"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.
