A Woman's Place Part 5

Miss Kitty relaxed her neck, willed the tenseness out of her body, and just lay for a while thinking of nothing. A gust, a rattle of raindrops, called her attention to the window. They had put her on the ground floor. She was able to see through the window to the street outside. The rain was pelting down, like that first rain they'd had there on New Earth. How chagrined the boys had looked when the roof started leaking in a dozen places!

She felt a warm sense of relief, of grat.i.tude, that she could remember them without shame. The nurse had been right, of course. Probably the doctors had planted that particular nurse in her room, antic.i.p.ating her return to consciousness, antic.i.p.ating the necessity for a little mental therapy.

_Good female sense._ With such a semantic difference from good male sense! The mind of a man and a woman was not the same. She knew that now. And she realized that deeply, hidden from her own admittance, she had always known it. And the nurse's good earthy expression--"propositioning those two guys"--approval that it had been natural and right. And another expression, "the way you pitched in there, carried your share of things."

Carried your share of things! That meant more than just cooking, mending, cleaning. More than just seeing that the race continued, too; although it somehow tied in with all these things.

She lay in her bed, watching the rain through the window, getting comfort from the soft, drumming sound. Along the street she could see people slos.h.i.+ng through the film of water underfoot. She watched the scene of turned-up collars, pulled-down hatbrims, bobbing umbrellas, as if it were something apart from her, and yet a part of her. She began to get a sense of rare vision, an understanding which she knew was more complete than any intellectual abstraction she had ever managed. She began to get a woman's sense of purpose, completely distinct from that of a man.

She recalled once reading of an incident where an Oklahoma oil millionaire had built a huge mansion; then, because his squaw did not know how to make a home within it, they pitched their tepee in the front grounds, to live there, unable to feel at home in anything else.

Yes, too often the mansions of science came in for a similar treatment.

The vast rooms of ideas, the great halls of expansion, the limitless ceilings of challenge, the wide expanses of speculation; all these things which would exalt Man into a truly great existence were denied, put to no use beyond mere gadgetry. And the ma.s.s of human beings still huddled in their cramped and grimy little tepees of ancient syndromes, only there feeling at home.

It was the fault of the women. They had not kept up with the men. Those who attempted it tried to be men, to prove themselves as good a man as any man, the way she had done.

They had missed the real point entirely, every single bit of it.

The male was still functioning in the way males always had. There was no essential difference between the cave man who climbed a new mountain and explored a new valley and brought back a speared deer to throw down at the entrance of his home cave; no difference between him and the modern explorer of science who, under similar hards.h.i.+ps, brought back a bright and rich new knowledge.

But the ancient cave woman had not failed. She had known what to do with the deer to strengthen and secure the future of the race.

And what about New Earth?

Lt. Harper and Sam had talked about the possibility of millions of Earths, each infinitesimally removed from the other, and if they could bridge the gap to one, they might bridge it to an uncountable number.

Perhaps there were millions of others, but for her there was only one New Earth.

Would the processions of colonists going there spoil it? Would the women going there see in it a great mansion? Or, instead, would they simply go there to escape here--escape from exhaustion, failure, anguish, bitterness--and, as always, take these things along with them? Would they still live in grimy little syndromes of endless antagonism, bickering in their foolish frustrations, because they had no wisdom about what to do with this newly speared deer?

_Oh, not on New Earth!_

Suddenly Miss Kitty knew what she must do. If that one particular mansion needed someone to make it into a home, why not herself? And who had a better right?

Somewhere, there, perhaps that very one striding along under the eaves of that building across the street, with his hatbrim pulled down, leaning against the rain, somewhere, close, there must be a man who could share her resolution and her dream. A man of the same breed as the lieutenant and Sam, a man who carried his head high, his shoulders back, who had keen, intelligent eyes, and laughter.

Yes, now she wanted to see the two men after all, and meet their lucky wives, and see their children, the kind of children she might have had.

Might _yet_ have!

At a flash of memory, she smiled a little ruefully, and yet with an inner peace.

"I am not so old," she repeated in a whisper. "I still have time for at least a half dozen sons and daughters before--before my barren years."