Moving the Mountain

On a gray, cold, soggy Tibetan plateau stood glaring at one another two white people⁠—a man and a woman.

With the first, a group of peasants; with the second, the guides and carriers of a well-equipped exploring party.

The man wore the dress of a peasant, but around him was a leather belt⁠—old, worn, battered⁠—but a recognizable belt of no Asiatic pattern, and showing a heavy buckle made in twisted initials.

The woman’s eye had caught the sunlight on this buckle before she saw that the heavily bearded face under the hood was white. She pressed forward to look at it.

“Where did you get that belt?” she cried, turning for the interpreter to urge her question.

The man had caught her voice, her words. He threw back his hood and looked at her, with a strange blank look, as of one listening to something far away.

“John!” she cried. “John! My brother!”

He lifted a groping hand to his head, made a confused noise that ended in almost a shout of “Nellie!” reeled and fell backward.

When one loses his mind, as it were, for thirty years, and finds it again; when one wakes up; comes to life; recognizes oneself an American citizen twenty-five years old⁠—

No. This is what I find it so hard to realize. I am not twenty-five; I am fifty-five.

Presently Nellie came to see how I was getting on. I saw her approaching, a firm, brisk figure, well and becomingly dressed, with a tailored trimness and convenience, far indeed from the slim, graceful, yielding girl I had once been so proud to protect and teach.

“How soon do we get in, Lady Manager?” I asked her.

“Day after tomorrow,” she answered back promptly⁠—not a word about going to see, or asking anyone!

“Well, ma’am, I want you to sit down here and tell me things⁠—right now. What am I to expect? Are there no men left in America?”

She laughed gaily.

“No men! Why, bless you, there are as many men as there are women, and a few more, I believe. Not such an overplus as there used to be, but some to spare still. We had a million and a half extra in your day, you know.”

“I’m glad to learn we’re allowed to live!” said I. “Now tell me the worst⁠—are the men all doing the housework?”

“You call that ‘the worst,’ do you?” inquired Nellie, cocking her head to one side and looking at me affectionately, and yet quizzically. “Well, I guess it was⁠—pretty near ‘the worst’! No dear, men are doing just as many kinds of business as they ever were.”

I heaved a sigh of relief and chucked my magazine under the chair.

“Nellie,” said I sternly. “You never told me you were married!”

“Why should I?” she asked innocently. “You never asked me.”

I had not. I had seen that she signed her name “Ellen Robertson,” and I knew she was president of a college⁠—how could I imagine her married. Married she evidently was, and even her long-lost brother was forgotten for a moment as the big man engulfed her in his gray overcoat, and the tall son and daughter added their arms to the group.

But it was only a moment, and the big brotherly grasp of my new relation’s hand, the cordial nephewly grip, and affectionate niecely kiss gave me a new and unexpected sense of the joys of homecoming.

These were people, real people, as warm and kind and cheery as people ever were; and they greeted me with evident good will. It was “Uncle John” in no time, and Hallie in especial seized upon me as her own.

“I know mother’s got you all broken in by this time,” she said. “And that you are prepared for all manner of amazing disclosures. But Mother never told us how handsome you are, Uncle John!”

“In vain is the net spread in sight of any bird,” murmured young Jerrold mischievously.

“Don’t listen to him, Uncle! I am perfectly sincere,” she protested, leaning over to hug her mother again, and turning back to me with a confiding smile.

“Why should I doubt such evident good judgment?” said I. And she slipped her hand in mine and squeezed it. Nellie sat there, looking as proud and happy and matronly and motherly as anybody could, and a great weight rolled off my heart.

Lots of them went into child culture⁠—used their mother-power that way. It wasn’t easy for them; it wasn’t easy for the leftover men, either!”

“It must have increased prostitution to an awful extent,” I said.

Owen shook his head and regarded me quizzically.

“That is the worst of it,” he said. “There isn’t any.”

I sat up. I stood up. I walked up and down. “No prostitution! I⁠—I can’t believe it. Why, prostitution is a social necessity, as old as Nineveh!”

Owen laughed outright. “Too late, old man; too late! I know we used to think so. We did use to call it a ‘social necessity,’ didn’t we? Come, now, tell me what necessity it was to the women.”

I stopped my march and looked at him.

“To the women,” he repeated. “What did they want of prostitution? What good did it do them?”

“Why⁠—why⁠—they made a living at it,” I replied, rather lamely.

“Yes, a nice, honorable, pleasant, healthy living, didn’t they? With all women perfectly well able to earn an excellent living decently; with all women fully educated about these matters and knowing what a horrible death was before them in this business; with all women brought up like human beings and not like oversexed female animals, and with all women quite free to marry if they wished to⁠—how many, do you think, would choose that kind of business?

“We never waited for them to choose it, remember! We fooled them and lied to them and dragged them in⁠—and drove them in⁠—forced them in⁠—and kept them as slaves and prisoners.

Dr. Borderson, it seemed, held the chair in Ethics at the university. I knew a Borderson once and was very fond of him. Poor Frank! If he was alive he would have more likely reached a prison or a hospital than a professorship. Yet he was brilliant enough. We were great friends in college, and before; let me see⁠—thirty-five years ago. But he was expelled for improper conduct, and went from bad to worse. The last I had heard of him was in a criminal case⁠—but he had run away and disappeared. I well remembered the grief and shame it was to me at the time to see such a promising young life ruined and lost so early.

Thinking of this, I was shown into the study of the great teacher of ethics, and as I shook hands I met the keen brown eyes of⁠—Frank Borderson. He had both my hands and shook them warmly.

“Well, John! It is good to see you again. How well you look; how little you have changed! It’s a good world you’ve come back to, isn’t it?”

“You are the most astonishing thing I’ve seen so far,” I replied. “Do you really mean it? Are you⁠—a professor of ethics?”

“When I used to be a godforsaken rascal, eh? Yes, it’s really so. I’ve taught ethics for twenty years, and gradually pushed along to this position. And I was a good deal farther off than Tibet, old man.”

I was tremendously glad to see him. It was more like a touch of the old life than anything I had yet found⁠—except Nellie, of course.