Mr Wroe's Virgins

by Jane Rogers

  Because no fruit did ever come from man

  Though it is often grafted by his hand.

  I fear I am not strong enough. I despise my own weakness, but I am afraid. I imagine the jeers of the people. I remember the streets, at the time of Mother Joanna’s confinement. I remember the crude effigies, and the cruder uses to which they were put – the foulness of the people’s bestial nature exposed – Lord, I shrink before such testing. And if, like Mother Joanna, I should die …

  Yaakov recalls me to my dream, speaking of the cinder which set my loose hairs aflame for a brief moment. This is the figure, he says, of the blessed halo which shall frame my face in eternity.

  Oh is it so? Can it be so?

  I am driven against the rock face of uncertainty, like a creature repeatedly beaten by the waves: there is no escape, no way out through this wall of rock, except to turn and brave the raging sea, lose sight of land, and swim.

  I fear that I have upset Sister Hannah with my silence. She does not complain, but there is a resentment in the set of her shoulders. She feigns deep concentration on her reading, and does not look up when I enter the room. I am imprisoned in silence: to whom can I speak or turn except Thee, O Lord? Give me a sign, for the truth.

  Yaakov is a practical man, he has in this instance a clear view of the world’s opinions. The child’s parentage must be kept secret from all. In so far as he fathers the child, it shall be simply as the agent of the holy spirit. This is beyond the understanding of simple mortals, who will put upon it their own gross interpretations. Secondly, there may be jealousy among the other virgins, if they are grieved that it is not they who are called. For these reasons, I must not tell a soul: though the secret burns and torments me till, like Midas’ wife, I long to run down to the river and whisper amongst the rustling rushes, ‘My husband has asses’ ears’ – only louder, ‘I am to mother Shiloh!’

  It will be put about, then, that the child is of spiritual conception – as indeed it will be, but not in such a way as the world can understand.

  I falter. I am afraid. Is this true? Or am I Satan’s plaything, dizzied with his inventions so that I can no longer see the way? Now do I understand Mother Southcott’s torments, her uncertainty at the origin of her Spirit voice. Dear Lord, help me along the path; if this is indeed the path You have ordained for me, let me see, and understand, and know it to be right. I pray You help me through the dark mists of doubt.

  I believe the Prophet’s interpretation of my dream to come from a sincere attempt to penetrate the mysteries of God’s will, and to act as His servant. I cannot believe him to harbour any base or sinful motives; nor, if that were the case, could his choice possibly fall on such a plain and tormented female as myself. I believe God loves and protects His own – just as I believe He has great plans (as Southcott foretold) for the women. Must I not trust Him then? Must I not give myself up to the will of Him who holds us all in the palm of His hand, cease my struggle and my doubt, and say with grace, ‘Lord, Thy will be done’?

  But then such sweet dreams, such fond hopes arise, that I tremble to own them. If indeed I was with child … Imagine the bliss arising from such motherhood. That I should be chosen – I, among the women of the world – for this great honour. Imagine the soft child’s embrace around the neck, the touch of that small hand. If I dared believe it to be true, would not the promise of these things steel me for all insults, all insinuations, all debaucheries: and would not the confirmation of God’s purpose, in the swelling growth of my belly, protect me and seal me from all danger? For who could hurt the vessel of the Godhead? What man’s hand could be raised against His holiness?

  I overreach. Mother Southcott was injured: hurt: insulted. Christ himself in his first appearance on earth was harried and tortured to death. Why should I escape? But I believe I could welcome the thought of such approaching dangers, could I but conquer my doubt. This is my most pressing fear – the doubt about the first origin of my dream. Could it not have been placed in my thoughts as easily by Satan as by God? What evil charade may we, in all deluded innocence, enact? And how might that prejudice His cause, in the years to come, and loose countless souls through mockery and disbelief, and weaken our church and set the tongue of scandal wagging loose amongst our members?

  Guide me Lord guide me, my prayer is constant, I know neither sleep nor rest.

  *

  I dreamed of the child again last night: his sweet face turned towards me as if in supplication. How can I reject God? How can I reject God’s will? It must be done.

  After I read to Yaakov I made this known. He nodded.

  ‘It is right. God’s will shall be done. I await His instructions on how and when this thing must be accomplished.’

  This thing. As I desire salvation I hope for success in this venture, but I am most afraid. How it may be secretly arranged I cannot imagine.

  Tonight Yaakov has told me God’s plan. On the Sabbath, Zion Ward, a London Israelite, comes to our meeting, and will speak in Yaakov’s stead. I must keep to my bed in the morning, complaining of sick headache, and not accompany the others to Sanctuary. Yaakov will absent himself from the meeting, after it has begun, giving the need for private intercourse with God as his reason. Every other soul in the place will be in Sanctuary. He will come straight to my bed. He reasons that the spirituality of the hour, and the concentrated (if unknowing) prayers of our brothers and sisters, must help us in our execution of God’s will.

  *

  The morning of the Sabbath was dark with rain, as if the heavens wept to see what must come to pass. True enough to say I had a sick headache, for I had not slept a wink in the night past. My Sister Hannah was kindness itself, wiping my feverish face with a cool damp cloth, fetching me fresh water, before she left for Sanctuary. And then the minutes seemed long: I tried to pray, but over and over again the mechanical repetition of words broke down, before the panic in my heart. I imagined I heard his footstep on the stairs a thousand times, and each time began afresh to beg God’s blessing and help to endure this trial of the flesh, and each time was lost and confounded in my prayer by hearing a new and clearer footstep. Then I began to think that he would not come; that God had perhaps given him a sign, that it was not to be.

  And then he was there. I heard him lift the latch and open the door, close it, place Hannah’s chair against it. I lay completely motionless, my face hidden beneath the sheet, unable to move for shame.

  ‘Joanna! Sister Joanna! Pray with me, for God’s blessing.’ He fell to his knees beside the bed, raised his joined hands, and closed his eyes. The terror in my heart was lessened: God would be with us, how could He fail to respond to so much faith, to such a sacrifice? I clambered awkwardly from my bed and knelt beside Yaakov, while he prayed aloud for blessing, for a fruitful union and for the forgiveness of our sins.

  When he was done he stood up and raised me to my feet, asking me kindly enough if I knew what it was we should do. I shook my head, and he asked me if I would trust him to enact God’s work, and surrender myself to him entirely as to the hand of God my heavenly husband. I could not help trembling, and he laid his hands upon my arms.

  ‘You must not be afraid, Sister Joanna. You must rejoice. The words of the earthly marriage ceremony may be repeated in our hearts here and amplified a thousand-fold: with my body, I thee worship. With our bodies, we Thee worship. Our bodies are His agents: glorious, shining, fit for angels. We step back, sister, into a time of innocence – for shame was only learnt by biting of the forbidden fruit. Before that time, nakedness was beautiful, the actions and functions of the body were, equally with the worship of the spirit, a means of extolling His praises. Forget fear, Joanna, forget shame. We will worship.’

  Saying this he unfastened my nightdress so that I was indeed naked. And then he removed his own clothes, revealing to my sight such a thing as I have never before seen or imagined; an angry leaping purple rod of flesh so terrible in its aspect that I clenched my eyes shut, forcing myself to keep t
he tears in.

  I cannot tell what followed; only that my heart is overwhelmed with grief for womankind, to know the torments of procreation that so many endure. How greatly we must have angered God, for Him to insult us by forcing us to perform these hideous and depraved actions. Man is no more than beast, and cruel indeed was He to imbue those who must endure the actions of beasts, with the sensibilities of higher things. Forgive me, my dear Lord, but I weep for my sex, and pray You earnestly to grant us Your pity, by making me the agent which might hasten the coming of Your reign of a thousand years, when all such bodily cruelty and contact shall cease. If the body is Your temple, Lord – such desecration must give grief to Your sweet heart also. As an horse would scarcely feel the pressure of my finger, yet that pressure destroys a butterfly: as surely must a fine sensibility be destroyed by the repetition of the depraved and bestial actions of procreation.

  I set myself to repeat the Lord’s prayer.

  Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done. Hallowed be Thy name Thy kingdom Oh God – forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us for Thine is for Thine is for Thine is. Our Father who art in – our Father our Father in heaven I bless the words although I could not say them. In time one would learn, perhaps that would be my aim if married, in time to perfect the saying of them so that no degree of physical distress could distract one from their soothing flow.

  At last he ceased and the terrible implement was extracted from between my legs, causing renewed hurt. He rose from the bed and dressed himself.

  ‘Stop crying, Joanna. It is done now. Your self-pity mocks God. Many have made greater sacrifices for His sake. Let us pray that our endeavour is crowned with success.’ He fell to his knees and began to pray silently; when I moved to join him I noticed the blood, an outward and recognizable sign of my sacrifice. Unworthy as I am, I have shed blood for You, Lord.

  When he stood up he told me to take the sheets down to the wash-house, and there to wash myself. ‘You must be composed and ready when the others return.’

  I was (forgive me Lord) so glad when he was gone, that I burst into another fit of crying. I wish I never had to see him again, God’s Prophet though he be; I cannot imagine how people who do this can look one another in the eye, or behave in any degree naturally. I cannot imagine – I cannot understand –

  Dear Lord, I cannot understand. Help me to a greater humility. May it please You to accept this my sacrifice, with gentle understanding, and forgiveness for my foolish and most unworthy distress.

  I must turn my thoughts forward, away from this sad pain. Let me imagine; let me dare to imagine, now, the outcome. That I may feel the child quicken in my belly, and know the heat of his warm soft body, nestled against my breast like little Thomas. The tears which swell and ache in my eyes are no longer pain, but joy. I thank you, sweet Lord, for what is promised me: I shall endeavour to be worthy.

  Hannah

  I have a letter of Edward. It was passed to me after service, by Samuel Walker, who was given it by my uncle. His reply to the news of my father’s death; and his first letter for over a year. I had nearly given up hope of hearing from him again; the sight of it made me very agitated, with a nervous ache in my stomach.

  We had to wait, as usual, till all had left Sanctuary; then make the place neat and extinguish all candles save the seven on the altar: and then walk back, in our tidy little band, led by the prophet. There was no opportunity to open the letter until I was safely in our room (and even then Joanna looked at me askance, because I was neither praying nor reading my Bible).

  The outside was none too clean, the writing a little smudged; I sniffed it, imagining that I could smell the salty sea it had passed over on its way to me.

  Libertatia,

  New Harmony,

  Indiana

  September 1829

  My Dear Hannah,

  How many times have I begun this letter, with hope and anticipation in my heart, only to find that I must put it aside for matters of more pressing urgency, which demand my immediate attention. So much has happened here, such a deluge of joys, disasters, excitements, disappointments, that I am at a loss where to begin to tell you our news.

  Let me begin at the beginning. The great triumph of the year is the completion of our own living quarters, designed along Mr Owen’s parallelogram lines. As you know, since our arrival at New Harmony we have been accommodated in the old meeting house; a cramped and generally unsatisfactory arrangement. We have been clear in our own minds about the necessity of setting ourselves at a distance from those individuals who remain here from the original New Harmony settlement of 1825, for their cynical views and return to individualism are particularly damaging to the tender shoots of a new community. The land we leased from Mr Owen is two miles down river from the village of New Harmony; and on a proud day in May, little over a year after our arrival here, we moved into our own new community house, Libertatia. It is constructed of logs, with an open courtyard at the centre, and individual sleeping quarters, 2 workshops, a kitchen, washroom and dining room (which serves us also as a meeting hall, and for dancing) surrounding it. I wish you could see it Hannah, standing clean and proud in its field, and sounding – by its very size and design – the death knell of small individual families, of competition and strife. It is a physical testimony to the ideals of cooperation and rationality: all work, education, leisure and joys to be shared.

  As you know, the members of our party were carefully selected so as to provide a range of those skills judged necessary for our independence, mutual comfort, and economic survival. Due to a variety of unforseen events, however, including the theft of a considerable amount of our agricultural equipment from the barn where it was stored, the results of our farming have been less successful than we hoped. We found ourselves short of foodstuffs which we had expected to be able to grow; and thus it became necessary to buy supplies from local farmers. Sadly, this reintroduced the need for cash into our lives. For myself, I can do without money forever; would that it were banished from the face of the earth! But besides foodstuffs there were a mounting number of needs, from additional cooking utensils through sewing thread and needles, to new scythes, to tea (which a couple of our number swore they could not live without, lacking, I fear, the real disregard for luxury necessary to the lives of pioneers and breakers of new moral ground). The original communitarians having made place for us only on condition that we should be self-reliant (and indeed, lacking the resources to offer us aid, for they are now no more than a collection of individual households, whose only cooperative venture is the school; their store, granary, mills, public eating house and cook house are all abandoned), we could not turn to them. And so it became necessary for us to turn to the world outside and offer our skills in the market place.

  This part of the country is inhabited chiefly by excommunitarians and farmers, many of whom are living in houses built by themselves or by their parents, using the same old simple furniture their parents contrived (or even brought with them, in laden wagons, on their first journey into the New World.) How glad I am for my skill as a cabinet maker! For every household seems to have some item of furniture in need of repair, or some small corner just needing a new cupboard. I have had more employment than I can fit in with my duties to the community (as you know, I am Superintendant of Domestic Economy, besides taking my three hours a day share of that labour in which we all partake, which was building, and is now the cultivation of two further fields of vegetables for our own consumption). I am delighted to have been able to finance both the replacement of the most essential agricultural equipment, and a new stock of medicines. (Every community suffers greatly from sickness in its early years: whether it be the change in climate, the effects of communal living, or some more deep-seated and unconscious purging of the last evils of the decaying and corrupt society they have left behind – I cannot say.) However: I threw myself into my work with my accustomed vigour, and was
foolishly unobservant of the sense of inferiority and distress this caused to some of my comrades. For whilst I was happily working, and knowing that the fruits of my labour should contribute to the good of all in our community, others were less fortunate. Nicholas and Benjamin, who had charge of the outdoor part of our enterprise (the sowing and raising of crops, and breeding of animals), found their activities curtailed by the harsh winter weather, and had the misfortune to lose one sow and her litter of ten, along with a calving cow, both in the space of a week in April. Alongside the smashing down of the vegetable plot fencing, the consequent eating of new shoots by deer, and a suspicion (which had no basis in fact) that others in the community held them responsible for these losses, they fell into a mood of despair which led them to seek comfort in liquor.

  This has caused tremendous concern and division among us, firstly because we agreed in our constitution to ban liquor entirely, and secondly because Benjamin purchased it with money which he had earned clearing land for a neighbouring farmer, as part of our drive to raise finance for essential supplies. He argues that the money was his to spend, since he earned it, ignoring one of our first principles which was that all wealth and property should be held in common.

  This distressing argument raises its head in so many guises, dear Hannah. I am sure nothing could have been more equitable than our starting point, at which each put £50, or more if they had it, towards the costs of establishing the community. How simple our agreement was; property and produce to be held in common, equal returns to all from our enterprise, and only personal property such as clothing to be individually owned. But the arguments that do blow up – from those who now complain that returns should be reckoned according to labour hours put in (for some are working harder than others), to those who, having retained a degree of personal wealth which they declined to put into the community, use it to procure individual comforts and luxuries, and so create jealousy – ensure that our weekly meetings are very frequently stormy.