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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Man And Superman, by George Bernard Shaw
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Man And Superman
+
+Author: George Bernard Shaw
+
+Release Date: March 21, 2006 [EBook #3328]
+Last Updated: July 30, 2015
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MAN AND SUPERMAN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Eve Sobol
+
+
+
+
+
+MAN AND SUPERMAN
+
+A COMEDY AND A PHILOSOPHY
+
+By Bernard Shaw
+
+
+
+
+EPISTLE DEDICATORY TO ARTHUR BINGHAM WALKLEY
+
+My dear Walkley:
+
+You once asked me why I did not write a Don Juan play. The levity with
+which you assumed this frightful responsibility has probably by this
+time enabled you to forget it; but the day of reckoning has arrived:
+here is your play! I say your play, because qui facit per alium facit
+per se. Its profits, like its labor, belong to me: its morals, its
+manners, its philosophy, its influence on the young, are for you to
+justify. You were of mature age when you made the suggestion; and you
+knew your man. It is hardly fifteen years since, as twin pioneers of
+the New Journalism of that time, we two, cradled in the same new sheets,
+made an epoch in the criticism of the theatre and the opera house by
+making it a pretext for a propaganda of our own views of life. So you
+cannot plead ignorance of the character of the force you set in motion.
+You meant me to epater le bourgeois; and if he protests, I hereby refer
+him to you as the accountable party.
+
+I warn you that if you attempt to repudiate your responsibility, I shall
+suspect you of finding the play too decorous for your taste. The
+fifteen years have made me older and graver. In you I can detect no such
+becoming change. Your levities and audacities are like the loves and
+comforts prayed for by Desdemona: they increase, even as your days do
+grow. No mere pioneering journal dares meddle with them now: the stately
+Times itself is alone sufficiently above suspicion to act as your
+chaperone; and even the Times must sometimes thank its stars that
+new plays are not produced every day, since after each such event
+its gravity is compromised, its platitude turned to epigram, its
+portentousness to wit, its propriety to elegance, and even its decorum
+into naughtiness by criticisms which the traditions of the paper do not
+allow you to sign at the end, but which you take care to sign with the
+most extravagant flourishes between the lines. I am not sure that this
+is not a portent of Revolution. In eighteenth century France the end was
+at hand when men bought the Encyclopedia and found Diderot there. When
+I buy the Times and find you there, my prophetic ear catches a rattle of
+twentieth century tumbrils.
+
+However, that is not my present anxiety. The question is, will you not
+be disappointed with a Don Juan play in which not one of that hero's
+mille e tre adventures is brought upon the stage? To propitiate you, let
+me explain myself. You will retort that I never do anything else: it
+is your favorite jibe at me that what I call drama is nothing but
+explanation. But you must not expect me to adopt your inexplicable,
+fantastic, petulant, fastidious ways: you must take me as I am, a
+reasonable, patient, consistent, apologetic, laborious person, with the
+temperament of a schoolmaster and the pursuits of a vestryman. No doubt
+that literary knack of mine which happens to amuse the British public
+distracts attention from my character; but the character is there none
+the less, solid as bricks. I have a conscience; and conscience is
+always anxiously explanatory. You, on the contrary, feel that a man who
+discusses his conscience is much like a woman who discusses her modesty.
+The only moral force you condescend to parade is the force of your
+wit: the only demand you make in public is the demand of your artistic
+temperament for symmetry, elegance, style, grace, refinement, and the
+cleanliness which comes next to godliness if not before it. But my
+conscience is the genuine pulpit article: it annoys me to see people
+comfortable when they ought to be uncomfortable; and I insist on making
+them think in order to bring them to conviction of sin. If you don't
+like my preaching you must lump it. I really cannot help it.
+
+In the preface to my Plays for Puritans I explained the predicament of
+our contemporary English drama, forced to deal almost exclusively with
+cases of sexual attraction, and yet forbidden to exhibit the incidents
+of that attraction or even to discuss its nature. Your suggestion that
+I should write a Don Juan play was virtually a challenge to me to treat
+this subject myself dramatically. The challenge was difficult enough
+to be worth accepting, because, when you come to think of it, though we
+have plenty of dramas with heroes and heroines who are in love and must
+accordingly marry or perish at the end of the play, or about people
+whose relations with one another have been complicated by the marriage
+laws, not to mention the looser sort of plays which trade on the
+tradition that illicit love affairs are at once vicious and delightful,
+we have no modern English plays in which the natural attraction of the
+sexes for one another is made the mainspring of the action. That is
+why we insist on beauty in our performers, differing herein from the
+countries our friend William Archer holds up as examples of seriousness
+to our childish theatres. There the Juliets and Isoldes, the Romeos and
+Tristans, might be our mothers and fathers. Not so the English actress.
+The heroine she impersonates is not allowed to discuss the elemental
+relations of men and women: all her romantic twaddle about novelet-made
+love, all her purely legal dilemmas as to whether she was married
+or "betrayed," quite miss our hearts and worry our minds. To console
+ourselves we must just look at her. We do so; and her beauty feeds our
+starving emotions. Sometimes we grumble ungallantly at the lady because
+she does not act as well as she looks. But in a drama which, with all
+its preoccupation with sex, is really void of sexual interest, good
+looks are more desired than histrionic skill.
+
+Let me press this point on you, since you are too clever to raise the
+fool's cry of paradox whenever I take hold of a stick by the right
+instead of the wrong end. Why are our occasional attempts to deal with
+the sex problem on the stage so repulsive and dreary that even those
+who are most determined that sex questions shall be held open and their
+discussion kept free, cannot pretend to relish these joyless attempts at
+social sanitation? Is it not because at bottom they are utterly sexless?
+What is the usual formula for such plays? A woman has, on some past
+occasion, been brought into conflict with the law which regulates the
+relations of the sexes. A man, by falling in love with her, or
+marrying her, is brought into conflict with the social convention which
+discountenances the woman. Now the conflicts of individuals with law and
+convention can be dramatized like all other human conflicts; but they
+are purely judicial; and the fact that we are much more curious about
+the suppressed relations between the man and the woman than about the
+relations between both and our courts of law and private juries of
+matrons, produces that sensation of evasion, of dissatisfaction, of
+fundamental irrelevance, of shallowness, of useless disagreeableness,
+of total failure to edify and partial failure to interest, which is as
+familiar to you in the theatres as it was to me when I, too, frequented
+those uncomfortable buildings, and found our popular playwrights in the
+mind to (as they thought) emulate Ibsen.
+
+I take it that when you asked me for a Don Juan play you did not want
+that sort of thing. Nobody does: the successes such plays sometimes
+obtain are due to the incidental conventional melodrama with which the
+experienced popular author instinctively saves himself from failure.
+But what did you want? Owing to your unfortunate habit--you now, I
+hope, feel its inconvenience--of not explaining yourself, I have had to
+discover this for myself. First, then, I have had to ask myself, what
+is a Don Juan? Vulgarly, a libertine. But your dislike of vulgarity
+is pushed to the length of a defect (universality of character is
+impossible without a share of vulgarity); and even if you could acquire
+the taste, you would find yourself overfed from ordinary sources
+without troubling me. So I took it that you demanded a Don Juan in the
+philosophic sense.
+
+Philosophically, Don Juan is a man who, though gifted enough to be
+exceptionally capable of distinguishing between good and evil, follows
+his own instincts without regard to the common statute, or canon law;
+and therefore, whilst gaining the ardent sympathy of our rebellious
+instincts (which are flattered by the brilliancies with which Don
+Juan associates them) finds himself in mortal conflict with existing
+institutions, and defends himself by fraud and farce as unscrupulously
+as a farmer defends his crops by the same means against vermin. The
+prototypic Don Juan, invented early in the XVI century by a Spanish
+monk, was presented, according to the ideas of that time, as the enemy
+of God, the approach of whose vengeance is felt throughout the drama,
+growing in menace from minute to minute. No anxiety is caused on Don
+Juan's account by any minor antagonist: he easily eludes the police,
+temporal and spiritual; and when an indignant father seeks private
+redress with the sword, Don Juan kills him without an effort. Not until
+the slain father returns from heaven as the agent of God, in the form
+of his own statue, does he prevail against his slayer and cast him into
+hell. The moral is a monkish one: repent and reform now; for to-morrow
+it may be too late. This is really the only point on which Don Juan is
+sceptical; for he is a devout believer in an ultimate hell, and risks
+damnation only because, as he is young, it seems so far off that
+repentance can be postponed until he has amused himself to his heart's
+content.
+
+But the lesson intended by an author is hardly ever the lesson the world
+chooses to learn from his book. What attracts and impresses us in El
+Burlador de Sevilla is not the immediate urgency of repentance, but
+the heroism of daring to be the enemy of God. From Prometheus to my own
+Devil's Disciple, such enemies have always been popular. Don Juan became
+such a pet that the world could not bear his damnation. It reconciled
+him sentimentally to God in a second version, and clamored for
+his canonization for a whole century, thus treating him as English
+journalism has treated that comic foe of the gods, Punch. Moliere's Don
+Juan casts back to the original in point of impenitence; but in piety he
+falls off greatly. True, he also proposes to repent; but in what terms?
+"Oui, ma foi! il faut s'amender. Encore vingt ou trente ans de cette
+vie-ci, et puis nous songerons a nous." After Moliere comes the
+artist-enchanter, the master of masters, Mozart, who reveals the hero's
+spirit in magical harmonies, elfin tones, and elate darting rhythms as
+of summer lightning made audible. Here you have freedom in love and in
+morality mocking exquisitely at slavery to them, and interesting you,
+attracting you, tempting you, inexplicably forcing you to range the hero
+with his enemy the statue on a transcendant plane, leaving the prudish
+daughter and her priggish lover on a crockery shelf below to live
+piously ever after.
+
+After these completed works Byron's fragment does not count for much
+philosophically. Our vagabond libertines are no more interesting from
+that point of view than the sailor who has a wife in every port, and
+Byron's hero is, after all, only a vagabond libertine. And he is dumb:
+he does not discuss himself with a Sganarelle-Leporello or with the
+fathers or brothers of his mistresses: he does not even, like Casanova,
+tell his own story. In fact he is not a true Don Juan at all; for he is
+no more an enemy of God than any romantic and adventurous young sower of
+wild oats. Had you and I been in his place at his age, who knows whether
+we might not have done as he did, unless indeed your fastidiousness
+had saved you from the empress Catherine. Byron was as little of a
+philosopher as Peter the Great: both were instances of that rare and
+useful, but unedifying variation, an energetic genius born without
+the prejudices or superstitions of his contemporaries. The resultant
+unscrupulous freedom of thought made Byron a greater poet than
+Wordsworth just as it made Peter a greater king than George III; but
+as it was, after all, only a negative qualification, it did not prevent
+Peter from being an appalling blackguard and an arrant poltroon, nor did
+it enable Byron to become a religious force like Shelley. Let us, then,
+leave Byron's Don Juan out of account. Mozart's is the last of the true
+Don Juans; for by the time he was of age, his cousin Faust had, in the
+hands of Goethe, taken his place and carried both his warfare and his
+reconciliation with the gods far beyond mere lovemaking into politics,
+high art, schemes for reclaiming new continents from the ocean, and
+recognition of an eternal womanly principle in the universe. Goethe's
+Faust and Mozart's Don Juan were the last words of the XVIII century
+on the subject; and by the time the polite critics of the XIX century,
+ignoring William Blake as superficially as the XVIII had ignored Hogarth
+or the XVII Bunyan, had got past the Dickens-Macaulay Dumas-Guizot stage
+and the Stendhal-Meredith-Turgenieff stage, and were confronted with
+philosophic fiction by such pens as Ibsen's and Tolstoy's, Don Juan had
+changed his sex and become Dona Juana, breaking out of the Doll's House
+and asserting herself as an individual instead of a mere item in a moral
+pageant.
+
+Now it is all very well for you at the beginning of the XX century to
+ask me for a Don Juan play; but you will see from the foregoing survey
+that Don Juan is a full century out of date for you and for me; and
+if there are millions of less literate people who are still in the
+eighteenth century, have they not Moliere and Mozart, upon whose art no
+human hand can improve? You would laugh at me if at this time of day I
+dealt in duels and ghosts and "womanly" women. As to mere libertinism,
+you would be the first to remind me that the Festin de Pierre of
+Moliere is not a play for amorists, and that one bar of the voluptuous
+sentimentality of Gounod or Bizet would appear as a licentious stain on
+the score of Don Giovanni. Even the more abstract parts of the Don Juan
+play are dilapidated past use: for instance, Don Juan's supernatural
+antagonist hurled those who refuse to repent into lakes of burning
+brimstone, there to be tormented by devils with horns and tails. Of that
+antagonist, and of that conception of repentance, how much is left that
+could be used in a play by me dedicated to you? On the other hand, those
+forces of middle class public opinion which hardly existed for a
+Spanish nobleman in the days of the first Don Juan, are now triumphant
+everywhere. Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman
+dares now shock his greengrocer. The women, "marchesane, principesse,
+cameriere, cittadine" and all, are become equally dangerous: the sex
+is aggressive, powerful: when women are wronged they do not group
+themselves pathetically to sing "Protegga il giusto cielo": they grasp
+formidable legal and social weapons, and retaliate. Political parties
+are wrecked and public careers undone by a single indiscretion. A man
+had better have all the statues in London to supper with him, ugly as
+they are, than be brought to the bar of the Nonconformist Conscience by
+Donna Elvira. Excommunication has become almost as serious a business as
+it was in the X century.
+
+As a result, Man is no longer, like Don Juan, victor in the duel of
+sex. Whether he has ever really been may be doubted: at all events
+the enormous superiority of Woman's natural position in this matter is
+telling with greater and greater force. As to pulling the Nonconformist
+Conscience by the beard as Don Juan plucked the beard of the
+Commandant's statue in the convent of San Francisco, that is out of the
+question nowadays: prudence and good manners alike forbid it to a hero
+with any mind. Besides, it is Don Juan's own beard that is in danger of
+plucking. Far from relapsing into hypocrisy, as Sganarelle feared,
+he has unexpectedly discovered a moral in his immorality. The growing
+recognition of his new point of view is heaping responsibility on him.
+His former jests he has had to take as seriously as I have had to take
+some of the jests of Mr W. S. Gilbert. His scepticism, once his least
+tolerated quality, has now triumphed so completely that he can no
+longer assert himself by witty negations, and must, to save himself from
+cipherdom, find an affirmative position. His thousand and three affairs
+of gallantry, after becoming, at most, two immature intrigues leading to
+sordid and prolonged complications and humiliations, have been discarded
+altogether as unworthy of his philosophic dignity and compromising to
+his newly acknowledged position as the founder of a school. Instead of
+pretending to read Ovid he does actually read Schopenhaur and Nietzsche,
+studies Westermarck, and is concerned for the future of the race instead
+of for the freedom of his own instincts. Thus his profligacy and his
+dare-devil airs have gone the way of his sword and mandoline into the
+rag shop of anachronisms and superstitions. In fact, he is now more
+Hamlet than Don Juan; for though the lines put into the actor's mouth to
+indicate to the pit that Hamlet is a philosopher are for the most
+part mere harmonious platitude which, with a little debasement of the
+word-music, would be properer to Pecksniff, yet if you separate the real
+hero, inarticulate and unintelligible to himself except in flashes of
+inspiration, from the performer who has to talk at any cost through
+five acts; and if you also do what you must always do in Shakespear's
+tragedies: that is, dissect out the absurd sensational incidents and
+physical violences of the borrowed story from the genuine Shakespearian
+tissue, you will get a true Promethean foe of the gods, whose
+instinctive attitude towards women much resembles that to which Don Juan
+is now driven. From this point of view Hamlet was a developed Don Juan
+whom Shakespear palmed off as a reputable man just as he palmed poor
+Macbeth off as a murderer. To-day the palming off is no longer necessary
+(at least on your plane and mine) because Don Juanism is no longer
+misunderstood as mere Casanovism. Don Juan himself is almost ascetic in
+his desire to avoid that misunderstanding; and so my attempt to bring
+him up to date by launching him as a modern Englishman into a modern
+English environment has produced a figure superficially quite unlike the
+hero of Mozart.
+
+And yet I have not the heart to disappoint you wholly of another glimpse
+of the Mozartian dissoluto punito and his antagonist the statue. I feel
+sure you would like to know more of that statue--to draw him out when he
+is off duty, so to speak. To gratify you, I have resorted to the trick
+of the strolling theatrical manager who advertizes the pantomime of
+Sinbad the Sailor with a stock of second-hand picture posters designed
+for Ali Baba. He simply thrusts a few oil jars into the valley of
+diamonds, and so fulfils the promise held out by the hoardings to
+the public eye. I have adapted this simple device to our occasion by
+thrusting into my perfectly modern three-act play a totally extraneous
+act in which my hero, enchanted by the air of the Sierra, has a dream in
+which his Mozartian ancestor appears and philosophizes at great length
+in a Shavio-Socratic dialogue with the lady, the statue, and the devil.
+
+But this pleasantry is not the essence of the play. Over this essence
+I have no control. You propound a certain social substance, sexual
+attraction to wit, for dramatic distillation; and I distil it for you.
+I do not adulterate the product with aphrodisiacs nor dilute it with
+romance and water; for I am merely executing your commission, not
+producing a popular play for the market. You must therefore (unless,
+like most wise men, you read the play first and the preface afterwards)
+prepare yourself to face a trumpery story of modern London life, a life
+in which, as you know, the ordinary man's main business is to get means
+to keep up the position and habits of a gentleman, and the ordinary
+woman's business is to get married. In 9,999 cases out of 10,000, you
+can count on their doing nothing, whether noble or base, that conflicts
+with these ends; and that assurance is what you rely on as their
+religion, their morality, their principles, their patriotism, their
+reputation, their honor and so forth.
+
+On the whole, this is a sensible and satisfactory foundation for
+society. Money means nourishment and marriage means children; and that
+men should put nourishment first and women children first is, broadly
+speaking, the law of Nature and not the dictate of personal ambition.
+The secret of the prosaic man's success, such as it is, is the
+simplicity with which he pursues these ends: the secret of the artistic
+man's failure, such as that is, is the versatility with which he strays
+in all directions after secondary ideals. The artist is either a poet
+or a scallawag: as poet, he cannot see, as the prosaic man does, that
+chivalry is at bottom only romantic suicide: as scallawag, he cannot see
+that it does not pay to spunge and beg and lie and brag and neglect
+his person. Therefore do not misunderstand my plain statement of the
+fundamental constitution of London society as an Irishman's reproach to
+your nation. From the day I first set foot on this foreign soil I knew
+the value of the prosaic qualities of which Irishmen teach Englishmen to
+be ashamed as well as I knew the vanity of the poetic qualities of which
+Englishmen teach Irishmen to be proud. For the Irishman instinctively
+disparages the quality which makes the Englishman dangerous to him; and
+the Englishman instinctively flatters the fault that makes the Irishman
+harmless and amusing to him. What is wrong with the prosaic Englishman
+is what is wrong with the prosaic men of all countries: stupidity. The
+vitality which places nourishment and children first, heaven and hell
+a somewhat remote second, and the health of society as an organic whole
+nowhere, may muddle successfully through the comparatively tribal stages
+of gregariousness; but in nineteenth century nations and twentieth
+century empires the determination of every man to be rich at all costs,
+and of every woman to be married at all costs, must, without a highly
+scientific social organization, produce a ruinous development of
+poverty, celibacy, prostitution, infant mortality, adult degeneracy, and
+everything that wise men most dread. In short, there is no future for
+men, however brimming with crude vitality, who are neither intelligent
+nor politically educated enough to be Socialists. So do not
+misunderstand me in the other direction either: if I appreciate the
+vital qualities of the Englishman as I appreciate the vital qualities of
+the bee, I do not guarantee the Englishman against being, like the
+bee (or the Canaanite) smoked out and unloaded of his honey by beings
+inferior to himself in simple acquisitiveness, combativeness, and
+fecundity, but superior to him in imagination and cunning.
+
+The Don Juan play, however, is to deal with sexual attraction, and not
+with nutrition, and to deal with it in a society in which the serious
+business of sex is left by men to women, as the serious business of
+nutrition is left by women to men. That the men, to protect themselves
+against a too aggressive prosecution of the women's business, have set
+up a feeble romantic convention that the initiative in sex business must
+always come from the man, is true; but the pretence is so shallow that
+even in the theatre, that last sanctuary of unreality, it imposes only
+on the inexperienced. In Shakespear's plays the woman always takes the
+initiative. In his problem plays and his popular plays alike the love
+interest is the interest of seeing the woman hunt the man down. She may
+do it by blandishment, like Rosalind, or by stratagem, like Mariana; but
+in every case the relation between the woman and the man is the same:
+she is the pursuer and contriver, he the pursued and disposed of. When
+she is baffled, like Ophelia, she goes mad and commits suicide; and the
+man goes straight from her funeral to a fencing match. No doubt Nature,
+with very young creatures, may save the woman the trouble of scheming:
+Prospero knows that he has only to throw Ferdinand and Miranda together
+and they will mate like a pair of doves; and there is no need for
+Perdita to capture Florizel as the lady doctor in All's Well That Ends
+Well (an early Ibsenite heroine) captures Bertram. But the mature
+cases all illustrate the Shakespearian law. The one apparent exception,
+Petruchio, is not a real one: he is most carefully characterized as
+a purely commercial matrimonial adventurer. Once he is assured that
+Katharine has money, he undertakes to marry her before he has seen her.
+In real life we find not only Petruchios, but Mantalinis and Dobbins who
+pursue women with appeals to their pity or jealousy or vanity, or cling
+to them in a romantically infatuated way. Such effeminates do not count
+in the world scheme: even Bunsby dropping like a fascinated bird into
+the jaws of Mrs MacStinger is by comparison a true tragic object of
+pity and terror. I find in my own plays that Woman, projecting herself
+dramatically by my hands (a process over which I assure you I have no
+more real control than I have over my wife), behaves just as Woman did
+in the plays of Shakespear.
+
+And so your Don Juan has come to birth as a stage projection of the
+tragi-comic love chase of the man by the woman; and my Don Juan is the
+quarry instead of the huntsman. Yet he is a true Don Juan, with a sense
+of reality that disables convention, defying to the last the fate which
+finally overtakes him. The woman's need of him to enable her to carry
+on Nature's most urgent work, does not prevail against him until his
+resistance gathers her energy to a climax at which she dares to throw
+away her customary exploitations of the conventional affectionate and
+dutiful poses, and claim him by natural right for a purpose that far
+transcends their mortal personal purposes.
+
+Among the friends to whom I have read this play in manuscript are some
+of our own sex who are shocked at the "unscrupulousness," meaning
+the total disregard of masculine fastidiousness, with which the woman
+pursues her purpose. It does not occur to them that if women were as
+fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end of the
+race. Is there anything meaner then to throw necessary work upon other
+people and then disparage it as unworthy and indelicate. We laugh at the
+haughty American nation because it makes the negro clean its boots and
+then proves the moral and physical inferiority of the negro by the fact
+that he is a shoeblack; but we ourselves throw the whole drudgery of
+creation on one sex, and then imply that no female of any womanliness
+or delicacy would initiate any effort in that direction. There are no
+limits to male hypocrisy in this matter. No doubt there are moments when
+man's sexual immunities are made acutely humiliating to him. When
+the terrible moment of birth arrives, its supreme importance and its
+superhuman effort and peril, in which the father has no part, dwarf
+him into the meanest insignificance: he slinks out of the way of the
+humblest petticoat, happy if he be poor enough to be pushed out of the
+house to outface his ignominy by drunken rejoicings. But when the
+crisis is over he takes his revenge, swaggering as the breadwinner, and
+speaking of Woman's "sphere" with condescension, even with chivalry, as
+if the kitchen and the nursery were less important than the office in
+the city. When his swagger is exhausted he drivels into erotic poetry
+or sentimental uxoriousness; and the Tennysonian King Arthur posing as
+Guinevere becomes Don Quixote grovelling before Dulcinea. You must admit
+that here Nature beats Comedy out of the field: the wildest hominist or
+feminist farce is insipid after the most commonplace "slice of life."
+The pretence that women do not take the initiative is part of the farce.
+Why, the whole world is strewn with snares, traps, gins and pitfalls
+for the capture of men by women. Give women the vote, and in five years
+there will be a crushing tax on bachelors. Men, on the other hand,
+attach penalties to marriage, depriving women of property, of the
+franchise, of the free use of their limbs, of that ancient symbol of
+immortality, the right to make oneself at home in the house of God by
+taking off the hat, of everything that he can force Woman to dispense
+with without compelling himself to dispense with her. All in vain. Woman
+must marry because the race must perish without her travail: if the risk
+of death and the certainty of pain, danger and unutterable discomforts
+cannot deter her, slavery and swaddled ankles will not. And yet we
+assume that the force that carries women through all these perils and
+hardships, stops abashed before the primnesses of our behavior for young
+ladies. It is assumed that the woman must wait, motionless, until she is
+wooed. Nay, she often does wait motionless. That is how the spider waits
+for the fly. But the spider spins her web. And if the fly, like my hero,
+shows a strength that promises to extricate him, how swiftly does she
+abandon her pretence of passiveness, and openly fling coil after coil
+about him until he is secured for ever!
+
+If the really impressive books and other art-works of the world were
+produced by ordinary men, they would express more fear of women's
+pursuit than love of their illusory beauty. But ordinary men cannot
+produce really impressive art-works. Those who can are men of genius:
+that is, men selected by Nature to carry on the work of building up an
+intellectual consciousness of her own instinctive purpose. Accordingly,
+we observe in the man of genius all the unscrupulousness and all the
+"self-sacrifice" (the two things are the same) of Woman. He will risk
+the stake and the cross; starve, when necessary, in a garret all his
+life; study women and live on their work and care as Darwin studied
+worms and lived upon sheep; work his nerves into rags without payment,
+a sublime altruist in his disregard of himself, an atrocious egotist in
+his disregard of others. Here Woman meets a purpose as impersonal, as
+irresistible as her own; and the clash is sometimes tragic. When it is
+complicated by the genius being a woman, then the game is one for a king
+of critics: your George Sand becomes a mother to gain experience for
+the novelist and to develop her, and gobbles up men of genius, Chopins,
+Mussets and the like, as mere hors d'oeuvres.
+
+I state the extreme case, of course; but what is true of the great man
+who incarnates the philosophic consciousness of Life and the woman who
+incarnates its fecundity, is true in some degree of all geniuses and
+all women. Hence it is that the world's books get written, its pictures
+painted, its statues modelled, its symphonies composed, by people who
+are free of the otherwise universal dominion of the tyranny of sex.
+Which leads us to the conclusion, astonishing to the vulgar, that art,
+instead of being before all things the expression of the normal sexual
+situation, is really the only department in which sex is a superseded
+and secondary power, with its consciousness so confused and its purpose
+so perverted, that its ideas are mere fantasy to common men. Whether the
+artist becomes poet or philosopher, moralist or founder of a religion,
+his sexual doctrine is nothing but a barren special pleading for
+pleasure, excitement, and knowledge when he is young, and for
+contemplative tranquillity when he is old and satiated. Romance and
+Asceticism, Amorism and Puritanism are equally unreal in the great
+Philistine world. The world shown us in books, whether the books be
+confessed epics or professed gospels, or in codes, or in political
+orations, or in philosophic systems, is not the main world at all: it
+is only the self-consciousness of certain abnormal people who have the
+specific artistic talent and temperament. A serious matter this for you
+and me, because the man whose consciousness does not correspond to that
+of the majority is a madman; and the old habit of worshipping madmen is
+giving way to the new habit of locking them up. And since what we call
+education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution
+of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete
+fictitious for the contemporary real, education, as you no doubt
+observed at Oxford, destroys, by supplantation, every mind that is not
+strong enough to see through the imposture and to use the great Masters
+of Arts as what they really are and no more: that is, patentees of
+highly questionable methods of thinking, and manufacturers of highly
+questionable, and for the majority but half valid representations of
+life. The schoolboy who uses his Homer to throw at his fellow's head
+makes perhaps the safest and most rational use of him; and I observe
+with reassurance that you occasionally do the same, in your prime, with
+your Aristotle.
+
+Fortunately for us, whose minds have been so overwhelmingly
+sophisticated by literature, what produces all these treatises and poems
+and scriptures of one sort or another is the struggle of Life to become
+divinely conscious of itself instead of blindly stumbling hither and
+thither in the line of least resistance. Hence there is a driving
+towards truth in all books on matters where the writer, though
+exceptionally gifted is normally constituted, and has no private axe to
+grind. Copernicus had no motive for misleading his fellowmen as to the
+place of the sun in the solar system: he looked for it as honestly as a
+shepherd seeks his path in a mist. But Copernicus would not have written
+love stories scientifically. When it comes to sex relations, the man of
+genius does not share the common man's danger of capture, nor the woman
+of genius the common woman's overwhelming specialization. And that is
+why our scriptures and other art works, when they deal with love, turn
+from honest attempts at science in physics to romantic nonsense, erotic
+ecstasy, or the stern asceticism of satiety ("the road of excess leads
+to the palace of wisdom" said William Blake; for "you never know what is
+enough unless you know what is more than enough").
+
+There is a political aspect of this sex question which is too big for my
+comedy, and too momentous to be passed over without culpable frivolity.
+It is impossible to demonstrate that the initiative in sex transactions
+remains with Woman, and has been confirmed to her, so far, more and more
+by the suppression of rapine and discouragement of importunity,
+without being driven to very serious reflections on the fact that this
+initiative is politically the most important of all the initiatives,
+because our political experiment of democracy, the last refuge of cheap
+misgovernment, will ruin us if our citizens are ill bred.
+
+When we two were born, this country was still dominated by a selected
+class bred by political marriages. The commercial class had not then
+completed the first twenty-five years of its new share of political
+power; and it was itself selected by money qualification, and bred, if
+not by political marriage, at least by a pretty rigorous class marriage.
+Aristocracy and plutocracy still furnish the figureheads of politics;
+but they are now dependent on the votes of the promiscuously bred
+masses. And this, if you please, at the very moment when the political
+problem, having suddenly ceased to mean a very limited and occasional
+interference, mostly by way of jobbing public appointments, in the
+mismanagement of a tight but parochial little island, with occasional
+meaningless prosecution of dynastic wars, has become the industrial
+reorganization of Britain, the construction of a practically
+international Commonwealth, and the partition of the whole of Africa and
+perhaps the whole of Asia by the civilized Powers. Can you believe that
+the people whose conceptions of society and conduct, whose power of
+attention and scope of interest, are measured by the British theatre as
+you know it to-day, can either handle this colossal task themselves, or
+understand and support the sort of mind and character that is (at least
+comparatively) capable of handling it? For remember: what our voters are
+in the pit and gallery they are also in the polling booth. We are
+all now under what Burke called "the hoofs of the swinish multitude."
+Burke's language gave great offence because the implied exceptions to
+its universal application made it a class insult; and it certainly was
+not for the pot to call the kettle black. The aristocracy he defended,
+in spite of the political marriages by which it tried to secure breeding
+for itself, had its mind undertrained by silly schoolmasters and
+governesses, its character corrupted by gratuitous luxury, its
+self-respect adulterated to complete spuriousness by flattery and
+flunkeyism. It is no better to-day and never will be any better: our
+very peasants have something morally hardier in them that culminates
+occasionally in a Bunyan, a Burns, or a Carlyle. But observe, this
+aristocracy, which was overpowered from 1832 to 1885 by the middle
+class, has come back to power by the votes of "the swinish multitude."
+Tom Paine has triumphed over Edmund Burke; and the swine are now courted
+electors. How many of their own class have these electors sent to
+parliament? Hardly a dozen out of 670, and these only under the
+persuasion of conspicuous personal qualifications and popular eloquence.
+The multitude thus pronounces judgment on its own units: it admits
+itself unfit to govern, and will vote only for a man morphologically
+and generically transfigured by palatial residence and equipage, by
+transcendent tailoring, by the glamor of aristocratic kinship. Well, we
+two know these transfigured persons, these college passmen, these well
+groomed monocular Algys and Bobbies, these cricketers to whom age brings
+golf instead of wisdom, these plutocratic products of "the nail and
+sarspan business as he got his money by." Do you know whether to laugh
+or cry at the notion that they, poor devils! will drive a team of
+continents as they drive a four-in-hand; turn a jostling anarchy of
+casual trade and speculation into an ordered productivity; and federate
+our colonies into a world-Power of the first magnitude? Give these
+people the most perfect political constitution and the soundest
+political program that benevolent omniscience can devise for them, and
+they will interpret it into mere fashionable folly or canting charity as
+infallibly as a savage converts the philosophical theology of a Scotch
+missionary into crude African idolatry.
+
+I do not know whether you have any illusions left on the subject of
+education, progress, and so forth. I have none. Any pamphleteer can show
+the way to better things; but when there is no will there is no way. My
+nurse was fond of remarking that you cannot make a silk purse out of
+a sow's ear, and the more I see of the efforts of our churches and
+universities and literary sages to raise the mass above its own level,
+the more convinced I am that my nurse was right. Progress can do nothing
+but make the most of us all as we are, and that most would clearly not
+be enough even if those who are already raised out of the lowest
+abysses would allow the others a chance. The bubble of Heredity has been
+pricked: the certainty that acquirements are negligible as elements in
+practical heredity has demolished the hopes of the educationists as well
+as the terrors of the degeneracy mongers; and we know now that there is
+no hereditary "governing class" any more than a hereditary hooliganism.
+We must either breed political capacity or be ruined by Democracy,
+which was forced on us by the failure of the older alternatives. Yet
+if Despotism failed only for want of a capable benevolent despot, what
+chance has Democracy, which requires a whole population of capable
+voters: that is, of political critics who, if they cannot govern in
+person for lack of spare energy or specific talent for administration,
+can at least recognize and appreciate capacity and benevolence in
+others, and so govern through capably benevolent representatives? Where
+are such voters to be found to-day? Nowhere. Promiscuous breeding has
+produced a weakness of character that is too timid to face the full
+stringency of a thoroughly competitive struggle for existence and
+too lazy and petty to organize the commonwealth co-operatively. Being
+cowards, we defeat natural selection under cover of philanthropy: being
+sluggards, we neglect artificial selection under cover of delicacy and
+morality.
+
+Yet we must get an electorate of capable critics or collapse as Rome
+and Egypt collapsed. At this moment the Roman decadent phase of panem
+et circenses is being inaugurated under our eyes. Our newspapers and
+melodramas are blustering about our imperial destiny; but our eyes and
+hearts turn eagerly to the American millionaire. As his hand goes down
+to his pocket, our fingers go up to the brims of our hats by instinct.
+Our ideal prosperity is not the prosperity of the industrial north, but
+the prosperity of the Isle of Wight, of Folkestone and Ramsgate, of Nice
+and Monte Carlo. That is the only prosperity you see on the stage, where
+the workers are all footmen, parlourmaids, comic lodging-letters
+and fashionable professional men, whilst the heroes and heroines are
+miraculously provided with unlimited dividends, and eat gratuitously,
+like the knights in Don Quixote's books of chivalry.
+
+The city papers prate of the competition of Bombay with Manchester and
+the like. The real competition is the competition of Regent Street with
+the Rue de Rivoli, of Brighton and the south coast with the Riviera, for
+the spending money of the American Trusts. What is all this growing
+love of pageantry, this effusive loyalty, this officious rising
+and uncovering at a wave from a flag or a blast from a brass band?
+Imperialism: Not a bit of it. Obsequiousness, servility, cupidity roused
+by the prevailing smell of money. When Mr Carnegie rattled his millions
+in his pockets all England became one rapacious cringe. Only, when
+Rhodes (who had probably been reading my Socialism for Millionaires)
+left word that no idler was to inherit his estate, the bent backs
+straightened mistrustfully for a moment. Could it be that the Diamond
+King was no gentleman after all? However, it was easy to ignore a rich
+man's solecism. The ungentlemanly clause was not mentioned again; and
+the backs soon bowed themselves back into their natural shape.
+
+But I hear you asking me in alarm whether I have actually put all this
+tub thumping into a Don Juan comedy. I have not. I have only made my Don
+Juan a political pamphleteer, and given you his pamphlet in full by way
+of appendix. You will find it at the end of the book. I am sorry to say
+that it is a common practice with romancers to announce their hero as
+a man of extraordinary genius, and to leave his works entirely to the
+reader's imagination; so that at the end of the book you whisper to
+yourself ruefully that but for the author's solemn preliminary assurance
+you should hardly have given the gentleman credit for ordinary good
+sense. You cannot accuse me of this pitiable barrenness, this feeble
+evasion. I not only tell you that my hero wrote a revolutionists'
+handbook: I give you the handbook at full length for your edification if
+you care to read it. And in that handbook you will find the politics of
+the sex question as I conceive Don Juan's descendant to understand them.
+Not that I disclaim the fullest responsibility for his opinions and for
+those of all my characters, pleasant and unpleasant. They are all right
+from their several points of view; and their points of view are, for the
+dramatic moment, mine also. This may puzzle the people who believe that
+there is such a thing as an absolutely right point of view, usually
+their own. It may seem to them that nobody who doubts this can be in a
+state of grace. However that may be, it is certainly true that nobody
+who agrees with them can possibly be a dramatist, or indeed anything
+else that turns upon a knowledge of mankind. Hence it has been pointed
+out that Shakespear had no conscience. Neither have I, in that sense.
+
+You may, however, remind me that this digression of mine into politics
+was preceded by a very convincing demonstration that the artist never
+catches the point of view of the common man on the question of sex,
+because he is not in the same predicament. I first prove that anything I
+write on the relation of the sexes is sure to be misleading; and then I
+proceed to write a Don Juan play. Well, if you insist on asking me why
+I behave in this absurd way, I can only reply that you asked me to,
+and that in any case my treatment of the subject may be valid for the
+artist, amusing to the amateur, and at least intelligible and therefore
+possibly suggestive to the Philistine. Every man who records his
+illusions is providing data for the genuinely scientific psychology
+which the world still waits for. I plank down my view of the existing
+relations of men to women in the most highly civilized society for what
+it is worth. It is a view like any other view and no more, neither true
+nor false, but, I hope, a way of looking at the subject which throws
+into the familiar order of cause and effect a sufficient body of fact
+and experience to be interesting to you, if not to the play-going public
+of London. I have certainly shown little consideration for that public
+in this enterprise; but I know that it has the friendliest disposition
+towards you and me as far as it has any consciousness of our existence,
+and quite understands that what I write for you must pass at a
+considerable height over its simple romantic head. It will take my books
+as read and my genius for granted, trusting me to put forth work of such
+quality as shall bear out its verdict. So we may disport ourselves on
+our own plane to the top of our bent; and if any gentleman points out
+that neither this epistle dedicatory nor the dream of Don Juan in the
+third act of the ensuing comedy is suitable for immediate production at
+a popular theatre we need not contradict him. Napoleon provided Talma
+with a pit of kings, with what effect on Talma's acting is not recorded.
+As for me, what I have always wanted is a pit of philosophers; and this
+is a play for such a pit.
+
+I should make formal acknowledgment to the authors whom I have pillaged
+in the following pages if I could recollect them all. The theft of the
+brigand-poetaster from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is deliberate; and the
+metamorphosis of Leporello into Enry Straker, motor engineer and New
+Man, is an intentional dramatic sketch for the contemporary embryo of
+Mr H. G. Wells's anticipation of the efficient engineering class
+which will, he hopes, finally sweep the jabberers out of the way of
+civilization. Mr Barrio has also, whilst I am correcting my proofs,
+delighted London with a servant who knows more than his masters. The
+conception of Mendoza Limited I trace back to a certain West Indian
+colonial secretary, who, at a period when he and I and Mr Sidney
+Webb were sowing our political wild oats as a sort of Fabian Three
+Musketeers, without any prevision of the surprising respectability
+of the crop that followed, recommended Webb, the encyclopedic and
+inexhaustible, to form himself into a company for the benefit of the
+shareholders. Octavius I take over unaltered from Mozart; and I hereby
+authorize any actor who impersonates him, to sing "Dalla sua pace" (if
+he can) at any convenient moment during the representation. Ann was
+suggested to me by the fifteenth century Dutch morality called Everyman,
+which Mr William Poel has lately resuscitated so triumphantly. I
+trust he will work that vein further, and recognize that Elizabethan
+Renascence fustian is no more bearable after medieval poesy than Scribe
+after Ibsen. As I sat watching Everyman at the Charterhouse, I said to
+myself Why not Everywoman? Ann was the result: every woman is not Ann;
+but Ann is Everywoman.
+
+That the author of Everyman was no mere artist, but an
+artist-philosopher, and that the artist-philosophers are the only sort
+of artists I take quite seriously, will be no news to you. Even Plato
+and Boswell, as the dramatists who invented Socrates and Dr Johnson,
+impress me more deeply than the romantic playwrights. Ever since, as
+a boy, I first breathed the air of the transcendental regions at a
+performance of Mozart's Zauberflote, I have been proof against the
+garish splendors and alcoholic excitements of the ordinary stage
+combinations of Tappertitian romance with the police intelligence.
+Bunyan, Blake, Hogarth and Turner (these four apart and above all the
+English Classics), Goethe, Shelley, Schopenhaur, Wagner, Ibsen, Morris,
+Tolstoy, and Nietzsche are among the writers whose peculiar sense of
+the world I recognize as more or less akin to my own. Mark the word
+peculiar. I read Dickens and Shakespear without shame or stint;
+but their pregnant observations and demonstrations of life are not
+co-ordinated into any philosophy or religion: on the contrary, Dickens's
+sentimental assumptions are violently contradicted by his observations;
+and Shakespear's pessimism is only his wounded humanity. Both have the
+specific genius of the fictionist and the common sympathies of human
+feeling and thought in pre-eminent degree. They are often saner and
+shrewder than the philosophers just as Sancho-Panza was often saner and
+shrewder than Don Quixote. They clear away vast masses of oppressive
+gravity by their sense of the ridiculous, which is at bottom a
+combination of sound moral judgment with lighthearted good humor. But
+they are concerned with the diversities of the world instead of with its
+unities: they are so irreligious that they exploit popular religion for
+professional purposes without delicacy or scruple (for example, Sydney
+Carton and the ghost in Hamlet!): they are anarchical, and cannot
+balance their exposures of Angelo and Dogberry, Sir Leicester Dedlock
+and Mr Tite Barnacle, with any portrait of a prophet or a worthy leader:
+they have no constructive ideas: they regard those who have them as
+dangerous fanatics: in all their fictions there is no leading thought or
+inspiration for which any man could conceivably risk the spoiling of
+his hat in a shower, much less his life. Both are alike forced to borrow
+motives for the more strenuous actions of their personages from
+the common stockpot of melodramatic plots; so that Hamlet has to
+be stimulated by the prejudices of a policeman and Macbeth by the
+cupidities of a bushranger. Dickens, without the excuse of having to
+manufacture motives for Hamlets and Macbeths, superfluously punt his
+crew down the stream of his monthly parts by mechanical devices which I
+leave you to describe, my own memory being quite baffled by the simplest
+question as to Monks in Oliver Twist, or the long lost parentage of
+Smike, or the relations between the Dorrit and Clennam families so
+inopportunely discovered by Monsieur Rigaud Blandois. The truth is, the
+world was to Shakespear a great "stage of fools" on which he was utterly
+bewildered. He could see no sort of sense in living at all; and Dickens
+saved himself from the despair of the dream in The Chimes by taking the
+world for granted and busying himself with its details. Neither of them
+could do anything with a serious positive character: they could place a
+human figure before you with perfect verisimilitude; but when the moment
+came for making it live and move, they found, unless it made them laugh,
+that they had a puppet on their hands, and had to invent some artificial
+external stimulus to make it work. This is what is the matter with
+Hamlet all through: he has no will except in his bursts of temper.
+Foolish Bardolaters make a virtue of this after their fashion:
+they declare that the play is the tragedy of irresolution; but all
+Shakespear's projections of the deepest humanity he knew have the same
+defect: their characters and manners are lifelike; but their actions
+are forced on them from without, and the external force is grotesquely
+inappropriate except when it is quite conventional, as in the case of
+Henry V. Falstaff is more vivid than any of these serious reflective
+characters, because he is self-acting: his motives are his own appetites
+and instincts and humors. Richard III, too, is delightful as the
+whimsical comedian who stops a funeral to make love to the corpse's
+widow; but when, in the next act, he is replaced by a stage villain who
+smothers babies and offs with people's heads, we are revolted at the
+imposture and repudiate the changeling. Faulconbridge, Coriolanus,
+Leontes are admirable descriptions of instinctive temperaments: indeed
+the play of Coriolanus is the greatest of Shakespear's comedies; but
+description is not philosophy; and comedy neither compromises the author
+nor reveals him. He must be judged by those characters into which he
+puts what he knows of himself, his Hamlets and Macbeths and Lears and
+Prosperos. If these characters are agonizing in a void about factitious
+melodramatic murders and revenges and the like, whilst the comic
+characters walk with their feet on solid ground, vivid and amusing,
+you know that the author has much to show and nothing to teach. The
+comparison between Falstaff and Prospero is like the comparison
+between Micawber and David Copperfield. At the end of the book you know
+Micawber, whereas you only know what has happened to David, and are not
+interested enough in him to wonder what his politics or religion might
+be if anything so stupendous as a religious or political idea, or a
+general idea of any sort, were to occur to him. He is tolerable as a
+child; but he never becomes a man, and might be left out of his own
+biography altogether but for his usefulness as a stage confidant, a
+Horatio or "Charles his friend" what they call on the stage a feeder.
+
+Now you cannot say this of the works of the artist-philosophers.
+You cannot say it, for instance, of The Pilgrim's Progress. Put your
+Shakespearian hero and coward, Henry V and Pistol or Parolles, beside
+Mr Valiant and Mr Fearing, and you have a sudden revelation of the abyss
+that lies between the fashionable author who could see nothing in the
+world but personal aims and the tragedy of their disappointment or the
+comedy of their incongruity, and the field preacher who achieved virtue
+and courage by identifying himself with the purpose of the world as
+he understood it. The contrast is enormous: Bunyan's coward stirs your
+blood more than Shakespear's hero, who actually leaves you cold and
+secretly hostile. You suddenly see that Shakespear, with all his flashes
+and divinations, never understood virtue and courage, never conceived
+how any man who was not a fool could, like Bunyan's hero, look back
+from the brink of the river of death over the strife and labor of his
+pilgrimage, and say "yet do I not repent me"; or, with the panache of
+a millionaire, bequeath "my sword to him that shall succeed me in my
+pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it." This
+is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by
+yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you
+are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a
+feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that
+the world will not devote itself to making you happy. And also the only
+real tragedy in life is the being used by personally minded men for
+purposes which you recognize to be base. All the rest is at worst mere
+misfortune or mortality: this alone is misery, slavery, hell on earth;
+and the revolt against it is the only force that offers a man's work
+to the poor artist, whom our personally minded rich people would so
+willingly employ as pandar, buffoon, beauty monger, sentimentalizer and
+the like.
+
+It may seem a long step from Bunyan to Nietzsche; but the difference
+between their conclusions is purely formal. Bunyan's perception that
+righteousness is filthy rags, his scorn for Mr Legality in the village
+of Morality, his defiance of the Church as the supplanter of religion,
+his insistence on courage as the virtue of virtues, his estimate of the
+career of the conventionally respectable and sensible Worldly Wiseman
+as no better at bottom than the life and death of Mr Badman: all
+this, expressed by Bunyan in the terms of a tinker's theology, is what
+Nietzsche has expressed in terms of post-Darwinian, post-Schopenhaurian
+philosophy; Wagner in terms of polytheistic mythology; and Ibsen in
+terms of mid-XIX century Parisian dramaturgy. Nothing is new in these
+matters except their novelties: for instance, it is a novelty to
+call Justification by Faith "Wille," and Justification by Works
+"Vorstellung." The sole use of the novelty is that you and I buy and
+read Schopenhaur's treatise on Will and Representation when we should
+not dream of buying a set of sermons on Faith versus Works. At bottom
+the controversy is the same, and the dramatic results are the same.
+Bunyan makes no attempt to present his pilgrims as more sensible or
+better conducted than Mr Worldly Wiseman. Mr W. W.'s worst enemies, as
+Mr Embezzler, Mr Never-go-to-Church-on-Sunday, Mr Bad Form, Mr Murderer,
+Mr Burglar, Mr Co-respondent, Mr Blackmailer, Mr Cad, Mr Drunkard, Mr
+Labor Agitator and so forth, can read the Pilgrim's Progress without
+finding a word said against them; whereas the respectable people who
+snub them and put them in prison, such as Mr W.W. himself and his young
+friend Civility; Formalist and Hypocrisy; Wildhead, Inconsiderate, and
+Pragmatick (who were clearly young university men of good family
+and high feeding); that brisk lad Ignorance, Talkative, By-Ends of
+Fairspeech and his mother-in-law Lady Feigning, and other reputable
+gentlemen and citizens, catch it very severely. Even Little Faith,
+though he gets to heaven at last, is given to understand that it served
+him right to be mobbed by the brothers Faint Heart, Mistrust, and
+Guilt, all three recognized members of respectable society and veritable
+pillars of the law. The whole allegory is a consistent attack on
+morality and respectability, without a word that one can remember
+against vice and crime. Exactly what is complained of in Nietzsche and
+Ibsen, is it not? And also exactly what would be complained of in all
+the literature which is great enough and old enough to have attained
+canonical rank, officially or unofficially, were it not that books are
+admitted to the canon by a compact which confesses their greatness in
+consideration of abrogating their meaning; so that the reverend rector
+can agree with the prophet Micah as to his inspired style without being
+committed to any complicity in Micah's furiously Radical opinions. Why,
+even I, as I force myself; pen in hand, into recognition and civility,
+find all the force of my onslaught destroyed by a simple policy of
+non-resistance. In vain do I redouble the violence of the language in
+which I proclaim my heterodoxies. I rail at the theistic credulity of
+Voltaire, the amoristic superstition of Shelley, the revival of tribal
+soothsaying and idolatrous rites which Huxley called Science and
+mistook for an advance on the Pentateuch, no less than at the welter
+of ecclesiastical and professional humbug which saves the face of the
+stupid system of violence and robbery which we call Law and Industry.
+Even atheists reproach me with infidelity and anarchists with nihilism
+because I cannot endure their moral tirades. And yet, instead of
+exclaiming "Send this inconceivable Satanist to the stake," the
+respectable newspapers pith me by announcing "another book by this
+brilliant and thoughtful writer." And the ordinary citizen, knowing that
+an author who is well spoken of by a respectable newspaper must be all
+right, reads me, as he reads Micah, with undisturbed edification from
+his own point of view. It is narrated that in the eighteen-seventies an
+old lady, a very devout Methodist, moved from Colchester to a house in
+the neighborhood of the City Road, in London, where, mistaking the Hall
+of Science for a chapel, she sat at the feet of Charles Bradlaugh
+for many years, entranced by his eloquence, without questioning
+his orthodoxy or moulting a feather of her faith. I fear I small be
+defrauded of my just martyrdom in the same way.
+
+However, I am digressing, as a man with a grievance always does. And
+after all, the main thing in determining the artistic quality of a book
+is not the opinions it propagates, but the fact that the writer has
+opinions. The old lady from Colchester was right to sun her simple soul
+in the energetic radiance of Bradlaugh's genuine beliefs and disbeliefs
+rather than in the chill of such mere painting of light and heat as
+elocution and convention can achieve. My contempt for belles lettres,
+and for amateurs who become the heroes of the fanciers of literary
+virtuosity, is not founded on any illusion of mind as to the permanence
+of those forms of thought (call them opinions) by which I strive to
+communicate my bent to my fellows. To younger men they are already
+outmoded; for though they have no more lost their logic than an
+eighteenth century pastel has lost its drawing or its color, yet, like
+the pastel, they grow indefinably shabby, and will grow shabbier until
+they cease to count at all, when my books will either perish, or, if
+the world is still poor enough to want them, will have to stand, with
+Bunyan's, by quite amorphous qualities of temper and energy. With this
+conviction I cannot be a bellettrist. No doubt I must recognize, as even
+the Ancient Mariner did, that I must tell my story entertainingly if I
+am to hold the wedding guest spellbound in spite of the siren sounds of
+the loud bassoon. But "for art's sake" alone I would not face the toil
+of writing a single sentence. I know that there are men who, having
+nothing to say and nothing to write, are nevertheless so in love with
+oratory and with literature that they keep desperately repeating as much
+as they can understand of what others have said or written aforetime.
+I know that the leisurely tricks which their want of conviction leaves
+them free to play with the diluted and misapprehended message supply
+them with a pleasant parlor game which they call style. I can pity their
+dotage and even sympathize with their fancy. But a true original style
+is never achieved for its own sake: a man may pay from a shilling to a
+guinea, according to his means, to see, hear, or read another man's act
+of genius; but he will not pay with his whole life and soul to become a
+mere virtuoso in literature, exhibiting an accomplishment which will not
+even make money for him, like fiddle playing. Effectiveness of assertion
+is the Alpha and Omega of style. He who has nothing to assert has no
+style and can have none: he who has something to assert will go as far
+in power of style as its momentousness and his conviction will carry
+him. Disprove his assertion after it is made, yet its style remains.
+Darwin has no more destroyed the style of Job nor of Handel than Martin
+Luther destroyed the style of Giotto. All the assertions get disproved
+sooner or later; and so we find the world full of a magnificent debris
+of artistic fossils, with the matter-of-fact credibility gone clean out
+of them, but the form still splendid. And that is why the old masters
+play the deuce with our mere susceptibles. Your Royal Academician thinks
+he can get the style of Giotto without Giotto's beliefs, and correct
+his perspective into the bargain. Your man of letters thinks he can
+get Bunyan's or Shakespear's style without Bunyan's conviction or
+Shakespear's apprehension, especially if he takes care not to split
+his infinitives. And so with your Doctors of Music, who, with their
+collections of discords duly prepared and resolved or retarded or
+anticipated in the manner of the great composers, think they can learn
+the art of Palestrina from Cherubim's treatise. All this academic art
+is far worse than the trade in sham antique furniture; for the man who
+sells me an oaken chest which he swears was made in the XIII century,
+though as a matter of fact he made it himself only yesterday, at least
+does not pretend that there are any modern ideas in it, whereas your
+academic copier of fossils offers them to you as the latest outpouring
+of the human spirit, and, worst of all, kidnaps young people as pupils
+and persuades them that his limitations are rules, his observances
+dexterities, his timidities good taste, and his emptinesses purities.
+And when he declares that art should not be didactic, all the people who
+have nothing to teach and all the people who don't want to learn agree
+with him emphatically.
+
+I pride myself on not being one of these susceptible: If you study
+the electric light with which I supply you in that Bumbledonian public
+capacity of mine over which you make merry from time to time, you will
+find that your house contains a great quantity of highly susceptible
+copper wire which gorges itself with electricity and gives you no light
+whatever. But here and there occurs a scrap of intensely insusceptible,
+intensely resistant material; and that stubborn scrap grapples with the
+current and will not let it through until it has made itself useful to
+you as those two vital qualities of literature, light and heat. Now if I
+am to be no mere copper wire amateur but a luminous author, I must also
+be a most intensely refractory person, liable to go out and to go wrong
+at inconvenient moments, and with incendiary possibilities. These are
+the faults of my qualities; and I assure you that I sometimes dislike
+myself so much that when some irritable reviewer chances at that moment
+to pitch into me with zest, I feel unspeakably relieved and obliged. But
+I never dream of reforming, knowing that I must take myself as I am and
+get what work I can out of myself. All this you will understand; for
+there is community of material between us: we are both critics of life
+as well as of art; and you have perhaps said to yourself when I have
+passed your windows, "There, but for the grace of God, go I." An awful
+and chastening reflection, which shall be the closing cadence of this
+immoderately long letter from yours faithfully,
+
+G. BERNARD SHAW.
+
+WOKING, 1903
+
+
+
+
+ACT I
+
+Roebuck Ramsden is in his study, opening the morning letters. The study,
+handsomely and solidly furnished, proclaims the man of means. Not
+a speck of dust is visible: it is clear that there are at least two
+housemaids and a parlormaid downstairs, and a housekeeper upstairs who
+does not let them spare elbow-grease. Even the top of Roebuck's head is
+polished: on a sunshiny day he could heliograph his orders to distant
+camps by merely nodding. In no other respect, however, does he suggest
+the military man. It is in active civil life that men get his broad air
+of importance, his dignified expectation of deference, his determinate
+mouth disarmed and refined since the hour of his success by the
+withdrawal of opposition and the concession of comfort and precedence
+and power. He is more than a highly respectable man: he is marked out
+as a president of highly respectable men, a chairman among directors,
+an alderman among councillors, a mayor among aldermen. Four tufts of
+iron-grey hair, which will soon be as white as isinglass, and are in
+other respects not at all unlike it, grow in two symmetrical pairs above
+his ears and at the angles of his spreading jaws. He wears a black frock
+coat, a white waistcoat (it is bright spring weather), and trousers,
+neither black nor perceptibly blue, of one of those indefinitely mixed
+hues which the modern clothier has produced to harmonize with the
+religions of respectable men. He has not been out of doors yet to-day;
+so he still wears his slippers, his boots being ready for him on the
+hearthrug. Surmising that he has no valet, and seeing that he has no
+secretary with a shorthand notebook and a typewriter, one meditates
+on how little our great burgess domesticity has been disturbed by new
+fashions and methods, or by the enterprise of the railway and hotel
+companies which sell you a Saturday to Monday of life at Folkestone as a
+real gentleman for two guineas, first class fares both ways included.
+
+How old is Roebuck? The question is important on the threshold of a
+drama of ideas; for under such circumstances everything depends on
+whether his adolescence belonged to the sixties or to the eighties. He
+was born, as a matter of fact, in 1839, and was a Unitarian and Free
+Trader from his boyhood, and an Evolutionist from the publication of
+the Origin of Species. Consequently he has always classed himself as an
+advanced thinker and fearlessly outspoken reformer.
+
+Sitting at his writing table, he has on his right the windows giving
+on Portland Place. Through these, as through a proscenium, the curious
+spectator may contemplate his profile as well as the blinds will permit.
+On his left is the inner wall, with a stately bookcase, and the door
+not quite in the middle, but somewhat further from him. Against the wall
+opposite him are two busts on pillars: one, to his left, of John Bright;
+the other, to his right, of Mr Herbert Spencer. Between them hang an
+engraved portrait of Richard Cobden; enlarged photographs of Martineau,
+Huxley, and George Eliot; autotypes of allegories by Mr G.F. Watts (for
+Roebuck believed in the fine arts with all the earnestness of a man who
+does not understand them), and an impression of Dupont's engraving of
+Delaroche's Beaux Artes hemicycle, representing the great men of
+all ages. On the wall behind him, above the mantelshelf, is a family
+portrait of impenetrable obscurity.
+
+A chair stands near the writing table for the convenience of business
+visitors. Two other chairs are against the wall between the busts.
+
+A parlormaid enters with a visitor's card. Roebuck takes it, and nods,
+pleased. Evidently a welcome caller.
+
+RAMSDEN. Show him up.
+
+The parlormaid goes out and returns with the visitor.
+
+THE MAID. Mr Robinson.
+
+Mr Robinson is really an uncommonly nice looking young fellow. He must,
+one thinks, be the jeune premier; for it is not in reason to suppose
+that a second such attractive male figure should appear in one story.
+The slim shapely frame, the elegant suit of new mourning, the small head
+and regular features, the pretty little moustache, the frank clear eyes,
+the wholesome bloom and the youthful complexion, the well brushed glossy
+hair, not curly, but of fine texture and good dark color, the arch of
+good nature in the eyebrows, the erect forehead and neatly pointed chin,
+all announce the man who will love and suffer later on. And that he will
+not do so without sympathy is guaranteed by an engaging sincerity and
+eager modest serviceableness which stamp him as a man of amiable nature.
+The moment he appears, Ramsden's face expands into fatherly liking and
+welcome, an expression which drops into one of decorous grief as the
+young man approaches him with sorrow in his face as well as in his black
+clothes. Ramsden seems to know the nature of the bereavement. As the
+visitor advances silently to the writing table, the old man rises and
+shakes his hand across it without a word: a long, affectionate shake
+which tells the story of a recent sorrow common to both.
+
+RAMSDEN. [concluding the handshake and cheering up] Well, well,
+Octavius, it's the common lot. We must all face it someday. Sit down.
+
+Octavius takes the visitor's chair. Ramsden replaces himself in his own.
+
+OCTAVIUS. Yes: we must face it, Mr Ramsden. But I owed him a great deal.
+He did everything for me that my father could have done if he had lived.
+
+RAMSDEN. He had no son of his own, you see.
+
+OCTAVIUS. But he had daughters; and yet he was as good to my sister as
+to me. And his death was so sudden! I always intended to thank him--to
+let him know that I had not taken all his care of me as a matter
+of course, as any boy takes his father's care. But I waited for an
+opportunity and now he is dead--dropped without a moment's warning. He
+will never know what I felt. [He takes out his handkerchief and cries
+unaffectedly].
+
+RAMSDEN. How do we know that, Octavius? He may know it: we cannot
+tell. Come! Don't grieve. [Octavius masters himself and puts up his
+handkerchief]. That's right. Now let me tell you something to console
+you. The last time I saw him--it was in this very room--he said to me:
+"Tavy is a generous lad and the soul of honor; and when I see how little
+consideration other men get from their sons, I realize how much better
+than a son he's been to me." There! Doesn't that do you good?
+
+OCTAVIUS. Mr Ramsden: he used to say to me that he had met only one man
+in the world who was the soul of honor, and that was Roebuck Ramsden.
+
+RAMSDEN. Oh, that was his partiality: we were very old friends, you
+know. But there was something else he used to say about you. I wonder
+whether I ought to tell you or not!
+
+OCTAVIUS. You know best.
+
+RAMSDEN. It was something about his daughter.
+
+OCTAVIUS. [eagerly] About Ann! Oh, do tell me that, Mr Ramsden.
+
+RAMSDEN. Well, he said he was glad, after all, you were not his son,
+because he thought that someday Annie and you--[Octavius blushes
+vividly]. Well, perhaps I shouldn't have told you. But he was in
+earnest.
+
+OCTAVIUS. Oh, if only I thought I had a chance! You know, Mr Ramsden, I
+don't care about money or about what people call position; and I can't
+bring myself to take an interest in the business of struggling for them.
+Well, Ann has a most exquisite nature; but she is so accustomed to be
+in the thick of that sort of thing that she thinks a man's character
+incomplete if he is not ambitious. She knows that if she married me she
+would have to reason herself out of being ashamed of me for not being a
+big success of some kind.
+
+RAMSDEN. [Getting up and planting himself with his back to the
+fireplace] Nonsense, my boy, nonsense! You're too modest. What does she
+know about the real value of men at her age? [More seriously] Besides,
+she's a wonderfully dutiful girl. Her father's wish would be sacred to
+her. Do you know that since she grew up to years of discretion, I don't
+believe she has ever once given her own wish as a reason for doing
+anything or not doing it. It's always "Father wishes me to," or "Mother
+wouldn't like it." It's really almost a fault in her. I have often told
+her she must learn to think for herself.
+
+OCTAVIUS. [shaking his head] I couldn't ask her to marry me because her
+father wished it, Mr Ramsden.
+
+RAMSDEN. Well, perhaps not. No: of course not. I see that. No: you
+certainly couldn't. But when you win her on your own merits, it will be
+a great happiness to her to fulfil her father's desire as well as her
+own. Eh? Come! you'll ask her, won't you?
+
+OCTAVIUS. [with sad gaiety] At all events I promise you I shall never
+ask anyone else.
+
+RAMSDEN. Oh, you shan't need to. She'll accept you, my boy--although
+[here he suddenly becomes very serious indeed] you have one great
+drawback.
+
+OCTAVIUS. [anxiously] What drawback is that, Mr Ramsden? I should rather
+say which of my many drawbacks?
+
+RAMSDEN. I'll tell you, Octavius. [He takes from the table a book bound
+in red cloth]. I have in my hand a copy of the most infamous, the most
+scandalous, the most mischievous, the most blackguardly book that ever
+escaped burning at the hands of the common hangman. I have not read
+it: I would not soil my mind with such filth; but I have read what the
+papers say of it. The title is quite enough for me. [He reads it]. The
+Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion by John Tanner, M.I.R.C.,
+Member of the Idle Rich Class.
+
+OCTAVIUS. [smiling] But Jack--
+
+RAMSDEN. [testily] For goodness' sake, don't call him Jack under my
+roof [he throws the book violently down on the table, Then, somewhat
+relieved, he comes past the table to Octavius, and addresses him at
+close quarters with impressive gravity]. Now, Octavius, I know that my
+dead friend was right when he said you were a generous lad. I know that
+this man was your schoolfellow, and that you feel bound to stand by
+him because there was a boyish friendship between you. But I ask you
+to consider the altered circumstances. You were treated as a son in my
+friend's house. You lived there; and your friends could not be turned
+from the door. This Tanner was in and out there on your account almost
+from his childhood. He addresses Annie by her Christian name as freely
+as you do. Well, while her father was alive, that was her father's
+business, not mine. This man Tanner was only a boy to him: his opinions
+were something to be laughed at, like a man's hat on a child's head.
+But now Tanner is a grown man and Annie a grown woman. And her father
+is gone. We don't as yet know the exact terms of his will; but he often
+talked it over with me; and I have no more doubt than I have that you're
+sitting there that the will appoints me Annie's trustee and guardian.
+[Forcibly] Now I tell you, once for all, I can't and I won't have Annie
+placed in such a position that she must, out of regard for you, suffer
+the intimacy of this fellow Tanner. It's not fair: it's not right: it's
+not kind. What are you going to do about it?
+
+OCTAVIUS. But Ann herself has told Jack that whatever his opinions are,
+he will always be welcome because he knew her dear father.
+
+RAMSDEN. [out of patience] That girl's mad about her duty to her
+parents. [He starts off like a goaded ox in the direction of John
+Bright, in whose expression there is no sympathy for him. As he speaks,
+he fumes down to Herbert Spencer, who receives him still more coldly]
+Excuse me, Octavius; but there are limits to social toleration. You
+know that I am not a bigoted or prejudiced man. You know that I am plain
+Roebuck Ramsden when other men who have done less have got handles to
+their names, because I have stood for equality and liberty of conscience
+while they were truckling to the Church and to the aristocracy.
+Whitefield and I lost chance after chance through our advanced opinions.
+But I draw the line at Anarchism and Free Love and that sort of thing.
+If I am to be Annie's guardian, she will have to learn that she has a
+duty to me. I won't have it: I will not have it. She must forbid John
+Tanner the house; and so must you.
+
+The parlormaid returns.
+
+OCTAVIUS. But--
+
+RAMSDEN. [calling his attention to the servant] Ssh! Well?
+
+THE MAID. Mr Tanner wishes to see you, sir.
+
+RAMSDEN. Mr Tanner!
+
+OCTAVIUS. Jack!
+
+RAMSDEN. How dare Mr Tanner call on me! Say I cannot see him.
+
+OCTAVIUS. [hurt] I am sorry you are turning my friend from your door
+like that.
+
+THE MAID. [calmly] He's not at the door, sir. He's upstairs in the
+drawingroom with Miss Ramsden. He came with Mrs Whitefield and Miss Ann
+and Miss Robinson, sir.
+
+Ramsden's feelings are beyond words.
+
+OCTAVIUS. [grinning] That's very like Jack, Mr Ramsden. You must see
+him, even if it's only to turn him out.
+
+RAMSDEN. [hammering out his words with suppressed fury] Go upstairs and
+ask Mr Tanner to be good enough to step down here. [The parlormaid goes
+out; and Ramsden returns to the fireplace, as to a fortified position].
+I must say that of all the confounded pieces of impertinence--well, if
+these are Anarchist manners I hope you like them. And Annie with him!
+Annie! A-- [he chokes].
+
+OCTAVIUS. Yes: that's what surprises me. He's so desperately afraid of
+Ann. There must be something the matter.
+
+Mr John Tanner suddenly opens the door and enters. He is too young to be
+described simply as a big man with a beard. But it is already plain that
+middle life will find him in that category. He has still some of the
+slimness of youth; but youthfulness is not the effect he aims at: his
+frock coat would befit a prime minister; and a certain high chested
+carriage of the shoulders, a lofty pose of the head, and the Olympian
+majesty with which a mane, or rather a huge wisp, of hazel colored
+hair is thrown back from an imposing brow, suggest Jupiter rather than
+Apollo. He is prodigiously fluent of speech, restless, excitable (mark
+the snorting nostril and the restless blue eye, just the thirty-secondth
+of an inch too wide open), possibly a little mad. He is carefully
+dressed, not from the vanity that cannot resist finery, but from a sense
+of the importance of everything he does which leads him to make as
+much of paying a call as other men do of getting married or laying a
+foundation stone. A sensitive, susceptible, exaggerative, earnest man: a
+megalomaniac, who would be lost without a sense of humor.
+
+Just at present the sense of humor is in abeyance. To say that he is
+excited is nothing: all his moods are phases of excitement. He is now in
+the panic-stricken phase; and he walks straight up to Ramsden as if with
+the fixed intention of shooting him on his own hearthrug. But what he
+pulls from his breast pocket is not a pistol, but a foolscap document
+which he thrusts under the indignant nose of Ramsden as he exclaims--
+
+TANNER. Ramsden: do you know what that is?
+
+RAMSDEN. [loftily] No, Sir.
+
+TANNER. It's a copy of Whitefield's will. Ann got it this morning.
+
+RAMSDEN. When you say Ann, you mean, I presume, Miss Whitefield.
+
+TANNER. I mean our Ann, your Ann, Tavy's Ann, and now, Heaven help me,
+my Ann!
+
+OCTAVIUS. [rising, very pale] What do you mean?
+
+TANNER. Mean! [He holds up the will]. Do you know who is appointed Ann's
+guardian by this will?
+
+RAMSDEN. [coolly] I believe I am.
+
+TANNER. You! You and I, man. I! I!! I!!! Both of us! [He flings the will
+down on the writing table].
+
+RAMSDEN. You! Impossible.
+
+TANNER. It's only too hideously true. [He throws himself into Octavius's
+chair]. Ramsden: get me out of it somehow. You don't know Ann as well
+as I do. She'll commit every crime a respectable woman can; and
+she'll justify every one of them by saying that it was the wish of
+her guardians. She'll put everything on us; and we shall have no more
+control over her than a couple of mice over a cat.
+
+OCTAVIUS. Jack: I wish you wouldn't talk like that about Ann.
+
+TANNER. This chap's in love with her: that's another complication. Well,
+she'll either jilt him and say I didn't approve of him, or marry him
+and say you ordered her to. I tell you, this is the most staggering blow
+that has ever fallen on a man of my age and temperament.
+
+RAMSDEN. Let me see that will, sir. [He goes to the writing table and
+picks it up]. I cannot believe that my old friend Whitefield would have
+shown such a want of confidence in me as to associate me with-- [His
+countenance falls as he reads].
+
+TANNER. It's all my own doing: that's the horrible irony of it. He told
+me one day that you were to be Ann's guardian; and like a fool I began
+arguing with him about the folly of leaving a young woman under the
+control of an old man with obsolete ideas.
+
+RAMSDEN. [stupended] My ideas obsolete!!!!!
+
+TANNER. Totally. I had just finished an essay called Down with
+Government by the Greyhaired; and I was full of arguments and
+illustrations. I said the proper thing was to combine the experience of
+an old hand with the vitality of a young one. Hang me if he didn't take
+me at my word and alter his will--it's dated only a fortnight after that
+conversation--appointing me as joint guardian with you!
+
+RAMSDEN. [pale and determined] I shall refuse to act.
+
+TANNER. What's the good of that? I've been refusing all the way from
+Richmond; but Ann keeps on saying that of course she's only an orphan;
+and that she can't expect the people who were glad to come to the house
+in her father's time to trouble much about her now. That's the latest
+game. An orphan! It's like hearing an ironclad talk about being at the
+mercy of the winds and waves.
+
+OCTAVIUS. This is not fair, Jack. She is an orphan. And you ought to
+stand by her.
+
+TANNER. Stand by her! What danger is she in? She has the law on her
+side; she has popular sentiment on her side; she has plenty of money
+and no conscience. All she wants with me is to load up all her moral
+responsibilities on me, and do as she likes at the expense of my
+character. I can't control her; and she can compromise me as much as she
+likes. I might as well be her husband.
+
+RAMSDEN. You can refuse to accept the guardianship. I shall certainly
+refuse to hold it jointly with you.
+
+TANNER. Yes; and what will she say to that? what does she say to it?
+Just that her father's wishes are sacred to her, and that she shall
+always look up to me as her guardian whether I care to face the
+responsibility or not. Refuse! You might as well refuse to accept the
+embraces of a boa constrictor when once it gets round your neck.
+
+OCTAVIUS. This sort of talk is not kind to me, Jack.
+
+TANNER. [rising and going to Octavius to console him, but still
+lamenting] If he wanted a young guardian, why didn't he appoint Tavy?
+
+RAMSDEN. Ah! why indeed?
+
+OCTAVIUS. I will tell you. He sounded me about it; but I refused the
+trust because I loved her. I had no right to let myself be forced on her
+as a guardian by her father. He spoke to her about it; and she said I
+was right. You know I love her, Mr Ramsden; and Jack knows it too. If
+Jack loved a woman, I would not compare her to a boa constrictor in his
+presence, however much I might dislike her [he sits down between the
+busts and turns his face to the wall].
+
+RAMSDEN. I do not believe that Whitefield was in his right senses
+when he made that will. You have admitted that he made it under your
+influence.
+
+TANNER. You ought to be pretty well obliged to me for my influence. He
+leaves you two thousand five hundred for your trouble. He leaves Tavy a
+dowry for his sister and five thousand for himself.
+
+OCTAVIUS. [his tears flowing afresh] Oh, I can't take it. He was too
+good to us.
+
+TANNER. You won't get it, my boy, if Ramsden upsets the will.
+
+RAMSDEN. Ha! I see. You have got me in a cleft stick.
+
+TANNER. He leaves me nothing but the charge of Ann's morals, on the
+ground that I have already more money than is good for me. That shows
+that he had his wits about him, doesn't it?
+
+RAMSDEN. [grimly] I admit that.
+
+OCTAVIUS. [rising and coming from his refuge by the wall] Mr Ramsden:
+I think you are prejudiced against Jack. He is a man of honor, and
+incapable of abusing--
+
+TANNER. Don't, Tavy: you'll make me ill. I am not a man of honor: I am
+a man struck down by a dead hand. Tavy: you must marry her after all and
+take her off my hands. And I had set my heart on saving you from her!
+
+OCTAVIUS. Oh, Jack, you talk of saving me from my highest happiness.
+
+TANNER. Yes, a lifetime of happiness. If it were only the first half
+hour's happiness, Tavy, I would buy it for you with my last penny. But
+a lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on
+earth.
+
+RAMSDEN. [violently] Stuff, sir. Talk sense; or else go and waste
+someone else's time: I have something better to do than listen to your
+fooleries [he positively kicks his way to his table and resumes his
+seat].
+
+TANNER. You hear him, Tavy! Not an idea in his head later than
+eighteen-sixty. We can't leave Ann with no other guardian to turn to.
+
+RAMSDEN. I am proud of your contempt for my character and opinions, sir.
+Your own are set forth in that book, I believe.
+
+TANNER. [eagerly going to the table] What! You've got my book! What do
+you think of it?
+
+RAMSDEN. Do you suppose I would read such a book, sir?
+
+TANNER. Then why did you buy it?
+
+RAMSDEN. I did not buy it, sir. It has been sent me by some foolish
+lady who seems to admire your views. I was about to dispose of it when
+Octavius interrupted me. I shall do so now, with your permission. [He
+throws the book into the waste paper basket with such vehemence that
+Tanner recoils under the impression that it is being thrown at his
+head].
+
+TANNER. You have no more manners than I have myself. However, that saves
+ceremony between us. [He sits down again]. What do you intend to do
+about this will?
+
+OCTAVIUS. May I make a suggestion?
+
+RAMSDEN. Certainly, Octavius.
+
+OCTAVIUS. Aren't we forgetting that Ann herself may have some wishes in
+this matter?
+
+RAMSDEN. I quite intend that Annie's wishes shall be consulted in every
+reasonable way. But she is only a woman, and a young and inexperienced
+woman at that.
+
+TANNER. Ramsden: I begin to pity you.
+
+RAMSDEN. [hotly] I don't want to know how you feel towards me, Mr
+Tanner.
+
+TANNER. Ann will do just exactly what she likes. And what's more, she'll
+force us to advise her to do it; and she'll put the blame on us if it
+turns out badly. So, as Tavy is longing to see her--
+
+OCTAVIUS. [shyly] I am not, Jack.
+
+TANNER. You lie, Tavy: you are. So let's have her down from the
+drawing-room and ask her what she intends us to do. Off with you, Tavy,
+and fetch her. [Tavy turns to go]. And don't be long for the strained
+relations between myself and Ramsden will make the interval rather
+painful [Ramsden compresses his lips, but says nothing--].
+
+OCTAVIUS. Never mind him, Mr Ramsden. He's not serious. [He goes out].
+
+RAMSDEN [very deliberately] Mr Tanner: you are the most impudent person
+I have ever met.
+
+TANNER. [seriously] I know it, Ramsden. Yet even I cannot wholly conquer
+shame. We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything
+that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our
+incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as
+we are ashamed of our naked skins. Good Lord, my dear Ramsden, we are
+ashamed to walk, ashamed to ride in an omnibus, ashamed to hire a hansom
+instead of keeping a carriage, ashamed of keeping one horse instead of
+two and a groom-gardener instead of a coachman and footman. The more
+things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is. Why, you're
+ashamed to buy my book, ashamed to read it: the only thing you're not
+ashamed of is to judge me for it without having read it; and even that
+only means that you're ashamed to have heterodox opinions. Look at the
+effect I produce because my fairy godmother withheld from me this gift
+of shame. I have every possible virtue that a man can have except--
+
+RAMSDEN. I am glad you think so well of yourself.
+
+TANNER. All you mean by that is that you think I ought to be ashamed of
+talking about my virtues. You don't mean that I haven't got them: you
+know perfectly well that I am as sober and honest a citizen as yourself,
+as truthful personally, and much more truthful politically and morally.
+
+RAMSDEN. [touched on his most sensitive point] I deny that. I will
+not allow you or any man to treat me as if I were a mere member of
+the British public. I detest its prejudices; I scorn its narrowness; I
+demand the right to think for myself. You pose as an advanced man. Let
+me tell you that I was an advanced man before you were born.
+
+TANNER. I knew it was a long time ago.
+
+RAMSDEN. I am as advanced as ever I was. I defy you to prove that I have
+ever hauled down the flag. I am more advanced than ever I was. I grow
+more advanced every day.
+
+TANNER. More advanced in years, Polonius.
+
+RAMSDEN. Polonius! So you are Hamlet, I suppose.
+
+TANNER. No: I am only the most impudent person you've ever met. That's
+your notion of a thoroughly bad character. When you want to give me a
+piece of your mind, you ask yourself, as a just and upright man, what
+is the worst you can fairly say of me. Thief, liar, forger, adulterer,
+perjurer, glutton, drunkard? Not one of these names fit me. You have
+to fall back on my deficiency in shame. Well, I admit it. I even
+congratulate myself; for if I were ashamed of my real self, I should
+cut as stupid a figure as any of the rest of you. Cultivate a little
+impudence, Ramsden; and you will become quite a remarkable man.
+
+RAMSDEN. I have no--
+
+TANNER. You have no desire for that sort of notoriety. Bless you, I knew
+that answer would come as well as I know that a box of matches will come
+out of an automatic machine when I put a penny in the slot: you would be
+ashamed to say anything else.
+
+The crushing retort for which Ramsden has been visibly collecting his
+forces is lost for ever; for at this point Octavius returns with Miss
+Ann Whitefield and her mother; and Ramsden springs up and hurries to the
+door to receive them. Whether Ann is good-looking or not depends upon
+your taste; also and perhaps chiefly on your age and sex. To Octavius
+she is an enchantingly beautiful woman, in whose presence the world
+becomes transfigured, and the puny limits of individual consciousness
+are suddenly made infinite by a mystic memory of the whole life of the
+race to its beginnings in the east, or even back to the paradise from
+which it fell. She is to him the reality of romance, the leaner good
+sense of nonsense, the unveiling of his eyes, the freeing of his soul,
+the abolition of time, place and circumstance, the etherealization of
+his blood into rapturous rivers of the very water of life itself,
+the revelation of all the mysteries and the sanctification of all the
+dogmas. To her mother she is, to put it as moderately as possible,
+nothing whatever of the kind. Not that Octavius's admiration is in any
+way ridiculous or discreditable. Ann is a well formed creature, as far
+as that goes; and she is perfectly ladylike, graceful, and comely, with
+ensnaring eyes and hair. Besides, instead of making herself an eyesore,
+like her mother, she has devised a mourning costume of black and
+violet silk which does honor to her late father and reveals the family
+tradition of brave unconventionality by which Ramsden sets such store.
+
+But all this is beside the point as an explanation of Ann's charm.
+Turn up her nose, give a cast to her eye, replace her black and violet
+confection by the apron and feathers of a flower girl, strike all the
+aitches out of her speech, and Ann would still make men dream. Vitality
+is as common as humanity; but, like humanity, it sometimes rises to
+genius; and Ann is one of the vital geniuses. Not at all, if you please,
+an oversexed person: that is a vital defect, not a true excess. She is
+a perfectly respectable, perfectly self-controlled woman, and looks
+it; though her pose is fashionably frank and impulsive. She inspires
+confidence as a person who will do nothing she does not mean to do; also
+some fear, perhaps, as a woman who will probably do everything she means
+to do without taking more account of other people than may be necessary
+and what she calls right. In short, what the weaker of her own sex
+sometimes call a cat.
+
+Nothing can be more decorous than her entry and her reception by
+Ramsden, whom she kisses. The late Mr Whitefield would be gratified
+almost to impatience by the long faces of the men (except Tanner, who is
+fidgety), the silent handgrasps, the sympathetic placing of chairs, the
+sniffing of the widow, and the liquid eye of the daughter, whose heart,
+apparently, will not let her control her tongue to speech. Ramsden and
+Octavius take the two chairs from the wall, and place them for the two
+ladies; but Ann comes to Tanner and takes his chair, which he offers
+with a brusque gesture, subsequently relieving his irritation by sitting
+down on the corner of the writing table with studied indecorum. Octavius
+gives Mrs Whitefield a chair next Ann, and himself takes the vacant
+one which Ramsden has placed under the nose of the effigy of Mr Herbert
+Spencer.
+
+Mrs Whitefield, by the way, is a little woman, whose faded flaxen hair
+looks like straw on an egg. She has an expression of muddled shrewdness,
+a squeak of protest in her voice, and an odd air of continually elbowing
+away some larger person who is crushing her into a corner. One guesses
+her as one of those women who are conscious of being treated as silly
+and negligible, and who, without having strength enough to assert
+themselves effectually, at any rate never submit to their fate. There
+is a touch of chivalry in Octavius's scrupulous attention to her, even
+whilst his whole soul is absorbed by Ann.
+
+Ramsden goes solemnly back to his magisterial seat at the writing table,
+ignoring Tanner, and opens the proceedings.
+
+RAMSDEN. I am sorry, Annie, to force business on you at a sad time like
+the present. But your poor dear father's will has raised a very serious
+question. You have read it, I believe?
+
+[Ann assents with a nod and a catch of her breath, too much affected to
+speak].
+
+I must say I am surprised to find Mr Tanner named as joint guardian
+and trustee with myself of you and Rhoda. [A pause. They all look
+portentous; but they have nothing to say. Ramsden, a little ruffled by
+the lack of any response, continues] I don't know that I can consent to
+act under such conditions. Mr Tanner has, I understand, some objection
+also; but I do not profess to understand its nature: he will no doubt
+speak for himself. But we are agreed that we can decide nothing until we
+know your views. I am afraid I shall have to ask you to choose between
+my sole guardianship and that of Mr Tanner; for I fear it is impossible
+for us to undertake a joint arrangement.
+
+ANN. [in a low musical voice] Mamma--
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. [hastily] Now, Ann, I do beg you not to put it on me. I
+have no opinion on the subject; and if I had, it would probably not be
+attended to. I am quite with whatever you three think best.
+
+Tanner turns his head and looks fixedly at Ramsden, who angrily refuses
+to receive this mute communication.
+
+ANN. [resuming in the same gentle voice, ignoring her mother's bad
+taste] Mamma knows that she is not strong enough to bear the whole
+responsibility for me and Rhoda without some help and advice. Rhoda
+must have a guardian; and though I am older, I do not think any young
+unmarried woman should be left quite to her own guidance. I hope you
+agree with me, Granny?
+
+TANNER. [starting] Granny! Do you intend to call your guardians Granny?
+
+ANN. Don't be foolish, Jack. Mr Ramsden has always been Grandpapa
+Roebuck to me: I am Granny's Annie; and he is Annie's Granny. I
+christened him so when I first learned to speak.
+
+RAMSDEN. [sarcastically] I hope you are satisfied, Mr Tanner. Go on,
+Annie: I quite agree with you.
+
+ANN. Well, if I am to have a guardian, CAN I set aside anybody whom my
+dear father appointed for me?
+
+RAMSDEN. [biting his lip] You approve of your father's choice, then?
+
+ANN. It is not for me to approve or disapprove. I accept it. My father
+loved me and knew best what was good for me.
+
+RAMSDEN. Of course I understand your feeling, Annie. It is what I should
+have expected of you; and it does you credit. But it does not settle the
+question so completely as you think. Let me put a case to you. Suppose
+you were to discover that I had been guilty of some disgraceful
+action--that I was not the man your poor dear father took me for. Would
+you still consider it right that I should be Rhoda's guardian?
+
+ANN. I can't imagine you doing anything disgraceful, Granny.
+
+TANNER. [to Ramsden] You haven't done anything of the sort, have you?
+
+RAMSDEN. [indignantly] No sir.
+
+MRS. WHITEFIELD. [placidly] Well, then, why suppose it?
+
+ANN. You see, Granny, Mamma would not like me to suppose it.
+
+RAMSDEN. [much perplexed] You are both so full of natural and
+affectionate feeling in these family matters that it is very hard to put
+the situation fairly before you.
+
+TANNER. Besides, my friend, you are not putting the situation fairly
+before them.
+
+RAMSDEN. [sulkily] Put it yourself, then.
+
+TANNER. I will. Ann: Ramsden thinks I am not fit be your guardian; and I
+quite agree with him. He considers that if your father had read my book,
+he wouldn't have appointed me. That book is the disgraceful action he
+has been talking about. He thinks it's your duty for Rhoda's sake to ask
+him to act alone and to make me withdraw. Say the word and I will.
+
+ANN. But I haven't read your book, Jack.
+
+TANNER. [diving at the waste-paper basket and fishing the book out for
+her] Then read it at once and decide.
+
+RAMSDEN. If I am to be your guardian, I positively forbid you to read
+that book, Annie. [He smites the table with his fist and rises].
+
+ANN. Of course, if you don't wish it. [She puts the book on the table].
+
+TANNER. If one guardian is to forbid you to read the other guardian's
+book, how are we to settle it? Suppose I order you to read it! What
+about your duty to me?
+
+ANN. [gently] I am sure you would never purposely force me into a
+painful dilemma, Jack.
+
+RAMSDEN. [irritably] Yes, yes, Annie: this is all very well, and, as I
+said, quite natural and becoming. But you must make a choice one way or
+the other. We are as much in a dilemma as you.
+
+ANN. I feel that I am too young, too inexperienced, to decide. My
+father's wishes are sacred to me.
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. If you two men won't carry them out I must say it is
+rather hard that you should put the responsibility on Ann. It seems to
+me that people are always putting things on other people in this world.
+
+RAMSDEN. I am sorry you take it that way.
+
+ANN. [touchingly] Do you refuse to accept me as your ward, Granny?
+
+RAMSDEN. No: I never said that. I greatly object to act with Mr Tanner:
+that's all.
+
+MRS. WHITEFIELD. Why? What's the matter with poor Jack?
+
+TANNER. My views are too advanced for him.
+
+RAMSDEN. [indignantly] They are not. I deny it.
+
+ANN. Of course not. What nonsense! Nobody is more advanced than Granny.
+I am sure it is Jack himself who has made all the difficulty. Come,
+Jack! Be kind to me in my sorrow. You don't refuse to accept me as your
+ward, do you?
+
+TANNER. [gloomily] No. I let myself in for it; so I suppose I must face
+it. [He turns away to the bookcase, and stands there, moodily studying
+the titles of the volumes].
+
+ANN. [rising and expanding with subdued but gushing delight] Then we are
+all agreed; and my dear father's will is to be carried out. You don't
+know what a joy that is to me and to my mother! [She goes to Ramsden and
+presses both his hands, saying] And I shall have my dear Granny to help
+and advise me. [She casts a glance at Tanner over her shoulder]. And
+Jack the Giant Killer. [She goes past her mother to Octavius]. And
+Jack's inseparable friend Ricky-ticky-tavy [he blushes and looks
+inexpressibly foolish].
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. [rising and shaking her widow's weeds straight] Now that
+you are Ann's guardian, Mr Ramsden, I wish you would speak to her about
+her habit of giving people nicknames. They can't be expected to like it.
+[She moves towards the door].
+
+ANN. How can you say such a thing, Mamma! [Glowing with affectionate
+remorse] Oh, I wonder can you be right! Have I been inconsiderate? [She
+turns to Octavius, who is sitting astride his chair with his elbows on
+the back of it. Putting her hand on his forehead she turns his face up
+suddenly]. Do you want to be treated like a grown up man? Must I call
+you Mr Robinson in future?
+
+OCTAVIUS. [earnestly] Oh please call me Ricky-ticky-tavy, "Mr Robinson"
+would hurt me cruelly. [She laughs and pats his cheek with her finger;
+then comes back to Ramsden]. You know I'm beginning to think that Granny
+is rather a piece of impertinence. But I never dreamt of its hurting
+you.
+
+RAMSDEN. [breezily, as he pats her affectionately on the back] My dear
+Annie, nonsense. I insist on Granny. I won't answer to any other name
+than Annie's Granny.
+
+ANN. [gratefully] You all spoil me, except Jack.
+
+TANNER. [over his shoulder, from the bookcase] I think you ought to call
+me Mr Tanner.
+
+ANN. [gently] No you don't, Jack. That's like the things you say on
+purpose to shock people: those who know you pay no attention to them.
+But, if you like, I'll call you after your famous ancestor Don Juan.
+
+RAMSDEN. Don Juan!
+
+ANN. [innocently] Oh, is there any harm in it? I didn't know. Then I
+certainly won't call you that. May I call you Jack until I can think of
+something else?
+
+TANKER. Oh, for Heaven's sake don't try to invent anything worse. I
+capitulate. I consent to Jack. I embrace Jack. Here endeth my first and
+last attempt to assert my authority.
+
+ANN. You see, Mamma, they all really like to have pet names.
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. Well, I think you might at least drop them until we are
+out of mourning.
+
+ANN. [reproachfully, stricken to the soul] Oh, how could you remind me,
+mother? [She hastily leaves the room to conceal her emotion].
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. Of course. My fault as usual! [She follows Ann].
+
+TANNER. [coming from the bockcase] Ramsden: we're
+beaten--smashed--nonentitized, like her mother.
+
+RAMSDEN. Stuff, Sir. [He follows Mrs Whitefield out of the room].
+
+TANNER. [left alone with Octavius, stares whimsically at him] Tavy: do
+you want to count for something in the world?
+
+OCTAVIUS. I want to count for something as a poet: I want to write a
+great play.
+
+TANNER. With Ann as the heroine?
+
+OCTAVIUS. Yes: I confess it.
+
+TANNER. Take care, Tavy. The play with Ann as the heroine is all right;
+but if you're not very careful, by Heaven she'll marry you.
+
+OCTAVIUS. [sighing] No such luck, Jack!
+
+TANNER. Why, man, your head is in the lioness's mouth: you are half
+swallowed already--in three bites--Bite One, Ricky; Bite Two, Ticky;
+Bite Three, Tavy; and down you go.
+
+OCTAVIUS. She is the same to everybody, Jack: you know her ways.
+
+TANNER. Yes: she breaks everybody's back with the stroke of her paw; but
+the question is, which of us will she eat? My own opinion is that she
+means to eat you.
+
+OCTAVIUS. [rising, pettishly] It's horrible to talk like that about her
+when she is upstairs crying for her father. But I do so want her to eat
+me that I can bear your brutalities because they give me hope.
+
+TANNER. Tavy; that's the devilish side of a woman's fascination: she
+makes you will your own destruction.
+
+OCTAVIUS. But it's not destruction: it's fulfilment.
+
+TANNER. Yes, of HER purpose; and that purpose is neither her happiness
+nor yours, but Nature's. Vitality in a woman is a blind fury of
+creation. She sacrifices herself to it: do you think she will hesitate
+to sacrifice you?
+
+OCTAVIUS. Why, it is just because she is self-sacrificing that she will
+not sacrifice those she loves.
+
+TANNER. That is the profoundest of mistakes, Tavy. It is the
+self-sacrificing women that sacrifice others most recklessly. Because
+they are unselfish, they are kind in little things. Because they have a
+purpose which is not their own purpose, but that of the whole universe,
+a man is nothing to them but an instrument of that purpose.
+
+OCTAVIUS. Don't be ungenerous, Jack. They take the tenderest care of us.
+
+TANNER. Yes, as a soldier takes care of his rifle or a musician of his
+violin. But do they allow us any purpose or freedom of our own? Will
+they lend us to one another? Can the strongest man escape from them when
+once he is appropriated? They tremble when we are in danger, and weep
+when we die; but the tears are not for us, but for a father wasted, a
+son's breeding thrown away. They accuse us of treating them as a mere
+means to our pleasure; but how can so feeble and transient a folly as
+a man's selfish pleasure enslave a woman as the whole purpose of Nature
+embodied in a woman can enslave a man?
+
+OCTAVIUS. What matter, if the slavery makes us happy?
+
+TANNER. No matter at all if you have no purpose of your own, and are,
+like most men, a mere breadwinner. But you, Tavy, are an artist: that
+is, you have a purpose as absorbing and as unscrupulous as a woman's
+purpose.
+
+OCTAVIUS. Not unscrupulous.
+
+TANNER. Quite unscrupulous. The true artist will let his wife starve,
+his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at
+seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. To women he is half
+vivisector, half vampire. He gets into intimate relations with them to
+study them, to strip the mask of convention from them, to surprise their
+inmost secrets, knowing that they have the power to rouse his deepest
+creative energies, to rescue him from his cold reason, to make him see
+visions and dream dreams, to inspire him, as he calls it. He persuades
+women that they may do this for their own purpose whilst he really means
+them to do it for his. He steals the mother's milk and blackens it to
+make printer's ink to scoff at her and glorify ideal women with. He
+pretends to spare her the pangs of childbearing so that he may have
+for himself the tenderness and fostering that belong of right to her
+children. Since marriage began, the great artist has been known as a
+bad husband. But he is worse: he is a child-robber, a bloodsucker, a
+hypocrite and a cheat. Perish the race and wither a thousand women if
+only the sacrifice of them enable him to act Hamlet better, to paint
+a finer picture, to write a deeper poem, a greater play, a profounder
+philosophy! For mark you, Tavy, the artist's work is to show us
+ourselves as we really are. Our minds are nothing but this knowledge of
+ourselves; and he who adds a jot to such knowledge creates new mind as
+surely as any woman creates new men. In the rage of that creation he
+is as ruthless as the woman, as dangerous to her as she to him, and
+as horribly fascinating. Of all human struggles there is none so
+treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man
+and the mother woman. Which shall use up the other? that is the issue
+between them. And it is all the deadlier because, in your romanticist
+cant, they love one another.
+
+OCTAVIUS. Even if it were so--and I don't admit it for a moment--it is
+out of the deadliest struggles that we get the noblest characters.
+
+TANNER. Remember that the next time you meet a grizzly bear or a Bengal
+tiger, Tavy.
+
+OCTAVIUS. I meant where there is love, Jack.
+
+TANNER. Oh, the tiger will love you. There is no love sincerer than the
+love of food. I think Ann loves you that way: she patted your cheek as
+if it were a nicely underdone chop.
+
+OCTAVIUS. You know, Jack, I should have to run away from you if I did
+not make it a fixed rule not to mind anything you say. You come out with
+perfectly revolting things sometimes.
+
+Ramsden returns, followed by Ann. They come in quickly, with their
+former leisurely air of decorous grief changed to one of genuine
+concern, and, on Ramsden's part, of worry. He comes between the two men,
+intending to address Octavius, but pulls himself up abruptly as he sees
+Tanner.
+
+RAMSDEN. I hardly expected to find you still here, Mr Tanner.
+
+TANNER. Am I in the way? Good morning, fellow guardian [he goes towards
+the door].
+
+ANN. Stop, Jack. Granny: he must know, sooner or later.
+
+RAMSDEN. Octavius: I have a very serious piece of news for you. It is of
+the most private and delicate nature--of the most painful nature too, I
+am sorry to say. Do you wish Mr Tanner to be present whilst I explain?
+
+OCTAVIUS. [turning pale] I have no secrets from Jack.
+
+RAMSDEN. Before you decide that finally, let me say that the news
+concerns your sister, and that it is terrible news.
+
+OCTAVIUS. Violet! What has happened? Is she--dead?
+
+RAMSDEN. I am not sure that it is not even worse than that.
+
+OCTAVIUS. Is she badly hurt? Has there been an accident?
+
+RAMSDEN. No: nothing of that sort.
+
+TANNER. Ann: will you have the common humanity to tell us what the
+matter is?
+
+ANN. [half whispering] I can't. Violet has done something dreadful. We
+shall have to get her away somewhere. [She flutters to the writing
+table and sits in Ramsden's chair, leaving the three men to fight it out
+between them].
+
+OCTAVIUS. [enlightened] Is that what you meant, Mr Ramsden?
+
+RAMSDEN. Yes. [Octavius sinks upon a chair, crushed]. I am afraid there
+is no doubt that Violet did not really go to Eastbourne three weeks ago
+when we thought she was with the Parry Whitefields. And she called on a
+strange doctor yesterday with a wedding ring on her finger. Mrs. Parry
+Whitefield met her there by chance; and so the whole thing came out.
+
+OCTAVIUS. [rising with his fists clenched] Who is the scoundrel?
+
+ANN. She won't tell us.
+
+OCTAVIUS. [collapsing upon his chair again] What a frightful thing!
+
+TANNER. [with angry sarcasm] Dreadful. Appalling. Worse than death, as
+Ramsden says. [He comes to Octavius]. What would you not give, Tavy, to
+turn it into a railway accident, with all her bones broken or something
+equally respectable and deserving of sympathy?
+
+OCTAVIUS. Don't be brutal, Jack.
+
+TANNER. Brutal! Good Heavens, man, what are you crying for? Here is
+a woman whom we all supposed to be making bad water color sketches,
+practising Grieg and Brahms, gadding about to concerts and parties,
+wasting her life and her money. We suddenly learn that she has turned
+from these sillinesses to the fulfilment of her highest purpose and
+greatest function--to increase, multiply and replenish the earth. And
+instead of admiring her courage and rejoicing in her instinct; instead
+of crowning the completed womanhood and raising the triumphal strain of
+"Unto us a child is born: unto us a son is given," here you are--you who
+have been as merry as Brigs in your mourning for the dead--all pulling
+long faces and looking as ashamed and disgraced as if the girl had
+committed the vilest of crimes.
+
+RAMSDEN. [roaring with rage] I will not have these abominations uttered
+in my house [he smites the writing table with his fist].
+
+TANNER. Look here: if you insult me again I'll take you at your word and
+leave your house. Ann: where is Violet now?
+
+ANN. Why? Are you going to her?
+
+TANNER. Of course I am going to her. She wants help; she wants money;
+she wants respect and congratulation. She wants every chance for her
+child. She does not seem likely to get it from you: she shall from me.
+Where is she?
+
+ANN. Don't be so headstrong, Jack. She's upstairs.
+
+TANNER. What! Under Ramsden's sacred roof! Go and do your miserable
+duty, Ramsden. Hunt her out into the street. Cleanse your threshold from
+her contamination. Vindicate the purity of your English home. I'll go
+for a cab.
+
+ANN. [alarmed] Oh, Granny, you mustn't do that.
+
+OCTAVIUS. [broken-heartedly, rising] I'll take her away, Mr Ramsden. She
+had no right to come to your house.
+
+RAMSDEN. [indignantly] But I am only too anxious to help her. [turning
+on Tanner] How dare you, sir, impute such monstrous intentions to me?
+I protest against it. I am ready to put down my last penny to save her
+from being driven to run to you for protection.
+
+TANNER. [subsiding] It's all right, then. He's not going to act up to
+his principles. It's agreed that we all stand by Violet.
+
+OCTAVIUS. But who is the man? He can make reparation by marrying her;
+and he shall, or he shall answer for it to me.
+
+RAMSDEN. He shall, Octavius. There you speak like a man.
+
+TANNER. Then you don't think him a scoundrel, after all?
+
+OCTAVIUS. Not a scoundrel! He is a heartless scoundrel.
+
+RAMSDEN. A damned scoundrel. I beg your pardon, Annie; but I can say no
+less.
+
+TANNER. So we are to marry your sister to a damned scoundrel by way of
+reforming her character! On my soul, I think you are all mad.
+
+ANN. Don't be absurd, Jack. Of course you are quite right, Tavy; but we
+don't know who he is: Violet won't tell us.
+
+TANNER. What on earth does it matter who he is? He's done his part; and
+Violet must do the rest.
+
+RAMSDEN. [beside himself] Stuff! lunacy! There is a rascal in our midst,
+a libertine, a villain worse than a murderer; and we are not to
+learn who he is! In our ignorance we are to shake him by the hand; to
+introduce him into our homes; to trust our daughters with him; to--to--
+
+ANN. [coaxingly] There, Granny, don't talk so loud. It's most shocking:
+we must all admit that; but if Violet won't tell us, what can we do?
+Nothing. Simply nothing.
+
+RAMSDEN. Hmph! I'm not so sure of that. If any man has paid Violet any
+special attention, we can easily find that out. If there is any man of
+notoriously loose principles among us--
+
+TANNER. Ahem!
+
+RAMSDEN. [raising his voice] Yes sir, I repeat, if there is any man of
+notoriously loose principles among us--
+
+TANNER. Or any man notoriously lacking in self-control.
+
+RAMSDEN. [aghast] Do you dare to suggest that I am capable of such an
+act?
+
+TANNER. My dear Ramsden, this is an act of which every man is capable.
+That is what comes of getting at cross purposes with Nature. The
+suspicion you have just flung at me clings to us all. It's a sort of mud
+that sticks to the judge's ermine or the cardinal's robe as fast as to
+the rags of the tramp. Come, Tavy: don't look so bewildered: it might
+have been me: it might have been Ramsden; just as it might have been
+anybody. If it had, what could we do but lie and protest as Ramsden is
+going to protest.
+
+RAMSDEN. [choking] I--I--I--
+
+TANNER. Guilt itself could not stammer more confusedly, And yet you know
+perfectly well he's innocent, Tavy.
+
+RAMSDEN. [exhausted] I am glad you admit that, sir. I admit, myself,
+that there is an element of truth in what you say, grossly as you
+may distort it to gratify your malicious humor. I hope, Octavius, no
+suspicion of me is possible in your mind.
+
+OCTAVIUS. Of you! No, not for a moment.
+
+TANNER. [drily] I think he suspects me just a little.
+
+OCTAVIUS. Jack: you couldn't--you wouldn't--
+
+TANNER. Why not?
+
+OCTAVIUS. [appalled] Why not!
+
+TANNER. Oh, well, I'll tell you why not. First, you would feel bound
+to quarrel with me. Second, Violet doesn't like me. Third, if I had
+the honor of being the father of Violet's child, I should boast of it
+instead of denying it. So be easy: our Friendship is not in danger.
+
+OCTAVIUS. I should have put away the suspicion with horror if only you
+would think and feel naturally about it. I beg your pardon.
+
+TANNER. MY pardon! nonsense! And now let's sit down and have a family
+council. [He sits down. The rest follow his example, more or less under
+protest]. Violet is going to do the State a service; consequently she
+must be packed abroad like a criminal until it's over. What's happening
+upstairs?
+
+ANN. Violet is in the housekeeper's room--by herself, of course.
+
+TANNER. Why not in the drawingroom?
+
+ANN. Don't be absurd, Jack. Miss Ramsden is in the drawingroom with my
+mother, considering what to do.
+
+TANNER. Oh! the housekeeper's room is the penitentiary, I suppose; and
+the prisoner is waiting to be brought before her judges. The old cats!
+
+ANN. Oh, Jack!
+
+RAMSDEN. You are at present a guest beneath the roof of one of the old
+cats, sir. My sister is the mistress of this house.
+
+TANNER. She would put me in the housekeeper's room, too, if she dared,
+Ramsden. However, I withdraw cats. Cats would have more sense. Ann: as
+your guardian, I order you to go to Violet at once and be particularly
+kind to her.
+
+ANN. I have seen her, Jack. And I am sorry to say I am afraid she is
+going to be rather obstinate about going abroad. I think Tavy ought to
+speak to her about it.
+
+OCTAVIUS. How can I speak to her about such a thing [he breaks down]?
+
+ANN. Don't break down, Ricky. Try to bear it for all our sakes.
+
+RAMSDEN. Life is not all plays and poems, Octavius. Come! face it like a
+man.
+
+TANNER. [chafing again] Poor dear brother! Poor dear friends of the
+family! Poor dear Tabbies and Grimalkins. Poor dear everybody except the
+woman who is going to risk her life to create another life! Tavy: don't
+you be a selfish ass. Away with you and talk to Violet; and bring her
+down here if she cares to come. [Octavius rises]. Tell her we'll stand
+by her.
+
+RAMSDEN. [rising] No, sir--
+
+TANNER. [rising also and interrupting him] Oh, we understand: it's
+against your conscience; but still you'll do it.
+
+OCTAVIUS. I assure you all, on my word, I never meant to be selfish.
+It's so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.
+
+TANNER. My dear Tavy, your pious English habit of regarding the world
+as a moral gymnasium built expressly to strengthen your character in,
+occasionally leads you to think about your own confounded principles
+when you should be thinking about other people's necessities. The need
+of the present hour is a happy mother and a healthy baby. Bend your
+energies on that; and you will see your way clearly enough.
+
+Octavius, much perplexed, goes out.
+
+RAMSDEN. [facing Tanner impressively] And Morality, sir? What is to
+become of that?
+
+TANNER. Meaning a weeping Magdalen and an innocent child branded with
+her shame. Not in our circle, thank you. Morality can go to its father
+the devil.
+
+RAMSDEN. I thought so, sir. Morality sent to the devil to please our
+libertines, male and female. That is to be the future of England, is it?
+
+TANNER. Oh, England will survive your disapproval. Meanwhile, I
+understand that you agree with me as to the practical course we are to
+take?
+
+RAMSDEN. Not in your spirit sir. Not for your reasons.
+
+TANNER. You can explain that if anybody calls you to account, here or
+hereafter. [He turns away, and plants himself in front of Mr Herbert
+Spencer, at whom he stares gloomily].
+
+ANN. [rising and coming to Ramsden] Granny: hadn't you better go up to
+the drawingroom and tell them what we intend to do?
+
+RAMSDEN. [looking pointedly at Tanner] I hardly like to leave you alone
+with this gentleman. Will you not come with me?
+
+ANN. Miss Ramsden would not like to speak about it before me, Granny. I
+ought not to be present.
+
+RAMSDEN. You are right: I should have thought of that. You are a good
+girl, Annie.
+
+He pats her on the shoulder. She looks up at him with beaming eyes and
+he goes out, much moved. Having disposed of him, she looks at Tanner.
+His back being turned to her, she gives a moment's attention to her
+personal appearance, then softly goes to him and speaks almost into his
+ear.
+
+ANN. Jack [he turns with a start]: are you glad that you are my
+guardian? You don't mind being made responsible for me, I hope.
+
+TANNER. The latest addition to your collection of scapegoats, eh?
+
+ANN. Oh, that stupid old joke of yours about me! Do please drop it. Why
+do you say things that you know must pain me? I do my best to please
+you, Jack: I suppose I may tell you so now that you are my guardian. You
+will make me so unhappy if you refuse to be friends with me.
+
+TANNER. [studying her as gloomily as he studied the dust] You need not
+go begging for my regard. How unreal our moral judgments are! You seem
+to me to have absolutely no conscience--only hypocrisy; and you can't
+see the difference--yet there is a sort of fascination about you. I
+always attend to you, somehow. I should miss you if I lost you.
+
+ANN. [tranquilly slipping her arm into his and walking about with him]
+But isn't that only natural, Jack? We have known each other since we
+were children. Do you remember?
+
+TANNER. [abruptly breaking loose] Stop! I remember EVERYTHING.
+
+ANN. Oh, I daresay we were often very silly; but--
+
+TANNER. I won't have it, Ann. I am no more that schoolboy now than I
+am the dotard of ninety I shall grow into if I live long enough. It is
+over: let me forget it.
+
+ANN. Wasn't it a happy time? [She attempts to take his arm again].
+
+TANNER. Sit down and behave yourself. [He makes her sit down in the
+chair next the writing table]. No doubt it was a happy time for you. You
+were a good girl and never compromised yourself. And yet the wickedest
+child that ever was slapped could hardly have had a better time. I can
+understand the success with which you bullied the other girls: your
+virtue imposed on them. But tell me this: did you ever know a good boy?
+
+ANN. Of course. All boys are foolish sometimes; but Tavy was always a
+really good boy.
+
+TANNER. [struck by this] Yes: you're right. For some reason you never
+tempted Tavy.
+
+ANN. Tempted! Jack!
+
+TANNER. Yes, my dear Lady Mephistopheles, tempted. You were insatiably
+curious as to what a boy might be capable of, and diabolically clever at
+getting through his guard and surprising his inmost secrets.
+
+ANN. What nonsense! All because you used to tell me long stories of the
+wicked things you had done--silly boys tricks! And you call such things
+inmost secrets: Boys' secrets are just like men's; and you know what
+they are!
+
+TANNER. [obstinately] No I don't. What are they, pray?
+
+ANN. Why, the things they tell everybody, of course.
+
+TANNER. Now I swear I told you things I told no one else. You lured me
+into a compact by which we were to have no secrets from one another. We
+were to tell one another everything, I didn't notice that you never told
+me anything.
+
+ANN. You didn't want to talk about me, Jack. You wanted to talk about
+yourself.
+
+TANNER. Ah, true, horribly true. But what a devil of a child you must
+have been to know that weakness and to play on it for the satisfaction
+of your own curiosity! I wanted to brag to you, to make myself
+interesting. And I found myself doing all sorts of mischievous things
+simply to have something to tell you about. I fought with boys I didn't
+hate; I lied about things I might just as well have told the truth
+about; I stole things I didn't want; I kissed little girls I didn't care
+for. It was all bravado: passionless and therefore unreal.
+
+ANN. I never told of you, Jack.
+
+TANNER. No; but if you had wanted to stop me you would have told of me.
+You wanted me to go on.
+
+ANN. [flashing out] Oh, that's not true: it's NOT true, Jack. I never
+wanted you to do those dull, disappointing, brutal, stupid, vulgar
+things. I always hoped that it would be something really heroic at last.
+[Recovering herself] Excuse me, Jack; but the things you did were never
+a bit like the things I wanted you to do. They often gave me great
+uneasiness; but I could not tell on you and get you into trouble. And
+you were only a boy. I knew you would grow out of them. Perhaps I was
+wrong.
+
+TANNER. [sardonically] Do not give way to remorse, Ann. At least
+nineteen twentieths of the exploits I confessed to you were pure lies. I
+soon noticed that you didn't like the true stories.
+
+ANN. Of course I knew that some of the things couldn't have happened.
+But--
+
+TANNER. You are going to remind me that some of the most disgraceful
+ones did.
+
+ANN. [fondly, to his great terror] I don't want to remind you of
+anything. But I knew the people they happened to, and heard about them.
+
+TANNER. Yes; but even the true stories were touched up for telling.
+A sensitive boy's humiliations may be very good fun for ordinary
+thickskinned grown-ups; but to the boy himself they are so acute,
+so ignominious, that he cannot confess them--cannot but deny them
+passionately. However, perhaps it was as well for me that I romanced a
+bit; for, on the one occasion when I told you the truth, you threatened
+to tell of me.
+
+ANN. Oh, never. Never once.
+
+TANNER. Yes, you did. Do you remember a dark-eyed girl named Rachel
+Rosetree? [Ann's brows contract for an instant involuntarily]. I got up
+a love affair with her; and we met one night in the garden and walked
+about very uncomfortably with our arms round one another, and kissed at
+parting, and were most conscientiously romantic. If that love affair had
+gone on, it would have bored me to death; but it didn't go on; for the
+next thing that happened was that Rachel cut me because she found out
+that I had told you. How did she find it out? From you. You went to her
+and held the guilty secret over her head, leading her a life of abject
+terror and humiliation by threatening to tell on her.
+
+ANN. And a very good thing for her, too. It was my duty to stop her
+misconduct; and she is thankful to me for it now.
+
+TANNER. Is she?
+
+ANN. She ought to be, at all events.
+
+TANNER. It was not your duty to stop my misconduct, I suppose.
+
+ANN. I did stop it by stopping her.
+
+TANNER. Are you sure of that? You stopped my telling you about my
+adventures; but how do you know that you stopped the adventures?
+
+ANN. Do you mean to say that you went on in the same way with other
+girls?
+
+TANNER. No. I had enough of that sort of romantic tomfoolery with
+Rachel.
+
+ANN. [unconvinced] Then why did you break off our confidences and become
+quite strange to me?
+
+TANNER. [enigmatically] It happened just then that I got something that
+I wanted to keep all to myself instead of sharing it with you.
+
+ANN. I am sure I shouldn't have asked for any of it if you had grudged
+it.
+
+TANNER. It wasn't a box of sweets, Ann. It was something you'd never
+have let me call my own.
+
+ANN. [incredulously] What?
+
+TANNER. My soul.
+
+ANN. Oh, do be sensible, Jack. You know you're talking nonsense.
+
+TANNER. The most solemn earnest, Ann. You didn't notice at that time
+that you were getting a soul too. But you were. It was not for nothing
+that you suddenly found you had a moral duty to chastise and reform
+Rachel. Up to that time you had traded pretty extensively in being a
+good child; but you had never set up a sense of duty to others. Well, I
+set one up too. Up to that time I had played the boy buccaneer with no
+more conscience than a fox in a poultry farm. But now I began to have
+scruples, to feel obligations, to find that veracity and honor were no
+longer goody-goody expressions in the mouths of grown up people, but
+compelling principles in myself.
+
+ANN. [quietly] Yes, I suppose you're right. You were beginning to be a
+man, and I to be a woman.
+
+TANNER. Are you sure it was not that we were beginning to be something
+more? What does the beginning of manhood and womanhood mean in most
+people's mouths? You know: it means the beginning of love. But love
+began long before that for me. Love played its part in the earliest
+dreams and follies and romances I can remember--may I say the earliest
+follies and romances we can remember?--though we did not understand it
+at the time. No: the change that came to me was the birth in me of moral
+passion; and I declare that according to my experience moral passion is
+the only real passion.
+
+ANN. All passions ought to be moral, Jack.
+
+TANNER. Ought! Do you think that anything is strong enough to impose
+oughts on a passion except a stronger passion still?
+
+ANN. Our moral sense controls passion, Jack. Don't be stupid.
+
+TANNER. Our moral sense! And is that not a passion? Is the devil to
+have all the passions as well as all the good times? If it were not a
+passion--if it were not the mightiest of the passions, all the other
+passions would sweep it away like a leaf before a hurricane. It is the
+birth of that passion that turns a child into a man.
+
+ANN. There are other passions, Jack. Very strong ones.
+
+TANNER. All the other passions were in me before; but they were idle
+and aimless--mere childish greedinesses and cruelties, curiosities
+and fancies, habits and superstitions, grotesque and ridiculous to the
+mature intelligence. When they suddenly began to shine like newly lit
+flames it was by no light of their own, but by the radiance of the
+dawning moral passion. That passion dignified them, gave them conscience
+and meaning, found them a mob of appetites and organized them into an
+army of purposes and principles. My soul was born of that passion.
+
+ANN. I noticed that you got more sense. You were a dreadfully
+destructive boy before that.
+
+TANNER. Destructive! Stuff! I was only mischievous.
+
+ANN. Oh Jack, you were very destructive. You ruined all the young fir
+trees by chopping off their leaders with a wooden sword. You broke all
+the cucumber frames with your catapult. You set fire to the common: the
+police arrested Tavy for it because he ran away when he couldn't stop
+you. You--
+
+TANNER. Pooh! pooh! pooh! these were battles, bombardments, stratagems
+to save our scalps from the red Indians. You have no imagination, Ann. I
+am ten times more destructive now than I was then. The moral passion has
+taken my destructiveness in hand and directed it to moral ends. I have
+become a reformer, and, like all reformers, an iconoclast. I no longer
+break cucumber frames and burn gorse bushes: I shatter creeds and
+demolish idols.
+
+ANN. [bored] I am afraid I am too feminine to see any sense in
+destruction. Destruction can only destroy.
+
+TANNER. Yes. That is why it is so useful. Construction cumbers the
+ground with institutions made by busybodies. Destruction clears it and
+gives us breathing space and liberty.
+
+ANN. It's no use, Jack. No woman will agree with you there.
+
+TANNER. That's because you confuse construction and destruction with
+creation and murder. They're quite different: I adore creation and abhor
+murder. Yes: I adore it in tree and flower, in bird and beast, even
+in you. [A flush of interest and delight suddenly clears the growing
+perplexity and boredom from her face]. It was the creative instinct that
+led you to attach me to you by bonds that have left their mark on me
+to this day. Yes, Ann: the old childish compact between us was an
+unconscious love compact.
+
+ANN. Jack!
+
+TANNER. Oh, don't be alarmed--
+
+ANN. I am not alarmed.
+
+TANNER. [whimsically] Then you ought to be: where are your principles?
+
+ANN. Jack: are you serious or are you not?
+
+TANNER. Do you mean about the moral passion?
+
+ANN. No, no; the other one. [Confused] Oh! you are so silly; one never
+knows how to take you.
+
+TANNER. You must take me quite seriously. I am your guardian; and it is
+my duty to improve your mind.
+
+ANN. The love compact is over, then, is it? I suppose you grew tired of
+me?
+
+TANNER. No; but the moral passion made our childish relations
+impossible. A jealous sense of my new individuality arose in me.
+
+ANN. You hated to be treated as a boy any longer. Poor Jack!
+
+TANNER. Yes, because to be treated as a boy was to be taken on the old
+footing. I had become a new person; and those who knew the old person
+laughed at me. The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor: he took
+my measure anew every time he saw me, whilst all the rest went on with
+their old measurements and expected them to fit me.
+
+ANN. You became frightfully self-conscious.
+
+TANNER. When you go to heaven, Ann, you will be frightfully conscious of
+your wings for the first year or so. When you meet your relatives there,
+and they persist in treating you as if you were still a mortal, you will
+not be able to bear them. You will try to get into a circle which has
+never known you except as an angel.
+
+ANN. So it was only your vanity that made you run away from us after
+all?
+
+TANNER. Yes, only my vanity, as you call it.
+
+ANN. You need not have kept away from ME on that account.
+
+TANNER. From you above all others. You fought harder than anybody
+against my emancipation.
+
+ANN. [earnestly] Oh, how wrong you are! I would have done anything for
+you.
+
+TANNER. Anything except let me get loose from you. Even then you had
+acquired by instinct that damnable woman's trick of heaping obligations
+on a man, of placing yourself so entirely and helplessly at his mercy
+that at last he dare not take a step without running to you for leave.
+I know a poor wretch whose one desire in life is to run away from his
+wife. She prevents him by threatening to throw herself in front of the
+engine of the train he leaves her in. That is what all women do. If we
+try to go where you do not want us to go there is no law to prevent us,
+but when we take the first step your breasts are under our foot as it
+descends: your bodies are under our wheels as we start. No woman shall
+ever enslave me in that way.
+
+ANN. But, Jack, you cannot get through life without considering other
+people a little.
+
+TANNER. Ay; but what other people? It is this consideration of other
+people or rather this cowardly fear of them which we call consideration
+that makes us the sentimental slaves we are. To consider you, as you
+call it, is to substitute your will for my own. How if it be a baser
+will than mine? Are women taught better than men or worse? Are mobs of
+voters taught better than statesmen or worse? Worse, of course, in both
+cases. And then what sort of world are you going to get, with its public
+men considering its voting mobs, and its private men considering their
+wives? What does Church and State mean nowadays? The Woman and the
+Ratepayer.
+
+ANN. [placidly] I am so glad you understand politics, Jack: it will
+be most useful to you if you go into parliament [he collapses like a
+pricked bladder]. But I am sorry you thought my influence a bad one.
+
+TANNER. I don't say it was a bad one. But bad or good, I didn't choose
+to be cut to your measure. And I won't be cut to it.
+
+ANN. Nobody wants you to, Jack. I assure you--really on my word--I
+don't mind your queer opinions one little bit. You know we have all been
+brought up to have advanced opinions. Why do you persist in thinking me
+so narrow minded?
+
+TANNER. That's the danger of it. I know you don't mind, because you've
+found out that it doesn't matter. The boa constrictor doesn't mind the
+opinions of a stag one little bit when once she has got her coils round
+it.
+
+ANN. [rising in sudden enlightenment] O-o-o-o-oh! NOW I understand why
+you warned Tavy that I am a boa constrictor. Granny told me. [She laughs
+and throws her boa around her neck]. Doesn't it feel nice and soft,
+Jack?
+
+TANNER. [in the toils] You scandalous woman, will you throw away even
+your hypocrisy?
+
+ANN. I am never hypocritical with you, Jack. Are you angry? [She
+withdraws the boa and throws it on a chair]. Perhaps I shouldn't have
+done that.
+
+TANNER. [contemptuously] Pooh, prudery! Why should you not, if it amuses
+you?
+
+ANN. [Shyly] Well, because--because I suppose what you really meant by
+the boa constrictor was THIS [she puts her arms round his neck].
+
+TANNER. [Staring at her] Magnificent audacity! [She laughs and pats his
+cheeks]. Now just to think that if I mentioned this episode not a soul
+would believe me except the people who would cut me for telling, whilst
+if you accused me of it nobody would believe my denial.
+
+ANN. [taking her arms away with perfect dignity] You are incorrigible,
+Jack. But you should not jest about our affection for one another.
+Nobody could possibly misunderstand it. YOU do not misunderstand it, I
+hope.
+
+TANNER. My blood interprets for me, Ann. Poor Ricky Tiky Tavy!
+
+ANN. [looking quickly at him as if this were a new light] Surely you are
+not so absurd as to be jealous of Tavy.
+
+TANNER. Jealous! Why should I be? But I don't wonder at your grip of
+him. I feel the coils tightening round my very self, though you are only
+playing with me.
+
+ANN. Do you think I have designs on Tavy?
+
+TANNER. I know you have.
+
+ANN. [earnestly] Take care, Jack. You may make Tavy very happy if you
+mislead him about me.
+
+TANNER. Never fear: he will not escape you.
+
+ANN. I wonder are you really a clever man!
+
+TANNER. Why this sudden misgiving on the subject?
+
+ANN. You seem to understand all the things I don't understand; but you
+are a perfect baby in the things I do understand.
+
+TANNER. I understand how Tavy feels for you, Ann; you may depend on
+that, at all events.
+
+ANN. And you think you understand how I feel for Tavy, don't you?
+
+TANNER. I know only too well what is going to happen to poor Tavy.
+
+ANN. I should laugh at you, Jack, if it were not for poor papa's death.
+Mind! Tavy will be very unhappy.
+
+TANNER. Yes; but he won't know it, poor devil. He is a thousand times
+too good for you. That's why he is going to make the mistake of his life
+about you.
+
+ANN. I think men make more mistakes by being too clever than by being
+too good [she sits down, with a trace of contempt for the whole male sex
+in the elegant carriage of her shoulders].
+
+TANNER. Oh, I know you don't care very much about Tavy. But there is
+always one who kisses and one who only allows the kiss. Tavy will kiss;
+and you will only turn the cheek. And you will throw him over if anybody
+better turns up.
+
+ANN. [offended] You have no right to say such things, Jack. They are not
+true, and not delicate. If you and Tavy choose to be stupid about me,
+that is not my fault.
+
+TANNER. [remorsefully] Forgive my brutalities, Ann. They are levelled
+at this wicked world, not at you. [She looks up at him, pleased and
+forgiving. He becomes cautious at once]. All the same, I wish Ramsden
+would come back. I never feel safe with you: there is a devilish
+charm--or no: not a charm, a subtle interest [she laughs]. Just so: you
+know it; and you triumph in it. Openly and shamelessly triumph in it!
+
+ANN. What a shocking flirt you are, Jack!
+
+TANNER. A flirt!! I!!
+
+ANN. Yes, a flirt. You are always abusing and offending people, but you
+never really mean to let go your hold of them.
+
+TANNER. I will ring the bell. This conversation has already gone further
+than I intended.
+
+Ramsden and Octavius come back with Miss Ramsden, a hardheaded old
+maiden lady in a plain brown silk gown, with enough rings, chains and
+brooches to show that her plainness of dress is a matter of principle,
+not of poverty. She comes into the room very determinedly: the two men,
+perplexed and downcast, following her. Ann rises and goes eagerly to
+meet her. Tanner retreats to the wall between the busts and pretends
+to study the pictures. Ramsden goes to his table as usual; and Octavius
+clings to the neighborhood of Tanner.
+
+MISS RAMSDEN. [almost pushing Ann aside as she comes to Mr. Whitefield's
+chair and plants herself there resolutely] I wash my hands of the whole
+affair.
+
+OCTAVIUS. [very wretched] I know you wish me to take Violet away, Miss
+Ramsden. I will. [He turns irresolutely to the door].
+
+RAMSDEN. No no--
+
+MISS RAMSDEN. What is the use of saying no, Roebuck? Octavius knows that
+I would not turn any truly contrite and repentant woman from your doors.
+But when a woman is not only wicked, but intends to go on being wicked,
+she and I part company.
+
+ANN. Oh, Miss Ramsden, what do you mean? What has Violet said?
+
+RAMSDEN. Violet is certainly very obstinate. She won't leave London. I
+don't understand her.
+
+MISS RAMSDEN. I do. It's as plain as the nose on your face, Roebuck,
+that she won't go because she doesn't want to be separated from this
+man, whoever he is.
+
+ANN. Oh, surely, surely! Octavius: did you speak to her?
+
+OCTAVIUS. She won't tell us anything. She won't make any arrangement
+until she has consulted somebody. It can't be anybody else than the
+scoundrel who has betrayed her.
+
+TANNER. [to Octavius] Well, let her consult him. He will be glad enough
+to have her sent abroad. Where is the difficulty?
+
+MISS RAMSDEN. [Taking the answer out of Octavius's mouth]. The
+difficulty, Mr Jack, is that when he offered to help her I didn't offer
+to become her accomplice in her wickedness. She either pledges her word
+never to see that man again, or else she finds some new friends; and the
+sooner the better.
+
+[The parlormaid appears at the door. Ann hastily resumes her seat, and
+looks as unconcerned as possible. Octavius instinctively imitates her].
+
+THE MAID. The cab is at the door, ma'am.
+
+MISS RAMSDEN. What cab?
+
+THE MAID. For Miss Robinson.
+
+MISS RAMSDEN. Oh! [Recovering herself] All right. [The maid withdraws].
+She has sent for a cab.
+
+TANNER. I wanted to send for that cab half an hour ago.
+
+MISS RAMSDEN. I am glad she understands the position she has placed
+herself in.
+
+RAMSDEN. I don't like her going away in this fashion, Susan. We had
+better not do anything harsh.
+
+OCTAVIUS. No: thank you again and again; but Miss Ramsden is quite
+right. Violet cannot expect to stay.
+
+ANN. Hadn't you better go with her, Tavy?
+
+OCTAVIUS. She won't have me.
+
+MISS RAMSDEN. Of course she won't. She's going straight to that man.
+
+TANNER. As a natural result of her virtuous reception here.
+
+RAMSDEN. [much troubled] There, Susan! You hear! and there's some truth
+in it. I wish you could reconcile it with your principles to be a little
+patient with this poor girl. She's very young; and there's a time for
+everything.
+
+MISS RAMSDEN. Oh, she will get all the sympathy she wants from the men.
+I'm surprised at you, Roebuck.
+
+TANNER. So am I, Ramsden, most favorably.
+
+Violet appears at the door. She is as impenitent and self-assured a
+young lady as one would desire to see among the best behaved of her sex.
+Her small head and tiny resolute mouth and chin; her haughty crispness
+of speech and trimness of carriage; the ruthless elegance of her
+equipment, which includes a very smart hat with a dead bird in it, mark
+a personality which is as formidable as it is exquisitely pretty. She is
+not a siren, like Ann: admiration comes to her without any compulsion
+or even interest on her part; besides, there is some fun in Ann, but in
+this woman none, perhaps no mercy either: if anything restrains her, it
+is intelligence and pride, not compassion. Her voice might be the
+voice of a schoolmistress addressing a class of girls who had disgraced
+themselves, as she proceeds with complete composure and some disgust to
+say what she has come to say.
+
+VIOLET. I have only looked in to tell Miss Ramsden that she will find
+her birthday present to me, the filagree bracelet, in the housekeeper's
+room.
+
+TANNER. Do come in, Violet, and talk to us sensibly.
+
+VIOLET. Thank you: I have had quite enough of the family conversation
+this morning. So has your mother, Ann: she has gone home crying. But
+at all events, I have found out what some of my pretended friends are
+worth. Good bye.
+
+TANNER. No, no: one moment. I have something to say which I beg you
+to hear. [She looks at him without the slightest curiosity, but waits,
+apparently as much to finish getting her glove on as to hear what he
+has to say]. I am altogether on your side in this matter. I congratulate
+you, with the sincerest respect, on having the courage to do what you
+have done. You are entirely in the right; and the family is entirely in
+the wrong.
+
+Sensation. Ann and Miss Ramsden rise and turn toward the two. Violet,
+more surprised than any of the others, forgets her glove, and comes
+forward into the middle of the room, both puzzled and displeased.
+Octavius alone does not move or raise his head; he is overwhelmed with
+shame.
+
+ANN. [pleading to Tanner to be sensible] Jack!
+
+MISS RAMSDEN. [outraged] Well, I must say!
+
+VIOLET. [sharply to Tanner] Who told you?
+
+TANNER. Why, Ramsden and Tavy of course. Why should they not?
+
+VIOLET. But they don't know.
+
+TANNER. Don't know what?
+
+VIOLET. They don't know that I am in the right, I mean.
+
+TANNER. Oh, they know it in their hearts, though they think themselves
+bound to blame you by their silly superstitions about morality and
+propriety and so forth. But I know, and the whole world really knows,
+though it dare not say so, that you were right to follow your instinct;
+that vitality and bravery are the greatest qualities a woman can have,
+and motherhood her solemn initiation into womanhood; and that the fact
+of your not being legally married matters not one scrap either to your
+own worth or to our real regard for you.
+
+VIOLET. [flushing with indignation] Oh! You think me a wicked woman,
+like the rest. You think I have not only been vile, but that I share
+your abominable opinions. Miss Ramsden: I have borne your hard words
+because I knew you would be sorry for them when you found out the truth.
+But I won't bear such a horrible insult as to be complimented by Jack on
+being one of the wretches of whom he approves. I have kept my marriage
+a secret for my husband's sake. But now I claim my right as a married
+woman not to be insulted.
+
+OCTAVIUS. [raising his head with inexpressible relief] You are married!
+
+VIOLET. Yes; and I think you might have guessed it. What business had
+you all to take it for granted that I had no right to wear my wedding
+ring? Not one of you even asked me: I cannot forget that.
+
+TANNER. [in ruins] I am utterly crushed. I meant well--I
+apologize--abjectly apologize.
+
+VIOLET. I hope you will be more careful in future about the things
+you say. Of course one does not take them seriously. But they are very
+disagreeable, and rather in bad taste.
+
+TANNER. [bowing to the storm] I have no defence: I shall know better in
+future than to take any woman's part. We have all disgraced ourselves in
+your eyes, I am afraid, except Ann, SHE befriended you. For Ann's sake,
+forgive us.
+
+VIOLET. Yes: Ann has been very kind; but then Ann knew.
+
+TANNER. Oh!
+
+MISS RAMSDEN. [stiffly] And who, pray, is the gentleman who does not
+acknowledge his wife?
+
+VIOLET. [promptly] That is my business, Miss Ramsden, and not yours. I
+have my reasons for keeping my marriage a secret for the present.
+
+RAMSDEN. All I can say is that we are extremely sorry, Violet. I am
+shocked to think of how we have treated you.
+
+OCTAVIUS. [awkwardly] I beg your pardon, Violet. I can say no more.
+
+MISS RAMSDEN. [still loth to surrender] Of course what you say puts
+a very different complexion on the matter. All the same, I owe it to
+myself--
+
+VIOLET. [cutting her short] You owe me an apology, Miss Ramsden: that's
+what you owe both to yourself and to me. If you were a married woman you
+would not like sitting in the housekeeper's room and being treated like
+a naughty child by young girls and old ladies without any serious duties
+and responsibilities.
+
+TANNER. Don't hit us when we're down, Violet. We seem to have made fools
+of ourselves; but really it was you who made fools of us.
+
+VIOLET. It was no business of yours, Jack, in any case.
+
+TANNER. No business of mine! Why, Ramsden as good as accused me of being
+the unknown gentleman.
+
+Ramsden makes a frantic demonstration; but Violet's cool keen anger
+extinguishes it.
+
+VIOLET. You! Oh, how infamous! how abominable! How disgracefully you
+have all been talking about me! If my husband knew it he would never let
+me speak to any of you again. [To Ramsden] I think you might have spared
+me, at least.
+
+RAMSDEN. But I assure you I never--at least it is a monstrous perversion
+of something I said that--
+
+MISS RAMSDEN. You needn't apologize, Roebuck. She brought it all on
+herself. It is for her to apologize for having deceived us.
+
+VIOLET. I can make allowances for you, Miss Ramsden: you cannot
+understand how I feel on this subject though I should have expected
+rather better taste from people of greater experience. However, I quite
+feel that you have all placed yourselves in a very painful position;
+and the most truly considerate thing for me to do is to go at once. Good
+morning.
+
+She goes, leaving them staring.
+
+Miss RAMSDEN. Well, I must say--!
+
+RAMSDEN. [plaintively] I don't think she is quite fair to us.
+
+TANNER. You must cower before the wedding ring like the rest of us,
+Ramsden. The cup of our ignominy is full.
+
+
+
+
+ACT II
+
+On the carriage drive in the park of a country house near Richmond a
+motor car has broken down. It stands in front of a clump of trees round
+which the drive sweeps to the house, which is partly visible through
+them: indeed Tanner, standing in the drive with the car on his right
+hand, could get an unobstructed view of the west corner of the house on
+his left were he not far too much interested in a pair of supine legs
+in blue serge trousers which protrude from beneath the machine. He is
+watching them intently with bent back and hands supported on his knees.
+His leathern overcoat and peaked cap proclaim him one of the dismounted
+passengers.
+
+THE LEGS. Aha! I got him.
+
+TANNER. All right now?
+
+THE LEGS. All right now.
+
+Tanner stoops and takes the legs by the ankles, drawing their owner
+forth like a wheelbarrow, walking on his hands, with a hammer in his
+mouth. He is a young man in a neat suit of blue serge, clean shaven,
+dark eyed, square fingered, with short well brushed black hair and
+rather irregular sceptically turned eyebrows. When he is manipulating
+the car his movements are swift and sudden, yet attentive and
+deliberate. With Tanner and Tanner's friends his manner is not in the
+least deferential, but cool and reticent, keeping them quite effectually
+at a distance whilst giving them no excuse for complaining of him.
+Nevertheless he has a vigilant eye on them always, and that, too, rather
+cynically, like a man who knows the world well from its seamy side. He
+speaks slowly and with a touch of sarcasm; and as he does not at all
+affect the gentleman in his speech, it may be inferred that his smart
+appearance is a mark of respect to himself and his own class, not to
+that which employs him.
+
+He now gets into the car to test his machinery and put his cap and
+overcoat on again. Tanner takes off his leather overcoat and pitches
+it into the car. The chauffeur (or automobilist or motoreer or whatever
+England may presently decide to call him) looks round inquiringly in the
+act of stowing away his hammer.
+
+THE CHAUFFEUR. Had enough of it, eh?
+
+TANNER. I may as well walk to the house and stretch my legs and calm my
+nerves a little. [Looking at his watch] I suppose you know that we have
+come from Hyde Park Corner to Richmond in twenty-one minutes.
+
+THE CHAUFFEUR. I'd have done it under fifteen if I'd had a clear road
+all the way.
+
+TANNER. Why do you do it? Is it for love of sport or for the fun of
+terrifying your unfortunate employer?
+
+THE CHAUFFEUR. What are you afraid of?
+
+TANNER. The police, and breaking my neck.
+
+THE CHAUFFEUR. Well, if you like easy going, you can take a bus, you
+know. It's cheaper. You pay me to save your time and give you the value
+of your thousand pound car. [He sits down calmly].
+
+TANNER. I am the slave of that car and of you too. I dream of the
+accursed thing at night.
+
+THE CHAUFFEUR. You'll get over that. If you're going up to the house,
+may I ask how long you're goin to stay there? Because if you mean to
+put in the whole morning talkin to the ladies, I'll put the car in the
+stables and make myself comfortable. If not, I'll keep the car on the go
+about here til you come.
+
+TANNER. Better wait here. We shan't be long. There's a young American
+gentleman, a Mr Malone, who is driving Mr Robinson down in his new
+American steam car.
+
+THE CHAUFFEUR. [springing up and coming hastily out of the car to
+Tanner] American steam car! Wot! racin us down from London!
+
+TANNER. Perhaps they're here already.
+
+THE CHAUFFEUR. If I'd known it! [with deep reproach] Why didn't you tell
+me, Mr Tanner?
+
+TANNER. Because I've been told that this car is capable of 84 miles an
+hour; and I already know what YOU are capable of when there is a rival
+car on the road. No, Henry: there are things it is not good for you to
+know; and this was one of them. However, cheer up: we are going to have
+a day after your own heart. The American is to take Mr Robinson and his
+sister and Miss Whitefield. We are to take Miss Rhoda.
+
+THE CHAUFFEUR. [consoled, and musing on another matter] That's Miss
+Whitefield's sister, isn't it?
+
+TANNER. Yes.
+
+THE CHAUFFEUR. And Miss Whitefield herself is goin in the other car? Not
+with you?
+
+TANNER. Why the devil should she come with me? Mr Robinson will be in
+the other car. [The Chauffeur looks at Tanner with cool incredulity, and
+turns to the car, whistling a popular air softly to himself. Tanner,
+a little annoyed, is about to pursue the subject when he hears the
+footsteps of Octavius on the gravel. Octavius is coming from the house,
+dressed for motoring, but without his overcoat]. We've lost the race,
+thank Heaven: here's Mr Robinson. Well, Tavy, is the steam car a
+success?
+
+OCTAVIUS. I think so. We came from Hyde Park Corner here in seventeen
+minutes. [The Chauffeur, furious, kicks the car with a groan of
+vexation]. How long were you?
+
+TANNER. Oh, about three quarters of an hour or so.
+
+THE CHAUFFEUR. [remonstrating] Now, now, Mr Tanner, come now! We could
+ha done it easy under fifteen.
+
+TANNER. By the way, let me introduce you. Mr Octavius Robinson: Mr Enry
+Straker.
+
+STRAKER. Pleased to meet you, sir. Mr Tanner is gittin at you with his
+Enry Straker, you know. You call it Henery. But I don't mind, bless you.
+
+TANNER. You think it's simply bad taste in me to chaff him, Tavy. But
+you're wrong. This man takes more trouble to drop his aiches than ever
+his father did to pick them up. It's a mark of caste to him. I have
+never met anybody more swollen with the pride of class than Enry is.
+
+STRAKER. Easy, easy! A little moderation, Mr Tanner.
+
+TANNER. A little moderation, Tavy, you observe. You would tell me to
+draw it mild, But this chap has been educated. What's more, he knows
+that we haven't. What was that board school of yours, Straker?
+
+STRAKER. Sherbrooke Road.
+
+TANNER. Sherbrooke Road! Would any of us say Rugby! Harrow! Eton! in
+that tone of intellectual snobbery? Sherbrooke Road is a place where
+boys learn something; Eton is a boy farm where we are sent because we
+are nuisances at home, and because in after life, whenever a Duke is
+mentioned, we can claim him as an old schoolfellow.
+
+STRAKER. You don't know nothing about it, Mr. Tanner. It's not the Board
+School that does it: it's the Polytechnic.
+
+TANNER. His university, Octavius. Not Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Dublin
+or Glasgow. Not even those Nonconformist holes in Wales. No, Tavy.
+Regent Street, Chelsea, the Borough--I don't know half their confounded
+names: these are his universities, not mere shops for selling class
+limitations like ours. You despise Oxford, Enry, don't you?
+
+STRAKER. No, I don't. Very nice sort of place, Oxford, I should
+think, for people that like that sort of place. They teach you to be a
+gentleman there. In the Polytechnic they teach you to be an engineer or
+such like. See?
+
+TANNER. Sarcasm, Tavy, sarcasm! Oh, if you could only see into Enry's
+soul, the depth of his contempt for a gentleman, the arrogance of his
+pride in being an engineer, would appal you. He positively likes the car
+to break down because it brings out my gentlemanly helplessness and his
+workmanlike skill and resource.
+
+STRAKER. Never you mind him, Mr Robinson. He likes to talk. We know him,
+don't we?
+
+OCTAVIUS. [earnestly] But there's a great truth at the bottom of what he
+says. I believe most intensely in the dignity of labor.
+
+STRAKER. [unimpressed] That's because you never done any, Mr Robinson.
+My business is to do away with labor. You'll get more out of me and a
+machine than you will out of twenty laborers, and not so much to drink
+either.
+
+TANNER. For Heaven's sake, Tavy, don't start him on political economy.
+He knows all about it; and we don't. You're only a poetic Socialist,
+Tavy: he's a scientific one.
+
+STRAKER. [unperturbed] Yes. Well, this conversation is very improvin;
+but I've got to look after the car; and you two want to talk about your
+ladies. I know. [He retires to busy himself about the car; and presently
+saunters off towards the house].
+
+TANNER. That's a very momentous social phenomenon.
+
+OCTAVIUS. What is?
+
+TANNER. Straker is. Here have we literary and cultured persons been
+for years setting up a cry of the New Woman whenever some unusually old
+fashioned female came along; and never noticing the advent of the New
+Man. Straker's the New Man.
+
+OCTAVIUS. I see nothing new about him, except your way of chaffing
+him. But I don't want to talk about him just now. I want to speak to you
+about Ann.
+
+TANNER. Straker knew even that. He learnt it at the Polytechnic,
+probably. Well, what about Ann? Have you proposed to her?
+
+OCTAVIUS. [self-reproachfully] I was brute enough to do so last night.
+
+TANNER. Brute enough! What do you mean?
+
+OCTAVIUS. [dithyrambically] Jack: we men are all coarse. We never
+understand how exquisite a woman's sensibilities are. How could I have
+done such a thing!
+
+TANNER. Done what, you maudlin idiot?
+
+OCTAVIUS. Yes, I am an idiot. Jack: if you had heard her voice! if you
+had seen her tears! I have lain awake all night thinking of them. If she
+had reproached me, I could have borne it better.
+
+TANNER. Tears! that's dangerous. What did she say?
+
+OCTAVIUS. She asked me how she could think of anything now but her dear
+father. She stifled a sob--[he breaks down].
+
+TANNER. [patting him on the back] Bear it like a man, Tavy, even if you
+feel it like an ass. It's the old game: she's not tired of playing with
+you yet.
+
+OCTAVIUS. [impatiently] Oh, don't be a fool, Jack. Do you suppose this
+eternal shallow cynicism of yours has any real bearing on a nature like
+hers?
+
+TANNER. Hm! Did she say anything else?
+
+OCTAVIUS. Yes; and that is why I expose myself and her to your ridicule
+by telling you what passed.
+
+TANNER. [remorsefully] No, dear Tavy, not ridicule, on my honor!
+However, no matter. Go on.
+
+OCTAVIUS. Her sense of duty is so devout, so perfect, so--
+
+TANNER. Yes: I know. Go on.
+
+OCTAVIUS. You see, under this new arrangement, you and Ramsden are her
+guardians; and she considers that all her duty to her father is now
+transferred to you. She said she thought I ought to have spoken to you
+both in the first instance. Of course she is right; but somehow it seems
+rather absurd that I am to come to you and formally ask to be received
+as a suitor for your ward's hand.
+
+TANNER. I am glad that love has not totally extinguished your sense of
+humor, Tavy.
+
+OCTAVIUS. That answer won't satisfy her.
+
+TANNER. My official answer is, obviously, Bless you, my children: may
+you be happy!
+
+OCTAVIUS. I wish you would stop playing the fool about this. If it is
+not serious to you, it is to me, and to her.
+
+TANNER. You know very well that she is as free to choose as you. She
+does not think so.
+
+OCTAVIUS. She does not think so.
+
+TANNER. Oh, doesn't she! just! However, say what you want me to do.
+
+OCTAVIUS. I want you to tell her sincerely and earnestly what you think
+about me. I want you to tell her that you can trust her to me--that is,
+if you feel you can.
+
+TANNER. I have no doubt that I can trust her to you. What worries me is
+the idea of trusting you to her. Have you read Maeterlinck's book about
+the bee?
+
+OCTAVIUS. [keeping his temper with difficulty] I am not discussing
+literature at present.
+
+TANNER. Be just a little patient with me. I am not discussing
+literature: the book about the bee is natural history. It's an awful
+lesson to mankind. You think that you are Ann's suitor; that you are the
+pursuer and she the pursued; that it is your part to woo, to persuade,
+to prevail, to overcome. Fool: it is you who are the pursued, the marked
+down quarry, the destined prey. You need not sit looking longingly
+at the bait through the wires of the trap: the door is open, and will
+remain so until it shuts behind you for ever.
+
+OCTAVIUS. I wish I could believe that, vilely as you put it.
+
+TANNER. Why, man, what other work has she in life but to get a husband?
+It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible, and a
+man's to keep unmarried as long as he can. You have your poems and your
+tragedies to work at: Ann has nothing.
+
+OCTAVIUS. I cannot write without inspiration. And nobody can give me
+that except Ann.
+
+TANNER. Well, hadn't you better get it from her at a safe distance?
+Petrarch didn't see half as much of Laura, nor Dante of Beatrice, as you
+see of Ann now; and yet they wrote first-rate poetry--at least so
+I'm told. They never exposed their idolatry to the test of domestic
+familiarity; and it lasted them to their graves. Marry Ann and at
+the end of a week you'll find no more inspiration than in a plate of
+muffins.
+
+OCTAVIUS. You think I shall tire of her.
+
+TANNER. Not at all: you don't get tired of muffins. But you don't find
+inspiration in them; and you won't in her when she ceases to be a poet's
+dream and becomes a solid eleven stone wife. You'll be forced to dream
+about somebody else; and then there will be a row.
+
+OCTAVIUS. This sort of talk is no use, Jack. You don't understand. You
+have never been in love.
+
+TANNER. I! I have never been out of it. Why, I am in love even with Ann.
+But I am neither the slave of love nor its dupe. Go to the bee, thou
+poet: consider her ways and be wise. By Heaven, Tavy, if women could do
+without our work, and we ate their children's bread instead of making
+it, they would kill us as the spider kills her mate or as the bees kill
+the drone. And they would be right if we were good for nothing but love.
+
+OCTAVIUS. Ah, if we were only good enough for Love! There is nothing
+like Love: there is nothing else but Love: without it the world would be
+a dream of sordid horror.
+
+TANNER. And this--this is the man who asks me to give him the hand of my
+ward! Tavy: I believe we were changed in our cradles, and that you are
+the real descendant of Don Juan.
+
+OCTAVIUS. I beg you not to say anything like that to Ann.
+
+TANNER. Don't be afraid. She has marked you for her own; and nothing
+will stop her now. You are doomed. [Straker comes back with a
+newspaper]. Here comes the New Man, demoralizing himself with a
+halfpenny paper as usual.
+
+STRAKER. Now, would you believe it: Mr Robinson, when we're out motoring
+we take in two papers, the Times for him, the Leader or the Echo for me.
+And do you think I ever see my paper? Not much. He grabs the Leader and
+leaves me to stodge myself with his Times.
+
+OCTAVIUS. Are there no winners in the Times?
+
+TANNER. Enry don't old with bettin, Tavy. Motor records are his
+weakness. What's the latest?
+
+STRAKER. Paris to Biskra at forty mile an hour average, not countin the
+Mediterranean.
+
+TANNER. How many killed?
+
+STRAKER. Two silly sheep. What does it matter? Sheep don't cost such a
+lot: they were glad to ave the price without the trouble o sellin em
+to the butcher. All the same, d'y'see, there'll be a clamor agin it
+presently; and then the French Government'll stop it; an our chance will
+be gone see? That what makes me fairly mad: Mr Tanner won't do a good
+run while he can.
+
+TANNER. Tavy: do you remember my uncle James?
+
+OCTAVIUS. Yes. Why?
+
+TANNER. Uncle James had a first rate cook: he couldn't digest anything
+except what she cooked. Well, the poor man was shy and hated society.
+But his cook was proud of her skill, and wanted to serve up dinners to
+princes and ambassadors. To prevent her from leaving him, that poor
+old man had to give a big dinner twice a month, and suffer agonies of
+awkwardness. Now here am I; and here is this chap Enry Straker, the New
+Man. I loathe travelling; but I rather like Enry. He cares for nothing
+but tearing along in a leather coat and goggles, with two inches of dust
+all over him, at sixty miles an hour and the risk of his life and mine.
+Except, of course, when he is lying on his back in the mud under the
+machine trying to find out where it has given way. Well, if I don't give
+him a thousand mile run at least once a fortnight I shall lose him. He
+will give me the sack and go to some American millionaire; and I shall
+have to put up with a nice respectful groom-gardener-amateur, who will
+touch his hat and know his place. I am Enry's slave, just as Uncle James
+was his cook's slave.
+
+STRAKER. [exasperated] Garn! I wish I had a car that would go as fast
+as you can talk, Mr Tanner. What I say is that you lose money by a motor
+car unless you keep it workin. Might as well ave a pram and a nussmaid
+to wheel you in it as that car and me if you don't git the last inch out
+of us both.
+
+TANNER. [soothingly] All right, Henry, all right. We'll go out for half
+an hour presently.
+
+STRAKER. [in disgust] Arf an ahr! [He returns to his machine; seats
+himself in it; and turns up a fresh page of his paper in search of more
+news].
+
+OCTAVIUS. Oh, that reminds me. I have a note for you from Rhoda. [He
+gives Tanner a note].
+
+TANNER. [opening it] I rather think Rhoda is heading for a row with Ann.
+As a rule there is only one person an English girl hates more than she
+hates her mother; and that's her eldest sister. But Rhoda positively
+prefers her mother to Ann. She--[indignantly] Oh, I say!
+
+OCTAVIUS. What's the matter?
+
+TANNER. Rhoda was to have come with me for a ride in the motor car. She
+says Ann has forbidden her to go out with me.
+
+Straker suddenly begins whistling his favorite air with remarkable
+deliberation. Surprised by this burst of larklike melody, and jarred by
+a sardonic note in its cheerfulness, they turn and look inquiringly at
+him. But he is busy with his paper; and nothing comes of their movement.
+
+OCTAVIUS. [recovering himself] Does she give any reason?
+
+TANNER. Reason! An insult is not a reason. Ann forbids her to be alone
+with me on any occasion. Says I am not a fit person for a young girl to
+be with. What do you think of your paragon now?
+
+OCTAVIUS. You must remember that she has a very heavy responsibility now
+that her father is dead. Mrs Whitefield is too weak to control Rhoda.
+
+TANNER. [staring at him] In short, you agree with Ann.
+
+OCTAVIUS. No; but I think I understand her. You must admit that your
+views are hardly suited for the formation of a young girl's mind and
+character.
+
+TANNER. I admit nothing of the sort. I admit that the formation of a
+young lady's mind and character usually consists in telling her lies;
+but I object to the particular lie that I am in the habit of abusing the
+confidence of girls.
+
+OCTAVIUS. Ann doesn't say that, Jack.
+
+TANNER. What else does she mean?
+
+STRAKER. [catching sight of Ann coming from the house] Miss Whitefield,
+gentlemen. [He dismounts and strolls away down the avenue with the air
+of a man who knows he is no longer wanted].
+
+ANN. [coming between Octavius and Tanner]. Good morning, Jack. I have
+come to tell you that poor Rhoda has got one of her headaches and cannot
+go out with you to-day in the car. It is a cruel disappointment to her,
+poor child!
+
+TANNER. What do you say now, Tavy.
+
+OCTAVIUS. Surely you cannot misunderstand, Jack. Ann is showing you the
+kindest consideration, even at the cost of deceiving you.
+
+ANN. What do you mean?
+
+TANNER. Would you like to cure Rhoda's headache, Ann?
+
+ANN. Of course.
+
+TANNER. Then tell her what you said just now; and add that you arrived
+about two minutes after I had received her letter and read it.
+
+ANN. Rhoda has written to you!
+
+TANNER. With full particulars.
+
+OCTAVIUS. Never mind him, Ann. You were right, quite right. Ann was only
+doing her duty, Jack; and you know it. Doing it in the kindest way, too.
+
+ANN. [going to Octavius] How kind you are, Tavy! How helpful! How well
+you understand!
+
+Octavius beams.
+
+TANNER. Ay: tighten the coils. You love her, Tavy, don't you?
+
+OCTAVIUS. She knows I do.
+
+ANN. Hush. For shame, Tavy!
+
+TANNER. Oh, I give you leave. I am your guardian; and I commit you to
+Tavy's care for the next hour.
+
+ANN. No, Jack. I must speak to you about Rhoda. Ricky: will you go back
+to the house and entertain your American friend? He's rather on Mamma's
+hands so early in the morning. She wants to finish her housekeeping.
+
+OCTAVIUS. I fly, dearest Ann [he kisses her hand].
+
+ANN. [tenderly] Ricky Ticky Tavy!
+
+He looks at her with an eloquent blush, and runs off.
+
+TANNER. [bluntly] Now look here, Ann. This time you've landed yourself;
+and if Tavy were not in love with you past all salvation he'd have found
+out what an incorrigible liar you are.
+
+ANN. You misunderstand, Jack. I didn't dare tell Tavy the truth.
+
+TANNER. No: your daring is generally in the opposite direction. What the
+devil do you mean by telling Rhoda that I am too vicious to associate
+with her? How can I ever have any human or decent relations with her
+again, now that you have poisoned her mind in that abominable way?
+
+ANN. I know you are incapable of behaving badly.
+
+TANNER. Then why did you lie to her?
+
+ANN. I had to.
+
+TANNER. Had to!
+
+ANN. Mother made me.
+
+TANNER. [his eye flashing] Ha! I might have known it. The mother! Always
+the mother!
+
+ANN. It was that dreadful book of yours. You know how timid mother is.
+All timid women are conventional: we must be conventional, Jack, or we
+are so cruelly, so vilely misunderstood. Even you, who are a man, cannot
+say what you think without being misunderstood and vilified--yes: I
+admit it: I have had to vilify you. Do you want to have poor Rhoda
+misunderstood and vilified to the same way? Would it be right for mother
+to let her expose herself to such treatment before she is old enough to
+judge for herself?
+
+TANNER. In short, the way to avoid misunderstanding is for everybody to
+lie and slander and insinuate and pretend as hard as they can. That is
+what obeying your mother comes to.
+
+ANN. I love my mother, Jack.
+
+TANNER. [working himself up into a sociological rage] Is that any reason
+why you are not to call your soul your own? Oh, I protest against this
+vile abjection of youth to age! look at fashionable society as you know
+it. What does it pretend to be? An exquisite dance of nymphs. What is
+it? A horrible procession of wretched girls, each in the claws of a
+cynical, cunning, avaricious, disillusioned, ignorantly experienced,
+foul-minded old woman whom she calls mother, and whose duty it is
+to corrupt her mind and sell her to the highest bidder. Why do these
+unhappy slaves marry anybody, however old and vile, sooner than not
+marry at all? Because marriage is their only means of escape from these
+decrepit fiends who hide their selfish ambitions, their jealous hatreds
+of the young rivals who have supplanted them, under the mask of maternal
+duty and family affection. Such things are abominable: the voice of
+nature proclaims for the daughter a father's care and for the son a
+mother's. The law for father and son and mother and daughter is not
+the law of love: it is the law of revolution, of emancipation, of final
+supersession of the old and worn-out by the young and capable. I
+tell you, the first duty of manhood and womanhood is a Declaration of
+Independence: the man who pleads his father's authority is no man: the
+woman who pleads her mother's authority is unfit to bear citizens to a
+free people.
+
+ANN. [watching him with quiet curiosity] I suppose you will go in
+seriously for politics some day, Jack.
+
+TANNER. [heavily let down] Eh? What? Wh--? [Collecting his scattered
+wits] What has that got to do with what I have been saying?
+
+ANN. You talk so well.
+
+TANNER. Talk! Talk! It means nothing to you but talk. Well, go back
+to your mother, and help her to poison Rhoda's imagination as she has
+poisoned yours. It is the tame elephants who enjoy capturing the wild
+ones.
+
+ANN. I am getting on. Yesterday I was a boa constrictor: to-day I am an
+elephant.
+
+TANNER. Yes. So pack your trunk and begone; I have no more to say to
+you.
+
+ANN. You are so utterly unreasonable and impracticable. What can I do?
+
+TANNER. Do! Break your chains. Go your way according to your own
+conscience and not according to your mother's. Get your mind clean
+and vigorous; and learn to enjoy a fast ride in a motor car instead of
+seeing nothing in it but an excuse for a detestable intrigue. Come with
+me to Marseilles and across to Algiers and to Biskra, at sixty miles
+an hour. Come right down to the Cape if you like. That will be a
+Declaration of Independence with a vengeance. You can write a book about
+it afterwards. That will finish your mother and make a woman of you.
+
+ANN. [thoughtfully] I don't think there would be any harm in that, Jack.
+You are my guardian: you stand in my father's place, by his own wish.
+Nobody could say a word against our travelling together. It would be
+delightful: thank you a thousand times, Jack. I'll come.
+
+TANNER. [aghast] You'll come!!!
+
+ANN. Of course.
+
+TANNER. But-- [he stops, utterly appalled; then resumes feebly] No: look
+here, Ann: if there's no harm in it there's no point in doing it.
+
+ANN. How absurd you are! You don't want to compromise me, do you?
+
+TANNER. Yes: that's the whole sense of my proposal.
+
+ANN. You are talking the greatest nonsense; and you know it. You would
+never do anything to hurt me.
+
+TANNER. Well, if you don't want to be compromised, don't come.
+
+ANN. [with simple earnestness] Yes, I will come, Jack, since you wish
+it. You are my guardian; and think we ought to see more of one another
+and come to know one another better. [Gratefully] It's very thoughtful
+and very kind of you, Jack, to offer me this lovely holiday, especially
+after what I said about Rhoda. You really are good--much better than you
+think. When do we start?
+
+TANNER. But--
+
+The conversation is interrupted by the arrival of Mrs Whitefield from
+the house. She is accompanied by the American gentleman, and followed by
+Ramsden and Octavius.
+
+Hector Malone is an Eastern American; but he is not at all ashamed of
+his nationality. This makes English people of fashion think well of
+him, as of a young fellow who is manly enough to confess to an obvious
+disadvantage without any attempt to conceal or extenuate it. They feel
+that he ought not to be made to suffer for what is clearly not his
+fault, and make a point of being specially kind to him. His chivalrous
+manners to women, and his elevated moral sentiments, being both
+gratuitous and unusual, strike them as being a little unfortunate;
+and though they find his vein of easy humor rather amusing when it has
+ceased to puzzle them (as it does at first), they have had to make
+him understand that he really must not tell anecdotes unless they
+are strictly personal and scandalous, and also that oratory is an
+accomplishment which belongs to a cruder stage of civilization than that
+in which his migration has landed him. On these points Hector is not
+quite convinced: he still thinks that the British are apt to make merits
+of their stupidities, and to represent their various incapacities as
+points of good breeding. English life seems to him to suffer from a lack
+of edifying rhetoric (which he calls moral tone); English behavior to
+show a want of respect for womanhood; English pronunciation to fail
+very vulgarly in tackling such words as world, girl, bird, etc.; English
+society to be plain spoken to an extent which stretches occasionally to
+intolerable coarseness; and English intercourse to need enlivening by
+games and stories and other pastimes; so he does not feel called upon to
+acquire these defects after taking great paths to cultivate himself in a
+first rate manner before venturing across the Atlantic. To this culture
+he finds English people either totally indifferent as they very commonly
+are to all culture, or else politely evasive, the truth being that
+Hector's culture is nothing but a state of saturation with our literary
+exports of thirty years ago, reimported by him to be unpacked at a
+moment's notice and hurled at the head of English literature, science
+and art, at every conversational opportunity. The dismay set up by
+these sallies encourages him in his belief that he is helping to educate
+England. When he finds people chattering harmlessly about Anatole France
+and Nietzsche, he devastates them with Matthew Arnold, the Autocrat of
+the Breakfast Table, and even Macaulay; and as he is devoutly religious
+at bottom, he first leads the unwary, by humorous irreverences, to wave
+popular theology out of account in discussing moral questions with him,
+and then scatters them in confusion by demanding whether the carrying
+out of his ideals of conduct was not the manifest object of God Almighty
+in creating honest men and pure women. The engaging freshness of his
+personality and the dumbfoundering staleness of his culture make it
+extremely difficult to decide whether he is worth knowing; for
+whilst his company is undeniably pleasant and enlivening, there is
+intellectually nothing new to be got out of him, especially as he
+despises politics, and is careful not to talk commercial shop, in which
+department he is probably much in advance of his English capitalist
+friends. He gets on best with romantic Christians of the amoristic sect:
+hence the friendship which has sprung up between him and Octavius.
+
+In appearance Hector is a neatly built young man of twenty-four, with
+a short, smartly trimmed black beard, clear, well shaped eyes, and an
+ingratiating vivacity of expression. He is, from the fashionable point
+of view, faultlessly dressed. As he comes along the drive from the
+house with Mrs Whitefield he is sedulously making himself agreeable
+and entertaining, and thereby placing on her slender wit a burden it is
+unable to bear. An Englishman would let her alone, accepting boredom and
+indifference of their common lot; and the poor lady wants to be either
+let alone or let prattle about the things that interest her.
+
+Ramsden strolls over to inspect the motor car. Octavius joins Hector.
+
+ANN. [pouncing on her mother joyously] Oh, mamma, what do you think!
+Jack is going to take me to Nice in his motor car. Isn't it lovely? I am
+the happiest person in London.
+
+TANNER. [desperately] Mrs Whitefield objects. I am sure she objects.
+Doesn't she, Ramsden?
+
+RAMSDEN. I should think it very likely indeed.
+
+ANN. You don't object, do you, mother?
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. I object! Why should I? I think it will do you good,
+Ann. [Trotting over to Tanner] I meant to ask you to take Rhoda out for
+a run occasionally: she is too much in the house; but it will do when
+you come back.
+
+TANNER. Abyss beneath abyss of perfidy!
+
+ANN. [hastily, to distract attention from this outburst] Oh, I forgot:
+you have not met Mr Malone. Mr Tanner, my guardian: Mr Hector Malone.
+
+HECTOR. Pleased to meet you, Mr Tanner. I should like to suggest an
+extension of the travelling party to Nice, if I may.
+
+ANN. Oh, we're all coming. That's understood, isn't it?
+
+HECTOR. I also am the modest possessor of a motor car. If Miss Robinson
+will allow me the privilege of taking her, my car is at her service.
+
+OCTAVIUS. Violet!
+
+General constraint.
+
+ANN. [subduedly] Come, mother: we must leave them to talk over the
+arrangements. I must see to my travelling kit.
+
+Mrs Whitefield looks bewildered; but Ann draws her discreetly away; and
+they disappear round the corner towards the house.
+
+HECTOR. I think I may go so far as to say that I can depend on Miss
+Robinson's consent.
+
+Continued embarrassment.
+
+OCTAVIUS. I'm afraid we must leave Violet behind, There are
+circumstances which make it impossible for her to come on such an
+expedition.
+
+HECTOR. [amused and not at all convinced] Too American, eh? Must the
+young lady have a chaperone?
+
+OCTAVIUS. It's not that, Malone--at least not altogether.
+
+HECTOR. Indeed! May I ask what other objection applies?
+
+TANNER. [impatiently] Oh, tell him, tell him. We shall never be able to
+keep the secret unless everybody knows what it is. Mr Malone: if you go
+to Nice with Violet, you go with another man's wife. She is married.
+
+HECTOR. [thunderstruck] You don't tell me so!
+
+TANNER. We do. In confidence.
+
+RAMSDEN. [with an air of importance, lest Malone should suspect a
+misalliance] Her marriage has not yet been made known: she desires that
+it shall not be mentioned for the present.
+
+HECTOR. I shall respect the lady's wishes. Would it be indiscreet to ask
+who her husband is, in case I should have an opportunity of consulting
+him about this trip?
+
+TANNER. We don't know who he is.
+
+HECTOR. [retiring into his shell in a very marked manner] In that case,
+I have no more to say.
+
+They become more embarrassed than ever.
+
+OCTAVIUS. You must think this very strange.
+
+HECTOR. A little singular. Pardon me for saving so.
+
+RAMSDEN. [half apologetic, half huffy] The young lady was married
+secretly; and her husband has forbidden her, it seems, to declare
+his name. It is only right to tell you, since you are interested in
+Miss--er--in Violet.
+
+OCTAVIUS. [sympathetically] I hope this is not a disappointment to you.
+
+HECTOR. [softened, coming out of his shell again] Well it is a blow.
+I can hardly understand how a man can leave a wife in such a position.
+Surely it's not customary. It's not manly. It's not considerate.
+
+OCTAVIUS. We feel that, as you may imagine, pretty deeply.
+
+RAMSDEN. [testily] It is some young fool who has not enough experience
+to know what mystifications of this kind lead to.
+
+HECTOR. [with strong symptoms of moral repugnance] I hope so. A man need
+be very young and pretty foolish too to be excused for such conduct.
+You take a very lenient view, Mr Ramsden. Too lenient to my mind. Surely
+marriage should ennoble a man.
+
+TANNER. [sardonically] Ha!
+
+HECTOR. Am I to gather from that cacchination that you don't agree with
+me, Mr Tanner?
+
+TANNER. [drily] Get married and try. You may find it delightful for
+a while: you certainly won't find it ennobling. The greatest common
+measure of a man and a woman is not necessarily greater than the man's
+single measure.
+
+HECTOR. Well, we think in America that a woman's moral number is higher
+than a man's, and that the purer nature of a woman lifts a man right out
+of himself, and makes him better than he was.
+
+OCTAVIUS. [with conviction] So it does.
+
+TANNER. No wonder American women prefer to live in Europe! It's more
+comfortable than standing all their lives on an altar to be worshipped.
+Anyhow, Violet's husband has not been ennobled. So what's to be done?
+
+HECTOR. [shaking his head] I can't dismiss that man's conduct as lightly
+as you do, Mr Tanner. However, I'll say no more. Whoever he is, he's
+Miss Robinson's husband; and I should be glad for her sake to think
+better of him.
+
+OCTAVIUS. [touched; for he divines a secret sorrow] I'm very sorry,
+Malone. Very sorry.
+
+HECTOR. [gratefully] You're a good fellow, Robinson, Thank you.
+
+TANNER. Talk about something else. Violet's coming from the house.
+
+HECTOR. I should esteem it a very great favor, men, if you would take
+the opportunity to let me have a few words with the lady alone. I shall
+have to cry off this trip; and it's rather a delicate--
+
+RAMSDEN. [glad to escape] Say no more. Come Tanner, Come, Tavy. [He
+strolls away into the park with Octavius and Tanner, past the motor
+car].
+
+Violet comes down the avenue to Hector.
+
+VIOLET. Are they looking?
+
+HECTOR. No.
+
+She kisses him.
+
+VIOLET. Have you been telling lies for my sake?
+
+HECTOR. Lying! Lying hardly describes it. I overdo it. I get carried
+away in an ecstasy of mendacity. Violet: I wish you'd let me own up.
+
+VIOLET. [instantly becoming serious and resolute] No, no. Hector: you
+promised me not to.
+
+HECTOR. I'll keep my promise until you release me from it. But I feel
+mean, lying to those men, and denying my wife. Just dastardly.
+
+VIOLET. I wish your father were not so unreasonable.
+
+HECTOR. He's not unreasonable. He's right from his point of view. He has
+a prejudice against the English middle class.
+
+VIOLET. It's too ridiculous. You know how I dislike saying such things
+to you, Hector; but if I were to--oh, well, no matter.
+
+HECTOR. I know. If you were to marry the son of an English manufacturer
+of office furniture, your friends would consider it a misalliance. And
+here's my silly old dad, who is the biggest office furniture man in
+the world, would show me the door for marrying the most perfect lady
+in England merely because she has no handle to her name. Of course it's
+just absurd. But I tell you, Violet, I don't like deceiving him. I feel
+as if I was stealing his money. Why won't you let me own up?
+
+VIOLET. We can't afford it. You can be as romantic as you please about
+love, Hector; but you mustn't be romantic about money.
+
+HECTOR. [divided between his uxoriousness and his habitual elevation
+of moral sentiment] That's very English. [Appealing to her impulsively]
+Violet: Dad's bound to find us out some day.
+
+VIOLET. Oh yes, later on of course. But don't let's go over this every
+time we meet, dear. You promised--
+
+HECTOR. All right, all right, I--
+
+VIOLET. [not to be silenced] It is I and not you who suffer by this
+concealment; and as to facing a struggle and poverty and all that sort
+of thing I simply will not do it. It's too silly.
+
+HECTOR. You shall not. I'll sort of borrow the money from my dad until I
+get on my own feet; and then I can own up and pay up at the same time.
+
+VIOLET. [alarmed and indignant] Do you mean to work? Do you want to
+spoil our marriage?
+
+HECTOR. Well, I don't mean to let marriage spoil my character. Your
+friend Mr Tanner has got the laugh on me a bit already about that; and--
+
+VIOLET. The beast! I hate Jack Tanner.
+
+HECTOR. [magnanimously] Oh, he's all right: he only needs the love of
+a good woman to ennoble him. Besides, he's proposed a motoring trip to
+Nice; and I'm going to take you.
+
+VIOLET. How jolly!
+
+HECTOR. Yes; but how are we going to manage? You see, they've warned
+me off going with you, so to speak. They've told me in confidence that
+you're married. That's just the most overwhelming confidence I've ever
+been honored with.
+
+Tanner returns with Straker, who goes to his car.
+
+TANNER. Your car is a great success, Mr Malone. Your engineer is showing
+it off to Mr Ramsden.
+
+HECTOR. [eagerly--forgetting himself] Let's come, Vi.
+
+VIOLET. [coldly, warning him with her eyes] I beg your pardon, Mr
+Malone, I did not quite catch--
+
+HECTOR. [recollecting himself] I ask to be allowed the pleasure of
+showing you my little American steam car, Miss Robinson.
+
+VIOLET. I shall be very pleased. [They go off together down the avenue].
+
+TANNER. About this trip, Straker.
+
+STRAKER. [preoccupied with the car] Yes?
+
+TANNER. Miss Whitefield is supposed to be coming with me.
+
+STRAKER. So I gather.
+
+TANNER. Mr Robinson is to be one of the party.
+
+STRAKER. Yes.
+
+TANNER. Well, if you can manage so as to be a good deal occupied with
+me, and leave Mr Robinson a good deal occupied with Miss Whitefield, he
+will be deeply grateful to you.
+
+STRAKER. [looking round at him] Evidently.
+
+TANNER. "Evidently!" Your grandfather would have simply winked.
+
+STRAKER. My grandfather would have touched his at.
+
+TANNER. And I should have given your good nice respectful grandfather a
+sovereign.
+
+STRAKER. Five shillins, more likely. [He leaves the car and approaches
+Tanner]. What about the lady's views?
+
+TANNER. She is just as willing to be left to Mr Robinson as Mr Robinson
+is to be left to her. [Straker looks at his principal with cool
+scepticism; then turns to the car whistling his favorite air]. Stop that
+aggravating noise. What do you mean by it? [Straker calmly resumes the
+melody and finishes it. Tanner politely hears it out before he again
+addresses Straker, this time with elaborate seriousness]. Enry: I have
+ever been a warm advocate of the spread of music among the masses; but
+I object to your obliging the company whenever Miss Whitefield's name is
+mentioned. You did it this morning, too.
+
+STRAKER. [obstinately] It's not a bit o use. Mr Robinson may as well
+give it up first as last.
+
+TANNER. Why?
+
+STRAKER. Garn! You know why. Course it's not my business; but you
+needn't start kiddin me about it.
+
+TANNER. I am not kidding. I don't know why.
+
+STRAKER. [Cheerfully sulky] Oh, very well. All right. It ain't my
+business.
+
+TANNER. [impressively] I trust, Enry, that, as between employer and
+engineer, I shall always know how to keep my proper distance, and not
+intrude my private affairs on you. Even our business arrangements
+are subject to the approval of your Trade Union. But don't abuse your
+advantages. Let me remind you that Voltaire said that what was too silly
+to be said could be sung.
+
+STRAKER. It wasn't Voltaire: it was Bow Mar Shay.
+
+TANNER. I stand corrected: Beaumarchais of course. Now you seem to think
+that what is too delicate to be said can be whistled. Unfortunately your
+whistling, though melodious, is unintelligible. Come! there's nobody
+listening: neither my genteel relatives nor the secretary of your
+confounded Union. As man to man, Enry, why do you think that my friend
+has no chance with Miss Whitefield?
+
+STRAKER. Cause she's arter summun else.
+
+TANNER. Bosh! who else?
+
+STRAKER. You.
+
+TANNER. Me!!!
+
+STRAKER. Mean to tell me you didn't know? Oh, come, Mr Tanner!
+
+TANNER. [in fierce earnest] Are you playing the fool, or do you mean it?
+
+STRAKER. [with a flash of temper] I'm not playin no fool. [More coolly]
+Why, it's as plain as the nose on your face. If you ain't spotted that,
+you don't know much about these sort of things. [Serene again] Ex-cuse
+me, you know, Mr Tanner; but you asked me as man to man; and I told you
+as man to man.
+
+TANNER. [wildly appealing to the heavens] Then I--I am the bee, the
+spider, the marked down victim, the destined prey.
+
+STRAKER. I dunno about the bee and the spider. But the marked down
+victim, that's what you are and no mistake; and a jolly good job for
+you, too, I should say.
+
+TANNER. [momentously] Henry Straker: the moment of your life has
+arrived.
+
+STRAKER. What d'y'mean?
+
+TANNER. That record to Biskra.
+
+STRAKER. [eagerly] Yes?
+
+TANNER. Break it.
+
+STRAKER. [rising to the height of his destiny] D'y'mean it?
+
+TANNER. I do.
+
+STRAKER. When?
+
+TANNER. Now. Is that machine ready to start?
+
+STRAKER. [quailing] But you can't--
+
+TANNER. [cutting him short by getting into the car] Off we go. First to
+the bank for money; then to my rooms for my kit; then to your rooms for
+your kit; then break the record from London to Dover or Folkestone; then
+across the channel and away like mad to Marseilles, Gibraltar, Genoa,
+any port from which we can sail to a Mahometan country where men are
+protected from women.
+
+STRAKER. Garn! you're kiddin.
+
+TANNER. [resolutely] Stay behind then. If you won't come I'll do it
+alone. [He starts the motor].
+
+STRAKER. [running after him] Here! Mister! arf a mo! steady on! [he
+scrambles in as the car plunges forward].
+
+
+
+
+ACT III
+
+Evening in the Sierra Nevada. Rolling slopes of brown, with olive trees
+instead of apple trees in the cultivated patches, and occasional prickly
+pears instead of gorse and bracken in the wilds. Higher up, tall stone
+peaks and precipices, all handsome and distinguished. No wild nature
+here: rather a most aristocratic mountain landscape made by a fastidious
+artist-creator. No vulgar profusion of vegetation: even a touch of
+aridity in the frequent patches of stones: Spanish magnificence and
+Spanish economy everywhere.
+
+Not very far north of a spot at which the high road over one of the
+passes crosses a tunnel on the railway from Malaga to Granada, is one
+of the mountain amphitheatres of the Sierra. Looking at it from the wide
+end of the horse-shoe, one sees, a little to the right, in the face
+of the cliff, a romantic cave which is really an abandoned quarry, and
+towards the left a little hill, commanding a view of the road, which
+skirts the amphitheatre on the left, maintaining its higher level on
+embankments and on an occasional stone arch. On the hill, watching
+the road, is a man who is either a Spaniard or a Scotchman. Probably a
+Spaniard, since he wears the dress of a Spanish goatherd and seems at
+home in the Sierra Nevada, but very like a Scotchman for all that. In
+the hollow, on the slope leading to the quarry-cave, are about a dozen
+men who, as they recline at their cave round a heap of smouldering white
+ashes of dead leaf and brushwood, have an air of being conscious of
+themselves as picturesque scoundrels honoring the Sierra by using it as
+an effective pictorial background. As a matter of artistic fact they are
+not picturesque; and the mountains tolerate them as lions tolerate lice.
+An English policeman or Poor Law Guardian would recognize them as a
+selected band of tramps and ablebodied paupers.
+
+This description of them is not wholly contemptuous. Whoever has
+intelligently observed the tramp, or visited the ablebodied ward of a
+workhouse, will admit that our social failures are not all drunkards and
+weaklings. Some of them are men who do not fit the class they were born
+into. Precisely the same qualities that make the educated gentleman an
+artist may make an uneducated manual laborer an ablebodied pauper. There
+are men who fall helplessly into the workhouse because they are good
+for nothing; but there are also men who are there because they are
+strongminded enough to disregard the social convention (obviously not a
+disinterested one on the part of the ratepayer) which bids a man live
+by heavy and badly paid drudgery when he has the alternative of walking
+into the workhouse, announcing himself as a destitute person, and
+legally compelling the Guardians to feed, clothe and house him better
+than he could feed, clothe and house himself without great exertion.
+When a man who is born a poet refuses a stool in a stockbroker's office,
+and starves in a garret, spunging on a poor landlady or on his friends
+and relatives rather than work against his grain; or when a lady,
+because she is a lady, will face any extremity of parasitic dependence
+rather than take a situation as cook or parlormaid, we make large
+allowances for them. To such allowances the ablebodied pauper and his
+nomadic variant the tramp are equally entitled.
+
+Further, the imaginative man, if his life is to be tolerable to him,
+must have leisure to tell himself stories, and a position which lends
+itself to imaginative decoration. The ranks of unskilled labor offer no
+such positions. We misuse our laborers horribly; and when a man refuses
+to be misused, we have no right to say that he is refusing honest work.
+Let us be frank in this matter before we go on with our play; so that we
+may enjoy it without hypocrisy. If we were reasoning, farsighted people,
+four fifths of us would go straight to the Guardians for relief,
+and knock the whole social system to pieces with most beneficial
+reconstructive results. The reason we do got do this is because we work
+like bees or ants, by instinct or habit, not reasoning about the matter
+at all. Therefore when a man comes along who can and does reason, and
+who, applying the Kantian test to his conduct, can truly say to us, If
+everybody did as I do, the world would be compelled to reform itself
+industrially, and abolish slavery and squalor, which exist only because
+everybody does as you do, let us honor that man and seriously
+consider the advisability of following his example. Such a man is the
+able-bodied, able-minded pauper. Were he a gentleman doing his best to
+get a pension or a sinecure instead of sweeping a crossing, nobody would
+blame him; for deciding that so long as the alternative lies between
+living mainly at the expense of the community and allowing the community
+to live mainly at his, it would be folly to accept what is to him
+personally the greater of the two evils.
+
+We may therefore contemplate the tramps of the Sierra without prejudice,
+admitting cheerfully that our objects--briefly, to be gentlemen of
+fortune--are much the same as theirs, and the difference in our position
+and methods merely accidental. One or two of them, perhaps, it would be
+wiser to kill without malice in a friendly and frank manner; for there
+are bipeds, just as there are quadrupeds, who are too dangerous to be
+left unchained and unmuzzled; and these cannot fairly expect to have
+other men's lives wasted in the work of watching them. But as society
+has not the courage to kill them, and, when it catches them, simply
+wreaks on them some superstitious expiatory rites of torture and
+degradation, and than lets them loose with heightened qualifications for
+mischief, it is just as well that they are at large in the Sierra,
+and in the hands of a chief who looks as if he might possibly, on
+provocation, order them to be shot.
+
+This chief, seated in the centre of the group on a squared block of
+stone from the quarry, is a tall strong man, with a striking cockatoo
+nose, glossy black hair, pointed beard, upturned moustache, and a
+Mephistophelean affectation which is fairly imposing, perhaps because
+the scenery admits of a larger swagger than Piccadilly, perhaps because
+of a certain sentimentality in the man which gives him that touch of
+grace which alone can excuse deliberate picturesqueness. His eyes and
+mouth are by no means rascally; he has a fine voice and a ready wit; and
+whether he is really the strongest man in the party, or not, he looks
+it. He is certainly, the best fed, the best dressed, and the best
+trained. The fact that he speaks English is not unexpected in spite of
+the Spanish landscape; for with the exception of one man who might be
+guessed as a bullfighter ruined by drink and one unmistakable Frenchman,
+they are all cockney or American; therefore, in a land of cloaks and
+sombreros, they mostly wear seedy overcoats, woollen mufflers, hard
+hemispherical hats, and dirty brown gloves. Only a very few dress after
+their leader, whose broad sombrero with a cock's feather in the band,
+and voluminous cloak descending to his high boots, are as un-English as
+possible. None of them are armed; and the ungloved ones keep their hands
+in their pockets because it is their national belief that it must be
+dangerously cold in the open air with the night coming on. (It is as
+warm an evening as any reasonable man could desire).
+
+Except the bullfighting inebriate there is only one person in the
+company who looks more than, say, thirty-three. He is a small man with
+reddish whiskers, weak eyes, and the anxious look of a small tradesman
+in difficulties. He wears the only tall hat visible: it shines in the
+sunset with the sticky glow of some sixpenny patent hat reviver, often
+applied and constantly tending to produce a worse state of the original
+surface than the ruin it was applied to remedy. He has a collar and cuff
+of celluloid; and his brown Chesterfield overcoat, with velvet collar,
+is still presentable. He is pre-eminently the respectable man of the
+party, and is certainly over forty, possibly over fifty. He is the
+corner man on the leader's right, opposite three men in scarlet ties on
+his left. One of these three is the Frenchman. Of the remaining two, who
+are both English, one is argumentative, solemn, and obstinate; the other
+rowdy and mischievous.
+
+The chief, with a magnificent fling of the end of his cloak across his
+left shoulder, rises to address them. The applause which greets him
+shows that he is a favorite orator.
+
+THE CHIEF. Friends and fellow brigands. I have a proposal to make
+to this meeting. We have now spent three evenings in discussing the
+question Have Anarchists or Social-Democrats the most personal courage?
+We have gone into the principles of Anarchism and Social-Democracy at
+great length. The cause of Anarchy has been ably represented by our one
+Anarchist, who doesn't know what Anarchism means [laughter]--
+
+THE ANARCHIST. [rising] A point of order, Mendoza--
+
+MENDOZA. [forcibly] No, by thunder: your last point of order took half
+an hour. Besides, Anarchists don't believe in order.
+
+THE ANARCHIST. [mild, polite but persistent: he is, in fact, the
+respectable looking elderly man in the celluloid collar and cuffs] That
+is a vulgar error. I can prove--
+
+MENDOZA. Order, order.
+
+THE OTHERS [shouting] Order, order. Sit down. Chair! Shut up.
+
+The Anarchist is suppressed.
+
+MENDOZA. On the other hand we have three Social-Democrats among us. They
+are not on speaking terms; and they have put before us three distinct
+and incompatible views of Social-Democracy.
+
+THE MAJORITY. [shouting assent] Hear, hear! So we are. Right.
+
+THE ROWDY SOCIAL-DEMOCRAT. [smarting under oppression] You ain't no
+Christian. You're a Sheeny, you are.
+
+MENDOZA. [with crushing magnanimity] My friend; I am an exception to
+all rules. It is true that I have the honor to be a Jew; and, when the
+Zionists need a leader to reassemble our race on its historic soil
+of Palestine, Mendoza will not be the last to volunteer [sympathetic
+applause--hear, hear, etc.]. But I am not a slave to any superstition.
+I have swallowed all the formulas, even that of Socialism; though, in a
+sense, once a Socialist, always a Socialist.
+
+THE SOCIAL-DEMOCRATS. Hear, hear!
+
+MENDOZA. But I am well aware that the ordinary man--even the ordinary
+brigand, who can scarcely be called an ordinary man [Hear, hear!]--is
+not a philosopher. Common sense is good enough for him; and in our
+business affairs common sense is good enough for me. Well, what is our
+business here in the Sierra Nevada, chosen by the Moors as the fairest
+spot in Spain? Is it to discuss abstruse questions of political economy?
+No: it is to hold up motor cars and secure a more equitable distribution
+of wealth.
+
+THE SULKY SOCIAL-DEMOCRAT. All made by labor, mind you.
+
+MENDOZA. [urbanely] Undoubtedly. All made by labor, and on its way to be
+squandered by wealthy vagabonds in the dens of vice that disfigure the
+sunny shores of the Mediterranean. We intercept that wealth. We restore
+it to circulation among the class that produced it and that chiefly
+needs it--the working class. We do this at the risk of our lives
+and liberties, by the exercise of the virtues of courage, endurance,
+foresight, and abstinence--especially abstinence. I myself have eaten
+nothing but prickly pears and broiled rabbit for three days.
+
+THE SULKY SOCIAL-DEMOCRAT. [Stubbornly] No more ain't we.
+
+MENDOZA. [indignantly] Have I taken more than my share?
+
+THE SULKY SOCIAL-DEMOCRAT. [unmoved] Why should you?
+
+THE ANARCHIST. Why should he not? To each according to his needs: from
+each according to his means.
+
+THE FRENCHMAN. [shaking his fist at the anarchist] Fumiste!
+
+MENDOZA. [diplomatically] I agree with both of you.
+
+THE GENUINELY ENGLISH BRIGANDS. Hear, hear! Bravo, Mendoza!
+
+MENDOZA. What I say is, let us treat one another as gentlemen, and
+strive to excel in personal courage only when we take the field.
+
+THE ROWDY SOCIAL-DEMOCRAT. [derisively] Shikespear.
+
+A whistle comes from the goatherd on the hill. He springs up and points
+excitedly forward along the road to the north.
+
+THE GOATHERD. Automobile! Automobile! [He rushes down the hill and joins
+the rest, who all scramble to their feet].
+
+MENDOZA. [in ringing tones] To arms! Who has the gun?
+
+THE SULKY SOCIAL-DEMOCRAT. [handing a rifle to Mendoza] Here.
+
+MENDOZA. Have the nails been strewn in the road?
+
+THE ROWDY SOCIAL-DEMOCRAT. Two ahnces of em.
+
+MENDOZA. Good! [To the Frenchman] With me, Duval. If the nails fail,
+puncture their tires with a bullet. [He gives the rifle to Duval, who
+follows him up the hill. Mendoza produces an opera glass. The others
+hurry across to the road and disappear to the north].
+
+MENDOZA. [on the hill, using his glass] Two only, a capitalist and his
+chauffeur. They look English.
+
+DUVAL. Angliche! Aoh yess. Cochons! [Handling the rifle] Faut tire,
+n'est-ce-pas?
+
+MENDOZA. No: the nails have gone home. Their tire is down: they stop.
+
+DUVAL. [shouting to the others] Fondez sur eux, nom de Dieu!
+
+MENDOZA. [rebuking his excitement] Du calme, Duval: keep your hair on.
+They take it quietly. Let us descend and receive them.
+
+Mendoza descends, passing behind the fire and coming forward, whilst
+Tanner and Straker, in their motoring goggles, leather coats, and caps,
+are led in from the road by brigands.
+
+TANNER. Is this the gentleman you describe as your boss? Does he speak
+English?
+
+THE ROWDY SOCIAL-DEMOCRAT. Course he does. Y'don't suppowz we
+Hinglishmen lets ahrselves be bossed by a bloomin Spenniard, do you?
+
+MENDOZA. [with dignity] Allow me to introduce myself: Mendoza, President
+of the League of the Sierra! [Posing loftily] I am a brigand: I live by
+robbing the rich.
+
+TANNER. [promptly] I am a gentleman: I live by robbing the poor. Shake
+hands.
+
+THE ENGLISH SOCIAL-DEMOCRATS. Hear, hear!
+
+General laughter and good humor. Tanner and Mendoza shake hands. The
+Brigands drop into their former places.
+
+STRAKER. Ere! where do I come in?
+
+TANNER. [introducing] My friend and chauffeur.
+
+THE SULKY SOCIAL-DEMOCRAT. [suspiciously] Well, which is he? friend or
+show-foor? It makes all the difference you know.
+
+MENDOZA. [explaining] We should expect ransom for a friend. A
+professional chauffeur is free of the mountains. He even takes a
+trifling percentage of his princpal's ransom if he will honor us by
+accepting it.
+
+STRAKER. I see. Just to encourage me to come this way again. Well, I'll
+think about it.
+
+DUVAL. [impulsively rushing across to Straker] Mon frere! [He embraces
+him rapturously and kisses him on both cheeks].
+
+STRAKER. [disgusted] Ere, git out: don't be silly. Who are you, pray?
+
+DUVAL. Duval: Social-Democrat.
+
+STRAKER. Oh, you're a Social-Democrat, are you?
+
+THE ANARCHIST. He means that he has sold out to the parliamentary
+humbugs and the bourgeoisie. Compromise! that is his faith.
+
+DUVAL. [furiously] I understand what he say. He say Bourgeois. He say
+Compromise. Jamais de la vie! Miserable menteur--
+
+STRAKER. See here, Captain Mendoza, ow much o this sort o thing do you
+put up with here? Are we avin a pleasure trip in the mountains, or are
+we at a Socialist meetin?
+
+THE MAJORITY. Hear, hear! Shut up. Chuck it. Sit down, etc. etc. [The
+Social-Democrats and the Anarchist are hurtled into the background.
+Straker, after superintending this proceeding with satisfaction, places
+himself on Mendoza's left, Tanner being on his right].
+
+MENDOZA. Can we offer you anything? Broiled rabbit and prickly pears--
+
+TANNER. Thank you: we have dined.
+
+MENDOZA. [to his followers] Gentlemen: business is over for the day. Go
+as you please until morning.
+
+The Brigands disperse into groups lazily. Some go into the cave. Others
+sit down or lie down to sleep in the open. A few produce a pack of cards
+and move off towards the road; for it is now starlight; and they know
+that motor cars have lamps which can be turned to account for lighting a
+card party.
+
+STRAKER. [calling after them] Don't none of you go fooling with that
+car, d'ye hear?
+
+MENDOZA. No fear, Monsieur le Chauffeur. The first one we captured cured
+us of that.
+
+STRAKER. [interested] What did it do?
+
+MENDOZA. It carried three brave comrades of ours, who did not know how
+to stop it, into Granada, and capsized them opposite the police station.
+Since then we never touch one without sending for the chauffeur. Shall
+we chat at our ease?
+
+TANNER. By all means.
+
+Tanner, Mendoza, and Straker sit down on the turf by the fire. Mendoza
+delicately waives his presidential dignity, of which the right to sit on
+the squared stone block is the appanage, by sitting on the ground like
+his guests, and using the stone only as a support for his back.
+
+MENDOZA. It is the custom in Spain always to put off business until
+to-morrow. In fact, you have arrived out of office hours. However, if
+you would prefer to settle the question of ransom at once, I am at your
+service.
+
+TANNER. To-morrow will do for me. I am rich enough to pay anything in
+reason.
+
+MENDOZA. [respectfully, much struck by this admission] You are a
+remarkable man, sir. Our guests usually describe themselves as miserably
+poor.
+
+TANNER. Pooh! Miserably poor people don't own motor cars.
+
+MENDOZA. Precisely what we say to them.
+
+TANNER. Treat us well: we shall not prove ungrateful.
+
+STRAKER. No prickly pears and broiled rabbits, you know. Don't tell me
+you can't do us a bit better than that if you like.
+
+MENDOZA. Wine, kids, milk, cheese and bread can be procured for ready
+money.
+
+STRAKER. [graciously] Now you're talking.
+
+TANNER. Are you all Socialists here, may I ask?
+
+MENDOZA. [repudiating this humiliating misconception] Oh no, no, no:
+nothing of the kind, I assure you. We naturally have modern views as to
+the justice of the existing distribution of wealth: otherwise we should
+lose our self-respect. But nothing that you could take exception to,
+except two or three faddists.
+
+TANNER. I had no intention of suggesting anything discreditable. In
+fact, I am a bit of a Socialist myself.
+
+STRAKER. [drily] Most rich men are, I notice.
+
+MENDOZA. Quite so. It has reached us, I admit. It is in the air of the
+century.
+
+STRAKER. Socialism must be looking up a bit if your chaps are taking to
+it.
+
+MENDOZA. That is true, sir. A movement which is confined to philosophers
+and honest men can never exercise any real political influence: there
+are too few of them. Until a movement shows itself capable of spreading
+among brigands, it can never hope for a political majority.
+
+TANNER. But are your brigands any less honest than ordinary citizens?
+
+MENDOZA. Sir: I will be frank with you. Brigandage is abnormal. Abnormal
+professions attract two classes: those who are not good enough for
+ordinary bourgeois life and those who are too good for it. We are dregs
+and scum, sir: the dregs very filthy, the scum very superior.
+
+STRAKER. Take care! some o the dregs'll hear you.
+
+MENDOZA. It does not matter: each brigand thinks himself scum, and likes
+to hear the others called dregs.
+
+TANNER. Come! you are a wit. [Mendoza inclines his head, flattered]. May
+one ask you a blunt question?
+
+MENDOZA. As blunt as you please.
+
+TANNER. How does it pay a man of your talent to shepherd such a flock as
+this on broiled rabbit and prickly pears? I have seen men less gifted,
+and I'll swear less honest, supping at the Savoy on foie gras and
+champagne.
+
+MENDOZA. Pooh! they have all had their turn at the broiled rabbit, just
+as I shall have my turn at the Savoy. Indeed, I have had a turn there
+already--as waiter.
+
+TANNER. A waiter! You astonish me!
+
+MENDOZA. [reflectively] Yes: I, Mendoza of the Sierra, was a waiter.
+Hence, perhaps, my cosmopolitanism. [With sudden intensity] Shall I tell
+you the story of my life?
+
+STRAKER. [apprehensively] If it ain't too long, old chap--
+
+TANNER. [interrupting him] Tsh-sh: you are a Philistine, Henry: you have
+no romance in you. [To Mendoza] You interest me extremely, President.
+Never mind Henry: he can go to sleep.
+
+MENDOZA. The woman I loved--
+
+STRAKER. Oh, this is a love story, is it? Right you are. Go on: I was
+only afraid you were going to talk about yourself.
+
+MENDOZA. Myself! I have thrown myself away for her sake: that is why
+I am here. No matter: I count the world well lost for her. She had, I
+pledge you my word, the most magnificent head of hair I ever saw. She
+had humor; she had intellect; she could cook to perfection; and her
+highly strung temperament made her uncertain, incalculable, variable,
+capricious, cruel, in a word, enchanting.
+
+STRAKER. A six shillin novel sort o woman, all but the cookin. Er name
+was Lady Gladys Plantagenet, wasn't it?
+
+MENDOZA. No, sir: she was not an earl's daughter. Photography,
+reproduced by the half-tone process, has made me familiar with the
+appearance of the daughters of the English peerage; and I can honestly
+say that I would have sold the lot, faces, dowries, clothes, titles, and
+all, for a smile from this woman. Yet she was a woman of the people,
+a worker: otherwise--let me reciprocate your bluntness--I should have
+scorned her.
+
+TANNER. Very properly. And did she respond to your love?
+
+MENDOZA. Should I be here if she did? She objected to marry a Jew.
+
+TANNER. On religious grounds?
+
+MENDOZA. No: she was a freethinker. She said that every Jew considers in
+his heart that English people are dirty in their habits.
+
+TANNER. [surprised] Dirty!
+
+MENDOZA. It showed her extraordinary knowledge of the world; for it
+is undoubtedly true. Our elaborate sanitary code makes us unduly
+contemptuous of the Gentile.
+
+TANNER. Did you ever hear that, Henry?
+
+STRAKER. I've heard my sister say so. She was cook in a Jewish family
+once.
+
+MENDOZA. I could not deny it; neither could I eradicate the impression
+it made on her mind. I could have got round any other objection; but
+no woman can stand a suspicion of indelicacy as to her person. My
+entreaties were in vain: she always retorted that she wasn't good enough
+for me, and recommended me to marry an accursed barmaid named Rebecca
+Lazarus, whom I loathed. I talked of suicide: she offered me a packet
+of beetle poison to do it with. I hinted at murder: she went into
+hysterics; and as I am a living man I went to America so that she might
+sleep without dreaming that I was stealing upstairs to cut her throat.
+In America I went out west and fell in with a man who was wanted by the
+police for holding up trains. It was he who had the idea of holding up
+motors cars--in the South of Europe: a welcome idea to a desperate and
+disappointed man. He gave me some valuable introductions to capitalists
+of the right sort. I formed a syndicate; and the present enterprise is
+the result. I became leader, as the Jew always becomes leader, by his
+brains and imagination. But with all my pride of race I would give
+everything I possess to be an Englishman. I am like a boy: I cut her
+name on the trees and her initials on the sod. When I am alone I lie
+down and tear my wretched hair and cry Louisa--
+
+STRAKER. [startled] Louisa!
+
+MENDOZA. It is her name--Louisa--Louisa Straker--
+
+TANNER. Straker!
+
+STRAKER. [scrambling up on his knees most indignantly] Look here: Louisa
+Straker is my sister, see? Wot do you mean by gassin about her like
+this? Wot she got to do with you?
+
+MENDOZA. A dramatic coincidence! You are Enry, her favorite brother!
+
+STRAKER. Oo are you callin Enry? What call have you to take a liberty
+with my name or with hers? For two pins I'd punch your fat ed, so I
+would.
+
+MENDOZA. [with grandiose calm] If I let you do it, will you promise to
+brag of it afterwards to her? She will be reminded of her Mendoza: that
+is all I desire.
+
+TANNER. This is genuine devotion, Henry. You should respect it.
+
+STRAKER. [fiercely] Funk, more likely.
+
+MENDOZA. [springing to his feet] Funk! Young man: I come of a famous
+family of fighters; and as your sister well knows, you would have as
+much chance against me as a perambulator against your motor car.
+
+STRAKER. [secretly daunted, but rising from his knees with an air of
+reckless pugnacity] I ain't afraid of you. With your Louisa! Louisa!
+Miss Straker is good enough for you, I should think.
+
+MENDOZA. I wish you could persuade her to think so.
+
+STRAKER. [exasperated] Here--
+
+TANNER. [rising quickly and interposing] Oh come, Henry: even if you
+could fight the President you can't fight the whole League of the
+Sierra. Sit down again and be friendly. A cat may look at a king; and
+even a President of brigands may look at your sister. All this family
+pride is really very old fashioned.
+
+STRAKER. [subdued, but grumbling] Let him look at her. But wot does he
+mean by makin out that she ever looked at im? [Reluctantly resuming his
+couch on the turf] Ear him talk, one ud think she was keepin company
+with him. [He turns his back on them and composes himself to sleep].
+
+MENDOZA. [to Tanner, becoming more confidential as he finds himself
+virtually alone with a sympathetic listener in the still starlight of
+the mountains; for all the rest are asleep by this time] It was just so
+with her, sir. Her intellect reached forward into the twentieth century:
+her social prejudices and family affections reached back into the dark
+ages. Ah, sir, how the words of Shakespear seem to fit every crisis in
+our emotions!
+
+     I loved Louisa: 40,000 brothers
+     Could not with all their quantity of love
+     Make up my sum.
+
+And so on. I forget the rest. Call it madness if you will--infatuation.
+I am an able man, a strong man: in ten years I should have owned a
+first-class hotel. I met her; and you see! I am a brigand, an outcast.
+Even Shakespear cannot do justice to what I feel for Louisa. Let me
+read you some lines that I have written about her myself. However slight
+their literary merit may be, they express what I feel better than any
+casual words can. [He produces a packet of hotel bills scrawled with
+manuscript, and kneels at the fire to decipher them, poking it with a
+stick to make it glow].
+
+TANNER. [clapping him rudely on the shoulder] Put them in the fire,
+President.
+
+MENDOZA. [startled] Eh?
+
+TANNER. You are sacrificing your career to a monomania.
+
+MENDOZA. I know it.
+
+TANNER. No you don't. No man would commit such a crime against himself
+if he really knew what he was doing. How can you look round at these
+august hills, look up at this divine sky, taste this finely tempered
+air, and then talk like a literary hack on a second floor in Bloomsbury?
+
+MENDOZA. [shaking his head] The Sierra is no better than Bloomsbury when
+once the novelty has worn off. Besides, these mountains make you dream
+of women--of women with magnificent hair.
+
+TANNER. Of Louisa, in short. They will not make me dream of women, my
+friend: I am heartwhole.
+
+MENDOZA. Do not boast until morning, sir. This is a strange country for
+dreams.
+
+TANNER. Well, we shall see. Goodnight. [He lies down and composes
+himself to sleep].
+
+Mendoza, with a sigh, follows his example; and for a few moments
+there is peace in the Sierra. Then Mendoza sits up suddenly and says
+pleadingly to Tanner--
+
+MENDOZA. Just allow me to read a few lines before you go to sleep. I
+should really like your opinion of them.
+
+TANNER. [drowsily] Go on. I am listening.
+
+MENDOZA. I saw thee first in Whitsun week Louisa, Louisa--
+
+TANNER. [roaring himself] My dear President, Louisa is a very pretty
+name; but it really doesn't rhyme well to Whitsun week.
+
+MENDOZA. Of course not. Louisa is not the rhyme, but the refrain.
+
+TANNER. [subsiding] Ah, the refrain. I beg your pardon. Go on.
+
+MENDOZA. Perhaps you do not care for that one: I think you will like
+this better. [He recites, in rich soft tones, and to slow time]
+
+     Louisa, I love thee.
+     I love thee, Louisa.
+     Louisa, Louisa, Louisa, I love thee.
+     One name and one phrase make my music,
+     Louisa. Louisa, Louisa, Louisa, I love thee.
+
+
+     Mendoza thy lover,
+     Thy lover, Mendoza,
+     Mendoza adoringly lives for Louisa.
+     There's nothing but that in the world for Mendoza.
+     Louisa, Louisa, Mendoza adores thee.
+
+[Affected] There is no merit in producing beautiful lines upon such a
+name. Louisa is an exquisite name, is it not?
+
+TANNER. [all but asleep, responds with a faint groan].
+
+MENDOZA.
+
+     O wert thou, Louisa,
+     The wife of Mendoza,
+     Mendoza's Louisa, Louisa Mendoza,
+     How blest were the life of Louisa's Mendoza!
+     How painless his longing of love for Louisa!
+
+That is real poetry--from the heart--from the heart of hearts. Don't you
+think it will move her?
+
+No answer.
+
+[Resignedly] Asleep, as usual. Doggrel to all the world; heavenly music
+to me! Idiot that I am to wear my heart on my sleeve! [He composes
+himself to sleep, murmuring] Louisa, I love thee; I love thee, Louisa;
+Louisa, Louisa, Louisa, I--
+
+Straker snores; rolls over on his side; and relapses into sleep.
+Stillness settles on the Sierra; and the darkness deepens. The fire
+has again buried itself in white ash and ceased to glow. The peaks show
+unfathomably dark against the starry firmament; but now the stars dim
+and vanish; and the sky seems to steal away out of the universe. Instead
+of the Sierra there is nothing; omnipresent nothing. No sky, no peaks,
+no light, no sound, no time nor space, utter void. Then somewhere
+the beginning of a pallor, and with it a faint throbbing buzz as of a
+ghostly violoncello palpitating on the same note endlessly. A couple of
+ghostly violins presently take advantage of this bass
+
+(a staff of music is supplied here)
+
+and therewith the pallor reveals a man in the void, an incorporeal but
+visible man, seated, absurdly enough, on nothing. For a moment he raises
+his head as the music passes him by. Then, with a heavy sigh, he droops
+in utter dejection; and the violins, discouraged, retrace their melody
+in despair and at last give it up, extinguished by wailings from uncanny
+wind instruments, thus:--
+
+(more music)
+
+It is all very odd. One recognizes the Mozartian strain; and on this
+hint, and by the aid of certain sparkles of violet light in the pallor,
+the man's costume explains itself as that of a Spanish nobleman of the
+XV-XVI century. Don Juan, of course; but where? why? how? Besides, in
+the brief lifting of his face, now hidden by his hat brim, there was
+a curious suggestion of Tanner. A more critical, fastidious, handsome
+face, paler and colder, without Tanner's impetuous credulity and
+enthusiasm, and without a touch of his modern plutocratic vulgarity, but
+still a resemblance, even an identity. The name too: Don Juan Tenorio,
+John Tanner. Where on earth---or elsewhere--have we got to from the XX
+century and the Sierra?
+
+Another pallor in the void, this time not violet, but a disagreeable
+smoky yellow. With it, the whisper of a ghostly clarionet turning this
+tune into infinite sadness:
+
+(Here there is another musical staff.)
+
+The yellowish pallor moves: there is an old crone wandering in the void,
+bent and toothless; draped, as well as one can guess, in the coarse
+brown frock of some religious order. She wanders and wanders in her
+slow hopeless way, much as a wasp flies in its rapid busy way, until
+she blunders against the thing she seeks: companionship. With a sob of
+relief the poor old creature clutches at the presence of the man and
+addresses him in her dry unlovely voice, which can still express pride
+and resolution as well as suffering.
+
+THE OLD WOMAN. Excuse me; but I am so lonely; and this place is so
+awful.
+
+DON JUAN. A new comer?
+
+THE OLD WOMAN. Yes: I suppose I died this morning. I confessed; I had
+extreme unction; I was in bed with my family about me and my eyes fixed
+on the cross. Then it grew dark; and when the light came back it was
+this light by which I walk seeing nothing. I have wandered for hours in
+horrible loneliness.
+
+DON JUAN. [sighing] Ah! you have not yet lost the sense of time. One
+soon does, in eternity.
+
+THE OLD WOMAN. Where are we?
+
+DON JUAN. In hell.
+
+THE OLD WOMAN [proudly] Hell! I in hell! How dare you?
+
+DON JUAN. [unimpressed] Why not, Senora?
+
+THE OLD WOMAN. You do not know to whom you are speaking. I am a lady,
+and a faithful daughter of the Church.
+
+DON JUAN. I do not doubt it.
+
+THE OLD WOMAN. But how then can I be in hell? Purgatory, perhaps: I have
+not been perfect: who has? But hell! oh, you are lying.
+
+DON JUAN. Hell, Senora, I assure you; hell at its best--that is, its most
+solitary--though perhaps you would prefer company.
+
+THE OLD WOMAN. But I have sincerely repented; I have confessed.
+
+DON JUAN. How much?
+
+THE OLD WOMAN. More sins than I really committed. I loved confession.
+
+DON JUAN. Ah, that is perhaps as bad as confessing too little. At all
+events, Senora, whether by oversight or intention, you are certainly
+damned, like myself; and there is nothing for it now but to make the
+best of it.
+
+THE OLD WOMAN [indignantly] Oh! and I might have been so much wickeder!
+All my good deeds wasted! It is unjust.
+
+DON JUAN. No: you were fully and clearly warned. For your bad deeds,
+vicarious atonement, mercy without justice. For your good deeds, justice
+without mercy. We have many good people here.
+
+THE OLD WOMAN. Were you a good man?
+
+DON JUAN. I was a murderer.
+
+THE OLD WOMAN. A murderer! Oh, how dare they send me to herd with
+murderers! I was not as bad as that: I was a good woman. There is some
+mistake: where can I have it set right?
+
+DON JUAN. I do not know whether mistakes can be corrected here. Probably
+they will not admit a mistake even if they have made one.
+
+THE OLD WOMAN. But whom can I ask?
+
+DON JUAN. I should ask the Devil, Senora: he understands the ways of
+this place, which is more than I ever could.
+
+THE OLD WOMAN. The Devil! _I_ speak to the Devil!
+
+DON JUAN. In hell, Senora, the Devil is the leader of the best society.
+
+THE OLD WOMAN. I tell you, wretch, I know I am not in hell.
+
+DON JUAN. How do you know?
+
+THE OLD WOMAN. Because I feel no pain.
+
+DON JUAN. Oh, then there is no mistake: you are intentionally damned.
+
+THE OLD WOMAN. Why do you say that?
+
+DON JUAN. Because hell, Senora, is a place for the wicked. The wicked
+are quite comfortable in it: it was made for them. You tell me you feel
+no pain. I conclude you are one of those for whom Hell exists.
+
+THE OLD WOMAN. Do you feel no pain?
+
+DON JUAN. I am not one of the wicked, Senora; therefore it bores me,
+bores me beyond description, beyond belief.
+
+THE OLD WOMAN. Not one of the wicked! You said you were a murderer.
+
+DON JUAN. Only a duel. I ran my sword through an old man who was trying
+to run his through me.
+
+THE OLD WOMAN. If you were a gentleman, that was not a murder.
+
+DON JUAN. The old man called it murder, because he was, he said,
+defending his daughter's honor. By this he meant that because I
+foolishly fell in love with her and told her so, she screamed; and he
+tried to assassinate me after calling me insulting names.
+
+THE OLD WOMAN. You were like all men. Libertines and murderers all, all,
+all!
+
+DON JUAN. And yet we meet here, dear lady.
+
+THE OLD WOMAN. Listen to me. My father was slain by just such a wretch
+as you, in just such a duel, for just such a cause. I screamed: it was
+my duty. My father drew on my assailant: his honor demanded it. He fell:
+that was the reward of honor. I am here: in hell, you tell me that is
+the reward of duty. Is there justice in heaven?
+
+DON JUAN. No; but there is justice in hell: heaven is far above such
+idle human personalities. You will be welcome in hell, Senora. Hell
+is the home of honor, duty, justice, and the rest of the seven deadly
+virtues. All the wickedness on earth is done in their name: where else
+but in hell should they have their reward? Have I not told you that the
+truly damned are those who are happy in hell?
+
+THE OLD WOMAN. And are you happy here?
+
+DON JUAN. [Springing to his feet] No; and that is the enigma on which I
+ponder in darkness. Why am I here? I, who repudiated all duty, trampled
+honor underfoot, and laughed at justice!
+
+THE OLD WOMAN. Oh, what do I care why you are here? Why am I here? I,
+who sacrificed all my inclinations to womanly virtue and propriety!
+
+DON JUAN. Patience, lady: you will be perfectly happy and at home here.
+As saith the poet, "Hell is a city much like Seville."
+
+THE OLD WOMAN. Happy! here! where I am nothing! where I am nobody!
+
+DON JUAN. Not at all: you are a lady; and wherever ladies are is hell.
+Do not be surprised or terrified: you will find everything here that a
+lady can desire, including devils who will serve you from sheer love of
+servitude, and magnify your importance for the sake of dignifying their
+service--the best of servants.
+
+THE OLD WOMAN. My servants will be devils!
+
+DON JUAN. Have you ever had servants who were not devils?
+
+THE OLD WOMAN. Never: they were devils, perfect devils, all of them. But
+that is only a manner of speaking. I thought you meant that my servants
+here would be real devils.
+
+DON JUAN. No more real devils than you will be a real lady. Nothing is
+real here. That is the horror of damnation.
+
+THE OLD WOMAN. Oh, this is all madness. This is worse than fire and the
+worm.
+
+DON JUAN. For you, perhaps, there are consolations. For instance: how
+old were you when you changed from time to eternity?
+
+THE OLD WOMAN. Do not ask me how old I was as if I were a thing of the
+past. I am 77.
+
+DON JUAN. A ripe age, Senora. But in hell old age is not tolerated. It
+is too real. Here we worship Love and Beauty. Our souls being entirely
+damned, we cultivate our hearts. As a lady of 77, you would not have a
+single acquaintance in hell.
+
+THE OLD WOMAN. How can I help my age, man?
+
+DON JUAN. You forget that you have left your age behind you in the realm
+of time. You are no more 77 than you are 7 or 17 or 27.
+
+THE OLD WOMAN. Nonsense!
+
+DON JUAN. Consider, Senora: was not this true even when you lived on
+earth? When you were 70, were you really older underneath your wrinkles
+and your grey hairs than when you were 30?
+
+THE OLD WOMAN. No, younger: at 30 I was a fool. But of what use is it to
+feel younger and look older?
+
+DON JUAN. You see, Senora, the look was only an illusion. Your wrinkles
+lied, just as the plump smooth skin of many a stupid girl of 17, with
+heavy spirits and decrepit ideas, lies about her age? Well, here we have
+no bodies: we see each other as bodies only because we learnt to think
+about one another under that aspect when we were alive; and we still
+think in that way, knowing no other. But we can appear to one another at
+what age we choose. You have but to will any of your old looks back, and
+back they will come.
+
+THE OLD WOMAN. It cannot be true.
+
+DON JUAN. Try.
+
+THE OLD WOMAN. Seventeen!
+
+DON JUAN. Stop. Before you decide, I had better tell you that these
+things are a matter of fashion. Occasionally we have a rage for 17; but
+it does not last long. Just at present the fashionable age is 40--or say
+37; but there are signs of a change. If you were at all good-looking at
+27, I should suggest your trying that, and setting a new fashion.
+
+THE OLD WOMAN. I do not believe a word you are saying. However, 27 be
+it. [Whisk! the old woman becomes a young one, and so handsome that in
+the radiance into which her dull yellow halo has suddenly lightened one
+might almost mistake her for Ann Whitefield].
+
+DON JUAN. Dona Ana de Ulloa!
+
+ANA. What? You know me!
+
+DON JUAN. And you forget me!
+
+ANA. I cannot see your face. [He raises his hat]. Don Juan Tenorio!
+Monster! You who slew my father! even here you pursue me.
+
+DON JUAN. I protest I do not pursue you. Allow me to withdraw [going].
+
+ANA. [seizing his arm] You shall not leave me alone in this dreadful
+place.
+
+DON JUAN. Provided my staying be not interpreted as pursuit.
+
+ANA. [releasing him] You may well wonder how I can endure your presence.
+My dear, dear father!
+
+DON JUAN. Would you like to see him?
+
+ANA. My father HERE!!!
+
+DON JUAN. No: he is in heaven.
+
+ANA. I knew it. My noble father! He is looking down on us now. What must
+he feel to see his daughter in this place, and in conversation with his
+murderer!
+
+DON JUAN. By the way, if we should meet him--
+
+ANA. How can we meet him? He is in heaven.
+
+DON JUAN. He condescends to look in upon us here from time to time.
+Heaven bores him. So let me warn you that if you meet him he will be
+mortally offended if you speak of me as his murderer! He maintains that
+he was a much better swordsman than I, and that if his foot had not
+slipped he would have killed me. No doubt he is right: I was not a good
+fencer. I never dispute the point; so we are excellent friends.
+
+ANA. It is no dishonor to a soldier to be proud of his skill in arms.
+
+DON JUAN. You would rather not meet him, probably.
+
+ANA. How dare you say that?
+
+DON JUAN. Oh, that is the usual feeling here. You may remember that on
+earth--though of course we never confessed it--the death of anyone
+we knew, even those we liked best, was always mingled with a certain
+satisfaction at being finally done with them.
+
+ANA. Monster! Never, never.
+
+DON JUAN. [placidly] I see you recognize the feeling. Yes: a funeral was
+always a festivity in black, especially the funeral of a relative. At
+all events, family ties are rarely kept up here. Your father is quite
+accustomed to this: he will not expect any devotion from you.
+
+ANA. Wretch: I wore mourning for him all my life.
+
+DON JUAN. Yes: it became you. But a life of mourning is one thing: an
+eternity of it quite another. Besides, here you are as dead as he. Can
+anything be more ridiculous than one dead person mourning for another?
+Do not look shocked, my dear Ana; and do not be alarmed: there is plenty
+of humbug in hell (indeed there is hardly anything else); but the humbug
+of death and age and change is dropped because here WE are all dead and
+all eternal. You will pick up our ways soon.
+
+ANA. And will all the men call me their dear Ana?
+
+DON JUAN. No. That was a slip of the tongue. I beg your pardon.
+
+ANA. [almost tenderly] Juan: did you really love me when you behaved so
+disgracefully to me?
+
+DON JUAN. [impatiently] Oh, I beg you not to begin talking about love.
+Here they talk of nothing else but love--its beauty, its holiness, its
+spirituality, its devil knows what!--excuse me; but it does so bore me.
+They don't know what they're talking about. I do. They think they have
+achieved the perfection of love because they have no bodies. Sheer
+imaginative debauchery! Faugh!
+
+ANA. Has even death failed to refine your soul, Juan? Has the terrible
+judgment of which my father's statue was the minister taught you no
+reverence?
+
+DON JUAN. How is that very flattering statue, by the way? Does it still
+come to supper with naughty people and cast them into this bottomless
+pit?
+
+ANA. It has been a great expense to me. The boys in the monastery school
+would not let it alone: the mischievous ones broke it; and the studious
+ones wrote their names on it. Three new noses in two years, and fingers
+without end. I had to leave it to its fate at last; and now I fear it is
+shockingly mutilated. My poor father!
+
+DON JUAN. Hush! Listen! [Two great chords rolling on syncopated waves of
+sound break forth: D minor and its dominant: a round of dreadful joy to
+all musicians]. Ha! Mozart's statue music. It is your father. You had
+better disappear until I prepare him. [She vanishes].
+
+From the void comes a living statue of white marble, designed to
+represent a majestic old man. But he waives his majesty with infinite
+grace; walks with a feather-like step; and makes every wrinkle in his
+war worn visage brim over with holiday joyousness. To his sculptor he
+owes a perfectly trained figure, which he carries erect and trim; and
+the ends of his moustache curl up, elastic as watchsprings, giving him
+an air which, but for its Spanish dignity, would be called jaunty. He is
+on the pleasantest terms with Don Juan. His voice, save for a much more
+distinguished intonation, is so like the voice of Roebuck Ramsden that
+it calls attention to the fact that they are not unlike one another in
+spite of their very different fashion of shaving.
+
+DON JUAN. Ah, here you are, my friend. Why don't you learn to sing the
+splendid music Mozart has written for you?
+
+THE STATUE. Unluckily he has written it for a bass voice. Mine is a
+counter tenor. Well: have you repented yet?
+
+DON JUAN. I have too much consideration for you to repent, Don Gonzalo.
+If I did, you would have no excuse for coming from Heaven to argue with
+me.
+
+THE STATUE. True. Remain obdurate, my boy. I wish I had killed you, as I
+should have done but for an accident. Then I should have come here; and
+you would have had a statue and a reputation for piety to live up to.
+Any news?
+
+DON JUAN. Yes: your daughter is dead.
+
+THE STATUE. [puzzled] My daughter? [Recollecting] Oh! the one you were
+taken with. Let me see: what was her name?
+
+DON JUAN. Ana.
+
+THE STATUE. To be sure: Ana. A goodlooking girl, if I recollect aright.
+Have you warned Whatshisname--her husband?
+
+DON JUAN. My friend Ottavio? No: I have not seen him since Ana arrived.
+
+Ana comes indignantly to light.
+
+ANA. What does this mean? Ottavio here and YOUR friend! And you, father,
+have forgotten my name. You are indeed turned to stone.
+
+THE STATUE. My dear: I am so much more admired in marble than I ever was
+in my own person that I have retained the shape the sculptor gave me. He
+was one of the first men of his day: you must acknowledge that.
+
+ANA. Father! Vanity! personal vanity! from you!
+
+THE STATUE. Ah, you outlived that weakness, my daughter: you must be
+nearly 80 by this time. I was cut off (by an accident) in my 64th year,
+and am considerably your junior in consequence. Besides, my child,
+in this place, what our libertine friend here would call the farce of
+parental wisdom is dropped. Regard me, I beg, as a fellow creature, not
+as a father.
+
+ANA. You speak as this villain speaks.
+
+THE STATUE. Juan is a sound thinker, Ana. A bad fencer, but a sound
+thinker.
+
+ANA. [horror creeping upon her] I begin to understand. These are devils,
+mocking me. I had better pray.
+
+THE STATUE. [consoling her] No, no, no, my child: do not pray. If you
+do, you will throw away the main advantage of this place. Written over
+the gate here are the words "Leave every hope behind, ye who enter."
+Only think what a relief that is! For what is hope? A form of moral
+responsibility. Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no
+work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what
+you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but
+amuse yourself. [Don Juan sighs deeply]. You sigh, friend Juan; but if
+you dwelt in heaven, as I do, you would realize your advantages.
+
+DON JUAN. You are in good spirits to-day, Commander. You are positively
+brilliant. What is the matter?
+
+THE STATUE. I have come to a momentous decision, my boy. But first,
+where is our friend the Devil? I must consult him in the matter. And Ana
+would like to make his acquaintance, no doubt.
+
+ANA. You are preparing some torment for me.
+
+DON JUAN. All that is superstition, Ana. Reassure yourself. Remember:
+the devil is not so black as he is painted.
+
+THE STATUE. Let us give him a call.
+
+At the wave of the statue's hand the great chords roll out again but
+this time Mozart's music gets grotesquely adulterated with Gounod's.
+A scarlet halo begins to glow; and into it the Devil rises, very
+Mephistophelean, and not at all unlike Mendoza, though not so
+interesting. He looks older; is getting prematurely bald; and, in spite
+of an effusion of goodnature and friendliness, is peevish and sensitive
+when his advances are not reciprocated. He does not inspire much
+confidence in his powers of hard work or endurance, and is, on the
+whole, a disagreeably self-indulgent looking person; but he is clever
+and plausible, though perceptibly less well bred than the two other men,
+and enormously less vital than the woman.
+
+THE DEVIL. [heartily] Have I the pleasure of again receiving a visit
+from the illustrious Commander of Calatrava? [Coldly] Don Juan, your
+servant. [Politely] And a strange lady? My respects, Senora.
+
+ANA. Are you--
+
+THE DEVIL. [bowing] Lucifer, at your service.
+
+ANA. I shall go mad.
+
+THE DEVIL. [gallantly] Ah, Senora, do not be anxious. You come to us
+from earth, full of the prejudices and terrors of that priest-ridden
+place. You have heard me ill spoken of; and yet, believe me, I have
+hosts of friends there.
+
+ANA. Yes: you reign in their hearts.
+
+THE DEVIL. [shaking his head] You flatter me, Senora; but you are
+mistaken. It is true that the world cannot get on without me; but it
+never gives me credit for that: in its heart it mistrusts and hates me.
+Its sympathies are all with misery, with poverty, with starvation of the
+body and of the heart. I call on it to sympathize with joy, with love,
+with happiness, with beauty.
+
+DON JUAN. [nauseated] Excuse me: I am going. You know I cannot stand
+this.
+
+THE DEVIL. [angrily] Yes: I know that you are no friend of mine.
+
+THE STATUE. What harm is he doing you, Juan? It seems to me that he was
+talking excellent sense when you interrupted him.
+
+THE DEVIL. [warmly shaking the statue's hand] Thank you, my friend:
+thank you. You have always understood me: he has always disparaged and
+avoided me.
+
+DON JUAN. I have treated you with perfect courtesy.
+
+THE DEVIL. Courtesy! What is courtesy? I care nothing for mere courtesy.
+Give me warmth of heart, true sincerity, the bond of sympathy with love
+and joy--
+
+DON JUAN. You are making me ill.
+
+THE DEVIL. There! [Appealing to the statue] You hear, sir! Oh, by what
+irony of fate was this cold selfish egotist sent to my kingdom, and you
+taken to the icy mansions of the sky!
+
+THE STATUE. I can't complain. I was a hypocrite; and it served me right
+to be sent to heaven.
+
+THE DEVIL. Why, sir, do you not join us, and leave a sphere for which
+your temperament is too sympathetic, your heart too warm, your capacity
+for enjoyment too generous?
+
+THE STATUE. I have this day resolved to do so. In future, excellent Son
+of the Morning, I am yours. I have left Heaven for ever.
+
+THE DEVIL. [again grasping his hand] Ah, what an honor for me! What a
+triumph for our cause! Thank you, thank you. And now, my friend--I may
+call you so at last--could you not persuade HIM to take the place you
+have left vacant above?
+
+THE STATUE. [shaking his head] I cannot conscientiously recommend
+anybody with whom I am on friendly terms to deliberately make himself
+dull and uncomfortable.
+
+THE DEVIL. Of course not; but are you sure HE would be uncomfortable?
+Of course you know best: you brought him here originally; and we had the
+greatest hopes of him. His sentiments were in the best taste of our best
+people. You remember how he sang? [He begins to sing in a nasal operatic
+baritone, tremulous from an eternity of misuse in the French manner].
+
+     Vivan le femmine!
+     Viva il buon vino!
+
+THE STATUE. [taking up the tune an octave higher in his counter tenor]
+
+     Sostegno a gloria
+     D'umanita.
+
+THE DEVIL. Precisely. Well, he never sings for us now.
+
+DON JUAN. Do you complain of that? Hell is full of musical amateurs:
+music is the brandy of the damned. May not one lost soul be permitted to
+abstain?
+
+THE DEVIL. You dare blaspheme against the sublimest of the arts!
+
+DON JUAN. [with cold disgust] You talk like a hysterical woman fawning
+on a fiddler.
+
+THE DEVIL. I am not angry. I merely pity you. You have no soul; and you
+are unconscious of all that you lose. Now you, Senor Commander, are a
+born musician. How well you sing! Mozart would be delighted if he were
+still here; but he moped and went to heaven. Curious how these clever
+men, whom you would have supposed born to be popular here, have turned
+out social failures, like Don Juan!
+
+DON JUAN. I am really very sorry to be a social failure.
+
+THE DEVIL. Not that we don't admire your intellect, you know. We do. But
+I look at the matter from your own point of view. You don't get on with
+us. The place doesn't suit you. The truth is, you have--I won't say no
+heart; for we know that beneath all your affected cynicism you have a
+warm one.
+
+DON JUAN. [shrinking] Don't, please don't.
+
+THE DEVIL. [nettled] Well, you've no capacity for enjoyment. Will that
+satisfy you?
+
+DON JUAN. It is a somewhat less insufferable form of cant than the
+other. But if you'll allow me, I'll take refuge, as usual, in solitude.
+
+THE DEVIL. Why not take refuge in Heaven? That's the proper place for
+you. [To Ana] Come, Senora! could you not persuade him for his own good
+to try a change of air?
+
+ANA. But can he go to Heaven if he wants to?
+
+THE DEVIL. What's to prevent him?
+
+ANA. Can anybody--can I go to Heaven if I want to?
+
+THE DEVIL. [rather contemptuously] Certainly, if your taste lies that
+way.
+
+ANA. But why doesn't everybody go to Heaven, then?
+
+THE STATUE. [chuckling] I can tell you that, my dear. It's because
+heaven is the most angelically dull place in all creation: that's why.
+
+THE DEVIL. His excellency the Commander puts it with military bluntness;
+but the strain of living in Heaven is intolerable. There is a notion
+that I was turned out of it; but as a matter of fact nothing could have
+induced me to stay there. I simply left it and organized this place.
+
+THE STATUE. I don't wonder at it. Nobody could stand an eternity of
+heaven.
+
+THE DEVIL. Oh, it suits some people. Let us be just, Commander: it is
+a question of temperament. I don't admire the heavenly temperament: I
+don't understand it: I don't know that I particularly want to understand
+it; but it takes all sorts to make a universe. There is no accounting
+for tastes: there are people who like it. I think Don Juan would like
+it.
+
+DON JUAN. But--pardon my frankness--could you really go back there if
+you desired to; or are the grapes sour?
+
+THE DEVIL. Back there! I often go back there. Have you never read the
+book of Job? Have you any canonical authority for assuming that there is
+any barrier between our circle and the other one?
+
+ANA. But surely there is a great gulf fixed.
+
+THE DEVIL. Dear lady: a parable must not be taken literally. The gulf
+is the difference between the angelic and the diabolic temperament.
+What more impassable gulf could you have? Think of what you have seen
+on earth. There is no physical gulf between the philosopher's class room
+and the bull ring; but the bull fighters do not come to the class room
+for all that. Have you ever been in the country where I have the largest
+following--England? There they have great racecourses, and also concert
+rooms where they play the classical compositions of his Excellency's
+friend Mozart. Those who go to the racecourses can stay away from them
+and go to the classical concerts instead if they like: there is no law
+against it; for Englishmen never will be slaves: they are free to do
+whatever the Government and public opinion allows them to do. And the
+classical concert is admitted to be a higher, more cultivated, poetic,
+intellectual, ennobling place than the racecourse. But do the lovers of
+racing desert their sport and flock to the concert room? Not they.
+They would suffer there all the weariness the Commander has suffered in
+heaven. There is the great gulf of the parable between the two places. A
+mere physical gulf they could bridge; or at least I could bridge it for
+them (the earth is full of Devil's Bridges); but the gulf of dislike
+is impassable and eternal. And that is the only gulf that separates my
+friends here from those who are invidiously called the blest.
+
+ANA. I shall go to heaven at once.
+
+THE STATUE. My child; one word of warning first. Let me complete my
+friend Lucifer's similitude of the classical concert. At every one of
+those concerts in England you will find rows of weary people who are
+there, not because they really like classical music, but because they
+think they ought to like it. Well, there is the same thing in heaven.
+A number of people sit there in glory, not because they are happy, but
+because they think they owe it to their position to be in heaven. They
+are almost all English.
+
+THE DEVIL. Yes: the Southerners give it up and join me just as you
+have done. But the English really do not seem to know when they are
+thoroughly miserable. An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only
+uncomfortable.
+
+THE STATUE. In short, my daughter, if you go to Heaven without being
+naturally qualified for it, you will not enjoy yourself there.
+
+ANA. And who dares say that I am not naturally qualified for it? The
+most distinguished princes of the Church have never questioned it. I owe
+it to myself to leave this place at once.
+
+THE DEVIL. [offended] As you please, Senora. I should have expected
+better taste from you.
+
+ANA. Father: I shall expect you to come with me. You cannot stay here.
+What will people say?
+
+THE STATUE. People! Why, the best people are here--princes of the church
+and all. So few go to Heaven, and so many come here, that the blest,
+once called a heavenly host, are a continually dwindling minority. The
+saints, the fathers, the elect of long ago are the cranks, the faddists,
+the outsiders of to-day.
+
+THE DEVIL. It is true. From the beginning of my career I knew that I
+should win in the long run by sheer weight of public opinion, in spite
+of the long campaign of misrepresentation and calumny against me. At
+bottom the universe is a constitutional one; and with such a majority as
+mine I cannot be kept permanently out of office.
+
+DON JUAN. I think, Ana, you had better stay here.
+
+ANA. [jealously] You do not want me to go with you.
+
+DON JUAN. Surely you do not want to enter Heaven in the company of a
+reprobate like me.
+
+ANA. All souls are equally precious. You repent, do you not?
+
+DON JUAN. My dear Ana, you are silly. Do you suppose heaven is like
+earth, where people persuade themselves that what is done can be undone
+by repentance; that what is spoken can be unspoken by withdrawing it;
+that what is true can be annihilated by a general agreement to give it
+the lie? No: heaven is the home of the masters of reality: that is why I
+am going thither.
+
+ANA. Thank you: I am going to heaven for happiness. I have had quite
+enough of reality on earth.
+
+DON JUAN. Then you must stay here; for hell is the home of the unreal
+and of the seekers for happiness. It is the only refuge from heaven,
+which is, as I tell you, the home of the masters of reality, and from
+earth, which is the home of the slaves of reality. The earth is a
+nursery in which men and women play at being heros and heroines, saints
+and sinners; but they are dragged down from their fool's paradise by
+their bodies: hunger and cold and thirst, age and decay and disease,
+death above all, make them slaves of reality: thrice a day meals must
+be eaten and digested: thrice a century a new generation must be
+engendered: ages of faith, of romance, and of science are all driven at
+last to have but one prayer, "Make me a healthy animal." But here you
+escape the tyranny of the flesh; for here you are not an animal at all:
+you are a ghost, an appearance, an illusion, a convention, deathless,
+ageless: in a word, bodiless. There are no social questions here, no
+political questions, no religious questions, best of all, perhaps, no
+sanitary questions. Here you call your appearance beauty, your emotions
+love, your sentiments heroism, your aspirations virtue, just as you did
+on earth; but here there are no hard facts to contradict you, no ironic
+contrast of your needs with your pretensions, no human comedy, nothing
+but a perpetual romance, a universal melodrama. As our German friend put
+it in his poem, "the poetically nonsensical here is good sense; and the
+Eternal Feminine draws us ever upward and on"--without getting us a step
+farther. And yet you want to leave this paradise!
+
+ANA. But if Hell be so beautiful as this, how glorious must heaven be!
+
+The Devil, the Statue, and Don Juan all begin to speak at once in
+violent protest; then stop, abashed.
+
+DON JUAN. I beg your pardon.
+
+THE DEVIL. Not at all. I interrupted you.
+
+THE STATUE. You were going to say something.
+
+DON JUAN. After you, gentlemen.
+
+THE DEVIL. [to Don Juan] You have been so eloquent on the advantages of
+my dominions that I leave you to do equal justice to the drawbacks of
+the alternative establishment.
+
+DON JUAN. In Heaven, as I picture it, dear lady, you live and work
+instead of playing and pretending. You face things as they are; you
+escape nothing but glamor; and your steadfastness and your peril are
+your glory. If the play still goes on here and on earth, and all the
+world is a stage, Heaven is at least behind the scenes. But Heaven
+cannot be described by metaphor. Thither I shall go presently, because
+there I hope to escape at last from lies and from the tedious, vulgar
+pursuit of happiness, to spend my eons in contemplation--
+
+THE STATUE. Ugh!
+
+DON JUAN. Senor Commander: I do not blame your disgust: a picture
+gallery is a dull place for a blind man. But even as you enjoy the
+contemplation of such romantic mirages as beauty and pleasure; so would
+I enjoy the contemplation of that which interests me above all things
+namely, Life: the force that ever strives to attain greater power of
+contemplating itself. What made this brain of mine, do you think? Not
+the need to move my limbs; for a rat with half my brains moves as well
+as I. Not merely the need to do, but the need to know what I do, lest in
+my blind efforts to live I should be slaying myself.
+
+THE STATUE. You would have slain yourself in your blind efforts to fence
+but for my foot slipping, my friend.
+
+DON JUAN. Audacious ribald: your laughter will finish in hideous boredom
+before morning.
+
+THE STATUE. Ha ha! Do you remember how I frightened you when I said
+something like that to you from my pedestal in Seville? It sounds rather
+flat without my trombones.
+
+DON JUAN. They tell me it generally sounds flat with them, Commander.
+
+ANA. Oh, do not interrupt with these frivolities, father. Is there
+nothing in Heaven but contemplation, Juan?
+
+DON JUAN. In the Heaven I seek, no other joy. But there is the work of
+helping Life in its struggle upward. Think of how it wastes and scatters
+itself, how it raises up obstacles to itself and destroys itself in its
+ignorance and blindness. It needs a brain, this irresistible force, lest
+in its ignorance it should resist itself. What a piece of work is man!
+says the poet. Yes: but what a blunderer! Here is the highest miracle of
+organization yet attained by life, the most intensely alive thing that
+exists, the most conscious of all the organisms; and yet, how wretched
+are his brains! Stupidity made sordid and cruel by the realities learnt
+from toil and poverty: Imagination resolved to starve sooner than face
+these realities, piling up illusions to hide them, and calling itself
+cleverness, genius! And each accusing the other of its own defect:
+Stupidity accusing Imagination of folly, and Imagination accusing
+Stupidity of ignorance: whereas, alas! Stupidity has all the knowledge,
+and Imagination all the intelligence.
+
+THE DEVIL. And a pretty kettle of fish they make of it between them. Did
+I not say, when I was arranging that affair of Faust's, that all Man's
+reason has done for him is to make him beastlier than any beast. One
+splendid body is worth the brains of a hundred dyspeptic, flatulent
+philosophers.
+
+DON JUAN. You forget that brainless magnificence of body has been tried.
+Things immeasurably greater than man in every respect but brain have
+existed and perished. The megatherium, the icthyosaurus have paced the
+earth with seven-league steps and hidden the day with cloud vast wings.
+Where are they now? Fossils in museums, and so few and imperfect at
+that, that a knuckle bone or a tooth of one of them is prized beyond the
+lives of a thousand soldiers. These things lived and wanted to live; but
+for lack of brains they did not know how to carry out their purpose, and
+so destroyed themselves.
+
+THE DEVIL. And is Man any the less destroying himself for all this
+boasted brain of his? Have you walked up and down upon the earth lately?
+I have; and I have examined Man's wonderful inventions. And I tell you
+that in the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death
+he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all
+the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine. The peasant I tempt
+to-day eats and drinks what was eaten and drunk by the peasants of ten
+thousand years ago; and the house he lives in has not altered as much
+in a thousand centuries as the fashion of a lady's bonnet in a score of
+weeks. But when he goes out to slay, he carries a marvel of mechanism
+that lets loose at the touch of his finger all the hidden molecular
+energies, and leaves the javelin, the arrow, the blowpipe of his fathers
+far behind. In the arts of peace Man is a bungler. I have seen his
+cotton factories and the like, with machinery that a greedy dog could
+have invented if it had wanted money instead of food. I know his clumsy
+typewriters and bungling locomotives and tedious bicycles: they are toys
+compared to the Maxim gun, the submarine torpedo boat. There is nothing
+in Man's industrial machinery but his greed and sloth: his heart is in
+his weapons. This marvellous force of Life of which you boast is a force
+of Death: Man measures his strength by his destructiveness. What is
+his religion? An excuse for hating ME. What is his law? An excuse for
+hanging YOU. What is his morality? Gentility! an excuse for consuming
+without producing. What is his art? An excuse for gloating over pictures
+of slaughter. What are his politics? Either the worship of a despot
+because a despot can kill, or parliamentary cockfighting. I spent an
+evening lately in a certain celebrated legislature, and heard the
+pot lecturing the kettle for its blackness, and ministers answering
+questions. When I left I chalked up on the door the old nursery
+saying--"Ask no questions and you will be told no lies." I bought a
+sixpenny family magazine, and found it full of pictures of young men
+shooting and stabbing one another. I saw a man die: he was a London
+bricklayer's laborer with seven children. He left seventeen pounds
+club money; and his wife spent it all on his funeral and went into
+the workhouse with the children next day. She would not have spent
+sevenpence on her children's schooling: the law had to force her to let
+them be taught gratuitously; but on death she spent all she had. Their
+imagination glows, their energies rise up at the idea of death, these
+people: they love it; and the more horrible it is the more they enjoy
+it. Hell is a place far above their comprehension: they derive their
+notion of it from two of the greatest fools that ever lived, an Italian
+and an Englishman. The Italian described it as a place of mud, frost,
+filth, fire, and venomous serpents: all torture. This ass, when he was
+not lying about me, was maundering about some woman whom he saw once in
+the street. The Englishman described me as being expelled from Heaven
+by cannons and gunpowder; and to this day every Briton believes that
+the whole of his silly story is in the Bible. What else he says I do not
+know; for it is all in a long poem which neither I nor anyone else ever
+succeeded in wading through. It is the same in everything. The highest
+form of literature is the tragedy, a play in which everybody is
+murdered at the end. In the old chronicles you read of earthquakes and
+pestilences, and are told that these showed the power and majesty of God
+and the littleness of Man. Nowadays the chronicles describe battles.
+In a battle two bodies of men shoot at one another with bullets and
+explosive shells until one body runs away, when the others chase the
+fugitives on horseback and cut them to pieces as they fly. And this, the
+chronicle concludes, shows the greatness and majesty of empires, and the
+littleness of the vanquished. Over such battles the people run about
+the streets yelling with delight, and egg their Governments on to spend
+hundreds of millions of money in the slaughter, whilst the strongest
+Ministers dare not spend an extra penny in the pound against the poverty
+and pestilence through which they themselves daily walk. I could give
+you a thousand instances; but they all come to the same thing: the power
+that governs the earth is not the power of Life but of Death; and the
+inner need that has nerved Life to the effort of organizing itself into
+the human being is not the need for higher life but for a more efficient
+engine of destruction. The plague, the famine, the earthquake, the
+tempest were too spasmodic in their action; the tiger and crocodile were
+too easily satiated and not cruel enough: something more constantly,
+more ruthlessly, more ingeniously destructive was needed; and that
+something was Man, the inventor of the rack, the stake, the gallows,
+and the electrocutor; of the sword and gun; above all, of justice, duty,
+patriotism and all the other isms by which even those who are clever
+enough to be humanely disposed are persuaded to become the most
+destructive of all the destroyers.
+
+DON JUAN. Pshaw! all this is old. Your weak side, my diabolic friend,
+is that you have always been a gull: you take Man at his own valuation.
+Nothing would flatter him more than your opinion of him. He loves to
+think of himself as bold and bad. He is neither one nor the other: he
+is only a coward. Call him tyrant, murderer, pirate, bully; and he will
+adore you, and swagger about with the consciousness of having the blood
+of the old sea kings in his veins. Call him liar and thief; and he will
+only take an action against you for libel. But call him coward; and
+he will go mad with rage: he will face death to outface that stinging
+truth. Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for
+his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is
+his cowardice. Yet all his civilization is founded on his cowardice, on
+his abject tameness, which he calls his respectability. There are limits
+to what a mule or an ass will stand; but Man will suffer himself to be
+degraded until his vileness becomes so loathsome to his oppressors that
+they themselves are forced to reform it.
+
+THE DEVIL. Precisely. And these are the creatures in whom you discover
+what you call a Life Force!
+
+DON JUAN. Yes; for now comes the most surprising part of the whole
+business.
+
+THE STATUE. What's that?
+
+DON JUAN. Why, that you can make any of these cowards brave by simply
+putting an idea into his head.
+
+THE STATUE. Stuff! As an old soldier I admit the cowardice: it's as
+universal as sea sickness, and matters just as little. But that about
+putting an idea into a man's head is stuff and nonsense. In a battle all
+you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that
+it's more dangerous to lose than to win.
+
+DON JUAN. That is perhaps why battles are so useless. But men never
+really overcome fear until they imagine they are fighting to further a
+universal purpose--fighting for an idea, as they call it. Why was the
+Crusader braver than the pirate? Because he fought, not for himself, but
+for the Cross. What force was it that met him with a valor as reckless
+as his own? The force of men who fought, not for themselves, but for
+Islam. They took Spain from us, though we were fighting for our very
+hearths and homes; but when we, too, fought for that mighty idea, a
+Catholic Church, we swept them back to Africa.
+
+THE DEVIL. [ironically] What! you a Catholic, Senor Don Juan! A devotee!
+My congratulations.
+
+THE STATUE. [seriously] Come come! as a soldier, I can listen to nothing
+against the Church.
+
+DON JUAN. Have no fear, Commander: this idea of a Catholic Church will
+survive Islam, will survive the Cross, will survive even that vulgar
+pageant of incompetent schoolboyish gladiators which you call the Army.
+
+THE STATUE. Juan: you will force me to call you to account for this.
+
+DON JUAN. Useless: I cannot fence. Every idea for which Man will die
+will be a Catholic idea. When the Spaniard learns at last that he is no
+better than the Saracen, and his prophet no better than Mahomet, he will
+arise, more Catholic than ever, and die on a barricade across the filthy
+slum he starves in, for universal liberty and equality.
+
+THE STATUE. Bosh!
+
+DON JUAN. What you call bosh is the only thing men dare die for.
+Later on, Liberty will not be Catholic enough: men will die for human
+perfection, to which they will sacrifice all their liberty gladly.
+
+THE DEVIL. Ay: they will never be at a loss for an excuse for killing
+one another.
+
+DON JUAN. What of that? It is not death that matters, but the fear of
+death. It is not killing and dying that degrade us, but base living, and
+accepting the wages and profits of degradation. Better ten dead men than
+one live slave or his master. Men shall yet rise up, father against son
+and brother against brother, and kill one another for the great Catholic
+idea of abolishing slavery.
+
+THE DEVIL. Yes, when the Liberty and Equality of which you prate shall
+have made free white Christians cheaper in the labor market than by
+auction at the block.
+
+DON JUAN. Never fear! the white laborer shall have his turn too. But
+I am not now defending the illusory forms the great ideas take. I am
+giving you examples of the fact that this creature Man, who in his own
+selfish affairs is a coward to the backbone, will fight for an idea like
+a hero. He may be abject as a citizen; but he is dangerous as a fanatic.
+He can only be enslaved whilst he is spiritually weak enough to listen
+to reason. I tell you, gentlemen, if you can show a man a piece of what
+he now calls God's work to do, and what he will later on call by many
+new names, you can make him entirely reckless of the consequences to
+himself personally.
+
+ANA. Yes: he shirks all his responsibilities, and leaves his wife to
+grapple with them.
+
+THE STATUE. Well said, daughter. Do not let him talk you out of your
+common sense.
+
+THE DEVIL. Alas! Senor Commander, now that we have got on to the subject
+of Woman, he will talk more than ever. However, I confess it is for me
+the one supremely interesting subject.
+
+DON JUAN. To a woman, Senora, man's duties and responsibilities begin
+and end with the task of getting bread for her children. To her, Man is
+only a means to the end of getting children and rearing them.
+
+ANA. Is that your idea of a woman's mind? I call it cynical and
+disgusting materialism.
+
+DON JUAN. Pardon me, Ana: I said nothing about a woman's whole mind. I
+spoke of her view of Man as a separate sex. It is no more cynical than
+her view of herself as above all things a Mother. Sexually, Woman is
+Nature's contrivance for perpetuating its highest achievement. Sexually,
+Man is Woman's contrivance for fulfilling Nature's behest in the most
+economical way. She knows by instinct that far back in the evolutional
+process she invented him, differentiated him, created him in order to
+produce something better than the single-sexed process can produce.
+Whilst he fulfils the purpose for which she made him, he is welcome to
+his dreams, his follies, his ideals, his heroisms, provided that the
+keystone of them all is the worship of woman, of motherhood, of the
+family, of the hearth. But how rash and dangerous it was to invent a
+separate creature whose sole function was her own impregnation! For mark
+what has happened. First, Man has multiplied on her hands until there
+are as many men as women; so that she has been unable to employ for her
+purposes more than a fraction of the immense energy she has left at
+his disposal by saving him the exhausting labor of gestation. This
+superfluous energy has gone to his brain and to his muscle. He has
+become too strong to be controlled by her bodily, and too imaginative
+and mentally vigorous to be content with mere self-reproduction. He has
+created civilization without consulting her, taking her domestic labor
+for granted as the foundation of it.
+
+ANA. THAT is true, at all events.
+
+THE DEVIL. Yes; and this civilization! what is it, after all?
+
+DON JUAN. After all, an excellent peg to hang your cynical commonplaces
+on; but BEFORE all, it is an attempt on Man's part to make himself
+something more than the mere instrument of Woman's purpose. So far, the
+result of Life's continual effort not only to maintain itself, but to
+achieve higher and higher organization and completer self-consciousness,
+is only, at best, a doubtful campaign between its forces and those of
+Death and Degeneration. The battles in this campaign are mere blunders,
+mostly won, like actual military battles, in spite of the commanders.
+
+THE STATUE. That is a dig at me. No matter: go on, go on.
+
+DON JUAN. It is a dig at a much higher power than you, Commander. Still,
+you must have noticed in your profession that even a stupid general can
+win battles when the enemy's general is a little stupider.
+
+THE STATUE. [very seriously] Most true, Juan, most true. Some donkeys
+have amazing luck.
+
+DON JUAN. Well, the Life Force is stupid; but it is not so stupid as the
+forces of Death and Degeneration. Besides, these are in its pay all
+the time. And so Life wins, after a fashion. What mere copiousness of
+fecundity can supply and mere greed preserve, we possess. The survival
+of whatever form of civilization can produce the best rifle and the best
+fed riflemen is assured.
+
+THE DEVIL. Exactly! the survival, not of the most effective means of
+Life but of the most effective means of Death. You always come back to
+my point, in spite of your wrigglings and evasions and sophistries, not
+to mention the intolerable length of your speeches.
+
+DON JUAN. Oh come! who began making long speeches? However, if I overtax
+your intellect, you can leave us and seek the society of love and beauty
+and the rest of your favorite boredoms.
+
+THE DEVIL. [much offended] This is not fair, Don Juan, and not civil. I
+am also on the intellectual plane. Nobody can appreciate it more than
+I do. I am arguing fairly with you, and, I think, utterly refuting you.
+Let us go on for another hour if you like.
+
+DON JUAN. Good: let us.
+
+THE STATUE. Not that I see any prospect of your coming to any point in
+particular, Juan. Still, since in this place, instead of merely killing
+time we have to kill eternity, go ahead by all means.
+
+DON JUAN. [somewhat impatiently] My point, you marbleheaded old
+masterpiece, is only a step ahead of you. Are we agreed that Life is a
+force which has made innumerable experiments in organizing itself; that
+the mammoth and the man, the mouse and the megatherium, the flies and
+the fleas and the Fathers of the Church, are all more or less successful
+attempts to build up that raw force into higher and higher individuals,
+the ideal individual being omnipotent, omniscient, infallible, and
+withal completely, unilludedly self-conscious: in short, a god?
+
+THE DEVIL. I agree, for the sake of argument.
+
+THE STATUE. I agree, for the sake of avoiding argument.
+
+ANA. I most emphatically disagree as regards the Fathers of the Church;
+and I must beg you not to drag them into the argument.
+
+DON JUAN. I did so purely for the sake of alliteration, Ana; and I
+shall make no further allusion to them. And now, since we are, with that
+exception, agreed so far, will you not agree with me further that Life
+has not measured the success of its attempts at godhead by the beauty or
+bodily perfection of the result, since in both these respects the birds,
+as our friend Aristophanes long ago pointed out, are so extraordinarily
+superior, with their power of flight and their lovely plumage, and,
+may I add, the touching poetry of their loves and nestings, that it is
+inconceivable that Life, having once produced them, should, if love
+and beauty were her object, start off on another line and labor at the
+clumsy elephant and the hideous ape, whose grandchildren we are?
+
+ANA. Aristophanes was a heathen; and you, Juan, I am afraid, are very
+little better.
+
+THE DEVIL. You conclude, then, that Life was driving at clumsiness and
+ugliness?
+
+DON JUAN. No, perverse devil that you are, a thousand times no. Life
+was driving at brains--at its darling object: an organ by which it can
+attain not only self-consciousness but self-understanding.
+
+THE STATUE. This is metaphysics, Juan. Why the devil should--[to the
+Devil] I BEG your pardon.
+
+THE DEVIL. Pray don't mention it. I have always regarded the use of my
+name to secure additional emphasis as a high compliment to me. It is
+quite at your service, Commander.
+
+THE STATUE. Thank you: that's very good of you. Even in heaven, I never
+quite got out of my old military habits of speech. What I was going to
+ask Juan was why Life should bother itself about getting a brain. Why
+should it want to understand itself? Why not be content to enjoy itself?
+
+DON JUAN. Without a brain, Commander, you would enjoy yourself without
+knowing it, and so lose all the fun.
+
+THE STATUE. True, most true. But I am quite content with brain enough to
+know that I'm enjoying myself. I don't want to understand why. In
+fact, I'd rather not. My experience is that one's pleasures don't bear
+thinking about.
+
+DON JUAN. That is why intellect is so unpopular. But to Life, the force
+behind the Man, intellect is a necessity, because without it he blunders
+into death. Just as Life, after ages of struggle, evolved that wonderful
+bodily organ the eye, so that the living organism could see where it
+was going and what was coming to help or threaten it, and thus avoid
+a thousand dangers that formerly slew it, so it is evolving to-day a
+mind's eye that shall see, not the physical world, but the purpose of
+Life, and thereby enable the individual to work for that purpose instead
+of thwarting and baffling it by setting up shortsighted personal aims as
+at present. Even as it is, only one sort of man has ever been happy, has
+ever been universally respected among all the conflicts of interests and
+illusions.
+
+THE STATUE. You mean the military man.
+
+DON JUAN. Commander: I do not mean the military man. When the military
+man approaches, the world locks up its spoons and packs off its
+womankind. No: I sing, not arms and the hero, but the philosophic man:
+he who seeks in contemplation to discover the inner will of the world,
+in invention to discover the means of fulfilling that will, and in
+action to do that will by the so-discovered means. Of all other sorts
+of men I declare myself tired. They're tedious failures. When I was on
+earth, professors of all sorts prowled round me feeling for an unhealthy
+spot in me on which they could fasten. The doctors of medicine bade me
+consider what I must do to save my body, and offered me quack cures for
+imaginary diseases. I replied that I was not a hypochondriac; so they
+called me Ignoramus and went their way. The doctors of divinity bade
+me consider what I must do to save my soul; but I was not a spiritual
+hypochondriac any more than a bodily one, and would not trouble myself
+about that either; so they called me Atheist and went their way. After
+them came the politician, who said there was only one purpose in Nature,
+and that was to get him into parliament. I told him I did not care
+whether he got into parliament or not; so he called me Mugwump and went
+his way. Then came the romantic man, the Artist, with his love songs and
+his paintings and his poems; and with him I had great delight for many
+years, and some profit; for I cultivated my senses for his sake; and
+his songs taught me to hear better, his paintings to see better, and
+his poems to feel more deeply. But he led me at last into the worship of
+Woman.
+
+ANA. Juan!
+
+DON JUAN. Yes: I came to believe that in her voice was all the music of
+the song, in her face all the beauty of the painting, and in her soul
+all the emotion of the poem.
+
+ANA. And you were disappointed, I suppose. Well, was it her fault that
+you attributed all these perfections to her?
+
+DON JUAN. Yes, partly. For with a wonderful instinctive cunning, she
+kept silent and allowed me to glorify her; to mistake my own visions,
+thoughts, and feelings for hers. Now my friend the romantic man was
+often too poor or too timid to approach those women who were beautiful
+or refined enough to seem to realize his ideal; and so he went to his
+grave believing in his dream. But I was more favored by nature and
+circumstance. I was of noble birth and rich; and when my person did
+not please, my conversation flattered, though I generally found myself
+fortunate in both.
+
+THE STATUE. Coxcomb!
+
+DON JUAN. Yes; but even my coxcombry pleased. Well, I found that when I
+had touched a woman's imagination, she would allow me to persuade myself
+that she loved me; but when my suit was granted she never said "I am
+happy: my love is satisfied": she always said, first, "At last, the
+barriers are down," and second, "When will you come again?"
+
+ANA. That is exactly what men say.
+
+DON JUAN. I protest I never said it. But all women say it. Well, these
+two speeches always alarmed me; for the first meant that the lady's
+impulse had been solely to throw down my fortifications and gain my
+citadel; and the second openly announced that henceforth she regarded me
+as her property, and counted my time as already wholly at her disposal.
+
+THE DEVIL. That is where your want of heart came in.
+
+THE STATUE. [shaking his head] You shouldn't repeat what a woman says,
+Juan.
+
+ANA. [severely] It should be sacred to you.
+
+THE STATUE. Still, they certainly do always say it. I never minded the
+barriers; but there was always a slight shock about the other, unless
+one was very hard hit indeed.
+
+DON JUAN. Then the lady, who had been happy and idle enough before,
+became anxious, preoccupied with me, always intriguing, conspiring,
+pursuing, watching, waiting, bent wholly on making sure of her prey--I
+being the prey, you understand. Now this was not what I had bargained
+for. It may have been very proper and very natural; but it was not
+music, painting, poetry and joy incarnated in a beautiful woman. I ran
+away from it. I ran away from it very often: in fact I became famous for
+running away from it.
+
+ANA. Infamous, you mean.
+
+DON JUAN. I did not run away from you. Do you blame me for running away
+from the others?
+
+ANA. Nonsense, man. You are talking to a woman of 77 now. If you had had
+the chance, you would have run away from me too--if I had let you. You
+would not have found it so easy with me as with some of the others. If
+men will not be faithful to their home and their duties, they must be
+made to be. I daresay you all want to marry lovely incarnations of music
+and painting and poetry. Well, you can't have them, because they
+don't exist. If flesh and blood is not good enough for you you must
+go without: that's all. Women have to put up with flesh-and-blood
+husbands--and little enough of that too, sometimes; and you will have to
+put up with flesh-and-blood wives. The Devil looks dubious. The Statue
+makes a wry face. I see you don't like that, any of you; but it's true,
+for all that; so if you don't like it you can lump it.
+
+DON JUAN. My dear lady, you have put my whole case against romance into
+a few sentences. That is just why I turned my back on the romantic man
+with the artist nature, as he called his infatuation. I thanked him
+for teaching me to use my eyes and ears; but I told him that his beauty
+worshipping and happiness hunting and woman idealizing was not worth a
+dump as a philosophy of life; so he called me Philistine and went his
+way.
+
+ANA. It seems that Woman taught you something, too, with all her
+defects.
+
+DON JUAN. She did more: she interpreted all the other teaching for me.
+Ah, my friends, when the barriers were down for the first time, what
+an astounding illumination! I had been prepared for infatuation, for
+intoxication, for all the illusions of love's young dream; and lo! never
+was my perception clearer, nor my criticism more ruthless. The most
+jealous rival of my mistress never saw every blemish in her more keenly
+than I. I was not duped: I took her without chloroform.
+
+ANA. But you did take her.
+
+DON JUAN. That was the revelation. Up to that moment I had never lost
+the sense of being my own master; never consciously taken a single step
+until my reason had examined and approved it. I had come to believe that
+I was a purely rational creature: a thinker! I said, with the foolish
+philosopher, "I think; therefore I am." It was Woman who taught me to
+say "I am; therefore I think." And also "I would think more; therefore I
+must be more."
+
+THE STATUE. This is extremely abstract and metaphysical, Juan. If you
+would stick to the concrete, and put your discoveries in the form
+of entertaining anecdotes about your adventures with women, your
+conversation would be easier to follow.
+
+DON JUAN. Bah! what need I add? Do you not understand that when I stood
+face to face with Woman, every fibre in my clear critical brain warned
+me to spare her and save myself. My morals said No. My conscience said
+No. My chivalry and pity for her said No. My prudent regard for myself
+said No. My ear, practised on a thousand songs and symphonies; my eye,
+exercised on a thousand paintings; tore her voice, her features, her
+color to shreds. I caught all those tell-tale resemblances to her father
+and mother by which I knew what she would be like in thirty years time.
+I noted the gleam of gold from a dead tooth in the laughing mouth: I
+made curious observations of the strange odors of the chemistry of the
+nerves. The visions of my romantic reveries, in which I had trod the
+plains of heaven with a deathless, ageless creature of coral and ivory,
+deserted me in that supreme hour. I remembered them and desperately
+strove to recover their illusion; but they now seemed the emptiest of
+inventions: my judgment was not to be corrupted: my brain still said No
+on every issue. And whilst I was in the act of framing my excuse to the
+lady, Life seized me and threw me into her arms as a sailor throws a
+scrap of fish into the mouth of a seabird.
+
+THE STATUE. You might as well have gone without thinking such a lot
+about it, Juan. You are like all the clever men: you have more brains
+than is good for you.
+
+THE DEVIL. And were you not the happier for the experience, Senor Don
+Juan?
+
+DON JUAN. The happier, no: the wiser, yes. That moment introduced me for
+the first time to myself, and, through myself, to the world. I saw then
+how useless it is to attempt to impose conditions on the irresistible
+force of Life; to preach prudence, careful selection, virtue, honor,
+chastity--
+
+ANA. Don Juan: a word against chastity is an insult to me.
+
+DON JUAN. I say nothing against your chastity, Senora, since it took the
+form of a husband and twelve children. What more could you have done had
+you been the most abandoned of women?
+
+ANA. I could have had twelve husbands and no children that's what I
+could have done, Juan. And let me tell you that that would have made all
+the difference to the earth which I replenished.
+
+THE STATUE. Bravo Ana! Juan: you are floored, quelled, annihilated.
+
+DON JUAN. No; for though that difference is the true essential
+difference--Dona Ana has, I admit, gone straight to the real point--yet
+it is not a difference of love or chastity, or even constancy; for
+twelve children by twelve different husbands would have replenished the
+earth perhaps more effectively. Suppose my friend Ottavio had died when
+you were thirty, you would never have remained a widow: you were too
+beautiful. Suppose the successor of Ottavio had died when you were
+forty, you would still have been irresistible; and a woman who marries
+twice marries three times if she becomes free to do so. Twelve lawful
+children borne by one highly respectable lady to three different fathers
+is not impossible nor condemned by public opinion. That such a lady may
+be more law abiding than the poor girl whom we used to spurn into the
+gutter for bearing one unlawful infant is no doubt true; but dare you
+say she is less self-indulgent?
+
+ANA. She is less virtuous: that is enough for me.
+
+DON JUAN. In that case, what is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the
+married? Let us face the facts, dear Ana. The Life Force respects
+marriage only because marriage is a contrivance of its own to secure
+the greatest number of children and the closest care of them. For honor,
+chastity and all the rest of your moral figments it cares not a rap.
+Marriage is the most licentious of human institutions--
+
+ANA. Juan!
+
+THE STATUE. [protesting] Really!--
+
+DON JUAN. [determinedly] I say the most licentious of human
+institutions: that is the secret of its popularity. And a woman seeking
+a husband is the most unscrupulous of all the beasts of prey. The
+confusion of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the
+conscience of the human race than any other single error. Come, Ana!
+do not look shocked: you know better than any of us that marriage is
+a mantrap baited with simulated accomplishments and delusive
+idealizations. When your sainted mother, by dint of scoldings and
+punishments, forced you to learn how to play half a dozen pieces on the
+spinet which she hated as much as you did--had she any other purpose
+than to delude your suitors into the belief that your husband would have
+in his home an angel who would fill it with melody, or at least play him
+to sleep after dinner? You married my friend Ottavio: well, did you ever
+open the spinet from the hour when the Church united him to you?
+
+ANA. You are a fool, Juan. A young married woman has something else to
+do than sit at the spinet without any support for her back; so she gets
+out of the habit of playing.
+
+DON JUAN. Not if she loves music. No: believe me, she only throws away
+the bait when the bird is in the net.
+
+ANA. [bitterly] And men, I suppose, never throw off the mask when
+their bird is in the net. The husband never becomes negligent, selfish,
+brutal--oh never!
+
+DON JUAN. What do these recriminations prove, Ana? Only that the hero is
+as gross an imposture as the heroine.
+
+ANA. It is all nonsense: most marriages are perfectly comfortable.
+
+DON JUAN. "Perfectly" is a strong expression, Ana. What you mean is that
+sensible people make the best of one another. Send me to the galleys and
+chain me to the felon whose number happens to be next before mine; and I
+must accept the inevitable and make the best of the companionship. Many
+such companionships, they tell me, are touchingly affectionate; and
+most are at least tolerably friendly. But that does not make a chain
+a desirable ornament nor the galleys an abode of bliss. Those who talk
+most about the blessings of marriage and the constancy of its vows
+are the very people who declare that if the chain were broken and
+the prisoners left free to choose, the whole social fabric would fly
+asunder. You cannot have the argument both ways. If the prisoner is
+happy, why lock him in? If he is not, why pretend that he is?
+
+ANA. At all events, let me take an old woman's privilege again, and tell
+you flatly that marriage peoples the world and debauchery does not.
+
+DON JUAN. How if a time comes when this shall cease to be true? Do you
+not know that where there is a will there is a way--that whatever Man
+really wishes to do he will finally discover a means of doing? Well,
+you have done your best, you virtuous ladies, and others of your way
+of thinking, to bend Man's mind wholly towards honorable love as the
+highest good, and to understand by honorable love romance and beauty
+and happiness in the possession of beautiful, refined, delicate,
+affectionate women. You have taught women to value their own youth,
+health, shapeliness, and refinement above all things. Well, what place
+have squalling babies and household cares in this exquisite paradise of
+the senses and emotions? Is it not the inevitable end of it all that the
+human will shall say to the human brain: Invent me a means by which I
+can have love, beauty, romance, emotion, passion without their wretched
+penalties, their expenses, their worries, their trials, their illnesses
+and agonies and risks of death, their retinue of servants and nurses and
+doctors and schoolmasters.
+
+THE DEVIL. All this, Senor Don Juan, is realized here in my realm.
+
+DON JUAN. Yes, at the cost of death. Man will not take it at that price:
+he demands the romantic delights of your hell whilst he is still on
+earth. Well, the means will be found: the brain will not fail when the
+will is in earnest. The day is coming when great nations will find their
+numbers dwindling from census to census; when the six roomed villa will
+rise in price above the family mansion; when the viciously reckless poor
+and the stupidly pious rich will delay the extinction of the race only
+by degrading it; whilst the boldly prudent, the thriftily selfish and
+ambitious, the imaginative and poetic, the lovers of money and solid
+comfort, the worshippers of success, art, and of love, will all oppose
+to the Force of Life the device of sterility.
+
+THE STATUE. That is all very eloquent, my young friend; but if you had
+lived to Ana's age, or even to mine, you would have learned that the
+people who get rid of the fear of poverty and children and all the other
+family troubles, and devote themselves to having a good time of it,
+only leave their minds free for the fear of old age and ugliness and
+impotence and death. The childless laborer is more tormented by his
+wife's idleness and her constant demands for amusement and distraction
+than he could be by twenty children; and his wife is more wretched than
+he. I have had my share of vanity; for as a young man I was admired by
+women; and as a statue I am praised by art critics. But I confess that
+had I found nothing to do in the world but wallow in these delights I
+should have cut my throat. When I married Ana's mother--or perhaps,
+to be strictly correct, I should rather say when I at last gave in and
+allowed Ana's mother to marry me--I knew that I was planting thorns
+in my pillow, and that marriage for me, a swaggering young officer
+thitherto unvanquished, meant defeat and capture.
+
+ANA. [scandalized] Father!
+
+THE STATUE. I am sorry to shock you, my love; but since Juan has
+stripped every rag of decency from the discussion I may as well tell the
+frozen truth.
+
+ANA. Hmf! I suppose I was one of the thorns.
+
+THE STATUE. By no means: you were often a rose. You see, your mother had
+most of the trouble you gave.
+
+DON JUAN. Then may I ask, Commander, why you have left Heaven to come
+here and wallow, as you express it, in sentimental beatitudes which you
+confess would once have driven you to cut your throat?
+
+THE STATUE. [struck by this] Egad, that's true.
+
+THE DEVIL. [alarmed] What! You are going back from your word. [To
+Don Juan] And all your philosophizing has been nothing but a mask for
+proselytizing! [To the Statue] Have you forgotten already the hideous
+dulness from which I am offering you a refuge here? [To Don Juan] And
+does your demonstration of the approaching sterilization and extinction
+of mankind lead to anything better than making the most of those
+pleasures of art and love which you yourself admit refined you, elevated
+you, developed you?
+
+DON JUAN. I never demonstrated the extinction of mankind. Life cannot
+will its own extinction either in its blind amorphous state or in any
+of the forms into which it has organized itself. I had not finished when
+His Excellency interrupted me.
+
+THE STATUE. I begin to doubt whether you ever will finish, my friend.
+You are extremely fond of hearing yourself talk.
+
+DON JUAN. True; but since you have endured so much you may as well
+endure to the end. Long before this sterilization which I described
+becomes more than a clearly foreseen possibility, the reaction will
+begin. The great central purpose of breeding the race, ay, breeding it
+to heights now deemed superhuman: that purpose which is now hidden in a
+mephitic cloud of love and romance and prudery and fastidiousness, will
+break through into clear sunlight as a purpose no longer to be confused
+with the gratification of personal fancies, the impossible realization
+of boys' and girls' dreams of bliss, or the need of older people for
+companionship or money. The plain-spoken marriage services of the
+vernacular Churches will no longer be abbreviated and half suppressed
+as indelicate. The sober decency, earnestness and authority of their
+declaration of the real purpose of marriage will be honored
+and accepted, whilst their romantic vowings and pledgings and
+until-death-do-us-partings and the like will be expunged as unbearable
+frivolities. Do my sex the justice to admit, Senora, that we have always
+recognized that the sex relation is not a personal or friendly relation
+at all.
+
+ANA. Not a personal or friendly relation! What relation is more
+personal? more sacred? more holy?
+
+DON JUAN. Sacred and holy, if you like, Ana, but not personally
+friendly. Your relation to God is sacred and holy: dare you call it
+personally friendly? In the sex relation the universal creative energy,
+of which the parties are both the helpless agents, over-rides and
+sweeps away all personal considerations and dispenses with all personal
+relations. The pair may be utter strangers to one another, speaking
+different languages, differing in race and color, in age and
+disposition, with no bond between them but a possibility of that
+fecundity for the sake of which the Life Force throws them into one
+another's arms at the exchange of a glance. Do we not recognize this by
+allowing marriages to be made by parents without consulting the woman?
+Have you not often expressed your disgust at the immorality of the
+English nation, in which women and men of noble birth become acquainted
+and court each other like peasants? And how much does even the peasant
+know of his bride or she of him before he engages himself? Why, you
+would not make a man your lawyer or your family doctor on so slight an
+acquaintance as you would fall in love with and marry him!
+
+ANA. Yes, Juan: we know the libertine's philosophy. Always ignore the
+consequences to the woman.
+
+DON JUAN. The consequences, yes: they justify her fierce grip of the
+man. But surely you do not call that attachment a sentimental one. As
+well call the policeman's attachment to his prisoner a love relation.
+
+ANA. You see you have to confess that marriage is necessary, though,
+according to you, love is the slightest of all the relations.
+
+DON JUAN. How do you know that it is not the greatest of all the
+relations? far too great to be a personal matter. Could your father have
+served his country if he had refused to kill any enemy of Spain unless
+he personally hated him? Can a woman serve her country if she refuses to
+marry any man she does not personally love? You know it is not so:
+the woman of noble birth marries as the man of noble birth fights, on
+political and family grounds, not on personal ones.
+
+THE STATUE. [impressed] A very clever point that, Juan: I must think it
+over. You are really full of ideas. How did you come to think of this
+one?
+
+DON JUAN. I learnt it by experience. When I was on earth, and made those
+proposals to ladies which, though universally condemned, have made me
+so interesting a hero of legend, I was not infrequently met in some such
+way as this. The lady would say that she would countenance my advances,
+provided they were honorable. On inquiring what that proviso meant, I
+found that it meant that I proposed to get possession of her property if
+she had any, or to undertake her support for life if she had not; that I
+desired her continual companionship, counsel and conversation to the
+end of my days, and would bind myself under penalties to be always
+enraptured by them; and, above all, that I would turn my back on all
+other women for ever for her sake. I did not object to these conditions
+because they were exorbitant and inhuman: it was their extraordinary
+irrelevance that prostrated me. I invariably replied with perfect
+frankness that I had never dreamt of any of these things; that unless
+the lady's character and intellect were equal or superior to my own, her
+conversation must degrade and her counsel mislead me; that her constant
+companionship might, for all I knew, become intolerably tedious to me;
+that I could not answer for my feelings for a week in advance, much
+less to the end of my life; that to cut me off from all natural and
+unconstrained relations with the rest of my fellow creatures would
+narrow and warp me if I submitted to it, and, if not, would bring me
+under the curse of clandestinity; that, finally, my proposals to her
+were wholly unconnected with any of these matters, and were the outcome
+of a perfectly simple impulse of my manhood towards her womanhood.
+
+ANA. You mean that it was an immoral impulse.
+
+DON JUAN. Nature, my dear lady, is what you call immoral. I blush for
+it; but I cannot help it. Nature is a pandar, Time a wrecker, and Death
+a murderer. I have always preferred to stand up to those facts and build
+institutions on their recognition. You prefer to propitiate the three
+devils by proclaiming their chastity, their thrift, and their loving
+kindness; and to base your institutions on these flatteries. Is it any
+wonder that the institutions do not work smoothly?
+
+THE STATUE. What used the ladies to say, Juan?
+
+DON JUAN. Oh, come! Confidence for confidence. First tell me what you
+used to say to the ladies.
+
+THE STATUE. I! Oh, I swore that I would be faithful to the death; that
+I should die if they refused me; that no woman could ever be to me what
+she was--
+
+ANA. She? Who?
+
+THE STATUE. Whoever it happened to be at the time, my dear. I had
+certain things I always said. One of them was that even when I was
+eighty, one white hair of the woman I loved would make me tremble more
+than the thickest gold tress from the most beautiful young head. Another
+was that I could not bear the thought of anyone else being the mother of
+my children.
+
+DON JUAN. [revolted] You old rascal!
+
+THE STATUE. [Stoutly] Not a bit; for I really believed it with all
+my soul at the moment. I had a heart: not like you. And it was this
+sincerity that made me successful.
+
+DON JUAN. Sincerity! To be fool enough to believe a ramping, stamping,
+thumping lie: that is what you call sincerity! To be so greedy for
+a woman that you deceive yourself in your eagerness to deceive her:
+sincerity, you call it!
+
+THE STATUE. Oh, damn your sophistries! I was a man in love, not a
+lawyer. And the women loved me for it, bless them!
+
+DON JUAN. They made you think so. What will you say when I tell you that
+though I played the lawyer so callously, they made me think so too?
+I also had my moments of infatuation in which I gushed nonsense and
+believed it. Sometimes the desire to give pleasure by saying beautiful
+things so rose in me on the flood of emotion that I said them
+recklessly. At other times I argued against myself with a devilish
+coldness that drew tears. But I found it just as hard to escape in the
+one case as in the others. When the lady's instinct was set on me, there
+was nothing for it but lifelong servitude or flight.
+
+ANA. You dare boast, before me and my father, that every woman found you
+irresistible.
+
+DON JUAN. Am I boasting? It seems to me that I cut the most pitiable of
+figures. Besides, I said "when the lady's instinct was set on me."
+It was not always so; and then, heavens! what transports of virtuous
+indignation! what overwhelming defiance to the dastardly seducer! what
+scenes of Imogen and Iachimo!
+
+ANA. I made no scenes. I simply called my father.
+
+DON JUAN. And he came, sword in hand, to vindicate outraged honor and
+morality by murdering me.
+
+THE STATUE. Murdering! What do you mean? Did I kill you or did you kill
+me?
+
+DON JUAN. Which of us was the better fencer?
+
+THE STATUE. I was.
+
+DON JUAN. Of course you were. And yet you, the hero of those scandalous
+adventures you have just been relating to us, you had the effrontery to
+pose as the avenger of outraged morality and condemn me to death! You
+would have slain me but for an accident.
+
+THE STATUE. I was expected to, Juan. That is how things were arranged
+on earth. I was not a social reformer; and I always did what it was
+customary for a gentleman to do.
+
+DON JUAN. That may account for your attacking me, but not for the
+revolting hypocrisy of your subsequent proceedings as a statue.
+
+THE STATUE. That all came of my going to Heaven.
+
+THE DEVIL. I still fail to see, Senor Don Juan, that these episodes
+in your earthly career and in that of the Senor Commander in any way
+discredit my view of life. Here, I repeat, you have all that you sought
+without anything that you shrank from.
+
+DON JUAN. On the contrary, here I have everything that disappointed me
+without anything that I have not already tried and found wanting. I tell
+you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot
+be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the
+way for it. That is the law of my life. That is the working within me
+of Life's incessant aspiration to higher organization, wider, deeper,
+intenser self-consciousness, and clearer self-understanding. It was the
+supremacy of this purpose that reduced love for me to the mere pleasure
+of a moment, art for me to the mere schooling of my faculties, religion
+for me to a mere excuse for laziness, since it had set up a God who
+looked at the world and saw that it was good, against the instinct in
+me that looked through my eyes at the world and saw that it could be
+improved. I tell you that in the pursuit of my own pleasure, my own
+health, my own fortune, I have never known happiness. It was not love
+for Woman that delivered me into her hands: it was fatigue, exhaustion.
+When I was a child, and bruised my head against a stone, I ran to the
+nearest woman and cried away my pain against her apron. When I grew up,
+and bruised my soul against the brutalities and stupidities with which
+I had to strive, I did again just what I had done as a child. I have
+enjoyed, too, my rests, my recuperations, my breathing times, my very
+prostrations after strife; but rather would I be dragged through all the
+circles of the foolish Italian's Inferno than through the pleasures of
+Europe. That is what has made this place of eternal pleasures so deadly
+to me. It is the absence of this instinct in you that makes you that
+strange monster called a Devil. It is the success with which you have
+diverted the attention of men from their real purpose, which in one
+degree or another is the same as mine, to yours, that has earned you the
+name of The Tempter. It is the fact that they are doing your will, or
+rather drifting with your want of will, instead of doing their own, that
+makes them the uncomfortable, false, restless, artificial, petulant,
+wretched creatures they are.
+
+THE DEVIL. [mortified] Senor Don Juan: you are uncivil to my friends.
+
+DON JUAN. Pooh! why should I be civil to them or to you? In this Palace
+of Lies a truth or two will not hurt you. Your friends are all the
+dullest dogs I know. They are not beautiful: they are only decorated.
+They are not clean: they are only shaved and starched. They are not
+dignified: they are only fashionably dressed. They are not educated
+they are only college passmen. They are not religious: they are only
+pewrenters. They are not moral: they are only conventional. They are not
+virtuous: they are only cowardly. They are not even vicious: they are
+only "frail." They are not artistic: they are only lascivious. They are
+not prosperous: they are only rich. They are not loyal, they are
+only servile; not dutiful, only sheepish; not public spirited, only
+patriotic; not courageous, only quarrelsome; not determined, only
+obstinate; not masterful, only domineering; not self-controlled, only
+obtuse; not self-respecting, only vain; not kind, only sentimental; not
+social, only gregarious; not considerate, only polite; not intelligent,
+only opinionated; not progressive, only factious; not imaginative,
+only superstitious; not just, only vindictive; not generous, only
+propitiatory; not disciplined, only cowed; and not truthful at
+all--liars every one of them, to the very backbone of their souls.
+
+THE STATUE. Your flow of words is simply amazing, Juan. How I wish I
+could have talked like that to my soldiers.
+
+THE DEVIL. It is mere talk, though. It has all been said before; but
+what change has it ever made? What notice has the world ever taken of
+it?
+
+DON JUAN. Yes, it is mere talk. But why is it mere talk? Because,
+my friend, beauty, purity, respectability, religion, morality, art,
+patriotism, bravery and the rest are nothing but words which I or anyone
+else can turn inside out like a glove. Were they realities, you
+would have to plead guilty to my indictment; but fortunately for your
+self-respect, my diabolical friend, they are not realities. As you
+say, they are mere words, useful for duping barbarians into adopting
+civilization, or the civilized poor into submitting to be robbed and
+enslaved. That is the family secret of the governing caste; and if we
+who are of that caste aimed at more Life for the world instead of at
+more power and luxury for our miserable selves, that secret would make
+us great. Now, since I, being a nobleman, am in the secret too, think
+how tedious to me must be your unending cant about all these moralistic
+figments, and how squalidly disastrous your sacrifice of your lives to
+them! If you even believed in your moral game enough to play it fairly,
+it would be interesting to watch; but you don't: you cheat at every
+trick; and if your opponent outcheats you, you upset the table and try
+to murder him.
+
+THE DEVIL. On earth there may be some truth in this, because the people
+are uneducated and cannot appreciate my religion of love and beauty; but
+here--
+
+DON JUAN. Oh yes: I know. Here there is nothing but love and beauty.
+Ugh! it is like sitting for all eternity at the first act of a
+fashionable play, before the complications begin. Never in my worst
+moments of superstitious terror on earth did I dream that Hell was so
+horrible. I live, like a hairdresser, in the continual contemplation
+of beauty, toying with silken tresses. I breathe an atmosphere of
+sweetness, like a confectioner's shopboy. Commander: are there any
+beautiful women in Heaven?
+
+THE STATUE. None. Absolutely none. All dowdies. Not two pennorth of
+jewellery among a dozen of them. They might be men of fifty.
+
+DON JUAN. I am impatient to get there. Is the word beauty ever
+mentioned; and are there any artistic people?
+
+THE STATUE. I give you my word they won't admire a fine statue even when
+it walks past them.
+
+DON JUAN. I go.
+
+THE DEVIL. Don Juan: shall I be frank with you?
+
+DON JUAN. Were you not so before?
+
+THE DEVIL. As far as I went, yes. But I will now go further, and confess
+to you that men get tired of everything, of heaven no less than of hell;
+and that all history is nothing but a record of the oscillations of
+the world between these two extremes. An epoch is but a swing of the
+pendulum; and each generation thinks the world is progressing because
+it is always moving. But when you are as old as I am; when you have a
+thousand times wearied of heaven, like myself and the Commander, and
+a thousand times wearied of hell, as you are wearied now, you will no
+longer imagine that every swing from heaven to hell is an emancipation,
+every swing from hell to heaven an evolution. Where you now see reform,
+progress, fulfilment of upward tendency, continual ascent by Man on
+the stepping stones of his dead selves to higher things, you will
+see nothing but an infinite comedy of illusion. You will discover
+the profound truth of the saying of my friend Koheleth, that there is
+nothing new under the sun. Vanitas vanitatum--
+
+DON JUAN. [out of all patience] By Heaven, this is worse than your cant
+about love and beauty. Clever dolt that you are, is a man no better than
+a worm, or a dog than a wolf, because he gets tired of everything?
+Shall he give up eating because he destroys his appetite in the act
+of gratifying it? Is a field idle when it is fallow? Can the Commander
+expend his hellish energy here without accumulating heavenly energy for
+his next term of blessedness? Granted that the great Life Force has hit
+on the device of the clockmaker's pendulum, and uses the earth for its
+bob; that the history of each oscillation, which seems so novel to us
+the actors, is but the history of the last oscillation repeated; nay
+more, that in the unthinkable infinitude of time the sun throws off the
+earth and catches it again a thousand times as a circus rider throws up
+a ball, and that the total of all our epochs is but the moment between
+the toss and the catch, has the colossal mechanism no purpose?
+
+THE DEVIL. None, my friend. You think, because you have a purpose,
+Nature must have one. You might as well expect it to have fingers and
+toes because you have them.
+
+DON JUAN. But I should not have them if they served no purpose. And I,
+my friend, am as much a part of Nature as my own finger is a part of me.
+If my finger is the organ by which I grasp the sword and the mandoline,
+my brain is the organ by which Nature strives to understand itself.
+My dog's brain serves only my dog's purposes; but my brain labors at a
+knowledge which does nothing for me personally but make my body bitter
+to me and my decay and death a calamity. Were I not possessed with a
+purpose beyond my own I had better be a ploughman than a philosopher;
+for the ploughman lives as long as the philosopher, eats more, sleeps
+better, and rejoices in the wife of his bosom with less misgiving. This
+is because the philosopher is in the grip of the Life Force. This Life
+Force says to him "I have done a thousand wonderful things unconsciously
+by merely willing to live and following the line of least resistance:
+now I want to know myself and my destination, and choose my path; so
+I have made a special brain--a philosopher's brain--to grasp this
+knowledge for me as the husbandman's hand grasps the plough for me. And
+this" says the Life Force to the philosopher "must thou strive to do
+for me until thou diest, when I will make another brain and another
+philosopher to carry on the work."
+
+THE DEVIL. What is the use of knowing?
+
+DON JUAN. Why, to be able to choose the line of greatest advantage
+instead of yielding in the direction of the least resistance. Does a
+ship sail to its destination no better than a log drifts nowhither? The
+philosopher is Nature's pilot. And there you have our difference: to be
+in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.
+
+THE DEVIL. On the rocks, most likely.
+
+DON JUAN. Pooh! which ship goes oftenest on the rocks or to the
+bottom--the drifting ship or the ship with a pilot on board?
+
+THE DEVIL. Well, well, go your way, Senor Don Juan. I prefer to be my
+own master and not the tool of any blundering universal force. I know
+that beauty is good to look at; that music is good to hear; that love is
+good to feel; and that they are all good to think about and talk about.
+I know that to be well exercised in these sensations, emotions, and
+studies is to be a refined and cultivated being. Whatever they may say
+of me in churches on earth, I know that it is universally admitted in
+good society that the prince of Darkness is a gentleman; and that is
+enough for me. As to your Life Force, which you think irresistible, it
+is the most resistible thing in the world for a person of any character.
+But if you are naturally vulgar and credulous, as all reformers are, it
+will thrust you first into religion, where you will sprinkle water on
+babies to save their souls from me; then it will drive you from religion
+into science, where you will snatch the babies from the water
+sprinkling and inoculate them with disease to save them from catching it
+accidentally; then you will take to politics, where you will become the
+catspaw of corrupt functionaries and the henchman of ambitious humbugs;
+and the end will be despair and decrepitude, broken nerve and
+shattered hopes, vain regrets for that worst and silliest of wastes
+and sacrifices, the waste and sacrifice of the power of enjoyment: in
+a word, the punishment of the fool who pursues the better before he has
+secured the good.
+
+DON JUAN. But at least I shall not be bored. The service of the Life
+Force has that advantage, at all events. So fare you well, Senor Satan.
+
+THE DEVIL. [amiably] Fare you well, Don Juan. I shall often think of our
+interesting chats about things in general. I wish you every happiness:
+Heaven, as I said before, suits some people. But if you should change
+your mind, do not forget that the gates are always open here to the
+repentant prodigal. If you feel at any time that warmth of heart,
+sincere unforced affection, innocent enjoyment, and warm, breathing,
+palpitating reality--
+
+DON JUAN. Why not say flesh and blood at once, though we have left those
+two greasy commonplaces behind us?
+
+THE DEVIL. [angrily] You throw my friendly farewell back in my teeth,
+then, Don Juan?
+
+DON JUAN. By no means. But though there is much to be learnt from a
+cynical devil, I really cannot stand a sentimental one. Senor Commander:
+you know the way to the frontier of hell and heaven. Be good enough to
+direct me.
+
+THE STATUE. Oh, the frontier is only the difference between two ways of
+looking at things. Any road will take you across it if you really want
+to get there.
+
+DON JUAN. Good. [saluting Dona Ana] Senora: your servant.
+
+ANA. But I am going with you.
+
+DON JUAN. I can find my own way to heaven, Ana; but I cannot find yours
+[he vanishes].
+
+ANA. How annoying!
+
+THE STATUE. [calling after him] Bon voyage, Juan! [He wafts a final
+blast of his great rolling chords after him as a parting salute. A faint
+echo of the first ghostly melody comes back in acknowledgment]. Ah!
+there he goes. [Puffing a long breath out through his lips] Whew! How he
+does talk! They'll never stand it in heaven.
+
+THE DEVIL. [gloomily] His going is a political defeat. I cannot keep
+these Life Worshippers: they all go. This is the greatest loss I have
+had since that Dutch painter went--a fellow who would paint a hag of 70
+with as much enjoyment as a Venus of 20.
+
+THE STATUE. I remember: he came to heaven. Rembrandt.
+
+THE DEVIL. Ay, Rembrandt. There a something unnatural about these
+fellows. Do not listen to their gospel, Senor Commander: it is
+dangerous. Beware of the pursuit of the Superhuman: it leads to an
+indiscriminate contempt for the Human. To a man, horses and dogs and
+cats are mere species, outside the moral world. Well, to the Superman,
+men and women are a mere species too, also outside the moral world. This
+Don Juan was kind to women and courteous to men as your daughter here
+was kind to her pet cats and dogs; but such kindness is a denial of the
+exclusively human character of the soul.
+
+THE STATUE. And who the deuce is the Superman?
+
+THE DEVIL. Oh, the latest fashion among the Life Force fanatics. Did
+you not meet in Heaven, among the new arrivals, that German Polish
+madman--what was his name? Nietzsche?
+
+THE STATUE. Never heard of him.
+
+THE DEVIL. Well, he came here first, before he recovered his wits. I had
+some hopes of him; but he was a confirmed Life Force worshipper. It was
+he who raked up the Superman, who is as old as Prometheus; and the 20th
+century will run after this newest of the old crazes when it gets tired
+of the world, the flesh, and your humble servant.
+
+THE STATUE. Superman is a good cry; and a good cry is half the battle. I
+should like to see this Nietzsche.
+
+THE DEVIL. Unfortunately he met Wagner here, and had a quarrel with him.
+
+THE STATUE. Quite right, too. Mozart for me!
+
+THE DEVIL. Oh, it was not about music. Wagner once drifted into Life
+Force worship, and invented a Superman called Siegfried. But he came to
+his senses afterwards. So when they met here, Nietzsche denounced him
+as a renegade; and Wagner wrote a pamphlet to prove that Nietzsche was
+a Jew; and it ended in Nietzsche's going to heaven in a huff. And a
+good riddance too. And now, my friend, let us hasten to my palace and
+celebrate your arrival with a grand musical service.
+
+THE STATUE. With pleasure: you're most kind.
+
+THE DEVIL. This way, Commander. We go down the old trap [he places
+himself on the grave trap].
+
+THE STATUE. Good. [Reflectively] All the same, the Superman is a fine
+conception. There is something statuesque about it. [He places himself
+on the grave trap beside The Devil. It begins to descend slowly. Red
+glow from the abyss]. Ah, this reminds me of old times.
+
+THE DEVIL. And me also.
+
+ANA. Stop! [The trap stops].
+
+THE DEVIL. You, Senora, cannot come this way. You will have an
+apotheosis. But you will be at the palace before us.
+
+ANA. That is not what I stopped you for. Tell me where can I find the
+Superman?
+
+THE DEVIL. He is not yet created, Senora.
+
+THE STATUE. And never will be, probably. Let us proceed: the red fire
+will make me sneeze. [They descend].
+
+ANA. Not yet created! Then my work is not yet done. [Crossing herself
+devoutly] I believe in the Life to Come. [Crying to the universe] A
+father--a father for the Superman!
+
+She vanishes into the void; and again there is nothing: all existence
+seems suspended infinitely. Then, vaguely, there is a live human voice
+crying somewhere. One sees, with a shock, a mountain peak showing
+faintly against a lighter background. The sky has returned from afar;
+and we suddenly remember where we were. The cry becomes distinct and
+urgent: it says Automobile, Automobile. The complete reality comes
+back with a rush: in a moment it is full morning in the Sierra; and the
+brigands are scrambling to their feet and making for the road as the
+goatherd runs down from the hill, warning them of the approach of
+another motor. Tanner and Mendoza rise amazedly and stare at one another
+with scattered wits. Straker sits up to yawn for a moment before he gets
+on his feet, making it a point of honor not to show any undue interest
+in the excitement of the bandits. Mendoza gives a quick look to see that
+his followers are attending to the alarm; then exchanges a private word
+with Tanner.
+
+MENDOZA. Did you dream?
+
+TANNER. Damnably. Did you?
+
+MENDOZA. Yes. I forget what. You were in it.
+
+TANNER. So were you. Amazing
+
+MENDOZA. I warned you. [a shot is heard from the road]. Dolts! they will
+play with that gun. [The brigands come running back scared]. Who fired
+that shot? [to Duval] Was it you?
+
+DUVAL. [breathless] I have not shoot. Dey shoot first.
+
+ANARCHIST. I told you to begin by abolishing the State. Now we are all
+lost.
+
+THE ROWDY SOCIAL-DEMOCRAT. [stampeding across the amphitheatre] Run,
+everybody.
+
+MENDOZA. [collaring him; throwing him on his back; and drawing a knife]
+I stab the man who stirs. [He blocks the way. The stampede it checked].
+What has happened?
+
+THE SULKY SOCIAL-DEMOCRAT, A motor--
+
+THE ANARCHIST. Three men--
+
+DUVAL. Deux femmes--
+
+MENDOZA. Three men and two women! Why have you not brought them here?
+Are you afraid of them?
+
+THE ROWDY ONE. [getting up] Thyve a hescort. Ow, de-ooh lut's ook it,
+Mendowza.
+
+THE SULKY ONE. Two armored cars full o soldiers at the end o the valley.
+
+ANARCHIST. The shot was fired in the air. It was a signal.
+
+Straker whistles his favorite air, which falls on the ears of the
+brigands like a funeral march.
+
+TANNER. It is not an escort, but an expedition to capture you. We were
+advised to wait for it; but I was in a hurry.
+
+THE ROWDY ONE. [in an agony of apprehension] And Ow my good Lord, ere we
+are, wytin for em! Lut's tike to the mahntns.
+
+MENDOZA. Idiot, what do you know about the mountains? Are you a
+Spaniard? You would be given up by the first shepherd you met. Besides,
+we are already within range of their rifles.
+
+THE ROWDY ONE. Bat--
+
+MENDOZA. Silence. Leave this to me. [To Tanner] Comrade: you will not
+betray us.
+
+STRAKER. Oo are you callin comrade?
+
+MENDOZA. Last night the advantage was with me. The robber of the poor
+was at the mercy of the robber of the rich. You offered your hand: I
+took it.
+
+TANNER. I bring no charge against you, comrade. We have spent a pleasant
+evening with you: that is all.
+
+STRAKER. I gev my and to nobody, see?
+
+MENDOZA. [turning on him impressively] Young man, if I am tried, I shall
+plead guilty, and explain what drove me from England, home and duty. Do
+you wish to have the respectable name of Straker dragged through the mud
+of a Spanish criminal court? The police will search me. They will find
+Louisa's portrait. It will be published in the illustrated papers. You
+blench. It will be your doing, remember.
+
+STRAKER. [with baffled rage] I don't care about the court. It's avin our
+name mixed up with yours that I object to, you blackmailin swine, you.
+
+MENDOZA. Language unworthy of Louisa's brother! But no matter: you are
+muzzled: that is enough for us. [He turns to face his own men, who back
+uneasily across the amphitheatre towards the cave to take refuge behind
+him, as a fresh party, muffled for motoring, comes from the road in
+riotous spirits. Ann, who makes straight for Tanner, comes first; then
+Violet, helped over the rough ground by Hector holding her right hand
+and Ramsden her left. Mendoza goes to his presidential block and seats
+himself calmly with his rank and file grouped behind him, and his
+Staff, consisting of Duval and the Anarchist on his right and the two
+Social-Democrats on his left, supporting him in flank].
+
+ANN. It's Jack!
+
+TANNER. Caught!
+
+HECTOR. Why, certainly it is. I said it was you, Tanner, We've just been
+stopped by a puncture: the road is full of nails.
+
+VIOLET. What are you doing here with all these men?
+
+ANN. Why did you leave us without a word of warning?
+
+HECTOR. I want that bunch of roses, Miss Whitefield. [To Tanner] When
+we found you were gone, Miss Whitefield bet me a bunch of roses my car
+would not overtake yours before you reached Monte Carlo.
+
+TANNER. But this is not the road to Monte Carlo.
+
+HECTOR. No matter. Miss Whitefield tracked you at every stopping place:
+she is a regular Sherlock Holmes.
+
+TANNER. The Life Force! I am lost.
+
+OCTAVIUS. [Bounding gaily down from the road into the amphitheatre, and
+coming between Tanner and Straker] I am so glad you are safe, old chap.
+We were afraid you had been captured by brigands.
+
+RAMSDEN. [who has been staring at Mendoza] I seem to remember the face
+of your friend here. [Mendoza rises politely and advances with a smile
+between Ann and Ramsden].
+
+HECTOR. Why, so do I.
+
+OCTAVIUS. I know you perfectly well, Sir; but I can't think where I have
+met you.
+
+MENDOZA. [to Violet] Do YOU remember me, madam?
+
+VIOLET. Oh, quite well; but I am so stupid about names.
+
+MENDOZA. It was at the Savoy Hotel. [To Hector] You, sir, used to come
+with this lady [Violet] to lunch. [To Octavius] You, sir, often brought
+this lady [Ann] and her mother to dinner on your way to the Lyceum
+Theatre. [To Ramsden] You, sir, used to come to supper, with [dropping
+his voice to a confidential but perfectly audible whisper] several
+different ladies.
+
+RAMSDEN. [angrily] Well, what is that to you, pray?
+
+OCTAVIUS. Why, Violet, I thought you hardly knew one another before this
+trip, you and Malone!
+
+VIOLET. [vexed] I suppose this person was the manager.
+
+MENDOZA. The waiter, madam. I have a grateful recollection of you all.
+I gathered from the bountiful way in which you treated me that you all
+enjoyed your visits very much.
+
+VIOLET. What impertinence! [She turns her back on him, and goes up the
+hill with Hector].
+
+RAMSDEN. That will do, my friend. You do not expect these ladies to
+treat you as an acquaintance, I suppose, because you have waited on them
+at table.
+
+MENDOZA. Pardon me: it was you who claimed my acquaintance. The ladies
+followed your example. However, this display of the unfortunate manners
+of your class closes the incident. For the future, you will please
+address me with the respect due to a stranger and fellow traveller. [He
+turns haughtily away and resumes his presidential seat].
+
+TANNER. There! I have found one man on my journey capable of reasonable
+conversation; and you all instinctively insult him. Even the New Man
+is as bad as any of you. Enry: you have behaved just like a miserable
+gentleman.
+
+STRAKER. Gentleman! Not me.
+
+RAMSDEN. Really, Tanner, this tone--
+
+ANN. Don't mind him, Granny: you ought to know him by this time [she
+takes his arm and coaxes him away to the hill to join Violet and Hector.
+Octavius follows her, doglike].
+
+VIOLET. [calling from the hill] Here are the soldiers. They are getting
+out of their motors.
+
+DUVAL. [panicstricken] Oh, nom de Dieu!
+
+THE ANARCHIST. Fools: the State is about to crush you because you spared
+it at the prompting of the political hangers-on of the bourgeoisie.
+
+THE SULKY SOCIAL-DEMOCRAT. [argumentative to the last] On the contrary,
+only by capturing the State machine--
+
+THE ANARCHIST. It is going to capture you.
+
+THE ROWDY SOCIAL-DEMOCRAT. [his anguish culminating] Ow, chock it. Wot
+are we ere for? WOT are we wytin for?
+
+MENDOZA. [between his teeth] Goon. Talk politics, you idiots: nothing
+sounds more respectable. Keep it up, I tell you.
+
+The soldiers line the road, commanding the amphitheatre with their
+rifles. The brigands, struggling with an over-whelming impulse to hide
+behind one another, look as unconcerned as they can. Mendoza rises
+superbly, with undaunted front. The officer in command steps down from
+the road in to the amphitheatre; looks hard at the brigands; and then
+inquiringly at Tanner.
+
+THE OFFICER. Who are these men, Senor Ingles?
+
+TANNER. My escort.
+
+Mendoza, with a Mephistophelean smile, bows profoundly. An irrepressible
+grin runs from face to face among the brigands. They touch their hats,
+except the Anarchist, who defies the State with folded arms.
+
+
+
+
+ACT IV
+
+The garden of a villa in Granada. Whoever wishes to know what it is like
+must go to Granada and see. One may prosaically specify a group of hills
+dotted with villas, the Alhambra on the top of one of the hills, and
+a considerable town in the valley, approached by dusty white roads in
+which the children, no matter what they are doing or thinking about,
+automatically whine for halfpence and reach out little clutching brown
+palms for them; but there is nothing in this description except the
+Alhambra, the begging, and the color of the roads, that does not fit
+Surrey as well as Spain. The difference is that the Surrey hills are
+comparatively small and ugly, and should properly be called the Surrey
+Protuberances; but these Spanish hills are of mountain stock: the
+amenity which conceals their size does not compromise their dignity.
+
+This particular garden is on a hill opposite the Alhambra; and the villa
+is as expensive and pretentious as a villa must be if it is to be let
+furnished by the week to opulent American and English visitors. If we
+stand on the lawn at the foot of the garden and look uphill, our horizon
+is the stone balustrade of a flagged platform on the edge of infinite
+space at the top of the hill. Between us and this platform is a flower
+garden with a circular basin and fountain in the centre, surrounded
+by geometrical flower beds, gravel paths, and clipped yew trees in the
+genteelest order. The garden is higher than our lawn; so we reach it
+by a few steps in the middle of its embankment. The platform is higher
+again than the garden, from which we mount a couple more steps to look
+over the balustrade at a fine view of the town up the valley and of the
+hills that stretch away beyond it to where, in the remotest distance,
+they become mountains. On our left is the villa, accessible by steps
+from the left hand corner of the garden. Returning from the platform
+through the garden and down again to the lawn (a movement which leaves
+the villa behind us on our right) we find evidence of literary interests
+on the part of the tenants in the fact that there is no tennis net nor
+set of croquet hoops, but, on our left, a little iron garden table with
+books on it, mostly yellow-backed, and a chair beside it. A chair on the
+right has also a couple of open books upon it. There are no newspapers,
+a circumstance which, with the absence of games, might lead an
+intelligent spectator to the most far reaching conclusions as to the
+sort of people who live in the villa. Such speculations are checked,
+however, on this delightfully fine afternoon, by the appearance at
+a little gate in a paling on our left, of Henry Straker in his
+professional costume. He opens the gate for an elderly gentleman, and
+follows him on to the lawn.
+
+This elderly gentleman defies the Spanish sun in a black frock coat,
+tall silk bat, trousers in which narrow stripes of dark grey and lilac
+blend into a highly respectable color, and a black necktie tied into a
+bow over spotless linen. Probably therefore a man whose social position
+needs constant and scrupulous affirmation without regard to climate:
+one who would dress thus for the middle of the Sahara or the top of Mont
+Blanc. And since he has not the stamp of the class which accepts as its
+life-mission the advertizing and maintenance of first rate tailoring and
+millinery, he looks vulgar in his finery, though in a working dress of
+any kind he would look dignified enough. He is a bullet cheeked man with
+a red complexion, stubbly hair, smallish eyes, a hard mouth that folds
+down at the corners, and a dogged chin. The looseness of skin that comes
+with age has attacked his throat and the laps of his cheeks; but he is
+still hard as an apple above the mouth; so that the upper half of his
+face looks younger than the lower. He has the self-confidence of one who
+has made money, and something of the truculence of one who has made it
+in a brutalizing struggle, his civility having under it a perceptible
+menace that he has other methods in reserve if necessary. Withal, a man
+to be rather pitied when he is not to be feared; for there is something
+pathetic about him at times, as if the huge commercial machine which has
+worked him into his frock coat had allowed him very little of his own
+way and left his affections hungry and baffled. At the first word
+that falls from him it is clear that he is an Irishman whose native
+intonation has clung to him through many changes of place and rank. One
+can only guess that the original material of his speech was perhaps the
+surly Kerry brogue; but the degradation of speech that occurs in London,
+Glasgow, Dublin and big cities generally has been at work on it so long
+that nobody but an arrant cockney would dream of calling it a brogue
+now; for its music is almost gone, though its surliness is still
+perceptible. Straker, as a very obvious cockney, inspires him with
+implacable contempt, as a stupid Englishman who cannot even speak his
+own language properly. Straker, on the other hand, regards the old
+gentleman's accent as a joke thoughtfully provided by Providence
+expressly for the amusement of the British race, and treats him
+normally with the indulgence due to an inferior and unlucky species, but
+occasionally with indignant alarm when the old gentleman shows signs of
+intending his Irish nonsense to be taken seriously.
+
+STRAKER. I'll go tell the young lady. She said you'd prefer to stay here
+[he turns to go up through the garden to the villa].
+
+MALONE. [who has been looking round him with lively curiosity] The young
+lady? That's Miss Violet, eh?
+
+STRAKER. [stopping on the steps with sudden suspicion] Well, you know,
+don't you?
+
+MALONE. Do I?
+
+STRAKER. [his temper rising] Well, do you or don't you?
+
+MALONE. What business is that of yours?
+
+Straker, now highly indignant, comes back from the steps and confronts
+the visitor.
+
+STRAKER. I'll tell you what business it is of mine. Miss Robinson--
+
+MALONE. [interrupting] Oh, her name is Robinson, is it? Thank you.
+
+STRAKER. Why, you don't know even her name?
+
+MALONE. Yes I do, now that you've told me.
+
+STRAKER. [after a moment of stupefaction at the old man's readiness in
+repartee] Look here: what do you mean by gittin into my car and lettin
+me bring you here if you're not the person I took that note to?
+
+MALONE. Who else did you take it to, pray?
+
+STRAKER. I took it to Mr Ector Malone, at Miss Robinson's request, see?
+Miss Robinson is not my principal: I took it to oblige her. I know Mr
+Malone; and he ain't you, not by a long chalk. At the hotel they told me
+that your name is Ector Malone.
+
+MALONE. Hector Malone.
+
+STRAKER. [with calm superiority] Hector in your own country: that's what
+comes o livin in provincial places like Ireland and America. Over here
+you're Ector: if you avn't noticed it before you soon will.
+
+The growing strain of the conversation is here relieved by Violet, who
+has sallied from the villa and through the garden to the steps, which
+she now descends, coming very opportunely between Malone and Straker.
+
+VIOLET. [to Straker] Did you take my message?
+
+STRAKER. Yes, miss. I took it to the hotel and sent it up, expecting to
+see young Mr Malone. Then out walks this gent, and says it's all right
+and he'll come with me. So as the hotel people said he was Mr Ector
+Malone, I fetched him. And now he goes back on what he said. But if he
+isn't the gentleman you meant, say the word: it's easy enough to fetch
+him back again.
+
+MALONE. I should esteem it a great favor if I might have a short
+conversation with you, madam. I am Hector's father, as this bright
+Britisher would have guessed in the course of another hour or so.
+
+STRAKER. [coolly defiant] No, not in another year or so. When we've ad
+you as long to polish up as we've ad im, perhaps you'll begin to look a
+little bit up to is mark. At present you fall a long way short. You've
+got too many aitches, for one thing. [To Violet, amiably] All right,
+Miss: you want to talk to him: I shan't intrude. [He nods affably to
+Malone and goes out through the little gate in the paling].
+
+VIOLET. [very civilly] I am so sorry, Mr Malone, if that man has been
+rude to you. But what can we do? He is our chauffeur.
+
+MALONE. Your what?
+
+VIOLET. The driver of our automobile. He can drive a motor car at
+seventy miles an hour, and mend it when it breaks down. We are dependent
+on our motor cars; and our motor cars are dependent on him; so of course
+we are dependent on him.
+
+MALONE. I've noticed, madam, that every thousand dollars an Englishman
+gets seems to add one to the number of people he's dependent on.
+However, you needn't apologize for your man: I made him talk on purpose.
+By doing so I learnt that you're staying here in Grannida with a party
+of English, including my son Hector.
+
+VIOLET. [conversationally] Yes. We intended to go to Nice; but we had to
+follow a rather eccentric member of our party who started first and came
+here. Won't you sit down? [She clears the nearest chair of the two books
+on it].
+
+MALONE. [impressed by this attention] Thank you. [He sits down,
+examining her curiously as she goes to the iron table to put down the
+books. When she turns to him again, he says] Miss Robinson, I believe?
+
+VIOLET. [sitting down] Yes.
+
+MALONE. [Taking a letter from his pocket] Your note to Hector runs as
+follows [Violet is unable to repress a start. He pauses quietly to take
+out and put on his spectacles, which have gold rims]: "Dearest: they
+have all gone to the Alhambra for the afternoon. I have shammed headache
+and have the garden all to myself. Jump into Jack's motor: Straker will
+rattle you here in a jiffy. Quick, quick, quick. Your loving Violet."
+[He looks at her; but by this time she has recovered herself, and meets
+his spectacles with perfect composure. He continues slowly] Now I don't
+know on what terms young people associate in English society; but in
+America that note would be considered to imply a very considerable
+degree of affectionate intimacy between the parties.
+
+VIOLET. Yes: I know your son very well, Mr Malone. Have you any
+objection?
+
+MALONE. [somewhat taken aback] No, no objection exactly. Provided it is
+understood that my son is altogether dependent on me, and that I have to
+be consulted in any important step he may propose to take.
+
+VIOLET. I am sure you would not be unreasonable with him, Mr Malone.
+
+MALONE. I hope not, Miss Robinson; but at your age you might think many
+things unreasonable that don't seem so to me.
+
+VIOLET. [with a little shrug] Oh well, I suppose there's no use our
+playing at cross purposes, Mr Malone. Hector wants to marry me.
+
+MALONE. I inferred from your note that he might. Well, Miss Robinson,
+he is his own master; but if he marries you he shall not have a rap from
+me. [He takes off his spectacles and pockets them with the note].
+
+VIOLET. [with some severity] That is not very complimentary to me, Mr
+Malone.
+
+MALONE. I say nothing against you, Miss Robinson: I daresay you are an
+amiable and excellent young lady. But I have other views for Hector.
+
+VIOLET. Hector may not have other views for himself, Mr Malone.
+
+MALONE. Possibly not. Then he does without me: that's all. I daresay you
+are prepared for that. When a young lady writes to a young man to
+come to her quick, quick, quick, money seems nothing and love seems
+everything.
+
+VIOLET. [sharply] I beg your pardon, Mr Malone: I do not think anything
+so foolish. Hector must have money.
+
+MALONE. [staggered] Oh, very well, very well. No doubt he can work for
+it.
+
+VIOLET. What is the use of having money if you have to work for it? [She
+rises impatiently]. It's all nonsense, Mr Malone: you must enable your
+son to keep up his position. It is his right.
+
+MALONE. [grimly] I should not advise you to marry him on the strength of
+that right, Miss Robinson.
+
+Violet, who has almost lost her temper, controls herself with an effort;
+unclenches her fingers; and resumes her seat with studied tranquillity
+and reasonableness.
+
+VIOLET. What objection have you to me, pray? My social position is as
+good as Hector's, to say the least. He admits it.
+
+MALONE. [shrewdly] You tell him so from time to time, eh? Hector's
+social position in England, Miss Robinson, is just what I choose to
+buy for him. I have made him a fair offer. Let him pick out the most
+historic house, castle or abbey that England contains. The day that he
+tells me he wants it for a wife worthy of its traditions, I buy it for
+him, and give him the means of keeping it up.
+
+VIOLET. What do you mean by a wife worthy of its traditions? Cannot any
+well bred woman keep such a house for him?
+
+MALONE. No: she must be born to it.
+
+VIOLET. Hector was not born to it, was he?
+
+MALONE. His granmother was a barefooted Irish girl that nursed me by a
+turf fire. Let him marry another such, and I will not stint her marriage
+portion. Let him raise himself socially with my money or raise somebody
+else so long as there is a social profit somewhere, I'll regard my
+expenditure as justified. But there must be a profit for someone. A
+marriage with you would leave things just where they are.
+
+VIOLET. Many of my relations would object very much to my marrying the
+grandson of a common woman, Mr Malone. That may be prejudice; but so is
+your desire to have him marry a title prejudice.
+
+MALONE. [rising, and approaching her with a scrutiny in which there is
+a good deal of reluctant respect] You seem a pretty straightforward
+downright sort of a young woman.
+
+VIOLET. I do not see why I should be made miserably poor because I
+cannot make profits for you. Why do you want to make Hector unhappy?
+
+MALONE. He will get over it all right enough. Men thrive better on
+disappointments in love than on disappointments in money. I daresay you
+think that sordid; but I know what I'm talking about. My father died of
+starvation in Ireland in the black 47, Maybe you've heard of it.
+
+VIOLET. The Famine?
+
+MALONE. [with smouldering passion] No, the starvation. When a country
+is full of food, and exporting it, there can be no famine. My father
+was starved dead; and I was starved out to America in my mother's
+arms. English rule drove me and mine out of Ireland. Well, you can keep
+Ireland. I and my like are coming back to buy England; and we'll buy the
+best of it. I want no middle class properties and no middle class women
+for Hector. That's straightforward isn't it, like yourself?
+
+VIOLET. [icily pitying his sentimentality] Really, Mr Malone, I am
+astonished to hear a man of your age and good sense talking in that
+romantic way. Do you suppose English noblemen will sell their places to
+you for the asking?
+
+MALONE. I have the refusal of two of the oldest family mansions in
+England. One historic owner can't afford to keep all the rooms dusted:
+the other can't afford the death duties. What do you say now?
+
+VIOLET. Of course it is very scandalous; but surely you know that the
+Government will sooner or later put a stop to all these Socialistic
+attacks on property.
+
+MALONE. [grinning] D'y' think they'll be able to get that done before I
+buy the house--or rather the abbey? They're both abbeys.
+
+VIOLET. [putting that aside rather impatiently] Oh, well, let us talk
+sense, Mr Malone. You must feel that we haven't been talking sense so
+far.
+
+MALONE. I can't say I do. I mean all I say.
+
+VIOLET. Then you don't know Hector as I do. He is romantic and faddy--he
+gets it from you, I fancy--and he wants a certain sort of wife to take
+care of him. Not a faddy sort of person, you know.
+
+MALONE. Somebody like you, perhaps?
+
+VIOLET. [quietly] Well, yes. But you cannot very well ask me to
+undertake this with absolutely no means of keeping up his position.
+
+MALONE. [alarmed] Stop a bit, stop a bit. Where are we getting to? I'm
+not aware that I'm asking you to undertake anything.
+
+VIOLET. Of course, Mr Malone, you can make it very difficult for me to
+speak to you if you choose to misunderstand me.
+
+MALONE. [half bewildered] I don't wish to take any unfair advantage; but
+we seem to have got off the straight track somehow.
+
+Straker, with the air of a man who has been making haste, opens the
+little gate, and admits Hector, who, snorting with indignation, comes
+upon the lawn, and is making for his father when Violet, greatly
+dismayed, springs up and intercepts him. Straker doer not wait; at least
+he does not remain visibly within earshot.
+
+VIOLET. Oh, how unlucky! Now please, Hector, say nothing. Go away until
+I have finished speaking to your father.
+
+HECTOR. [inexorably] No, Violet: I mean to have this thing out, right
+away. [He puts her aside; passes her by; and faces his father, whose
+cheeks darken as his Irish blood begins to simmer]. Dad: you've not
+played this hand straight.
+
+MALONE. Hwat d'y'mean?
+
+HECTOR. You've opened a letter addressed to me. You've impersonated me
+and stolen a march on this lady. That's dishonorable.
+
+MALONE. [threateningly] Now you take care what you're saying, Hector.
+Take care, I tell you.
+
+HECTOR. I have taken care. I am taking care. I'm taking care of my honor
+and my position in English society.
+
+MALONE. [hotly] Your position has been got by my money: do you know
+that?
+
+HECTOR. Well, you've just spoiled it all by opening that letter. A
+letter from an English lady, not addressed to you--a confidential
+letter! a delicate letter! a private letter opened by my father! That's
+a sort of thing a man can't struggle against in England. The sooner
+we go back together the better. [He appeals mutely to the heavens to
+witness the shame and anguish of two outcasts].
+
+VIOLET. [snubbing him with an instinctive dislike for scene making]
+Don't be unreasonable, Hector. It was quite natural of Mr Malone to open
+my letter: his name was on the envelope.
+
+MALONE. There! You've no common sense, Hector. I thank you, Miss
+Robinson.
+
+HECTOR. I thank you, too. It's very kind of you. My father knows no
+better.
+
+MALONE. [furiously clenching his fists] Hector--
+
+HECTOR. [with undaunted moral force] Oh, it's no use hectoring me. A
+private letter's a private letter, dad: you can't get over that.
+
+MALONE [raising his voice] I won't be talked back to by you, d'y' hear?
+
+VIOLET. Ssh! please, please. Here they all come.
+
+Father and son, checked, glare mutely at one another as Tanner comes in
+through the little gate with Ramsden, followed by Octavius and Ann.
+
+VIOLET. Back already!
+
+TANNER. The Alhambra is not open this afternoon.
+
+VIOLET. What a sell!
+
+Tanner passes on, and presently finds himself between Hector and a
+strange elder, both apparently on the verge of personal combat. He looks
+from one to the other for an explanation. They sulkily avoid his eye,
+and nurse their wrath in silence.
+
+RAMSDEN. Is it wise for you to be out in the sunshine with such a
+headache, Violet?
+
+TANNER. Have you recovered too, Malone?
+
+VIOLET. Oh, I forgot. We have not all met before. Mr Malone: won't you
+introduce your father?
+
+HECTOR. [with Roman firmness] No, I will not. He is no father of mine.
+
+MALONE. [very angry] You disown your dad before your English friends, do
+you?
+
+VIOLET. Oh please don't make a scene.
+
+Ann and Octavius, lingering near the gate, exchange an astonished
+glance, and discreetly withdraw up the steps to the garden, where they
+can enjoy the disturbance without intruding. On their way to the steps
+Ann sends a little grimace of mute sympathy to Violet, who is standing
+with her back to the little table, looking on in helpless annoyance as
+her husband soars to higher and higher moral eminences without the least
+regard to the old man's millions.
+
+HECTOR. I'm very sorry, Miss Robinson; but I'm contending for a
+principle. I am a son, and, I hope, a dutiful one; but before everything
+I'm a Man!!! And when dad treats my private letters as his own, and
+takes it on himself to say that I shan't marry you if I am happy and
+fortunate enough to gain your consent, then I just snap my fingers and
+go my own way.
+
+TANNER. Marry Violet!
+
+RAMSDEN. Are you in your senses?
+
+TANNER. Do you forget what we told you?
+
+HECTOR. [recklessly] I don't care what you told me.
+
+RAMSDEN. [scandalized] Tut tut, sir! Monstrous! [he flings away towards
+the gate, his elbows quivering with indignation]
+
+TANNER. Another madman! These men in love should be locked up. [He gives
+Hector up as hopeless, and turns away towards the garden, but Malone,
+taking offence in a new direction, follows him and compels him, by the
+aggressivenes of his tone, to stop].
+
+MALONE. I don't understand this. Is Hector not good enough for this
+lady, pray?
+
+TANNER. My dear sir, the lady is married already. Hector knows it; and
+yet he persists in his infatuation. Take him home and lock him up.
+
+MALONE. [bitterly] So this is the high-born social tone I've spoilt by
+my ignorant, uncultivated behavior! Makin love to a married woman! [He
+comes angrily between Hector and Violet, and almost bawls into Hector's
+left ear] You've picked up that habit of the British aristocracy, have
+you?
+
+HECTOR. That's all right. Don't you trouble yourself about that. I'll
+answer for the morality of what I'm doing.
+
+TANNER. [coming forward to Hector's right hand with flashing eyes] Well
+said, Malone! You also see that mere marriage laws are not morality! I
+agree with you; but unfortunately Violet does not.
+
+MALONE. I take leave to doubt that, sir. [Turning on Violet] Let me tell
+you, Mrs Robinson, or whatever your right name is, you had no right to
+send that letter to my son when you were the wife of another man.
+
+HECTOR. [outraged] This is the last straw. Dad: you have insulted my
+wife.
+
+MALONE. YOUR wife!
+
+TANNER. YOU the missing husband! Another moral impostor! [He smites his
+brow, and collapses into Malone's chair].
+
+MALONE. You've married without my consent!
+
+RAMSDEN. You have deliberately humbugged us, sir!
+
+HECTOR. Here: I have had just about enough of being badgered. Violet and
+I are married: that's the long and the short of it. Now what have you
+got to say--any of you?
+
+MALONE. I know what I've got to say. She's married a beggar.
+
+HECTOR. No; she's married a Worker [his American pronunciation imparts
+an overwhelming intensity to this simple and unpopular word]. I start to
+earn my own living this very afternoon.
+
+MALONE. [sneering angrily] Yes: you're very plucky now, because you got
+your remittance from me yesterday or this morning, I reckon. Wait til
+it's spent. You won't be so full of cheek then.
+
+HECTOR. [producing a letter from his pocketbook] Here it is [thrusting
+it on his father]. Now you just take your remittance and yourself out of
+my life. I'm done with remittances; and I'm done with you. I don't sell
+the privilege of insulting my wife for a thousand dollars.
+
+MALONE. [deeply wounded and full of concern] Hector: you don't know what
+poverty is.
+
+HECTOR. [fervidly] Well, I want to know what it is. I want'be a Man.
+Violet: you come along with me, to your own home: I'll see you through.
+
+OCTAVIUS. [jumping down from the garden to the lawn and running to
+Hector's left hand] I hope you'll shake hands with me before you go,
+Hector. I admire and respect you more than I can say. [He is affected
+almost to tears as they shake hands].
+
+VIOLET. [also almost in tears, but of vexation] Oh don't be an idiot,
+Tavy. Hector's about as fit to become a workman as you are.
+
+TANNER. [rising from his chair on the other ride of Hector] Never fear:
+there's no question of his becoming a navvy, Mrs Malone. [To Hector]
+There's really no difficulty about capital to start with. Treat me as a
+friend: draw on me.
+
+OCTAVIUS. [impulsively] Or on me.
+
+MALONE. [with fierce jealousy] Who wants your dirty money? Who should he
+draw on but his own father? [Tanner and Octavius recoil, Octavius rather
+hurt, Tanner consoled by the solution of the money difficulty. Violet
+looks up hopefully]. Hector: don't be rash, my boy. I'm sorry for what I
+said: I never meant to insult Violet: I take it all back. She's just the
+wife you want: there!
+
+HECTOR. [Patting him on the shoulder] Well, that's all right, dad. Say
+no more: we're friends again. Only, I take no money from anybody.
+
+MALONE. [pleading abjectly] Don't be hard on me, Hector. I'd rather you
+quarrelled and took the money than made friends and starved. You don't
+know what the world is: I do.
+
+HECTOR. No, no, NO. That's fixed: that's not going to change. [He passes
+his father inexorably by, and goes to Violet]. Come, Mrs Malone: you've
+got to move to the hotel with me, and take your proper place before the
+world.
+
+VIOLET. But I must go in, dear, and tell Davis to pack. Won't you go on
+and make them give you a room overlooking the garden for me? I'll join
+you in half an hour.
+
+HECTOR. Very well. You'll dine with us, Dad, won't you?
+
+MALONE. [eager to conciliate him] Yes, yes.
+
+HECTOR. See you all later. [He waves his hand to Ann, who has now been
+joined by Tanner, Octavius, and Ramsden in the garden, and goes out
+through the little gate, leaving his father and Violet together on the
+lawn].
+
+MALONE. You'll try to bring him to his senses, Violet: I know you will.
+
+VIOLET. I had no idea he could be so headstrong. If he goes on like
+that, what can I do?
+
+MALONE. Don't be discurridged: domestic pressure may be slow; but it's
+sure. You'll wear him down. Promise me you will.
+
+VIOLET. I will do my best. Of course I think it's the greatest nonsense
+deliberately making us poor like that.
+
+MALONE. Of course it is.
+
+VIOLET. [after a moment's reflection] You had better give me the
+remittance. He will want it for his hotel bill. I'll see whether I can
+induce him to accept it. Not now, of course, but presently.
+
+MALONE. [eagerly] Yes, yes, yes: that's just the thing [he hands her the
+thousand dollar bill, and adds cunningly] Y'understand that this is only
+a bachelor allowance.
+
+VIOLET. [Coolly] Oh, quite. [She takes it]. Thank you. By the way, Mr
+Malone, those two houses you mentioned--the abbeys.
+
+MALONE. Yes?
+
+VIOLET. Don't take one of them until I've seen it. One never knows what
+may be wrong with these places.
+
+MALONE. I won't. I'll do nothing without consulting you, never fear.
+
+VIOLET. [politely, but without a ray of gratitude] Thanks: that will
+be much the best way. [She goes calmly back to the villa, escorted
+obsequiously by Malone to the upper end of the garden].
+
+TANNER. [drawing Ramsden's attention to Malone's cringing attitude as he
+takes leave of Violet] And that poor devil is a billionaire! one of the
+master spirits of the age! Led on a string like a pug dog by the first
+girl who takes the trouble to despise him. I wonder will it ever come to
+that with me. [He comes down to the lawn.]
+
+RAMSDEN. [following him] The sooner the better for you.
+
+MALONE. [clapping his hands as he returns through the garden] That'll be
+a grand woman for Hector. I wouldn't exchange her for ten duchesses. [He
+descends to the lawn and comes between Tanner and Ramsden].
+
+RAMSDEN. [very civil to the billionaire] It's an unexpected pleasure to
+find you in this corner of the world, Mr Malone. Have you come to buy up
+the Alhambra?
+
+MALONE. Well, I don't say I mightn't. I think I could do better with it
+than the Spanish government. But that's not what I came about. To tell
+you the truth, about a month ago I overheard a deal between two men over
+a bundle of shares. They differed about the price: they were young and
+greedy, and didn't know that if the shares were worth what was bid for
+them they must be worth what was asked, the margin being too small to
+be of any account, you see. To amuse meself, I cut in and bought the
+shares. Well, to this day I haven't found out what the business is. The
+office is in this town; and the name is Mendoza, Limited. Now whether
+Mendoza's a mine, or a steamboat line, or a bank, or a patent article--
+
+TANNER. He's a man. I know him: his principles are thoroughly
+commercial. Let us take you round the town in our motor, Mr Malone, and
+call on him on the way.
+
+MALONE. If you'll be so kind, yes. And may I ask who--
+
+TANNER. Mr Roebuck Ramsden, a very old friend of your daughter-in-law.
+
+MALONE. Happy to meet you, Mr Ramsden.
+
+RAMSDEN. Thank you. Mr Tanner is also one of our circle.
+
+MALONE. Glad to know you also, Mr Tanner.
+
+TANNER. Thanks. [Malone and Ramsden go out very amicably through the
+little gate. Tanner calls to Octavius, who is wandering in the garden
+with Ann] Tavy! [Tavy comes to the steps, Tanner whispers loudly to
+him] Violet has married a financier of brigands. [Tanner hurries away
+to overtake Malone and Ramsden. Ann strolls to the steps with an idle
+impulse to torment Octavius].
+
+ANN. Won't you go with them, Tavy?
+
+OCTAVIUS. [tears suddenly flushing his eyes] You cut me to the heart,
+Ann, by wanting me to go [he comes down on the lawn to hide his face
+from her. She follows him caressingly].
+
+ANN. Poor Ricky Ticky Tavy! Poor heart!
+
+OCTAVIUS. It belongs to you, Ann. Forgive me: I must speak of it. I love
+you. You know I love you.
+
+ANN. What's the good, Tavy? You know that my mother is determined that I
+shall marry Jack.
+
+OCTAVIUS. [amazed] Jack!
+
+ANN. It seems absurd, doesn't it?
+
+OCTAVIUS. [with growing resentment] Do you mean to say that Jack has
+been playing with me all this time? That he has been urging me not to
+marry you because he intends to marry you himself?
+
+ANN. [alarmed] No no: you mustn't lead him to believe that I said that:
+I don't for a moment think that Jack knows his own mind. But it's clear
+from my father's will that he wished me to marry Jack. And my mother is
+set on it.
+
+OCTAVIUS. But you are not bound to sacrifice yourself always to the
+wishes of your parents.
+
+ANN. My father loved me. My mother loves me. Surely their wishes are a
+better guide than my own selfishness.
+
+OCTAVIUS. Oh, I know how unselfish you are, Ann. But believe me--though
+I know I am speaking in my own interest--there is another side to this
+question. Is it fair to Jack to marry him if you do not love him? Is
+it fair to destroy my happiness as well as your own if you can bring
+yourself to love me?
+
+ANN. [looking at him with a faint impulse of pity] Tavy, my dear, you
+are a nice creature--a good boy.
+
+OCTAVIUS. [humiliated] Is that all?
+
+ANN. [mischievously in spite of her pity] That's a great deal, I assure
+you. You would always worship the ground I trod on, wouldn't you?
+
+OCTAVIUS. I do. It sounds ridiculous; but it's no exaggeration. I do;
+and I always shall.
+
+ANN. Always is a long word, Tavy. You see, I shall have to live up
+always to your idea of my divinity; and I don't think I could do that if
+we were married. But if I marry Jack, you'll never be disillusioned--at
+least not until I grow too old.
+
+OCTAVIUS. I too shall grow old, Ann. And when I am eighty, one white
+hair of the woman I love will make me tremble more than the thickest
+gold tress from the most beautiful young head.
+
+ANN. [quite touched] Oh, that's poetry, Tavy, real poetry. It gives
+me that strange sudden sense of an echo from a former existence which
+always seems to me such a striking proof that we have immortal souls.
+
+OCTAVIUS. Do you believe that is true?
+
+ANN. Tavy, if it is to become true you must lose me as well as love me.
+
+OCTAVIUS. Oh! [he hastily sits down at the little table and covers his
+face with his hands].
+
+ANN. [with conviction] Tavy: I wouldn't for worlds destroy your
+illusions. I can neither take you nor let you go. I can see exactly what
+will suit you. You must be a sentimental old bachelor for my sake.
+
+OCTAVIUS. [desperately] Ann: I'll kill myself.
+
+ANN. Oh no you won't: that wouldn't be kind. You won't have a bad time.
+You will be very nice to women; and you will go a good deal to the
+opera. A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London
+if he has a comfortable income.
+
+OCTAVIUS. [considerably cooled, but believing that he is only recovering
+his self-control] I know you mean to be kind, Ann. Jack has persuaded
+you that cynicism is a good tonic for me. [He rises with quiet dignity].
+
+ANN. [studying him slyly] You see, I'm disillusionizing you already.
+That's what I dread.
+
+OCTAVIUS. You do not dread disillusionizing Jack.
+
+ANN. [her face lighting up with mischievous ecstasy--whispering] I
+can't: he has no illusions about me. I shall surprise Jack the other
+way. Getting over an unfavorable impression is ever so much easier than
+living up to an ideal. Oh, I shall enrapture Jack sometimes!
+
+OCTAVIUS. [resuming the calm phase of despair, and beginning to enjoy
+his broken heart and delicate attitude without knowing it] I don't doubt
+that. You will enrapture him always. And he--the fool!--thinks you would
+make him wretched.
+
+ANN. Yes: that's the difficulty, so far.
+
+OCTAVIUS. [heroically] Shall _I_ tell him that you love him?
+
+ANN. [quickly] Oh no: he'd run away again.
+
+OCTAVIUS. [shocked] Ann: would you marry an unwilling man?
+
+ANN. What a queer creature you are, Tavy! There's no such thing as a
+willing man when you really go for him. [She laughs naughtily]. I'm
+shocking you, I suppose. But you know you are really getting a sort of
+satisfaction already in being out of danger yourself.
+
+OCTAVIUS [startled] Satisfaction! [Reproachfully] You say that to me!
+
+ANN. Well, if it were really agony, would you ask for more of it?
+
+OCTAVIUS. Have I asked for more of it?
+
+ANN. You have offered to tell Jack that I love him. That's
+self-sacrifice, I suppose; but there must be some satisfaction in it.
+Perhaps it's because you're a poet. You are like the bird that presses
+its breast against the sharp thorn to make itself sing.
+
+OCTAVIUS. It's quite simple. I love you; and I want you to be happy. You
+don't love me; so I can't make you happy myself; but I can help another
+man to do it.
+
+ANN. Yes: it seems quite simple. But I doubt if we ever know why we do
+things. The only really simple thing is to go straight for what you want
+and grab it. I suppose I don't love you, Tavy; but sometimes I feel
+as if I should like to make a man of you somehow. You are very foolish
+about women.
+
+OCTAVIUS. [almost coldly] I am content to be what I am in that respect.
+
+ANN. Then you must keep away from them, and only dream about them. I
+wouldn't marry you for worlds, Tavy.
+
+OCTAVIUS. I have no hope, Ann: I accept my ill luck. But I don't think
+you quite know how much it hurts.
+
+ANN. You are so softhearted! It's queer that you should be so different
+from Violet. Violet's as hard as nails.
+
+OCTAVIUS. Oh no. I am sure Violet is thoroughly womanly at heart.
+
+ANN. [with some impatience] Why do you say that? Is it unwomanly to be
+thoughtful and businesslike and sensible? Do you want Violet to be an
+idiot--or something worse, like me?
+
+OCTAVIUS. Something worse--like you! What do you mean, Ann?
+
+ANN. Oh well, I don't mean that, of course. But I have a great respect
+for Violet. She gets her own way always.
+
+OCTAVIUS. [sighing] So do you.
+
+ANN. Yes; but somehow she gets it without coaxing--without having to
+make people sentimental about her.
+
+OCTAVIUS. [with brotherly callousness] Nobody could get very sentimental
+about Violet, I think, pretty as she is.
+
+ANN. Oh yes they could, if she made them.
+
+OCTAVIUS. But surely no really nice woman would deliberately practise on
+men's instincts in that way.
+
+ANN. [throwing up her hands] Oh Tavy, Tavy, Ricky Ticky Tavy, heaven
+help the woman who marries you!
+
+OCTAVIUS. [his passion reviving at the name] Oh why, why, why do you say
+that? Don't torment me. I don't understand.
+
+ANN. Suppose she were to tell fibs, and lay snares for men?
+
+OCTAVIUS. Do you think _I_ could marry such a woman--I, who have known and
+loved you?
+
+ANN. Hm! Well, at all events, she wouldn't let you if she were wise. So
+that's settled. And now I can't talk any more. Say you forgive me, and
+that the subject is closed.
+
+OCTAVIUS. I have nothing to forgive; and the subject is closed. And if
+the wound is open, at least you shall never see it bleed.
+
+ANN. Poetic to the last, Tavy. Goodbye, dear. [She pats his check;
+has an impulse to kiss him and then another impulse of distaste which
+prevents her; finally runs away through the garden and into the villa].
+
+Octavius again takes refuge at the table, bowing his head on his arms
+and sobbing softly. Mrs Whitefield, who has been pottering round the
+Granada shops, and has a net full of little parcels in her hand, comes
+in through the gate and sees him.
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. [running to him and lifting his head] What's the matter,
+Tavy? Are you ill?
+
+OCTAVIUS. No, nothing, nothing.
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. [still holding his head, anxiously] But you're crying.
+Is it about Violet's marriage?
+
+OCTAVIUS. No, no. Who told you about Violet?
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. [restoring the head to its owner] I met Roebuck and that
+awful old Irishman. Are you sure you're not ill? What's the matter?
+
+OCTAVIUS. [affectionately] It's nothing--only a man's broken heart.
+Doesn't that sound ridiculous?
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. But what is it all about? Has Ann been doing anything to
+you?
+
+OCTAVIUS. It's not Ann's fault. And don't think for a moment that I
+blame you.
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. [startled] For what?
+
+OCTAVIUS. [pressing her hand consolingly] For nothing. I said I didn't
+blame you.
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. But I haven't done anything. What's the matter?
+
+OCTAVIUS. [smiling sadly] Can't you guess? I daresay you are right to
+prefer Jack to me as a husband for Ann; but I love Ann; and it hurts
+rather. [He rises and moves away from her towards the middle of the
+lawn].
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. [following him hastily] Does Ann say that I want her to
+marry Jack?
+
+OCTAVIUS. Yes: she has told me.
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. [thoughtfully] Then I'm very sorry for you, Tavy. It's
+only her way of saying SHE wants to marry Jack. Little she cares what _I_
+say or what I want!
+
+OCTAVIUS. But she would not say it unless she believed it. Surely you
+don't suspect Ann of--of DECEIT!!
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. Well, never mind, Tavy. I don't know which is best for a
+young man: to know too little, like you, or too much, like Jack.
+
+Tanner returns.
+
+TANNER. Well, I've disposed of old Malone. I've introduced him to
+Mendoza, Limited; and left the two brigands together to talk it out.
+Hullo, Tavy! anything wrong?
+
+OCTAVIUS. I must go wash my face, I see. [To Mrs Whitefield] Tell him
+what you wish. [To Tanner] You may take it from me, Jack, that Ann
+approves of it.
+
+TANNER. [puzzled by his manner] Approves of what?
+
+OCTAVIUS. Of what Mrs Whitefield wishes. [He goes his way with sad
+dignity to the villa].
+
+TANNER. [to Mrs Whitefield] This is very mysterious. What is it you
+wish? It shall be done, whatever it is.
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. [with snivelling gratitude] Thank you, Jack. [She sits
+down. Tanner brings the other chair from the table and sits close to her
+with his elbows on his knees, giving her his whole attention]. I don't
+know why it is that other people's children are so nice to me, and that
+my own have so little consideration for me. It's no wonder I don't seem
+able to care for Ann and Rhoda as I do for you and Tavy and Violet. It's
+a very queer world. It used to be so straightforward and simple; and
+now nobody seems to think and feel as they ought. Nothing has been right
+since that speech that Professor Tyndall made at Belfast.
+
+TANNER. Yes: life is more complicated than we used to think. But what am
+I to do for you?
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. That's just what I want to tell you. Of course you'll
+marry Ann whether I like it myself or not--
+
+TANNER. [starting] It seems to me that I shall presently be married to
+Ann whether I like it myself or not.
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. [peacefully] Oh, very likely you will: you know what she
+is when she has set her mind on anything. But don't put it on me: that's
+all I ask. Tavy has just let out that she's been saying that I am making
+her marry you; and the poor boy is breaking his heart about it; for he
+is in love with her himself, though what he sees in her so wonderful,
+goodness knows: _I_ don't. It's no use telling Tavy that Ann puts things
+into people's heads by telling them that I want them when the thought of
+them never crossed my mind. It only sets Tavy against me. But you know
+better than that. So if you marry her, don't put the blame on me.
+
+TANNER. [emphatically] I haven't the slightest intention of marrying
+her.
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. [slyly] She'd suit you better than Tavy. She'd meet her
+match in you, Jack. I'd like to see her meet her match.
+
+TANNER. No man is a match for a woman, except with a poker and a pair of
+hobnailed boots. Not always even then. Anyhow, I can't take the poker to
+her. I should be a mere slave.
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. No: she's afraid of you. At all events, you would tell
+her the truth about herself. She wouldn't be able to slip out of it as
+she does with me.
+
+TANNER. Everybody would call me a brute if I told Ann the truth about
+herself in terms of her own moral code. To begin with, Ann says things
+that are not strictly true.
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. I'm glad somebody sees she is not an angel.
+
+TANNER. In short--to put it as a husband would put it when exasperated
+to the point of speaking out--she is a liar. And since she has plunged
+Tavy head over ears in love with her without any intention of marrying
+him, she is a coquette, according to the standard definition of
+a coquette as a woman who rouses passions she has no intention of
+gratifying. And as she has now reduced you to the point of being willing
+to sacrifice me at the altar for the mere satisfaction of getting me to
+call her a liar to her face, I may conclude that she is a bully as
+well. She can't bully men as she bullies women; so she habitually
+and unscrupulously uses her personal fascination to make men give her
+whatever she wants. That makes her almost something for which I know no
+polite name.
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. [in mild expostulation] Well, you can't expect
+perfection, Jack.
+
+TANNER. I don't. But what annoys me is that Ann does. I know perfectly
+well that all this about her being a liar and a bully and a coquette and
+so forth is a trumped-up moral indictment which might be brought against
+anybody. We all lie; we all bully as much as we dare; we all bid for
+admiration without the least intention of earning it; we all get as much
+rent as we can out of our powers of fascination. If Ann would admit this
+I shouldn't quarrel with her. But she won't. If she has children she'll
+take advantage of their telling lies to amuse herself by whacking them.
+If another woman makes eyes at me, she'll refuse to know a coquette. She
+will do just what she likes herself whilst insisting on everybody else
+doing what the conventional code prescribes. In short, I can stand
+everything except her confounded hypocrisy. That's what beats me.
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. [carried away by the relief of hearing her own opinion
+so eloquently expressed] Oh, she is a hypocrite. She is: she is. Isn't
+she?
+
+TANNER. Then why do you want to marry me to her?
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. [querulously] There now! put it on me, of course. I
+never thought of it until Tavy told me she said I did. But, you know,
+I'm very fond of Tavy: he's a sort of son to me; and I don't want him to
+be trampled on and made wretched.
+
+TANNER. Whereas I don't matter, I suppose.
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. Oh, you are different, somehow: you are able to take
+care of yourself. You'd serve her out. And anyhow, she must marry
+somebody.
+
+TANNER. Aha! there speaks the life instinct. You detest her; but you
+feel that you must get her married.
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. [rising, shocked] Do you mean that I detest my own
+daughter! Surely you don't believe me to be so wicked and unnatural as
+that, merely because I see her faults.
+
+TANNER. [cynically] You love her, then?
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. Why, of course I do. What queer things you say, Jack! We
+can't help loving our own blood relations.
+
+TANNER. Well, perhaps it saves unpleasantness to say so. But for my
+part, I suspect that the tables of consanguinity have a natural basis in
+a natural repugnance [he rises].
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. You shouldn't say things like that, Jack. I hope you
+won't tell Ann that I have been speaking to you. I only wanted to
+set myself right with you and Tavy. I couldn't sit mumchance and have
+everything put on me.
+
+TANNER. [politely] Quite so.
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. [dissatisfied] And now I've only made matters worse.
+Tavy's angry with me because I don't worship Ann. And when it's been put
+into my head that Ann ought to marry you, what can I say except that it
+would serve her right?
+
+TANNER. Thank you.
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. Now don't be silly and twist what I say into something I
+don't mean. I ought to have fair play--
+
+Ann comes from the villa, followed presently by Violet, who is dressed
+for driving.
+
+ANN. [coming to her mother's right hand with threatening suavity] Well,
+mamma darling, you seem to be having a delightful chat with Jack. We can
+hear you all over the place.
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. [appalled] Have you overheard--
+
+TANNER. Never fear: Ann is only--well, we were discussing that habit of
+hers just now. She hasn't heard a word.
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. [stoutly] I don't care whether she has or not: I have a
+right to say what I please.
+
+VIOLET. [arriving on the lawn and coming between Mrs Whitefield and
+Tanner] I've come to say goodbye. I'm off for my honeymoon.
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. [crying] Oh don't say that, Violet. And no wedding, no
+breakfast, no clothes, nor anything.
+
+VIOLET. [petting her] It won't be for long.
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. Don't let him take you to America. Promise me that you
+won't.
+
+VIOLET. [very decidedly] I should think not, indeed. Don't cry, dear:
+I'm only going to the hotel.
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. But going in that dress, with your luggage, makes one
+realize--[she chokes, and then breaks out again] How I wish you were my
+daughter, Violet!
+
+VIOLET. [soothing her] There, there: so I am. Ann will be jealous.
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. Ann doesn't care a bit for me.
+
+ANN. Fie, mother! Come, now: you mustn't cry any more: you know Violet
+doesn't like it [Mrs Whitefield dries her eyes, and subsides].
+
+VIOLET. Goodbye, Jack.
+
+TANNER. Goodbye, Violet.
+
+VIOLET. The sooner you get married too, the better. You will be much
+less misunderstood.
+
+TANNER. [restively] I quite expect to get married in the course of the
+afternoon. You all seem to have set your minds on it.
+
+VIOLET. You might do worse. [To Mrs Whitefield: putting her arm round
+her] Let me take you to the hotel with me: the drive will do you good.
+Come in and get a wrap. [She takes her towards the villa].
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. [as they go up through the garden] I don't know what I
+shall do when you are gone, with no one but Ann in the house; and she
+always occupied with the men! It's not to be expected that your husband
+will care to be bothered with an old woman like me. Oh, you needn't
+tell me: politeness is all very well; but I know what people think--[She
+talks herself and Violet out of sight and hearing].
+
+Ann, musing on Violet's opportune advice, approaches Tanner; examines
+him humorously for a moment from toe to top; and finally delivers her
+opinion.
+
+ANN. Violet is quite right. You ought to get married.
+
+TANNER. [explosively] Ann: I will not marry you. Do you hear? I won't,
+won't, won't, won't, WON'T marry you.
+
+ANN. [placidly] Well, nobody axd you, sir she said, sir she said, sir
+she said. So that's settled.
+
+TANNER. Yes, nobody has asked me; but everybody treats the thing as
+settled. It's in the air. When we meet, the others go away on absurd
+pretexts to leave us alone together. Ramsden no longer scowls at me: his
+eye beams, as if he were already giving you away to me in church. Tavy
+refers me to your mother and gives me his blessing. Straker openly
+treats you as his future employer: it was he who first told me of it.
+
+ANN. Was that why you ran away?
+
+TANNER. Yes, only to be stopped by a lovesick brigand and run down like
+a truant schoolboy.
+
+ANN. Well, if you don't want to be married, you needn't be [she turns
+away from him and sits down, much at her ease].
+
+TANNER. [following her] Does any man want to be hanged? Yet men let
+themselves be hanged without a struggle for life, though they could at
+least give the chaplain a black eye. We do the world's will, not our
+own. I have a frightful feeling that I shall let myself be married
+because it is the world's will that you should have a husband.
+
+ANN. I daresay I shall, someday.
+
+TANNER. But why me--me of all men? Marriage is to me apostasy,
+profanation of the sanctuary of my soul, violation of my manhood,
+sale of my birthright, shameful surrender, ignominious capitulation,
+acceptance of defeat. I shall decay like a thing that has served its
+purpose and is done with; I shall change from a man with a future to
+a man with a past; I shall see in the greasy eyes of all the other
+husbands their relief at the arrival of a new prisoner to share their
+ignominy. The young men will scorn me as one who has sold out: to the
+young women I, who have always been an enigma and a possibility,
+shall be merely somebody else's property--and damaged goods at that: a
+secondhand man at best.
+
+ANN. Well, your wife can put on a cap and make herself ugly to keep you
+in countenance, like my grandmother.
+
+TANNER. So that she may make her triumph more insolent by publicly
+throwing away the bait the moment the trap snaps on the victim!
+
+ANN. After all, though, what difference would it make? Beauty is all
+very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been
+in the house three days? I thought our pictures very lovely when papa
+bought them; but I haven't looked at them for years. You never bother
+about my looks: you are too well used to me. I might be the umbrella
+stand.
+
+TANNER. You lie, you vampire: you lie.
+
+ANN. Flatterer. Why are you trying to fascinate me, Jack, if you don't
+want to marry me?
+
+TANNER. The Life Force. I am in the grip of the Life Force.
+
+ANN. I don't understand in the least: it sounds like the Life Guards.
+
+TANNER. Why don't you marry Tavy? He is willing. Can you not be
+satisfied unless your prey struggles?
+
+ANN. [turning to him as if to let him into a secret] Tavy will never
+marry. Haven't you noticed that that sort of man never marries?
+
+TANNER. What! a man who idolizes women! who sees nothing in nature but
+romantic scenery for love duets! Tavy, the chivalrous, the faithful, the
+tenderhearted and true! Tavy never marry! Why, he was born to be swept
+up by the first pair of blue eyes he meets in the street.
+
+ANN. Yes, I know. All the same, Jack, men like that always live in
+comfortable bachelor lodgings with broken hearts, and are adored
+by their landladies, and never get married. Men like you always get
+married.
+
+TANNER. [Smiting his brow] How frightfully, horribly true! It has been
+staring me in the face all my life; and I never saw it before.
+
+ANN. Oh, it's the same with women. The poetic temperament's a very nice
+temperament, very amiable, very harmless and poetic, I daresay; but it's
+an old maid's temperament.
+
+TANNER. Barren. The Life Force passes it by.
+
+ANN. If that's what you mean by the Life Force, yes.
+
+TANNER. You don't care for Tavy?
+
+ANN. [looking round carefully to make sure that Tavy is not within
+earshot] No.
+
+TANNER. And you do care for me?
+
+ANN. [rising quietly and shaking her finger at him] Now Jack! Behave
+yourself.
+
+TANNER. Infamous, abandoned woman! Devil!
+
+ANN. Boa-constrictor! Elephant!
+
+TANNER. Hypocrite!
+
+ANN. [Softly] I must be, for my future husband's sake.
+
+TANNER. For mine! [Correcting himself savagely] I mean for his.
+
+ANN.[ignoring the correction] Yes, for yours. You had better marry what
+you call a hypocrite, Jack. Women who are not hypocrites go about in
+rational dress and are insulted and get into all sorts of hot water. And
+then their husbands get dragged in too, and live in continual dread of
+fresh complications. Wouldn't you prefer a wife you could depend on?
+
+TANNER. No, a thousand times no: hot water is the revolutionist's
+element. You clean men as you clean milkpails, by scalding them.
+
+ANN. Cold water has its uses too. It's healthy.
+
+TANNER. [despairingly] Oh, you are witty: at the supreme moment the Life
+Force endows you with every quality. Well, I too can be a hypocrite.
+Your father's will appointed me your guardian, not your suitor. I shall
+be faithful to my trust.
+
+ANN. [in low siren tones] He asked me who would I have as my guardian
+before he made that will. I chose you!
+
+TANNER. The will is yours then! The trap was laid from the beginning.
+
+ANN. [concentrating all her magic] From the beginning--from our
+childhood--for both of us--by the Life Force.
+
+TANNER. I will not marry you. I will not marry you.
+
+ANN. Oh, you will, you will.
+
+TANNER. I tell you, no, no, no.
+
+ANN. I tell you, yes, yes, yes.
+
+TANNER. NO.
+
+ANN. [coaxing--imploring--almost exhausted] Yes. Before it is too late
+for repentance. Yes.
+
+TANNER. [struck by the echo from the past] When did all this happen to
+me before? Are we two dreaming?
+
+ANN. [suddenly losing her courage, with an anguish that she does not
+conceal] No. We are awake; and you have said no: that is all.
+
+TANNER. [brutally] Well?
+
+ANN. Well, I made a mistake: you do not love me.
+
+TANNER. [seizing her in his arms] It is false: I love you. The Life
+Force enchants me: I have the whole world in my arms when I clasp you.
+But I am fighting for my freedom, for my honor, for myself, one and
+indivisible.
+
+ANN. Your happiness will be worth them all.
+
+TANNER. You would sell freedom and honor and self for happiness?
+
+ANN. It will not be all happiness for me. Perhaps death.
+
+TANNER. [groaning] Oh, that clutch holds and hurts. What have you
+grasped in me? Is there a father's heart as well as a mother's?
+
+ANN. Take care, Jack: if anyone comes while we are like this, you will
+have to marry me.
+
+TANNER. If we two stood now on the edge of a precipice, I would hold you
+tight and jump.
+
+ANN. [panting, failing more and more under the strain] Jack: let me go.
+I have dared so frightfully--it is lasting longer than I thought. Let me
+go: I can't bear it.
+
+TANNER. Nor I. Let it kill us.
+
+ANN. Yes: I don't care. I am at the end of my forces. I don't care. I
+think I am going to faint.
+
+At this moment Violet and Octavius come from the villa with Mrs
+Whitefield, who is wrapped up for driving. Simultaneously Malone and
+Ramsden, followed by Mendoza and Straker, come in through the little
+gate in the paling. Tanner shamefacedly releases Ann, who raises her
+hand giddily to her forehead.
+
+MALONE. Take care. Something's the matter with the lady.
+
+RAMSDEN. What does this mean?
+
+VIOLET. [running between Ann and Tanner] Are you ill?
+
+ANN. [reeling, with a supreme effort] I have promised to marry Jack.
+[She swoons. Violet kneels by her and chafes her hand. Tanner runs round
+to her other hand, and tries to lift her bead. Octavius goes to Violet's
+assistance, but does not know what to do. Mrs Whitefield hurries back
+into the villa. Octavius, Malone and Ramsden run to Ann and crowd round
+her, stooping to assist. Straker coolly comes to Ann's feet, and Mendoza
+to her head, both upright and self-possessed].
+
+STRAKER. Now then, ladies and gentlemen: she don't want a crowd round
+her: she wants air--all the air she can git. If you please, gents--
+[Malone and Ramsden allow him to drive them gently past Ann and up
+the lawn towards the garden, where Octavius, who has already become
+conscious of his uselessness, joins them. Straker, following them up,
+pauses for a moment to instruct Tanner]. Don't lift er ed, Mr Tanner:
+let it go flat so's the blood can run back into it.
+
+MENDOZA. He is right, Mr Tanner. Trust to the air of the Sierra. [He
+withdraws delicately to the garden steps].
+
+TANNER. [rising] I yield to your superior knowledge of physiology,
+Henry. [He withdraws to the corner of the lawn; and Octavius immediately
+hurries down to him].
+
+TAVY. [aside to Tanner, grasping his hand] Jack: be very happy.
+
+TANNER. [aside to Tavy] I never asked her. It is a trap for me. [He goes
+up the lawn towards the garden. Octavius remains petrified].
+
+MENDOZA. [intercepting Mrs Whitefield, who comes from the villa with a
+glass of brandy] What is this, madam [he takes it from her]?
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. A little brandy.
+
+MENDOZA. The worst thing you could give her. Allow me. [He swallows it].
+Trust to the air of the Sierra, madam.
+
+For a moment the men all forget Ann and stare at Mendoza.
+
+ANN. [in Violet's ear, clutching her round the neck] Violet, did Jack
+say anything when I fainted?
+
+VIOLET. No.
+
+ANN. Ah! [with a sigh of intense relief she relapses].
+
+MRS WHITEFIELD. Oh, she's fainted again.
+
+They are about to rush back to her; but Mendoza stops them with a
+warning gesture.
+
+ANN. [supine] No I haven't. I'm quite happy.
+
+TANNER. [suddenly walking determinedly to her, and snatching her hand
+from Violet to feel her pulse] Why, her pulse is positively bounding.
+Come, get up. What nonsense! Up with you. [He gets her up summarily].
+
+ANN. Yes: I feel strong enough now. But you very nearly killed me, Jack,
+for all that.
+
+MALONE. A rough wooer, eh? They're the best sort, Miss Whitefield.
+I congratulate Mr Tanner; and I hope to meet you and him as frequent
+guests at the Abbey.
+
+ANN. Thank you. [She goes past Malone to Octavius] Ricky Ticky Tavy:
+congratulate me. [Aside to him] I want to make you cry for the last
+time.
+
+TAVY. [steadfastly] No more tears. I am happy in your happiness. And I
+believe in you in spite of everything.
+
+RAMSDEN. [coming between Malone and Tanner] You are a happy man, Jack
+Tanner. I envy you.
+
+MENDOZA. [advancing between Violet and Tanner] Sir: there are two
+tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is
+to get it. Mine and yours, sir.
+
+TANNER. Mr Mendoza: I have no heart's desires. Ramsden: it is very easy
+for you to call me a happy man: you are only a spectator. I am one of
+the principals; and I know better. Ann: stop tempting Tavy, and come
+back to me.
+
+ANN. [complying] You are absurd, Jack. [She takes his proffered arm].
+
+TANNER. [continuing] I solemnly say that I am not a happy man. Ann looks
+happy; but she is only triumphant, successful, victorious. That is not
+happiness, but the price for which the strong sell their happiness. What
+we have both done this afternoon is to renounce tranquillity, above all
+renounce the romantic possibilities of an unknown future, for the cares
+of a household and a family. I beg that no man may seize the occasion to
+get half drunk and utter imbecile speeches and coarse pleasantries at my
+expense. We propose to furnish our own house according to our own taste;
+and I hereby give notice that the seven or eight travelling clocks,
+the four or five dressing cases, the salad bowls, the carvers and
+fish slices, the copy of Tennyson in extra morocco, and all the other
+articles you are preparing to heap upon us, will be instantly sold, and
+the proceeds devoted to circulating free copies of the Revolutionist's
+Handbook. The wedding will take place three days after our return
+to England, by special license, at the office of the district
+superintendent registrar, in the presence of my solicitor and his clerk,
+who, like his clients, will be in ordinary walking dress.
+
+VIOLET. [with intense conviction] You are a brute, Jack.
+
+ANN. [looking at him with fond pride and caressing his arm] Never mind
+her, dear. Go on talking.
+
+TANNER. Talking!
+
+Universal laughter.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Man And Superman, by George Bernard Shaw
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