“It will not be easy; old prejudices die hard. The simple rely on a bolstering mass of maxim and precept; so do the timid; so do the mentally lazy-and so do all of us, more than we imagine. Now that the organization has gone, our ready reckoners for conduct within it no longer Live the right answers. We must have the moral courage to think and to plan for ourselves.”
He paused to survey his audience thoughtfully. Then he said:
“There is one thing to be made quite clear to you before you decide to join our community. It is that those of us who start on this task will all have our parts to play. The men must work-the women must have babies. Unless you can agree to that, there can be no place for you in our community.”
After an interval of dead silence, he added:
“We can afford to support a limited number of women who cannot see, because they will have babies who can see. We cannot afford to support men who cannot see. In our new world, then, babies become very much more important than husbands.”
For some seconds after he stopped speaking, silence continued, then isolated murmurs grew quickly into a general buzz.
I looked at Josella. To my astonishment, she was grinning impishly.
“What do you find funny about this?” I asked a trifle shortly.
“People’s expressions mostly,” she replied.
I had to admit it as a reason. I looked round the place, and then across at Michael. His eyes were moving from one section to another of the audience as he tried to sum up the reaction.
“Michael’s looking a bit anxious,” I observed.
“He should worry,” said Josella. “If Brigham Young could bring it off in the middle of the nineteenth century, this ought to be a pushover.”
“What a crude young woman you are at times,” I said. “Were you in on this before?”
“Not exactly, but I’m not quite dumb, you know. Besides, while you were away someone drove in a bus with most of these blind girls on board. They all came from some institution. I said to myself, why collect them from there when you could gather up thousands in a few streets round here?
The answer obviously was that (a) being blind before this happened, they had been trained to do work of some kind, and (b) they were all girls. The deduction wasn’t terribly difficult.”
“H’m,” I said. “Depends on one’s outlook, I suppose. I must say, it wouldn’t have struck me. Do you-”
“Sh-sh,” she told me as a quietness came over the hail. A tail, dark, purposeful-looking, youngish woman had risen. While she waited, she appeared to have a mouth not made to open, but later it did.
“Are we to understand,” she inquired, using a kind of carbon-steel voice, “are we to understand that the last speaker is advocating free love?” And she sat down, with spine-jarring decision.
Dr. Vorless smoothed back his hair as he regarded her.
“I think the questioner must be aware that I never mentioned love, free, bought, or bartered. Will she please make her question clearer?”
The woman stood up again.
“I think the speaker understood me. I am asking if he suggests the abolition of the marriage law?”
“The laws we knew have been abolished by circumstances. It now falls to us to make laws suitable to the conditions, and to enforce them if necessary.”
“There is still God’s law, and the law of decency.”
“Madam. Solomon had three hundred-or was it five hundred?-wives, and God did not apparently hold them against him. A Mohammedan preserves rigid respectability with three wives. These are matters of local custom. Just what our laws in these matters, and in others, will be is for us all to decide later for the greatest benefit of the community.
“This committee, after discussion, has decided that if we are to build a new state of things and avoid a relapse into barbarism-which is an appreciable danger-we must have certain undertakings from those who wish to join us.
“Not one of us is going to recapture the conditions we have lost. What we offer is a busy life in the best conditions we can contrive, and the happiness which will come of achievement against odds. In return we ask willingness and fruitfulness. There is no compulsion. The choice is yours. Those to whom our offer does not appeal are at perfect liberty to go elsewhere and start a separate community on such lines as they prefer.
“But I would ask you to consider very carefully whether or not you do hold a warrant from God to deprive any woman of the happiness of carrying out her natural functions.”
The discussion which followed was a rambling affair, descending frequently to points of detail and hypothesis on which there could as yet be no answers. But there was no move to cut it short. The longer it went on, the less strangeness the idea would have.
Josella and I moved over to the table where Nurse Berr had set up her paraphernalia. We took several shots in our arms and then sat down again to listen to the wrangling.
“How many of them will decide to come, do you think?” I asked her.
She glanced round.
“Nearly all of them-by the morning,” she told me.
I felt doubtful. There was a lot of objecting and questioning going on. Josella said:
“If you were a woman who was going to spend an hour or two before you went to sleep tonight considering whether you would choose babies and an organization to look after you or adherence to a principle which might quite likely mean no babies and no one to look after you, you’d not really be very doubtful, you know. And after all, most women want babies anyway-the husband’s just what Dr. Vorless might call the local means to the end.”
“That’s rather cynical of you.”
“If you really think that’s cynical, you must be a very sentimental character. I’m talking about real women, not those in the world.”
“Oh,” I said.
She sat pensively awhile, and gradually acquired a frown. At last she said;
“The thing that worries me is how many will they expect? I like babies, all right, but there are limits.”
After the debate had gone on raggedly for an hour or so it was wound up. Michael asked that the names of all those willing to join in his plan should be left in his office by ten o’clock the next morning. The Colonel requested all who could drive a truck to report to him by 700 hours, and the meeting broke up.
Josella and I wandered out of doors. The evening was mild. The light on the tower was again stabbing hopefully into the sky. The moon had just risen clear of the museum roof. We found a low wall and sat on it, looking into the shadows of the Square garden and listening to the faint sound of the wind in the branches of the trees there. We smoked a cigarette each almost in silence. When I reached the end of mine I threw it away and drew a breath.
“Josella,” I said.
“M’m?” she replied, scarcely emerging from her thoughts. Josella,” I said again. “Er-those babies. I’d-er-I’d be sort of terribly proud and happy if they could be mine as well as yours.”
She sat quite still for a moment, saying nothing. Then she turned her head. The moonlight was glinting on her fair hair, but her face and eyes were in shadow. I waited, with a hammered and slightly sick feeling inside me. She said, with surprising calm:
“Thank you, Bill dear. I think I would too.”
I sighed. The hammering did not ease up much, and I saw that my hand was trembling as it reached for, hers. I didn’t have any words, for the moment. Josella, however, did. She said:
“But it isn’t quite as easy as that now.”
I was jolted.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
She said consideringly: “I think that if I were those people in there”-she nodded in the direction of the tower-“I think that I should make a rule. I should divide us up into lots. I should say every man who marries a sighted girl must take two blind girls as well. I’m pretty sure that’s what I should do.”
I stared at her face in the shadow.
“You don’t mean that,” I protested. “I’m afraid I do, Bill.”
“But look here
“Don’t you think they may have some idea like that in P their minds-from what they’ve been saying?”
“Not unlikely,” I conceded. “But if they make the rule, that’s one thing. I don’t see-”
“You mean you don’t love me enough to take on two other women as well?”
I swallowed. I also objected:
“Look here. This is all crazy. It’s unnatural. What you’re suggesting
She put up a hand to stop me.