MAN’S WORLD (9)
By:
September 6, 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.
THE VOYAGES OF CHRISTOPHER
Belief is not voluntary; it is not an action, but a passion of the mind.
SHELLEY IN A LETTER TO HIS FATHER.
I
Christopher’s airplane crept smoothly through the clouds until it had got above them. Even then they were still comparatively low, though they were well provided with oxygen in case he should feel inclined to soar. But at the moment they neither looked up nor down. Nicolette knew quite well the meaning of those casual invitations he flung her from time to time. ‘Coming up?’ more as statement than query, meant, from him to her, ‘I need you.’ It meant that he must talk to her, indulge in one of those increasing moods when the urge of speech was upon him, but when the matter for discussion was for her ears alone. She noted that he had carefully disconnected all apparatus which could instantly put them in touch with the rest of the world. He had cut them off.
There was a physical delight in flying with Christopher. His control of hands and feet was exquisite and precise. His control, through them, of the machine, appeared automatic. Inseparable as snail and shell seemed Christopher and the Makara when once he was ensconced in her.
Nicolette’s thoughts had been running on the loveliness of young things and small things. Moving through the air beside Christopher, she remembered a living carpet of scillas which she had tended in the spring, until it had broken into a stretch of unblemished blue, still and clear as the waters of an inland lake. She tried to hold on to the picture and the mood, for she knew quite well that in a moment or two both would vanish.
‘Do you ever feel, Christopher,’ she asked presently, looking straight ahead, ‘as if you were one of those nice, fat, stone jars, filled to the brim with cool wine?’
‘No, you nice, fat, little mother-pot,’ he smiled on her. ‘Your thoughts are as podgy as your body. I do know what you mean though. I can almost feel it now, with you here, and this’ — his hand gently patted the control beneath it — ‘under my hands. But there’s something all the time escaping me. There always has been. There’s something, not somebody, but something intangible, that’s always just beyond my seeking. I shall never know that sort of peace you mean till I’ve found it.’
After a moment he went on, ‘There’s somewhere I want to go to alone where it must be waiting for me.’
‘That’s poetry, Christopher, isn’t it?’ she said softly. ‘What all the artists, or mystics, are said to have felt, anyway. But what else are you going to do?’
‘Nothing,’ he answered, and his brows came together sharply. ‘Why should I? It’s all very well for Adrian to say I should know by now. How can I settle to do anything until I am something?’
‘But it is so easy for you to do things.’ Nicolette was always gentle with him. ‘It never seems necessary for you to learn anything.’
‘That’s my trouble. Action, don’t you understand, is merely a drug. People who can’t or won’t think are always doing things. There’s no adventure in action at all. It’s all in the mind. I’m going away to think. I’m going to walk. My walking and what I meet on my walks — will those matter?’
‘You have your music, your poetry — you have more chances than most of us to make things and to know the joy of creation.’
‘Not yet. For one thing, I’m immature. Sixteen years old — an infant. And there are things you cannot be expected quite to understand. You have the happy certainty that you can control yourself and your works. You can say “I too will something make, and joy in the making, though to-morrow it seem like the words of a dream remembered on waking.”‘
‘You’re a renegade’ — she admonished him with a smile that took the sting from her mockery. ‘What you really want is a spiritual gamble. You want to imagine for yourself a nice little old-fashioned heaven and hell, and then lead an attack on a golden throne where a fat Jewish god with a beard will sit ready to hurl you into pits or something like that, if you dare him.’
‘I do.’ The boy responded fiercely, so that she glanced at him in quick surprise and quickly away again. ‘I do. I want something like old-fashioned religion to throw myself into. What fun they must have got out of it. And the Christians, with their mortification of the flesh.’
‘Christopher!’
‘I don’t think it was so beastly as it sounds. Remember our people have translated the ideas of vice and wickedness to terms of ill-health and foolishness and ignorance. If I went and wrote out ninety-five theses and nailed them on a door, the investigators would just glance through them, see that I was a bit off balance, and order me some dope to put me in order. My only chance of fun — these I have to take you up in the air to tell you it things. I have I to switch off. Otherwise, it might be awkward.’
Suddenly he dived rather vindictively towards the earth beneath them. They found themselves on the edge of a rocky forlorn coast, tattered and gutted by waves which now rolled in false gentleness towards it. And, beneath the clear blue of the sky, under the full sun, it seemed to await them contentedly enough. For what he still wanted to say Christopher felt he needed the hot, rough contact of those rocks.
‘Hullo,’ he said abruptly, ‘here is the sea. Let’s go down and bathe. There’s a broad strip of sandy beach where we can land.’
They descended slowly.
They sat quietly for a little, with their backs against the same smooth hot rock, letting the sun suck the moisture from them. Hard to tell at a short distance which was the boy, which the girl. Each had peculiar grace; he in his hairless slimness, she in her rounder, sturdier curves.
At first they had frolicked and bathed and quite forgotten in their physical pleasure that they were growing so fast that adolescence with its queer pangs and momentous changes was upon them both. But Nicolette knew her Christopher, needed no further telling to know that her happy mood of the morning was dissipated. He was going to leave her quite soon.
‘And whom shall I share with?’ she pleaded.
‘Oh, I may be peevish and absurd, but what on earth do people, does any one else matter to me? Always we have been together; always. Now — you do not want me to be there any more.’
Christopher, watching her dig her toes into the sand, watching them stab little holes in it and wriggle impatiently out of them, suddenly realized the change in her. The round child face he had adored was thinning to a less soft oval. Her eyes had lost some of their infant candour and were now almost darkened by tears. She had lost her smile and gained expression. All that was happening could so clearly be read that it awed him by its uncompromising advance.
Tormented by his own ‘growing pains,’ he had never before detected the symptons in his little sister. Now they appeared plainly to him.
‘My love,’ he explained gently, ‘for both our sakes we must part for a while. All our lives we have mattered far more to one another than is usual. Nowadays family ties are so loose. They can hardly be tightened as much as we have tightened ours. If you depend on me as much as you have just revealed, there is all the more reason for our separation.’
‘It is rather a bluff for you to be so sensible suddenly,’ she answered reproachfully. ‘You want me as I want you, and you cannot deny it! Who understands you as I do? Who can comfort you as I can? Whom will you have if I agree to do as you say?’
‘I am not going to deny anything. Of course I have always needed you. But I intend to cut that need out now;’ he glanced at her and then added, ‘or rather cut it down.’ He had been lying on his back beside her, in his favourite attitude, hands clasped beneath his neck, knees crossed, gazing into the sky. He turned now, and leaning on his right elbow, his chin cupped in one hand, looked at her steadfastly. ‘I am going to ask something of you now, Nicolette, something of your love — and your understanding.’ He spoke very softly and shook a little. ‘I have known fear in these last months — real fear; terror of myself.’
She did not attempt to answer, but gazed at him. Fear had little place in the minds of those of her day and race. She had never known it herself, but knew its name as that of a nervous symptom. Yet this kind of fear which Christopher felt was not, apparently, like that. She read in his eyes that it was only part of some new and significant emotion.
‘Be patient with me,’ he went on, because what I am trying to explain to you I can hardly, as yet, explain to myself. You know, Nicolette, I have never known the sort of love most people feel nowadays. It is a comfortable kind, simply an easy benevolence, sometimes no more than tolerance. Ours is not an emotional race — our Leaders take care of that. But moderate affection is not in me. Even when I was quite small, I was often surprised at my coldness. Then I was proud; I thought I was more reasonable than any one. Two years ago, Adrian suddenly drove me into a fury. I had to run to get away before I lost my self-control. I just managed to, and then I walked miles, struggling with my rage. It kept coming on, almost choking me. At last it left me, worn out, in the middle of a field. I lay down under some trees and soon I went to sleep. I did not analyse my feelings when I woke up, but went back, jolly glad I had escaped before any one noticed anything, and feeling I had made a fool of myself. But after that sort of thing had happened once or twice, I began to suspect. And then you.’
‘Me? What of me?’ asked Nicolette.
‘Because you were the only creature in the world I loved. I loved you as I hated Adrian, passionately. I could not bear you to be keen on any one else, or anything we could not share. It grew on me with me. It was only through you and with you I could be really happy. Only you could satisfy my need to love and to be loved. Our mutual dependence has got too great,’ he finished abruptly.
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.