‘It is, they tell me, not nearly so remarkable as it would appear at first sight. The locust, it seems, will continue to produce female locusts without male, or any other kind of assistance, the aphis, too, is able to go on breeding alone and in seclusion, certainly for eight generations, perhaps more. So it would be a poor thing if we, with all our knowledge and powers of research to assist us, should find ourselves inferior to the locust and the aphis in this respect, would it not?’
She paused, looking at me somewhat quizzically for my response. Perhaps she expected amazed – or possibly shocked – disbelief. If so, I disappointed her: technical achievements have ceased to arouse simple wonder since atomic physics showed how the barriers fall before the pressure of a good brains-team. One can take it that most things are possible: whether they are desirable, or worth doing, is a different matter – and one that seemed to me particularly pertinent to her question. I asked her:
‘And what is it that you have achieved?’
‘Survival,’ she said, simply.
‘Materially,’ I agreed, ‘I suppose you have. But when it has cost all the rest, when love, art, poetry, excitement, and physical joy have all been sacrificed to mere continued existence, what is left but a soulless waste? What reason is there any longer for survival?’
‘As to the reason, I don’t know – except that survival is a desire common to all species. I am quite sure that the reason for that desire was no clearer in the twentieth century than it is now. But, for the rest, why should you assume that they are gone? Did not Sappho write poetry? And your assumption that the possession of a soul depends upon a duality of sexes surprises me: it has so often been held that the two are in some sort of conflict, has it not?’
‘As an historian who must have studied men, women, and motives you should have taken my meaning better,’ I told her.
She shook her head, with reproof. ‘You are so much the conditioned product of your age, my dear. They told you, on all levels, from the works of Freud to that of the most nugatory magazines for women, that it was sex, civilized into romantic love, that made the world go round – and you believed them. But the world continues to go round for others, too – for the insects, the fish, the birds, the animals – and how much do you suppose they know of romantic love, even in brief mating seasons? They hoodwinked you, my dear. Between them they channelled your interests and ambitions along courses that were socially convenient, economically profitable, and almost harmless.’
I shook my head.
‘I just don’t believe it. Oh, yes, you know something of my world – from the outside. But you don’t understand it, or feel it.’
‘That’s your conditioning, my dear,’ she told me, calmly.
Her repeated assumption irritated me. I asked:
‘Suppose I were to believe what you say, what is it, then, that does make the world go round?’
‘That’s simple, my dear. It is the will to power. We have that as babies; we have it still in old age. It occurs in men and women alike. It is more fundamental, and more desirable, than sex; I tell you, you were misled – exploited, sublimated for economic convenience.
‘After the disease had struck, women ceased, for the first time in history, to be an exploited class. Without male rulers to confuse and divert them they began to perceive that all true power resides in the female principle. The male had served only one brief useful purpose; for the rest of his life he was a painful and costly parasite.
‘As they became aware of power, the doctors grasped it. In twenty years they were in full control. With them were the few women engineers, architects, lawyers, administrators, some teachers, and so on, but it was the doctors who held the keys of life and death. The future was in their hands and, as things began gradually to revive, they, together with the other professions, remained the dominant class and became known as the Doctorate. It assumed authority; it made the laws; it enforced them.
‘There was opposition, of course. Neither the memory of the old days, nor the effect of twenty years of lawlessness, could be wiped out at once, but the doctors had the whiphand – any woman who wanted a child had to come to them, and they saw to it that she was satisfactorily settled in a community. The roving gangs dwindled away, and gradually order was restored.
‘Later on, they faced better-organized opposition. There was a party which contended that the disease which had struck down the men had run its course, and the balance could, and should, be restored – they were known as Reactionists, and they became an embarrassment.
‘Most of the Council of the Doctorate still had clear memories of a system which used every weakness of women, and had been no more than a mere civilized culmination of their exploitation through the ages. They remembered how they themselves had only grudgingly been allowed to qualify for their careers. They were now in command: they felt no obligation to surrender their power and authority, and eventually, no doubt, their freedom to a creature whom they had proved to be biologically, and in all other ways, expendable. They refused unanimously to take a step that would lead to corporate suicide, and the Reactionists were proscribed as a subversive criminal organization.
‘That, however, was just a palliative. It quickly became clear that they were attacking a symptom and neglecting the cause. The Council was driven to realize that it had an unbalanced society at its hands – a society that was capable of continuity, but was in structure, you might say, little more than the residue of a vanished form. It could not continue in that truncated shape, and as long as it tried to disaffection would increase. Therefore, if power was to become stable, a new form suitable to the circumstances must be found.
‘In deciding the shape it should take, the natural tendencies of the little-educated and uneducated woman were carefully considered – such qualities as her feeling for hierarchical principles and her disposition to respect artificial distinctions. You will no doubt recollect that in your own time any fool of a woman whose husband was ennobled or honoured at once acquired increased respect and envy from other women though she remained the same fool; and also, that any gathering or society of unoccupied women would soon become obsessionally enmeshed in the creation and preservation of social distinctions. Allied to this is the high value they usually place upon a feeling of security. Important, too, is the capacity for devoted self-sacrifice, and slavery to conscience within the canons of any local convention. We are naturally very biddable creatures. Most of us are happiest when we are being orthodox, however odd our customs may appear to an outsider; the difficulty in handling us lies chiefly in establishing the required standards of orthodoxy.
‘Obviously, the broad outline of a system which was going to stand any chance of success, would have to provide scope for these and other characteristic traits. It must be a scheme where the interplay of forces would preserve equilibrium and respect for authority. The details of such an organization, however, were less easy to determine.
‘An extensive study of social forms and orders was undertaken but for several years every plan put forward was rejected as in some way unsuitable. The architecture of that finally chosen was said, though I do not know with how much truth, to have been inspired by the Bible – a book at that time still unprohibited, and the source of much unrest – I am told that it ran something like: “Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways.”
‘The Council appears to have felt that this advice, suitably modified, could be expected to lead to a state of affairs which would provide most of the requisite characteristics.
‘A four-class system was chosen as the basis, and strong differentiations were gradually introduced. These, now that they have become well established, greatly help to ensure stability – there is scope for ambition within one’s class, but none for passing from one class to another. Thus, we have the Doctorate – the educated ruling-class, fifty per cent of whom are actually of the medical profession. The Mothers, whose title is self-explanatory. The Servitors who are numerous and, for psychological rea
sons, small. The Workers, who are physically and muscularly strong, to do the heavier work. All the three lower classes respect the authority of the Doctorate. Both the employed classes revere the Mothers. The Servitors consider themselves more favoured in their tasks than the Workers; and the Workers tend to regard the puniness of the Servitors with a semi-affectionate contempt.
‘So you see a balance has been struck, and though it works somewhat crudely as yet, no doubt it will improve. It seems likely, for instance, that it would be advantageous to introduce sub-divisions into the Servitor class before long, and the police are thought by some to be put at a disadvantage by having no more than a little education to distinguish them from the ordinary Worker …’
She went on explaining with increasing detail while the enormity of the whole process gradually grew upon me.
‘Ants!’ I broke in, suddenly. ‘The ant-nest! You’ve taken that for your model?’
She looked surprised, either at my tone, or the fact that what she was saying had taken so long to register.
‘And why not?’ she asked. ‘Surely it is one of the most enduring social patterns that nature has evolved – though of course some adaptation –’
‘You’re – are you telling me that only the Mothers have children?’ I demanded.
‘Oh, members of the Doctorate do, too, when they wish,’ she assured me.
‘But – but –’
‘The Council decides the ratios,’ she went on to explain. ‘The doctors at the clinic examine the babies and allocate them suitably to the different classes. After that, of course, it is just a matter of seeing to their specialized feeding, glandular control, and proper training.’
‘But,’ I objected wildly, ‘what’s it for? Where’s the sense in it? What’s the good of being alive, like that?’
‘Well, what is the sense in being alive? You tell me,’ she suggested.
‘But we’re meant to love and be loved, to have babies we love by people we love.’
‘There’s your conditioning again; glorifying and romanticizing primitive animalism. Surely you consider that we are superior to the animals?’
‘Of course I do, but –’
‘Love, you say, but what can you know of the love there can be between mother and daughter when there are no men to introduce jealousy? Do you know of any purer sentiment than the love of a girl for her little sisters?’
‘But you don’t understand,’ I protested again. ‘How should you understand a love that colours the whole world? How it centres in your heart and reaches out from there to pervade your whole being, how it can affect everything you are, everything you touch, everything you hear … It can hurt dreadfully, I know, oh, I know, but it can run like sunlight in your veins … It can make you a garden out of a slum; brocade out of rags; music out of a speaking voice. It can show you a whole universe in someone else’s eyes. Oh, you don’t understand … you don’t know … you can’t … Oh, Donald, darling, how can I show her what she’s never even guessed at …?’
There was an uncertain pause, but presently she said:
‘Naturally, in your form of society it was necessary for you to be given such a conditioned reaction, but you can scarcely expect us to surrender our freedom, to connive at our own re-subjection, by calling our oppressors into existence again.’
‘Oh, you won’t understand. It was only the more stupid men and women who were continually at war with one another. Lots of us were complementary. We were pairs who formed units.’
She smiled. ‘My dear, either you are surprisingly ill-informed on your own period, or else the stupidity you speak of was astonishingly dominant. Neither as myself, nor as an historian, can I consider that we should be justified in resurrecting such a state of affairs. A primitive stage of our development has now given way to a civilized era. Woman, who is the vessel of life, had the misfortune to find man necessary for a time, but now she does no longer. Are you suggesting that such a useless and dangerous encumbrance ought to be preserved, out of sheer sentimentality? I will admit that we have lost some minor conveniences – you will have noticed, I expect, that we are less inventive mechanically, and tend to copy the patterns we have inherited; but that troubles us very little; our interests lie not in the inorganic, but in the organic and the sentient. Perhaps men could show us how to travel twice as fast, or how to fly to the moon, or how to kill more people more quickly; but it does not seem to us that such kinds of knowledge would be good payment for re-enslaving ourselves. No, our kind of world suits us better – all of us except a few Reactionists. You have seen our Servitors. They are a little timid in manner, perhaps, but are they oppressed, or sad? Don’t they chatter among themselves as brightly and perkily as sparrows? And the Workers – those you called the Amazons – don’t they look strong, healthy, and cheerful?’
‘But you’re robbing them all – robbing them of their birthright.’
‘You mustn’t give me cant, my dear. Did not your social system conspire to rob a woman of her “birthright” unless she married? You not only let her know it, but you socially rubbed it in: here, our Servitors and Workers do not know it, and they are not worried by a sense of inadequacy. Motherhood is the function of the Mothers, and understood as such.’
I shook my head. ‘Nevertheless, they are being robbed. A woman has a right to love –’
For once she was a little impatient as she cut me short.
‘You keep repeating to me the propaganda of your age. The love you talk about, my dear, existed in your little sheltered part of the world by polite and profitable convention. You were scarcely ever allowed to see its other face, unglamorized by Romance. You were never openly bought and sold, like livestock; you never had to sell yourself to the first-comer in order to live; you did not happen to be one of the women who through the centuries have screamed in agony and suffered and died under invaders in a sacked city – nor were you ever flung into a pit of fire to be saved from them; you were never compelled to suttee upon your dead husband’s pyre; you did not have to spend your whole life imprisoned in a harem; you were never part of the cargo of a slave-ship; you never retained your own life only at the pleasure of your lord and master …
‘That is the other side – the age-long side. There is going to be no more of such things. They are finished at last. Dare you suggest that we should call them back, to suffer them all again?’
‘But most of these things had already gone,’ I protested. ‘The world was getting better.’
‘Was it?’ she said. ‘I wonder if the women of Berlin thought so when it fell? Was it, indeed? – Or was it on the edge of a new barbarism?’
‘But if you can only get rid of evil by throwing out the good too, what is there left?’
‘There is a great deal. Man was only a means to an end. We needed him in order to have babies. The rest of his vitality accounted for all the misery in the world. We are a great deal better off without him.’
‘So you really consider that you’ve improved on nature?’ I suggested.
‘Tcha!’ she said, impatient with my tone. ‘Civilization is improvement on nature. Would you want to live in a cave, and have most of your babies die in infancy?’
‘There are some things, some fundamental things –’ I began, but she checked me, holding up her hand for silence.
Outside, the long shadows had crept across the lawns. In the evening quiet I could hear a choir of women’s voices singing, a little distance away. We listened for some minutes until the song was finished.
‘Beautiful!’ said the old lady. ‘Could angels themselves sing more sweetly! They sound happy enough, don’t they? Our own lovely children – two of my granddaughters are there among them. They are happy, and they’ve reason to be happy: they’re not growing up into a world where they must gamble on the goodwill of some man to keep them; they’ll never need to be servile before a lord and master; they’ll never stand in danger of rape and butchery, either. Listen to them!’
Another song had s
tarted and came lilting lightly to us out of the dusk.
‘Why are you crying?’ the old lady asked me as it ended.
‘I know it’s stupid – I don’t really believe any of this is what it seems to be – so I suppose I’m crying for all you would have lost if it were true,’ I told her. ‘There should be lovers out there under the trees; they should be listening hand in hand to that song while they watch the moon rise. But there are no lovers now, there won’t be any more …’ I looked back at her.
‘Did you ever read the lines: “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air?” Can’t you feel the forlornness of this world you’ve made? Do you really not understand?’ I asked.
‘I know you’ve only seen a little of us, but do you not begin to understand what it can be like when women are no longer forced to fight one another for the favours of men?’ she countered.
We talked on while the dusk gave way to darkness and the lights of other houses started to twinkle through the trees. Her reading had been wide. It had given her even an affection for some periods of the past, but her approval of her own era was unshaken. She felt no aridity in it. Always it was my ‘conditioning’ which prevented me from seeing that the golden age of woman had begun at last.
‘You cling to too many myths,’ she told me. ‘You speak of a full life, and your instance is some unfortunate woman hugging her chains in a suburban villa. Full life, fiddlesticks! But it was convenient for the traders that she could be made to think so. A truly full life would be an exceedingly short one, in any form of society.’