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.
