bath” theory realized. From earliest childhood each

had a separate bedroom with toilet conveniences, and one of the marks

of coming of age was the addition of an outer room in which to receive

friends.

Long since we had been given our own two rooms apiece, and as being of a

different sex and race, these were in a separate house. It seemed to be

recognized that we should breathe easier if able to free our minds in

real seclusion.

For food we either went to any convenient eating-house, ordered a meal

brought in, or took it with us to the woods, always and equally good.

All this we had become used to and enjoyed--in our courting days.

After marriage there arose in us a somewhat unexpected urge of feeling

that called for a separate house; but this feeling found no response in

the hearts of those fair ladies.

“We _are_ alone, dear,” Ellador explained to me with gentle patience.

“We are alone in these great forests; we may go and eat in any little

summer-house--just we two, or have a separate table anywhere--or even

have a separate meal in our own rooms. How could we be aloner?”

This was all very true. We had our pleasant mutual solitude about our

work, and our pleasant evening talks in their apartments or ours; we

had, as it were, all the pleasures of courtship carried right on; but we

had no sense of--perhaps it may be called possession.

“Might as well not be married at all,” growled Terry. “They only got up

that ceremony to please us--please Jeff, mostly. They’ve no real idea of

being married.”

I tried my best to get Ellador’s point of view, and naturally I tried to

give her mine. Of course, what we, as men, wanted to make them see was

that there were other, and as we proudly said “higher,” uses in this

relation than what Terry called “mere parentage.” In the highest terms I

knew I tried to explain this to Ellador.

“Anything higher than for mutual love to hope to give life, as we did?”

she said. “How is it higher?”

“It develops love,” I explained. “All the power of beautiful permanent

mated love comes through this higher development.”

“Are you sure?” she asked gently. “How do you know that it was so

developed? There are some birds who love each other so that they mope

and pine if separated, and never pair again if one dies, but they never

mate except in the mating season. Among your people do you find high and

lasting affection appearing in proportion to this indulgence?”

It is a very awkward thing, sometimes, to have a logical mind.

Of course I knew about those monogamous birds and beasts too, that mate

for life and show every sign of mutual affection, without ever having

stretched the sex relationship beyond its original range. But what of

it?

“Those are lower forms of life!” I protested. “They have no capacity

for faithful and affectionate, and apparently happy--but oh, my dear! my

dear!--what can they know of such a love as draws us together? Why, to

touch you--to be near you--to come closer and closer--to lose myself in

you--surely you feel it too, do you not?”

I came nearer. I seized her hands.

Her eyes were on mine, tender radiant, but steady and strong. There was

something so powerful, so large and changeless, in those eyes that

I could not sweep her off her feet by my own emotion as I had

unconsciously assumed would be the case.

It made me feel as, one might imagine, a man might feel who loved a

goddess--not a Venus, though! She did not resent my attitude, did not

repel it, did not in the least fear it, evidently. There was not a shade

of that timid withdrawal or pretty resistance which are so--provocative.

“You see, dearest,” she said, “you have to be patient with us. We are

not like the women of your country. We are Mothers, and we are People,

but we have not specialized in this line.”

“We” and “we” and “we”--it was so hard to get her to be personal. And,

as I thought that, I suddenly remembered how we were always criticizing

_our_ women for _being_ so personal.

Then I did my earnest best to picture to her the sweet intense joy of

married lovers, and the result in higher stimulus to all creative work.

“Do you mean,” she asked quite calmly, as if I was not holding her cool

firm hands in my hot and rather quivering ones, “that with you, when

people marry, they go right on doing this in season and out of season,

with no thought of children at all?”

“They do,” I said, with some bitterness. “They are not mere parents.

They are men and women, and they love each other.”

“How long?” asked Ellador, rather unexpectedly.

“How long?” I repeated, a little dashed. “Why as long as they live.”

“There is something very beautiful in the idea,” she admitted, still as

if she were discussing life on Mars. “This climactic expression, which,

in all the other life-forms, has but the one purpose, has with you

become specialized to higher, purer, nobler uses. It has--I judge from

what you tell me--the most ennobling effect on character. People marry,

not only for parentage, but for this exquisite interchange--and, as

a result, you have a world full of continuous lovers, ardent, happy,

mutually devoted, always living on that high tide of supreme emotion

which we had supposed to belong only to one season and one use. And you

say it has other results, stimulating all high creative work. That must

mean floods, oceans of such work, blossoming from this intense happiness

of every married pair! It is a beautiful idea!”

She was silent, thinking.

So was I.

She slipped one hand free, and was stroking my hair with it in a gentle

motherly way. I bowed my hot head on her shoulder and felt a dim sense

of peace, a restfulness which was very pleasant.

“You must take me there someday, darling,” she was saying. “It is

not only that I love you so much, I want to see your country--your

people--your mother--” she paused reverently. “Oh, how I shall love your

mother!”

I had not been in love many times--my experience did not compare

with Terry’s. But such as I had was so different from this that I was

perplexed, and full of mixed feelings: partly a growing sense of common

ground between us, a pleasant rested calm feeling, which I had imagined

could only be attained in one way; and partly a bewildered resentment

because what I found was not what I had looked for.

It was their confounded psychology! Here they were with this profound

highly developed system of education so bred into them that even if they

were not teachers by profession they all had a general proficiency in

it--it was second nature to them.

And no child, stormily demanding a cookie “between meals,” was ever more

subtly diverted into an interest in house-building than was I when

I found an apparently imperative demand had disappeared without my

noticing it.

And all the time those tender mother eyes, those keen scientific eyes,

noting every condition and circumstance, and learning how to “take time

by the forelock” and avoid discussion before occasion arose.

I was amazed at the results. I found that much, very much, of what I had

honestly supposed to be a physiological necessity was a psychological

necessity--or so believed. I found, after my ideas of what was essential

had changed, that my feelings changed also. And more than all, I found

this--a factor of enormous weight--these women were not provocative.

That made an immense difference.

The thing that Terry had so complained of when we first came--that they

weren’t “feminine,” they lacked “charm,” now became a great comfort.

Their vigorous beauty was an aesthetic pleasure, not an irritant. Their

dress and ornaments had not a touch of the “come-and-find-me” element.

Even with my own Ellador, my wife, who had for a time unveiled a woman’s

heart and faced the strange new hope and joy of dual parentage, she

afterward withdrew again into the same good comrade she had been at

first. They were women, _plus_, and so much plus that when they did not

choose to let the womanness appear, you could not find it anywhere.

I don’t say it was easy for me; it wasn’t. But when I made appeal to

her sympathies I came up against another immovable wall. She was sorry,

honestly sorry, for my distresses, and made all manner of thoughtful

suggestions, often quite useful, as well as the wise foresight I have

mentioned above, which often saved all difficulty before it arose; but

her sympathy did not alter her convictions.

“If I thought it was really right and necessary, I could perhaps bring

myself to it, for your sake, dear; but I do not want to--not at all.

You would not have a mere submission, would you? That is not the kind of

high romantic love you spoke of, surely? It is a pity, of course, that

you should have to adjust your highly specialized faculties to our

unspecialized ones.”

Confound it! I hadn’t married the nation, and I told her so. But she

only smiled at her own limitations and explained that she had to “think

in we’s.”

Confound it again! Here I’d have all my energies focused on one wish,

and before I knew it she’d have them dissipated in one direction or

another, some subject of discussion that began just at the point I was

talking about and ended miles away.

It must not be imagined that I was just repelled, ignored, left to

cherish a grievance. Not at all. My happiness was in the hands of a

larger, sweeter womanhood than I had ever imagined. Before our marriage

my own ardor had perhaps blinded me to much of this. I was madly in love

with not so much what was there as with what I supposed to be there. Now

I found an endlessly beautiful undiscovered country to explore, and in

it the sweetest wisdom and understanding. It was as if I had come to

some new place and people, with a desire to eat at all hours, and no

other interests in particular; and as if my hosts, instead of merely

saying, “You shall not eat,” had presently aroused in me a lively desire

for music, for pictures, for games, for exercise, for playing in the

water, for running some ingenious machine; and, in the multitude of my

satisfactions, I forgot the one point which was not satisfied, and got

along very well until mealtime.

One of the cleverest and most ingenious of these tricks was only clear

to me many years after, when we were so wholly at one on this subject

that I could laugh at my own predicament then. It was this: You see,

with us, women are kept as different as possible and as feminine as

possible. We men have our own world, with only men in it; we get tired

of our ultra-maleness and turn gladly to the ultra-femaleness. Also,

in keeping our women as feminine as possible, we see to it that when

we turn to them we find the thing we want always in evidence. Well, the

atmosphere of this place was anything but seductive. The very numbers

of these human women, always in human relation, made them anything

but alluring. When, in spite of this, my hereditary instincts and

race-traditions made me long for the feminine response in Ellador,

instead of withdrawing so that I should want her more, she deliberately

gave me a little too much of her society.--always de-feminized, as it

were. It was awfully funny, really.

Here was I, with an Ideal in mind, for which I hotly longed, and here

was she, deliberately obtruding in the foreground of my consciousness a

Fact--a fact which I coolly enjoyed, but which actually interfered with

what I wanted. I see now clearly enough why a certain kind of man, like

Sir Almroth Wright, resents the professional development of women. It

gets in the way of the sex ideal; it temporarily covers and excludes

femininity.

Of course, in this case, I was so fond of Ellador my friend, of Ellador

my professional companion, that I necessarily enjoyed her society on any

terms. Only--when I had had her with me in her de-feminine capacity for

a sixteen-hour day, I could go to my own room and sleep without dreaming

about her.

The witch! If ever anybody worked to woo and win and hold a human soul,

she did, great superwoman that she was. I couldn’t then half comprehend

the skill of it, the wonder. But this I soon began to find: that under

all our cultivated attitude of mind toward women, there is an older,

deeper, more “natural” feeling, the restful reverence which looks up to

the Mother sex.

So we grew together in friendship and happiness, Ellador and I, and so

did Jeff and Celis.

When it comes to Terry’s part of it, and Alima’s, I’m sorry--and

I’m ashamed. Of course I blame her somewhat. She wasn’t as fine

a psychologist as Ellador, and what’s more, I think she had a

far-descended atavistic trace of more marked femaleness, never apparent

till Terry called it out. But when all is said, it doesn’t excuse him. I

hadn’t realized to the full Terry’s character--I couldn’t, being a man.

The position was the same as with us, of course, only with these

distinctions. Alima, a shade more alluring, and several shades less able

as a practical psychologist; Terry, a hundredfold more demanding--and

proportionately less reasonable.

Things grew strained very soon between them. I fancy at first, when

they were together, in her great hope of parentage and his keen joy of

conquest--that Terry was inconsiderate. In fact, I know it, from things

he said.

“You needn’t talk to me,” he snapped at Jeff one day, just before

our weddings. “There never was a woman yet that did not enjoy being

_mastered_. All your pretty talk doesn’t amount to a hill o’beans--I

_know_.” And Terry would hum:

I’ve taken my fun where I found it.

I’ve rogued and I’ve ranged in my time,

and

The things that I learned from the yellow and black,

They ‘ave helped me a ‘eap with the white.

Jeff turned sharply and left him at the time. I was a bit disquieted

myself.

Poor old Terry! The things he’d learned didn’t help him a heap in

Herland. His idea was to take--he thought that was the way. He thought,

he honestly believed, that women like it. Not the women of Herland! Not

Alima!

I can see her now--one day in the very first week of their marriage,

setting forth to her day’s work with long determined strides and

hard-set mouth, and sticking close to Ellador. She didn’t wish to be

alone with Terry--you could see that.

But the more she kept away from him, the more he wanted her--naturally.

He made a tremendous row about their separate establishments, tried to

keep her in his rooms, tried to stay in hers. But there she drew the

line sharply.

He came away one night, and stamped up and down the moonlit road,

swearing under his breath. I was taking a walk that night too, but I

wasn’t in his state of mind. To hear him rage you’d not have believed

that he loved Alima at all--you’d have thought that she was some quarry

he was pursuing, something to catch and conquer.

I think that, owing to all those differences I spoke of, they soon lost

the common ground they had at first, and were unable to meet sanely

and dispassionately. I fancy too--this is pure conjecture--that he

had succeeded in driving Alima beyond her best judgment, her real

conscience, and that after that her own sense of shame, the reaction of

the thing, made her bitter perhaps.

They quarreled, really quarreled, and after making it up once or twice,

they seemed to come to a real break--she would not be alone with him

at all. And perhaps she was a bit nervous, I don’t know, but she got

Moadine to come and stay next door to her. Also, she had a sturdy

assistant detailed to accompany her in her work.

Terry had his own ideas, as I’ve tried to show. I daresay he thought he

had a right to do as he did. Perhaps he even convinced himself that

it would be better for her. Anyhow, he hid himself in her bedroom one

night...

The women of Herland have no fear of men. Why should they have? They

are not timid in any sense. They are not weak; and they all have strong

trained athletic bodies. Othello could not have extinguished Alima with

a pillow, as if she were a mouse.

Terry put in practice his pet conviction that a woman loves to be

mastered, and by sheer brute force, in all the pride and passion of his

intense masculinity, he tried to master this woman.

It did not work. I got a pretty clear account of it later from Ellador,

but what we heard at the time was the noise of a tremendous struggle,

and Alima calling to Moadine. Moadine was close by and came at once; one

or two more strong grave women followed.

Terry dashed about like a madman; he would cheerfully have killed

them--he told me that, himself--but he couldn’t. When he swung a chair

over his head one sprang in the air and caught it, two threw themselves

bodily upon him and forced him to the floor; it was only the work of a

few moments to have him tied hand and foot, and then, in sheer pity for

his futile rage, to anesthetize him.

Alima was in a cold fury. She wanted him killed--actually.

There was a trial before the local Over Mother, and this woman, who did

not enjoy being mastered, stated her case.

In a court in our country he would have been held quite “within his

rights,” of course. But this was not our country; it was theirs. They

seemed to measure the enormity of the offense by its effect upon a

possible fatherhood, and he scorned even to reply to this way of putting

it.

He did let himself go once, and explained in definite terms that they

were incapable of understanding a man’s needs, a man’s desires, a man’s

point of view. He called them neuters, epicenes, bloodless, sexless

creatures. He said they could of course kill him--as so many insects

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!”