Free Consider Her Ways by John Wyndham Page B

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. ‘Civilization
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, but 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
so on …
    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