Black humor; Utopian fiction; Utopias -- Fiction; Women -- Fiction
Things grew strained very soon between them. I fancy at first, when
they were together, in her great hope of parentage and his keen joy of
conquest--that Terry was inconsiderate. In fact, I know it, from things
he said.
“You needn’t talk to me,” he snapped at Jeff one day, just before
our weddings. “There never was a woman yet that did not enjoy being
_mastered_. All your pretty talk doesn’t amount to a hill o’beans--I
_know_.” And Terry would hum:
I’ve taken my fun where I found it.
I’ve rogued and I’ve ranged in my time,
and
The things that I learned from the yellow and black,
They ‘ave helped me a ‘eap with the white.
Jeff turned sharply and left him at the time. I was a bit disquieted
myself.
Poor old Terry! The things he’d learned didn’t help him a heap in
Herland. His idea was to take--he thought that was the way. He thought,
he honestly believed, that women like it. Not the women of Herland! Not
Alima!
I can see her now--one day in the very first week of their marriage,
setting forth to her day’s work with long determined strides and
hard-set mouth, and sticking close to Ellador. She didn’t wish to be
alone with Terry--you could see that.
But the more she kept away from him, the more he wanted her--naturally.
He made a tremendous row about their separate establishments, tried to
keep her in his rooms, tried to stay in hers. But there she drew the
line sharply.
He came away one night, and stamped up and down the moonlit road,
swearing under his breath. I was taking a walk that night too, but I
wasn’t in his state of mind. To hear him rage you’d not have believed
that he loved Alima at all--you’d have thought that she was some quarry
he was pursuing, something to catch and conquer.
I think that, owing to all those differences I spoke of, they soon lost
the common ground they had at first, and were unable to meet sanely
and dispassionately. I fancy too--this is pure conjecture--that he
had succeeded in driving Alima beyond her best judgment, her real
conscience, and that after that her own sense of shame, the reaction of
the thing, made her bitter perhaps.
They quarreled, really quarreled, and after making it up once or twice,
they seemed to come to a real break--she would not be alone with him
at all. And perhaps she was a bit nervous, I don’t know, but she got
Moadine to come and stay next door to her. Also, she had a sturdy
assistant detailed to accompany her in her work.
Terry had his own ideas, as I’ve tried to show. I daresay he thought he
had a right to do as he did. Perhaps he even convinced himself that
it would be better for her. Anyhow, he hid himself in her bedroom one
night...
The women of Herland have no fear of men. Why should they have? They
are not timid in any sense. They are not weak; and they all have strong
trained athletic bodies. Othello could not have extinguished Alima with
a pillow, as if she were a mouse.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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