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In the course of a day or so they had touched on nearly every
phase in the growth of Man and Woman from that remote and
brutish past which has left its traces in human bones mingled
with the bones of hyaenas and cave bears beneath the
stalagmites of Wookey Hole near Wells. In those nearly
forgotten days the mind of man and woman had been no more
than an evanescent succession of monstrous and infantile
imaginations. That brief journey in the west country had lit
up phase after phase in the long teaching and discipline of
man as he had developed depth of memory and fixity of purpose
out of these raw beginnings, through the dreaming childhood
of Avebury and Stonehenge and the crude boyhood of ancient
wars and massacres. Sir Richmond recalled those phases now,
and how, as they had followed one another, man's idea of
woman and woman's idea of man had changed with them, until
nowadays in the minds of civilized men brute desire and
possession and a limitless jealousy had become almost
completely overlaid by the desire for fellowship and a free
mutual loyalty. "Overlaid," he said. "The older passions are
still there like the fires in an engine." He invented a
saying for Dr. Martineau that the Man in us to-day was still
the old man of Palaeolithic times, with his will, his wrath
against the universe increased rather than diminished. If today
he ceases to crack his brother's bones and rape and bully
his womenkind, it is because he has grown up to a greater
game and means to crack this world and feed upon its marrow
and wrench their secrets from the stars.
And furthermore it would seem that the prophet Martineau had
declared that in this New Age that was presently to dawn for
mankind, jealousy was to be disciplined even as we had
disciplined lust and anger; instead of ruling our law it was
to be ruled by law and custom. No longer were the jealousy of
strange peoples, the jealousy of ownership and the jealousy
of sex to determine the framework of human life. There was to
be one peace and law throughout the world, one economic
scheme and a universal freedom for men and women to possess
and give themselves.
"And how many generations yet must there be before we reach
that Utopia?" Miss Grammont asked.
"I wouldn't put it at a very great distance."
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