Man and Superman

Roebuck Ramsden is in his study, opening the morning letters. The study, handsomely and solidly furnished, proclaims the man of means. Not a speck of dust is visible: it is clear that there are at least two housemaids and a parlormaid downstairs, and a housekeeper upstairs who does not let them spare elbow-grease. Even the top of Roebuck’s head is polished: on a sunshiny day he could heliograph his orders to distant camps by merely nodding. In no other respect, however, does he suggest the military man. It is in active civil life that men get his broad air of importance, his dignified expectation of deference, his determinate mouth disarmed and refined since the hour of his success by the withdrawal of opposition and the concession of comfort and precedence and power. He is more than a highly respectable man: he is marked out as a president of highly respectable men, a chairman among directors, an alderman among councillors, a mayor among aldermen. Four tufts of iron-grey hair, which will soon be as white as isinglass, and are in other respects not at all unlike it, grow in two symmetrical pairs above his ears and at the angles of his spreading jaws. He wears a black frock coat, a white waistcoat (it is bright spring weather), and trousers, neither black nor perceptibly blue, of one of those indefinitely mixed hues which the modern clothier has produced to harmonize with the religions of respectable men. He has not been out of doors yet today; so he still wears his slippers, his boots being ready for him on the hearthrug.

Mr. John Tanner suddenly opens the door and enters. He is too young to be described simply as a big man with a beard. But it is already plain that middle life will find him in that category. He has still some of the slimness of youth; but youthfulness is not the effect he aims at: his frock coat would befit a prime minister; and a certain high chested carriage of the shoulders, a lofty pose of the head, and the Olympian majesty with which a mane, or rather a huge wisp, of hazel colored hair is thrown back from an imposing brow, suggest Jupiter rather than Apollo. He is prodigiously fluent of speech, restless, excitable (mark the snorting nostril and the restless blue eye, just the thirty-secondth of an inch too wide open), possibly a little mad. He is carefully dressed, not from the vanity that cannot resist finery, but from a sense of the importance of everything he does which leads him to make as much of paying a call as other men do of getting married or laying a foundation stone. A sensitive, susceptible, exaggerative, earnest man: a megalomaniac, who would be lost without a sense of humor.

Just at present the sense of humor is in abeyance. To say that he is excited is nothing: all his moods are phases of excitement. He is now in the panic-stricken phase; and he walks straight up to Ramsden as if with the fixed intention of shooting him on his own hearthrug.

Tanner

Coming from the bockcase. Ramsden: we’re beaten⁠—smashed⁠—nonentitized, like her mother.

Ramsden

Stuff, Sir. He follows Mrs. Whitefield out of the room.

Tanner

Left alone with Octavius, stares whimsically at him. Tavy: do you want to count for something in the world?

Octavius

I want to count for something as a poet: I want to write a great play.

Tanner

With Ann as the heroine?

Octavius

Yes: I confess it.

Tanner

Take care, Tavy. The play with Ann as the heroine is all right; but if you’re not very careful, by Heaven she’ll marry you.

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

That is true, sir. A movement which is confined to philosophers and honest men can never exercise any real political influence: there are too few of them. Until a movement shows itself capable of spreading among brigands, it can never hope for a political majority.

Tanner

But are your brigands any less honest than ordinary citizens?

Mendoza

Sir: I will be frank with you. Brigandage is abnormal. Abnormal professions attract two classes: those who are not good enough for ordinary bourgeois life and those who are too good for it. We are dregs and scum, sir: the dregs very filthy, the scum very superior.

Straker

Take care! Some o’ the dregs’ll hear you.

Mendoza

It does not matter: each brigand thinks himself scum, and likes to hear the others called dregs.

Tanner

Come! You are a wit. Mendoza inclines his head, flattered. May one ask you a blunt question?

Mendoza

As blunt as you please.

Tanner

How does it pay a man of your talent to shepherd such a flock as this on broiled rabbit and prickly pears? I have seen men less gifted, and I’ll swear less honest, supping at the Savoy on foie gras and champagne.

Mendoza

Pooh! They have all had their turn at the broiled rabbit, just as I shall have my turn at the Savoy. Indeed, I have had a turn there already⁠—as waiter.

Tanner

A waiter! You astonish me!

Mendoza

Reflectively. Yes: I, Mendoza of the Sierra, was a waiter. Hence, perhaps, my cosmopolitanism. With sudden intensity. Shall I tell you the story of my life?

The yellowish pallor moves: there is an old crone wandering in the void, bent and toothless; draped, as well as one can guess, in the coarse brown frock of some religious order. She wanders and wanders in her slow hopeless way, much as a wasp flies in its rapid busy way, until she blunders against the thing she seeks: companionship. With a sob of relief the poor old creature clutches at the presence of the man and addresses him in her dry unlovely voice, which can still express pride and resolution as well as suffering.

The Old Woman

Excuse me; but I am so lonely; and this place is so awful.

Don Juan

A newcomer?

The Old Woman

Yes: I suppose I died this morning. I confessed; I had extreme unction; I was in bed with my family about me and my eyes fixed on the cross. Then it grew dark; and when the light came back it was this light by which I walk seeing nothing. I have wandered for hours in horrible loneliness.

Don Juan

Sighing. Ah! You have not yet lost the sense of time. One soon does, in eternity.

The Old Woman

Where are we?

Don Juan

In Hell.

The Old Woman

Proudly. Hell! I in Hell! How dare you?

Don Juan

Unimpressed. Why not, Señora?

The Old Woman

You do not know to whom you are speaking. I am a lady, and a faithful daughter of the Church.

Don Juan