Man and Superman, George Bernard Shaw [hardest books to read txt] 📗

the wicked things you had done⁠—silly boys tricks! And you call such things inmost secrets: boys’ secrets are just like men’s; and you know what they are! Tanner Obstinately. No I don’t. What are they, pray? Ann Why, the things they tell everybody, of course. Tanner Now I swear I told you things I told no one else. You lured me into a compact by which we were to have no secrets from one another. We were to tell one another everything. I didn’t notice that you never told me anything. Ann You didn’t want to talk about me, Jack. You wanted to talk about yourself. Tanner Ah, true, horribly true. But what a devil of a child you must have been to know that weakness and to play on it for the satisfaction of your own curiosity! I wanted to brag to you, to make myself interesting. And I found myself doing all sorts of mischievous things simply to have something to tell you about. I fought with boys I didn’t hate; I lied about things I might just as well have told the truth about; I stole things I didn’t want; I kissed little girls I didn’t care for. It was all bravado: passionless and therefore unreal. Ann I never told of you, Jack. Tanner No; but if you had wanted to stop me you would have told of me. You wanted me to go on. Ann Flashing out. Oh, that’s not true: it’s not true, Jack. I never wanted you to do those dull, disappointing, brutal, stupid, vulgar things. I always hoped that it would be something really heroic at last. Recovering herself. Excuse me, Jack; but the things you did were never a bit like the things I wanted you to do. They often gave me great uneasiness; but I could not tell on you and get you into trouble. And you were only a boy. I knew you would grow out of them. Perhaps I was wrong. Tanner Sardonically. Do not give way to remorse, Ann. At least nineteen twentieths of the exploits I confessed to you were pure lies. I soon noticed that you didn’t like the true stories. Ann Of course I knew that some of the things couldn’t have happened. But⁠— Tanner You are going to remind me that some of the most disgraceful ones did. Ann Fondly, to his great terror. I don’t want to remind you of anything. But I knew the people they happened to, and heard about them. Tanner Yes; but even the true stories were touched up for telling. A sensitive boy’s humiliations may be very good fun for ordinary thickskinned grownups; but to the boy himself they are so acute, so ignominious, that he cannot confess them⁠—cannot but deny them passionately. However, perhaps it was as well for me that I romanced a bit; for, on the one occasion when I told you the truth, you threatened to tell of me. Ann Oh, never. Never once. Tanner Yes, you did. Do you remember a dark-eyed girl named Rachel Rosetree? Ann’s brows contract for an instant involuntarily. I got up a love affair with her; and we met one night in the garden and walked about very uncomfortably with our arms round one another, and kissed at parting, and were most conscientiously romantic. If that love affair had gone on, it would have bored me to death; but it didn’t go on; for the next thing that happened was that Rachel cut me because she found out that I had told you. How did she find it out? From you. You went to her and held the guilty secret over her head, leading her a life of abject terror and humiliation by threatening to tell on her. Ann And a very good thing for her, too. It was my duty to stop her misconduct; and she is thankful to me for it now. Tanner Is she? Ann She ought to be, at all events. Tanner It was not your duty to stop my misconduct, I suppose. Ann I did stop it by stopping her. Tanner Are you sure of that? You stopped my telling you about my adventures; but how do you know that you stopped the adventures? Ann Do you mean to say that you went on in the same way with other girls? Tanner No. I had enough of that sort of romantic tomfoolery with Rachel. Ann Unconvinced. Then why did you break off our confidences and become quite strange to me? Tanner Enigmatically. It happened just then that I got something that I wanted to keep all to myself instead of sharing it with you. Ann I am sure I shouldn’t have asked for any of it if you had grudged it. Tanner It wasn’t a box of sweets, Ann. It was something you’d never have let me call my own. Ann Incredulously. What? Tanner My soul. Ann Oh, do be sensible, Jack. You know you’re talking nonsense. Tanner The most solemn earnest, Ann. You didn’t notice at that time that you were getting a soul too. But you were. It was not for nothing that you suddenly found you had a moral duty to chastise and reform Rachel. Up to that time you had traded pretty extensively in being a good child; but you had never set up a sense of duty to others. Well, I set one up too. Up to that time I had played the boy buccaneer with no more conscience than a fox in a poultry farm. But now I began to have scruples, to feel obligations, to find that veracity and honor were no longer goody-goody expressions in the mouths of grown up people, but compelling principles in myself. Ann Quietly. Yes, I suppose you’re right. You were beginning to be a man, and I to be a woman. Tanner Are you sure it was not that we were beginning to be something more? What does the beginning of manhood and womanhood mean in most people’s mouths? You know: it means the beginning of love. But love began long before