Consider Her Ways by John Wyndham Page A

she asked:
    ‘What strikes you as the oddest feature of your experience, so far?’
    I considered. ‘There’s so much –’
    ‘Might it not be that you have not seen a single man?’ she suggested.
    I
thought back. I remembered the wondering tone of one of the Mothers asking: ‘What is a man?’
    ‘That’s certainly one of them,’ I agreed. ‘Where are they?’
    She shook her head, watching me steadily.
    ‘There aren’t any, my dear. Not any more. None at all.’
    I simply went on staring at her. Her expression was perfectly serious and sympathetic. There was no trace of guile there, or deception, while I struggled with the idea. At last I managed:
    ‘But – but that’s impossible! There must be some somewhere … You couldn’t – I mean, how? – I mean …’ My expostulation trailed off in confusion.
    She shook her head.
    ‘I know it must seem impossible to you, Jane – may I call you Jane? But it is so. I am an old woman now, nearly eighty, and in all my long life I have never seen a man – save in old pictures and photographs. Drink your sherry, my dear. It will do you good.’ She paused. ‘I’m afraid this upsets you.’
    I obeyed, too bewildered for further comment at the moment, protesting inwardly, yet not altogether disbelieving, for certainly I had not seen one man, nor sign of any. She went on quietly, giving me time to collect my wits:
    ‘I can understand a little how you must feel. I haven’t had to learn all my history entirely from books, you see. When I was a girl, sixteen or seventeen, I used to listen a lot to my grandmother. She was as old then as I am now, but her memory of her youth was still very good. I was able almost to see the places she talked about – but they were part of such a different world that it was difficult for me to understand how she felt. When she spoke about the young man she had been engaged to, tears would roll down her cheeks, even then – not just for him, of course, but for the whole world that she had known as a girl. I was sorry for her, although I could not really understand how she felt. – How should I? But now that I am old, too, and have read so much, I am perhaps a little nearer to understanding her feelings, I think.’ She
looked at me curiously. ‘And you, my dear. Perhaps you, too, were engaged to be married?’
    ‘I was married – for a little time,’ I told her.
    She contemplated that for some seconds, then:
    ‘It must be a very strange experience to be owned,’ she remarked, reflectively.
    ‘Owned?’ I exclaimed, in astonishment.
    ‘Ruled by a husband,’ she explained, sympathetically.
    I stared at her.
    ‘But it – it wasn’t like that – it wasn’t like that at all,’ I protested. ‘It was –’ But there I broke off, with tears too close. To sheer her away I asked:
    ‘But what happened? What on earth happened to the men?’
    ‘They all died,’ she told me. ‘They fell sick. Nobody could do anything for them, so they died. In little more than a year they were all gone – all but a very few.’
    ‘But surely – surely everything would collapse?’
    ‘Oh, yes. Very largely it did. It was very bad. There was a dreadful lot of starvation. The industrial parts were the worst hit, of course. In the more backward countries and in rural areas women were able to turn to the land and till it to keep themselves and their children alive, but almost all the large organizations broke down entirely. Transport ceased very soon: petrol ran out, and no coal was being mined. It was quite a dreadful state of affairs because although there were a great many women, and they had outnumbered the men, in fact, they had only really been important as consumers and spenders of money. So when the crisis came it turned out that scarcely any of them knew how to do any of the important things because they had nearly all been owned by men, and had to lead their lives as pets and parasites.’
    I started to protest, but her frail hand waved me