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

worse. To Mrs. Whitefield: putting her arm round her. Let me take you to the hotel with me: the drive will do you good. Come in and get a wrap. She takes her towards the villa. Mrs. Whitefield As they go up through the garden. I don’t know what I shall do when you are gone, with no one but Ann in the house; and she always occupied with the men! It’s not to be expected that your husband will care to be bothered with an old woman like me. Oh, you needn’t tell me: politeness is all very well; but I know what people think⁠—She talks herself and Violet out of sight and hearing. Ann, musing on Violet’s opportune advice, approaches Tanner; examines him humorously for a moment from toe to top; and finally delivers her opinion. Ann Violet is quite right. You ought to get married. Tanner Explosively. Ann: I will not marry you. Do you hear? I won’t, won’t, won’t, won’t, won’t marry you. Ann Placidly. Well, nobody asked you, sir she said, sir she said, sir she said. So that’s settled. Tanner Yes, nobody has asked me; but everybody treats the thing as settled. It’s in the air. When we meet, the others go away on absurd pretexts to leave us alone together. Ramsden no longer scowls at me: his eye beams, as if he were already giving you away to me in church. Tavy refers me to your mother and gives me his blessing. Straker openly treats you as his future employer: it was he who first told me of it. Ann Was that why you ran away? Tanner Yes, only to be stopped by a lovesick brigand and run down like a truant schoolboy. Ann Well, if you don’t want to be married, you needn’t be. She turns away from him and sits down, much at her ease. Tanner Following her. Does any man want to be hanged? Yet men let themselves be hanged without a struggle for life, though they could at least give the chaplain a black eye. We do the world’s will, not our own. I have a frightful feeling that I shall let myself be married because it is the world’s will that you should have a husband. Ann I daresay I shall, someday. Tanner But why me⁠—me of all men? Marriage is to me apostasy, profanation of the sanctuary of my soul, violation of my manhood, sale of my birthright, shameful surrender, ignominious capitulation, acceptance of defeat. I shall decay like a thing that has served its purpose and is done with; I shall change from a man with a future to a man with a past; I shall see in the greasy eyes of all the other husbands their relief at the arrival of a new prisoner to share their ignominy. The young men will scorn me as one who has sold out: to the young women I, who have always been an enigma and a possibility, shall be merely somebody else’s property⁠—and damaged goods at that: a secondhand man at best. Ann Well, your wife can put on a cap and make herself ugly to keep you in countenance, like my grandmother. Tanner So that she may make her triumph more insolent by publicly throwing away the bait the moment the trap snaps on the victim! Ann After all, though, what difference would it make? Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days? I thought our pictures very lovely when papa bought them; but I haven’t looked at them for years. You never bother about my looks: you are too well used to me. I might be the umbrella stand. Tanner You lie, you vampire: you lie. Ann Flatterer. Why are you trying to fascinate me, Jack, if you don’t want to marry me? Tanner The life force. I am in the grip of the life force. Ann I don’t understand in the least: it sounds like the Life Guards. Tanner Why don’t you marry Tavy? He is willing. Can you not be satisfied unless your prey struggles? Ann Turning to him as if to let him into a secret. Tavy will never marry. Haven’t you noticed that that sort of man never marries? Tanner What! A man who idolizes women! Who sees nothing in nature but romantic scenery for love duets! Tavy, the chivalrous, the faithful, the tenderhearted and true! Tavy never marry! Why, he was born to be swept up by the first pair of blue eyes he meets in the street. Ann Yes, I know. All the same, Jack, men like that always live in comfortable bachelor lodgings with broken hearts, and are adored by their landladies, and never get married. Men like you always get married. Tanner Smiting his brow. How frightfully, horribly true! It has been staring me in the face all my life; and I never saw it before. Ann Oh, it’s the same with women. The poetic temperament’s a very nice temperament, very amiable, very harmless and poetic, I daresay; but it’s an old maid’s temperament. Tanner Barren. The life force passes it by. Ann If that’s what you mean by the life force, yes. Tanner You don’t care for Tavy? Ann Looking round carefully to make sure that Tavy is not within earshot. No. Tanner And you do care for me? Ann Rising quietly and shaking her finger at him. Now Jack! Behave yourself. Tanner Infamous, abandoned woman! Devil! Ann Boa-constrictor! Elephant! Tanner Hypocrite! Ann Softly. I must be, for my future husband’s sake. Tanner For mine! Correcting himself savagely. I mean for his. Ann Ignoring the correction. Yes, for yours. You had better marry what you call a hypocrite, Jack. Women who are not hypocrites go about in rational dress and are insulted and get into all sorts of hot water. And then their husbands get dragged in too, and live in continual dread of fresh complications. Wouldn’t you prefer a wife you could depend on? Tanner No, a thousand times