But she smiled wisely and shook her head, quoting after her instructor: “‘And history, with all her volumes vast, hath but one page.’”
“They all tell about the same things,” she said. “They all do the same things, and not one of them ever sees what really matters most — ever gives ‘the history of the case’ correctly. I truly think, dear, that we could help you with your history.”
She had fully accepted the proposition I made that day when the Horror so overthrew her, and now talked to me as freely as if I were one of her sisters. She talked about men as if I wasn’t one, and about the world as if it was no more mine than hers.
There was a strange exaltation, a wonderful companionship, in this. I grew to see life as she saw it, more and more, and it was like rising from some tangled thorny thicket to take a bird’s eye view of city and farmland, of continent and ocean. Life itself grew infinitely more interesting. I thought of that benighted drummer’s joke, that “Life is just one damn thing after another,” so widely accepted as voicing a general opinion. I thought of our pathetic virtues of courage, cheerfulness, patience — all so ridiculously wasted in facing troubles which need not be there at all.
Ellador saw human life as a think in the making, with human beings as the makers. We have always seemed to regard it as an affliction — or blessing — bestowed upon us by some exterior force. Studying, seeing, understanding, with her, I grew insensibly to adopt her point of view, her scale of measurements, and her eager and limitless interest. So when we did set forth on our round-the-world trip to my home, we were both fairly well equipped for the rapid survey which was all we planned for.
3. A JOURNEY OF INSPECTION
It was fortunate for Ellador’s large purposes that her fat little bag of jewels contained more wealth than I had at first understood, and that there were some jewel-hungry millionaires left in the world. In India we found native princes who were as much athirst for rubies and emeralds as ever were their hoarding ancestors, and who had comfortable piles of ancient gold wherewith to pay for them. We were easily able to fill snug belts with universally acceptable gold pieces, and to establish credit to carry us wherever there were banks.
She was continually puzzled over our money values. “Why do they want these so much?” she demanded. “Why are they willing to pay so much for them?”
Money she understood well enough. They had their circulating medium in Herland in earlier years; but it was used more as a simple method of keeping accounts than anything else — like tickets, and finally discontinued. They had so soon centralized their industries, that the delay and inconvenience of measuring off every item of exchange in this everlasting system of tokens became useless, to their practical minds. As an “incentive to industry” it was not necessary; motherhood was their incentive. When they had plenty of everything it was free to all in such amounts as were desired; in scarcity they divided. Their interest in life was in what they were doing — and what they were going to do, not in what they were to get. Our point of view puzzled her.
I remember this matter coming up between Ellador and a solemn college professor, an economist, as we were creeping through the dangerous Mediterranean. She questioned and listened, saying nothing about her country — this we had long since found was the only safe way; for the instant demand: “Where is it?” was what we did not propose to answer.
But having learned what she could from those she talked with, and sped searchingly through the books they offered her, she used to relieve her mind in two ways; by talking with me, and by writing.
“I’ve simply got to,” she told me. “I’m writing a book — in fact, I’m writing two books. One is notes, quotations, facts, and pictures — pictures — pictures. This photography is a wonderful art!”
She had become quite a devotee of said art, and was gathering material right and left, to show her people.
“We’ll have to go back and tell them, you know,” she explained, “and they’ll be so interested, I shall have to go about lecturing, as you men did..”
“I wish you’d go about lecturing to us,” I told her. “We have more to learn than you have — of the really important matters in living.”
“But I couldn’t, you see, without quoting always from home — and then they’d want to know — they’d have a right to know. Or else they wouldn’t believe me. No, all I can do is to ask questions; to make suggestions, perhaps, here and there; even to criticize a little — when I’ve learned a lot more, and if I’m very sure of my hearers. Meanwhile I’ve got to talk it off to you, you poor boy — and just write. You shall read it, if you want to, of course.”
Her notes were a study in themselves.
Ships and shipping interested her at once, as something totally new, and her first access to encyclopaedias had supplied background to what she learned from people. She had set down, in the briefest possible manner, not mere loose data as to vessels and navigation, but an outlined history of the matter, arranged like a genealogical tree.
There were the rude beginnings — log, raft, skin-boat, basket-boat, canoe; and the line of paddled or oared boats went on to the great carved war-canoes with outriggers, the galleys of Romans and Norsemen, the delicate birchbarks of our American Aborigines, and the neat manufactured ones on the market. A bare sentence covered it, and another the evolution of the sailing craft; then steam.
“Navigation is an exclusively masculine process,” she noted. “Always men, only men. Oared vessels of large size required slave labor; status of sailors still akin to slavery; rigid discipline, miserable accommodations, abusive language and personal violence.” To this she added in parenthesis: “Same holds true of armies. Always men, only men. Similar status, but somewhat better provision for men, and more chance of promotion, owing to greater danger to officers.”
Continuing with ships, she noted: “Psychology: a high degree of comradeship, the habit of obedience — enforced; this doubtless accounts for large bodies of such indispensable men putting up with such wretched treatment. Obedience appears to dull and weaken the mind; same with soldiers — study further. Among officers great personal gallantry, a most exalted sense of duty, as well as brutal and unjust treatment of inferiors. The captain in especial is so devoted to his concept of duty as sometimes to prefer to ‘go down with his ship’ to being saved without her. Why? What social service is there in being drowned? I learn this high devotion is found also in engineers and in pilots. Seems to be a product of extreme responsibility. Might be developed more widely by extending opportunity.”
She came to me with this, asking for more information on our political system of “rotation in office.”
“Is that why you do it?” she asked eagerly. “Not so much as to get the work done better, as to make all the people — or at least most of them — feel greater responsibility, a deeper sense of duty?”
I had never put it that way to myself, but I now agreed that that was the idea — that it must be. She was warmly interested; said she knew she should love America. I felt sure she would.
There was an able Egyptologist on board, a man well acquainted with ancient peoples, and he, with the outline she had so well laid down during her English studies, soon filled her mind with a particularly clear and full acquaintance with our first civilizations.
“Egypt, with its One River; Asia Minor, with the Valley of the Two Rivers and China with its great rivers—” she pored over her maps and asked careful eager questions. The big black bearded professor was delighted with her interest, and discoursed most instructively.
“I see,” she said. “I see! They came to places where the soil was rich, and where there was plenty of water. It made agriculture possible, profitable — and then the surplus — and then the wonderful growth — of course!”
That German officer, who had made so strong and disagreeable an impression while we were on the Swedish ship, had been insistent, rudely insistent, on the advantages of difficulty and what he called “discipline.” He had maintai
ned that the great races, the dominant races, came always from the north. This she had borne in mind, and now questioned her obliging preceptor, with map outspread and dates at hand.
“For all those thousands of years these Mediterranean and Oriental peoples held the world — were the world?”
“Yes, absolutely.”
“And what was up here?” she pointed to the wide vacant spaces on the northern coasts.
“Savages — barbarians — wild, skin-clad ferocious men, madam.”
Ellador made a little diagram, a vertical line, with many ages marked across it.
“This is The Year One — as far back as you can go,” she explained, pointing to the mark at the bottom. “And here we are, near the top — this is Now. And these Eastern peoples held the stage and did the work all the way up to — here, did they?”
“They certainly did, madam.”
“And were these people in these northern lands there all the time? Or did they happen afterward?”
“They were there — we have their bones to prove it.”
“Then if they were there — and as long, and of the same stock — you tell me that all these various clans streamed out, westward, from a common source, and became in time, Persians, Hindus, Pelasgians, Etruscans, and all the rest — as well as Celts, Slavs, Teutons?”
“It is so held, roughly speaking.” He resented a little her sweeping generalizations and condensations; but she had her own ends in view.
“And what did these northern tribes contribute to social progress during all this time?”
“Practically nothing,” he answered. “Their arts were naturally limited by the rigors of the climate. The difficulties of maintaining existence prevented any higher developments.”
“I see, I see,” she nodded gravely. “Then why is it, in the face of these facts, that some still persist in attributing progress to difficulties, and cold weather.”
This professor, who was himself Italian, was quite willing to question this opinion.
“That theory you will find is quite generally confined to the people who live in the colder climates,” he suggested.
When Ellador discussed this with me, she went further. “It seems as if, when people say— ‘The World’ they mean their own people,” she commented. “I’ve been reading history as written by the North European races. Perhaps when we get to Persia, India, China and Japan, it will be different.”
It was different. I had spent my own youth in the most isolated of modern nations, the one most ignorant of and indifferent to all the others; the one whose popular view of foreigners is based on the immigrant classes, and whose traveling rich consider Europe as a play-ground, a picture gallery, a museum, a place wherein to finish one’s education. Being so reared, and associating with similarly minded persons, my early view of history was a great helter-skelter surging background to the clear, strong, glorious incidents of our own brief national career; while geography consisted of the vivid large scale familiar United States, and a globe otherwise covered with more or less nebulous maps; and such political evolution as I had in mind consisted of the irresistible development of our own “institutions.”
All this, of course, was my youthful attitude. In later studies I had added a considerable knowledge of general history, sociology and the like, but had never realized until now how remote all this was to me from the definite social values already solidly established in my mind.
Now, associating with Ellador, dispassionate and impartial as a visiting angel, bringing to her studies of the world, the triple freshness of view of one of different stock, different social development, and different sex, I began to get a new perspective. To her the world was one field of general advance. Her own country held the foreground in her mind, of course, but she had left it as definitely as if she came from Mars, and was studying the rest of humanity in the mass. Her alien point of view, her previous complete ignorance, and that powerful well-ordered mind she brought to bear on the new knowledge so rapidly amassed, gave her advantages as an observer far beyond our best scientists.
The one special and predominant distinction given to her studies by her supreme femininity, was what gave me the most numerous, and I may say, unpleasant surprises. In my world studies I had always assumed that humanity did thus and so, but she was continually shearing through the tangled facts with her sharp distinction that this and this phenomenon was due to masculinity alone.
“But Ellador,” I protested, “why do you say— ‘the male Scandinavians continually indulged in piracy,’ and ‘the male Spaniards practiced terrible cruelties,’ and so on? It sounds so — invidious — as if you were trying to make out a case against men.”
“Why, I wouldn’t do that for anything!” she protested. “I’m only trying to understand the facts. You don’t mind when I say ‘the male Phoenicians made great progress in navigation,’ or ‘the male Greeks developed great intelligence,’ do you?”
“That’s different,” I answered. “They did do those things.”
“Didn’t they do the others, too?”
“Well — yes — they did them, of course; but why rub it in that they were exclusively males?”
“But weren’t they, dear? Really? Did the Norse women raid the coasts of England and France? Did the Spanish women cross the ocean and torture the poor Aztecs?”
“They would have if they could!” I protested.
“So would the Phoenician women and Grecian women in the other cases — wouldn’t they?”
I hesitated.
“Now my Best Beloved,” she said, holding my hand in both hers and looking deep into my eyes— “Please, oh please, don’t mind. The facts are there, and they are immensely important. Think, dearest. We of Herland have known no men — till now. We, alone, in our tiny land, have worked out a happy, healthy life. Then you came — you ‘Wonderful Three.’ Ah! You should realize the stir, the excitement, the Great Hope that it meant to us! We knew there was more world — but nothing about it, and you meant a vast new life to us. Now I come to see — to learn — for the sake of my country.
“Because, you see, some things we gathered from you made us a little afraid. Afraid for our children, you see. Perhaps it was better, after all, to live up there, alone, in ignorance, but in happiness, we thought. Now I’ve come — to see — to learn — to really understand, if I can, so as to tell my people.
“You mustn’t think I’m against men, dear. Why, if it were only for your sake, I would love them. And I’m sure — we are all sure at home (or at least most of us are) that two sexes, working together, must be better than one.
“Then I can see how, being two sexes, and having so much more complex a problem than ours, and having all kinds of countries to live in — how you got into difficulties we never knew.
“I’m making every allowance. I’m firm in my conviction of the superiority of the bisexual method. It must be best or it would not have been evolved in all the higher animals. But — but you can’t expect me to ignore No, I couldn’t. What troubled me most was that I, too, began to see facts, -quite obvious facts, which I had never noticed before.
Wherever men had been superior to women we had proudly claimed it as a sex-distinction. Wherever men had shown evil traits, not common to women, we had serenely treated them as race-characteristics.
So, although I did not enjoy it, I did not dispute any further Ellador’s growing collection of facts. It was just as well not to. Facts are stubborn things.
We visited a little in Tunis, Algiers, and Cairo, making quite an excursion in Egypt, with our steamship acquaintance, whose knowledge was invaluable to us. He translated inscriptions; showed us the more important discoveries, and gave condensed accounts of the vanished civilizations.
Ellador was deeply impressed.
“To think that under one single city, here in Abydos, there are the remains of five separate cultures. Five! As different as can be. With a long time between, evidently, so that the ruins were forgotten, and a new
people built a new city on the site of the old one. It is wonderful.”
Then she turned suddenly on Signor Armini. “What did they die of?” she demanded.
“Die of? Who, madam?”
“Those cities — those civilizations?”
“Why, they were conquered in war, doubtless; the inhabitants were put to the sword — some carried away as slaves, perhaps — and the cities razed to the ground?”
“By whom?” she demanded. “Who did it?”
“Why, other peoples, other cultures, from other cities.”
“Do you mean other peoples, or just other men?” she asked.
He was puzzled. “Why, the soldiers were men, of course, but war was made by one nation against another.”
“Do you mean that the women of the other nations were the governing power and sent the men to fight?”
No, he did not mean that.
“And surely the children did not send them?”
Of course not.
“But people are men, women and children, aren’t they? And only the adult men, about one-fifth of the population, made war?”
This he admitted perforce, and Ellador did not press the point further.
“But in these cities were all kinds of people, weren’t there? Women and children, as well as men?”
This was obvious, also; and then she branched off a little: “What made them want to conquer a city?”
“Either fear — or revenge — or desire for plunder. Oftenest that. The ancient cities were the centers of production, of course.” And he discoursed on the beautiful handicrafts of the past, the rich fabrics, the jewels and carved work and varied treasures.
“Who made them,” she asked.
“Slaves, for the most part,” he answered.
“Men and women?”
“Yes — men and women.”
“I see,” said Ellador. She saw more than she spoke of, even to me.
In ancient Egypt she found much that pleased her in the power and place of historic womanhood. This satisfaction was short-lived as we went on eastward.
Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman Page 121
