No More Learning

[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?

ANN. Of course. All boys are foolish sometimes; but Tavy was always a
really good boy.

TANNER. [struck by this] Yes: you're right. For some reason you never
tempted Tavy.

ANN. Tempted! Jack!

TANNER. Yes, my dear Lady Mephistopheles, tempted. You were insatiably
curious as to what a boy might be capable of, and diabolically clever at
getting through his guard and surprising his inmost secrets.

ANN. What nonsense! All because you used to tell me long stories of 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 grown-ups; 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 that for me. Love played its part in the earliest
dreams and follies and romances I can remember--may I say the earliest
follies and romances we can remember? --though we did not understand it
at the time. No: the change that came to me was the birth in me of moral
passion; and I declare that according to my experience moral passion is
the only real passion.

ANN. All passions ought to be moral, Jack.

TANNER. Ought! Do you think that anything is strong enough to impose
oughts on a passion except a stronger passion still?

ANN. Our moral sense controls passion, Jack. Don't be stupid.

TANNER. Our moral sense! And is that not a passion? Is the devil to
have all the passions as well as all the good times? If it were not a
passion--if it were not the mightiest of the passions, all the other
passions would sweep it away like a leaf before a hurricane. It is the
birth of that passion that turns a child into a man.

ANN. There are other passions, Jack. Very strong ones.

TANNER. All the other passions were in me before; but they were idle
and aimless--mere childish greedinesses and cruelties, curiosities
and fancies, habits and superstitions, grotesque and ridiculous to the
mature intelligence. When they suddenly began to shine like newly lit
flames it was by no light of their own, but by the radiance of the
dawning moral passion. That passion dignified them, gave them conscience
and meaning, found them a mob of appetites and organized them into an
army of purposes and principles. My soul was born of that passion.

ANN. I noticed that you got more sense. You were a dreadfully
destructive boy before that.

TANNER. Destructive! Stuff! I was only mischievous.

ANN. Oh Jack, you were very destructive. You ruined all the young fir
trees by chopping off their leaders with a wooden sword. You broke all
the cucumber frames with your catapult. You set fire to the common: the
police arrested Tavy for it because he ran away when he couldn't stop
you. You--

TANNER. Pooh! pooh! pooh! these were battles, bombardments, stratagems
to save our scalps from the red Indians. You have no imagination, Ann. I
am ten times more destructive now than I was then. The moral passion has
taken my destructiveness in hand and directed it to moral ends. I have
become a reformer, and, like all reformers, an iconoclast. I no longer
break cucumber frames and burn gorse bushes: I shatter creeds and
demolish idols.

ANN. [bored] I am afraid I am too feminine to see any sense in
destruction. Destruction can only destroy.

TANNER. Yes. That is why it is so useful. Construction cumbers the
ground with institutions made by busybodies.
Destruction clears it and
gives us breathing space and liberty.

ANN. It's no use, Jack. No woman will agree with you there.

TANNER. That's because you confuse construction and destruction with
creation and murder. They're quite different: I adore creation and abhor
murder. Yes: I adore it in tree and flower, in bird and beast, even
in you. [A flush of interest and delight suddenly clears the growing
perplexity and boredom from her face]. It was the creative instinct that
led you to attach me to you by bonds that have left their mark on me
to this day. Yes, Ann: the old childish compact between us was an
unconscious love compact.

ANN. Jack!

TANNER. Oh, don't be alarmed--

ANN. I am not alarmed.

TANNER. [whimsically] Then you ought to be: where are your principles?

ANN. Jack: are you serious or are you not?

TANNER. Do you mean about the moral passion?

ANN. No, no; the other one. [Confused] Oh! you are so silly; one never
knows how to take you.

TANNER. You must take me quite seriously. I am your guardian; and it is
my duty to improve your mind.

ANN. The love compact is over, then, is it? I suppose you grew tired of
me?

TANNER. No; but the moral passion made our childish relations
impossible. A jealous sense of my new individuality arose in me.

ANN. You hated to be treated as a boy any longer. Poor Jack!

TANNER. Yes, because to be treated as a boy was to be taken on the old
footing. I had become a new person; and those who knew the old person
laughed at me. The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor: he took
my measure anew every time he saw me, whilst all the rest went on with
their old measurements and expected them to fit me.

ANN. You became frightfully self-conscious.

TANNER. When you go to heaven, Ann, you will be frightfully conscious of
your wings for the first year or so. When you meet your relatives there,
and they persist in treating you as if you were still a mortal, you will
not be able to bear them. You will try to get into a circle which has
never known you except as an angel.

ANN. So it was only your vanity that made you run away from us after
all?

TANNER. Yes, only my vanity, as you call it.

ANN. You need not have kept away from ME on that account.

TANNER. From you above all others. You fought harder than anybody
against my emancipation.

ANN. [earnestly] Oh, how wrong you are! I would have done anything for
you.

TANNER. Anything except let me get loose from you. Even then you had
acquired by instinct that damnable woman's trick of heaping obligations
on a man, of placing yourself so entirely and helplessly at his mercy
that at last he dare not take a step without running to you for leave.
I know a poor wretch whose one desire in life is to run away from his
wife. She prevents him by threatening to throw herself in front of the
engine of the train he leaves her in. That is what all women do. If we
try to go where you do not want us to go there is no law to prevent us,
but when we take the first step your breasts are under our foot as it
descends: your bodies are under our wheels as we start. No woman shall
ever enslave me in that way.

ANN. But, Jack, you cannot get through life without considering other
people a little.

TANNER. Ay; but what other people? It is this consideration of other
people or rather this cowardly fear of them which we call consideration
that makes us the sentimental slaves we are. To consider you, as you
call it, is to substitute your will for my own. How if it be a baser
will than mine? Are women taught better than men or worse? Are mobs of
voters taught better than statesmen or worse? Worse, of course, in both
cases. And then what sort of world are you going to get, with its public
men considering its voting mobs, and its private men considering their
wives? What does Church and State mean nowadays? The Woman and the
Ratepayer.

ANN. [placidly] I am so glad you understand politics, Jack: it will
be most useful to you if you go into parliament [he collapses like a
pricked bladder]. But I am sorry you thought my influence a bad one.

TANNER. I don't say it was a bad one. But bad or good, I didn't choose
to be cut to your measure. And I won't be cut to it.

ANN. Nobody wants you to, Jack. I assure you--really on my word--I
don't mind your queer opinions one little bit. You know we have all been
brought up to have advanced opinions. Why do you persist in thinking me
so narrow minded?

TANNER. That's the danger of it. I know you don't mind, because you've
found out that it doesn't matter. The boa constrictor doesn't mind the
opinions of a stag one little bit when once she has got her coils round
it.

ANN. [rising in sudden enlightenment] O-o-o-o-oh! NOW I understand why
you warned Tavy that I am a boa constrictor. Granny told me. [She laughs
and throws her boa around her neck]. Doesn't it feel nice and soft,
Jack?

TANNER. [in the toils] You scandalous woman, will you throw away even
your hypocrisy?

ANN. I am never hypocritical with you, Jack. Are you angry? [She
withdraws the boa and throws it on a chair]. Perhaps I shouldn't have
done that.

TANNER. [contemptuously] Pooh, prudery! Why should you not, if it amuses
you?

ANN. [Shyly] Well, because--because I suppose what you really meant by
the boa constrictor was THIS [she puts her arms round his neck].

TANNER. [Staring at her] Magnificent audacity! [She laughs and pats his
cheeks]. Now just to think that if I mentioned this episode not a soul
would believe me except the people who would cut me for telling, whilst
if you accused me of it nobody would believe my denial.

ANN. [taking her arms away with perfect dignity] You are incorrigible,
Jack. But you should not jest about our affection for one another.
Nobody could possibly misunderstand it. YOU do not misunderstand it, I
hope.

TANNER. My blood interprets for me, Ann. Poor Ricky Tiky Tavy!

ANN. [looking quickly at him as if this were a new light] Surely you are
not so absurd as to be jealous of Tavy.

TANNER. Jealous! Why should I be? But I don't wonder at your grip of
him. I feel the coils tightening round my very self, though you are only
playing with me.

ANN. Do you think I have designs on Tavy?

TANNER. I know you have.

ANN. [earnestly] Take care, Jack. You may make Tavy very happy if you
mislead him about me.

TANNER. Never fear: he will not escape you.

ANN. I wonder are you really a clever man!

TANNER. Why this sudden misgiving on the subject?

ANN. You seem to understand all the things I don't understand; but you
are a perfect baby in the things I do understand.

TANNER. I understand how Tavy feels for you, Ann; you may depend on
that, at all events.

ANN. And you think you understand how I feel for Tavy, don't you?

TANNER. I know only too well what is going to happen to poor Tavy.

ANN. I should laugh at you, Jack, if it were not for poor papa's death.
Mind! Tavy will be very unhappy.

TANNER. Yes; but he won't know it, poor devil. He is a thousand times
too good for you. That's why he is going to make the mistake of his life
about you.

ANN. I think men make more mistakes by being too clever than by being
too good [she sits down, with a trace of contempt for the whole male sex
in the elegant carriage of her shoulders].

TANNER. Oh, I know you don't care very much about Tavy. But there is
always one who kisses and one who only allows the kiss. Tavy will kiss;
and you will only turn the cheek. And you will throw him over if anybody
better turns up.

ANN. [offended] You have no right to say such things, Jack. They are not
true, and not delicate. If you and Tavy choose to be stupid about me,
that is not my fault.

TANNER. [remorsefully] Forgive my brutalities, Ann. They are levelled
at this wicked world, not at you. [She looks up at him, pleased and
forgiving. He becomes cautious at once]. All the same, I wish Ramsden
would come back. I never feel safe with you: there is a devilish
charm--or no: not a charm, a subtle interest [she laughs]. Just so: you
know it; and you triumph in it. Openly and shamelessly triumph in it!

ANN. What a shocking flirt you are, Jack!

TANNER. A flirt! ! I! !

ANN. Yes, a flirt. You are always abusing and offending people, but you
never really mean to let go your hold of them.

TANNER. I will ring the bell. This conversation has already gone further
than I intended.

Ramsden and Octavius come back with Miss Ramsden, a hardheaded old
maiden lady in a plain brown silk gown, with enough rings, chains and
brooches to show that her plainness of dress is a matter of principle,
not of poverty. She comes into the room very determinedly: the two men,
perplexed and downcast, following her. Ann rises and goes eagerly to
meet her. Tanner retreats to the wall between the busts and pretends
to study the pictures. Ramsden goes to his table as usual; and Octavius
clings to the neighborhood of Tanner.