MAN’S WORLD (14)
By:
October 7, 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.
NO NEW GODS FOR OLD
(cont.)
It was then that, unconsciously changing his position as the moss beneath his right thigh pricked a little too harshly, he saw the owner of the other voice, saw a woman leaning against the smooth wet rock, saw her body glisten as the spray sparkled on it like a garment of faery diamonds. His song then turned as his body had turned; he directed the stream of it straight at her, then, as she did not move, but smiled slowly at him, it surged into a great triumphant song of welcome. Now she sent her voice to answer his, together their notes soared and swooped, joined, recoiled, joined again; it seemed to Christopher that a cloud had come before the sunset, that every other sound was stilled as the woods listened to such music as had never echoed there since the beginning. He feared to lose breath with the violence of his emotion, when, the duet having risen to its almost unendurable climax, she suddenly, with one last rousing call, stretched serpentine arms above her head and dived into the dark pool below her.
Icy water smacked against Christopher’s breast as, panting, he dived in after her. There in the centre they met. Just above the pines, in a sky darkly blue, the first ironic stars began to twinkle.
‘Now you were the sort of person they worshipped once,’ said Christopher slowly, gazing at Lois. The assault of her beauty on his vision was becoming less irresistible. Its power was waning. Soon, even his senses would once again be free.
She knew it. Possibly a certain malice tinted her words as she answered, no less slowly, ‘And so were you.’
Matters were not progressing as she wished, as she had planned. During the past six weeks they had learned to know one another, and now the barrier between them had become so obvious that it could no longer be ignored.
‘Why,’ he challenged, assuming the offensive in order to protect himself, ‘did you seek me out?’
‘Why not, beautiful one?’ she repeated in mockery. ‘You have only to look at yourself if you want to know.’
‘Oh, that!’ Christopher was impatient of her praise. ‘I should have thought you were satiated by now with mere beauty.’
Lois responded quickly to the taunt.
‘Who are you to know or to understand me, ridiculous boy? You have not even a glimmer of knowledge about yourself. And how much do you expect me to teach you, with your absurd air of self-sufficiency?’
‘But I do not know why that should annoy you. Why reproach me? All that a woman can have of me, you have had; all a woman could give me, you have given. I tell you that once you would have been hailed as a goddess. I mean it. Don’t even my compliments satisfy you?’
‘No more than the compliments of Adonis would have satisfied Venus. Look here — at me!’ She moved closer to him, wound her arms around his neck, held his head in her palms and forced his eyes to meet hers. Now then! Can’t you see you give me a sense of failure? A sense that infuriates me. This has never happened to me before. Whatever I do you remain unattainable. There is something in you I cannot reach; you have consistently withheld what I really wanted. Give it me.’
‘I can’t,’ he said sullenly, turning away, and she released him. ‘Do understand. It is nothing to do with you at all.’ She had succeeded in driving him towards that which he wished to evade. He was on the defensive. Seeing him so she became compassionate. My dear, be careful,’ she said. ‘You are so young, but I foresee serious troubles for you. Whatever more you want it would be wiser for you to forget. You must stay with me for a little while, if only because of your art. I advise you to stay with me. If that, at least, satisfies you, cling to it.’
‘There, anyway, we are in harmony,’ he assented, and took her hand and pressed it affectionately. ‘I have been unfair,’ he went on after a moment. ‘I did not tell you before, because I wanted you to have your way of me, but I will tell you now. When you came on me so suddenly, my mind was very busy. I was trying to follow out something, a thought, which matters to me above everything. Perhaps it was unfortunate that I followed you. But you offered me an exquisite novelty. I thought at I first you were going to be a stimulant — the kind I had never tried before. But you became a narcotic. Oh, Lois,’ he murmured sadly, ‘it was no use. I don’t want anything — anything you have to give.’
‘Do you really mean that I was the first?’ Her desire for him was only increased by this curious confession, but she held it in check. She was savouring a new, delightful sensation.
‘Absolutely,’ Christopher answered candidly, ‘and — the last.’
‘No other woman at all?’ she pursued, unbelieving.
‘No,’ he emphasized almost roughly. ‘Do understand — I am trying to explain. No woman — nor any one. No emotion of that kind at all. I told you — I was after something quite different. But that I cannot explain. All I can tell you I’ll repeat. Those experiences you have given me, the nearest to the sublime, I suppose, most people would get (for you are a goddess among women), to me they mean nothing pleasurable; on the whole, rather distasteful.’
There was silence for a moment. For she was beginning to understand, and all the malice dropped from her, leaving only pity.
‘What do you think is the reason for it?’ she demanded quietly then. How do you expect to be an artist, missing all that?’
‘Art is not the important thing with me,’ he answered at once, decisively — ‘except as an expression of something else. Myself I have not cared how or why I am as I am. I don’t see that it matters. Things that to other people (not only this, but lots of things) are so important, don’t matter to me. I am looking for something above and beyond it all and that is all I can tell you.’
‘It seems to me, dear boy,’ she answered, a trifle impatiently, ‘you are looking for the Absolute. I should have thought that had by now been proved a futile research.’
‘What I am looking for, or what I shall find, is my own affair. Please, do leave me to it.’
‘I could say many things — but I won’t. I will only ask that you stay with me a little longer. However you think about your music you do take it sufficiently seriously to make me want you. If I consent to the rest — won’t you, for your sake and for mine, stay?’
‘I want to go back to Nucleus now; I want to see my little sister. She is going to be mated soon. But afterwards, for a short time anyway, I will come back to you.’
‘Ah, I remember her. Now what do you feel for her?’
‘Something I never have felt nor ever shall feel, for any other woman in the world; you see, she alone is a very part of me, of my own inner life. You need not mind; it is all so different from ordinary feelings, that; something I cannot explain; friendship, love, none of those words are adequate — do you want me to go on…?’
‘No. It does not interest me so much that you need torture yourself to explain. But if she is to be mated soon,’ Lois smiled at him, and he could make little of her look — ‘if that is so, I do not doubt that you will return to me.’
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.