Part 38

He wrinkled up his queer face, regarded the wait and made his pipe gurgle for a space, thinking deeply.

“There are complications, I admit. We’ve grown up under the terror of Grundy and that innocent but docile and—yes—formidable lady, his wife. I don’t know how far the complications aren’t a disease, a sort of bleaching under the Grundy shadow.... It is possible there are things I have still to learn about women.... Man has eaten of the Tree of Knowledge. His innocence is gone. You can’t have your cake and eat it. We’re in for knowledge; let’s have it plain and straight. I should begin, I think, by abolishing the ideas of decency and indecency....”

“Grundy would have fits!” I injected.

“Grundy, Ponderevo, would have cold douches—publicly—if the sight was not too painful—three times a day.... But I don’t think, mind you, that I should let the sexes run about together. No. The fact behind the sexes—is sex. It’s no good humbugging. It trails about—even in the best mixed company. Tugs at your ankle. The men get showing off and quarrelling—and the women. Or they’re bored. I suppose the ancestral males have competed for the ancestral females ever since they were both some sort of grubby little reptile. You aren’t going to alter that in a thousand years or so.... Never should you have a mixed company, never—except with only one man or only one woman. How would that be?...

“Or duets only?...

“How to manage it? Some rule of etiquette, perhaps.”... He became portentously grave.

Then his long hand went out in weird gestures.

“I seem to see—I seem to see—a sort of City of Women, Ponderevo. Yes.... A walled enclosure—good stone-mason’s work—a city wall, high as the walls of Rome, going about a garden. Dozens of square miles of garden—trees—fountains—arbours—lakes. Lawns on which the women play, avenues in which they gossip, boats.... Women like that sort of thing. Any woman who’s been to a good eventful girls’ school lives on the memory of it for the rest of her life. It’s one of the pathetic things about women—the superiority of school and college—to anything they get afterwards. And this city-garden of women will have beautiful places for music, places for beautiful dresses, places for beautiful work. Everything a woman can want. Nurseries. Kindergartens. Schools. And no man—except to do rough work, perhaps—ever comes in. The men live in a world where they can hunt and engineer, invent and mine and manufacture, sail ships, drink deep and practice the arts, and fight—”

“Yes,” I said, “but—”

He stilled me with a gesture.

“I’m coming to that. The homes of the women, Ponderevo, will be set in the wall of their city; each woman will have her own particular house and home, furnished after her own heart in her own manner—with a little balcony on the outside wall. Built into the wall—and a little balcony. And there she will go and look out, when the mood takes her, and all round the city there will be a broad road and seats and great shady trees. And men will stroll up and down there when they feel the need of feminine company; when, for instance, they want to talk about their souls or their characters or any of the things that only women will stand.... The women will lean over and look at the men and smile and talk to them as they fancy. And each woman will have this; she will have a little silken ladder she can let down if she chooses—if she wants to talk closer...”

“The men would still be competing.”

“There perhaps—yes. But they’d have to abide by the women’s decisions.”

I raised one or two difficulties, and for a while we played with this idea.

“Ewart,” I said, “this is like Doll’s Island.

“Suppose,” I reflected, “an unsuccessful man laid siege to a balcony and wouldn’t let his rival come near it?”

“Move him on,” said Ewart, “by a special regulation. As one does organ-grinders. No difficulty about that. And you could forbid it—make it against the etiquette. No life is decent without etiquette.... And people obey etiquette sooner than laws...”

“H’m,” I said, and was struck by an idea that is remote in the world of a young man. “How about children?” I asked; “in the City? Girls are all very well. But boys, for example—grow up.”

“Ah!” said Ewart. “Yes. I forgot. They mustn’t grow up inside.... They’d turn out the boys when they were seven. The father must come with a little pony and a little gun and manly wear, and take the boy away. Then one could come afterwards to one’s mother’s balcony.... It must be fine to have a mother. The father and the son...”

“This is all very pretty in its way,” I said at last, “but it’s a dream. Let’s come back to reality. What I want to know is, what are you going to do in Brompton, let us say, or Walham Green now?”

“Oh! damn it!” he remarked, “Walham Green! What a chap you are, Ponderevo!” and he made an abrupt end to his discourse. He wouldn’t even reply to my tentatives for a time.

“While I was talking just now,” he remarked presently,

“I had a quite different idea.”

“What?”

“For a masterpiece. A series. Like the busts of the Cæsars. Only not heads, you know. We don’t see the people who do things to us nowadays...”

“How will you do it, then?”

“Hands—a series of hands! The hands of the Twentieth Century. I’ll do it. Some day some one will discover it—go there—see what I have done, and what is meant by it.”

“See it where?”