THE DEVIL. What is the use of knowing?
    508
   
  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.
    509
   
  THE DEVIL. On the rocks, most likely.
    510
   
  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?
    511
   
  THE DEVIL. Well, well, go your way, Señor 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.
    512
   
  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, Señor Satan.
    513
   
  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—
    514
   
  DON JUAN. Why not say flesh and blood at once, though we have left those two greasy commonplaces behind us?
    515
   
  THE DEVIL [angrily] You throw my friendly farewell back in my teeth, then, Don Juan?
    516
   
  DON JUAN. By no means. But though there is much to be learnt from a cynical devil, I really cannot stand a sentimental one. Señor Commander: you know the way to the frontier of hell and heaven. Be good enough to direct me.
    517
   
  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.
    518
   
  DON JUAN. Good. [Saluting Doña Ana] Señora: your servant.
    519
   
  ANA. But I am going with you.
    520
   
  DON JUAN. I can find my own way to heaven, Ana; not yours [he vanishes].
    521
   
  ANA. How annoying!
    522
   
  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! Theyll never stand it in heaven.
    523
   
  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.
    524
   
  THE STATUE. I remember: he came to heaven. Rembrandt.
    525
   
  THE DEVIL. Ay, Rembrandt. There is something unnatural about these fellows. Do not listen to their gospel, Señor 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.
    526
   
  THE STATUE. And who the deuce is the Superman?
    527
   
  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?
    528
   
  THE STATUE. Never heard of him.
    529
   
  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.
    530
   
  THE STATUE. Superman is a good cry; and a good cry is half the battle. I should like to see this Nietzsche.
    531
   
  THE DEVIL. Unfortunately he met Wagner here, and had a quarrel with him.
    532
   
  THE STATUE. Quite right, too. Mozart for me!
    533
   
  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.
    534
   
  THE STATUE. With pleasure: youre most kind.
    535
   
  THE DEVIL. This way, Commander. We go down the old trap [he places himself on the grave trap].
    536
   
  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.
    537
   
  THE DEVIL. And me also.
    538
   
  ANA. Stop! [The trap stops].
    539
   
  THE DEVIL. You, Señora, cannot come this way. You will have an apotheosis. But you will be at the palace before us.
    540
   
  ANA. That is not what I stopped you for. Tell me: where can I find the Superman?
    541
   
  THE DEVIL. He is not yet created, Señora.
    542
   
  THE STATUE. And never will be, probably. Let us proceed: the red fire will make me sneeze. [They descend].
    543
   
  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 shewing 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 shew 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.
    544
   
  MENDOZA. Did you dream?
    545
   
  TANNER. Damnably. Did you?
    546
   
  MENDOZA. Yes. I forget what. You were in it.
    547
   
  TANNER. So were you. Amazing!
    548
   
  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?
    549
   
  DUVAL [breathless] I have not shoot. Dey shoot first.
    550
   
  ANARCHIST. I told you to begin by abolishing the State. Now we are all lost.
    551
   
  THE ROWDY SOCIAL-DEMOCRAT [stampeding across the amphitheatre] Ran, everybody.
    552
   
  MENDOZA [collaring him; throwing him on his back; and drawing a knife] I stab the man who stirs. [He blocks the way. The stampede is checked]. What has happened?
    553
   
  THE SULKY SOCIAL-DEMOCRAT. A motor—
    554
   
  THE ANARCHIST. Three men—
    555
   
  DUVAL. Deux femmes—
    556
   
  MENDOZA. Three men and two women! Why have you not brought them here? Are you afraid of them?
    557
   
  THE ROWDY ONE [getting up] Thyve a hescort. Ow, de-ooh luts ook it, Mendowza.
    558
   
  THE SULKY ONE. Two armored cars full o soldiers at the ed o the valley.
    559
   
  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.
    560
   
  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.
    561
   
  THE ROWDY ONE [in agony of apprehension] And Ow my good Lord, ere we are, wytin for em! Luts tike to the mahntns.
    562
   
  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.
    563
   
  THE ROWDY ONE. Bat—
    564
   
  MENDOZA. Silence. Leave this to me. [To Tanner] Comrade: you will not betray us.
    565
   
  STRAKER. Oo are you callin comrade?
    566
   
  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.
    567
   
  TANNER. I bring no charge against you, comrade. We have spent a pleasant evening with you: that is all.
    568
   
  STRAKER. I gev my and to nobody, see?
    569
   
  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.
    570
   
  STRAKER [with baffled rage] I dont care about the court. It’s avin our name mixed up with yours that I object to, you blackmailin swine, you.
    571
   
  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].
    572
   
  ANN. It’s Jack!
    573
   
  TANNER. Caught!
    574
   
  HECTOR. Why, certainly it is. I said it was you,
    575
   
  TANNER. Weve just been stopped by a puncture: the road is full of nails.
    576
   
  VIOLET. What are you doing here with all these men?
    577
   
  ANN. Why did you leave us without a word of warning?
    578
   
  HECTOR. I wawnt 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.
    579
   
  TANNER. But this is not the road to Monte Carlo.
    580
   
  HECTOR. No matter. Miss Whitefield tracked you at every stopping place: she is a regular Sherlock Holmes.
    581
   
  TANNER. The Life Force! I am lost.
    582
   
  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.
    583
   
  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].
    584
   
  HECTOR. Why, so do I.
    585
   
  OCTAVIUS. I know you perfectly well, sir; but I cant think where I have met you.
    586
   
  MENDOZA [to Violet] Do you remember me, madam?
    587
   
  VIOLET. Oh, quite well; but I am so stupid about names.
    588
   
  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.
    589
   
  RAMSDEN [angrily] Well, what is that to you, pray?
    590
   
  OCTAVIUS. Why, Violet, I thought you hardly knew one another before this trip, you and Malone!
    591
   
  VIOLET [vexed] I suppose this person was the manager.
    592
   
  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.
    593
   
  VIOLET. What impertinence! [She turns her back on him, and goes up the hill with Hector].
    594
   
  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.
    595
   
  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].
    596
   
  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.
    597
   
  STRAKER. Gentleman! Not me.
    598
   
  RAMSDEN. Really, Tanner, this tone—
    599
   
  ANN. Dont 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, dog-like].
    600
   
  VIOLET [calling from the hill] Here are the soldiers. They are getting out of their motors.
    601
   
  DUVAL [panic-stricken] Oh, nom de Dieu!
    602
   
  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.
    603
   
  THE SULKY SOCIAL-DEMOCRAT [argumentative to the last] On the contrary, only by capturing the State machine—
    604
   
  THE ANARCHIST. It is going to capture you.
    605
   
  THE ROWDY SOCIAL DEMOCRAT [his anguish culminating] Ow, chack it. Wot are we ere for? Wot are we wytin for?
    606
   
  MENDOZA [between his teeth] Go on. 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 overwhelming 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 into the amphitheatre; looks hard at the brigands; and then inquiringly at Tanner.
    607
   
  THE OFFICER. Who are these men, Señor Ingles?
    608
   
  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 to 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.
      1
   
  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.
      2
   
  This elderly gentleman defies the Spanish sun in a black frock coat, tall silk hat, 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, being 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 shews signs of intending his Irish nonsense to be taken seriously.
      3
   
  STRAKER. I’ll go tell the young lady. She said youd prefer to stay here [he turns to go up through the garden to the villa].
      4
   
  THE IRISHMAN [who has been looking round him with lively curiosity] The young lady? Thats Miss Violet, eh?
      5
   
  STRAKER [stopping on the steps with sudden suspicion] Well, you know, dont you?
      6
   
  THE IRISHMAN. Do I?
      7
   
  STRAKER [his temper rising] Well, do you or dont you?
      8
   
  THE IRISHMAN. What business is that of yours?
  Straker, now highly indignant, comes back from the steps and confronts the visitor.
      9
   
  STRAKER. I’ll tell you what business it is of mine. Miss Robinson—
     10
   
  THE IRISHMAN [interrupting] Oh, her name is Robinson, is it? Thank you.
     11
   
  STRAKER. Why, you dont know even her name?
     12
   
  THE IRISHMAN. Yes I do, now that youve told me.
     13
   
  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 youre not the person I took that note to?
     14
   
  THE IRISHMAN. Who else did you take it to, pray?
     15
   
  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 aint you, not by a long chalk. At the hotel they told me that your name is Ector Malone—
     16
   
  MALONE. Hector Malone.
     17
   
  STRAKER [with calm superiority] Hector in your own country: thats what comes o livin in provincial places like Ireland and America. Over here youre Ector: if you avnt 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.
     18
   
  VIOLET [to Straker] Did you take my message?
     19
   
  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 isnt the gentleman you meant, say the word: it’s easy enough to fetch him back again.
     20
   
  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.
     21
   
  STRAKER [coolly defiant] No, not in another year or so. When weve ad you as long to polish up as weve ad im, perhaps youll begin to look a little bit up to is mark. At present you fall a long way short. Youve got too many aitches, for one thing. [To Violet, amiably] All right, Miss: you want to talk to him: I shant intrude. [He nods affably to Malone and goes out through the little gate in the paling].
     22
   
  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.
     23
   
  MALONE. Your hwat?
     24
   
  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.
     25
   
  MALONE. Ive noticed, madam, that every thousand dollars an Englishman gets seems to add one to the number of people he’s dependent on. However, you neednt apologize for your man: I made him talk on purpose. By doing so I learnt that youre stayin here in Grannida with a party of English, including my son Hector.
     26
   
  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. Wont you sit down? [She clears the nearest chair of the two books on it].
     27
   
  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?
     28
   
  VIOLET [sitting down] Yes.
     29
   
  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 dont know on hwat 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.
     30
   
  VIOLET. Yes: I know your son very well, Mr Malone. Have you any objection?
     31
   
  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.
     32
   
  VIOLET. I am sure you would not be unreasonable with him, Mr Malone.
     33
   
  MALONE. I hope not, Miss Robinson; but at your age you might think many things unreasonable that dont seem so to me.
     34
   
  VIOLET [with a little shrug] Oh, well, I suppose theres no use our playing at cross purposes, Mr Malone. Hector wants to marry me.
     35
   
  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].
     36
   
  VIOLET [with some severity] That is not very complimentary to me, Mr Malone.
     37
   
  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.
     38
   
  VIOLET. Hector may not have other views for himself, Mr Malone.
     39
   
  MALONE. Possibly not. Then he does without me: thats 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.
     40
   
  VIOLET [sharply] I beg your pardon, Mr Malone: I do not think anything so foolish. Hector must have money.
     41
   
  MALONE [staggered] Oh, very well, very well. No doubt he can work for it.
     42
   
  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.
     43
   
  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.
     44
   
  VIOLET. What objection have you to me, pray? My social position is as good as Hector’s, to say the least. He admits it.
     45
   
  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 very day 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.
     46
   
  VIOLET. What do you mean by a wife worthy of its traditions? Cannot any well bred woman keep such a house for him?
     47
   
  MALONE. No: she must be born to it.
     48
   
  VIOLET. Hector was not born to it, was he?
     49
   
  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.
     50
   
  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.
     51
   
  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.
     52
   
  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?
     53
   
  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. Me father died of starvation in Ireland in the black 47. Maybe youve heard of it.
     54
   
  VIOLET. The Famine?
     55
   
  MALONE [with smouldering passion] No, the starvation. When a country is full o food, and exporting it, there can be no famine. Me father was starved dead; and I was starved out to America in me mother’s arms. English rule drove me and mine out of Ireland. Well, you can keep Ireland. Me and me 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. Thats straightforward, isnt it, like yourself?
     56
   
  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?
     57
   
  MALONE. I have the refusal of two of the oldest family mansions in England. One historic owner cant afford to keep all the rooms dusted: the other cant afford the death duties. What do you say now?
     58
   
  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.
     59
   
  MALONE [grinning] D’y’think theyll be able to get that done before I buy the house—or rather the abbey? Theyre both abbeys.
     60
   
  VIOLET [putting that aside rather impatiently] Oh, well, let us talk sense, Mr Malone. You must feel that we havnt been talking sense so far.
     61
   
  MALONE. I cant say I do. I mean all I say.
     62
   
  VIOLET. Then you dont 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.
     63
   
  MALONE. Somebody like you, perhaps?
     64
   
  VIOLET [quietly] Well, yes. But you cannot very well ask me to undertake this with absolutely no means of keeping up his position.
     65
   
  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.
     66
   
  VIOLET. Of course, Mr Malone, you can make it very difficult for me to speak to you if you choose to misunderstand me.
     67
   
  MALONE [half bewildered] I dont 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 does not wait; at least he does not remain visibly within earshot.
     68
   
  VIOLET. Oh, how unlucky! Now please, Hector, say nothing. Go away until I have finished speaking to your father.
     69
   
  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: youve not played this hand straight.
     70
   
  MALONE. Hwat d’y’mean?
     71
   
  HECTOR. Youve opened a letter addressed to me. Youve impersonated me and stolen a march on this lady. Thats disawnerable.
     72
   
  MALONE [threateningly] Now you take care what youre saying, Hector. Take care, I tell you.
     73
   
  HECTOR. I have taken care. I am taking care. I’m taking care of my honor and my position in English society.
     74
   
  MALONE [hotly] Your position has been got by my money: do you know that?
     75
   
  HECTOR. Well, youve spoiled it all by opening that letter. A letter from an English lady, not addressed to you—a cawnfidential letter! a dullicate letter! a private letter! opened by my father! Thats a sort of thing a man cant 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].
     76
   
  VIOLET [snubbing him with an instinctive dislike for scene making] Dont be unreasonable, Hector. It was quite natural for Mr Malone to open my letter: his name was on the envelope.
     77
   
  MALONE. There! Youve no common sense, Hector. I thank you, Miss Robinson.
     78
   
  HECTOR. I thank you, too. It’s very kind of you. My father knows no better.
     79
   
  MALONE [furiously clenching his fists] Hector—
     80
   
  HECTOR [with undaunted moral force] Oh, it’s no use hectoring me. A private letter’s a private letter, dad: you cant get over that.
     81
   
  MALONE [raising his voice] I wont be talked back to by you, d’y’hear?
     82
   
  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.
     83
   
  VIOLET. Back already!
     84
   
  TANNER. The Alhambra is not open this afternoon.
     85
   
  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.
     86
   
  RAMSDEN. Is it wise for you to be out in the sunshine with such a headache, Violet?
     87
   
  TANNER. Have you recovered too, Malone?
     88
   
  VIOLET. Oh, I forgot. We have not all met before. Mr Malone: wont you introduce your father?
     89
   
  HECTOR [with Roman firmness] No, I will not. He is no father of mine.
     90
   
  MALONE [very angry] You disown your dad before your English friends, do you?
     91
   
  VIOLET. Oh, please dont 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.
     92
   
  HECTOR. I’m very sorry, Miss Rawbnsn; but I’m contending for a principle. I am a son, and, I hope, a dutiful one; but before everything I’m a Mahn!!! And when dad treats my private letters as his own, and takes it on himself to say that I shant marry you if I am happy and fortunate enough to gain your consent, then I just snap my fingers and go my own way.
     93
   
  TANNER. Marry Violet!
     94
   
  RAMSDEN. Are you in your senses?
     95
   
  TANNER. Do you forget what we told you?
     96
   
  HECTOR [recklessly] I dont care what you told me.
     97
   
  RAMSDEN [scandalized] Tut tut, sir! Monstrous! [he flings away towards the gate, his elbows quivering with indignation].
     98
   
  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 aggressiveness of his tone, to stop].
     99
   
  MALONE. I dont understand this. Is Hector not good enough for this lady, pray?
    100
   
  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.
    101
   
  MALONE [bitterly] So this is the highborn social tone Ive spoilt be me ignorant, uncultivated behavior! Makin love to a married woman! [He comes angrily between Hector and Violet, and almost bawls into Hector’s left ear] Youve picked up that habit of the British aristocracy, have you?
    102
   
  HECTOR. Thats all right. Dont you trouble yourself about that. I’ll answer for the morality of what I’m doing.
    103
   
  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.
    104
   
  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.
    105
   
  HECTOR [outraged] This is the last straw. Dad: you have insulted my wife.
    106
   
  MALONE. Your wife!
    107
   
  TANNER. You the missing husband! Another moral impostor! [He smites his brow, and collapses into Malone’s chair].
    108
   
  MALONE. Youve married without my consent!
    109
   
  RAMSDEN. You have deliberately humbugged us, sir!
    110
   
  HECTOR. Here: I have had just about enough of being badgered. Violet and I are married: thats the long and the short of it. Now what have you got to say—any of you?
    111
   
  MALONE. I know what Ive got to say. She’s married a beggar.
    112
   
  HECTOR. No: shes 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.
    113
   
  MALONE [sneering angrily] Yes: youre very plucky now, because you got your remittance from me yesterday or this morning, I reckon. Waitl it’s spent. You wont be so full of cheek then.
    114
   
  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 dont sell the privilege of insulting my wife for a thousand dollars.
    115
   
  MALONE [deeply wounded and full of concern] Hector: you dont know what poverty is.
    116
   
  HECTOR [fervidly] Well, I wawnt to know what it is. I wawnt’be a Mahn. Violet: you come along with me, to your own home: I’ll see you through.
    117
   
  OCTAVIUS [jumping down from the garden to the lawn and running to Hector’s left hand] I hope youll 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].
    118
   
  VIOLET [also almost in tears, but of vexation] Oh, dont be an idiot, Tavy. Hector’s about as fit to become a workman as you are.
    119
   
  TANNER [rising from his chair on the other side of Hector] Never fear: theres no question of his becoming a navvy, Mrs Malone. [To Hector] Theres really no difficulty about capital to start with. Treat me as a friend: draw on me.
    120
   
  OCTAVIUS [impulsively] Or on me.
    121
   
  MALONE [with fierce jealousy] Who wants your durty 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: dont 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!
    122
   
  HECTOR [patting him on the shoulder] Well, thats all right, dad. Say no more: we’re friends again. Only, I take no money from anybody.
    123
   
  MALONE [pleading abjectly] Dont be hard on me, Hector. I’d rather you quarrelled and took the money than made friends and starved. You dont know what the world is: I do.
    124
   
  HECTOR. No, no, NO. Thats fixed: thats not going to change. [He passes his father inexorably by, and goes to Violet]. Come, Mrs Malone: youve got to move to the hotel with me, and take your proper place before the world.
    125
   
  VIOLET. But I must go in, dear, and tell Davis to pack. Wont you go on and make them give you a room overlooking the garden for me? I’ll join you in half an hour.
    126
   
  HECTOR. Very well. Youll dine with us, Dad, wont you?
    127
   
  MALONE [eager to conciliate him] Yes, yes.
    128
   
  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].
    129
   
  MALONE. Youll try to bring him to his senses, Violet: I know you will.
    130
   
  VIOLET. I had no idea he could be so headstrong. If he goes on like that, what can I do?
    131
   
  MALONE. Dont be discurridged: domestic pressure may be slow; but it’s sure. Youll wear him down. Promise me you will.
    132
   
  VIOLET. I will do my best. Of course I think it’s the greatest nonsense deliberately making us poor like that.
    133
   
  MALONE. Of course it is.
    134
   
  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.
    135
   
  MALONE [eagerly] Yes, yes, yes: thats just the thing [he hands her the thousand dollar bill, and adds cunningly] Y’understand that this is only a bachelor allowance.
    136
   
  VIOLET [coolly] Oh, quite. [She takes it]. Thank you. By the way, Mr Malone, those two houses you mentioned—the abbeys.
    137
   
  MALONE. Yes?
    138
   
  VIOLET. Dont take one of them until Ive seen it. One never knows what may be wrong with these places.
    139
   
  MALONE. I wont. I’ll do nothing without consulting you, never fear.
    140
   
  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].
    141
   
  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 in 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].
    142
   
  RAMSDEN [following him] The sooner the better for you.
    143
   
  MALONE [slapping his hands as he returns through the garden) That’ll be a grand woman for Hector. I wouldnt exchange her for ten duchesses. [He descends to the lawn and comes between Tanner and Ramsden].
    144
   
  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?
    145
   
  MALONE. Well, I dont say I mightnt. I think I could do better with it than the Spanish government. But thats 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 didnt 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 havnt 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—
    146
   
  TANNER. Hes 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.
    147
   
  MALONE. If youll be so kind, yes. And may I ask who—
    148
   
  TANNER. Mr Roebuck Ramsden, a very old friend of your daughter-in-law.
    149
   
  MALONE. Happy to meet you, Mr Ramsden.
    150
   
  RAMSDEN. Thank you. Mr Tanner is also one of our circle.
    151
   
  MALONE. Glad to know you also, Mr Tanner.
    152
   
  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].
    153
   
  ANN. Wont you go with them, Tavy?
    154
   
  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].
    155
   
  ANN. Poor Ricky Ticky Tavy! Poor heart!
    156
   
  OCTAVIUS. It belongs to you, Ann. Forgive me: I must speak of it. I love you. You know I love you.
    157
   
  ANN. Whats the good, Tavy? You know that my mother is determined that I shall marry Jack.
    158
   
  OCTAVIUS [amazed] Jack!
    159
   
  ANN. It seems absurd, doesnt it?
    160
   
  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?
    161
   
  ANN [alarmed] No, no: you mustnt lead him to believe that I said that. I dont 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.
    162
   
  OCTAVIUS. But you are not bound to sacrifice yourself to the wishes of your parents.
    163
   
  ANN. My father loved me. My mother loves me. Surely their wishes are a better guide than my own selfishness.
    164
   
  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?
    165
   
  ANN [looking at him with a faint impulse of pity] Tavy, my dear, you are a nice creature—a good boy.
    166
   
  OCTAVIUS [humiliated] Is that all?
    167
   
  ANN [mischievously in spite of her pity] Thats a great deal, I assure you. You would always worship the ground I trod on, wouldnt you?
    168
   
  OCTAVIUS. I do. It sounds ridiculous; but it’s no exaggeration. I do; and I always shall.
    169
   
  ANN. Always is a long word, Tavy. You see, I shall have to live up always to your idea of my divinity; and I dont think I could do that if we were married. But if I marry Jack, youll never be disillusioned—at least not until I grow too old.
    170
   
  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.
    171
   
  ANN [quite touched] Oh, thats 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.
    172
   
  OCTAVIUS. Do you believe that it is true?
    173
   
  ANN. Tavy: if it is to come true, you must lose me as well as love me.
    174
   
  OCTAVIUS. Oh! [he hastily sits down at the little table and covers his face with his hands].
    175
   
  ANN [with conviction] Tavy: I wouldnt 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.
    176
   
  OCTAVIUS [desperately] Ann: I’ll kill myself.
    177
   
  ANN. Oh no, you wont: that wouldnt be kind. You wont 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.
    178
   
  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. Thats what I dread.
    180
   
  OCTAVIUS. You do not dread disillusionizing Jack.
    181
   
  ANN [her face lighting up with mischievous ecstasy—whispering] I cant: 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!
    182
   
  OCTAVIUS [resuming the calm phase of despair, and beginning to enjoy his broken heart and delicate attitude without knowing it] I dont doubt that. You will enrapture him always. And he—the fool!—thinks you would make him wretched.
    183
   
  ANN. Yes: thats the difficulty, so far.
    184
   
  OCTAVIUS [heroically] Shall I tell him that you love him?
    185
   
  ANN [quickly] Oh no: he’d run away again.
    186
   
  OCTAVIUS [shocked] Ann: would you marry an unwilling man?
    187
   
  ANN. What a queer creature you are, Tavy! Theres 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.
    188
   
  OCTAVIUS [startled] Satisfaction! [Reproachfully] You say that to me!
    189
   
  ANN. Well, if it were really agony, would you ask for more of it?
    190
   
  OCTAVIUS. Have I asked for more of it?
    191
   
  ANN. You have offered to tell Jack that I love him. Thats self-sacrifice, I suppose; but there must be some satisfaction in it. Perhaps it’s because youre a poet. You are like the bird that presses its breast against the sharp thorn to make itself sing.
    192
   
  OCTAVIUS. It’s quite simple. I love you; and I want you to be happy. You dont love me; so I cant make you happy myself; but I can help another man to do it.
    193
   
  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 dont 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.
    194
   
  OCTAVIUS [almost coldly] I am content to be what I am in that respect.
    195
   
  ANN. Then you must keep away from them, and only dream about them. I wouldnt marry you for worlds, Tavy.
    196
   
  OCTAVIUS. I have no hope, Ann: I accept my ill luck. But I dont think you quite know how much it hurts.
    197
   
  ANN. You are so softhearted! It’s queer that you should be so different from Violet. Violets as hard as nails.
    198
   
  OCTAVIUS. Oh no. I am sure Violet is thoroughly womanly at heart.
    199
   
  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?
    200
   
  OCTAVIUS. Something worse—like you! What do you mean, Ann?
    201
   
  ANN. Oh well, I dont mean that, of course. But I have a great respect for Violet. She gets her own way always.
    202
   
  OCTAVIUS [sighing] So do you.
    203
   
  ANN. Yes; but somehow she gets it without coaxing—without having to make people sentimental about her.
    204
   
  OCTAVIUS [with brotherly callousness] Nobody could get very sentimental about Violet, I think, pretty as she is.
    205
   
  ANN. Oh yes they could, if she made them.
    206
   
  OCTAVIUS. But surely no really nice woman would deliberately practise on men’s instincts in that way.
    207
   
  ANN [throwing up her hands] Oh, Tavy, Tavy, Ricky Ticky Tavy, heaven help the woman who marries you!
    208
   
  OCTAVIUS [his passion reviving at the name] Oh why, why, why do you say that? Dont torment me. I dont understand.
    209
   
  ANN. Suppose she were to tell fibs, and lay snares for men?
    210
   
  OCTAVIUS. Do you think I could marry such a woman—I, who have known and loved you?
    211
   
  ANN. Hm! Well, at all events, she wouldnt let you if she were wise. So thats settled. And now I cant talk any more. Say you forgive me, and that the subject is closed.
    212
   
  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.
    213
   
  ANN. Poetic to the last, Tavy. Goodbye, dear. [She pats his cheek; 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 shop, and has a net full of little parcels in her hand, comes in through the gate and sees him.
    214
   
  MRS WHITEFIELD [running to him and lifting his head] Whats the matter, Tavy? Are you ill?
    215
   
  OCTAVIUS. No, nothing, nothing.
    216
   
  MRS WHITEFIELD [still holding his head, anxiously] But youre crying. Is it about Violet’s marriage?
    217
   
  OCTAVIUS. No, no. Who told you about Violet?
    218
   
  MRS WHITEFIELD [restoring the head to its owner] I met Roebuck and that awful old Irishman. Are you sure youre not ill? Whats the matter?
    219
   
  OCTAVIUS [affectionately] It’s nothing. Only a man’s broken heart. Doesnt that sound ridiculous?
    220
   
  MRS WHITEFIELD. But what is it all about? Has Ann been doing anything to you?
    221
   
  OCTAVIUS. It’s not Ann’s fault. And dont think for a moment that I blame you.
    222
   
  MRS WHITEFIELD [startled] For what?
    223
   
  OCTAVIUS [pressing her hand consolingly] For nothing. I said I didnt blame you.
    224
   
  MRS WHITEFIELD. But I havnt done anything. Whats the matter?
    225
   
  OCTAVIUS [smiling sadly] Cant 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].
    226
   
  MRS WHITEFIELD [following him hastily] Does Ann say that I want her to marry Jack?
    227
   
  OCTAVIUS. Yes: she has told me.
    228
   
  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!
    229
   
  OCTAVIUS. But she would not say it unless she believed it. Surely you dont suspect Ann of—of deceit!
    230
   
  MRS WHITEFIELD. Well, never mind, Tavy. I dont know which is best for a young man: to know too little, like you, or too much, like Jack.
  Tanner returns.
    231
   
  TANNER. Well, Ive disposed of old Malone. Ive introduced him to Mendoza, Limited; and left the two brigands together to talk it out. Hullo, Tavy! anything wrong?
    232
   
  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.
    233
   
  TANNER [puzzled by his manner] Approves of what?
    234
   
  OCTAVIUS. Of what Mrs Whitefield wishes. [He goes his way with sad dignity to the villa].
    235
   
  TANNER [to Mrs Whitefield] This is very mysterious. What is it you wish? It shall be done, whatever it is.
    236
   
  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 dont 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 dont 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.
    237
   
  TANNER. Yes: life is more complicated than we used to think. But what am I to do for you?
    238
   
  MRS WHITEFIELD. Thats just what I want to tell you. Of course youll marry Ann whether I like it or not—
    239
   
  TANNER [starting] It seems to me that I shall presently be married to Ann whether I like it myself or not.
    240
   
  MRS WHITEFIELD [peacefully] Oh, very likely you will: you know what she is when she has set her mind on anything. But dont put it on me: thats 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 dont. 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, dont put the blame on me.
    241
   
  TANNER [emphatically] I havnt the slightest intention of marrying her.
    242
   
  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.
    243
   
  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 cant take the poker to her. I should be a mere slave.
    244
   
  MRS WHITEFIELD. No: she’s afraid of you. At all events, you would tell her the truth about herself. She wouldnt be able to slip out of it as she does with me.
    245
   
  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.
    246
   
  MRS WHITEFIELD. I’m glad somebody sees she is not an angel.
    247
   
  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 cant 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.
    248
   
  MRS WHITEFIELD [in mild expostulation] Well, you cant expect perfection, Jack.
    249
   
  TANNER. I dont. 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 shouldnt quarrel with her. But she wont. 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. Thats what beats me.
    250
   
  MRS WHITEFIELD [carried away by the relief of hearing her own opinion so eloquently expressed] Oh, she is a hypocrite. She is: she is. Isnt she?
    251
   
  TANNER. Then why do you want to marry me to her?
    252
   
  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 dont want him to be trampled on and made wretched.
    253
   
  TANNER. Whereas I dont matter, I suppose.
    254
   
  MRS WHITEFIELD. Oh, you are different, somehow: you are able to take care of yourself. Youd serve her out. And anyhow, she must marry somebody.
    255
   
  TANNER. Aha! there speaks the life instinct. You detest her; but you feel that you must get her married.
    256
   
  MRS WHITEFIELD [rising, shocked] Do you mean that I detest my own daughter! Surely you dont believe me to be so wicked and unnatural as that, merely because I see her faults.
    257
   
  TANNER [cynically] You love her, then?
    258
   
  MRS WHITEFIELD. Why, of course I do. What queer things you say, Jack! We cant help loving our own blood relations.
    259
   
  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].
    260
   
  MRS WHITEFIELD. You shouldnt say things like that, Jack. I hope you wont tell Ann that I have been speaking to you. I only wanted to set myself right with you and Tavy. I couldnt sit mumchance and have everything put on me.
    261
   
  TANNER [politely] Quite so.
    262
   
  MRS WHITEFIELD [dissatisfied] And now Ive only made matters worse. Tavy’s angry with me because I dont 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?
    263
   
  TANNER. Thank you.
    264
   
  MRS WHITEFIELD. Now dont be silly and twist what I say into something I dont mean. I ought to have fair play—
  Ann comes from the villa, followed presently by Violet, who is dressed for driving.
    265
   
  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.
    266
   
  MRS WHITEFIELD [appalled] Have you overheard—
    267
   
  TANNER. Never fear: Ann is only—well, we were discussing that habit of hers just now. She hasnt heard a word.
    268
   
  MRS WHITEFIELD [stoutly] I dont care whether she has or not: I have a right to say what I please.
    269
   
  VIOLET [arriving on the lawn and coming between Mrs Whitefield and Tanner] Ive come to say goodbye. I’m off for my honeymoon.
    270
   
  MRS WHITEFIELD [crying] Oh, dont say that, Violet. And no wedding, no breakfast, no clothes, nor anything.
    271
   
  VIOLET [petting her] It wont be for long.
    272
   
  MRS WHITEFIELD. Dont let him take you to America. Promise me that you wont.
    273
   
  VIOLET [very decidedly] I should think not, indeed. Dont cry, dear: I’m only going to the hotel.
    274
   
  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!
    275
   
  VIOLET [soothing her] There, there: so I am. Ann will be jealous.
    276
   
  MRS WHITEFIELD. Ann doesnt care a bit for me.
    277
   
  ANN. Fie, mother! Come, now: you mustnt cry any more: you know Violet doesnt like it [Mrs Whitefield dries her eyes, and subsides].
    278
   
  VIOLET. Goodbye, Jack.
    279
   
  TANNER. Goodbye, Violet.
    280
   
  VIOLET. The sooner you get married too, the better. You will be much less misunderstood.
    281
   
  TANNER [restively] I quite expect to get married in the course of the afternoon. You all seem to have set your minds on it.
    282
   
  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].
    283
   
  MRS WHITEFIELD [as they go up through the garden] I dont 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 neednt 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.
    284
   
  ANN. Violet is quite right. You ought to get married.
    285
   
  TANNER [explosively] Ann: I will not marry you. Do you hear? I wont, wont, wont, wont, WONT marry you.
    286
   
  ANN [placidly] Well, nobody axd you, sir she said, sir she said, sir she said. So thats settled.
    287
   
  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.
    288
   
  ANN. Was that why you ran away?
    289
   
  TANNER. Yes, only to be stopped by a lovesick brigand and run down like a truant schoolboy.
    290
   
  ANN. Well, if you dont want to be married, you neednt be [she turns away from him and sits down, much at her ease].
    291
   
  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.
    292
   
  ANN. I daresay I shall, someday.
    293
   
  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 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.
    294
   
  ANN. Well, your wife can put on a cap and make herself ugly to keep you in countenance, like my grandmother.
    295
   
  TANNER. So that she may make her triumph more insolent by publicly throwing away the bait the moment the trap snaps on the victim!
    296
   
  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 havnt looked at them for years. You never bother about my looks: you are too well used to me. I might be the umbrella stand.
    297
   
  TANNER. You lie, you vampire: you lie.
    298
   
  ANN. Flatterer. Why are you trying to fascinate me, Jack, if you dont want to marry me?
    299
   
  TANNER. The Life Force. I am in the grip of the Life Force.
    300
   
  ANN. I dont understand in the least: it sounds like the Life Guards.
    301
   
  TANNER. Why dont you marry Tavy? He is willing. Can you not be satisfied unless your prey struggles?
    302
   
  ANN [turning to him as if to let him into a secret] Tavy will never marry. Havnt you noticed that that sort of man never marries?
    303
   
  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.
    304
   
  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.
    305
   
  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.
    306
   
  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.
    307
   
  TANNER. Barren. The Life Force passes it by.
    308
   
  ANN. If thats what you mean by the Life Force, yes.
    309
   
  TANNER. You dont care for Tavy?
    310
   
  ANN [looking round carefully to make sure that Tavy is not within earshot] No.
    311
   
  TANNER. And you do care for me?
    312
   
  ANN [rising quietly and shaking her finger at him] Now, Jack! Behave yourself.
    313
   
  TANNER. Infamous, abandoned woman! Devil!
    314
   
  ANN. Boa-constrictor! Elephant!
    315
   
  TANNER. Hypocrite!
    316
   
  ANN [softly] I must be, for my future husband’s sake.
    317
   
  TANNER. For mine! [Correcting himself savagely] I mean for his.
    318
   
  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. Wouldnt you prefer a wife you could depend on?
    319
   
  TANNER. No: a thousand times no: hot water is the revolutionist’s element. You clean men as you clean milk-pails, by scalding them.
    320
   
  ANN. Cold water has its uses too. It’s healthy.
    321
   
  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.
    322
   
  ANN [in low siren tones] He asked me who I would have as my guardian before he made that will. I chose you!
    323
   
  TANNER. The will is yours then! The trap was laid from the beginning.
    324
   
  ANN [concentrating all her magic] From the beginning—from our childhood—for both of us—by the Life Force.
    325
   
  TANNER. I will not marry you. I will not marry you.
    326
   
  ANN. Oh, you will, you will.
    327
   
  TANNER. I tell you, no, no, no.
    328
   
  ANN. I tell you, yes, yes, yes.
    329
   
  TANNER. No.
    330
   
  ANN [coaxing—imploring—almost exhausted] Yes. Before it is too late for repentance. Yes.
    331
   
  TANNER [struck by the echo from the past] When did all this happen to me before? Are we two dreaming?
    332
   
  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.
    333
   
  TANNER [brutally] Well?
    334
   
  ANN. Well, I made a mistake: you do not love me.
    335
   
  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 my self, one and indivisible.
    336
   
  ANN. Your happiness will be worth them all.
    337
   
  TANNER. You would sell freedom and honor and self for happiness?
    338
   
  ANN. It will not be all happiness for me. Perhaps death.
    339
   
  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?
    340
   
  ANN. Take care, Jack: if anyone comes while we are like this, you will have to marry me.
    341
   
  TANNER. If we two stood now on the edge of a precipice, I would hold you tight and jump.
    342
   
  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 cant bear it.
    343
   
  TANNER. Nor I. Let it kill us.
    344
   
  ANN. Yes: I dont care. I am at the end of my forces. I dont 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.
    345
   
  MALONE. Take care. Something’s the matter with the lady.
    346
   
  RAMSDEN. What does this mean?
    347
   
  VIOLET [running between Ann and Tanner] Are you ill?
    348
   
  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 head. 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].
    349
   
  STRAKER. Now then, ladies and gentlemen: she dont 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]. Dont lift er ed, Mr Tanner: let it go flat so’s the blood can run back into it.
    350
   
  MENDOZA. He is right, Mr. Tanner. Trust to the air of the Sierra. [He withdraws delicately to the garden steps].
    351
   
  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].
    352
   
  TAVY [aside to Tanner, grasping his hand] Jack: be very happy.
    353
   
  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].
    354
   
  MENDOZA [intercepting Mrs Whitefield, who comes from the villa with a glass of brandy] What is this, Madam [he takes it from her]?
    355
   
  MRS WHITEFIELD. A little brandy.
    356
   
  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.
    357
   
  ANN [in Violet’s ear, clutching her round the neck] Violet: did Jack say anything when I fainted?
    358
   
  VIOLET. No.
    359
   
  ANN. Ah! [with a sigh of intense relief she relapses].
    360
   
  MRS WHITEFIELD. Oh, she’s fainted again.
  They are about to rush back to her; but Mendoza stops them with a warning gesture.
    361
   
  ANN [supine] No, I havnt. I’m quite happy.
    362
   
  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 hauls her up summarily].
    363
   
  ANN. Yes: I feel strong enough now. But you very nearly killed me, Jack, for all that.
    364
   
  MALONE. A rough wooer, eh? Theyre the best sort, Miss Whitefield. I congratulate Mr Tanner; and I hope to meet you and him as frequent guests at the Abbey.
    365
   
  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.
    366
   
  TAVY [steadfastly] No more tears. I am happy in your happiness. And I believe in you in spite of everything.
    367
   
  RAMSDEN [coming between Malone and Tanner] You are a happy man, Jack Tanner. I envy you.
    368
   
  MENDOZA [advancing between Violet and Tanner] Sir: there are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it. Mine and yours, sir.
    369
   
  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.
    370
   
  ANN [complying] You are absurd, Jack. [She takes his proffered arm].
    371
   
  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 happiness, renounce freedom, 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 carvers and fish slices, the copies of Patmore’s Angel In The House in extra morocco, and 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 licence, 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—
    372
   
  VIOLET [with intense conviction] You are a brute, Jack.
    373
   
  ANN [looking at him with fond pride and caressing his arm] Never mind her, dear. Go on talking.
    374
   
  TANNER. Talking!
  Universal laughter.

The Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion
by
John Tanner, M.I.R.C.
(Member of the Idle Rich Class).
   
 
   
Preface to the Revolutionist's Handbook

  “No one can contemplate the present condition of the masses of the people without desiring something like a revolution for the better.” Sir Robert Giffen. Essays in Finance, vol. ii. p. 393.

FOREWORD

A revolutionist is one who desires to discard the existing social order and try another.   
  The constitution of England is revolutionary. To a Russian or Anglo-Indian bureaucrat, a general election is as much a revolution as a referendum or plebiscite in which the people fight instead of voting. The French Revolution overthrew one set of rulers and substituted another with different interests and different views. That is what a general election enables the people to do in England every seven years if they choose. Revolution is therefore a national institution in England; and its advocacy by an Englishman needs no apology.
  Every man is a revolutionist concerning the thing he understands. For example, every person who has mastered a profession is a sceptic concerning it, and consequently a revolutionist   
  Every genuine religious person is a heretic and therefore a revolutionist.
  All who achieve real distinction in life begin as revolutionists. The most distinguished persons become more revolutionary as they grow older, though they are commonly supposed to become more conservative owing to their loss of faith in conventional methods of reform.   
  Any person under the age of thirty, who, having any knowledge of the existing social order, is not a revolutionist, is an inferior.
 

And yet

  Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder.
JOHN TANNER

I
On Good Breeding


IF there were no God, said the eighteenth century Deist, it would be necessary to invent Him. Now this XVIII century god was deus ex machina, the god who helped those who could not help themselves, the god of the lazy and incapable. The nineteenth century decided that there is indeed no such god; and now Man must take in hand all the work that he used to shirk with an idle prayer. He must, in effect, change himself into the political Providence which he formerly conceived as god; and such change is not only possible, but the only sort of change that is real. The mere transfiguration of institutions, as from military and priestly dominance to commercial and scientific dominance, from commercial dominance to proletarian democracy, from slavery to serfdom, from serfdom to capitalism, from monarchy to republicanism, from polytheism to monotheism, from monotheism to atheism, from atheism to pantheistic humanitarianism, from general illiteracy to general literacy, from romance to realism, from realism to mysticism, from metaphysics to physics, are all but changes from Tweedledum to Tweedledee: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. But the changes from the crab apple to the pippin, from the wolf and fox to the house dog, from the charger of Henry V to the brewer’s draught horse and the race-horse, are real; for here Man has played the god, subduing Nature to his intention, and ennobling or debasing Life for a set purpose. And what can be done with a wolf can be done with a man. If such monsters as the tramp and the gentleman can appear as mere by-products of Man’s individual greed and folly, what might we not hope for as a main product of his universal aspiration?
      
  This is no new conclusion. The despair of institutions, and the inexorable “ye must be born again,” with Mrs Poyser’s stipulation, “and born different,” recurs in every generation. The cry for the Superman did not begin with Nietzsche, nor will it end with his vogue. But it has always been silenced by the same question: what kind of person is this Superman to be? You ask, not for a super-apple, but for an eatable apple; not for a superhorse, but for a horse of greater draught or velocity. Neither is it of any use to ask for a Superman: you must furnish a specification of the sort of man you want. Unfortunately you do not know what sort of man you want. Some sort of goodlooking philosopher-athlete, with a handsome healthy woman for his mate, perhaps.
      
  Vague as this is, it is a great advance on the popular demand for a perfect gentleman and a perfect lady. And, after all, no market demand in the world takes the form of exact technical specification of the article required. Excellent poultry and potatoes are produced to satisfy the demand of housewives who do not know the technical differences between a tuber and a chicken. They will tell you that the proof of the pudding is in the eating; and they are right. The proof of the Superman will be in the living; and we shall find out how to produce him by the old method of trial and error, and not by waiting for a completely convincing prescription of his ingredients.
       
  Certain common and obvious mistakes may be ruled out from the beginning. For example, we agree that we want superior mind; but we need not fall into the football club folly of counting on this as a product of superior body. Yet if we recoil so far as to conclude that superior mind consists in being the dupe of our ethical classifications of virtues and vices, in short, of conventional morality, we shall fall out of the fryingpan of the football club into the fire of the Sunday School. If we must choose between a race of athletes and a race of “good” men, let us have the athletes: better Samson and Milo than Calvin and Robespierre. But neither alternative is worth changing for: Samson is no more a Superman than Calvin. What then are we to do?

II
Property and Marriage


Let us hurry over the obstacles set up by property and marriage. Revolutionists make too much of them. No doubt it is easy to demonstrate that property will destroy society unless society destroys it. No doubt, also, property has hitherto held its own and destroyed all the empires. But that was because the superficial objection to it (that it distributes social wealth and the social labor burden in a grotesquely inequitable manner) did not threaten the existence of the race, but only the individual happiness of its units, and finally the maintenance of some irrelevant political form or other, such as a nation, an empire, or the like. Now as happiness never matters to Nature, as she neither recognizes flags and frontiers nor cares a straw whether the economic system adopted by a society is feudal, capitalistic, or collectivist, provided it keeps the race afoot (the hive and the anthill being as acceptable to her as Utopia), the demonstrations of Socialists, though irrefutable, will never make any serious impression on property. The knell of that over-rated institution will not sound until it is felt to conflict with some more vital matter than mere personal inequities in industrial economy. No such conflict was perceived whilst society had not yet grown beyond national communities too small and simple to overtax Man’s limited political capacity disastrously. But we have now reached the stage of international organization. Man’s political capacity and magnanimity are clearly beaten by the vastness and complexity of the problems forced on him. And it is at this anxious moment that he finds, when he looks upward for a mightier mind to help him, that the heavens are empty. He will presently see that his discarded formula that Man is the Temple of the Holy Ghost happens to be precisely true, and that it is only through his own brain and hand that this Holy Ghost, formally the most nebulous person in the Trinity, and now become its sole survivor as it has always been its real Unity, can help him in any way. And so, if the Superman is to come, he must be born of Woman by Man’s intentional and well-considered contrivance. Conviction of this will smash everything that opposes it. Even Property and Marriage, which laugh at the laborer’s petty complaint that he is defrauded of “surplus value,” and at the domestic miseries of the slaves of the wedding ring, will themselves be laughed aside as the lightest of trifles if they cross this conception when it becomes a fully realized vital purpose of the race.
        
  That they must cross it becomes obvious the moment we acknowledge the futility of breeding men for special qualities as we breed cocks for game, greyhounds for speed, or sheep for mutton. What is really important in Man is the part of him that we do not yet understand. Of much of it we are not even conscious, just as we are not normally conscious of keeping up our circulation by our heart-pump, though if we neglect it we die. We are therefore driven to the conclusion that when we have carried selection as far as we can by rejecting from the list of eligible parents all persons who are uninteresting, unpromising, or blemished without any set-off, we shall still have to trust to the guidance of fancy (alias Voice of Nature), both in the breeders and the parents, for that superiority in the unconscious self which will be the true characteristic of the Superman.
   
  At this point we perceive the importance of giving fancy the widest possible field. To cut humanity up into small cliques, and effectively limit the selection of the individual to his own clique, is to postpone the Superman for eons, if not for ever. Not only should every person be nourished and trained as a possible parent, but there should be no possibility of such an obstacle to natural selection as the objection of a countess to a navvy or of a duke to a charwoman. Equality is essential to good breeding; and equality, as all economists know, is incompatible with property.
    
  Besides, equality is an essential condition of bad breeding also; and bad breeding is indispensable to the weeding out of the human race. When the conception of heredity took hold of the scientific imagination in the middle of last century, its devotees announced that it was a crime to marry the lunatic to the lunatic or the consumptive to the consumptive. But pray are we to try to correct our diseased stocks by infecting our healthy stocks with them? Clearly the attraction which disease has for diseased people is beneficial to the race. If two really unhealthy people get married, they will, as likely as not, have a great number of children who will all die before they reach maturity. This is a far more satisfactory arrangement than the tragedy of a union between a healthy and an unhealthy person. Though more costly than sterilization of the unhealthy, it has the enormous advantage that in the event of our notions of health and unhealth being erroneous (which to some extent they most certainly are), the error will be corrected by experience instead of confirmed by evasion.
   
  One fact must be faced resolutely, in spite of the shrieks of the romantic. There is no evidence that the best citizens are the offspring of congenial marriages, or that a conflict of temperament is not a highly important part of what breeders call crossing. On the contrary, it is quite sufficiently probable that good results may be obtained from parents who would be extremely unsuitable companions and partners, to make it certain that the experiment of mating them will sooner or later be tried purposely almost as often as it is now tried accidentally. But mating such couples must clearly not involve marrying them. In conjugation two complementary persons may supply one another’s deficiencies: in the domestic partnership of marriage they only feel them and suffer from them. Thus the son of a robust, cheerful, eupeptic British country squire, with the tastes and range of his class, and of a clever, imaginative, intellectual, highly civilized Jewess, might be very superior to both his parents; but it is not likely that the Jewess would find the squire an interesting companion, or his habits, his friends, his place and mode of life congenial to her. Therefore marriage, whilst it is made an indispensable condition of mating, will delay the advent of the Superman as effectually as Property, and will be modified by the impulse towards him just as effectually.
    
  The practical abrogation of Property and Marriage as they exist at present will occur without being much noticed. To the mass of men, the intelligent abolition of property would mean nothing except an increase in the quantity of food, clothing, housing, and comfort at their personal disposal, as well as a greater control over their time and circumstances. Very few persons now make any distinction between virtually complete property and property held on such highly developed public conditions as to place its income on the same footing as that of a propertyless clergyman, officer, or civil servant. A landed proprietor may still drive men and women off his land, demolish their dwellings, and replace them with sheep or deer; and in the unregulated trades the private trader may still spunge on the regulated trades and sacrifice the life and health of the nation as lawlessly as the Manchester cotton manufacturers did at the beginning of last century. But though the Factory Code on the one hand, and Trade Union organization on the other, have, within the lifetime of men still living, converted the old unrestricted property of the cotton manufacturer in his mill and the cotton spinner in his labor into a mere permission to trade or work on stringent public or collective conditions, imposed in the interest of the general welfare without any regard for individual hard cases, people in Lancashire still speak of their “property” in the old terms, meaning nothing more by it than the things a thief can be punished for stealing. The total abolition of property, and the conversion of every citizen into a salaried functionary in the public service, would leave much more than 99 per cent of the nation quite unconscious of any greater change than now takes place when the son of a shipowner goes into the navy. They would still call their watches and umbrellas and back gardens their property.
   
  Marriage also will persist as a name attached to a general custom long after the custom itself will have altered. For example, modern English marriage, as modified by divorce and by Married Women’s Property Acts, differs more from early XIX century marriage than Byron’s marriage did from Shakespear’s. At the present moment marriage in England differs not only from marriage in France, but from marriage in Scotland. Marriage as modified by the divorce laws in South Dakota would be called mere promiscuity in Clapham. Yet the Americans, far from taking a profligate and cynical view of marriage, do homage to its ideals with a seriousness that seems old fashioned in Clapham. Neither in England nor America would a proposal to abolish marriage be tolerated for a moment; and yet nothing is more certain than that in both countries the progressive modification of the marriage contract will be continued until it is no more onerous nor irrevocable than any ordinary commercial deed of partnership. Were even this dispensed with, people would still call themselves husbands and wives; describe their companionships as marriages; and be for the most part unconscious that they were any less married than Henry VIII. For though a glance at the legal conditions of marriage in different Christian countries shews that marriage varies legally from frontier to frontier, domesticity varies so little that most people believe their own marriage laws to be universal. Consequently here again, as in the case of Property, the absolute confidence of the public in the stability of the institution’s name, makes it all the easier to alter its substance.
    
  However, it cannot be denied that one of the changes in public opinion demanded by the need for the Superman is a very unexpected one. It is nothing less than the dissolution of the present necessary association of marriage with conjugation, which most unmarried people regard as the very diagnostic of marriage. They are wrong, of course: it would be quite as near the truth to say that conjugation is the one purely accidental and incidental condition of marriage. Conjugation is essential to nothing but the propagation of the race; and the moment that paramount need is provided for otherwise than by marriage, conjugation, from Nature’s creative point of view, ceases to be essential in marriage. But marriage does not thereupon cease to be so economical, convenient, and comfortable, that the Superman might safely bribe the matrimonomaniacs by offering to revive all the old inhuman stringency and irrevocability of marriage, to abolish divorce, to confirm the horrible bond which still chains decent people to drunkards, criminals, and wasters, provided only the complete extrication of conjugation from it were conceded to him. For if people could form domestic companionships on no easier terms than these, they would still marry. The Roman Catholic, forbidden by his Church to avail himself of the divorce laws, marries as freely as the South Dakotan Presbyterians who can change partners with a facility that scandalizes the old world; and were his Church to dare a further step towards Christianity and enjoin celibacy on its laity as well as on its clergy, marriages would still be contracted for the sake of domesticity by perfectly obedient sons and daughters of the Church. One need not further pursue these hypotheses: they are only suggested here to help the reader to analyse marriage into its two functions of regulating conjugation and supplying a form of domesticity. These two functions are quite separable; and domesticity is the only one of the two which is essential to the existence of marriage, because conjugation without domesticity is not marriage at all, whereas domesticity without conjugation is still marriage: in fact it is necessarily the actual condition of all fertile marriages during a great part of their duration, and of some marriages during the whole of it.
    
  Taking it, then, that Property and Marriage, by destroying Equality and thus hampering sexual selection with irrelevant conditions, are hostile to the evolution of the Superman, it is easy to understand why the only generally known modern experiment in breeding the human race took place in a community which discarded both institutions.

III
The Perfectionist Experiment at Oneida Creek


In 1848 the Oneida Community was founded in America to carry out a resolution arrived at by a handful of Perfectionist Communists “that we will devote ourselves exclusively to the establishment of the Kingdom of God.” Though the American nation declared that this sort of thing was not to be tolerated in a Christian country, the Oneida Community held its own for over thirty years, during which period it seems to have produced healthier children and done and suffered less evil than any Joint Stock Company on record. It was, however, a highly selected community; for a genuine communist (roughly definable as an intensely proud person who proposes to enrich the common fund instead of to spunge on it) is superior to an ordinary joint stock capitalist precisely as an ordinary joint stock capitalist is superior to a pirate. Further, the Perfectionists were mightily shepherded by their chief Noyes, one of those chance attempts at the Superman which occur from time to time in spite of the interference of Man’s blundering institutions. The existence of Noyes simplified the breeding problem for the Communists, the question as to what sort of man they should strive to breed being settled at once by the obvious desirability of breeding another Noyes.
        
  But an experiment conducted by a handful of people, who, after thirty years of immunity from the unintentional child slaughter that goes on by ignorant parents in private homes, numbered only 300, could do very little except prove that Communists, under the guidance of a Superman “devoted exclusively to the establishment of the Kingdom of God,” and caring no more for property and marriage than a Camberwell minister cares for Hindoo Caste or Suttee, might make a much better job of their lives than ordinary folk under the harrow of both these institutions. Yet their Superman himself admitted that this apparent success was only part of the abnormal phenomenon of his own occurrence; for when he came to the end of his powers through age, he himself guided and organized the voluntary relapse of the communists into marriage, capitalism, and customary private life, thus admitting that the real social solution was not what a casual Superman could persuade a picked company to do for him, but what a whole community of Supermen would do spontaneously. If Noyes had had to organize, not a few dozen Perfectionists, but the whole United States, America would have beaten him as completely as England beat Oliver Cromwell, France Napoleon, or Rome Julius Cæsar. Cromwell learnt by bitter experience that God himself cannot raise a people above its own level, and that even though you stir a nation to sacrifice all its appetites to its conscience, the result will still depend wholly on what sort of conscience the nation has got. Napoleon seems to have ended by regarding mankind as a troublesome pack of hounds only worth keeping for the sport of hunting with them. Cæsar’s capacity for fighting without hatred or resentment was defeated by the determination of his soldiers to kill their enemies in the field instead of taking them prisoners to be spared by Cæsar; and his civil supremacy was purchased by colossal bribery of the citizens of Rome. What great rulers cannot do, codes and religions cannot do. Man reads his own nature into every ordinance: if you devise a superhuman commandment so cunningly that it cannot be misinterpreted in terms of his will, he will denounce it as seditious blasphemy, or else disregard it as either crazy or totally unintelligible. Parliaments and synods may tinker as much as they please with their codes and creeds as circumstances alter the balance of classes and their interests; and, as a result of the tinkering, there may be an occasional illusion of moral evolution, as when the victory of the commercial caste over the military caste leads to the substitution of social boycotting and pecuniary damages for duelling. At certain moments there may even be a considerable material advance, as when the conquest of political power by the working class produces a better distribution of wealth through the simple action of the selfishness of the new masters; but all this is mere readjustment and reformation: until the heart and mind of the people is changed the very greatest man will no more dare to govern on the assumption that all are as great as he than a drover dare leave his flock to find its way through the streets as he himself would. Until there is an England in which every man is a Cromwell, a France in which every man is a Napoleon, a Rome in which every man is a Cæsar, a Germany in which every man is a Luther plus a Goethe, the world will be no more improved by its heroes than a Brixton villa is improved by the pyramid of Cheops. The production of such nations is the only real change possible to us.

IV
Man's Objection to his own Improvement


But would such a change be tolerated if Man must rise above himself to desire it? It would, through his misconception of its nature. Man does desire an ideal Superman with such energy as he can spare from his nutrition, and has in every age magnified the best living substitute for it he can find. His least incompetent general is set up as an Alexander; his king is the first gentleman in the world; his Pope is a saint. He is never without an array of human idols who are all nothing but sham Supermen. That the real Superman will snap his superfingers at all Man’s present trumpery ideals of right, duty, honor, justice, religion, even decency, and accept moral obligations beyond present human endurance, is a thing that contemporary Man does not foresee: in fact he does not notice it when our casual Supermen do it in his very face. He actually does it himself every day without knowing it. He will therefore make no objection to the production of a race of what he calls Great Men or Heroes, because he will imagine them, not as true Supermen, but as himself endowed with infinite brains, infinite courage, and infinite money.
   
  The most troublesome opposition will arise from the general fear of mankind that any interference with our conjugal customs will be an interference with our pleasures and our romance. This fear, by putting on airs of offended morality, has always intimidated people who have not measured its essential weakness; but it will prevail with those degenerates only in whom the instinct of fertility has faded into a mere itching for pleasure. The modern devices for combining pleasure with sterility, now universally known and accessible, enable these persons to weed themselves out of the race, a process already vigorously at work; and the consequent survival of the intelligently fertile means the survival of the partizans of the Superman; for what is proposed is nothing but the replacement of the old unintelligent, inevitable, almost unconscious fertility by an intelligently controlled, conscious fertility, and the elimination of the mere voluptuary from the evolutionary process. * Even if this selective agency had not been invented, the purpose of the race would still shatter the opposition of individual instincts. Not only do the bees and the ants satisfy their reproductive and parental instincts vicariously; but marriage itself successfully imposes celibacy on millions of unmarried normal men and women. In short, the individual instinct in this matter, overwhelming as it is thoughtlessly supposed to be, is really a finally negligible one.   
   
  *The part played in evolution by the voluptuary will be the same as that already played by the glutton. The glutton, as the man with the strongest motive for nourishing himself, will always take more pains than his fellows to get food. When food is so difficult to get that only great exertions can secure a sufficient supply of it, the glutton’s appetite develops his cunning and enterprise to the utmost; and he becomes not only the best fed but the ablest man in the community. But in more hospitable climates, or where the social organization of the food supply makes it easy for a man to overeat, then the glutton eats himself out of health and finally out of existence. All other voluptuaries prosper and perish in the same way; way; and this is why the survival of the fittest means finally the survival of the self-controlled, because they alone can adapt themselves to the perpetual shifting of conditions produced by industrial progress.

V
The Political Need for the Superman


The need for the Superman is, in its most imperative aspect, a political one. We have been driven to Proletarian Democracy by the failure of all the alternative systems; for these depended on the existence of Supermen acting as despots or oligarchs; and not only were these Supermen not always or even often forthcoming at the right moment and in an eligible social position, but when they were forthcoming they could not, except for a short time and by morally suicidal coercive methods, impose superhumanity on those whom they governed; so, by mere force of “human nature,” government by consent of the governed has supplanted the old plan of governing the citizen as a public-schoolboy is governed.    
   
  Now we have yet to see the man who, having any practical experience of Proletarian Democracy, has any belief in its capacity for solving great political problems, or even for doing ordinary parochial work intelligently and economically. Only under despotisms and oligarchies has the Radical faith in “universal suffrage” as a political panacea arisen. It withers the moment it is exposed to practical trial, because Democracy cannot rise above the level of the human material of which its voters are made. Switzerland seems happy in comparison with Russia; but if Russia were as small as Switzerland, and had her social problems simplified in the same way by impregnable natural fortifications and a population educated by the same variety and intimacy of international intercourse, there might be little to choose between them. At all events Australia and Canada, which are virtually protected democratic republics, and France and the United States, which are avowedly independent democratic republics, are neither healthy, wealthy, nor wise; and they would be worse instead of better if their popular ministers were not experts in the art of dodging popular enthusiasms and duping popular ignorance. The politician who once had to learn how to flatter Kings has now to learn how to fascinate, amuse, coax, humbug, frighten, or otherwise strike the fancy of the electorate; and though in advanced modern States, where the artizan is better educated than the King, it takes a much bigger man to be a successful demagogue than to be a successful courtier, yet he who holds popular convictions with prodigious energy is the man for the mob, whilst the frailer sceptic who is cautiously feeling his way towards the next century has no chance unless he happens by accident to have the specific artistic talent of the mountebank as well, in which case it is as a mountebank that he catches votes, and not as a meliorist. Consequently the demagogue, though he professes (and fails) to readjust matters in the interests of the majority of the electors, yet stereotypes mediocrity, organizes intolerance, disparages exhibitions of uncommon qualities, and glorifies conspicuous exhibitions of common ones. He manages a small job well: he muddles rhetorically through a large one. When a great political movement takes place, it is not consciously led nor organized: the unconscious self in mankind breaks its way through the problem as an elephant breaks through a jungle; and the politicians make speeches about whatever happens in the process, which, with the best intentions, they do all in their power to prevent. Finally, when social aggregation arrives at a point demanding international organization before the demagogues and electorates have learnt how to manage even a country parish properly much less internationalize Constantinople, the whole political business goes to smash; and presently we have Ruins of Empires, New Zealanders sitting on a broken arch of London Bridge, and so forth.
   
  To that recurrent catastrophe we shall certainly come again unless we can have a Democracy of Supermen; and the production of such a Democracy is the only change that is now hopeful enough to nerve us to the effort that Revolution demands.

VI
Prudery Explained


Why the bees should pamper their mothers whilst we pamper only our operatic prima donnas is a question worth reflecting on. Our notion of treating a mother is, not to increase her supply of food, but to cut it off by forbidding her to work in a factory for a month after her confinement. Everything that can make birth a misfortune to the parents as well as a danger to the mother is conscientiously done. When a great French writer, Emil Zola, alarmed at the sterilization of his nation, wrote an eloquent and powerful book to restore the prestige of parentage, it was at once assumed in England that a work of this character, with such a title as Fecundity, was too abominable to be translated, and that any attempt to deal with the relations of the sexes from any other than the voluptuary or romantic point of view must be sternly put down. Now if this assumption were really founded on public opinion, it would indicate an attitude of disgust and resentment towards the Life Force that could only arise in a diseased and moribund community in which Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler would be the typical woman. But it has no vital foundation at all. The prudery of the newspapers is, like the prudery of the dinner table, a mere difficulty of education and language. We are not taught to think decently on these subjects, and consequently we have no language for them except indecent language. We therefore have to declare them unfit for public discussion, because the only terms in which we can conduct the discussion are unfit for public use. Physiologists, who have a technical vocabulary at their disposal, find no difficulty; and masters of language who think decently can write popular stories like Zola’s Fecundity or Tolstoy’s Resurrection without giving the smallest offence to readers who can also think decently. But the ordinary modern journalist, who has never discussed such matters except in ribaldry, cannot write a simple comment on a divorce case without a conscious shamefulness or a furtive facetiousness that makes it impossible to read the comment aloud in company. All this ribaldry and prudery (the two are the same) does not mean that people do not feel decently on the subject: on the contrary, it is just the depth and seriousness of our feeling that makes its desecration by vile language and coarse humor intolerable; so that at last we cannot bear to have it spoken of at all because only one in a thousand can speak of it without wounding our self-respect, especially the self-respect of women. Add to the horrors of popular language the horrors of popular poverty. In crowded populations poverty destroys the possibility of cleanliness; and in the absence of cleanliness many of the natural conditions of life become offensive and noxious, with the result that at last the association of uncleanliness with these natural conditions becomes so overpowering that among civilized people (that is, people massed in the labyrinths of slums we call cities), half their bodily life becomes a guilty secret, unmentionable except to the doctor in emergencies; and Hedda Gabler shoots herself because maternity is so unladylike. In short, popular prudery is only a mere incident of popular squalor: the subjects which it taboos remain the most interesting and earnest of subjects in spite of it.