Consider Her Ways and Others Page 5

  ‘Welcome, my dear,’ she said, in a voice which had no trace of the quaver I half-expected.

  Her glance went to a chair. Then she looked at me again, and thought better of it.

  ‘I expect you’d be more comfortable on the couch,’ she suggested.

  I regarded the couch – a genuine Georgian piece, I thought – doubtfully.

  ‘Will it stand it?’ I wondered.

  ‘Oh, I think so,’ she said, but not too certainly.

  The retinue deposited me there carefully, and stood by, with anxious expressions. When it was clear that though it creaked it was probably going to hold, the old lady shooed them away, and rang a little silver bell. A diminutive figure, a perfect parlourmaid three-foot-ten in height, entered.

  ‘The brown sherry, please, Mildred,’ instructed the old lady. ‘You’ll take sherry, my dear?’ she added to me.

  ‘Y-yes – yes, thank you,’ I said, faintly. After a pause I added: ‘You will excuse me, Mrs – er – Miss –?’

  ‘Oh, I should have introduced myself. My name is Laura – not Miss, or Mrs, just Laura. You, I know, are Orchis – Mother Orchis.’

  ‘So they tell me,’ I owned, distastefully.

  We studied one another. For the first time since the hallucination had set in I saw sympathy, even pity, in someone else’s eyes. I looked round the room again, noticing the perfection of details.

  ‘This is – I’m not mad, am I?’ I asked.

  She shook her head slowly, but before she could reply the miniature parlourmaid returned, bearing a cut-glass decanter and glasses on a silver tray. As she poured out a glass for each of us I saw the old lady glance from her to me and back again, as though comparing us. There was a curious, uninterpretable expression on her face. I made an effort.

  ‘Shouldn’t it be Madeira?’ I suggested.

  She looked surprised, and then smiled, and nodded appreciatively.

  ‘I think you have accomplished the purpose of this visit in one sentence,’ she said.

  The parlourmaid left, and we raised our glasses. The old lady sipped at hers and then placed it on an occasional table beside her.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ she went on, ‘we had better go into it a little more. Did they tell you why they have sent you to me, my dear?’

  ‘No,’ I shook my head.

  ‘It is because I am an historian,’ she informed me. ‘Access to history is a privilege. It is not granted to many of us nowadays – and then somewhat reluctantly. Fortunately, a feeling that no branches of knowledge should be allowed to perish entirely still exists – though some of them are pursued at the cost of a certain political suspicion.’ She smiled deprecatingly, and then went on. ‘So when confirmation is required it is necessary to appeal to a specialist. Did they give you any report on their diagnosis?’

  I shook my head again.

  ‘I thought not. So like the profession, isn’t it? Well, I’ll tell you what they told me on the telephone from the Mothers’ Home, and we shall have a better idea of what we are about. I was informed that you have been interviewed by several doctors whom you have interested, puzzled – and I suspect, distressed – very much, poor things. None of them has more than a minimum smattering of history, you see. Well, briefly, two of them are of the opinion that you are suffering from delusions of a schizophrenic nature: and three are inclined to think you are a genuine case of transferred personality. It is an extremely rare condition. There are not more than three reliably documented cases, and one that is more debatable, they tell me; but of those confirmed two are associated with the drug chuinjuatin, and the third with a drug of very similar properties.

  ‘Now, the majority of three found your answers coherent for the most part, and felt that they were authentically circumstantial. That is to say that nothing you told them conflicted directly with what they know, but, since they know so little outside their professional field, they found a great deal of the rest both hard to believe and impossible to check. Therefore I, with my better means of checking, have been asked for my opinion.’

  She paused, and looked me thoughtfully over.

  ‘I rather think,’ she added, ‘that this is going to be one of the most curiously interesting things that has happened to me in my quite long life. – Your glass is empty, my dear.’

  ‘Transferred personality,’ I repeated wonderingly, as I held out my glass. ‘Now, if that were possible –’

  ‘Oh, there’s no doubt about the possibility. Those three cases I mentioned are fully authenticated.’

  ‘It might be that – almost,’ I admitted. ‘At least, in some ways it might be – but not in others. There is this nightmare quality. You seem perfectly normal to me, but look at me, myself – and at your little maid! There’s certainly an element of delusion. I seem to be here, like this, and talking to you – but it can’t really be so, so where am I?’

  ‘I can understand, better than most, I think, how unreal this must seem to you. In fact, I have spent so much of my time in books that it sometimes seems unreal to me – as if I did not quite belong anywhere. Now, tell me my dear, when were you born?’

  I told her. She thought for a moment.

  ‘H’m,’ she said. ‘George the Sixth – but you’d not remember the second big war?’

  ‘No,’ I agreed.

  ‘But you might remember the coronation of the next monarch? Whose was that?’

  ‘Elizabeth – Elizabeth the Second. My mother took me to see the procession,’ I told her.

  ‘Do you remember anything about it?’

  ‘Not a lot really – except that it rained, nearly all day,’ I admitted.

  We went on like that for a little while, then she smiled, reassuringly.

  ‘Well, I don’t think we need any more to establish our point. I’ve heard about that coronation before – at secondhand. It must have been a wonderful scene in the abbey.’ She mused a moment, and gave a little sigh. ‘You’ve been very patient with me, my dear. It is only fair that you should have your turn – but I’m afraid you must prepare yourself for some shocks.’

  ‘I think I must be inured after my last thirty-six hours – or what has appeared to be thirty-six hours,’ I told her.

  ‘I doubt it,’ she said, looking at me seriously.

  ‘Tell me,’ I asked her. ‘Please explain it all – if you can.’

  ‘Your glass, my dear. Then I’ll get the crux of it over.’ She poured for each of us, then she asked:

  ‘What strikes you as the oddest feature of your experience, so far?’

  I considered. ‘There’s so much –’

  ‘Might it not be that you have not seen a single man?’ she suggested.

  I thought back. I remembered the wondering tone of one of the Mothers asking: ‘What is a man?’

  ‘That’s certainly one of them,’ I agreed. ‘Where are they?’

  She shook her head, watching me steadily.

  ‘There aren’t any, my dear. Not any more. None at all.’

  I simply went on staring at her. Her expression was perfectly serious and sympathetic. There was no trace of guile there, or deception, while I struggled with the idea. At last I managed:

  ‘But – but that’s impossible! There must be some somewhere … You couldn’t – I mean, how? – I mean …’ My expostulation trailed off in confusion.

  She shook her head.

  ‘I know it must seem impossible to you, Jane – may I call you Jane? But it is so. I am an old woman now, nearly eighty, and in all my long life I have never seen a man – save in old pictures and photographs. Drink your sherry, my dear. It will do you good.’ She paused. ‘I’m afraid this upsets you.’

  I obeyed, too bewildered for further comment at the moment, protesting inwardly, yet not altogether disbelieving, for certainly I had not seen one man, nor sign of any. She went on quietly, giving me time to collect my wits:

  ‘I can understand a little how you must feel. I haven’t had to learn all my history entirely from books, you see.
When I was a girl, sixteen or seventeen, I used to listen a lot to my grandmother. She was as old then as I am now, but her memory of her youth was still very good. I was able almost to see the places she talked about – but they were part of such a different world that it was difficult for me to understand how she felt. When she spoke about the young man she had been engaged to, tears would roll down her cheeks, even then – not just for him, of course, but for the whole world that she had known as a girl. I was sorry for her, although I could not really understand how she felt. – How should I? But now that I am old, too, and have read so much, I am perhaps a little nearer to understanding her feelings, I think.’ She looked at me curiously. ‘And you, my dear. Perhaps you, too, were engaged to be married?’

  ‘I was married – for a little time,’ I told her.

  She contemplated that for some seconds, then:

  ‘It must be a very strange experience to be owned,’ she remarked, reflectively.

  ‘Owned?’ I exclaimed, in astonishment.

  ‘Ruled by a husband,’ she explained, sympathetically.

  I stared at her.

  ‘But it – it wasn’t like that – it wasn’t like that at all,’ I protested. ‘It was –’ But there I broke off, with tears too close. To sheer her away I asked:

  ‘But what happened? What on earth happened to the men?’

  ‘They all died,’ she told me. ‘They fell sick. Nobody could do anything for them, so they died. In little more than a year they were all gone – all but a very few.’

  ‘But surely – surely everything would collapse?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Very largely it did. It was very bad. There was a dreadful lot of starvation. The industrial parts were the worst hit, of course. In the more backward countries and in rural areas women were able to turn to the land and till it to keep themselves and their children alive, but almost all the large organizations broke down entirely. Transport ceased very soon: petrol ran out, and no coal was being mined. It was quite a dreadful state of affairs because although there were a great many women, and they had outnumbered the men, in fact, they had only really been important as consumers and spenders of money. So when the crisis came it turned out that scarcely any of them knew how to do any of the important things because they had nearly all been owned by men, and had to lead their lives as pets and parasites.’

  I started to protest, but her frail hand waved me aside.

  ‘It wasn’t their fault – not entirely,’ she explained. ‘They were caught up in a process, and everything conspired against their escape. It was a long process, going right back to the eleventh century, in Southern France. The Romantic conception started there as an elegant and amusing fashion for the leisured classes. Gradually, as time went on, it permeated through most levels of society, but it was not until the latter part of the nineteenth century that its commercial possibilities were intelligently perceived, and not until the twentieth that it was really exploited.

  ‘At the beginning of the twentieth century women were starting to have their chance to lead useful, creative, interesting lives. But that did not suit commerce: it needed them much more as mass-consumers than as producers – except on the most routine levels. So Romance was adopted and developed as a weapon against their further progress and to promote consumption, and it was used intensively.

  ‘Women must never for a moment be allowed to forget their sex, and compete as equals. Everything had to have a “feminine angle” which must be different from the masculine angle, and be dinned in without ceasing. It would have been unpopular for manufacturers actually to issue an order “back to the kitchen”, but there were other ways. A profession without a difference, called “housewife”, could be invented. The kitchen could be glorified and made more expensive; it could be made to seem desirable, and it could be shown that the way to realize this heart’s desire was through marriage. So the presses turned out, by the hundred thousand a week, journals which concentrated the attention of women ceaselessly and relentlessly upon selling themselves to some man in order that they might achieve some small, uneconomic unit of a home upon which money could be spent.

  ‘Whole trades adopted the romantic approach and the glamour was spread thicker and thicker in the articles, the write-ups, and most of all in the advertisements. Romance found a place in everything that women might buy from underclothes to motor-cycles, from “health” foods to kitchen stoves, from deodorants to foreign travel, until soon they were too bemused to be amused any more.

  ‘The air was filled with frustrated moanings. Women maundered in front of microphones yearning only to “surrender”, and “give themselves”, to adore and to be adored. The cinema most of all maintained the propaganda, persuading the main and important part of their audience, which was female, that nothing in life was worth achieving but dewy-eyed passivity in the strong arms of Romance. The pressure became such that the majority of young women spent all their leisure time dreaming of Romance, and the means of securing it. They were brought to a state of honestly believing that to be owned by some man and set down in a little brick box to buy all the things that the manufacturers wanted them to buy would be the highest form of bliss that life could offer.’

  ‘But –’ I began to protest again. The old lady was now well launched, however, and swept on without a check.

  ‘All this could not help distorting society, of course. The divorce-rate went up. Real life simply could not come near to providing the degree of romantic glamour which was being represented as every girl’s proper inheritance. There was probably, in the aggregate, more disappointment, disillusion, and dissatisfaction among women than there had ever been before. Yet, with this ridiculous and ornamental ideal grained-in by unceasing propaganda, what could a conscientious idealist do but take steps to break up the short-weight marriage she had made, and seek elsewhere for the ideal which was hers, she understood, by right?

  ‘It was a wretched state of affairs brought about by deliberately promoted dissatisfaction; a kind of rat-race with, somewhere safely out of reach, the glamorized romantic ideal always luring. Perhaps an exceptional few almost attained it, but, for all except those very few, it was a cruel, tantalizing sham on which they spent themselves, and of course their money, in vain.’

  This time I did get in my protest.

  ‘But it wasn’t like that. Some of what you say may be true – but that’s all the superficial part. It didn’t feel a bit like the way you put it. I was in it. I know.’

  She shook her head reprovingly.

  ‘There is such a thing as being too close to make a proper evaluation. At a distance we are able to see more clearly. We can perceive it for what it was – a gross and heartless exploitation of the weaker-willed majority. Some women of education and resolution were able to withstand it, of course, but at a cost. There must always be a painful price for resisting majority pressure – even they could not always, altogether escape the feeling that they might be wrong, and that the rat-racers were having the better time of it.

  ‘You see, the great hopes for the emancipation of women with which the century had started had been outflanked. Purchasing-power had passed into the hands of the ill-educated and highly-suggestible. The desire for Romance is essentially a selfish wish, and when it is encouraged to dominate every other it breaks down all corporate loyalties. The individual woman thus separated from, and yet at the same time thrust into competition with, all other women was almost defenceless; she became the prey of organized suggestion. When it was represented to her that the lack of certain goods or amenities would be fatal to Romance she became alarmed and, thus, eminently exploitable. She could only believe what she was told, and spent a great deal of time worrying about whether she was doing all the right things to encourage Romance. Thus, she became, in a new, a subtler way, more exploited, more dependent, and less creative than she had ever been before.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘this is the most curiously unrecognizable account of my world that I have ever heard – it�
�s like something copied, but with all the proportions wrong. And as for “less creative” – well, perhaps families were smaller, but women still went on having babies. The population was still increasing.’

  The old lady’s eyes dwelt on me a moment.

  ‘You are undoubtedly a thought-child of your time, in some ways,’ she observed. ‘What makes you think there is anything creative about having babies? Would you call a plant-pot creative because seeds grow in it? It is a mechanical operation – and, like most mechanical operations, is most easily performed by the least intelligent. Now, bringing up a child, educating, helping her to become a person, that is creative. But unfortunately, in the time we are speaking of, women had, in the main, been successfully conditioned into bringing up their daughters to be unintelligent consumers, like themselves.’

  ‘But,’ I said helplessly, ‘I know the time. It’s my time. This is all distorted.’

  ‘The perspective of history must be truer,’ she told me again, unimpressed, and went on: ‘But if what happened had to happen, then it chose a fortunate time to happen. A hundred years earlier, even fifty years earlier, it would very likely have meant extinction. Fifty years later might easily have been too late – it might have come upon a world in which all women had profitably restricted themselves to domesticity and consumership. Luckily, however, in the middle of the century some women were still entering the professions, and by far the greatest number of professional women was to be found in medicine – which is to say that they were only really numerous in, and skilled in, the very profession which immediately became of vital importance if we were to survive at all.

  ‘I have no medical knowledge, so I cannot give you any details of the steps they took. All I can tell you is that there was intensive research on lines which will probably be more obvious to you than they are to me.

  ‘A species, even our species, has great will to survive, and the doctors saw to it that the will had the means of expression. Through all the hunger, and the chaos, and the other privations, babies somehow continued to be born. That had to be. Reconstruction could wait: the priority was the new generation that would help in the reconstruction, and then inherit it. So babies were born: the girl babies lived, the boy babies died. That was distressing, and wasteful, too, and so, presently, only girl babies were born – again, the means by which that could be achieved will be easier for you to understand than for me.