Misalliance

my idea of bringing up a young girl has been rather a success. Don’t you listen to this, Patsy: it might make you conceited. She’s never been treated like a child. I always said the same thing to her mother. Let her read what she likes. Let her do what she likes. Let her go where she likes. Eh, Patsy? Hypatia Oh yes, if there had only been anything for me to do, any place for me to go, anything I wanted to read. Tarleton There, you see! She’s not satisfied. Restless. Wants things to happen. Wants adventures to drop out of the sky. Hypatia Gathering up her work. If you’re going to talk about me and my education, I’m off. Tarleton Well, well, off with you. To Lord Summerhays. She’s active, like me. She actually wanted me to put her into the shop. Hypatia Well, they tell me that the girls there have adventures sometimes. She goes out through the inner door. Tarleton She had me there, though she doesn’t know it, poor innocent lamb! Public scandal exaggerates enormously, of course; but moralize as you will, superabundant vitality is a physical fact that can’t be talked away. He sits down between the writing table and the sideboard. Difficult question this, of bringing up children. Between ourselves, it has beaten me. I never was so surprised in my life as when I came to know Johnny as a man of business and found out what he was really like. How did you manage with your sons? Lord Summerhays Well, I really hadn’t time to be a father: that’s the plain truth of the matter. Their poor dear mother did the usual thing while they were with us. Then of course, Harrow, Cambridge, the usual routine of their class. I saw very little of them, and thought very little about them: how could I? with a whole province on my hands. They and I are⁠—acquaintances. Not perhaps, quite ordinary acquaintances: there’s a sort of⁠—er⁠—I should almost call it a sort of remorse about the way we shake hands (when we do shake hands) which means, I suppose, that we’re sorry we don’t care more for one another; and I’m afraid we don’t meet oftener than we can help. We put each other too much out of countenance. It’s really a very difficult relation. To my mind not altogether a natural one. Tarleton Impressed, as usual. That’s an idea, certainly. I don’t think anybody has ever written about that. Lord Summerhays Bentley is the only one who was really my son in any serious sense. He was completely spoilt. When he was sent to a preparatory school he simply yelled until he was sent home. Harrow was out of the question; but we managed to tutor him into Cambridge. No use: he was sent down. By that time my work was over; and I saw a good deal of him. But I could do nothing with him⁠—except look on. I should have thought your case was quite different. You keep up the middle-class tradition: the day school and the business training instead of the university. I believe in the day school part of it. At all events, you know your own children. Tarleton Do you? I’m not so sure of it. Fact is, my dear Summerhays, once childhood is over, once the little animal has got past the stage at which it acquires what you might call a sense of decency, it’s all up with the relation between parent and child. You can’t get over the fearful shyness of it. Lord Summerhays Shyness? Tarleton Yes, shyness. Read Dickens. Lord Summerhays Surprised. Dickens!! Of all authors, Charles Dickens! Are you serious? Tarleton I don’t mean his books. Read his letters to his family. Read any man’s letters to his children. They’re not human. They’re not about himself or themselves. They’re about hotels, scenery, about the weather, about getting wet and losing the train and what he saw on the road and all that. Not a word about himself. Forced. Shy. Duty letters. All fit to be published: that says everything. I tell you there’s a wall ten feet thick and ten miles high between parent and child. I know what I’m talking about. I’ve girls in my employment: girls and young men. I had ideas on the subject. I used to go to the parents and tell them not to let their children go out into the world without instruction in the dangers and temptations they were going to be thrown into. What did every one of the mothers say to me? “Oh, sir, how could I speak of such things to my own daughter?” The men said I was quite right; but they didn’t do it, any more than I’d been able to do it myself to Johnny. I had to leave books in his way; and I felt just awful when I did it. Believe me, Summerhays, the relation between the young and the old should be an innocent relation. It should be something they could talk about. Well, the relation between parent and child may be an affectionate relation. It may be a useful relation. It may be a necessary relation. But it can never be an innocent relation. You’d die rather than allude to it. Depend on it, in a thousand years it’ll be considered bad form to know who your father and mother are. Embarrassing. Better hand Bentley over to me. I can look him in the face and talk to him as man to man. You can have Johnny. Lord Summerhays Thank you. I’ve lived so long in a country where a man may have fifty sons, who are no more to him than a regiment of soldiers, that I’m afraid I’ve lost the English feeling about it. Tarleton Restless again. You mean Jinghiskahn. Ah yes. Good thing the empire. Educates us. Opens our minds. Knocks the Bible out of us. And civilizes the other chaps. Lord Summerhays Yes: it civilizes them. And it uncivilizes us.