Herland (11 page)

“Oh, yes, birds and bugs,” Terry said, “but not among animals—have you
no
animals?”

“We have cats,” she said. “The father is not very useful.”

“Have you no cattle—sheep—horses?” I drew some rough outlines of these beasts and showed them to her.

“We had, in the very old days, these,” said Somel, and sketched with swift sure touches a sort of sheep or llama, “and these”—dogs, of two or three kinds, “and that”—pointing to my absurd but recognizable horse.

“What became of them?” asked Jeff.

“We do not want them anymore. They took up too much room—we need all our land to feed our people. It is such a little country, you know.”

“Whatever do you do without milk?” Terry demanded incredulously.

“Milk?
We have milk in abundance—our own.”

“But—but—I mean for cooking—for grown people,” Terry blundered, while they looked amazed and a shade displeased.

Jeff came to the rescue. “We keep cattle for their milk, as well as for their meat,” he explained. “Cow’s milk is a staple article of diet. There is a great milk industry—to collect and distribute it.”

Still they looked puzzled. I pointed to my outline of a cow. “The farmer milks the cow,” I said, and sketched a milk pail, the stool, and in pantomime showed the man milking. “Then it is carried to the city and distributed by milkmen—everybody has it at the door in the morning.”

“Has the cow no child?” asked Somel earnestly.

“Oh, yes, of course, a calf, that is.”

“Is there milk for the calf and you, too?”

It took some time to make clear to those three sweet-faced women the process which robs the cow of her calf, and the calf of its true food; and the talk led us into a further discussion of the meat business. They heard it out, looking very white, and presently begged to be excused.

It is no use for me to try to piece out this account with adventures. If the people who read it are not interested in these amazing women and their history, they will not be interested at all.

As for us—three young men to a whole landful of women—what could we do? We did get away, as described, and were peacefully brought back again without, as Terry complained, even the satisfaction of hitting anybody.

There were no adventures because there was nothing to fight. There were no wild beasts in the country and very few tame ones. Of these I might as well stop to describe the one common pet of the country. Cats, of course. But such cats!

What do you suppose these lady Burbanks had done with their cats? By the most prolonged and careful selection and exclusion they had developed a race of cats that did not sing! That’s a fact. The most those poor dumb brutes could do was to make a kind of squeak when they were hungry or wanted the door open, and, of course, to purr, and make the various mother-noises to their kittens.

Moreover, they had ceased to kill birds. They were rigorously bred to destroy mice and moles and all such enemies of the food supply; but the birds were numerous and safe.

While we were discussing birds, Terry asked them if they used feathers for their hats, and they seemed amused at the idea.
He made a few sketches of our women’s hats, with plumes and quills and those various tickling things that stick out so far; and they were eagerly interested, as at everything about our women.

As for them, they said they only wore hats for shade when working in the sun; and those were big light straw hats, something like those used in China and Japan. In cold weather they wore caps or hoods.

“But for decorative purposes—don’t you think they would be becoming?” pursued Terry, making as pretty a picture as he could of a lady with a plumed hat.

They by no means agreed to that, asking quite simply if the men wore the same kind. We hastened to assure her that they did not—drew for them our kind of headgear.

“And do no men wear feathers in their hats?”

“Only Indians,” Jeff explained. “Savages, you know.” And he sketched a war bonnet to show them.

“And soldiers,” I added, drawing a military hat with plumes.

They never expressed horror or disapproval, nor indeed much surprise—just a keen interest. And the notes they made!—miles of them!

But to return to our pussycats. We were a good deal impressed by this achievement in breeding, and when they questioned us—I can tell you we were well pumped for information—we told of what had been done for dogs and horses and cattle, but that there was no effort applied to cats, except for show purposes.

I wish I could represent the kind, quiet, steady, ingenious way they questioned us. It was not just curiosity—they weren’t a bit more curious about us than we were about them, if as much. But they were bent on understanding our kind of civilization, and their lines of interrogation would gradually surround us and drive us in till we found ourselves up against some admissions we did not want to make.

“Are all these breeds of dogs you have made useful?” they asked.

“Oh—useful! Why, the hunting dogs and watchdogs and sheepdogs are useful—and sleddogs of course!—and ratters, I suppose, but we don’t keep dogs for their
usefulness
. The dog is ‘the friend of man,’ we say—we love them.”

That they understood. “We love our cats that way. They surely are our friends, and helpers, too. You can see how intelligent and affectionate they are.”

It was a fact. I’d never seen such cats, except in a few rare instances. Big, handsome silky things, friendly with everyone and devotedly attached to their special owners.

“You must have a heartbreaking time drowning kittens,” we suggested. But they said, “Oh, no! You see we care for them as you do for your valuable cattle. The fathers are few compared to the mothers, just a few very fine ones in each town; they live quite happily in walled gardens and the houses of their friends. But they only have a mating season once a year.”

“Rather hard on Thomas, isn’t it?” suggested Terry.

“Oh, no—truly! You see, it is many centuries that we have been breeding the kind of cats we wanted. They are healthy and happy and friendly, as you see. How do you manage with your dogs? Do you keep them in pairs, or segregate the fathers, or what?”

Then we explained that—well, that it wasn’t a question of fathers exactly; that nobody wanted a—a mother dog; that, well, that practically all our dogs were males—there was only a very small percentage of females allowed to live.

Then Zava, observing Terry with her grave sweet smile, quoted back at him: “Rather hard on Thomas, isn’t it? Do they enjoy it—living without mates? Are your dogs as uniformly healthy and sweet-tempered as our cats?”

Jeff laughed, eyeing Terry mischievously. As a matter of fact we began to feel Jeff something of a traitor—he so often flopped over and took their side of things; also his medical knowledge gave him a different point of view somehow.

“I’m sorry to admit,” he told them, “that the dog, with us, is the most diseased of any animal—next to man. And as to temper—there are always some dogs who bite people—especially children.”

That was pure malice. You see, children were the—the
raison d’être
in this country. All our interlocutors sat up straight at once. They were still gentle, still restrained, but there was a note of deep amazement in their voices.

“Do we understand that you keep an animal—an unmated male animal—that bites children? About how many are there of them, please?”

“Thousands—in a large city,” said Jeff, “and nearly every family has one in the country.”

Terry broke in at this. “You must not imagine they are all dangerous—it’s not one in a hundred that ever bites anybody. Why, they are the best friends of the children—a boy doesn’t have half a chance that hasn’t a dog to play with!”

“And the girls?” asked Somel.

“Oh—girls—why they like them too,” he said, but his voice flatted a little. They always noticed little things like that, we found later.

Little by little they wrung from us the fact that the friend of man, in the city, was a prisoner; was taken out for his meager exercise on a leash; was liable not only to many diseases but to the one destroying horror of rabies; and, in many cases, for the safety of the citizens, had to go muzzled. Jeff maliciously added vivid instances he had known or read of injury and death from mad dogs.

They did not scold or fuss about it. Calm as judges, those women were. But they made notes; Moadine read them to us.

“Please tell me if I have the facts correct,” she said. “In your country—and in others too?”

“Yes,” we admitted, “in most civilized countries.”

“In most civilized countries a kind of animal is kept which is no longer useful—”

“They are a protection,” Terry insisted. “They bark if burglars try to get in.”

Then she made notes of “burglars” and went on: “because of the love which people bear to this animal.”

Zava interrupted here. “Is it the men or the women who love this animal so much?”

“Both!” insisted Terry.

“Equally?” she inquired.

And Jeff said, “Nonsense, Terry—you know men like dogs better than women do—as a whole.”

“Because they love it so much—especially men. This animal is kept shut up, or chained.”

“Why?” suddenly asked Somel. “We keep our father cats shut up because we do not want too much fathering; but they are not chained—they have large grounds to run in.”

“A valuable dog would be stolen if he was let loose,” I said. “We put collars on them, with the owner’s name, in case they do stray. Besides, they get into fights—a valuable dog might easily be killed by a bigger one.”

“I see,” she said. “They fight when they meet—is that common?” We admitted that it was.

“They are kept shut up, or chained.” She paused again, and asked, “Is not a dog fond of running? Are they not built for speed?” That we admitted, too, and Jeff, still malicious, enlightened them further.

“I’ve always thought it was a pathetic sight, both ways—to see a man or a woman taking a dog to walk—at the end of a string.”

“Have you bred them to be as neat in their habits as cats are?” was the next question. And when Jeff told them of the effect of dogs on sidewalk merchandise and the streets generally, they found it hard to believe.

You see, their country was as neat as a Dutch kitchen, and as to sanitation—but I might as well start in now with as much as I can remember of the history of this amazing country before further description.

And I’ll summarize here a bit as to our opportunities for learning it. I will not try to repeat the careful, detailed account I lost; I’ll just say that we were kept in that fortress a good six months all told, and after that, three in a pleasant enough city where—to Terry’s infinite disgust—there were only “Colonels” and little children—no young women whatever. Then we were under surveillance for three more—always with a tutor or a guard or both. But those months were pleasant because we were really getting acquainted with the girls. That was a chapter!—or will be—I will try to do justice to it.

We learned their language pretty thoroughly—had to; and they learned ours much more quickly and used it to hasten our own studies.

Jeff, who was never without reading matter of some sort, had two little books with him, a novel and a little anthology of verse; and I had one of those pocket encyclopedias—a fat little thing,
bursting with facts. These were used in our education—and theirs. Then as soon as we were up to it, they furnished us with plenty of their own books, and I went in for the history part—I wanted to understand the genesis of this miracle of theirs.

And this is what happened, according to their records:

As to geography—at about the time of the Christian era this land had a free passage to the sea. I’m not saying where, for good reasons. But there was a fairly easy pass through that wall of mountains behind us, and there is no doubt in my mind that these people were of Aryan stock, and were once in contact with the best civilization of the old world. They were “white,” but somewhat darker than our northern races because of their constant exposure to sun and air.

The country was far larger then, including much land beyond the pass, and a strip of coast. They had ships, commerce, an army, a king—for at that time they were what they so calmly called us—a bi-sexual race.

What happened to them first was merely a succession of historic misfortunes such as have befallen other nations often enough. They were decimated by war, driven up from their coastline till finally the reduced population, with many of the men killed in battle, occupied this hinterland, and defended it for years, in the mountain passes. Where it was open to any possible attack from below they strengthened the natural defenses so that it became unscalably secure, as we found it.

They were a polygamous people, and a slave-holding people, like all of their time; and during the generation or two of this struggle to defend their mountain home they built the fortresses, such as the one we were held in, and other of their oldest buildings, some still in use. Nothing but earthquakes could destroy such architecture—huge solid blocks, holding by their own weight. They must have had efficient workmen and enough of them in those days.

They made a brave fight for their existence, but no nation can stand up against what the steamship companies call “an act of God.” While the whole fighting force was doing its best to defend their mountain pathway, there occurred a volcanic outburst, with some local tremors, and the result was the complete filling up of the pass—their only outlet. Instead of a passage, a new ridge, sheer and high, stood between them and the sea; they were walled in, and beneath that wall lay their whole little army. Very
few men were left alive, save the slaves; and these now seized their opportunity, rose in revolt, killed their remaining masters even to the youngest boy, killed the old women too, and the mothers, intending to take possession of the country with the remaining young women and girls.

But this succession of misfortunes was too much for those infuriated virgins. There were many of them, and but few of these would-be masters, so the young women, instead of submitting, rose in sheer desperation and slew their brutal conquerors.