MAN’S WORLD (3)
By:
July 23, 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.
When you’re married I wish you joy,
First a girl, and then a boy.
— ‘POOR JENNY LIES A-WEEPING.’
Christopher and Nicolette sat at their Aunt Emmeline’s feet. She liked to have them there. Her procreative instincts had been sublimated. Now, in early middle age, their entire gratification came from the contemplation of eager, upturned child faces. Child minds to mould, to direct, to develop — she loved them.
She knew, as she watched these two, that their curiosity reached out to her this evening hungrily. She revelled in the anticipation of satisfying it. She loved Christopher especially, as all virgins did. And she knew that to-day, on his seventh birthday, the tale she was about to unfold as her gift to him would draw him still closer to her.
From the moment he had entered, Christopher’s blue eyes, which sometimes were dulled by dreams but now shone brightly and exploringly, had tracked her every gesture. While all the preliminary ritual had taken place he had watched, silent and observing. Nicolette, waiting more passively, taking her cue, as she invariably did, from her brother, kept closely by his side; Nicolette being only a small girl. She was still chubby; her short brown curls and the curves of her fat cheeks retained their infantile imprint.
They all three wore a short one-piece garment, of a synthetic silky material, and nothing else but sandals, to protect the soles of their feet. The boy’s frock of blue was cunningly patterned in reds and yellows; the baby girl’s was white, primrose-bordered; the grey of their aunt’s dress matched the tone of her abundant hair.
The room, though airy and comfortably furnished, was cell-like in its simplicity, chiefly because it contained no pictures, whilst the broad ledge reserved for implements and small pieces of sculpture had only one occupant, a stone owl; and eyes which might have gazed at it out of the past would have had to look hard in order to perceive that it was an owl.
Christopher spoke first, having settled himself satisfactorily on the floor, with Nicolette close beside him.
‘We are quite ready, Emmeline. Have you all you want?’
‘I think so, now.’
‘Oh, I am glad. Now listen, Nicolette; you must remember everything. Do you remember? Who was Humphrey?’
‘The baby they made a boy,’ said Nicolette gravely, like they make you and me.’
‘Do you remember, Christopher? Emmeline asked. ‘Tell me, before I continue, what I explained last time.’
‘Before Humphrey came,’ began Christopher reflectively, ‘the world was very different from what it is now. In those days hardly any important things, like birth and death, were talked about to children. Sometimes they wanted to know, like we do, but all they were told about the beginning and end of their bodies was that they would know later. All that was unpleasant. It hurt mothers to have their children born. People were untaught, so they suffered fear.’
‘What is “fear”?’ interrupted Nicolette.
‘What happens to people who won’t ask questions,’ he answered. ‘People who won’t be interested in their own bodies. There are none like that now, but nearly all were like it then. In some places there were too many children, in others not enough, and nearly everywhere a lot were hungry and unhappy and suffered.’
‘What is “suffered”?’ Nicolette asked again.
‘They could not do anything for themselves. They just let things happen to them. Like those seedlings you planted, they all needed a lot of light and air and food, and they could not get them because they were all crowded up together. No one stopped planting or weeded out the weak ones, so they just went on growing — badly, until they were killed somehow. That’s all, Emmeline.’
‘No, you have forgotten something, Christopher.’
‘Yes. Wait.’ Thought narrowed the blue eyes. ‘There were not enough boys. There were too many girls. Until Professor Perrier made Humphrey. Now, Emmeline, tell us how he did it.’
‘It began before Humphrey came,’ she took up his tale. ‘They had already managed to arrange how many children should be born each year in each country. The war-makers would not have even that at first, but after a while the women paid no attention to them. Several geneticists — that’s a long word, but Nicolette need not remember it — had been trying to find out why animals and humans were born either males or females. They began to pair insects, birds, and small mammals in their own workshops. Bit by bit they understood how sex worked. They found out how it was that queen bees laid eggs which later developed into just the sort of bees the hive needed. Professor Perrier bred hundreds of animals, until it became clear what had to be done. Then he did it. And many of these things you will do also, Christopher, if you want to, later on.’
‘I have done some already,’ he answered eagerly. ‘Anatomy on mice and frogs. Nicolette has been looking after them for me, but the other day she overfed Stella, the best one of all. Stella may have to be killed now.’
‘Give her to me,’ pleaded Nicolette, and her brown eyes grew rounder than ever with entreaty. ‘I do like Stella. I’ll be ever so careful with the others if you will.’
‘It’s no use asking me. I must do other things now. I cannot run so fast as you, Nicolette, nor make things with my hands so well. I must learn to.’
‘I run faster than all the other children. You cannot help it, darling Christopher,’ Nicolette hastened to console.
‘I do not want to go fast,’ he answered quietly. ‘I want to go my own way. I shall, too. I want to be like Humphrey, new and wonderful. How wonderful was Humphrey, Emmeline?’
‘Look, and you shall see.’ She pressed a button at her side, the light faded out, the projector whirred, the first film appeared on the untinted wall before them.
‘Of course this is a very old one, taken long ago,’ Emmeline explained to the entranced children. ‘It is all flat; there are no colours and no sounds, for they did not know how to reproduce them then.’
There appeared a man and a woman in weird clothes. All of them that emerged clearly were their faces and their hands. Their heads were covered with some ugly and curious things — ‘hats,’ — their bodies were funnelled in heavy, uncouth garments; their feet, bottled up in what the children knew were called boots, were invisible.
‘They must have been uncomfortable!’ exclaimed Christopher. ‘However could they have borne those things? ‘
‘In their day — the early twentieth century — no one could have lived without them. Only towards the middle of it those things began to be discarded in parts of the world.’
‘But they never lived as long as we do,’ he objected.
‘No, they did not know how.’
The woman carried a swathed and veiled bundle, a mass of white draperies. Both parents smiled fatuous smiles of pride and pleasure.
‘Where is Humphrey?’ asked Nicolette impatiently.
‘In the arms of his mother.’
‘That bundle, Nicolette. Can we see his face, Emmeline?’
A caption appeared on the wall. ‘The World Famous Perrier Baby,’ read the children. Then came a large picture of the mite, lying naked on a cushioned table. Its mouth gaped hungrily, dimpled fists beat against the greedy infant lips.
‘The darling!’ cried Nicolette.
‘Just like any other.’ Christopher’s disappointment was revealed in his eyes and in his voice.
‘That was the marvel of it,’ said Emmeline quietly, smiling a little at him. ‘Just like any other, and yet the herald of a revolution.’
‘Why did they want this boy so badly?’ asked Christopher, as more pictures of the child passed before them, causing Nicolette to take her brother’s arm and snuggle closer to him in her delight. Humphrey year by year; Humphrey with a little girl, his senior, guiding his first steps with maternal care.
‘She’s like you, Emmeline!’ cried Nicolette.
‘No, like Antonia — like our mother,’ contradicted Christopher.
‘You may both be correct. She and Humphrey were ancestors of ours. We are their descendants, and therefore perhaps resemble them.’
The children’s chatter ceased as a grave, kindly, bearded man peered at them from the screen, smiled, bowed, and walked out of the camera’s focus. ‘Perrier,’ said Emmeline, with reverence in her voice.
‘Those funny things — he’s wearing them too,’ Nicolette objected.
‘Everybody was obliged to dress like that,’ her brother explained. ‘They thought that if they were shut up in all those things nobody could see the diseases of their bodies and their minds. They tried to cover everything up, as ostriches cover their heads.’
‘Well,’ said Emmeline, and her voice held a shade of mutiny, ‘though your father insists on complete frankness, I know, it may sometimes be unwise.’
‘But those were ugly and unnatural in their living, and full of fear and hatred.’ Christopher repeated his history lesson loyally.
‘And they all stayed where they were put,’ chimed in Nicolette. ‘We go where we like. If they did not like a place they stayed there all the same. I wouldn’t — would you, Christopher?’
‘Never. And they frightened the children with gods and bogeys. They said they were in the sky or under the ground. But tell us, Emmeline,’ Christopher always returned to his points like a fox-terrier to a rat-hole, ‘why did Humphrey’s people want a boy so much? The girl was nice. Did they not like girls?’
‘They wanted a son who when they were dead would have their title — a special kind of name.’
‘But they had her.’
‘Girls were not always allowed to take titles. And their ancestor had gone to a lot of expense to get it.’
‘To get just a name? Was it a splendid name like ——’ Christopher searched and presently found, ‘like the names in that play the Players gave us? “Commander of the Faithful,” “Peacock of the World!” Lovely names!’
‘No, not a bit like that. It was just “Sir,” “Sir Joseph Dobson.” But it was valuable to him. It showed that he had been more successful, as they called it, than most of the others. He wanted it to go on and So did his children.’
‘What was ex-pense?’ asked Nicolette, pronouncing the new word cautiously.
‘It meant a lot of things. Working, for instance, without ever playing. Then the two were not the same thing, but quite different. To this man and other people it meant spending long hours in a horrible place called a Factory. He had to see that lots of men and women kept it going for him, and he kept it going for what was called the Government. He and his friends had to make it impossible for any one to get enough of anything unless they worked all the time at what they were told to do, not what they really enjoyed. Those people didn’t know how to look at a picture, or at the stars, or how to listen to music. He could only think of money, for without it he could get nothing.’
‘Do you mean coins?’ The children were subdued, perplexed, and vaguely sorry, as Emmeline’s voice rose above them.
‘I cannot tell you all I mean, Christopher. You, my darlings, need never know fear nor greed. Your day shall never breed such a people, nor such a life. And of your day the vision of a different man was the beginning. That man of whom you, Christopher, already know something.’
‘Was Humphrey really the first of the new babies?’ asked Nicolette, whose mind had wandered back to its favourite maternal musings.
‘Not quite the first, dear. There were a lot of animal babies, and then Perrier and his mate had a baby this way themselves. And there were one or two others. But in those days there were very few people who would try a new experiment themselves.’
‘No Stalwarts?’ asked Christopher in surprise.
‘No. They were called soldiers, but they were kept to fight other soldiers, not disease or ignorance. There was no Gay Company. But Humphrey’s father, Sir Thomas, the son of Sir Joseph, owned a large estate, on which many cattle and pigs were bred.’
‘Like we have.’
‘Not quite. You see, they belonged entirely to him and to no one else; but he did not look after them. He also owned two libraries at which he never looked, and dozens of ships on which he never sailed, and sugar andcoffee plantations which he never visited. He left his herds in the care of a breeder. Now this man knew a little more about bodies than most men of his time. He liked to learn to do new things. So he began copying some of the experiments on a few animals.’
‘One day, Sir Thomas and his mate, or wife as she was called, went to see the farm. This man, Simon, who did not know how they wanted a boy, began telling them what he had been doing. Sir Thomas, who never listened to what any one said except people he was afraid of, kept nodding his head and saying: ‘Splendid! Splendid!’
Christopher laughed gaily. He could see, inside him as he used to explain, a picture of Sir Thomas’s fat red face wagging between the wings of a stiff collar, the sort those people had worn, and the points of it digging into his fat chin at each nod. He mimicked the nodding and said ‘Splendid!’ several times in as guttural and deep a voice as he could command. This set Nicolette giggling and nodding in imitation, until she, who had been growing drowsy, nodded herself to sleep.
Emmeline wished to take her in her arms.
‘Oh don’t bother. Leave her,’ begged Christopher. ‘The cushions are nice and soft.’ Emmeline’s curves were angular, and he knew that Nicolette had once called her aunt’s arms ‘crackly.’ He placed another cushion beneath the child’s head and said tactfully: ‘She is ever so heavy now, and would tire you.’
Emmeline leaned back in her chair and sighed. She knew that Christopher was precociously wise. She began to smoke, and looking at the boy’s fair face said, ‘You are remarkably like Anne, Christopher.’
‘Was she a nodder, too?’ he asked with a chuckle.
‘She was a fine woman. Brave and keen and intelligent. Fair, like you are, and fearless. Women were mostly braver than men, but not many were as Anne was. She listened carefully to Simon. And though she could not understand all he explained she began to think. If she had been fearful this would have passed her by, and there would have been no Humphrey. When she got home, she sent for all the books she could get about Perrier, and set to study them. After two weeks she wrote to him. Several letters passed between them, and then, when she had come to her decision, she told Sir Thomas what she proposed they should do. He was extremely angry at first. He was as ignorant as all of his kind. He believed in what he called “Nature.”
‘I suppose he was afraid?’
‘Of course he was. Of the idea — of all ideas. But he pretended to be afraid for Anne. She just smiled and let him talk. After a long time, when he could not think of anything more to say, and was about to go to sleep, Anne said softly: “We will call him Humphrey.” Then, because he really loved her, and longed almost as much as she longed, he turned to her and kissed her good-night. So Anne knew she would have her boy.’
‘Oh, go on; go on quickly, dear Emmeline,’ whispered Christopher.
‘That is all really,’ she answered, smiling her dry smile at the eager, upturned face. ‘They went to see Perrier, and even Sir Thomas did not turn back. It was very painful to him when Perrier explained these matters of sex. You see, he could not rid himself of what he thought were his “ideas” on this subject, but which were really unclean mental habits. He had been educated to be interested in the inside of a motor-car, but his own inside he dared not think about. Luckily Anne made it easy for him; she knew that once Humphrey had arrived he would regain what he called his “self-respect.”‘
‘It must have been funny! To respect yourself for not knowing anything. And when Humphrey came ——’
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.