Man and Superman and Three Other Plays (52 page)

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
^db
[
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 Ibeen 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?

TANNER 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 bookcase] Ramsden: we're beated—smashed—nonentitized, like her mother.

RAMSDEN Stuff, sir.
[Hefollows MRS. WHITEFIELD out of the room].

TANNER [
left alone with OCTAVIUS,
stares
whimsically at him]
Tavy: ido 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 child-bearing 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 blood-sucker, 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 shew 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 under done 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 into the 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,”
^dc
here you are—you who have been as merry as grigs
^dd
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.