Misalliance (2/2) (3/12)

| Bentley | Keep young. Keep your eye on me. That’s the tip for you. | | | Bentley* and Mr. Tarleton (an immense and genial veteran of trade) come into view and enter the pavilion. | | John Tarleton | You think you’re young, do you? You think I’m old? Energetically shaking off his motoring coat and hanging it up with his cap. | | Bentley | Helping him with the coat. Of course you’re old. Look at your face and look at mine. What you call your youth is nothing but your levity. Why do we get on so well together? Because I’m a young cub and you’re an old josser. He throws a cushion at Hypatia’s feet and sits down on it with his back against her knees. | | Tarleton | Old! That’s all you know about it, my lad. How do, Patsy! Hypatia kisses him. How is my Chickabiddy? He kisses Mrs. Tarleton’s hand and poses expansively in the middle of the picture. Look at me! Look at these wrinkles, these gray hairs, this repulsive mask that you call old age! What is it? Vehemently. I ask you, what is it? | | Bentley | Jolly nice and venerable, old man. Don’t be discouraged. | | Tarleton | Nice? Not a bit of it. Venerable? Venerable be blowed! Read your Darwin, my boy. Read your Weismann. He goes to the sideboard for a drink of lemonade. | | Mrs. Tarleton | For shame, John! Tell him to read his Bible. | | Tarleton | Manipulating the syphon. What’s the use of telling children to read the Bible when you know they won’t. I was kept away from the Bible for forty years by being told to read it when I was young. Then I picked it up one evening in a hotel in Sunderland when I had left all my papers in the train; and I found it wasn’t half bad. He drinks, and puts down the glass with a smack of enjoyment. Better than most halfpenny papers, anyhow, if only you could make people believe it. He sits down by the writing-table, near his wife. But if you want to understand old age scientifically, read Darwin and Weismann. Of course if you want to understand it romantically, read about Solomon. | | Mrs. Tarleton | Have you had tea, John? | | Tarleton | Yes. Don’t interrupt me when I’m improving the boy’s mind. Where was I? This repulsive mask⁠—Yes. Explosively. What is death? | | Mrs. Tarleton | John! | | Hypatia | Death is a rather unpleasant subject, papa. | | Tarleton | Not a bit. Not scientifically. Scientifically it’s a delightful subject. You think death’s natural. Well, it isn’t. You read Weismann. There wasn’t any death to start with. You go look in any ditch outside and you’ll find swimming about there as fresh as paint some of the identical little live cells that Adam christened in the Garden of Eden. But if big things like us didn’t die, we’d crowd one another off the face of the globe. Nothing survived, sir, except the sort of people that had the sense and good manners to die and make room for the fresh supplies. And so death was introduced by Natural Selection. You get it out of your head, my lad, that I’m going to die because I’m wearing out or decaying. There’s no such thing as decay to a vital man. I shall clear out; but I shan’t decay. | | Bentley | And what about the wrinkles and the almond tree and the grasshopper that becomes a burden and the desire that fails? | | Tarleton | Does it? by George! No, sir: it spiritualizes. As to your grasshopper, I can carry an elephant. | | Mrs. Tarleton | You do say such things, Bunny! What does he mean by the almond tree? | | Tarleton | He means my white hairs: the repulsive mask. That, my boy, is another invention of Natural Selection to disgust young women with me, and give the lads a turn. | | Mrs. Tarleton | John: I won’t have it. That’s a forbidden subject. | | Tarleton | They talk of the wickedness and vanity of women painting their faces and wearing auburn wigs at fifty. But why shouldn’t they? Why should a woman allow Nature to put a false mask of age on her when she knows that she’s as young as ever? Why should she look in the glass and see a wrinkled lie when a touch of fine art will show her a glorious truth? The wrinkles are a dodge to repel young men. Suppose she doesn’t want to repel young men! Suppose she likes them! | | Mrs. Tarleton | Bunny: take Hypatia out into the grounds for a walk: there’s a good boy. John has got one of his naughty fits this evening. | | Hypatia | Oh, never mind me. I’m used to him. | | Bentley | I’m not. I never heard such conversation: I can’t believe my ears. And mind you, this is the man who objected to my marrying his daughter on the ground that a marriage between a member of the great and good middle class with one of the vicious and corrupt aristocracy would be a misalliance. A misalliance, if you please! This is the man I’ve adopted as a father! | | Tarleton | Eh! What’s that? Adopted me as a father, have you? | | Bentley | Yes. That’s an idea of mine. I knew a chap named Joey Percival at Oxford (you know I was two months at Balliol before I was sent down for telling the old woman who was head of that silly college what I jolly well thought of him. He would have been glad to have me back, too, at the end of six months; but I wouldn’t go: I just let him want; and serve him right!) Well, Joey was a most awfully clever fellow, and so nice! I asked him what made such a difference between him and all the other pups⁠—they were pups, if you like. He told me it was very simple: they had only one father apiece; and he had three. | | Mrs. Tarleton | Don’t talk nonsense, child. How could that be? | | Bentley | Oh, very simple. His father⁠— | | Tarleton | Which father? | | Bentley | The first one: the regulation natural chap. He kept a tame philosopher in the house: a sort of Coleridge or Herbert Spencer kind of card, you know. That was the second father. Then his mother was an Italian princess; and she had an Italian priest always about. He was supposed to take charge of her conscience; but from what I could make out, she jolly well took charge of his. The whole three of them took charge of Joey’s conscience. He used to hear them arguing like mad about everything. You see, the philosopher was a freethinker, and always believed the latest thing. The priest didn’t believe anything, because it was sure to get him into trouble with someone or another. And the natural father kept an open mind and believed whatever paid him best. Between the lot of them Joey got cultivated no end. He said if he could only have had three mothers as well, he’d have backed himself against Napoleon. | | Tarleton | Impressed. That’s an idea. That’s a most interesting idea: a most important idea. | | Mrs. Tarleton | You always were one for ideas, John. | | Tarleton | You’re right, Chickabiddy. What do I tell Johnny when he brags about Tarleton’s Underwear? It’s not the underwear. The underwear be hanged! Anybody can make underwear. Anybody can sell underwear. Tarleton’s Ideas: that’s what’s done it. I’ve often thought of putting that up over the shop. | | Bentley | Take me into partnership when you do, old man. I’m wasted on the underwear; but I shall come in strong on the ideas. | | Tarleton | You be a good boy; and perhaps I will. | | Mrs. Tarleton | Scenting a plot against her beloved Johnny. Now, John: you promised⁠— | | Tarleton | Yes, yes. All right, Chickabiddy: don’t fuss. Your precious Johnny shan’t be interfered with. Bouncing up, too energetic to sit still. But I’m getting sick of that old shop. Thirty-five years I’ve had of it: same blessed old stairs to go up and down every day: same old lot: same old game: sorry I ever started it now. I’ll chuck it and try something else: something that will give a scope to all my faculties. | | Hypatia | There’s money in underwear: there’s none in wildcat ideas. | | Tarleton | There’s money in me, madam, no matter what I go into. | | Mrs. Tarleton | Don’t boast, John. Don’t tempt Providence. | | Tarleton | Rats! You don’t understand Providence. Providence likes to be tempted. That’s the secret of the successful man. Read Browning. Natural theology on an island, eh? Caliban was afraid to tempt Providence: that was why he was never able to get even with Prospero. What did Prospero do? Prospero didn’t even tempt Providence: he was Providence. That’s one of Tarleton’s ideas; and don’t you forget it. | | Bentley | You are full of beef today, old man. | | Tarleton | Beef be blowed! Joy of life. Read Ibsen. He goes into the pavilion to relieve his restlessness, and stares out with his hands thrust deep in his pockets. | | Hypatia | Thoughtful. Bentley: couldn’t you invite your friend Mr. Percival down here? | | Bentley | Not if I know it. You’d throw me over the moment you set eyes on him. | | Mrs. Tarleton | Oh, Bunny! For shame! | | Bentley | Well, who’d marry me, d’you suppose, if they could get my brains with a full-sized body? No, thank you. I shall take jolly good care to keep Joey out of this until Hypatia is past praying for. | | | Johnny and Lord Summerhays return through the pavilion from their stroll. | | Tarleton | Welcome! welcome! Why have you stayed away so long? | | Lord Summerhays | Shaking hands. Yes: I should have come sooner. But I’m still rather lost in England. Johnny takes his hat and hangs it up beside his own. Thank you. Johnny returns to his swing and his novel. Lord Summerhays comes to the writing table. The fact is that as I’ve nothing to do, I never have time to go anywhere. He sits down next Mrs. Tarleton. | | Tarleton | Following him and sitting down on his left. Paradox, paradox. Good. Paradoxes are the only truths. Read Chesterton. But there’s lots for you to do here. You have a genius for government. You learnt your job out there in Jinghiskahn. Well, we want to be governed here in England. Govern us. | | Lord Summerhays | Ah yes, my friend; but in Jinghiskahn you have to govern the right way. If you don’t, you go under and come home. Here everything has to be done the wrong way, to suit governors who understand nothing but partridge shooting (our English native princes, in fact) and voters who don’t know what they’re voting about. I don’t understand these democratic games; and I’m afraid I’m too old to learn. What can I do but sit in the window of my club, which consists mostly of retired Indian Civil servants? We look on at the muddle and the folly and amateurishness; and we ask each other where a single fortnight of it would have landed us. | | Tarleton | Very true. Still, Democracy’s all right, you know. Read Mill. Read Jefferson. | | Lord Summerhays | Yes. Democracy reads well; but it doesn’t act well, like some people’s plays. No, no, my friend Tarleton: to make Democracy work, you need an aristocratic democracy. To make Aristocracy work, you need a democratic aristocracy. You’ve got neither; and there’s an end of it. | | Tarleton | Still, you know, the superman may come. The superman’s an idea. I believe in ideas. Read Whatshisname. | | Lord Summerhays | Reading is a dangerous amusement, Tarleton. I wish I could persuade your free library people of that. | | Tarleton | Why, man, it’s the beginning of education. | | Lord Summerhays | On the contrary, it’s the end of it. How can you dare teach a man to read until you’ve taught him everything else first? | | Johnny | Intercepting his father’s reply by coming out of the swing and taking the floor. Leave it at that. That’s good sense. Anybody on for a game of tennis? | | Bentley | Oh, lets have some more improving conversation. Wouldn’t you rather, Johnny? | | Johnny | If you ask me, no. | | Tarleton | Johnny: you don’t cultivate your mind. You don’t read. | | Johnny | Coming between his mother and Lord Summerhays, book in hand. Yes I do. I bet you what you like that, page for page, I read more than you, though I don’t talk about it so much. Only, I don’t read the same books. I like a book with a plot in it. You like a book with nothing in it but some idea that the chap that writes it keeps worrying, like a cat chasing its own tail. I can stand a little of it, just as I can stand watching the cat for two minutes, say, when I’ve nothing better to do. But a man soon gets fed up with that sort of thing. The fact is, you look on an author as a sort of god. I look on him as a man that I pay to do a certain thing for me. I pay him to amuse me and to take me out of myself and make me forget. | | Tarleton | No. Wrong principle. You want to remember. Read Kipling. “Lest we forget.” | | Johnny | If Kipling wants to remember, let him remember. If he had to run Tarleton’s Underwear, he’d be jolly glad to forget. As he has a much softer job, and wants to keep himself before the public, his cry is, “Don’t you forget the sort of things I’m rather clever at writing about.” Well, I don’t blame him: it’s his business: I should do the same in his place. But what he wants and what I want are two different things. I want to forget; and I pay another man to make me forget. If I buy a book or go to the theatre, I want to forget the shop and forget myself from the moment I go in to the moment I come out. That’s what I pay my money for. And if I find that the author’s simply getting at me the whole time, I consider that he’s obtained my money under false pretences. I’m not a morbid crank: I’m a natural man; and, as such, I don’t like being got at. If a man in my employment did it, I should sack him. If a member of my club did it, I should cut him. If he went too far with it, I should bring his conduct before the committee. I might even punch his head, if it came to that. Well, who and what is an author that he should be privileged to take liberties that are not allowed to other men? | | Mrs. Tarleton | You see, John! What have I always told you? Johnny has as much to say for himself as anybody when he likes. | | Johnny | I’m no fool, mother, whatever some people may fancy. I don’t set up to have as many ideas as the Governor; but what ideas I have are consecutive, at all events. I can think as well as talk. | | Bentley | To Tarleton*, chuckling. Had you there, old man, hadn’t he? You are rather all over the shop with your ideas, ain’t you? | | Johnny | Handsomely. I’m not saying anything against you, Governor. But I do say that the time has come for sane, healthy, unpretending men like me to make a stand against this conspiracy of the writing and talking and artistic lot to put us in the back row. It isn’t a fact that we’re inferior to them: it’s a put-up job; and it’s they that have put the job up. It’s we that run the country for them; and all the thanks we get is to be told we’re Philistines and vulgar tradesmen and sordid city men and so forth, and that they’re all angels of light and leading. The time has come to assert ourselves and put a stop to their stuck-up nonsense. Perhaps if we had nothing better to do than talking or writing, we could do it better than they. Anyhow, they’re the failures and refuse of business (hardly a man of them that didn’t begin in an office) and we’re the successes of it. Thank God I haven’t failed yet at anything; and I don’t believe I should fail at literature if it would pay me to turn my hand to it. | | Bentley | Hear, hear! | | Mrs. Tarleton | Fancy you writing a book, Johnny! Do you think he could, Lord Summerhays? | | Lord Summerhays | Why not? As a matter of fact all the really prosperous authors I have met since my return to England have been very like him. | | Tarleton | Again impressed. That’s an idea. That’s a new idea. I believe I ought to have made Johnny an author. I’ve never said so before for fear of hurting his feelings, because, after all, the lad can’t help it; but I’ve never thought Johnny worth tuppence as a man of business. |