“But you’re robbing them all robbing them of their birthright.”
“You mustn’t give me cant, my dear. Did not your social system conspire to rob a woman of her “birthright” unless she married? You not only let her know it, but you socially rubbed it in: here, our Servitors and Workers do not know it, and they are not worried by a sense of inadequacy. Motherhood is the function of the Mothers, and understood as such.”
I shook my head. “Nevertheless, they are being robbed. A woman has a right to love”
For once she was a little impatient as she cut me short.
“You keep repeating to me the propaganda of your age. The love you talk about, my dear, existed in your little sheltered part of the world by polite and profitable convention. You were scarcely ever allowed to see its other face, unglamorised by Romance. You were never openly bought and sold, like livestock; you never had to sell yourself to the first corner in order to live; you did not happen to be one of the women who through the centuries have screamed in agony and suffered and died under invaders in a sacked city, nor were you ever flung into a pit of fire to be saved from them; you were never compelled to suttee upon your dead husband’s pyre; you did not have to spend your whole life imprisoned in a harem; you were never part of the cargo of a slaveship; you never retained your own life at the pleasure of your lord and master…
“That is the other side the age-long side. There is going to be no more of such things. They are finished at last. Dare you suggest that we should call them back, to suffer them all again?”
“But most of these things had already gone,” I protested. “The world was getting better.”
“Was it? ” she said. “I wonder if the women of Berlin thought so when it fell? Was it, indeed? Or was it on the edge of a new barbarism?”
“But if you can only get rid of evil by throwing out the good, too, what is there left?”
“There is a great deal. Man was only a means to an end. We needed him in order to have babies. The rest of his vitality accounted for all the misery in the world. We are a great deal better off without him.”
“So you really consider that you’ve improved on nature?” I suggested.
“Tcha!” she said, impatient with my tone. “Civilisation is improvement on nature. Would you want to live in a cave, and have most of your babies die in infancy?”
“There are some things, some fundamental things” I began, but she checked me, holding up her hand for silence.
Outside, the long shadows had crept across the lawns. In the evening quiet I could hear a choir of women’s voices singing, a little distance away. We listened for some minutes until the song was finished.
“Beautiful!” said the old lady. “Could angels themselves sing more sweetly! They sound happy enough, don’t they? Our own lovely children, two of my granddaughters are there among them. They are happy, and they’ve reason to be happy: they’re not growing up into a world where they must gamble on the goodwill of some man to keep them; they’ll never need to be servile before a lord and master; they’ll never stand in danger of rape and butchery, either. Listen to them!”
Another song had started and came lilting lightly to us out of the dusk.
“Why are you crying?” the old lady asked me as it ended.
“I know it’s stupid. I don’t really believe any of this is what it seems to be so I suppose I’m crying for all you would have lost if it were true,” I told her. “There should be lovers out there under the trees; they should be listening hand in hand to that song while they watch the moon rise. But there are no lovers now, there won’t be any more… ” I looked back at her.
“Did you ever read the lines: “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air?” Can’t you feel the forlornness of this world you’ve made? Do you really not understand?” I asked.
“I know you’ve only seen a little of us, and do you not begin to understand what it can be like when women are no longer forced to fight one another for the favours of men?” she countered.
We talked on while the dusk gave way to darkness and the lights of other houses started to twinkle through the trees. Her reading had been wide. It had given her even an affection for some periods of the past, but her approval of her own era was unshaken. She felt no aridity in it. Always it was my “conditioning” which prevented me from seeing that the golden age of woman had begun at last.
“You cling to too many myths,” she told me. “You speak of a full life, and your instance is some unfortunate woman hugging her chains in a suburban villa. Full life, fiddlesticks! But it was convenient for the traders that she could be made to think so. A truly full life would be an exceedingly short one, in any form of society.”
And soon…
At length, the little parlourmaid reappeared to say that my attendants were ready to leave when it should be convenient. But there was one thing I very much wanted to know before I left. I put the question to the old lady.
“Please tell me. How did it, how could it happen?”
“Simply by accident, my dear, though it was the kind of accident that was entirely the product of its time. A piece of research which showed unexpected, secondary results, that’s all.”
“But how?”
“Rather curiously, almost irrelevantly, you might say. Did you ever hear of a man called Perrigan?”
“Perrigan?” I repeated. “I don’t think so, it’s an uncommon name.”
“It became very commonly known indeed,” she assured me. “Doctor Perrigan was a biologist, and his concern was the extermination of rats, particularly the brown rat, which used to do a great deal of expensive damage.
“His approach to the problem was to find a disease which would attack them fatally. In order to produce it he took as his basis a virus infection often fatal to rabbits or, rather, a group of virus infections that were highly selective, and also unstable since they were highly liable to mutation. Indeed, there was so much variation in the strains that when infection of rabbits in Australia was tried, it was only at the sixth attempt that it was successful; all the earlier strains died out as the rabbits developed immunity. It was tried in other places, too, though with indifferent success until a still more effective strain was started in France, and ran though the rabbit population of Europe.
“Well, taking some of these viruses as a basis, Perrigan induced new mutations by irradiation and succeeded in producing a variant that would attack rats. That was not enough, however, and he continued his work until he had a strain that had enough of its ancestral selectivity to attack only the brown rat, and with great virulence.”
“In that way he settled the question of a longstanding pest, for there are no brown rats now. But something went amiss. It is still an open question whether the successful virus mutated again, or whether one of his earlier experimental viruses was accidentally liberated by escaped “carrier” rats, but that’s academic. The important thing is that somehow a strain capable of attacking human beings got loose, and that it was already widely disseminated before it was traced also, that once it was free, it spread with devastating speed; too fast for any effective steps to be taken to check it.