its moments, were born and wondered and played and desired and
hungered and grew weary and died. Incalculable successions of
vision, visions of sunlit jungle, river wilderness, wild forest,
eager desire, beating hearts, soaring wings and creeping terror
flamed hotly and then were as though they had never been. Life
was an uneasiness across which lights played and vanished. And
then we came, man came, and opened eyes that were a question and
hands that were a demand and began a mind and memory that dies
not when men die, but lives and increases for ever, an over-mind,
a dominating will, a question and an aspiration that reaches to
the stars… Hunger and fear and this that you make so much of,
this sex, are but the elementals of life out of which we have
arisen. All these elementals, I grant you, have to be provided
for, dealt with, satisfied, but all these things have to be left
behind.'
'But Love,' said Kahn.
'I speak of sexual love and the love of intimate persons. And
that is what you mean, Kahn.'
Karenin shook his head. 'You cannot stay at the roots and climb
the tree,' he said…
'No,' he said after a pause, 'this sexual excitement, this love
story, is just a part of growing up and we grow out of it. So far
literature and art and sentiment and all our emotionalforms have
been almost altogether adolescent, plays and stories, delights
and hopes, they have all turned on that marvellous discovery of
the love interest, but life lengthens out now and the mind of
adult humanity detaches itself. Poets who used to die at thirty
live now to eighty-five. You, too, Kahn! There are endless years
yet for you-and all full of learning… We carry an excessive
burden of sex and sexual tradition still, and we have to free
ourselves from it. We do free ourselves from it. We have learnt
in a thousand different ways to hold back death, and this sex,
which in the old barbaric days was just sufficient to balance our
dying, is now like a hammer that has lost its anvil, it plunges
through human life. You poets, you young people want to turn it
to delight. Turn it to delight. That may be one way out. In a
little while, if you have any brains worth thinking about, you
will be satisfied, and then you will come up here to the greater
things. The old religions and their new offsets want still, I
see, to suppress all these things. Let them suppress. If they
can suppress. In their own people. Either road will bring you
here at last to the eternal search for knowledge and the great
adventure of power.'
'But incidentally,' said Rachel Borken; 'incidentally you have
half of humanity, you have womankind, very much specialised
for-for this love and reproduction that is so much less needed
than it was.'
'Both sexes are specialised for love and reproduction,' said
Karenin.
'But the women carry the heavier burden.'
'Not in their imaginations,' said Edwards.
'And surely,' said Kahn, 'when you speak of love as a
phase-isn't it a necessary phase? Quite apart from reproduction
the love of the sexes is necessary. Isn't it love, sexual love,
which has released the imagination? Without that stir, without
that impulse to go out from ourselves, to be reckless of
ourselves and wonderful, would our lives be anything more than
the contentment of the stalled ox?'
'The key that opens the door,' said Karenin, 'is not the goal of
the journey.'
'But women!' cried Rachel. 'Here we are! What is our future-as
women? Is it only that we have unlocked the doors of the
imagination for you men? Let us speak of this question now. It
is a thing constantly in my thoughts, Karenin. What do you think
of us? You who must have thought so much of these perplexities.'
Karenin seemed to weigh his words. He spoke very deliberately.
'I do not care a rap about your future-as women. I do not care
a rap about the future of men-as males. I want to destroy these
peculiar futures. I care for your future as intelligences, as
parts of and contribution to the universal mind of the race.
Humanity is not only naturally over-specialised in these matters,
but all its institutions, its customs, everything, exaggerate,
intensify this difference. I want to unspecialise women. No new
idea. Plato wanted exactly that. I do not want to go on as we go
now, emphasising this natural difference; I do not deny it, but I
want to reduce it and overcome it.'
'And-we remain women,' said Rachel Borken. 'Need you remain
thinking of yourselves as women?'
'It is forced upon us,' said Edith Haydon.
'I do not think a woman becomes less of a woman because she
dresses and works like a man,' said Edwards. 'You women here, I
mean you scientific women, wear white clothing like the men,
twist up your hair in the simplest fashion, go about your work as
though there was only one sex in the world. You are just as much
women, even if you are not so feminine, as the fine ladies down
below there in the plains who dress for excitement and display,
whose only thoughts are of lovers, who exaggerate every
difference… Indeed we love you more.'
'But we go about our work,' said Edith Haydon.
'So does it matter?' asked Rachel.
'If you go about your work and if the men go about their work
then for Heaven's sake be as much woman as you wish,' said
Karenin. 'When I ask you to unspecialise, Iamthinking not of
the abolition of sex, but the abolition of the irksome,
restricting, obstructive obsession with sex. It may be true that
sex made society, that the first society was the sex-cemented
family, the first state a confederacy of blood relations, the
first laws sexual taboos. Until a few years ago morality meant
proper sexual behaviour. Up to within a few years of us the
chief interest and motive of an ordinary man was to keep and rule
a woman and her children and the chief concern of a woman was to
get a man to do that. That was the drama, that was life. And the
jealousy of these demands was the master motive in the world. You
said, Kahn, a little while ago that sexual love was the key that
let one out from the solitude of self, but I tell you that so far
it has only done so in order to lock us all up again in a
solitude of two… All that may have been necessary but it is