necessary no longer. All that has changed and changes still very
swiftly. Your future, Rachel, AS WOMEN, is a diminishing future.'
'Karenin?' asked Rachel, 'do you mean that women are to become
men?'
'Men and women have to become human beings.'
'You would abolish women? But, Karenin, listen! There is more
than sex in this. Apart from sex we are different from you. We
take up life differently. Forget we are-females, Karenin, and
still we are a different sort of human being with a different
use. In some things we are amazingly secondary. Here am I in
this place because of my trick of management, and Edith is here
because of her patient, subtle hands. That does not alter the
fact that nearly the whole body of science is man made; that does
not alter the fact that men do so predominatingly make history,
that you could nearly write a complete history of the world
without mentioning a woman's name. And on the other hand we have
a gift of devotion, of inspiration, a distinctive power for truly
loving beautiful things, a care for life and a peculiar keen
close eye for behaviour. You know men are blind beside us in
these last matters. You know they are restless-and fitful. We
have a steadfastness. We may never draw the broad outlines nor
discover the new paths, but in the future isn't there a
confirming and sustaining and supplying role for us? As
important, perhaps, as yours? Equally important. We hold the
world up, Karenin, though you may have raised it.'
'You know very well, Rachel, that I believe as you believe. Iam
not thinking of the abolition of woman. But I do want to
abolish-the heroine, the sexual heroine. I want to abolish the
woman whose support is jealousy and whose gift possession. I
want to abolish the woman who can be won as a prize or locked up
as a delicious treasure. And away down there the heroine flares
like a divinity.'
'In America,' said Edwards, 'men are fighting duels over the
praises of women and holding tournaments before Queens of
Beauty.'
'I saw a beautiful girl in Lahore,' said Kahn, 'she sat under a
golden canopy like a goddess, and three fine men, armed and
dressed like the ancient paintings, sat on steps below her to
show their devotion. And they wanted only her permission to fight
for her.'
'That is the men's doing,' said Edith Haydon.
'I SAID,' cried Edwards, 'that man's imagination was more
specialised for sex than the whole being of woman. What woman
would do a thing like that? Women do but submit to it or take
advantage of it.'
'There is no evil between men and women that is not a common
evil,' said Karenin. 'It is you poets, Kahn, with your love
songs which turn the sweet fellowship of comrades into this
woman-centred excitement. But there is something in women, in
many women, which responds to these provocations; they succumb to
a peculiarly self-cultivating egotism. They become the subjects
of their own artistry. They develop and elaborate themselves as
scarcely any man would ever do. They LOOK for golden canopies.
And even when they seem to react against that, they may do it
still. I have been reading in the old papers of the movements to
emancipate women that were going on before the discovery of
atomic force. These things which began with a desire to escape
from the limitations and servitude of sex, ended in an inflamed
assertion of sex, and women more heroines than ever. Helen of
Holloway was at last as big a nuisance in her way as Helen of
Troy, and so long as you think of yourselves as women'-he held
out a finger at Rachel and smiled gently-'instead of thinking of
yourselves as intelligent beings, you will be in danger
of-Helenism. To think of yourselves as women is to think of
yourselves in relation to men. You can't escape that
consequence. You have to learn to think of yourselves-for our
sakes and your own sakes-in relation to the sun and stars. You
have to cease to be our adventure, Rachel, and come with us upon
our adventures…' He waved his hand towards the dark sky above
the mountain crests.
Section 8
'These questions are the next questions to which research will
bring us answers,' said Karenin. 'While we sit here and talk
idly and inexactly of what is needed and what may be, there are
hundreds of keen-witted men and women who are working these
things out, dispassionately and certainly, for the love of
knowledge. The next sciences to yield great harvests now will be
psychology and neural physiology. These perplexities of the
situation between man and woman and the trouble with the
obstinacy of egotism, these are temporary troubles, the issue of
our own times. Suddenly all these differences that seem so fixed
will dissolve, all these incompatibles will run together, and we
shall go on to mould our bodies and our bodily feelings and
personal reactions as boldly as we begin now to carve mountains
and set the seas in their places and change the currents of the
wind.'
'It is the next wave,' said Fowler, who had come out upon the
terrace and seated himself silently behind Karenin's chair.
'Of course, in the old days,' said Edwards, 'men were tied to
their city or their country, tied to the homes they owned or the
work they did…'
'I do not see,' said Karenin, 'that there is any final limit to
man's power of self-modification.
'There is none,' said Fowler, walking forward and sitting down
upon the parapet in front of Karenin so that he could see his
face. 'There is no absolutelimit to either knowledge or
power… I hope you do not tire yourself talking.'
'I am interested,' said Karenin. 'I suppose in a little while
men will cease to be tired. I suppose in a little time you will
give us something that will hurry away the fatigue products and
restore our jaded tissues almost at once. This old machine may
be made to run without slacking or cessation.'
'That is possible, Karenin. But there is much to learn.'
'And all the hours we give to digestion and half living; don't
you think there will be some way of saving these?'