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“A Legend of Another World” by Lily Spender

—

by

Milan Terlunen
in

Popular categories: Digital Storytelling, Short Story

Edition created by Jake Ross

Table of contents

1.1 – Introduction

Do you ever despair?

Do you ever find yourself wandering desolate streets of a world far past salvation, a world ravaged by impurity, hatred, where sons raise weapons against their fathers? Do you ever think we should try to be better, then throw that thought away: with the state of humanity, how could we begin to try? Do you ever wish you could—think you should—burn it all down?

Or do you hope? Do you believe, despite all evidence otherwise, of the goodness inherent in people? Do you think that, no matter how awful the circumstances, how few survivors of a calamity, there will always be a way to rebuild, and that maybe, just maybe, this time we can make it work?

Like the Barbenheimer sensation, A Legend of Another World is a two-minded tragedy of emotion and science that appeals to an eclectic audience. If you are a teenager or adult darkly wondering about how close society is to collapse, if you enjoyed one or both of the movies that defined summer 2023, or even if you were a fan of H.G. Wells, E.A. Abbott, or other 19th-century science-fiction writers, this story is for you.

1.2 – Editor’s Note

A Legend of Another World is a science-fiction short story about love, family, and the perpetuity of evil and violence. Written by Lillian “Lily” Spender—more on her later—and published in 1886 in MacMillan’s Magazine, a literary periodical—more on that later—it is of the time of a very specific breed of science fiction. Unlike the laser guns and shiny plastic-metal of space operas like Star Trek or Star Wars, unlike the neon grunge of cyberpunk, science-fiction in the late 19th and early 20th centuries opened up possibilities, many set at home in the present day, not a distant future. Spender, in fact, does not claim to be authoring a fictional story, but describes herself as merely publishing the notes of a late astrophysicist whose scientific advances had led him to space travel. On one such exploration, he had transcribed the story as a resident of a planet he visited told him. Spender found these notes while going through his things after he’d died, and decided to make the story publicly available.

Its unique framing makes A Legend of Another World reminiscent of The Plattner Story, a short story by H.G. Wells published ten years later in 1896. The Plattner Story uses a scientific framing—fourth dimensions and chemical explosions—to drive its narration. Though the narrator of Plattner is Wells himself, he was no primary witness: he, like Spender’s astrophysicist, is only re-telling a story that was told to him. However, Spender is two degrees removed from the narrative, while Wells is only one. Did it give her subtly feminist story, especially as a woman writer, more credibility to be both told and transcribed by a man?

1.3 – History of Magazine and Author

MacMillan’s Magazine, “the first of the shilling monthlies”1, began as a men’s literary magazine in 1859; by only its third issue, it had published its first of many pieces by and for women. Rosemary T. Vanarsdel, a literary scholar, writes that there had been so many woman writers in only its first fifteen years that “by no means could [she] list them all”. By 1886, a year into a new editorship that, according to scholar Ann Parry, prioritized fiction more than it had in fifteen years2, the environment was uniquely friendly to Spender.

Lily Spender, who sometimes wrote with the pen name Mrs. John Kent Spender, was a writer and novelist who published 21 books throughout her lifetime—according to a biography at the time3. But my unearthing of this story begs the question: how many more unrecognized works? Even finding her identity was a multi-step process, as she published this short story under “the author of A Strange Temptation”. This sort of pseudonym was not uncommon in literary magazines of the time, especially by women writers who didn’t want to be seen as “pushy”4, but it makes crediting lesser-known authors or collating their works difficult.

However, Spender, especially when publishing in a magazine known for its woman authors, may have had quite the opposite motivation for attributing her work to “the author of A Strange Temptation”. Her earlier works, that novel most of all, had come under literary criticism for being too easy to read: derided as “penny novelettes” by the Society of Authors. Yet she fought back against this, taking pride in her writing, and perhaps defining herself as the author of such a “penny novelette” proved she wasn’t ashamed. “We have two distinct classes of readers,” Spender wrote in a response5, and noted that while it “pleases one’s conceit” to write for the higher audience, there was a needier, larger, “second public” of readers from the middle and lower economic classes. “They read our stories when they are first of all published by the newspaper agencies”—meaning periodicals like The Leeds Times and MacMillan’s Magazine. “For them,” she concluded her statement, “the phraseology must not be too studied, nor the allusions too subtle, and the plot must be more or less exciting.”

You may think A Legend of Another World is a bit heavy-handed with its metaphors and allegories, but Spender was writing for an audience that may have never taken high school English. And perhaps her intended audience is why, nearly a hundred and forty years later, A Legend of Another World is incredibly readable. Unlike my peers, I didn’t have to make a glossary for unfamiliar or complex words, nor footnotes to explain certain dated references. The common, easy language Spender writes in is not the high prose stereotypical to Victorian-era writing, but save for its separation of “forever” into “for ever”, almost timeless.

1.4 – Motivation; Work Process

I was inspired to republish this story because, like Lily, I found it by chance. I’d been rifling through volume after electronic volume of MacMillan’s Magazine six-month compilations, each five-hundred pages long. This, I told myself on the sixteenth such volume, would be the final one. Most of the work I had found was interesting, but had already been republished. Perhaps MacMillan’s had been picked clean, and I should try my luck elsewhere.

It was then that A Legend of Another World finally reared its tragic head—or perhaps I should say tail. The index, arranged in an infuriating way, had sent me to the spread containing A Legend’s ending in search of another work, which turned out to be a review or perhaps obituary. My eyes wandered onto the previous page, and at the first line I read I was hooked. When I figured out that the story hadn’t been republished (after a not insignificant battle with SEO, as there were other “Legends of (An)other World”s out there) I told everyone in my vicinity the good news. My throat was sore the next day.

I screen-shotted the thirteen pages of scanned documents comprising the story (at 8900 words, still a “short story” by our class’s definition) and used OCR to transcribe them into text, then went through line-by-line to ensure there were no errors. My most common correction came when the OCR software I used didn’t properly transcribe the em-dash, a punctuation Lily Spender and I both employ liberally.

But past the necessity of finding an ancient, unloved story to bring into light, I do find myself with a real love for A Legend of Another World. Its message is not only relevant, but relevant now. As society gets more and more hateful, and as the threat of total destruction looms again and again in a different form each year, I think it’s important to learn from a world in which someone was driven by despair to take the nuclear option. A world in which hiding or sanitizing a violent history dooms a population to repeat it. Spender’s story is relevant today, and you’ll soon see why.

A LEGEND OF ANOTHER WORLD

BY THE AUTHOR OF A STRANGE TEMPTATION.

INTRODUCTION.

AMONG the papers of the late distinguished astronomer and inventor, Dickinson Elliott Jones, there has been found one which bears on the outside a singular explanatory statement. It is well known that Mr. Elliott Jones professed, during the later years of his life, to have discovered a highly practicable method of visiting the planets, and even of reaching the nearer fixed stars. He referred to this knowledge when he desired to account for his mysterious periodical disappearances, which disappearances have never indeed received any satisfactory explanation. In the absence of positive proof, however, the possibility of his having taken journeys through space in a manner which—not to mention other difficulties—must have been inconceivably rapid, cannot for a moment be entertained. Mr. Elliott Jones always refused to give any hint of the details of his marvellous discovery. On this point, therefore, he must have been subject to some hallucination, although on other points his mind remained clear and subtle to the last. In the solution of difficult scientific problems his help was always welcome; on points of astronomical inquiry his opinion was invariably received with respect by his fellow-scientists. He even furnished us with much information concerning the heavenly bodies—proved correct by subsequent experiment—which could not have been obtained originally by any known method of observation. How he procured this information he never revealed to us, and the secret is now unhappily lost by his death.

The one defect in his character or intelligence—we hardly know where to place it—this instinct of secrecy combined with a claim to extravagant personal power, interferes with the great value which would otherwise attach to all his written works. The document of which I now speak claims, by his notes upon it, to be the substance of a narrative related to him by a very extraordinary individual; a man who was an inhabitant of another world, and who, even in that world, was an exception and a mystery. He was reputed to be many generations old, and none of those with whom he lived knew anything of his origin. Of this old man, and the world in which he lived, and the people who inhabited it with him, Mr. Elliott Jones left a full and particular account, which it is not my purpose to offer here. It is sufficient to say that the old man who told his story had a reputation for great knowledge and a character of great benevolence. He was consulted by his countrymen—like our friend Mr. Jones—on all abstruse and difficult questions; but, on the point of his personal history and individual power he was—again like our friend Mr. Jones—reputed to be somewhat mad. As the editor of the papers of the late Mr. Elliott Jones (for whom I had a very warm affection and admiration), it is not for me to pass any opinion upon the weight to be attached to the document which I now put before the public. I give it as I found it. It seems to me, however, that, whether it is regarded as the history of an actual, though apparently impossible, life, or only as the work of my friend’s too ardent imagination, it may be accepted as a contribution (fragmentary, indeed, but not without suggestiveness) to that discussion on the value of life and the growth of creatures in the direction of happiness or misery, which has occupied so much of the attention of modern society. Without further preface, then, I offer the story as I found it among my friend’s papers.

I.

Because I loved my fellows with a love which absorbed my whole heart, and because I had no desires for my own happiness, the great gift was granted to me of a term of life beyond that which was accorded unto others. Generations were born and died, nations rose and fell, and still I was left alive to work among the new races, and to help them with my knowledge. This gift was bestowed on me because it was not for myself that I desired it, perhaps because for myself I desired nothing; it may be that I hold it only on these conditions, but that indeed I cannot tell. From the days of my first youth a great love and a great compassion has had possession of me whenever I have looked upon the toiling multitudes around. I have seen them in their early ignorance struggling dumbly with physical troubles and wresting from nature a difficult and painful existence. I have watched them in their later luxury becoming the victims of indolence and melancholy, of a hundred diseases and a thousand sins inherited with the wealth and the knowledge of their forefathers. If you ask me which state was the worse I cannot tell you; I only know that in the first there was a great hope, and in the last there is a deep despair.

It is many ages since the gift of a long life was bestowed on me; none can remember the granting of it; there is no record of it except in my own heart; and none will believe me when I speak of it. It was a great thing to have, a wonderful thing. Many had desired it before me, and had been forced to go, letting their unfinished task drop out of their hands. To me only was it said, “You have the ages to work in; an almost endless life is yours in which to toil for the benefit of your fellow men; your strength shall not fail while your love does not weary. The people may find in you a benefactor and a teacher who shall not be taken from them.”

But the gift that was bestowed on me was too great for a man to endure. As the generations went by, the sum of all that I could do to serve them seemed small compared with the sum of their sorrows and their needs; for these seemed to grow with the ages, and could not be checked nor changed. Then I said in my heart at last, “There is no remedy, nor any hope; for every new life makes a new sorrow, and every new circumstance breeds a new pain. My help is only as a straw in the torrent of tribulation which roars onwards through the ages and will never be dried up.” And in my despair I went away from the people to a great solitude where I could brood without interruption over the sorrows of the world, seeking always for some thought or some hope which might bring to it healing and help.

But no thought would come to me, nor any hope, save one: “It would be better for this suffering people that death should fall upon them swiftly, a painless death, overtaking them like a sleep from which they may never awaken.” Like a whisper came these words in answer to my thought: “This gift also is yours, because you have desired it unselfishly. Behold, it is in your hands to do even as you have said.”

But I was afraid, and shrank back from the power which was offered to me; for I knew not, nor know I fully now, whether it was given as a reward of my great love, or a trial of my sincerity and constancy of purpose; or even as a punishment for my overweening ambition to stand against the tide of things and to protect my own people from the woes appointed to them to bear.

Instead of turning my hasty thought into an irremediable act, I went down once more among the people and—with that great power unused in my hands—I saw, as I had never seen before, the joy and the gladness of life. Babies clapped their hands in the sunlight, and children laughed gleefully at their play; lovers plighted their troth without fear or foreboding, and mothers led their boys proudly by the hand, showing them the world which they were to conquer; husbands, while they kissed their wives, thanked them for the love which made life beautiful; sisters and brothers rejoiced in the happiness of each other; and young girls looked out upon life with sweet expectant eyes, certain of praise and affection, and many good things to come. The painter gloried in his picture, the author loved his book. In every trade and every profession were men who delighted in their task and who put their best strength joyfully into it. Beyond all these joys, and common to all men, were other good things; the loveliness of the skies and of the world, of moving seas and growing trees and running waters; the beauty of music, of perfumes, of form, and of colour; the ecstasy of motion and the sweetness of rest; the pleasant cheerfulness of social intercourse and the peaceful influences of solitude; the satisfaction of originating a new thought, and the joy of feasting on the thoughts of greater men; the pleasure of approbation and the happiness of worship. Beholding all these things, I said, “Is not life a good thing after all? How should I dare to take it from those who have not had their full portion?”

So I waited and put the gift by. But the old sadness returned, and I only lied to myself when I said that I was content; for always the sum of the evil was greater than the sum of the good, and if a few were happy many more were miserable. Not a single life was perfect; not a single joy went on to the end. The pleasure of one seemed to bring the trouble of another; for the balance of things was awry, and the weight lay heavy on the side of evil.

As I watched the people, and waited, and doubted (having still that power in my hands to use as I would), I saw that as they grew more unhappy they grew more wicked also; for the strong races are purified by suffering, but the weaker ones are corrupted; and the strength had gone from my people; only the obstinate instinct of life, the desperate determination to snatch enjoyment from the misery around, survived among them. Virtue had begun to go down in the struggle with vice, and generosity to retreat discouraged before the advance of selfishness. Men had no time to be kind, and no power to be good. The clear springs of the most innocent lives seemed to be polluted at their source; babies were born to sin as their fathers had sinned, and the fairest promise of youth carried secretly the germ of its own destruction. The moral disease which had taken root among the people spread upwards and downwards; it perverted to viciousness the simplest instincts of human nature, and transformed to selfishness the higher intellectual tendencies. Cruelty, sensuality, and the pride of mental power flourished together. Men ceased to keep faith with one another; they began to despise their mothers; most of them had long neglected their wives. The strong ill-treated the weak, and the weak hated and lied to the strong. Treachery lurked in every corner: oppression ruled in the name of order, and cruelty abounded under the plea of necessity. If men were unkind to each other they were absolutely pitiless to the lower creatures in their power. Most of them had long ceased to worship or to follow after anything except their own satisfaction and glory, or—as some among them preferred to put it, loving noble names for ignoble things—the satisfaction and glory of their species. A few indeed kept up a fiction of belief in a creating power worthy of reverence, but this power was little more than a magnified ideal of their own desires. They did not boast that they were made in the image of God; rather did they make their God in the image of themselves. He was, as they represented Him, the base ally of the human race in its struggle with the other conscious creatures of His making. These other creatures He had abandoned—according to their showing—to the tender mercies of His unworthy favourite—man. Therefore many were ill-treated and tormented in the name of pleasure, or of health, or of science, nay, of humanity, and even of religion itself: for men had come to say that whatsoever they did for their own ultimate good, was good in itself, absolutely and always.

And still they waxed no happier. The suffering they inflicted seemed to recoil in manifold ways upon themselves, until at last I could endure the sight of it no more; for I thought, “If this people, whom I have loved and desired to help, continue in their evil ways, I shall learn to hate them at last, and all good things must hate them, and there will be no help for them anywhere. It is better that they should die.”

Then, in one night, silently and without any warning, so that no one suffered fear or felt a single pang, I did the thing that had been given to me to do; and the cities of the living became the cities of the dead. The people slept and awoke no more, and with them slept also all the other creatures of the world; and I was left alone.

The greatness of the act sustained me in its doing; but when it was over I was appalled by the solitude I had made, and by the strange great silence which followed, as if it had been lurking like a wild beast ready to seize upon the desolation. I went down to the lately populous places, and trod the streets where my footsteps echoed alone. I looked on the faces of the dead, but I did not repent, for all were at rest; and—for the first time for so many generations—I heard no sounds of weeping. nor saw any signs of woe. Yet I think I should have been glad if some little thing, some lower creature which could not suffer much from its prolonged consciousness, had escaped the general death, to be, as it were, a visible shadow of my own life in the unpeopled world. That life of mine, left single and unlike all the creation on which I looked, became immediately a monstrosity and a horror to me; it had reached beyond its proper term, and survived its natural use. How, then, could it continue to be?

The first few hours of my travel among the dead seemed indeed as long as a lifetime. A dreadful curiosity drove me through the silent cities; I wished to convince myself that all their inhabitants were of a certainty asleep for ever, that none had, by any chance, escaped. I was not hungry, nor thirsty; the need to eat or to drink would have seemed a mockery in the face of all these people whose wants were at an end for all time. My own soul seemed dead within me, and my life a vision and no reality.

Towards evening I came upon a house where there was a cradle, and a baby in it. I stood looking at the child idly for a moment, having seen many such sights that day; but there was something in the appearance of this little baby which made my heart begin to beat suddenly and violently. Death could not terrify me; it was life that I looked upon with wonder and dismay. The child was breathing, slowly and faintly, more faintly every moment; but it was breathing still. A few hours more and its life would have ebbed away, the last wave left on the shore of time of all that great tide so full a little while ago. Should I leave it to die, or snatch it back to the existence it had scarcely tasted?—an existence it had never by any act of its own polluted or forfeited. The tender beauty of its face, the rounded softness of its limbs, touched me with a thrill of longing tenderness. Its little hands, rosy and dimpled, drew me towards them, helpless as they were, with a giant’s strength.

I held my breath as I gazed upon it. I, who had desired and accomplished the annihilation of a race, could not leave this single little one alone to die. All my natural instincts fought for the child’s life, yet I knew that my deeper reason had willed its death. My selfish desires for a companion of my solitude had dropped away from me; it was of the child alone that I thought as I watched it, afraid to move lest so I should decide its fate one way or another.

It did not occur to me that this might be a trial, or temptation, to prove the reality of my own belief in the necessity of what I had done; to test whether I had the strength to complete what I had begun. I did not think of this. I thought only of the child. And as I looked I forgot one by one the generations of the past; all the problems of life slipped from me; I had no memory of its troubles or its losses. I saw only a little child, a young creature whose helplessness appealed for help, and whose innocence demanded a cherishing love. I bent over it, and the warmth of my breath touched its cheeks; then it stretched its dimpled hands and uttered a tiny cry. Without any will of my own, or so it seemed to me, for thought had left me, and instincts long forgotten had full possession of me, I put out my arms and lifted the child from its cradle.

II.

After that there was no question of leaving it to die. I took it away from the cities of the dead to the solitary mountains, where there was no remnant of anything that had had a conscious life. I nursed it back to strength; I fed it, and guarded it, and cherished it; for its life had become mine, and I had no thought of any other thing.

Those were, I think, the happiest days of any that I had lived. My great yearning to be a healer of trouble, a giver of love, was satisfied. In my arms I could hold all the life of the world, with my hands I could care for it, and guard it and caress it. In return I had—wonderful indeed to think of—all the love that the world contained for my very own: but this latter good was the smallest part of my joy; the greater blessing was my power to guard from trouble the life I had saved, so that none could interfere to work it any woe.

Sometimes, however, as I looked at the lovely child, when she had learned to speak to me, and to run about with agile feet, I wondered if sickness and old age must come also upon her as upon her forefathers. From these things I could not protect her, as I could from want and wrong. Her very life held its own elements of decay, and in her breast lurked those inherited instincts of generations which might some day demand more than I could give her—a more passionate love, a fuller life; and with these things the trouble that they bring.

As she grew older she proved very gentle and obedient. The sins of her fathers seemed to have left no rebellious inclinations, no morbid desires in her pure spirit. The life which we lived together seemed for a long time to satisfy her completely. The reverential affection with which she regarded me was sufficient to occupy her whole heart.

I kept her away from the cities of the dead, from those vast remains of an ancient civilisation, which I myself nevertheless visited from time to time. We read books together; books chosen by myself, which had to do with the larger aspects of physical creation, and touched little on its human element. And yet, as she grew older and more thoughtful every day, I was aware that fancies were rising in her mind which it would be difficult to treat with wisdom. She gazed at me often, with a sort of wonder in her eyes. “It is strange, dear father,” she said once, “that there should be only you and I, just two and no more. This is such a great world that we live in; it has room for so many others.”

And again she observed to me, when she was growing tall and strangely fair to look upon—

“I change, dear father, as the time goes on. I remember when I could not look through the window of my little room; now I am tall enough to see much higher than that. I change, but you remain always the same. Why should this be? and will it go on for ever?”

“You are young,” I answered, “and not yet completely grown. I came to my full size long ago.”

“What is it to be young!” she asked; “and are there any other creatures that are young besides me? The things that we see around us do not alter, except backwards and forwards as the seasons come and go. But I change always one way, and you not at all.”

These and other speculations working in her mind produced after a time a certain restlessness, and a blind desire to reach that wider knowledge of which she perceived dimly the indications in the world about her and in my teachings. I could not keep her ignorant for ever of her own nature, and of the history of her race: but I could not bear to hasten by any revelation of my own the crisis which must come. I did not know what mood would follow a full understanding of her position; resignation to her lot, so peaceful, but so isolated; or bitter disappointment and indignation against me, as the author of her strange fate.

The crisis came, without any action of mine to hasten or retard it. One day, when I came back from a journey, I missed her from our home. She had often asked me why I went away and left her alone, and I had explained that it was needful for me to seek from time to time fresh stores of the things which we used; she was not strong enough, so I told her truthfully, to endure the fatigues of travel. She never asked where I found the things I brought to her, nor how they were made; she had a boundless confidence in my resources, in my knowledge and ingenuity; she was satisfied to accept what I offered her, and to use it as I directed her.

But now she was gone, and, whatever way her wandering footsteps took her, she could not fail to come upon some strange memorials of the past. She might indeed travel far before I could trace and overtake her; she might be overcome by hunger and fatigue. I felt certain that it would be in one of the great cities that 1 should find her, because she must inevitably chance upon some of the ancient roads before she had gone very far, and one of these she would follow to see what they meant and whither they led. It was inevitable that she should see things it would have been better for her never to look upon, and learn things which she had better not have known. The time of her happiest ignorance was gone for ever.

In a city of the dead I found her at last. I had travelled long through the silent streets and peered often into the silent houses. There was no one from whom I could ask any tidings of my lost darling; no one to tell me if her delicate feet had trodden those solitary ways, or her sweet young eyes looked in upon the grim remains of death.

So many years had passed away, since the night of the great death, that the most terrible and dangerous effects of the universal mortality were at an end. The houses stood as when their inhabitants were alive, and there had been none to bury the dead; but at least these had lost all resemblance to their old forms in life, and so to any form that my darling had ever seen. I found her sitting in a luxurious room in a large house, leaning back in a carved chair, and looking with wonder and curiosity, but without any repugnance or terror, on the skeletons who were, besides herself, the sole inhabitants of the place.

“Dear father,” she said, putting her hands out to me with a smile, and looking at me as if my discovery of her had nothing strange in it, “I am glad you have come. I am tired, and I have had so little to eat! Besides, I want you to tell me many things. What a strange place this is! and what strange carvings these are! But the most curious thing of all is that they should be dressed in clothes something like what I wear. Who made them like this? and did you know that they were here?”

I took her hands, and my own trembled so that she looked down on them in surprise.

“I knew of them,” I answered; “but you must not stay where they are. It is bad for you to be here.”

“I do not feel it so. I like it. I should like to stay. It seems as if some one had lived here who loved the things I love, and gathered them all about her. But there never was any one, was there?” she asked wistfully.

I spoke to her with more sternness than I had ever used before. “You must come away at once. If it had been good for you to be here I should have brought you myself. You ought to have known that.”

She rose with a reluctant sigh, and followed me slowly, pausing halfway across the room to look at an empty cradle.

“What a strange little bed!” she remarked, with interest; “something like mine, only so very small; as if I might have slept in it before I grew high enough to look through the window. Was it made for me? Was there ever another me before this one?”

Some fatality might have led her steps to that house and to that room, for she was looking at the very cradle from which I had taken her. I hurried her impatiently away, refusing to answer her questions. She looked at me in surprise from time to time, often with an air of awakened observation; something other than the old complete confidence in me and docile fidelity to my will was working in her heart. She was ceasing to be entirely receptive; soon she might become critical.

“How many homes!” she murmured, as she passed along the streets, “and no one to live in any of them! How did they all come here, gathered together in one place? Did they grow like trees in a forest?”

I did not attempt to answer all her questions, but I got her home again as soon as I could. Knowledge—a full knowledge of the life she had lost—could only bring to her sadness and discontent. Her present perplexity seemed better than that, and I was resolved to leave her in ignorance as long as it was possible. She could see that, for the first time in her life, I was seriously displeased with her; yet even this affected her less than it would have done in ordinary circumstances. When we reached our home, I spoke to her impressively.

“What is good for you to know I will tell you; what is good for you to see I will show you,” I said, holding her hands in mine and looking steadfastly into her eyes. “Promise me that you will never again seek out new things alone.”

To my astonishment she—who had hitherto been so obedient, tender, and sweetly acquiescent—drew her hands from mine, covered her face with them, and broke out into passionate weeping.

“I cannot promise,” she answered; “everything that I have I owe to you; without you I should be nothing at all. I wish to obey you; I will try to obey you; but there is something in my heart stronger than you are, and so I cannot promise.”

That was all she would say to me; and from that time I knew that she cherished many thoughts and wishes of which she never spoke. I no longer possessed her full confidence. She understood that there existed powers beyond mine, and that, even of the power I had, I had not offered all the results to her. Yet she was tender to me, very tender and sweet, as if she wished to make up to me by grateful deeds for that reserve of force, of intention, of possible rebellion, in her heart.

One day she brought to me a book, not a book which I had given to her, but which she had found in her wanderings among the habitations of the past. She had been studying it in secret, and it was a love story.

“Do you know,” she said, “who made this book, and what it means? It tells me of many things of which you have never spoken at all.”

I could not lie to her, though truth must bring the bitterness of conscious loss, of unavailing desire. If she knew that I lied to her she would have none left to trust or to lean upon; she could not fail to become miserably aware of her own loneliness and helpless ignorance.

“It tells of things which it is better for you not to know,” I answered. “They belong to the past, and can never be again.”

“Ah!” she said, her eyes glowing with a strange light, “then it is all true! Others have lived like me, and have known each other, and have been happy together. They were not lonely as I am—oh, not for ever alone!”

“I am with you,” I answered briefly.

“You!” she said, “you?” Then she paused and looked at me contemplatively. “You are not like me,” she went on, with deliberation. “You are like the rocks and the trees and the soil and the light; always the same, always giving me help, never wanting anything back. But I—I change from day to day. Life is full of surprise to me, and of longing. I want some one like myself to be my companion, to talk with, as the men and women talk in that book. I always wondered why—since all other things were many—there should be but one man and one woman, you and I. You so old and changeless; I so young and full of change. I know now what it is to be young. It is to be unfinished—not as you are; to feel new every day—not as you do; to be incomplete, and to long for something outside myself; to feel the need of other lives to mix with mine; not to be satisfied to go on alone. That is what it is to be young, and I am young. But you—oh! you are very old. How did it come to be that we are alone together?”

“Because you are weak, and I am strong,” I answered her; “because you need care, and I can give it.”

“I would rather have lived when the other people were here,” she replied; “then we could have helped one another. I understand now why all those homes stand empty. Once men and women lived there and—loved each other, and—were happy. I have learnt many beautiful things from that book. I wish you had taught them to me before. Tell me only this one thing—if the people were there once, why are they not there now?”

“They went away; they will never come again,” I answered, for I could not speak to her of death. In the book that she had read the whole history of life was not recorded, only its bright beginning; and of death, towards which her life led her, towards which her bright, expectant face was turned in all unconsciousness, she knew nothing.

It was some weeks afterwards that I found her waiting for me near our home as I turned my steps thither for our evening meal. It was not strange to see her waiting so; but it was very strange, it was wonderful, that she was not alone. Destiny had found her, and had defeated me; for a kindred life had come to her from another world, and with life had come love, the love which explained life to her and completed it. There was no surprise in her eyes, for the things we have desired come to us as old companions and not as strangers; rather was there a look of radiant happiness and triumph.

Her companion was a stranger to me, however. He was not a creature of our world; he belonged to a race stronger and more beautiful than my own; yet he was not wholly unlike some of the young men I had known, not so unlike that he should not seem a fitting mate for the beautiful woman beside him. He appeared to have easily established communication with her; but to me he was silent, regarding me with a haughty curiosity as I approached them. She seemed already to belong to him; and she met me with a look of eager gladness, as if I must certainly rejoice in her happiness, and welcome the wonderful being who brought it.

“The book spoke the truth,” she said. “There are others alive besides myself; others who are young as I am, and beautiful to look upon, and sweet to live with. And he he has come from another world to find me.”

I ought to have slain him as he stood there in the proud consciousness of his youth, splendour, and strength, with that serenity of aspect which was born of a perfect conviction of his own claims to satisfaction, and of his power to seize it; with that gracious courtesy of manner which partly hid his haughtiness and was the offspring of his simple selfishness of purpose. At his feet lay a strange garment, a dark-coloured wrap, hooded and winged, the ingenious instrument of his transit from another world.

“I was afraid when I saw him first,” said my darling, whose eyes had followed mine. “He was black and dreadful to look upon, and his face was hidden. But when he threw that veil away and stood before me, it—it was like a sun bursting from behind a hideous cloud.”

She caught his hand as she spoke, with her white caressing fingers, and looked up into his shining eyes with a smile of love and confidence.

I ought to have slain him as he stood there, It would have been better for her, better for all things—for myself, last and least of all. He had no happiness to give which would not bring its trouble, though my darling, with her face towards the sun, could not see the shadow it cast behind her. I had no right to undo and destroy the great gift that had been granted to me; I had no right, for the sake of one simple girl, to let the beautiful world become once more the habitation of sorrow that grew, and sin that increased from day to day.

I ought to have slain him. It would have been easy. For my power was greater than his, in spite of that dazzling youthful splendour which he had about him. But I looked at my darling, and my hand was stayed. Once more, for the sake of one whose innocence appealed to me, I forgot the misery of a world. I could not bring horror to the eyes where gladness now shone; I could not turn the look of tenderness with which she gazed at him to one of hate for me. I could not teach her then and there what death was, and the meaning of sorrow and separation and despair. I turned and left them. As a criminal flies from the scene of his crime I fled from the sight of the happiness which had no right to be, longing only for that death to come to me which I had not the courage to give to another.

I did not die. I could not die. My punishment is to live. For a time my darling was happy; joyously and laughingly at first, afterwards tenderly and quietly. Children came to her, and she loved them with a passion of delight, as if they were gifts that none other had had before—created for the employment of her tenderness alone.

Her husband was kind to her, in his splendid, lordly, condescending fashion; but he spoke to her little of the world from which he came, and for which he often left her. He told her that it was impossible to take her with him on these visits, and he probably had no desire to take her. His discovery of her youth and beauty in an apparently empty and abandoned world, on which he had by chance. alighted, had been a pleasant surprise to him; he had taken full advantage of the circumstance, but he did not let it interfere in the least degree with his freedom of action. He left me to provide, as before, for the material wants of his wife, and of her children also. He told her, when she desired to go away with him, that she was sweetest and best as he had found her; that intercourse with others could only spoil, and must distress her. This satisfied her at first, for his passionate admiration of her beauty gave her keen delight; afterwards, when she had her children to think of, she no longer desired to go away.

As for me, when I found that I was needed, I took up my burden again and became her servant. I hoped for the best. Surely this new race, which had been cut loose from all the base traditions, habits, and examples of the past, might run a brighter and purer course than the last. The sweet fidelity and tenderness of the mother, the keen and cultivated intelligence of the father, must form a hopeful heritage for the boys and girls who were born to them. The temptations lurking in the old social conditions were swept away; degrading memories, bitter recollections, these things had no place in the good new world where my darling kissed her children and told them to love one another. I hoped for the best, but the worst was to come.

Her first real trouble fell on her when one of her babies died. She could not be made to understand what had happened to it, for she had never heard of death. Her husband delighted in all her innocent ignorances. and left them undisturbed. She thought me therefore strangely cruel when I wanted to take the dead child from her and to put it away under the ground. No, she said, she would wait any length of time and not grow tired of nursing it, even if it should never wake again. She loved it as it was, and would keep it with her. But her husband interfered with his authority, and she listened to him as she would not listen to me.

“It is necessary, entirely necessary, that you should let the dead child go.”

“What do you mean by the dead child?” she asked; but he did not trouble to explain himself.

“You must obey those who know things of which you are ignorant,” was all he vouchsafed to say to her on this point. “There are reasons of which you need not be told; but supposing that there were none, why should you waste your time, and your love, and your care, on a thing which can no longer feel, or see, or hear? which cannot have any consciousness of what you do for it? Have you not your husband to think of, and your other children? Do you suppose that I would permit such a waste of your energy and love? What is a dead baby, that never, even when it was alive, understood your affection for it?”

“It is my child—I am its mother,” was all she could answer, out of her ignorance and blind maternal yearnings; but she used the words that she had received from my lips as if her own experience were enough to sanctify them, without that association with the love of generations of mothers which they carried to my ears. Her simple plea could avail her nothing, however. Her baby was buried, and her husband made light of her trouble.

“What is one child more or less?” he would say to her. “Surely enough are left to you.”

Perhaps she thought he was cruel; perhaps his words only perplexed her. She ceased to speak of the dead child; its memory lay silent in her heart, carefully covered from sight by living loves and daily efforts; but it was a sorrowful mystery to her, a broken chord in the musical instrument to which tenderness had tuned her life; no more such perfect harmony could be born for her again as she had listened to before.

As the years passed her husband’s absences became longer and more frequent; but the care of her children occupied her at these times. She was. one of those women who are too sweet to permit themselves to be unhappy while happiness is possible; because anything less than satisfaction with their lot would be a sort of complaint against those who love them. If she saddened, it was inwardly; and the outward signs of it were an increased tenderness and patience. Her children ceased to be entirely a joy to her, but she never expressed any of the grief which they must have caused her. They had inherited from the ancestors of whom she knew so little instincts and tendencies strange and repugnant to her pure and loving heart. The boys were quarrelsome and disrespectful, the girls frivolous and vain. They exhibited airs and graces such as their grandmothers had cultivated in the lost city life, which offended the simple sweetness of their mother. Their brothers struggled for pre-eminence and personal satisfaction in the vast solitudes which surrounded them, just as their forefathers had struggled in the crowded settlements of of the past. Still my darling loved them, and smiled when they wounded her, and would not blame or utter any regret. Only she looked at me wonderingly, sympathetically, sometimes almost remorsefully.

“I think sometimes, father,” she said to me once, “that you knew of all these things beforehand, and wanted to save me from them. I think that perhaps there is more, very much more, that is plain to you, but that I do not know yet.”

She was silent a moment, looking at me wistfully. “It must be sad to know,” she went on slowly; “I wonder if you have known always. I do not want you to tell me. I would rather—wait.” She ended with a little shudder, and turned to kiss her youngest child with a sudden passion that was born of sorrow and of fear. She had no desire to lift higher the dark veil which hid the possibilities of the future from her eyes.

There came a time when her husband went away, and did not return. Still she made no complaint, and asked no useless questions. This, she thought, was one of the hidden things of the future, against which there was no appeal. Her children became more troublesome and difficult to manage. They knew what fear was, but had no sense of reverence. They had feared their father and obeyed him, because his will was hard as iron against theirs, and as pitiless; in my devotion, unrewarded and undemanding, they saw only weakness. They were swift to learn lessons of evil; and as their father had treated me with a courtesy touched with contempt, so they behaved to me with a disobedience hardly modified by politeness. They despised their mother a good deal, and loved her a little (again imitating their father’s sentiments with the proportions reversed); and thus it came to pass that they subdued none of their faults in her presence; and it was in the face of her own children that my darling learned to read the evil passions which had reigned in the unknown world of the past. Anger she saw, and jealousy; cowardice, ill-temper, cruelty, greed, and insolence. With a throb of terror in her heart she recognised them for the evil things they were, the beginning of trouble to which there would be no end.

Her trial was not so long as it might have been. She missed, at least, the pangs of sickness and the weakness of old age. She did not live to see herself counted a burden where she had been a treasure, nor to receive ingratitude and slights in return for all her loving care. She never lost her health or her beauty; and the end that came to her, bitter as it was, was merciful, in that it was not long delayed. For her, at least, the curtain was never lifted to its height, and the depth of the darkness behind it was left unfathomed.

Her boys read books that she had never seen, for after the first she longed for no more. They knew things of which she was ignorant; the learning and history of the past were not secrets to them. They became ransackers of the ancient cities, and brought home strange spoils of weapons, and jewels, and carving, and ingenious instruments. One day two of them came upon a great store of daggers. Together they brought them. home, and set to work to polish and sharpen them. Their mother looked on, and wondered what the strange knives were made for, but felt no fear. Over the division of the spoil, however, the brothers quarrelled.

“I am the elder,” said one, “and the books say that to the elder goes the larger portion.”

“But I am the stronger,” said the other, “and I laugh at the books, and bid them come and get the knives from me if they can!”

Then in anger the two rushed together, and the mother, with a cry of terror, ran between. But their rage was increased by her interference.

“Leave us alone,” said the elder; “I have read in the books that women ought not to interfere with the affairs of men. Go back to your own work, and leave us to fight it out.”

“Put the knives down,” she entreated; “they are sharp like those with which the old father cuts wood for our fire. It is not good to play with them,”

“We are not playing,” answered the stronger. “These are made for men to fight with. The men of the past forged things like these with which to strike and slay one another when they were angry. We are men, too, and must do as they did.”

“Strike? Slay?” she repeated, her face growing paler still at the ominous. sound of those strange new words, coming, with a fierceness suggestive of their meaning, from the lips of her son. “You are speaking of something dreadful, something else that is waiting in the secret past to spring into our happy future. Let it go! Put them down!—ah, I can see it in your eyes!”

It was murder that she saw, and could not understand; but she held her two sons apart for one moment, while her panting breath refused to let her say more. The young men were stronger than she was, however, and they wasted no words upon her. By mutual consent they thrust her from between them, and rushed together again. The daggers gleamed in the air, but before they had time to fall, the mother, with a wild shriek of terror, had flung herself forward once more, with her slender hands trying to part the combatants.

And the daggers fell. Was it one wound or two beneath which she slipped to the ground, as water slips from a hollowed rock when the barrier is taken away? She had no strength left to struggle or to rise, but lay as she had fallen, her life flowing away in a warm current. The boys looked at her in wonder, and then at the red daggers in their hands. This thing they had not meant to do, and they uttered a loud cry of dismay, which brought me from afar.

I lifted my darling’s head, and knew that there was no hope. She would die so, lying with her bright hair on my knee, and her eyes full of wonder and pain.

“My children, what have you done to me?” she asked pitifully. “What is this new thing that you have brought into our lives?”

I soothed her and comforted her, telling her that the pain would soon be over.

“But I grow weaker,” she answered. “I am slipping away into the darkness. You seem farther off every moment.”

“Rest will come soon,” I told her; “and I will put you to sleep with your little one, where no trouble can reach you.”

She smiled then, faintly and wanly. “Is it true? Have you kept her for me? Put her in my arms and let us sleep together. Better the night and the darkness. I want no more daytime and knowledge. She only of them all never looked at me with something dreadful in her eyes. Let me go to my little one!” cried the poor mother, trying with a last effort of life to raise herself from my arms. “Why should I stay longer? My children do not love me, and my husband has forsaken me!” So with her dying words she uttered that secret of her sorrow which she had kept hidden in her heart before.

I buried her in her baby’s grave, and with her I buried all hopes of a glad new world. With her children I could do nothing; they mocked at my teaching, and at last drove me from among them. The boys who had slain their mother, brooded over her loss at first, and reproached one another. After a time, however, the most calculating of the two put his grief away, and tried to make use of his experience.

“I know what death is now,” he was heard to explain to a younger one; “it is a useful thing—a thing that takes people out of your way when they want to interfere with you. But it must be used carefully, because it lasts for ever, and cannot be undone.”

Since the day of my darling’s death it has seemed to me that each gene- ration has been worse than the one before it. The remnants of an old civilisation which the new race inherited proved a snare and a trouble only. The people hated to work with their hands, and loved to live on the labour of others. They were always plotting to do little and to have much. The keen intelligence handed down to them from their father helped them in this respect; they became the cleverest and the most self-indulgent of races. Some affections survived among them, but these were regarded as weaknesses, and as hindrances to true prosperity. The stronger of them oppressed the weaker, until at last there was a terrible outbreak, in which multitudes were slain: the survivors lived perpetually on their guard, as in an enemy’s country, each seeking his own advantage and striving to circumvent his neighbour. After a time they became too idle even for warfare, and grew to be—what you see them now.

It is my punishment to live among them; to be despised by them; to be unable to render them any real help or service; while I am a constant witness of their wickedness and woe. Their sins seem to be mine, and their sorrows too; and I repent with a repentance which has no end. For I dared once to ask—in the arrogance of a great desire to help—that the fate of a whole race should be put in my hands. I dared, with my finite will, to meddle with issues that were infinite. How then can there be any end to my sorrow, since there is no end to the misery I have made?

2. Interpretative Essay

Every time I reread Lily Spender’s science-fiction short story A Legend of Another World, I think of a new connection to draw to it. A feminist reimagining of the Creation story: Eve the innocent first human raised by the God-figure, and her husband Adam help not meet for her; her sons, those who ate from the tree of knowledge, and introduced sin to the world. Alternatively, a Great Flood narrative: sin cannot be purged from the world despite the God-figure leaving only the most innocent person alive. Alternatively, a Jesus narrative: an innocent person dies, their only crime having more love in their heart than anyone else. It almost seems as though Biblical allusions are low-hanging fruit.

So instead, what about a more modern comparison? What about the two blockbusters that defined the summer of 2023?

Yes, I mean Barbie and Oppenheimer.

In case you missed it, Oppenheimer (2023) told the story of Robert J. Oppenheimer, theoretical physicist and father of the atomic bomb. Like Oppenheimer, A Legend of Another World is narrated by a man who regrets that the definitive act of his life was to spark a destruction of many greater consequences than his grand intentions to save the world. The first “act” of A Legend of Another World, where the narrator describes the actions that led to his decision to eliminate all human life, parallels in a way Oppenheimer sitting in the trial chamber, confessing. There’s no need for the narrator to tell a space-travelling professor his world’s history—there’s no need for Oppenheimer to bring so many unrelated personal details to the trial—but each man’s guilty conscience cannot let him live without ensuring the world knows he is responsible for mass suffering.

Film critic Matt Seitz writes of Oppenheimer, “There are a lot of gradually expanding flashbacks in this film, where you see a glimpse of something first, then a bit more of it, and then finally the entire thing.”6 In the movie, of course, this most obviously refers to the nuclear bomb test in the desert, of which we see flashes in memory before the explosion itself. Yet by this Seitz also means the “little [bombs] that are constantly detonating in Oppenheimer’s life […] because he made a naive or thoughtless mistake […] long ago.” In A Legend of Another World, the narrator looks back upon many mistakes he made, many of them naive.

One might think the narrator’s big red button moment is wiping out the human race in the first place: mass destruction for mass destruction. And yes, he does regret that decision every moment of his life—but only because it led to a worse decision he made down the line. I invite you to look at page 8 of the story document: “I ought to have slain him as he stood there.” He repeats the phrase three times as he reminisces, each time more violent and regretful than the last. His decision to let the man from another world live, because he ultimately prioritises his daughter’s happiness over his own comfort and control, ends up killing his daughter and restarting the cycle of misery that he thought he’d left behind with the rest of humanity. Likewise, Oppenheimer’s building of the bomb, meant to save lives by shortening World War II, ends up creating the technology that kills hundreds of thousands of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Oppenheimer, says Seitz, is about chain reactions. Its “gradually expanding flashbacks” are accompanied by repeated images of ripples in water or a sky catching on fire.

It is also about a man who plays God.

“For I dared once to ask—in the arrogance of a great desire to help—that the fate of a whole race should be put in my hands. I dared, with my finite will, to meddle with issues that were infinite. How then can there be any end to my sorrow, since there is no end to the misery I have made?”

I am become death, destroyer of worlds: all the narrator’s despair in as few words.

Anyways, remember the whiplash when your Barbenheimer marathon plans picked you up from a black-and-white theatre heavy with the silence of the nuclear bomb and sat you down in a world of neon pink plastic and pop music? While critical analysis isn’t as joyful and carefree as the opening sequence of Barbie, we’re still switching gears—just maybe from fifth to third, rather than fifth to reverse.

Barbie (2023) is a movie that tries to do many things. The weightiest criticism of it, in fact, is that it tries to do too much. (If you need a refresher on the plot: Barbie flees the feminist utopia of Barbieland to the “real world” in search for a cure to depression, only for the “real world” to tell her to sit back and shut up while empowering Ken to take misogyny to Barbieland and liberate the men from second-class citizenship. Of course, everything is resolved in the end.) It’s a narrative on motherhood, on misogyny and misandry, on feminism, on teenage angst, on mental health, on patriarchy, on capitalism—all the while a vehicle with which to sell plastic dolls. And yet many of its commentaries occur too in A Legend of Another World.

The narrator’s “daughter”, of course, is the Barbie of Spender’s story. Growing up in a world tailored to her personhood, she never learned the pain of what we would consider the “real world”. She never had glass ceilings foisted upon her, never had to conform to expectations of a society that saw women as defined by the men they were attached to, never had to deal with laws biased against women or wage gaps or the period tax or a million daily microaggressions that wore away at her ability or will to be herself. The world was her oyster.

And then the men showed up.

In Barbie, Ken begins wonderfully innocent to the workings of misogyny. He’s as impressionable as a child when he picks up books on men’s place in the “real world” from a middle school library in California. And he takes this knowledge back to the safe haven of Barbieland, which is completely unprepared for the men to rise up, take what they see as their rightful place, and brainwash women into airheaded sex accessories.

The daughter’s husband in A Legend of Another World was never innocent, seeing the daughter as merely “satisfaction” within “his power to seize” from the moment they meet. The greater parallel to the Kens in Barbie lies with her children: born, as she was, without sin. But after ransacking the ruined cities of the “real world” and reading the ancient texts of the civilization her father had wiped out, her sons become “quarrelsome and disrespectful”, while her daughters become “frivolous and vain”—just as the Kens and Barbies changed when the patriarchy had enthralled them. “I have read in the books that women ought not to interfere with the affairs of men.” One son’s words could come straight from Ken’s mouth.

Maybe if the Kens had done their final battle with daggers, I’d be able to fit in another paragraph on parallels. Luckily for the hordes of twelve-year-olds crowding theaters on opening night, Barbie is not stabbed to death on the beach, introducing murder into an already fragile society and letting loose all hell. Ultimately, Barbie ends on a hopeful note: the characters learn that the society of Barbieland should be based on neither misogyny nor misandry, and decide to build a future where everyone is equal. In A Legend of Another World, everyone is equal, all right—after generations of hatred, only the “cleverest and most self-indulgent” have survived, so used to profiting off the backs of others that they are “too idle even for warfare”.

So what to do with all this? What, indeed, to do when the messages of an 1886 short story are present in the two most popular films of 2023? Both Barbie and Oppenheimer spoke to contemporary issues about misogyny and ethics, and it’s clear that these issues were present, perhaps in different forms, almost 140 years ago.

All we can do, suggests not only A Legend of Another World but Oppenheimer and Barbie too, is teach our history, and properly. We mustn’t sanitize it to protect ourselves or our children: that, indeed, will leave them the most susceptible when they are exposed to evil at last. (And it will happen, no matter how hard we try to prevent it.) I think of Spender’s message today and I think of the bills about to pass in courts of law to “protect children” by banning content that might raise hard-to-answer questions. Banning or even hiding books on abuse in libraries or schools makes it harder for victims, especially children, to recognise that they are being abused. Banning the teaching of America’s recent history of racism makes students less likely to recognize they may still be participating in it or even benefiting from it. In Barbie, pretending misogyny didn’t exist only made Barbieland’s citizens all the more vulnerable to its toxic thrall; in A Legend of Another World, hiding the truth of death from the daughter only served to confuse and hurt her, and eventually led to her own death. And refusing to confront his own hard-to-answer questions—and his wife’s, and everyone else around him who cared, too—brought Oppenheimer to another tragedy.

We can’t expect the next generation to change for the better if we ourselves don’t try. And we can’t expect the world to change if there is no “next generation”. Together, this story and these films teach us that history is only cyclical if we blind ourselves to it. There is a way forwards, and we must not let despair hide from us the joys of the world as the narrator did. We must not believe that suffering will forever outweigh happiness. Otherwise, there will be no end to the sorrow we will make.

License

The text of “A Legend of Another World” is in the public domain.

All editorial material by Jake Ross is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0

  1. Macmillan’s Magazine and the Fair Sex: 1859-1874, Rosemary T. Vanarsdel. Part One.↩︎
  2. The Grove Years 1868-1883: A “new look” for MacMillan’s Magazine?, Ann Parry. Link.↩︎
  3. Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Edward Irving Carlyle. Vol. 53.↩︎
  4. Macmillan’s Magazine and the Fair Sex: 1859-1874, Rosemary T. Vanarsdel. Part Two.↩︎
  5. Tale Bearing in the 1890s: The Author and Fiction Syndication, Robert A. Colby, p. 8↩︎
  6. Seitz, Matt Zoller. “Oppenheimer Movie Review & Film Summary (2023).” Roger Ebert, 19 July 2023. Link.↩︎