OCTAVIUS. [sighing] No such luck, Jack!
TANNER. Why, man, your head is in the lioness’s mouth: you are half swallowed already — in three bites — Bite One, Ricky; Bite Two, Ticky; Bite Three, Tavy; and down you go.
OCTAVIUS. She is the same to everybody, Jack: you know her ways.
TANNER. Yes: she breaks everybody’s back with the stroke of her paw; but the question is, which of us will she eat? My own opinion is that she means to eat you.
OCTAVIUS. [rising, pettishly] It’s horrible to talk like that about her when she is upstairs crying for her father. But I do so want her to eat me that I can bear your brutalities because they give me hope.
TANNER. Tavy; that’s the devilish side of a woman’s fascination: she makes you will your own destruction.
OCTAVIUS. But it’s not destruction: it’s fulfilment.
TANNER. Yes, of HER purpose; and that purpose is neither her happiness nor yours, but Nature’s. Vitality in a woman is a blind fury of creation. She sacrifices herself to it: do you think she will hesitate to sacrifice you?
OCTAVIUS. Why, it is just because she is self-sacrificing that she will not sacrifice those she loves.
TANNER. That is the profoundest of mistakes, Tavy. It is the self-sacrificing women that sacrifice others most recklessly. Because they are unselfish, they are kind in little things. Because they have a purpose which is not their own purpose, but that of the whole universe, a man is nothing to them but an instrument of that purpose.
OCTAVIUS. Don’t be ungenerous, Jack. They take the tenderest care of us.
TANNER. Yes, as a soldier takes care of his rifle or a musician of his violin. But do they allow us any purpose or freedom of our own? Will they lend us to one another? Can the strongest man escape from them when once he is appropriated? They tremble when we are in danger, and weep when we die; but the tears are not for us, but for a father wasted, a son’s breeding thrown away. They accuse us of treating them as a mere means to our pleasure; but how can so feeble and transient a folly as a man’s selfish pleasure enslave a woman as the whole purpose of Nature embodied in a woman can enslave a man?
OCTAVIUS. What matter, if the slavery makes us happy?
TANNER. No matter at all if you have no purpose of your own, and are, like most men, a mere breadwinner. But you, Tavy, are an artist: that is, you have a purpose as absorbing and as unscrupulous as a woman’s purpose.
OCTAVIUS. Not unscrupulous.
TANNER. Quite unscrupulous. The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. To women he is half vivisector, half vampire. He gets into intimate relations with them to study them, to strip the mask of convention from them, to surprise their inmost secrets, knowing that they have the power to rouse his deepest creative energies, to rescue him from his cold reason, to make him see visions and dream dreams, to inspire him, as he calls it. He persuades women that they may do this for their own purpose whilst he really means them to do it for his. He steals the mother’s milk and blackens it to make printer’s ink to scoff at her and glorify ideal women with. He pretends to spare her the pangs of childbearing so that he may have for himself the tenderness and fostering that belong of right to her children. Since marriage began, the great artist has been known as a bad husband. But he is worse: he is a child-robber, a bloodsucker, a hypocrite and a cheat. Perish the race and wither a thousand women if only the sacrifice of them enable him to act Hamlet better, to paint a finer picture, to write a deeper poem, a greater play, a profounder philosophy! For mark you, Tavy, the artist’s work is to show us ourselves as we really are. Our minds are nothing but this knowledge of ourselves; and he who adds a jot to such knowledge creates new mind as surely as any woman creates new men. In the rage of that creation he is as ruthless as the woman, as dangerous to her as she to him, and as horribly fascinating. Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman. Which shall use up the other? that is the issue between them. And it is all the deadlier because, in your romanticist cant, they love one another.
OCTAVIUS. Even if it were so — and I don’t admit it for a moment — it is out of the deadliest struggles that we get the noblest characters.
TANNER. Remember that the next time you meet a grizzly bear or a Bengal tiger, Tavy.
OCTAVIUS. I meant where there is love, Jack.
TANNER. Oh, the tiger will love you. There is no love sincerer than the love of food. I think Ann loves you that way: she patted your cheek as if it were a nicely underdone chop.
OCTAVIUS. You know, Jack, I should have to run away from you if I did not make it a fixed rule not to mind anything you say. You come out with perfectly revolting things sometimes.
Ramsden returns, followed by Ann. They come in quickly, with their former leisurely air of decorous grief changed to one of genuine concern, and, on Ramsden’s part, of worry. He comes between the two men, intending to address Octavius, but pulls himself up abruptly as he sees Tanner.
RAMSDEN. I hardly expected to find you still here, Mr Tanner.
TANNER. Am I in the way? Good morning, fellow guardian [he goes towards the door].
ANN. Stop, Jack. Granny: he must know, sooner or later.
RAMSDEN. Octavius: I have a very serious piece of news for you. It is of the most private and delicate nature — of the most painful nature too, I am sorry to say. Do you wish Mr Tanner to be present whilst I explain?
OCTAVIUS. [turning pale] I have no secrets from Jack.
RAMSDEN. Before you decide that finally, let me say that the news concerns your sister, and that it is terrible news.
OCTAVIUS. Violet! What has happened? Is she — dead?
RAMSDEN. I am not sure that it is not even worse than that.
OCTAVIUS. Is she badly hurt? Has there been an accident?
RAMSDEN. No: nothing of that sort.
TANNER. Ann: will you have the common humanity to tell us what the matter is?
ANN. [half whispering] I can’t. Violet has done something dreadful. We shall have to get her away somewhere. [She flutters to the writing table and sits in Ramsden’s chair, leaving the three men to fight it out between them].
OCTAVIUS. [enlightened] Is that what you meant, Mr Ramsden?
RAMSDEN. Yes. [Octavius sinks upon a chair, crushed]. I am afraid there is no doubt that Violet did not really go to Eastbourne three weeks ago when we thought she was with the Parry Whitefields. And she called on a strange doctor yesterday with a wedding ring on her finger. Mrs. Parry Whitefield met her there by chance; and so the whole thing came out.
OCTAVIUS. [rising with his fists clenched] Who is the scoundrel?
ANN. She won’t tell us.
OCTAVIUS. [collapsing upon his chair again] What a frightful thing!
TANNER. [with angry sarcasm] Dreadful. Appalling. Worse than death, as Ramsden says. [He comes to Octavius]. What would you not give, Tavy, to turn it into a railway accident, with all her bones broken or something equally respectable and deserving of sympathy?
OCTAVIUS. Don’t be brutal, Jack.
TANNER. Brutal! Good Heavens, man, what are you crying for? Here is a woman whom we all supposed to be making bad water color sketches, practising Grieg and Brahms, gadding about to concerts and parties, wasting her life and her money. We suddenly learn that she has turned from these sillinesses to the fulfilment of her highest purpose and greatest function — to increase, multiply and replenish the earth. And instead of admiring her courage and rejoicing in her instinct; instead of crowning the completed womanhood and raising the triumphal strain of “Unto us a child is born: unto us a son is given,” here you are — you who have been as merry as Brigs in your mourning for the dead — all pulling long faces and looking as ashamed and disgraced as if the girl had committed the vilest of crimes.
RAMSDEN. [roaring with rage] I will not have these abominations uttered in my house [he smit
es the writing table with his fist].
TANNER. Look here: if you insult me again I’ll take you at your word and leave your house. Ann: where is Violet now?
ANN. Why? Are you going to her?
TANNER. Of course I am going to her. She wants help; she wants money; she wants respect and congratulation. She wants every chance for her child. She does not seem likely to get it from you: she shall from me. Where is she?
ANN. Don’t be so headstrong, Jack. She’s upstairs.
TANNER. What! Under Ramsden’s sacred roof! Go and do your miserable duty, Ramsden. Hunt her out into the street. Cleanse your threshold from her contamination. Vindicate the purity of your English home. I’ll go for a cab.
ANN. [alarmed] Oh, Granny, you mustn’t do that.
OCTAVIUS. [broken-heartedly, rising] I’ll take her away, Mr Ramsden. She had no right to come to your house.
RAMSDEN. [indignantly] But I am only too anxious to help her. [turning on Tanner] How dare you, sir, impute such monstrous intentions to me? I protest against it. I am ready to put down my last penny to save her from being driven to run to you for protection.
TANNER. [subsiding] It’s all right, then. He’s not going to act up to his principles. It’s agreed that we all stand by Violet.
OCTAVIUS. But who is the man? He can make reparation by marrying her; and he shall, or he shall answer for it to me.
RAMSDEN. He shall, Octavius. There you speak like a man.
TANNER. Then you don’t think him a scoundrel, after all?
OCTAVIUS. Not a scoundrel! He is a heartless scoundrel.
RAMSDEN. A damned scoundrel. I beg your pardon, Annie; but I can say no less.
TANNER. So we are to marry your sister to a damned scoundrel by way of reforming her character! On my soul, I think you are all mad.
ANN. Don’t be absurd, Jack. Of course you are quite right, Tavy; but we don’t know who he is: Violet won’t tell us.
TANNER. What on earth does it matter who he is? He’s done his part; and Violet must do the rest.
RAMSDEN. [beside himself] Stuff! lunacy! There is a rascal in our midst, a libertine, a villain worse than a murderer; and we are not to learn who he is! In our ignorance we are to shake him by the hand; to introduce him into our homes; to trust our daughters with him; to — to —
ANN. [coaxingly] There, Granny, don’t talk so loud. It’s most shocking: we must all admit that; but if Violet won’t tell us, what can we do? Nothing. Simply nothing.
RAMSDEN. Hmph! I’m not so sure of that. If any man has paid Violet any special attention, we can easily find that out. If there is any man of notoriously loose principles among us —
TANNER. Ahem!
RAMSDEN. [raising his voice] Yes sir, I repeat, if there is any man of notoriously loose principles among us —
TANNER. Or any man notoriously lacking in self-control.
RAMSDEN. [aghast] Do you dare to suggest that I am capable of such an act?
TANNER. My dear Ramsden, this is an act of which every man is capable. That is what comes of getting at cross purposes with Nature. The suspicion you have just flung at me clings to us all. It’s a sort of mud that sticks to the judge’s ermine or the cardinal’s robe as fast as to the rags of the tramp. Come, Tavy: don’t look so bewildered: it might have been me: it might have been Ramsden; just as it might have been anybody. If it had, what could we do but lie and protest as Ramsden is going to protest.
RAMSDEN. [choking] I — I — I —
TANNER. Guilt itself could not stammer more confusedly, And yet you know perfectly well he’s innocent, Tavy.
RAMSDEN. [exhausted] I am glad you admit that, sir. I admit, myself, that there is an element of truth in what you say, grossly as you may distort it to gratify your malicious humor. I hope, Octavius, no suspicion of me is possible in your mind.
OCTAVIUS. Of you! No, not for a moment.
TANNER. [drily] I think he suspects me just a little.
OCTAVIUS. Jack: you couldn’t — you wouldn’t —
TANNER. Why not?
OCTAVIUS. [appalled] Why not!
TANNER. Oh, well, I’ll tell you why not. First, you would feel bound to quarrel with me. Second, Violet doesn’t like me. Third, if I had the honor of being the father of Violet’s child, I should boast of it instead of denying it. So be easy: our Friendship is not in danger.
OCTAVIUS. I should have put away the suspicion with horror if only you would think and feel naturally about it. I beg your pardon.
TANNER. MY pardon! nonsense! And now let’s sit down and have a family council. [He sits down. The rest follow his example, more or less under protest]. Violet is going to do the State a service; consequently she must be packed abroad like a criminal until it’s over. What’s happening upstairs?
ANN. Violet is in the housekeeper’s room — by herself, of course.
TANNER. Why not in the drawingroom?
ANN. Don’t be absurd, Jack. Miss Ramsden is in the drawingroom with my mother, considering what to do.
TANNER. Oh! the housekeeper’s room is the penitentiary, I suppose; and the prisoner is waiting to be brought before her judges. The old cats!
ANN. Oh, Jack!
RAMSDEN. You are at present a guest beneath the roof of one of the old cats, sir. My sister is the mistress of this house.
TANNER. She would put me in the housekeeper’s room, too, if she dared, Ramsden. However, I withdraw cats. Cats would have more sense. Ann: as your guardian, I order you to go to Violet at once and be particularly kind to her.
ANN. I have seen her, Jack. And I am sorry to say I am afraid she is going to be rather obstinate about going abroad. I think Tavy ought to speak to her about it.
OCTAVIUS. How can I speak to her about such a thing [he breaks down]?
ANN. Don’t break down, Ricky. Try to bear it for all our sakes.
RAMSDEN. Life is not all plays and poems, Octavius. Come! face it like a man.
TANNER. [chafing again] Poor dear brother! Poor dear friends of the family! Poor dear Tabbies and Grimalkins. Poor dear everybody except the woman who is going to risk her life to create another life! Tavy: don’t you be a selfish ass. Away with you and talk to Violet; and bring her down here if she cares to come. [Octavius rises]. Tell her we’ll stand by her.
RAMSDEN. [rising] No, sir —
TANNER. [rising also and interrupting him] Oh, we understand: it’s against your conscience; but still you’ll do it.
OCTAVIUS. I assure you all, on my word, I never meant to be selfish. It’s so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.
TANNER. My dear Tavy, your pious English habit of regarding the world as a moral gymnasium built expressly to strengthen your character in, occasionally leads you to think about your own confounded principles when you should be thinking about other people’s necessities. The need of the present hour is a happy mother and a healthy baby. Bend your energies on that; and you will see your way clearly enough.
Octavius, much perplexed, goes out.
RAMSDEN. [facing Tanner impressively] And Morality, sir? What is to become of that?
TANNER. Meaning a weeping Magdalen and an innocent child branded with her shame. Not in our circle, thank you. Morality can go to its father the devil.
RAMSDEN. I thought so, sir. Morality sent to the devil to please our libertines, male and female. That is to be the future of England, is it?
TANNER. Oh, England will survive your disapproval. Meanwhile, I understand that you agree with me as to the practical course we are to take?
RAMSDEN. Not in your spirit sir. Not for your reasons.
TANNER. You can explain that if anybody calls you to account, here or hereafter. [He turns away, and plants himself in front of Mr Herbert Spencer, at whom he stares gloomily].
ANN. [rising and coming to Ramsden] Granny: hadn’t you better go up to the drawingroom and tell them what we intend to do?
RAMSDEN. [looking pointedly at Tanner] I hardly like to leave you alone with t
his gentleman. Will you not come with me?
ANN. Miss Ramsden would not like to speak about it before me, Granny. I ought not to be present.
RAMSDEN. You are right: I should have thought of that. You are a good girl, Annie.
He pats her on the shoulder. She looks up at him with beaming eyes and he goes out, much moved. Having disposed of him, she looks at Tanner. His back being turned to her, she gives a moment’s attention to her personal appearance, then softly goes to him and speaks almost into his ear.
ANN. Jack [he turns with a start]: are you glad that you are my guardian? You don’t mind being made responsible for me, I hope.
TANNER. The latest addition to your collection of scapegoats, eh?
ANN. Oh, that stupid old joke of yours about me! Do please drop it. Why do you say things that you know must pain me? I do my best to please you, Jack: I suppose I may tell you so now that you are my guardian. You will make me so unhappy if you refuse to be friends with me.
TANNER. [studying her as gloomily as he studied the dust] You need not go begging for my regard. How unreal our moral judgments are! You seem to me to have absolutely no conscience — only hypocrisy; and you can’t see the difference — yet there is a sort of fascination about you. I always attend to you, somehow. I should miss you if I lost you.
ANN. [tranquilly slipping her arm into his and walking about with him] But isn’t that only natural, Jack? We have known each other since we were children. Do you remember?
TANNER. [abruptly breaking loose] Stop! I remember EVERYTHING.
ANN. Oh, I daresay we were often very silly; but —
TANNER. I won’t have it, Ann. I am no more that schoolboy now than I am the dotard of ninety I shall grow into if I live long enough. It is over: let me forget it.
ANN. Wasn’t it a happy time? [She attempts to take his arm again].
TANNER. Sit down and behave yourself. [He makes her sit down in the chair next the writing table]. No doubt it was a happy time for you. You were a good girl and never compromised yourself. And yet the wickedest child that ever was slapped could hardly have had a better time. I can understand the success with which you bullied the other girls: your virtue imposed on them. But tell me this: did you ever know a good boy?
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