Countless women passed me as I walked along. They were erect of form and
plain of feature, with expressions devoid of either intelligence or
passion. Garbed in formless robes of sombre grey, like saints
of song and story, they went their way with solemn resignation. Some of
them led small children by the hand; others pushed perambulators
containing white robed infants being taken to or from the nurseries for
their scheduled stays in the mothers' individual apartments.
The actions of the mothers were as methodical as well trained nurses. In
their faces was the cold, pallid light of the mother love of the
madonnas of art, uncontaminated by the fretful excitement of the mother
love in a freer and more uncertain world.
Even the children seemed wooden cherubim. They were physically healthy
beyond all blemish, but they cooed and smiled in a subdued manner.
Already the ever present "_verboten_" of an ordered life seemed to have
crept into the small souls and repressed the instincts of anarchy and
the aspirations of individualism. As I walked among these madonnas of
science and their angelic offspring, I felt as I imagined a man of
earthly passions would feel if suddenly loosed in a mediaeval and
orthodox heaven; for everything about me breathed peace, goodness,
and coldness.
At the door of her apartment Frau Karoline greeted me with formal
gravity. She was a young woman of twenty years, with a high forehead and
piercing eyes. Her face was mobile but her manner possessed the dignity
of the matron assured of her importance in the world. Her only child was
at the nursery at the time, in accordance with the rules of the level
that forbids a man to see his step-children. But a large photograph,
aided by Frau Karoline's fulsome description and eulogies, gave me a
very clear picture of the high order of the young chemist's intelligence
though that worthy had but recently passed his first birthday.
The necessary matters of the inspection of pedigrees and the signing of
my card of authorization had been conducted by the young mother with the
cool self-possession of a well disciplined school-mistress. Her attitude
and manner revealed the thoroughness of her education and training for
her duties and functions in life. And yet, though she relieved me so
skilfully of what I feared would be an embarrassing situation, I
conceived an intense dislike for this most exemplary young mother, for
she made me feel that a man was a most useless and insignificant
creature to be tolerated as a necessary evil in this maternal world.
"Surely," said Frau Karoline, as I returned her pedigree, "you could not
do better for your first born child than to honour me with his
motherhood. Not only is my pedigree of the purest of chemical lines,
reaching back to the establishment of the eugenic control, but I myself
have taken the highest honours in the training for motherhood."
"Yes," I acknowledged, "you seem very well trained."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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