MAN’S WORLD (4)
By:
August 12, 2024
HiLoBooks is pleased to serialize Charlotte Haldane’s 1926 proto-sf novel Man’s World for HILOBROW’s readers. Written by an author married to one of the world’s most prominent eugenics advocates, this ambivalent adventure anticipates both Brave New World and The Handmaid’s Tale. When a young woman rebels against her conditioning, can she break free? Reissued in 2024 (with a new introduction by Philippa Levine) by the MIT Press’s RADIUM AGE series.
ALL INSTALLMENTS: INTRO | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25.
(cont.)
‘You will understand more fully, when you grow up a little, just what the coming of Humphrey meant. By then you will have learnt about the last war. Humphrey was killed in it. At that time the governments of the world began to see that with the Perrier method they could get plenty of boys. The nations would have an unlimited supply of “Man Power.” They only overlooked one person: Mensch.’
‘Hullo,’ said a soft voice suddenly.
‘Just look, will you, dear,’ asked Emmeline. Christopher rose from his cushions and moved to the wall behind him. He pushed aside a panel and saw, framed in strips of light metal, a picture of his mother, Antonia, seated in her room. She smiled at him, and out of the picture her voice spoke: ‘May I come to you, you two gossipers? Why, that babe’s asleep again.’
‘Yes, do come, Antonia,’ answered Emmeline. Christopher watched his mother rise, then closed the panel. He turned to his aunt. ‘Some music will wake Nicolette,’ he said. Shall we have some?’
‘It will have to be rather loud,’ she suggested.
‘I’ll sing my new marching song,’ — and immediately he began in a clear confident voice, stamping his feet and snapping his fingers in time:
The children of the days of old
Just had to do what they were told,
They were not free
Like you and me,
But silly lambs within the fold.They all believed in fairies bold,
And ogres grim, so they were told,
At dark nightfall
Would eat them all
If ever they strayed from the fold.They feared the heat, they feared the cold,
They feared their god so cruel and old,
With fear they squeaked,
With pain they shrieked,
And huddled close within the fold.I’ll never do as I am told,
For I am brave and strong and bold;
It’s fine to strive,
To learn and thrive,
But not to be a lamb within the fold.
Nicolette opened one eye, awakened by the familiar tune, and then the other. ‘Oh, Christopher!’ she murmured sleepily, ‘what a lot of noise.’
Christopher danced around her, with flushed cheeks and shining eyes, waving his arms at her, and repeating:
I’ll never do as I am told,
For I am brave and strong and bold….
She scrambled to her feet and began to dance with him. Then Antonia entered. Nicolette ran to her. Christopher continued to dance until he fell, stumbling into the cushions. ‘Lovely stories, Antonia,’ he called up to his mother, lying where he had fallen, his hands clasped behind his head, his legs outstretched, feet crossed.
‘Come, children,’ she answered smilingly, and held out her hand to him and raised him. ‘You will only just have time to get to the swimming bath. All the others are there already. Come along.’
‘Dear Emmeline has told me all about Humphrey at last,’ said Christopher, gratefully taking Emmeline’s firm hand in his. It was always a cool hand.
‘And no one could tell so nicely, answered his mother, with an affectionate glance, marred by a faint tinge of pity, for her sister. ‘Will you come with us?’
‘Not now,’ Emmeline replied, and watched them as they went together; the tall, soft-bosomed, still beautiful mother; the lithe, ardent boy; the rounded, brown-curled small girl, who turned and threw her kisses as she went. Emmeline, who had chosen another path, watched them go and turned slowly to her books.
Emmeline fingered the press-cutting books and thought backward. She tried, not for the first time, to sum up what Humphrey’s coming had meant to the world — and to her. In the end it always came back to that, for Emmeline, though remarkable in many ways, retained one of the chief failings of the women of an earlier day and an earlier, more primitive education; she thought from the general to the particular.
Humphrey’s coming had meant many things to many people besides Anne and Thomas. To Perrier less than to most of them. To him the boy’s birth had been an event inasmuch as the parents were the first, outside his own tiny circle, to place themselves unreservedly in his hands. The Humphrey experiment was a complete success; a satisfactory experiment. It was the fruition of his years of labour. He would have dismissed it at that, but he had reckoned without the psychology of the child’s absurd father. Sir Thomas regarded himself, he proudly told the geneticist, as a pioneer. Since, in his schooldays, he had been taught that all pioneers were great and good men and fameworthy, he sought his due. He remembered the Pilgrim Fathers; he liked the phrase and had often used it in public speeches, and jestingly told Anne that he was, in a new and an amazing sense, a Pilgrim Father. Anne, having her heart’s desire, let him be. His first gesture was to press on the reluctant Perrier a vast sum of money. This would probably have been refused had Mme. Perrier not insisted on its acceptance.
Sir Thomas then invited all his available friends to a dinner party, the nearest possible approach to a banquet he could command, to celebrate the birth of his heir.
‘You see in me,’ he told them with post-prandial lack of self-consciousness, ‘a sceptic confused, who wishes to pay his small tribute to the greatest man in the world to-day. Unfortunately he is not here, by my side; you know what these great men are, shy as kittens, ridiculous. But think what this means. Here is a man who gratifies one of the oldest desires of mankind, a desire that has hitherto depended entirely on the will of God. In future, any one who wants can have a son and heir. The nations want men as never before in history; they will now have them. You will naturally understand that I am unable to give you details, but the thing is as simple as can be. It is the beginning of a new world.’
So he talked to his friends and they talked to their friends, and within five days the Press had discovered the Perrier baby. Reporters besieged Sir Thomas’s house in Grosvenor Square, London. He received them all with cordiality, to them all he gave answer: You will naturally understand that I am unable to give you details.’
Within four hours the newspaper correspondents from London and New York and a hundred more cities had flung themselves on Perrier’s doorstep. Perrier had not yet completed the paper he had been invited to read to the Parisian Society for the Promotion of Genetical Research. Biologists had, of course, been in touch with the experiments he had been carrying out during the past twenty years. His methods with regard to birds and mammals had been tested, adopted, and developed in Cambridge, in Moscow, and in Munich five years previously, and more recently in every centre of biological experiment. It was obvious to his fellow scientists that the next step must be their application and adaptation to the genetics of man. The results of the initial experiments practised by himself and his wife he had not felt justified in publishing. Only his friends, Eugene Delagrêve and Morton Gedding, had been informed of their results. It was Delagrêve, the president of the Parisian Genetical Society, whom he had first informed of the Humphrey experiment, and Delagrêve who, on its successful issue, had urged him to read a paper on the subject to his colleagues.
The fury of Perrier, as this loathed and despised notoriety arose before him, a giant wave that threatened to drown his calm and engulf his peace, knew no bounds. He expressed it with exceeding bitterness and accuracy in a letter to Sir Thomas, which also contained a cheque for the amount bestowed on him by the grateful millionaire, less five hundred francs. He then fled to his ancestral farm in Gascony, and endeavoured to complete his paper.
The coming of Humphrey, however, produced several more unforeseen reactions. Professor Perrier’s countrymen heaped academic honours upon him. The French Government, quick to perceive the stimulus this biological invention would give to the birth-rate, placed subsidies at his disposal, while eager bridegrooms sought knowledge and enlightenment. All nations of the European continent sent their biologists to investigate. The Soviet Union offered him laboratories and an unlimited supply of human material on which to continue his experiments. This offer he in due course accepted, in order to escape from the importunities of his would-be disciples.
In England and in the United States, however, the Perrier invention caused greater turmoil than elsewhere in the world. The British and the American nations, led by their clergy, their Press, and their publicists, advanced upon this biological phenomenon from their fortresses of mental turpitude. They gave tongue to their moral battle-cries, and hurled themselves upon that unfortunate who, in a moment of sweet self-delusion, had referred to himself as a pioneer. Those details he had been unable to give must, so argued these peoples in their accustomed manner, be of a revolting nature. Conception control was then still practised by the minority. ‘Nature’ was still the only geneticist mentioned in public and polite circles. A voluntary, personal control of their sexual mechanism by prospective parents could only be inadequately described as disgusting by people of whom a majority still believed in the Book of Genesis and refused to admit the existence of text-books of genetics.
Sir Thomas knew these people; he had once been of them. But he came of a stock whose chief quality was tenacity developed to a high degree. He stood by his wife with that loyalty that made him lovable despite his absurdities, and told his accusers that he stood by his principles. He was, moreover, a skilled strategist; his father had been a financial power behind a former Government, and Sir Thomas’s contributions to political funds had never fallen below the standard set in that respect by the late Sir Joseph, that first baronet of whom Emmeline had told with bitterness the story to her niece and nephew.
Scientific opinion was on Sir Thomas’s side; it regarded him as a freakish and comical, but nevertheless respectable instrument in its cause. One or two men of learning descended disdainfully into the arena of public debate and mentioned without emphasis that determination of sex in no way implied the end of the race. The question, as far as England was concerned, was finally settled by a letter, written to the leading journal of the day, diffidently inquiring whether in the Perrier invention might not have been found the final solution of the ‘Surplus Women’ problem, which threatened at that time to become increasingly vexatious. This brief communication of not more than eight lines was signed A. Mensch, and caused a number of questions to be asked in Parliament which drew from the Minister of Health the reply that the Government saw no reason to prohibit the instruction of the medical practitioners of the country in the application of the Perrier method.
Emmeline’s cuttings of that period were beginning to fade, despite their careful preservation. And now, looking back on them in the light of the subsequent astounding revolution, nothing seemed enduringly significant beyond the signature to that letter, A. Mensch.
Even in thinking from the general to the particular, she did not lose her gift of logical and coherent thought. She had voluntarily renounced motherhood in order to assist in the re-creation of the world foreseen and initiated by that man of stupendous vision. This was a fine world that she had helped to make, and she would not have done otherwise. She put books and cinematographic apparatus away, gave a momentary, loving thought to Christopher’s shining eyes, and went down to her lecture room.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF: “Radium Age” is Josh Glenn’s name for the nascent sf genre’s c. 1900–1935 era, a period which saw the discovery of radioactivity, i.e., the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. More info here.
SERIALIZED BY HILOBOOKS: James Parker’s Cocky the Fox | Annalee Newitz’s “The Great Oxygen Race” | Matthew Battles’s “Imago” | & many more original and reissued novels and stories.