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

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

this time, collating and relating them, and making inferences, laid the

result of their labors before the council.

Little had we thought that our careful efforts at concealment had been

so easily seen through, with never a word to show us that they saw. They

had followed up words of ours on the science of optics, asked innocent

questions about glasses and the like, and were aware of the defective

eyesight so common among us.

With the lightest touch, different women asking different questions at

different times, and putting all our answers together like a picture

puzzle, they had figured out a sort of skeleton chart as to the

prevalence of disease among us. Even more subtly with no show of horror

or condemnation, they had gathered something--far from the truth, but

something pretty clear--about poverty, vice, and crime. They even had

a goodly number of our dangers all itemized, from asking us about

insurance and innocent things like that.

They were well posted as to the different races, beginning with their

poison-arrow natives down below and widening out to the broad racial

divisions we had told them about. Never a shocked expression of the face

or exclamation of revolt had warned us; they had been extracting the

evidence without our knowing it all this time, and now were studying

with the most devout earnestness the matter they had prepared.

The result was rather distressing to us. They first explained the matter

fully to Ellador, as she was the one who purposed visiting the Rest

of the World. To Celis they said nothing. She must not be in any way

distressed, while the whole nation waited on her Great Work.

Finally Jeff and I were called in. Somel and Zava were there, and

Ellador, with many others that we knew.

They had a great globe, quite fairly mapped out from the small section

maps in that compendium of ours. They had the different peoples of the

earth roughly outlined, and their status in civilization indicated.

They had charts and figures and estimates, based on the facts in that

traitorous little book and what they had learned from us.

Somel explained: “We find that in all your historic period, so much

longer than ours, that with all the interplay of services, the exchange

of inventions and discoveries, and the wonderful progress we so admire,

that in this widespread Other World of yours, there is still much

disease, often contagious.”

We admitted this at once.

“Also there is still, in varying degree, ignorance, with prejudice and

unbridled emotion.”

This too was admitted.

“We find also that in spite of the advance of democracy and the increase

of wealth, that there is still unrest and sometimes combat.”

Yes, yes, we admitted it all. We were used to these things and saw no

reason for so much seriousness.

“All things considered,” they said, and they did not say a hundredth

part of the things they were considering, “we are unwilling to expose

our country to free communication with the rest of the world--as yet. If

Ellador comes back, and we approve her report, it may be done later--but

not yet.

“So we have this to ask of you gentlemen [they knew that word was held

a title of honor with us], that you promise not in any way to betray the

location of this country until permission--after Ellador’s return.”

Jeff was perfectly satisfied. He thought they were quite right. He

always did. I never saw an alien become naturalized more quickly than

that man in Herland.

I studied it awhile, thinking of the time they’d have if some of our

contagions got loose there, and concluded they were right. So I agreed.

Terry was the obstacle. “Indeed I won’t!” he protested. “The first

thing I’ll do is to get an expedition fixed up to force an entrance into

Ma-land.”

“Then,” they said quite calmly, “he must remain an absolute prisoner,

always.”

“Anesthesia would be kinder,” urged Moadine.

“And safer,” added Zava.

“He will promise, I think,” said Ellador.

And he did. With which agreement we at last left Herland.