Pygmalion and Three Other Plays (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (56 page)

Read Pygmalion and Three Other Plays (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Online

Authors: George Bernard Shaw

DOOLITTLE No, Governor. She wouldnt have the heart to spend ten; and perhaps I shouldnt neither. Ten pounds is a lot of money: it makes a man feel prudent like; and then goodbye to happiness. You give me what I ask you, Governor: not a penny more, and not a penny less.
PICKERING Why dont you marry that missus of yours? I rather draw the line at encouraging that sort of immorality.
DOOLITTLE Tell her so, Governor: tell her so.
I
’m willing. It’s me that suffers by it. Ive no hold on her. I got to be agreeable to her. I got to give her presents. I got to buy her clothes something sinful. I’m a slave to that woman, Governor, just because I’m not her lawful husband. And she knows it too. Catch her marrying me! Take my advice, Governor: marry Eliza while shes young and dont know no better. If you dont youll be sorry for it after. If you do, she’ll be sorry for it after; but better you than her, because youre a man, and shes only a woman and dont know how to be happy anyhow.
HIGGINS Pickering: if we listen to this man another minute, we shall have no convictions left. [
To DOOLITTLE
] Five pounds I think you said.
DOOLITTLE Thank you kindly, Governor.
HIGGINS Youre sure you wont take ten?
DOOLITTLE Not now. Another time, Governor.
HIGGINS [
handing him afive-pound note
] Here you are.
DOOLITTLE Thank you, Governor. Good morning.
[He hurries to the door, anxious to get away with his booty. When he opens it he is confronted with a dainty and exquisitely clean young Japanese lady in a simple blue cotton kimono printed cunningly with small white jasmine blossoms. MRS. PEARCE is with her. He gets out of her
way
deferentially and apologizes].
Beg pardon, miss.
THE JAPANESE LADY Garn! Dont you know your own daughter?
LIZA Dont I look silly?
HIGGINS Silly?
MRS. PEARCE [
at the door
] Now, Mr. Higgins, please dont say anything to make the girl conceited about herself.
HIGGINS [
conscientiously
] Oh! Quite right, Mrs. Pearce. [To ELIZA]Yes : damned silly.
MRS. PEARCE Please, sir.
HIGGINS [
correcting himself
] I mean extremely silly.
LIZA I should look all right with my hat on.
[She takes up her hat; puts it on; and walks across the room to the fireplace with a fashionable air
].
HIGGINS A new fashion, by George ! And it ought to look horrible !
DOOLITTLE
[with fatherly
pride] Well, I never thought she’d clean up as good looking as that, Governor. Shes a credit to me, aint she?
LIZA I tell you, it’s easy to clean up here. Hot and cold water on tap, just as much as you like, there is. Woolly towels, there is; and a towel horse so hot, it burns your fingers. Soft brushes to scrub yourself, and a wooden bowl of soap smelling like primroses. Now I know why ladies is so clean. Washing’s a treat for them. Wish they saw what it is for the like of me!
HIGGINS I’m glad the bath-room met with your approval.
LIZA It didnt: not all of it; and I dont care who hears me say it. Mrs. Pearce knows.
HIGGINS What was wrong, Mrs. Pearce?
MRS. PEARCE [
blandly
] Oh, nothing, sir. It doesnt matter.
LIZA I had a good mind to break it. I didnt know which way to look. But I hung a towel over it, I did.
HIGGINS Over what?
MRS. PEARCE Over the looking-glass, sir.
HIGGINS Doolittle: you have brought your daughter up too strictly.
DOOLITTLE Me! I never brought her up at all, except to give her a lick of a strap now and again. Dont put it on me, Governor. She aint accustomed to it, you see: thats all. But she’ll soon pick up your free-and-easy ways.
LIZA I’m a good girl, I am; and I wont pick up no free and easy ways.
HIGGINS Eliza: if you say again that youre a good girl, your father shall take you home.
LIZA Not him. You dont know my father. All he come here for was to touch you for some money to get drunk on.
DOOLITTLE Well, what else would I want money for? To put into the plate in church, I suppose. [
She puts out her tongue at him. He is so incensed by this that PICKERING presently finds it necessary to step between them
]. Dont you give me none of your lip; and dont let me hear you giving this gentleman any of it neither, or youll hear from me about it. See?
HIGGINS Have you any further advice to give her before you go, Doolittle? Your blessing, for instance.
DOOLITTLE No, Governor: I aint such a mug as to put up my children to all I know myself. Hard enough to hold them in without that. If you want Eliza’s mind improved, Governor, you do it yourself with a strap. So long, gentlemen.
[He turns to go
].
HIGGINS [
impressively
] Stop. Youll come regularly to see your daughter. It’s your duty, you know. My brother is a clergyman; and he could help you in your talks with her.
DOOLITTLE [
evasively
] Certainly. I’ll come, Governor. Not just this week, because I have a job at a distance. But later on you may depend on me. Afternoon, gentlemen. Afternoon, maam. [He
takes off his hat to MRS. PEARCE, who disdains the salutation and goes out. He winks at HIGGINS, thinking him probably a fellow-sufferer from MRS. PEARCE’s difficult disposition, and follows her].
LIZA Dont you believe the old liar. He’d as soon you set a bulldog on him as a clergyman. You wont see him again in a hurry.
HIGGINS I dont want to, Eliza. Do you?
LIZA Not me. I dont want never to see him again, I dont. Hes a disgrace to me, he is, collecting dust, instead of working at his trade.
PICKERING What is his trade, Eliza?
LIZA Talking money out of other people’s pockets into his own. His proper trade’s a navvy;
gy
and he works at it sometimes too—for exercise—and earns good money at it. Aint you going to call me Miss Doolittle any more?
PICKERING I beg your pardon, Miss Doolittle. It was a slip of the tongue.
LIZA Oh, I dont mind; only it sounded so genteel. I should just like to take a taxi to the corner of Tottenham Court Road and get out there and tell it to wait for me, just to put the girls in their place a bit. I wouldnt speak to them, you know.
PICKERING Better wait til we get you something really fashionable.
HIGGINS Besides, you shouldnt cut your old friends now that you have risen in the world. Thats what we call snobbery.
LIZA You dont call the like of them my friends now, I should hope. Theyve took it out of me often enough with their ridicule when they had the chance; and now I mean to get a bit of my own back. But if I’m to have fashionable clothes, I’ll wait. I should like to have some. Mrs. Pearce says youre going to give me some to wear in bed at night different to what I wear in the daytime; but it do seem a waste of money when you could get something to shew. Besides, I never could fancy changing into cold things on a winter night.
MRS. PEARCE [
coming back
] Now, Eliza. The new things have come for you to try on.
LIZA Ah-ow-oo-ooh!
[She rushes out].
MRS. PEARCE [
following her
] Oh, dont rush about like that, girl. [
She shuts the door behind her
].
HIGGINS Pickering: we have taken on a stiff job.
PICKERING [
with conviction
] Higgins: we have.
ACT III
It is Mrs. Higgins’s at-home day. Nobody has yet arrived. Her drawing-room, in a flat on Chelsea
gz
embankment, has three windows looking on the river; and the ceiling is not so lofty as it would be in an older house of the same pretension. The windows are open, giving access to a balcony with flowers in pots. If you stand with your face to the windows, you have the fireplace on your left and the door in the right-hand wall close to the corner nearest the windows.
Mrs. Higgins was brought up on Morris and Burne Jones; and her room, which is very unlike her son’s room in Wimpole Street, is not crowded with furniture and little tables and nicknacks. In the middle of the room there is a big ottoman; and this, with the carpet, the Morris wall-papers, and the Morris chintz window curtains and brocade covers of the ottoman and its cushions, supply all the ornament, and are much too handsome to be hidden by odds and ends of useless things. A few good oil-paintings from the exhibitions in the Grosvenor Gallery thirty years ago (the Burne Jones, not the Whistler
8
side of them) are on the walls. The only landscape is a Cecil Lawson
ha
on the scale of a Rubens. There is a portrait of Mrs. Higgins as she was when she defied fashion in her youth in one of the
beautiful Rossettian
hb
costumes which, when caricatured by people who did not understand, led to the absurdities of popular estheticism in the eighteen -seventies.
In the corner diagonally opposite the door Mrs. Higgins, now over sixty and long past taking the trouble to dress out of the fashion, sits writing at an elegantty simple writing-table with a bell button within reach of her hand. There is a Chippendale chair further baclz in the room between her and the window nearest her side. At the other side of the room, further forward, is an Elizabethan chair roughly carved in the taste of Inigo Jones. On the same side a piano in a decorated case. The corner between the fireplace and the window is occupied by a divan cushioned in Morris chintz.
It is between four and five in the afternoon.
The door is opened violently; and Higgins enters with his hat on.
MRS. HIGGINS [
dismayed
] Henry [
scolding him
]! What are you doing here to-day? It is my at-home day:
hc
you promised not to come
. [As he bends to kiss her, she takes his hat off, and presents it
to
him
]
.
HIGGINS Oh bother!
[He throws the hat down on the table].
MRS. HIGGINS Go home at once.
HIGGINS
[kissing her]
I know, mother. I came on purpose.
MRS. HIGGINS But you mustnt. I’m serious, Henry. You of fend all my friends: they stop coming whenever they meet you.
HIGGINS Nonsense! I know I have no small talk; but people dont mind.
[He sits on the settee].
MRS. HIGGINS Oh! dont they? Small talk indeed! What about your large talk? Really, dear, you mustnt stay.
HIGGINS I must. Ive a job for you. A phonetic job.
MRS. HIGGINS No use, dear. I’m sorry; but I cant get round your vowels; and though I like to get pretty postcards in your patent shorthand, I always have to read the copies in ordinary writing you so thoughtfully send me.
HIGGINS Well, this isnt a phonetic job.
MRS. HIGGINS You said it was.
HIGGINS Not your part of it. Ive picked up a girl.
MRS. HIGGINS Does that mean that some girl has picked you up?
HIGGINS Not at all. I dont mean a love affair.
MRS. HIGGINS What a pity!
HIGGINS Why?
MRS. HIGGINS Well, you never fall in love with anyone under forty-five. When will you discover that there are some rather nice-looking young women about?
HIGGINS Oh, I cant be bothered with young women. My idea of a loveable woman is something as like you as possible.
9
I shall never get into the way of seriously liking young women: some habits lie too deep to be changed. [
Rising abruptly and walking about, jingling his money and his keys in his trouser pockets]
Besides, theyre all idiots.
MRS. HIGGINS Do you know what you would do if you really loved me, Henry?
HIGGINS Oh bother! What? Marry, I suppose?
MRS. HIGGINS No. Stop fidgeting and take your hands out of your pockets.
[With a gesture of despair, he obeys and sits down again].
Thats a good boy. Now tell me about the girl.

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