Black humor; Utopian fiction; Utopias -- Fiction; Women -- Fiction
For the higher one, try to imagine a devoted and impassioned man trying
to set up housekeeping with a lady angel, a real wings-and-harp-and-halo
angel, accustomed to fulfilling divine missions all over interstellar
space. This angel might love the man with an affection quite beyond his
power of return or even of appreciation, but her ideas of service and
duty would be on a very different scale from his. Of course, if she was
a stray angel in a country of men, he might have had his way with her;
but if he was a stray man among angels--!
Terry, at his worst, in a black fury for which, as a man, I must have
some sympathy, preferred the ant simile. More of Terry and his special
troubles later. It was hard on Terry.
Jeff--well, Jeff always had a streak that was too good for this world!
He’s the kind that would have made a saintly priest in parentagearlier
times. He accepted the angel theory, swallowed it whole, tried to force
it on us--with varying effect. He so worshipped Celis, and not only
Celis, but what she represented; he had become so deeply convinced of
the almost supernatural advantages of this country and people, that he
took his medicine like a--I cannot say “like a man,” but more as if he
wasn’t one.
Don’t misunderstand me for a moment. Dear old Jeff was no milksop or
molly-coddle either. He was a strong, brave, efficient man, and an
excellent fighter when fighting was necessary. But there was always this
angel streak in him. It was rather a wonder, Terry being so different,
that he really loved Jeff as he did; but it happens so sometimes, in
spite of the difference--perhaps because of it.
As for me, I stood between. I was no such gay Lothario as Terry, and no
such Galahad as Jeff. But for all my limitations I think I had the habit
of using my brains in regard to behavior rather more frequently than
either of them. I had to use brain-power now, I can tell you.
The big point at issue between us and our wives was, as may easily be
imagined, in the very nature of the relation.
“Wives! Don’t talk to me about wives!” stormed Terry. “They don’t know
what the word means.”
Which is exactly the fact--they didn’t. How could they? Back in their
prehistoric records of polygamy and slavery there were no ideals of
wifehood as we know it, and since then no possibility of forming such.
“The only thing they can think of about a man is _Fatherhood!_” said
Terry in high scorn. “_Fatherhood!_ As if a man was always wanting to
be a _father!_”
This also was correct. They had their long, wide, deep, rich experience
of Motherhood, and their only perception of the value of a male creature
as such was for Fatherhood.
Aside from that, of course, was the whole range of personal love, love
which as Jeff earnestly phrased it “passeth the love of women!” It did,
too. I can give no idea--either now, after long and happy experience of
it, or as it seemed then, in the first measureless wonder--of the beauty
and power of the love they gave us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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