“Don’t be afraid, my dear boy — I remember your outline of the various religions — all about how Christianity arose and spread; how it held together in one church for a long time, and then divided, and kept on dividing — naturally. And I remember about the religious wars, and persecutions, that you used to have in earlier ages. We had a good deal of trouble with religion in our first centuries too, and for a long time people kept appearing with some sort of new one they had had ‘revealed’ to them, just like yours. But we saw that all that was needed was a higher level of mentality and a clear understanding of the real Laws — so we worked toward that. And, as you know, we have been quite at peace as to our religion for some centuries. It’s just part of us.”
That was the clearest way of putting it she had yet thought of. The Herland religion was like the manners of a true aristocrat, a thing inborn and inbred. It was the way they lived. They had so clear and quick a connection between conviction and action that it was well nigh impossible for them to know a thing and not do it. I suppose that was why, when we had told them about the noble teachings of Christianity, they had been so charmed, taking it for granted that our behavior was equal to our belief.
The Reverend Alexander Murdock was more than pleased to talk with Ellador — any man would be, of course. He was immensely curious about her too, but even to impertinent questions she presented an amiable but absolute impermeability.
“From what country do you come, Mrs. Jennings?” he asked her one day, in my hearing. He did not know I was within earshot, however.
Ellador was never annoyed by questions, nor angry, nor confused. Where most people seem to think that there is no alternative but to answer correctly or, to lie, she recognized an endless variety of things to say or not say. Sometimes she would look pleasantly at the inquirer, with those deep kind eyes of hers, and ask: “Why do you wish to know?” Not sarcastically, not offensively at all, but as if she really wanted to know why they wanted to know. It was generally difficult for them to explain the cause of their curiosity, but if they did; if they said it was just interest, a kindly human interest in her, she would thank them for the interest, and ask if they felt it about every one. If they said they did, she would say, still with her quiet gentleness: “And is it customary, when one feels interested in a stranger, to ask them questions? I mean is it a — what you call a compliment? If so, I thank you heartily for the compliment.”
If they drove her — some people never will take a hint — she would remain always quite courteous and gentle, even praise them for their perseverance, but never say one word she did not choose to. And she did not choose to give to anyone news of her beloved country until such time as that country decided it should be done.
The missionary was not difficult to handle.
“Did you not say that you were to preach the gospel to all nations — or all people — or something like that?” she asked him. “Do you find some nations easier to preach to than others? Or is it the same gospel to all?”
He assured her that it was the same, but that he was naturally interested in all his hearers, and that it was often important to know something of their antecedents. This she agreed might be an advantage, and left it at that, asking him if he would let her see his Bible. Once he was embarked on that subject, she had only to listen, and to steer the conversation, or rather the monologue.
I told her I had overheard this bit of conversation, begging her pardon for listening, but she said she would greatly enjoy having me with her while he talked. I told her I doubted if he would talk as freely if there were three of us, and she suggested in that case that if I was interested I was quite welcome to listen as far as she was concerned. Of course I wasn’t going to be an eavesdropper, even on a missionary trying to convert my wife, but I heard a good bit of their talk as I strolled about, and sat with them sometimes.
He let her read his precious flexible Oxford Bible at times, giving her marked passages, and she read about a hundred times as much as he thought she could in a given time. It interested her immensely, and she questioned him eagerly about it:
“You call this The Word of God’?”
“Yes,” he replied solemnly. “It is His Revealed Word.”
“And every thing it says is true?”
“It is Truth itself, Divine Truth,” he answered.
“You do not mean that God wrote it?”
“Oh, no. He revealed it to His servants. It is an Inspired Book.”
“It was written by many people, was it not?”
“Yes — many people, but the same Word.”
“And at different times?”
“Oh yes — the revelation was given at long intervals — the Old Testament to the Jews, the New Testament to us all.”
Ellador turned the pages reverently. She had a great respect for religion, and for any sincere person.
“How old is the oldest part?” she asked him.
He told her as best he could, but he was not versed in the latest scholarship and had a genuine horror of “the higher criticism.” But I supplied a little information on the side, when we were alone, telling her of the patchwork group of ancient legends which made up the first part; of the very human councils of men who had finally decided which of the ancient writings were inspired and which were not; of how the Book of Job, the oldest of all, had only scraped in by one vote, and then, with rather a malicious relish, of that most colossal joke of all history — how the Song of Songs — that amorous, not to say salacious ancient love-lyric, had been embraced with the others and interpreted as a mystical lofty outburst of devotion with that “black but comely” light-o’-love figuring as The Church.
Ellador was quite shocked.
“But Van! — he ought to know that. You ought to tell him. Is it generally known?”
“It is known to scholars, not to the public as a whole.”
“But they still have it bound in with the others — and think it is holy — when it isn’t.”
“Yes,” I grinned, “the joke is still going on.”
“What have the scholars done about it?” she asked.
“Oh, they have worked out their proof, shown up the thing — and let it go at that.”
“Wasn’t there any demand from the people who knew to have it taken out of the Bible?”
“There is one edition of the Bible now printed in all the separate books — a whole shelf full of little ones, instead of one big one.”
“I should think that would be much better,” she said, “but the other one is still printed — and sold?”
“Printed and sold and given away by hundreds of thousands — with The Joke going right on.”
She was puzzled. It was not so much the real outside things we did which she found it hard to understand, but the different way our minds worked. In Herland, if a thing like that had been discovered, the first effort of all their wisest students would have been to establish the facts. When they were sure about it, they would then have taken the rather shameful old thing out of its proud position among the “sacred” books at once. They would have publicly acknowledged their mistake, rectified it, and gone on.
“You’ll have to be very patient with me, Van dearest. It is going to take me a long time to get hold of your psychology. But I’ll do my best.”
Her best was something amazing. And she would have come to her final conclusions far earlier but for certain firm preconceptions that we were somehow better, nobler, than we were.
The Reverend Murdock kept at her pretty steadily. He started in at the beginning, giving her the full circumstantial account of The Temptation, The Fall, and The Curse.
She listened quietly, with no hint in her calm face of what she might be thinking. But when he came to the punishment of the serpent: “Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life,” she asked a question.
“Will you tell me please — how did the serpent ‘go’ before?”
Mr. Murdock looked at her. He was rea
ding in a deep sorrowful voice, his mind full of the solemn purport of the Great Tragedy.
“What was his method of locomotion before he was cursed?” asked Ellador.
He laid down the book in some annoyance. “It is believed that the serpent walked erect, that he stood like a man, that he was Satan himself,” he replied.
“But it says: ‘Now the serpent was more subtle than any of the beasts of the field,’ doesn’t it? And the picture you showed me is of a snake, in the tree.”
“The picture is, as it were, allegorical,” he replied. “It is not reverent to question the divine account like this.”
She did not mind this note of censure, but asked further: “As a matter of fact, do snakes eat dust? Or is that allegorical too? How do you know which is allegorical and which is fact? Who decides?”
They had a rather stormy discussion on that point; at least the missionary was stormy. He was unable to reconcile Ellador’s gentle courtesy with her singular lack of reverence for mere statements.
But our theological discussions were summarily ended, and Ellador reduced to clinging to her berth, by a severe storm. It was not a phenomenal hurricane by any means; but a steady lashing gale which drove us far out of our course, and so damaged the vessel that we could do little but drive before the wind.
“There’s a steamer!” said Terry on the third day of heavy weather. And as we watched the drift of smoke on the horizon we found it was nearing us. And none too soon! By the time they were within hailing distance our small vessel ran up signals of distress, for we were leaking heavily, and we were thankful to be taken off, even though the steamer, a Swedish one, was bound for Europe instead of America.
They gave us better accommodations than we had had on the other, and eagerly took on board our big motor-boat and biplane — too eagerly, I thought.
Ellador was greatly interested in the larger ship, the big blond men, and in their talk. I prepared her as well as I could. They had good maps of Europe, and I filled in her outlines of history as far as I was able, and told her of the war. Her horror at this was natural enough.
“We have always had war,” Terry explained. “Ever since the world began — at least as far as history goes, we have had war. It is human nature.”
“Human?” asked Ellador.
“Yes,” he said, “human. Bad as it is, it is evidently human nature to do it. Nations advance, the race is improved by fighting. It is the law of nature.”
Since our departure from Herland, Terry had rebounded like a rubber ball from all its influences. Even his love for Alima he was evidently striving to forget, with some success. As for the rest, he had never studied the country and its history as I had, nor accepted it like Jeff; and now he was treating it all as if it really was, what he had often called it to me, a bad dream. He would keep his word in regard to telling nothing about it; that virtue was his at any rate. But in his glad reaction, his delighted return, “a man in a world of men,” he was now giving information to Ellador in his superior way, as if she was a totally ignorant stranger. And this war seemed almost to delight him.
“Yes,” he repeated, “you will have to accept life as it is. To make war is human activity.”
“Are some of the soldiers women?” she inquired.
“Women! Of course not! They are men; strong, brave men. Once in a while some abnormal woman becomes a soldier, I believe, and in Dahomey — that’s in Africa — one of the black tribes have women soldiers. But speaking generally it is men — of course.”
“Then why do you call it ‘human’ nature?” she persisted. “If it was human wouldn’t they both do it?”
So he tried to explain that it was a human necessity, but it was done by the men because they could do it — and the women couldn’t.
“The women are just as indispensable — in their way. They give us the children — you know — men cannot do that.”
To hear Terry talk you would think he had never left home.
Ellador listened to him with her grave gentle smile. She always seemed to understand not only what one said, but all the back-ground of sentiment and habit behind.
“Do you call bearing children ‘human nature’?” she asked him. “It’s woman nature,” he answered. “It’s her work.”
“Then why do you not call fighting ‘man nature’ — instead of human?”
Terry’s conclusion of an argument with Ellador was the simple one of going somewhere else. So off he went, to enjoy himself in the society of those sturdy Scandinavians, and we two sat together discussing war.
2. WAR
For a long time my wife from Wonderland, as I love to call her, used to the utmost the high self-restraint taught by her religion, her education, the whole habit of her life. She knew that I should be grieved by her distresses, that I expected the new experiences would be painful to her and was watching to give what aid and comfort I could; and further she credited me with a racial sensitiveness and pride far beyond the facts.
Here again was one of the differences between her exquisitely organized people and ours. With them the majority of their interests in life were communal; their love and pride and ambition was almost wholly for the group, even motherhood itself was viewed as social service, and so fulfilled. They were all of them intimately acquainted with their whole history, that was part of their beautiful and easy educational system; with their whole country, and with all its industries.
The children of Herland were taken to all parts of the country, shown all its arts and crafts, taught to honor its achievements and to appreciate its needs and difficulties. They grew up with a deep and vital social consciousness which not one in a thousand of us could approach.
This kind of thing does not show; we could not see it externally, any more than one could see a good housewife’s intimate acquaintance with and pride in the last detail of her menage. Further, as our comments on their country had been almost wholly complimentary (they had not heard Terry’s!), we had not hurt this national pride; or if we had they had never let us see it.
Now here was Ellador, daring traveler, leaving her world for mine, and finding herself, not as we three had been, exiled into a wisely ordered, peaceful and beautiful place, with the mothering care of that group of enlightened women; but as one alone in a world of which her first glimpse was of hideous war. As one who had never in her life seen worse evil than misunderstanding, or accident, and not much of these; one to whom universal comfort and beauty was the race habit of a thousand years, the sight of Europe in its present condition was far more of a shock than even I had supposed.
She thought that I felt as she did. I did feel badly, and ashamed, but not a thousandth part as she would have felt the exposure of some fault in Herland; not nearly as badly as she supposed.
I was constantly learning from her to notice things among us which I had never seen before, and one of the most conspicuous of my new impressions was the realization of how slightly socialized we are. We are quite indifferent to public evils, for the most part, unless they touch us personally; which is as though the housewife was quite indifferent to having grease on the chairs unless she happened to spoil her own dress with it. Even our “reformers” seem more like such a housewife who should show great excitement over the greasy chairs, but none over the dusty floor, the grimy windows, the empty coal-bin, the bad butter, or the lack of soap. Special evils rouse us, some of us, but as for a clean, sanitary, effortless housekeeping — we have not come to want it — most of us.
But Ellador, lovely, considerate soul that she was, had not only the incessant shock of these new impressions to meet and bear, but was doing her noble best to spare my feelings by not showing hers. She could not bear to blame my sex, to blame my country, or at least my civilization, my world; she did not wish to cast reproach on me.
I was ashamed, to a considerable degree. If a man has been living in the pleasant atmosphere of perfect housekeeping, such as I have mentioned, and is then precipitated suddenly into foul slovenline
ss, with noise, confusion and ill-will, he feels it more than if he had remained in such surroundings from the first.
It was the ill-will that counted most. Here again comes the psychic difference between the women of Herland and us. People who grow up amid slang, profanity, obscenity, harsh contradiction and quarrelling, do not particularly note or mind it. But one reared in an atmosphere of the most subtle understanding, gracious courtesy, and a loving use of language as an art, is very sharply impressed if someone says: “Hold yer jaw, yer son of a — !,” or even by a glowering roomful of silent haters.
That’s what was heavy on Ellador all the time, — the atmosphere, the social atmosphere of suspicion, distrust, hatred, of ruthless, self-aggrandizement and harsh scorn.
There was a German officer on this ship. He tried to talk to Ellador at first, merely because she was a woman and beautiful. She tried to talk to him, merely because he was a human being, a member of a great nation.
But I, watching, saw how soon the clear light of her mind brought out the salient characteristics of his, and of how, in spite of all her exalted philosophy, she turned shuddering away from him.
We were overhauled by an English vessel before reaching our destination in Sweden, and all three of us were glad to be transferred because we could so reach home sooner. At least that was what we thought. The German officer was not glad, I might add.
Ellador hailed the change with joy. She knew more about England than about the Scandinavian countries, and could speak the language. I think she thought it would be — easier there.
We were unable to get away as soon as we expected. Terry indeed determined to enlist, or to join the service in some way, and they were glad :o use him and his aeroplane. This was not to be wondered at. If Terry had :he defects of his qualities he also had the qualities of his defects, and he did good work for the Allies.
Ellador, rather unexpectedly asked to stay awhile: “It is hard,” she said, ‘but we may not come again perhaps, and I want to learn all I can.”
Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman Page 119
