1913
PYGMALION: A ROMANCE IN FIVE ACTS
by George Bernard Shaw
PREFACE TO PYGMALION - A PROFESSOR OF PHONETICS
-
AS WILL BE SEEN later on, Pygmalion needs, not a preface, but a
sequel, which I have supplied in its due place. The English have no
respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak
it. They cannot spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself
what it sounds like. It is impossible for an Englishman to open his
mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him. German
and Spanish are accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible
even to Englishmen. The reformer England needs today is an energetic
phonetic enthusiast: that is why I have made such a one the hero of
a popular play. They have been heroes of that kind crying in the
wilderness for many years past. When I became interested in the
subject towards the end of the eighteen-seventies, the illustrious
Alexander Melville Bell, the inventor of Visible Speech, had emigrated
to Canada, where his son invented the telephone; but Alexander J.
Ellis was still a London patriarch, with an impressive head always
covered by a velvet skull cap, for which he would apologize to
public meetings in a very courtly manner. He and Tito Pagliardini,
another phonetic veteran, were men whom it was impossible to
dislike. Henry Sweet, then a young man, lacked their sweetness of
character: he was about as conciliatory to conventional mortals as
Ibsen or Samuel Butler. His great ability as a phonetician (he was,
I think, the best of them all at his job) would have entitled him to
high official recognition, and perhaps enabled him to popularize his
subject, but for his Satanic contempt for all academic dignitaries and
persons in general who thought more of Greek than of phonetics.
Once, in the days when the Imperial Institute rose in South
Kensington, and Joseph Chamberlain was booming the Empire, I induced
the editor of a leading monthly review to commission an article from
Sweet on the imperial importance of his subject. When it arrived, it
contained nothing but a savagely derisive attack on a professor of
language and literature whose chair Sweet regarded as proper to a
phonetic expert only. The article, being libellous, had to be returned
as impossible; and I had to renounce my dream of dragging its author
into the limelight. When I met him afterwards, for the first time
for many years, I found to my astonishment that he, who had been a
quite tolerably presentable young man, had actually managed by sheer
scorn to alter his personal appearance until he had become a sort of
walking repudiation of Oxford and all its traditions. It must have
been largely in his own despite that he was squeezed into something
called a Readership of phonetics there. The future of phonetics
rests probably with his pupils, who all swore by him; but nothing
could bring the man himself into any sort of compliance with the
university to which he nevertheless clung by divine right in an
intensely Oxonian way. I daresay his papers, if he has left any,
include some satires that may be published without too destructive
results fifty years hence. He was, I believe, not in the least an
illnatured man: very much the opposite, I should say; but he would not
suffer fools gladly.
Those who knew him will recognize in my third act the allusion to
the patent shorthand in which he used to write postcards, and which
may be acquired from a four and sixpenny manual published by the
Clarendon Press. The postcards which Mrs Higgins describes are such as
I have received from Sweet. I would decipher a sound which a cockney
would represent by zerr, * and a Frenchman by seu, and then write
demanding with some heat what on earth it meant. Sweet, with boundless
contempt for my stupidity, would reply that it not only meant but
obviously was the word Result, as no other word containing that sound,
and capable of making sense with the context, existed in any
language spoken on earth. That less expert mortals should require
fuller indications was beyond Sweet's patience. Therefore, though
the whole point of his Current Shorthand is that it can express
every sound in the language perfectly, vowels as well as consonants,
and that your hand has to make no stroke except the easy and current
ones with which you write m, n, and u, l, p, and q, scribbling them at
whatever angle comes easiest to you, his unfortunate determination
to make this remarkable and quite legible script serve also as a
shorthand reduced it in his own practice to the most inscrutable of
cryptograms. His true objective was the provision of a full, accurate,
legible script for our noble but ill-dressed language; but he was
led past that by his contempt for the popular Pitman system of
shorthand, which he called the Pitfall system. The triumph of Pitman
was a triumph of business organization: there was a weekly paper to
persuade you to learn Pitman: there were cheap textbooks and
exercise books and transcripts of speeches for you to copy, and
schools where experienced teachers coached you up to the necessary
proficiency. Sweet could not organize his market in that fashion. He
might as well have been the Sybil who tore up the leaves of prophecy
that nobody would attend to. The four and sixpenny manual, mostly in
his lithographed handwriting, that was never vulgarly advertized,
may perhaps someday be taken up by a syndicate and pushed upon the
public as the Times pushed the Encyclopaedia Britannica; but until
then it will certainly not prevail against Pitman. I have bought three
copies of it during my lifetime; and I am informed by the publishers
that its cloistered existence is still a steady and healthy one. I
actually learned the system two several times; and yet the shorthand
in which I am writing these lines is Pitman's. And the reason is, that
my secretary cannot transcribe Sweet, having been perforce taught in
the schools of Pitman. Therefore Sweet railed at Pitman as vainly as
Thersites railed at Ajax: his raillery, however it may have eased
his soul, gave no popular vogue to Current Shorthand.
-
* In DOS versions italicized text is enclosed in chevrons .
-
Pygmalion Higgins is not a portrait of Sweet, to whom the
adventure of Eliza Doolittle would have been impossible; still, as
will be seen, there are touches of Sweet in the play. With Higgins's
physique and temperament Sweet might have set the Thames on fire. As
it was, he impressed himself professionally on Europe to an extent
that made his comparative personal obscurity, and the failure of
Oxford to do justice to his eminence, a puzzle to foreign
specialists in his subject. I do not blame Oxford, because I think
Oxford is quite right in demanding a certain social amenity from its
nurslings (heaven knows it is not exorbitant in its requirements!);
for although I well know how hard it is for a man of genius with a
seriously underrated subject to maintain serene and kindly relations
with the men who underrate it, and who keep all the best places for
less important subjects which they profess without originality and
sometimes without much capacity for them, still, if he overwhelms them
with wrath and disdain, he cannot expect them to heap honors on him.
Of the later generations of phoneticians I know little. Among them
towers the Poet Laureate, to whom perhaps Higgins may owe his Miltonic
sympathies, though here again I must disclaim all portraiture. But
if the play makes the public aware that there are such people as
phoneticians, and that they are among the most important people in
England at present, it will serve its turn.
I wish to boast that Pygmalion has been an extremely successful play
all over Europe and North America as well as at home. It is so
intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so
dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who
repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic. It goes to
prove my contention that great art can never be anything else.
Finally, and for the encouragement of people troubled with accents
that cut them off from all high employment, I may add that the
change wrought by Professor Higgins in the flower girl is neither
impossible nor uncommon. The modern concierge's daughter who fulfils
her ambition by playing the Queen of Spain in Ruy Blus at the
Theatre Francais is only one of many thousands of men and women who
have sloughed off their native dialects and acquired a new tongue. But
the thing has to be done scientifically, or the last state of the
aspirant may be worse than the first. An honest and natural slum
dialect is more tolerable than the attempt of a phonetically
untaught persons to imitate the vulgar dialect of the golf club; and I
am sorry to say that in spite of the efforts of our Royal Academy of
Dramatic Art, there is still too much sham golfing English on our
stage, and too little of the noble English of Forbes Robertson.
ACT_ONE
ACT ONE
-
CONVENT GARDEN at 11.15 p.m. Torrents of heavy summer rain. Cab
whistles blowing frantically in all directions. Pedestrians running
for shelter into the market and under the portico of St Paul's Church,
where there are already several people, among them a lady and her
daughter in evening dress. They are all peering out gloomily at the
rain, except one man with his back turned to the rest, who seems
wholly preoccupied with a notebook in which he is writing.
The church clock strikes the first quarter.
-
THE DAUGHTER (in the space between the central pillars, close to
the one on her left) I'm getting chilled to the bone. What can
Freddy be doing all this time? He's been gone twenty minutes.
THE MOTHER (on her daughter's right) Not so long. But he ought to
have got us a cab by this.
A BYSTANDER (on the lady's right) He wont get no cab not until
half-past eleven, missus, when they come back after dropping
their theatre fares.
THE MOTHER. But we must have a cab. We cant stand here until
half-past eleven. It's too bad.
THE BYSTANDER. Well, it aint my fault, missus.
THE DAUGHTER. If Freddy had a bit of gumption, he would have got
one at the theatre door.
THE MOTHER. What could he have done, poor boy?
THE DAUGHTER. Other people got cabs. Why couldnt he?
-
Freddy rushes in out of the rain from the Southampton Street side,
and comes between them closing a dripping umbrella. He is a young
man of twenty, in evening dress, very wet round the ankles.
-
THE DAUGHTER. Well, havnt you got a cab?
FREDDY. Theres not one to be had for love or money.
THE MOTHER. Oh, Freddy, there must be one. You cant have tried.
THE DAUGHTER. It's too tiresome. Do you expect us to go and get one
ourselves?
FREDDY. I tell you theyre all engaged. The rain was so sudden:
nobody was prepared; and everybody had to take a cab. Ive been
to Charing Cross one way and nearly to Ludgate Circus the
other; and they were all engaged.
THE MOTHER. Did you try Trafalgar Square?
FREDDY. There wasnt one at Trafalgar Square.
THE DAUGHTER. Did you try?
FREDDY. I tried as far as Charing Cross Station. Did you expect me
to walk to Hammersmith?
THE DAUGHTER. You havnt tried at all.
THE MOTHER. You really are very helpless, Freddy. Go again; and
dont come back until you have found a cab.
FREDDY. I shall simply get soaked for nothing.
THE DAUGHTER. And what about us? Are we to stay here all night in
this draught, with next to nothing on? You selfish pig-
FREDDY. Oh, very well: I'll go, I'll go. (He opens his umbrella and
dashes off Strandwards, but comes into collision with a flower
girl who is hurrying in for shelter, knocking her basket out of
her hands. A blinding flash of lightning, followed instantly by
a rattling peal of thunder, orchestrates the incident).
THE FLOWER GIRL. Nah then, Freddy: look wh' y' gowin, deah.
FREDDY. Sorry [he rushes off].
THE FLOWER GIRL (picking up her scattered flowers and replacing
them in the basket) Theres menners f' yer! Te-oo banches o
voylets trod into the mad. (She sits down on the plinth of the
column, sorting her flowers, on the lady's right. She is not at
all an attractive person. She is perhaps eighteen, perhaps
twenty, hardly older. She wears a little sailor hat of black
straw that has long been exposed to the dust and soot of London
and has seldom if ever been brushed. Her hair needs washing
rather badly: its mousy color can hardly be natural. She wears
a shoddy black coat that reaches nearly to her knees and is
shaped to her waist. She has a brown skirt with a coarse apron.
Her boots are much the worse for wear. She is no doubt as clean
as she can afford to be; but compared to the ladies she is very
dirty. Her features are no worse than theirs; but their
condition leaves something to he desired; and she needs the
services of a dentist).
THE MOTHER. How do you know that my son's name is Freddy, pray?
THE FLOWER GIRL. Ow, eez ye-ooa san, is e? Wal, fewd dan y' de-ooty
bawmz a mather should, eed now bettern to spawl a pore gel's
flahrzn than ran awy athaht pyin. Will ye-oo py me f' them?
(Here, with apologies, this desperate attempt to represent her
dialect without a phonetic alphahet must be abandoned as
unintelligible outside London).
THE DAUGHTER. Do nothing of the sort, Mother. The idea!
THE MOTHER. Please allow me, Clara. Have you any pennies?
THE DAUGHTER. No. Ive nothing smaller than sixpence.
THE FLOWER GIRL (hopefully) I can give you change for a tanner,
kind lady.
THE MOTHER (to Clara) Give it to me. (Clara parts reluctantly). Now
(to the girl) This is for your flowers.
THE FLOWER GIRL. Thank you kindly, lady.
THE DAUGHTER. Make her give you the change. These things are only a
penny a bunch.
THE MOTHER. Do hold your tongue, Clara. (To the girl) You can keep
the change.
THE FLOWER GIRL. Oh, thank you, lady.
THE MOTHER. Now tell me how you know that young gentleman's name.
THE FLOWER GIRL. I didnt.
THE MOTHER. I heard you call him by it. Dont try to deceive me.
THE FLOWER GIRL (protesting) Who's trying to deceive you? I called
him Freddy or Charlie same as you might yourself if you was
talking to a stranger and wished to be pleasant. (She sits down
beside her basket).
THE DAUGHTER. Sixpence thrown away! Really, Mamma, you might have
spared Freddy that. (She retreats in disgust behind the
pillar).
-
An elderly gentleman of the amiable military type rushes into the
shelter, and closes a dripping umbrella. He is in the same plight as
Freddy, very wet about the ankles. He is in evening dress, with a
light overcoat. He takes the place left vacant by the daughter's
retirement.
-
THE GENTLEMAN. Phew!
THE MOTHER (to the gentleman) Oh sir, is there any sign of its
stopping?
THE GENTLEMAN. I'm afraid not. It started worse than ever about two
minutes ago (He goes to the plinth beside the flower girl; puts
up his foot on it; and stoops to turn down his trouser ends).
THE MOTHER. Oh dear! (She retires sadly and joins her daughter).
THE FLOWER GIRL (taking advantage of the military gentleman's
proxmity to establish friendly relations with him) If it's
worse, it's a sign it's nearly over. So cheer up, Captain; and
buy a flower off a poor girl.
THE GENTLEMAN. I'm sorry. I havnt any change.
THE FLOWER GIRL. I can give you change, Captain.
THE GENTLEMAN. For a sovereign? Ive nothing less.
THE FLOWER GIRL. Garn! Oh do buy a flower off me, Captain. I can
change half-a-crown. Take this for tuppence.
THE GENTLEMAN. Now dont be troublesome: theres a good girl. (Trying
his pockets) I really havnt any change- Stop: heres three
hapence, if thats any use to you (he retreats to the other
pillar).
THE FLOWER GIRL (disappointed, but thinking three halfpence better
than nothing) Thank you, sir.
THE BYSTANDER (to the girl) You be careful: give him a flower for
it. Theres a bloke here behind taking down every blessed word
youre saying. (All turn to the man who is taking notes).
THE FLOWER GIRL (springing up terrified) I aint done nothing wrong
by speaking to the gentleman. Ive a right to sell flowers if I
keep off the kerb. (Hysterically) I'm a respectable girl: so
help me, I never spoke to him except to ask him to buy a flower
off me. (General hubbub, mostly sympathetic to the flower girl,
but deprecating her excessive sensibility. Cries of Dont start
hollerin. Who's hurting you? Nobody's going to touch you. Whats
the good of fussing? Steady on. Easy easy, etc., come from the
elderly staid spectators, who pat her comfortingly. Less
patient ones bid her shut her head, or ask her roughly what is
wrong with her. A remoter group, not knowing what the matter
is, crowd in and increase the noise with question and answer:
Whats the row? Whatshe do? Where is he? A tec taking her down.
What! him? Yes: him over there: Took money off the gentleman,
etc. The flower girl, distraught and mobbed, breaks through
them to the gentleman, crying wildly) Oh, sir, dont let him
charge me. You dunno what it means to me. Theyll take away my
character and drive me on the streets for speaking to
gentlemen. They-
THE NOTE TAKER (coming forward on her right, the rest crowding
after him) There, there, there, there! who's hurting you, you
silly girl? What do you take me for?
THE BYSTANDER. It's all right: he's a genleman: look at his boots.
(Explaining to the note taker) She thought you was a copper's
nark, sir.
THE NOTE TAKER (with quick interest) Whats a copper's nark?
THE BYSTANDER (inapt at definition) It's a- well, it's a copper's
nark, as you might say. What else would you call it? A sort of
informer.
THE FLOWER GIRL (still hysterical) I take my Bible oath I never
said a word-
THE NOTE TAKER (overbearing but good-humored) Oh, shut up, shut up.
Do I look like a policeman?
THE FLOWER GIRL (far from reassured) Then what did you take down my
words for? How do I know whether you took me down right? You
just shew me what youve wrote about me. (The note taker opens
his book and holds it steadily under her nose, though the
pressure of the mob trying to read it over his shoulders would
upset a weaker man). Whats that? That aint proper writing. I
cant read that.
THE NOTE TAKER. I can. (Reads, reproducing her pronunciation
exactly) "Cheer ap, Keptin; n'baw ya flahr orf a pore gel."
THE FLOWER GIRL (much distressed) It's because I called him
Captain. I meant no harm. (To the gentleman) Oh, sir, dont let
him lay a charge agen me for a word like that. You-
THE GENTLEMAN. Charge! I make no charge. (To the note taker)
Really, sir, if you are a detective, you need not begin
protecting me against molestation by young women until I ask
you. Anybody could see that the girl meant no harm.
THE BYSTANDERS GENERALLY (demonstrating against police espionage)
Course they could. What business is it of yours? You mind your
own affairs. He wants promotion, he does. Taking down people's
words! Girl never said a word to him. What harm if she did?
Nice thing a girl cant shelter from the rain without being
insulted, etc., etc., etc. (She is conducted by the more
sympathetic demonstrators back to her plinth, where she resumes
her seat and struggles with her emotion).
THE BYSTANDER. He aint a tec. He's a blooming busybody: thats what
he is. I tell you, look at his boots.
THE NOTE TAKER (turning on him genially) And how are all your
people down at Selsey?
THE BYSTANDER (suspiciously) Who told you my people come from
Selsey?
THE NOTE TAKER. Never you mind. They did. (To the girl) How do you
come to be up so far east? You were born in Lisson Grove.
THE FLOWER GIRL (appalled) Oh, what harm is there in my leaving
Lisson Grove? It wasnt fit for a pig to live in; and I had to
pay four-and-six a week. (In tears) Oh, boo-hoo-oo-
THE NOTE TAKER. Live where you like; but stop that noise.
THE GENTLEMAN (to the girl) Come, come! he cant touch you: you have
a right to live where you please.
A SARCASTIC BYSTANDER (thrusting himself between the note taker and
the gentleman) Park Lane, for instance. I'd like to go into the
Housing Question with you, I would.
THE FLOWER GIRL (subsiding into a brooding melancholy over her
basket, and talking very low-spiritedly to herself) I'm a good
girl, I am.
THE SARCASTIC BYSTANDER (not attending to her) Do you know where I
come from?
THE NOTE TAKER (promptly) Hoxton.
-
Titterings. Popular interest in the note taker's performance
increases.
Це бред, вам воне треба, це треба мені
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Поделиться12008-12-14 19:01:49
<АдмініСТРАТОР>
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- Сообщений: 1830
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- Пол: Мужской
- Возраст: 35 [1991-09-01]
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2010-05-10 21:16:51
Поделиться22008-12-14 19:02:38
- <АдмініСТРАТОР>
- Откуда: 11-Б
- Зарегистрирован: 2008-02-08
- Приглашений: 0
- Сообщений: 1830
- Уважение: +200
- Позитив: +142
- Пол: Мужской
- Возраст: 35 [1991-09-01]
- Провел на форуме:
3 часа 2 минуты - Последний визит:
2010-05-10 21:16:51
-
THE SARCASTIC ONE (amazed) Well, who said I didnt? Bly me! You know
everything, you do.
THE FLOWER GIRL (still nursing her sense of injury) Aint no call to
meddle with me, he aint.
THE BYSTANDER (to her) Of course he aint. Dont you stand it from
him. (To the note taker) See here: what call have you to know
about people what never offered to meddle with you? Wheres your
warrant?
SEVERAL BYSTANDERS (encouraged by this seeming point of law) Yes:
wheres your warrant?
THE FLOWER GIRL. Let him say what he likes. I dont want to have no
truck with him.
THE BYSTANDER. You take us for dirt under your feet, dont you?
Catch you taking liberties with a gentleman!
THE SARCASTIC BYSTANDER. Yes: tell him where he come from if you
want to go fortune-telling.
THE NOTE TAKER. Cheltenham, Harrow, Cambridge, and India.
THE GENTLEMAN. Quite right. (Great laughter. Reaction in the note
taker's favor. Exclamations of He knows all about it. Told him
proper. Hear him tell the toff where he come from? etc.) May I
ask, sir, do you do this for your living at a music hall?
THE NOTE TAKER. Ive thought of that. Perhaps I shall some day.
-
The rain has stopped; and the persons on the outside of the crowd
begin to drop off.
-
THE FLOWER GIRL (resenting the reaction) He's no gentleman, he
aint, to interfere with a poor girl.
THE DAUGHTER (out of patience, pushing her way rudely to the front
and displacing the gentleman, who politely retires to the other
side of the pillar) What on earth is Freddy doing? I shall get
pneumownia if I stay in this draught any longer.
THE NOTE TAKER (to himself, hastily making a note of her
pronunciation of "monia") Earlscourt.
THE DAUGHTER (violently) Will you please keep your impertinent
remarks to yourself.
THE NOTE TAKER. Did I say that out loud? I didnt mean to. I beg
your pardon. Your mother's Epsom, unmistakeably.
THE MOTHER (advancing between her daughter and the note taker) How
very curious! I was brought up in Largelady Park, near Epsom.
THE NOTE TAKER (uproariously amused) Ha! ha! What a devil of a
name! Excuse me. (To the daughter) You want a cab, do you?
THE DAUGHTER. Dont dare speak to me.
THE MOTHER. Oh please, please, Clara. (Her daughter repudiates her
with an angry shrug and retires haughtily). We should be so
grateful to you, sir, if you found us a cab. (The note taker
produces a whistle). Oh, thank you. (She joins her daughter).
-
The note taker blows a piercing blast.
-
THE SARCASTIC BYSTANDER. There! I knowed he was a plainclothes
copper.
THE BYSTANDER. That aint a police whistle: thats a sporting
whistle.
THE FLOWER GIRL (still preoccupied with her wounded feelings) He's
no right to take away my character. My character is the same to
me as any lady's.
THE NOTE TAKER. I dont know whether youve noticed it; but the rain
stopped about two minutes ago.
THE BYSTANDER. So it has. Why didnt you say so before? and us
losing our time listening to your silliness! (He walks off
towards the Strand).
THE SARCASTIC BYSTANDER. I can tell where you come from. You come
from Anwell. Go back there.
THE NOTE TAKER (helpfully) Hanwell.
THE SARCASTIC BYSTANDER (affecting great distinction of speech)
Thenk you, teacher. Haw haw! So long (he touches his hat with
mock respect and strolls off).
THE FLOWER GIRL. Frightening people like that! How would he like it
himself?
THE MOTHER. It's quite fine now, Clara. We can walk to a motor bus.
Come. (She gathers her skirts above her ankles and hurries off
towards the Strand).
THE DAUGHTER. But the cab- (her mother is out of hearing). Oh, how
tiresome! (She follows angrily).
-
All the rest have gone except the note taker, the gentleman, and the
flower girl, who sits arranging her basket, and still pitying
herself in murmurs.
-
THE FLOWER GIRL. Poor girl! Hard enough for her to live without
being worrited and chivied.
THE GENTLEMAN (returning to his former place on the note taker's
left) How do you do it, if I may ask?
THE NOTE TAKER. Simply phonetics. The science of speech. Thats my
profession: also my hobby. Happy is the man who can make a
living by his hobby! You can spot an Irishman or a Yorkshireman
by his brogue. I can place any man within six miles. I can
place him within two miles in London. Sometimes within two
streets.
THE FLOWER GIRL. Ought to be ashamed of himself, unmanly coward!
THE GENTLEMAN. But is there a living in that?
THE NOTE TAKER. Oh yes. Quite a fat one. This is an age of
upstarts. Men begin in Kentish Town with L 80 a year, and end
in Park Lane with a hundred thousand. They want to drop Kentish
Town; but they give themselves away every time they open their
mouths. Now I can teach them-
THE FLOWER GIRL. Let him mind his own business and leave a poor
girl-
THE NOTE TAKER (explosively) Woman: cease this detestable boohooing
instantly; or else seek the shelter of some other place of
worship.
THE FLOWER GIRL (with feeble defiance) Ive a right to be here if I
like, same as you.
THE NOTE TAKER. A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting
sounds has no right to be anywhere- no right to live. Remember
that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of
articulate speech: that your native language is the language of
Shakespear and Milton and the Bible; and dont sit there
crooning like a bilious pigeon.
THE FLOWER GIRL (quite overwhelmed, looking up at him in mingled
wonder and deprecation without daring to raise her head)
Ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-ow-oo!
THE NOTE TAKER (whipping out his book) Heavens! what a sound! (He
writes; then holds out the book and reads, reproducing her
vowels exactly) Ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-ow-oo!
THE FLOWER GIRL (tickled by the performance, and laughing in spite
of herself) Garn!
THE NOTE TAKER. You see this creature with her kerbstone English:
the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her
days. Well, sir, in three months I could pass that girl off as
a duchess at an ambassador's garden party. I could even get her
a place as lady's maid or shop assistant, which requires better
English. Thats the sort of thing I do for commercial
millionaires. And on the profits of it I do genuine scientific
work in phonetics, and a little as a poet on Miltonic lines.
THE GENTLEMAN. I am myself a student of Indian dialects; and-
THE NOTE TAKER (eagerly) Are you? Do you know Colonel Pickering,
the author of Spoken Sanscrit?
THE GENTLEMAN. I am Colonel Pickering. Who are you?
THE NOTE TAKER. Henry Higgins, author of Higgins's Universal
Alphabet.
PICKERING (with enthusiasm) I came from India to meet you.
HIGGINS. I was going to India to meet you.
PICKERING. Where do you live?
HIGGINS. 27A Wimpole Street. Come and see me to-morrow.
PICKERING. I'm at the Carlton. Come with me now and lets have a jaw
over some supper.
HIGGINS. Right you are.
THE FLOWER GIRL (to Pickering, as he passes her) Buy a flower, kind
gentleman. I'm short for my lodging.
PICKERING. I really havnt any change. I'm sorry (he goes away).
HIGGINS (shocked at the girl's mendacity) Liar. You said you could
change half-a-crown.
THE FLOWER GIRL (rising in desperation) You ought to be stuffed
with nails, you ought. (Flinging the basket at his feet) Take
the whole blooming basket for sixpence.
-
The church clock strikes the second quarter.
-
HIGGINS (hearing in it the voice of God, rebuking him for his
Pharisaic want of charity to the poor girl) A reminder. (He
raises his hat solemnly; then throws a handful of money into
the basket and follows Pickering).
THE FLOWER GIRL (picking up a half-crown) Ah-ow-ooh! (Picking up a
couple of florins) Aaah-ow-ooh! (Picking up several coins)
Aaaaaah-ow-ooh! (Picking up a half-sovereign)
Aaaaaaaaaaaah-ow-ooh!!!
FREDDY (springing out of a taxicab) Got one at last. Hallo! (To the
girl) Where are the two ladies that were here?
THE FLOWER GIRL. They walked to the bus when the rain stopped.
FREDDY. And left me with a cab on my hands! Damnation!
THE FLOWER GIRL (with grandeur) Never mind, young man. I'm going
home in a taxi. (She sails off to the cab. The driver puts his
hand behind him and holds the door firmly shut against her.
Quite understanding his mistrust, she shews him her handful of
money). Eightpence aint no object to me, Charlie. (He grins and
opens the door). Angel Court, Drury Lane, round the corner of
Micklejohn's oil shop. Lets see how fast you can make her hop
it. (She gets in and pulls the door to with a slam as the
taxicab starts).
FREDDY. Well, I'm dashed!
ACT_TWO
ACT TWO
-
NEXT DAY at 11 a.m. Higgins's laboratory in Wimpole Street. It is
a room on the first floor, looking on the street, and was meant for
the drawing room. The double doors are in the middle of the back wall;
and persons entering find in the corner to their right two tall file
cabinets at right angles to one another against the walls. In this
corner stands a flat writing-table, on which are a phonograph, a
laryngoscope, a row of tiny organ pipes with a bellows, a set of
lamp chimneys for singing flames with burners attached to a gas plug
in the wall by an indiarubber tube, several tuning-forks of
different sizes, a life-size image of half a human head, shewing in
section the vocal organs, and a box containing a supply of wax
cylinders for the phonograph.
Further down the room, on the same side, is a fireplace, with a
comfortable leather-covered easy-chair at the side of the hearth
nearest the door, and a coal-scuttle. There is a clock on the
mantelpiece. Between the fireplace and the phonograph table is a stand
for newspapers.
On the other side of the central door, to the left of the visitor,
is a cabinet of shallow drawers. On it is a telephone and the
telephone directory. The corner beyond, and most of the side wall,
is occupied by a grand piano, with the keyboard at the end furthest
from the door, and a bench for the player extending the full length of
the keyboard. On the piano is a dessert dish heaped with fruit and
sweets, mostly chocolates.
The middle of the room is clear. Besides the easy-chair, the piano
bench, and two chairs at the phonograph table, there is one stray
chair. It stands near the fireplace. On the walls, engravings:
mostly Piranesis and mezzotint portraits. No paintings.
Pickering is seated at the table, putting down some cards and a
tuning-fork which he has been using. Higgins is standing up near
him, closing two or three file drawers which are hanging out. He
appears in the morning light as a robust, vital, appetizing sort of
man of forty or thereabouts, dressed in a professional-looking black
frock-coat with a white linen collar and black silk tie. He is of
the energetic, scientific type, heartily, even violently interested in
everything that can be studied as a scientific subject, and careless
about himself and other people, including their feelings. He is, in
fact, but for his years and size, rather like a very impetuous baby
"taking notice" eagerly and loudly, and requiring almost as much
watching to keep him out of unintended mischief. His manner varies
from genial bullying when he is in a good humor to stormy petulance
when anything goes wrong; but he is so entirely frank and void of
malice that he remains likeable even in his least reasonable moments.
-
HIGGINS (as he shuts the last drawer) Well, I think thats the whole
show.
PICKERING. It's really amazing. I havnt taken half of it in, you
know.
HIGGINS. Would you like to go over any of it again?
PICKERING (rising and coming to the fireplace, where he plants
himself with his back to the fire) No, thank you: not now. I'm
quite done up for this morning.
HIGGINS (following him, and standing beside him on his left) Tired
of listening to sounds?
PICKERING. Yes. It's a fearful strain. I rather fancied myself
because I can pronounce twenty-four distinct vowel sounds; but
your hundred and thirty beat me. I cant hear a bit of
difference between most of them.
HIGGINS (chuckling, and going over to the piano to eat sweets) Oh,
that comes with practice. You hear no difference at first; but
you keep on listening, and presently you find theyre all as
different as A from B. (Mrs Pearce looks in: she is Higgins's
housekeeper). Whats the matter?
MRS PEARCE (hesitating, evidently perplexed) A young woman asks to
see you, sir.
HIGGINS. A young woman! What does she want?
MRS PEARCE. Well, sir, she says youll be glad to see her when you
know what she's come about. She's quite a common girl, sir.
Very common indeed. I should have sent her away, only I thought
perhaps you wanted her to talk into your machines. I hope Ive
not done wrong; but really you see such queer people sometimes-
youll excuse me, I'm sure, sir-
HIGGINS. Oh, thats all right, Mrs Pearce. Has she an interesting
accent?
MRS PEARCE. Oh, something dreadful, sir, really. I dont know how
you can take an interest in it.
HIGGINS (to Pickering) Lets have her up. Shew her up, Mrs Pearce
(he rushes across to his working table and picks out a cylinder
to use on the phonograph).
MRS PEARCE (only half resigned to it) Very well, sir. It's for you
to say. (She goes downstairs).
HIGGINS. This is rather a bit of luck. I'll shew you how I make
records. We'll set her talking; and I'll take it down first in
Bell's Visible Speech; then in broad Romic; and then we'll get
her on the phonograph so that you can turn her on as often as
you like with the written transcript before you.
MRS PEARCE (returning) This is the young woman, sir.
-
The flower girl enters in state. She has a hat with three ostrich
feathers, orange, sky-blue, and red. She has a nearly clean apron, and
the shoddy coat has been tidied a little. The pathos of this
deplorable figure, with its innocent vanity and consequential air,
touches Pickering, who has already straightened himself in the
presence of Mrs Pearce. But as to Higgins, the only distinction he
makes between men and women is that when he is neither bullying nor
exclaiming to the heavens against some feather-weight cross, he coaxes
women as a child coaxes its nurse when it wants to get anything out of
her.
-
HIGGINS (brusquely, recognizing her with unconcealed
disappointment, and at once, babylike, making an intolerable
grievance of it) Why, this is the girl I jotted down last
night. She's no use: Ive got all the records I want of the
Lisson Grove lingo; and I'm not going to waste another cylinder
on it. (To the girl) Be off with you: I dont want you.
THE FLOWER GIRL. Dont you be so saucy. You aint heard what I come
for yet. (To Mrs Pearce, who is waiting at the door for further
instructions) Did you tell him I come in a taxi?
MRS PEARCE. Nonsense, girl! what do you think a gentleman like Mr
Higgins cares what you came in?
THE FLOWER GIRL. Oh, we are proud! He aint above giving lessons,
not him: I heard him say so. Well, I aint come here to ask for
any compliment; and if my money's not good enough I can go
elsewhere.
HIGGINS. Good enough for what?
THE FLOWER GIRL. Good enough for ye-oo. Now you know, dont you? I'm
come to have lessons, I am. And to pay for em too: make no
mistake.
HIGGINS (stupent) Well!!! (Recovering his breath with a gasp) What
do you expect me to say to you?
THE FLOWER GIRL. Well, if you was a gentleman, you might ask me to
sit down, I think. Dont I tell you I'm bringing you business?
HIGGINS. Pickering: shall we ask this baggage to sit down, or shall
we throw her out of the window?
THE FLOWER GIRL (running away in terror to the piano, where she
turns at bay) Ah-ah-oh-ow-ow-ow-oo! (Wounded and whimpering) I
wont be called a baggage when Ive offered to pay like any lady.
-
Motionless, the two men stare at her from the other side of the
room, amazed.
-
PICKERING (gently) What is it you want, my girl?
THE FLOWER GIRL. I want to be a lady in a flower shop stead of
sellin at the corner of Tottenham Court Road. But they wont
take me unless I can talk more genteel. He said he could teach
me. Well, here I am ready to pay him- not asking any favor- and
he treats me as if I was dirt.
MRS PEARCE. How can you be such a foolish ignorant girl as to think
you could afford to pay Mr Higgins?
THE FLOWER GIRL. Why shouldnt I? I know what lessons cost as well
as you do; and I'm ready to pay.
HIGGINS. How much?
THE FLOWER GIRL (coming back to him, triumphant) Now youre talking!
I thought youd come off it when you saw a chance of getting
back a bit of what you chucked at me last night.
(Confidentially) Youd had a drop in, hadnt you?
HIGGINS (peremptorily) Sit down.
THE FLOWER GIRL. Oh, if youre going to make a compliment of it-
HIGGINS (thundering at her) Sit down.
MRS PEARCE (severely) Sit down, girl. Do as youre told. (She places
the stray chair near the hearthrug between Higgins and
Pickering, and stands behind it waiting for the girl to sit
down).
THE FLOWER GIRL. Ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-oo! (She stands, half rebellious,
half bewildered).
PICKERING (very courteous) Wont you sit down?
THE FLOWER GIRL (coyly) Dont mind if I do. (She sits down.
Pickering returns to the hearthrug).
HIGGINS. Whats your name?
THE FLOWER GIRL. Liza Doolittle.
HIGGINS (declaiming gravely)
Eliza, Elizabeth, Betsy and Bess,
They went to the woods to get a bird's nes':
PICKERING. They found a nest with four eggs in it:
HIGGINS. They took one apiece, and left three in it.
-
They laugh heartily at their own fun.
-
LIZA. Oh, dont be silly.
MRS PEARCE. You mustnt speak to the gentleman like that.
LIZA. Well, why wont he speak sensible to me?
HIGGINS. Come back to business. How much do you propose to pay me
for the lessons?
LIZA. Oh, I know whats right. A lady friend of mine gets French
lessons for eighteenpence an hour from a real French gentleman.
Well, you wouldnt have the face to ask me the same for teaching
me my own language as you would for French; so I wont give more
than a shilling. Take it or leave it.
HIGGINS (walking up and down the room, rattling his keys and his
cash in his pockets) You know, Pickering, if you consider a
shilling, not as a simple shilling, but as a percentage of this
girl's income, it works out as fully equivalent to sixty or
seventy guineas from a millionaire.
PICKERING. How so?
HIGGINS. Figure it out. A millionaire has about L 150 a day. She
earns about half-a-crown.
LIZA (haughtily) Who told you I only-
HIGGINS (continuing) She offers me two-fifths of her day's income
for a lesson. Two-fifths of a millionaire's income for a day
would be somewhere about L 60. It's handsome. By George, it's
enormous! it's the biggest offer I ever had.
LIZA (rising, terrified) Sixty pounds! What are you talking about?
I never offered you sixty pounds. Where would I get-
HIGGINS. Hold your tongue.
LIZA (weeping) But I aint got sixty pounds. Oh-
MRS PEARCE. Dont cry, you silly girl. Sit down. Nobody is going to
touch your money.
HIGGINS. Somebody is going to touch you, with a broomstick, if you
dont stop snivelling. Sit down.
LIZA (obeying slowly) Ah-ah-ah-ow-oo-o! One would think you was my
father.
HIGGINS. If I decide to teach you, I'll be worse than two fathers
to you. Here (he offers her his silk handkerchief)!
LIZA. Whats this for?
HIGGINS. To wipe your eyes. To wipe any part of your face that
feels moist. Remember: thats your handkerchief; and thats your
sleeve. Dont mistake the one for the other if you wish to
become a lady in a shop.
-
Liza, utterly bewildered, stares helplessly at him.
-
MRS PEARCE. It's no use talking to her like that, Mr Higgins: she
doesnt understand you. Besides, youre quite wrong: she doesnt
do it that way at all (she takes the handkerchief).
LIZA (snatching it) Here! You give me that handkerchief. He give it
to me, not to you.
PICKERING (laughing) He did. I think it must be regarded as her
property, Mrs Pearce.
MRS PEARCE (resigning herself) Serve you right, Mr Higgins.
PICKERING. Higgins: I'm interested. What about the ambassador's
garden party? I'll say youre the greatest teacher alive if you
make that good. I'll bet you all the expenses of the experiment
you cant do it. And I'll pay for the lessons.
LIZA. Oh, you are real good. Thank you, Captain.
HIGGINS (tempted, looking at her) It's almost irresistible. She's
so deliciously low- so horribly dirty-
LIZA (protesting extremely) Ah-ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-oo-oo!!! I aint dirty:
I washed my face and hands afore I come, I did.
PICKERING. Youre certainly not going to turn her head with
flattery, Higgins.
MRS PEARCE (uneasy) Oh, dont say that, sir: theres more ways than
one of turning a girl's head; and nobody can do it better than
Mr Higgins, though he may not always mean it. I do hope, sir,
you wont encourage him to do anything foolish.
HIGGINS (becoming excited as the idea grows on him) What is life
but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find
them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesnt come every day. I
shall make a duchess of this draggletailed guttersnipe.
LIZA (strongly deprecating this view of her) Ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-oo!
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HIGGINS (carried away) Yes: in six months- in three if she has a
good ear and a quick tongue- I'll take her anywhere and pass
her off as anything. We'll start today: now! this moment! Take
her away and clean her, Mrs Pearce. Monkey Brand, if it wont
come off any other way. Is there a good fire in the kitchen?
MRS PEARCE (protesting) Yes; but-
HIGGINS (storming on) Take all her clothes off and burn them. Ring
up Whiteley or somebody for new ones. Wrap her up in brown
paper til they come.
LIZA. Youre no gentleman, youre not, to talk of such things. I'm a
good girl, I am; and I know what the like of you are, I do.
HIGGINS. We want none of your Lisson Grove prudery here, young
woman. Youve got to learn to behave like a duchess. Take her
away, Mrs Pearce. If she gives you any trouble, wallop her.
LIZA (springing up and running between Pickering and Mrs Pearce for
protection) No! I'll call the police, I will.
MRS PEARCE. But Ive no place to put her.
HIGGINS. Put her in the dustbin.
LIZA. Ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-oo!
PICKERING. Oh come, Higgins! be reasonable.
MRS PEARCE (resolutely) You must be reasonable, Mr Higgins: really
you must. You cant walk over everybody like this.
-
Higgins, thus scolded, subsides. The hurricane is succeeded by a
zephyr of amiable surprise.
-
HIGGINS (with professional exquisiteness of modulation) I walk over
everybody! My dear Mrs Pearce, my dear Pickering, I never had
the slightest intention of walking over anyone. All I propose
is that we should be kind to this poor girl. We must help her
to prepare and fit herself for her new station in life. If I
did not express myself clearly it was because I did not wish to
hurt her delicacy, or yours.
-
Liza, reassured, steals back to her chair.
-
MRS PEARCE (to Pickering) Well, did you ever hear anything like
that, sir?
PICKERING (laughing heartily) Never, Mrs Pearce: never.
HIGGINS (patiently) Whats the matter?
MRS PEARCE. Well, the matter is, sir, that you cant take a girl up
like that as if you were picking up a pebble on the beach.
HIGGINS. Why not?
MRS PEARCE. Why not! But you dont know anything about her. What
about her parents? She may be married.
LIZA. Garn!
HIGGINS. There! As the girl very properly says, Garn! Married
indeed! Dont you know that a woman of that class looks a worn
out drudge of fifty a year after she's married?
LIZA. Whood marry me?
HIGGINS (suddenly resorting to the most thrillingly beautiful low
tones in his best elocutionary style) By George, Eliza, the
streets will be strewn with the bodies of men shooting
themselves for your sake before Ive done with you.
MRS PEARCE. Nonsense, sir. You mustnt talk like that to her.
LIZA (rising and squaring herself determinedly) I'm going away.
He's off his chump, he is. I dont want no balmies teaching me.
HIGGINS (wounded in his tenderest point by her insensibility to his
elocution) Oh, indeed! I'm mad, am I? Very well, Mrs Pearce:
you neednt order the new clothes for her. Throw her out.
LIZA (whimpering) Nah-ow. You got no right to touch me.
MRS PEARCE. You see now what comes of being saucy. (Indicating the
door) This way, please.
LIZA (almost in tears) I didnt want no clothes. I wouldnt have
taken them (she throws away the handkerchief). I can buy my own
clothes.
HIGGINS (deftly retrieving the handkerchief and intercepting her on
her reluctant way to the door) Youre an ungrateful wicked girl.
This is my return for offering to take you out of the gutter
and dress you beautifully and make a lady of you.
MRS PEARCE. Stop, Mr Higgins. I wont allow it. It's you that are
wicked. Go home to your parents, girl; and tell them to take
better care of you.
LIZA. I aint got no parents. They told me I was big enough to earn
my own living and turned me out.
MRS PEARCE. Wheres your mother?
LIZA. I aint got no mother. Her that turned me out was my sixth
stepmother. But I done without them. And I'm a good girl, I am.
HIGGINS. Very well, then, what on earth is all this fuss about? The
girl doesnt belong to anybody- is no use of anybody but me. (He
goes to Mrs Pearce and begins coaxing). You can adopt her, Mrs
Pearce: I'm sure a daughter would be a great amusement to you.
Now dont make any more fuss. Take her downstairs; and-
MRS PEARCE. But whats to become of her? Is she to be paid anything?
Do be sensible, sir.
HIGGINS. Oh, pay her whatever is necessary: put it down in the
housekeeping book. (Impatiently) What on earth will she want
with money? She'll have her food and her clothes. She'll only
drink if you give her money.
LIZA (turning on him) Oh you are a brute. It's a lie: nobody ever
saw the sign of liquor on me. (She goes back to her chair and
plants herself there defiantly).
PICKERING (in good-humored remonstrance) Does it occur to you,
Higgins, that the girl has some feelings?
HIGGINS (looking critically at her) Oh no, I dont think so. Not any
feelings that we need bother about. (Cheerily) Have you, Eliza?
LIZA. I got my feelings same as anyone else.
HIGGINS (to Pickering, reflectively) You see the difficulty?
PICKERING. Eh? What difficulty?
HIGGINS. To get her to talk grammar. The mere pronunciation is easy
enough.
LIZA. I dont want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady.
MRS PEARCE. Will you please keep to the point, Mr Higgins? I want
to know on what terms the girl is to be here. Is she to have
any wages? And what is to become of her when youve finished
your teaching? You must look ahead a little.
HIGGINS (impatiently) Whats to become of her if I leave her in the
gutter? Tell me that, Mrs Pearce.
MRS PEARCE. Thats her own business, not yours, Mr Higgins.
HIGGINS. Well, when Ive done with her, we can throw her back into
the gutter; and then it will be her own business again; so
thats all right.
LIZA. Oh, youve no feeling heart in you: you dont care for nothing
but yourself (she rises and takes the floor resolutely). Here!
Ive had enough of this. I'm going (making for the door). You
ought to be ashamed of yourself, you ought.
HIGGINS (snatching a chocolate cream from the piano, his eyes
suddenly beginning to twinkle with mischief) Have some
chocolates, Eliza.
LIZA (halting, tempted) How do I know what might be in them? Ive
heard of girls being drugged by the like of you.
-
Higgins whips out his penknife; cuts a chocolate in two; puts one
half into his mouth and bolts it; and offers her the other half.
-
HIGGINS. Pledge of good faith, Eliza. I eat one half. you eat the
other. (Liza opens her mouth to retort: he pops the half
chocolate into it). You shall have boxes of them, barrels of
them, every day. You shall live on them. Eh?
LIZA (who has disposed of the chocolate after being nearly choked
by it) I wouldnt have ate it, only I'm too ladylike to take it
out of my mouth.
HIGGINS. Listen, Eliza. I think you said you came in a taxi.
LIZA. Well, what if I did? Ive as good a right to take a taxi as
anyone else.
HIGGINS. You have, Eliza; and in future you shall have as many
taxis as you want. You shall go up and down and round the town
in a taxi every day. Think of that, Eliza.
MRS PEARCE. Mr Higgins: youre tempting the girl. It's not right.
She should think of the future.
HIGGINS. At her age! Nonsense! Time enough to think of the future
when you havnt any future to think of. No, Eliza: do as this
lady does: think of other people's futures; but never think of
your own. Think of chocolates, and taxis, and gold, and
diamonds.
LIZA. No: I dont want no gold and no diamonds. I'm a good girl, I
am. (She sits down again, with an attempt at dignity).
HIGGINS. You shall remain so, Eliza, under the care of Mrs Pearce.
And you shall marry an officer in the Guards, with a beautiful
moustache: the son of a marquis, who will disinherit him for
marrying you, but will relent when he sees your beauty and
goodness-
PICKERING. Excuse me, Higgins; but I really must interfere. Mrs
Pearce is quite right. If this girl is to put herself in your
hands for six months for an experiment in teaching, she must
understand thoroughly what she's doing.
HIGGINS. How can she? She's incapable of understanding anything.
Besides, do any of us understand what we are doing? If we did,
would we ever do it?
PICKERING. Very clever, Higgins; but not sound sense. (To Eliza)
Miss Doolittle-
LIZA (overwhelmed) Ah-ah-ow-oo!
HIGGINS. There! Thats all youll get out of Eliza. Ah-ah-ow-oo! No
use explaining. As a military man you ought to know that. Give
her her orders: thats what she wants. Eliza: you are to live
here for the next six months, learning how to speak
beautifully, like a lady in a florist's shop. If youre good and
do whatever youre told, you shall sleep in a proper bedroom,
and have lots to eat, and money to buy chocolates and take
rides in taxis. If youre naughty and idle you will sleep in the
back kitchen among the black beetles, and be walloped by Mrs
Pearce with a broomstick. At the end of six months you shall go
to Buckingham Palace in a carriage, beautifully dressed. If the
King finds out youre not a lady, you will be taken by the
police to the Tower of London, where your head will be cut off
as a warning to other presumptuous flower girls. If you are not
found out, you shall have a present of seven-and-sixpence to
start life with as a lady in a shop. If you refuse this offer
you will be a most ungrateful wicked girl; and the angels will
weep for you. (To Pickering) Now are you satisfied, Pickering?
(To Mrs Pearce) Can I put it more plainly and fairly, Mrs
Pearce?
MRS PEARCE (patiently) I think youd better let me speak to the girl
properly in private. I dont know that I can take charge of her
or consent to the arrangement at all. Of course I know you dont
mean her any harm; but when you get what you call interested in
people's accents, you never think or care what may happen to
them or you. Come with me, Eliza.
HIGGINS. Thats all right. Thank you, Mrs Pearce. Bundle her off to
the bathroom.
LIZA (rising reluctantly and suspiciously) Youre a great bully, you
are. I wont stay here if I dont like. I wont let nobody wallop
me. I never asked to go to Bucknam Palace, I didnt. I was never
in trouble with the police, not me. I'm a good girl-
MRS PEARCE. Dont answer back, girl. You dont understand the
gentleman. Come with me. (She leads the way to the door, and
holds it open for Eliza).
LIZA (as she goes out) Well, what I say is right. I wont go near
the King, not if I'm going to have my head cut off. If I'd
known what I was letting myself in for, I wouldnt have come
here. I always been a good girl; and I never offered to say a
word to him; and I dont owe him nothing; and I dont care; and I
wont be put upon; and I have my feelings the same as anyone
else-
-
Mrs Pearce shuts the door; and Eliza's plaints are no longer
audible. Pickering comes from the hearth to the chair and sits astride
it with his arms on the back.
-
PICKERING. Excuse the straight question, Higgins. Are you a man of
good character where women are concerned?
HIGGINS (moodily) Have you ever met a man of good character where
women are concerned?
PICKERING. Yes: very frequently.
HIGGINS (dogmatically, lifting himself on his hands to the level of
the piano, and sitting on it with a bounce) Well, I havnt. I
find that the moment I let a woman make friends with me, she
becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious, and a damned nuisance. I
find that the moment I let myself make friends with a woman, I
become selfish and tyrannical. Women upset everything. When you
let them into your life, you find that the woman's driving at
one thing and youre driving at another.
PICKERING. At what, for example?
HIGGINS (coming off the piano restlessly) Oh, Lord knows! I suppose
the woman wants to live her own life; and the man wants to live
his; and each tries to drag the other on to the wrong track.
One wants to go north and the other south; and the result is
that both have to go east, though they both hate the east wind.
(He sits down on the bench at the keyboard). So here I am, a
confirmed old bachelor, and likely to remain so.
PICKERING (rising and standing over him gravely) Come, Higgins! You
know what I mean. If I'm to be in this business I shall feel
responsible for that girl. I hope it's understood that no
advantage is to be taken of her position.
HIGGINS. What! That thing! Sacred, I assure you. (Rising to
explain) You see, she'll be a pupil; and teaching would be
impossible unless pupils were sacred. Ive taught scores of
American millionairesses how to speak English: the best looking
women in the world. I'm seasoned. They might as well be blocks
of wood. I might as well be a block of wood. It's-
-
Mrs Pearce opens the door. She has Eliza's hat in her hand.
Pickering retires to the easy-chair at the hearth and sits down.
-
HIGGINS (eagerly) Well, Mrs Pearce: is it all right?
MRS PEARCE (at the door) I just wish to trouble you with a word, if
I may, Mr Higgins.
HIGGINS. Yes, certainly. Come in. (She comes forward). Dont burn
that, Mrs Pearce. I'll keep it as a curiosity. (He takes the
hat).
MRS PEARCE. Handle it carefully, sir, please. I had to promise her
not to burn it; but I had better put it in the oven for a
while.
HIGGINS (putting it down hastily on the piano) Oh! thank you. Well,
what have you to say to me?
PICKERING. Am I in the way?
MRS PEARCE. Not at all, sir. Mr Higgins: will you please be very
particular what you say before the girl?
HIGGINS (sternly) Of course. I'm always particular about what I
say. Why do you say this to me?
MRS PEARCE (unmoved) No, sir: youre not at all particular when
youve mislaid anything or when you get a little impatient. Now
it doesnt matter before me: I'm used to it. But you really must
not swear before the girl.
HIGGINS (indignantly) I swear! (Most emphatically) I never swear.
I detest the habit. What the devil do you mean?
MRS PEARCE (stolidly) Thats what I mean, sir. You swear a great
deal too much. I dont mind your damning and blasting, and what
the devil and where the devil and who the devil-
HIGGINS. Mrs Pearce: this language from your lips! Really!
MRS PEARCE (not to be put off)- but there is a certain word I must
ask you not to use. The girl used it herself because the bath
was too hot. It begins with the same letter as bath. She knows
no better: she learnt it at her mother's knee. But she must not
hear it from your lips.
HIGGINS (loftily) I cannot charge myself with having ever uttered
it, Mrs Pearce. (She looks at him steadfastly. He adds, hiding
an uneasy conscience with a judicial air) Except perhaps in a
moment of extreme and justifiable excitement.
MRS PEARCE. Only this morning, sir, you applied it to your boots,
to the butter, and to the brown bread.
HIGGINS. Oh, that! Mere alliteration, Mrs Pearce, natural to a
poet.
MRS PEARCE. Well, sir, whatever you choose to call it, I beg you
not to let the girl hear you repeat it.
HIGGINS. Oh, very well, very well. Is that all?
MRS PEARCE. No, sir. We shall have to be very particular with this
girl as to personal cleanliness.
HIGGINS. Certainly. Quite right. Most important.
MRS PEARCE. I mean not to be slovenly about her dress or untidy in
leaving things about.
HIGGINS (going to her solemnly) Just so. I intended to call your
attention to that. (He passes on to Pickering, who is enjoying
the conversation immensely). It is these little things that
matter, Pickering. Take care of the pence and the pounds will
take care of themselves is as true of personal habits as of
money. (He comes to anchor on the hearthrug, with the air of a
man in an unassailable position).
MRS PEARCE. Yes, sir. Then might I ask you not to come down to
breakfast in your dressing-gown, or at any rate not to use it
as a napkin to the extent you do, sir. And if you would be so
good as not to eat everything off the same plate, and to
remember not to put the porridge saucepan out of your hand on
the clean tablecloth, it would be a better example to the girl.
You know you nearly choked yourself with a fishbone in the jam
only last week.
HIGGINS (routed from the hearthrug and drifting back to the piano)
I may do these things in absence of mind; but surely I dont do
them habitually. (Angrily) By the way: my dressing-gown smells
most damnably of benzine.
MRS PEARCE. No doubt it does, Mr Higgins. But if you will wipe your
fingers-
HIGGINS (yelling) Oh very well, very well: I'll wipe them in my
hair in future.
MRS PEARCE. I hope youre not offended, Mr Higgins.
HIGGINS (shocked at finding himself thought capable of an unamiable
sentiment) Not at all, not at all. Youre quite right, Mrs
Pearce: I shall be particularly careful before the girl. Is
that all?
MRS PEARCE. No, sir. Might she use some of those Japanese dresses
you brought from abroad? I really cant put her back into her
old things.
HIGGINS. Certainly. Anything you like. Is that all?
MRS PEARCE. Thank you, sir. Thats all. (She goes out).
HIGGINS. You know, Pickering, that woman has the most extraordinary
ideas about me. Here I am, a shy, diffident sort of man. Ive
never been able to feel really grown-up and tremendous, like
other chaps. And yet she's firmly persuaded that I'm an
arbitrary overbearing bossing kind of person. I cant account
for it.
-
Mrs Pearce returns.
-
MRS PEARCE. If you please, sir, the trouble's beginning already.
Theres a dustman downstairs, Alfred Doolittle, wants to see
you. He says you have his daughter here.
PICKERING (rising) Phew! I say! (He retreats to the hearthrug).
HIGGINS (promptly) Send the blackguard up.
MRS PEARCE. Oh, very well, sir. (She goes out).
PICKERING. He may not be a blackguard, Higgins.
HIGGINS. Nonsense. Of course he's a blackguard.
PICKERING. Whether he is or not, I'm afraid we shall have some
trouble with him.
HIGGINS (confidently) Oh no: I think not. If theres any trouble he
shall have it with me, not I with him. And we are sure to get
something interesting out of him.
PICKERING. About the girl?
HIGGINS. No. I mean his dialect.
PICKERING. Oh!
MRS PEARCE (at the door) Doolittle, sir. (She admits Doolittle and
retires).
-
Alfred Doolittle is an elderly but vigorous dustman, clad in the
costume of his profession, including a hat with a back brim covering
his neck and shoulders. He has well marked and rather interesting
features, and seems equally free from fear and conscience. He has a
remarkably expressive voice, the result of a habit of giving vent to
his feelings without reserve. His present pose is that of wounded
honor and stern resolution.
-
DOOLITTLE (at the door, uncertain which of the two gentlemen is his
man) Professor Higgins?
HIGGINS. Here. Good morning. Sit down.
DOOLITTLE. Morning, Governor. (He sits down magisterially) I come
about a very serious matter, Governor.
HIGGINS (to Pickering) Brought up in Hounslow. Mother Welsh, I
should think. (Doolittle opens his mouth, amazed. Higgins
continues) What do you want, Doolittle?
DOOLITTLE (menacingly) I want my daughter: thats what I want. See?
HIGGINS. Of course you do. Youre her father, arnt you? You dont
suppose anyone else wants her, do you? I'm glad to see you have
some spark of family feeling left. She's upstairs. Take her
away at once.
DOOLITTLE (rising, fearfully taken aback) What!
HIGGINS. Take her away. Do you suppose I'm going to keep your
daughter for you?
DOOLITTLE (remonstrating) Now, now, look here, Governor. Is this
reasonable? Is it fairity to take advantage of a man like this?
The girl belongs to me. You got her. Where do I come in? (He
sits down again).
HIGGINS. Your daughter had the audacity to come to my house and ask
me to teach her how to speak properly so that she could get a
place in a flower-shop. This gentleman and my housekeeper have
been here all the time. (Bullying him) How dare you come here
and attempt to blackmail me? You sent her here on purpose.
DOOLITTLE (protesting) No, Governor.
HIGGINS. You must have. How else could you possibly know that she
is here?
DOOLITTLE. Dont take a man up like that, Governor.
HIGGINS. The police shall take you up. This is a plant- a plot to
extort money by threats. I shall telephone for the police. (He
goes resolutely to the telephone and opens the directory).
DOOLITTLE. Have I asked you for a brass farthing? I leave it to the
gentleman here: have I said a word about money?
HIGGINS (throwing the book aside and marching down on Doolittle
with a poser) What else did you come for?
DOOLITTLE (sweetly) Well, what would a man come for? Be human,
Governor.
HIGGINS (disarmed) Alfred: did you put her up to it?
DOOLITTLE. So help me, Governor, I never did. I take my Bible oath
I aint seen the girl these two months past.
HIGGINS. Then how did you know she was here?
DOOLITTLE ("most musical, most melancholy") I'll tell you,
Governor, if youll only let me get a word in. I'm willing to
tell you. I'm wanting to tell you. I'm waiting to tell you.
HIGGINS. Pickering: this chap has a certain natural gift of
rhetoric. Observe the rhythm of his native woodnotes wild. "I'm
willing to tell you: I'm wanting to tell you: I'm waiting to
tell you." Sentimental rhetoric! thats the Welsh strain in him.
It also accounts for his mendacity and dishonesty.
PICKERING. Oh, please, Higgins: I'm west country myself. (To
Doolittle) How did you know the girl was here if you didnt send
her?
DOOLITTLE. It was like this, Governor. The girl took a boy in the
taxi to give him a jaunt. Son of her landlady, he is. He hung
about on the chance of her giving him another ride home. Well,
she sent him back for her luggage when she heard you was
willing for her to stop here. I met the boy at the corner of
Long Acre and Endell Street.
HIGGINS. Public house. Yes?
DOOLITTLE. The poor man's club, Governor: why shouldnt I?
PICKERING. Do let him tell his story, Higgins.
DOOLITTLE. He told me what was up. And I ask you, what was my
feelings and my duty as a father? I says to the boy, "You bring
me the luggage," I says-
PICKERING. Why didnt you go for it yourself?
DOOLITTLE. Landlady wouldnt have trusted me with it, Governor.
She's that kind of woman: you know. I had to give the boy a
penny afore he trusted me with it, the little swine. I brought
it to her just to oblige you like, and make myself agreeable.
Thats all.
HIGGINS. How much luggage?
DOOLITTLE. Musical instrument, Governor. A few pictures, a trifle
of jewelry, and a bird-cage. She said she didnt want no
clothes. What was I to think from that, Governor? I ask you as
a parent what was I to think?
HIGGINS. So you came to rescue her from worse than death, eh?
DOOLITTLE (appreciatively: relieved at being so well understood)
Just so, Governor. Thats right.
PICKERING. But why did you bring her luggage if you intended to
take her away?
DOOLITTLE. Have I said a word about taking her away? Have I now?
HIGGINS (determinedly) Youre going to take her away, double quick.
(He crosses to the hearth and rings the bell).
DOOLITTLE (rising) No, Governor. Dont say that. I'm not the man to
stand in my girl's light. Heres a career opening for her, as
you might say; and-
-
Mrs Pearce opens the door and awaits orders.
-
HIGGINS. Mrs Pearce: this is Eliza's father. He has come to take
her away. Give her to him. (He goes back to the piano, with an
air of washing his hands of the whole affair).
DOOLITTLE. No. This is a misunderstanding. Listen here-
MRS PEARCE. He cant take her away, Mr Higgins: how can he? You told
me to burn her clothes.
DOOLITTLE. Thats right. I cant carry the girl through the streets
like a blooming monkey, can I? I put it to you.
HIGGINS. You have put it to me that you want your daughter. Take
your daughter. If she has no clothes go out and buy her some.
DOOLITTLE (desperate) Wheres the clothes she come in? Did I burn
them or did your missus here?
MRS PEARCE. I am the housekeeper, if you please. I have sent for
some clothes for your girl. When they come you can take her
away. You can wait in the kitchen. This way, please.
-
Doolittle, much troubled, accompanies her to the door; then
hesitates; finally turns confidentially to Higgins.
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DOOLITTLE. Listen here, Governor. You and me is men of the world,
aint we?
HIGGINS. Oh! Men of the world, are we? Youd better go, Mrs Pearce.
MRS PEARCE. I think so, indeed, sir. (She goes, with dignity).
PICKERING. The floor is yours, Mr Doolittle.
DOOLITTLE (to Pickering) I thank you, Governor. (To Higgins, who
takes refuge on the piano bench, a little overwhelmed by the
proximity of his visitor; for Doolittle has a professional
flavor of dust about him). Well, the truth is, Ive taken a sort
of fancy to you, Governor; and if you want the girl, I'm not so
set on having her back home again but what I might be open to
an arrangement. Regarded in the light of a young woman, she's a
fine handsome girl. As a daughter she's not worth her keep; and
so I tell you straight. All I ask is my rights as a father; and
youre the last man alive to expect me to let her go for
nothing; for I can see youre one of the straight sort,
Governor. Well, whats a five-pound note to you? and whats Eliza
to me? (He turns to his chair and sits down judicially).
PICKERING. I think you ought to know, Doolittle, that Mr Higgins's
intentions are entirely honorable.
DOOLITTLE. Course they are, Governor. If I thought they wasnt, I'd
ask fifty.
HIGGINS (revolted) Do you mean to say, you callous rascal, that you
would sell your daughter for L 50?
DOOLITTLE. Not in a general way I wouldnt; but to oblige a
gentleman like you I'd do a good deal, I do assure you.
PICKERING. Have you no morals, man?
DOOLITTLE (unabashed) Cant afford them, Governor. Neither could you
if you was as poor as me. Not that I mean any harm, you know.
But if Liza is going to have a bit out of this, why not me too?
HIGGINS (troubled) I dont know what to do, Pickering. There can be
no question that as a matter of morals it's a positive crime to
give this chap a farthing. And yet I feel a sort of rough
justice in his claim.
DOOLITTLE. Thats it, Governor. Thats all I say. A father's heart,
as it were.
PICKERING. Well, I know the feeling; but really it seems hardly
right-
DOOLITTLE. Dont say that, Governor. Dont look at it that way. What
am I, Governors both? I ask you, what am I? I'm one of the
undeserving poor: thats what I am. Think of what that means to
a man. It means that he's up agen middle class morality all the
time. If theres anything going, and I put in for a bit of it,
it's always the same story: "Youre undeserving; so you cant
have it." But my needs is as great as the most deserving
widow's that ever got money out of six different charities in
one week for the death of the same husband. I dont need less
than a deserving man: I need more. I dont eat less hearty than
him; and I drink a lot more. I want a bit of amusement, cause
I'm a thinking man. I want cheerfulness and a song and a band
when I feel low. Well, they charge me just the same for
everything as they charge the deserving. What is middle class
morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything.
Therefore, I ask you, as two gentlemen, not to play that game
on me. I'm playing straight with you. I aint pretending to be
deserving. I'm undeserving; and I mean to go on being
undeserving. I like it; and thats the truth. Will you take
advantage of a man's nature to do him out of the price of his
own daughter what he's brought up and fed and clothed by the
sweat of his brow until she's growed big enough to be
interesting to you two gentlemen? Is five pounds unreasonable?
I put it to you; and I leave it to you.
HIGGINS (rising, and going over to Pickering) Pickering: if we were
to take this man in hand for three months, he could choose
between a seat in the Cabinet and a popular pulpit in Wales.
PICKERING. What do you say to that, Doolittle?
DOOLITTLE. Not me, Governor, thank you kindly. Ive heard all the
preachers and all the prime ministers- for I'm a thinking man
and game for politics or religion or social reform same as all
the other amusements- and I tell you it's a dog's life any way
you look at it. Undeserving poverty is my line. Taking one
station in society with another, it's- it's- well, it's the
only one that has any ginger in it, to my taste.
HIGGINS. I suppose we must give him a fiver.
PICKERING. He'll make a bad use of it, I'm afraid.
DOOLITTLE. Not me, Governor, so help me I wont. Dont you be afraid
that I'll save it and spare it and live idle on it. There wont
be a penny of it left by Monday: I'll have to go to work same
as if I'd never had it. It wont pauperize me, you bet. Just one
good spree for myself and the missus, giving pleasure to
ourselves and employment to others, and satisfaction to you to
think it's not been throwed away. You couldnt spend it better.
HIGGINS (taking out his pocket book and coming between Doolittle
and the piano) This is irresistible. Lets give him ten. (He
offers two notes to the dustman).
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
she's 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 her than you, because youre a man, and she's 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 a five-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?
-
(exclaiming simultaneously)
DOOLITTLE. Bly me! it's Eliza!
HIGGINS. What's that? This!
PICKERING. By Jove!
-
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. She's 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 could see what it is for the like of
me!
HIGGINS. I'm glad the bathroom 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
bull-dog 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. He's 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; 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_THREE
ACT THREE
-
IT IS Mrs Higgins's at-home day. Nobody has yet arrived. Her drawing
room, in a flat on Chelsea 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 side of them) are on the walls. The only
landscape is a Cecil Lawson 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 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 elegantly simple writing-table with a bell button
within reach of her hand. There is a Chippendale chair further back 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: 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 offend 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
lovable woman is somebody as like you as possible. 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.
HIGGINS. She's coming to see you.
MRS HIGGINS. I dont remember asking her.
HIGGINS. You didnt. I asked her. If youd known her you wouldnt have
asked her.
MRS HIGGINS. Indeed! Why?
HIGGINS. Well, it's like this. She's a common flower girl. I picked
her off the kerbstone.
MRS HIGGINS. And invited her to my at-home!
HIGGINS (rising and coming to her to coax her) Oh, thatll be all
right. Ive taught her to speak properly; and she has strict
orders as to her behavior. She's to keep to two subjects: the
weather and everybody's health- Fine day and How do you do, you
know- and not to let herself go on things in general. That will
be safe.
MRS HIGGINS. Safe! To talk about our health! about our insides!
perhaps about our outsides! How could you be so silly, Henry?
HIGGINS (impatiently) Well, she must talk about something. (He
controls himself and sits down again). Oh, she'll be all right:
dont you fuss. Pickering is in it with me. Ive a sort of bet on
that I'll pass her off as a duchess in six months. I started on
her some months ago; and she's getting on like a house on fire.
I shall win my bet. She has a quick ear; and she's been easier
to teach than my middle class pupils because she's had to learn
a complete new language. She talks English almost as you talk
French.
MRS HIGGINS. Thats satisfactory, at all events.
HIGGINS. Well, it is and it isnt.
MRS HIGGINS. What does that mean?
HIGGINS. You see, Ive got her pronunciation all right; but you have
to consider not only how a girl pronounces, but what she
pronounces; and that's where-
-
They are interrupted by the parlor-maid, announcing guests.
-
THE PARLOR-MAID. Mrs and Miss Eynsford Hill. (She withdraws).
HIGGINS. Oh Lord! (He rises; snatches his hat from the table; and
makes for the door; but before he reaches it his mother
introduces him).
-
Mrs and Miss Eynsford Hill are the mother and daughter who sheltered
from the rain in Covent Garden. The mother is well bred, quiet, and
has the habitual anxiety of straitened means. The daughter has
acquired a gay air of being very much at home in society: the
bravado of genteel poverty.
-
MRS EYNSFORD HILL (to Mrs Higgins) How do you do? (They shake
hands).
MISS EYNSFORD HILL. How d'you do? (She shakes).
MRS HIGGINS (introducing) My son Henry.
MRS EYNSFORD HILL. Your celebrated son! I have so longed to meet
you, Professor Higgins.
HIGGINS (glumly, making no movement in her direction) Delighted.
(He backs against the piano and bows brusquely).
MISS EYNSFORD HILL (going to him with confident familiarity) How do
you do?
HIGGINS (staring at her) Ive seen you before somewhere. I havnt the
ghost of a notion where; but Ive heard your voice. (Drearily)
It doesnt matter. Youd better sit down.
MRS HIGGINS. I'm sorry to say that my celebrated son has no
manners. You mustnt mind him.
MISS EYNSFORD HILL (gaily) I dont. (She sits in the Elizabethan
chair).
MRS EYNSFORD HILL (a little bewildered) Not at all. (She sits on
the ottoman between her daughter and Mrs Higgins, who has
turned her chair away from the writing-table).
HIGGINS. Oh, have I been rude? I didnt mean to be.
-
He goes to the central window, through which, with his back to the
company, he contemplates the river and the flowers in Battersea Park
on the opposite bank as if they were a frozen desert.
The parlor-maid returns, ushering in Pickering.
-
THE PARLOR-MAID. Colonel Pickering. (She withdraws).
PICKERING. How do you do, Mrs Higgins?
MRS HIGGINS. So glad youve come. Do you know Mrs Eynsford Hill-
Miss Eynsford Hill? (Exchange of bows. The Colonel brings the
Chippendale chair a little forward between Mrs Hill and Mrs
Higgins, and sits down).
PICKERING. Has Henry told you what weve come for?
HIGGINS (over his shoulder) We were interrupted: damn it!
MRS HIGGINS. Oh Henry, Henry, really!
MRS EYNSFORD HILL (half rising) Are we in the way?
MRS HIGGINS (rising and making her sit down again) No, no. You
couldnt have come more fortunately: we want you to meet a
friend of ours.
HIGGINS (turning hopefully) Yes, by George! We want two or three
people. Youll do as well as anybody else.
-
The parlor-maid returns, ushering Freddy.
-
THE PARLOR-MAID. Mr Eynsford Hill.
HIGGINS (almost audibly, past endurance) God of Heaven! another of
them.
FREDDY (shaking hands with Mrs Higgins) Ahdedo?
MRS HIGGINS. Very good of you to come. (Introducing) Colonel
Pickering.
FREDDY (bowing) Ahdedo?
MRS HIGGINS. I dont think you know my son, Professor Higgins.
FREDDY (going to Higgins) Ahdedo?
HIGGINS (looking at him much as if he were a pickpocket) I'll take
my oath Ive met you before somewhere. Where was it?
FREDDY. I dont think so.
HIGGINS (resignedly) It dont matter, anyhow. Sit down.
-
He shakes Freddy's hand, and almost slings him on to the ottoman
with his face to the windows; then comes round to the other side of
it.
-
HIGGINS. Well, here we are, anyhow! (He sits down on the ottoman
next Mrs Eynsford Hill, on her left). And now, what the devil
are we going to talk about until Eliza comes?
MRS HIGGINS. Henry: you are the life and soul of the Royal
Society's soirees; but really youre rather trying on more
commonplace occasions.
HIGGINS. Am I? Very sorry. (Beaming suddenly) I suppose I am, you
know. (Uproariously) Ha, ha!
MISS EYNSFORD HILL (who considers Higgins quite eligible
matrimonially) I sympathize. I havnt any small talk. If people
would only be frank and say what they really think!
HIGGINS (relapsing into gloom) Lord forbid!
MRS EYNSFORD HILL (taking up her daughter's cue) But why?
HIGGINS. What they think they ought to think is bad enough, Lord
knows; but what they really think would break up the whole
show. Do you suppose it would be really agreeable if I were to
come out now with what I really think?
MISS EYNSFORD HILL (gaily) Is it so very cynical?
HIGGINS. Cynical! Who the dickens said it was cynical? I mean it
wouldnt be decent.
MRS EYNSFORD HILL (seriously) Oh! I'm sure you dont mean that, Mr
Higgins.
HIGGINS. You see, we're all savages, more or less. We're supposed
to be civilized and cultured- to know all about poetry and
philosophy and art and science, and so on; but how many of us
know even the meanings of these names? (To Miss Hill) What do
you know of poetry? (To Mrs Hill) What do you know of science?
(Indicating Freddy) What does he know of art or science or
anything else? What the devil do you imagine I know of
philosophy?
MRS HIGGINS (warningly) Or of manners, Henry?
THE PARLOR-MAID (opening the door) Miss Doolittle. (She withdraws).
HIGGINS (rising hastily and running to Mrs Higgins) Here she is,
Mother. (He stands on tiptoe and makes signs over his mother's
head to Eliza to indicate to her which lady is her hostess).
-
Eliza, who is exquisitely dressed, produces an impression of such
remarkable distinction and beauty as she enters that they all rise,
quite fluttered. Guided by Higgins's signals, she comes to Mrs Higgins
with studied grace.
-
LIZA (speaking with pedantic correctness of pronunciation and great
beauty of tone) How do you do, Mrs Higgins? (She gasps slightly
in making sure of the H in Higgins, but is quite successful).
Mr Higgins told me I might come.
MRS HIGGINS (cordially) Quite right: I'm very glad indeed to see
you.
PICKERING. How do you do, Miss Doolittle?
LIZA (shaking hands with him) Colonel Pickering, is it not?
MRS EYNSFORD HILL. I feel sure we have met before, Miss Doolittle.
I remember your eyes.
LIZA. How do you do? (She sits down on the ottoman gracefully in
the place just left vacant by Higgins).
MRS EYNSFORD HILL (introducing) My daughter Clara.
LIZA. How do you do?
CLARA (impulsively) How do you do? (She sits down on the ottoman
beside Eliza, devouring her with her eyes).
FREDDY (coming to their side of the ottoman) Ive certainly had the
pleasure.
MRS EYNSFORD HILL (introducing) My son Freddy.
LIZA. How do you do?
-
Freddy bows and sits down in the Elizabethan chair, infatuated.
-
HIGGINS (suddenly) By George, yes: it all comes back to me! (They
stare at him). Covent Garden! (Lamentably) What a damned thing!
MRS HIGGINS. Henry, please! (He is about to sit on the edge of the
table) Dont sit on my writing-table: youll break it.
HIGGINS (sulkily) Sorry.
-
He goes to the divan, stumbling into the fender and over the
fire-irons on his way; extricating himself with muttered imprecations;
and finishing his disastrous journey by throwing himself so
impatiently on the divan that he almost breaks it. Mrs Higgins looks
at him, but controls herself and says nothing.
A long and painful pause ensues.
-
MRS HIGGINS (at last, conversationally) Will it rain, do you think?
LIZA. The shallow depression in the west of these islands is likely
to move slowly in an easterly direction. There are no
indications of any great change in the barometrical situation.
FREDDY. Ha! ha! how awfully funny!
LIZA. What is wrong with that, young man? I bet I got it right.
FREDDY. Killing!
MRS EYNSFORD HILL. I'm sure I hope it wont turn cold. Theres so
much influenza about. It runs right through our whole family
regularly every spring.
LIZA (darkly) My aunt died of influenza: so they said.
MRS EYNSFORD HILL (clicks her tongue sympathetically)!!!
LIZA (in the same tragic tone) But it's my belief they done the old
woman in.
MRS HIGGINS (puzzled) Done her in?
LIZA. Y-e-e-e-es, Lord love you! Why should she die of influenza?
She come through diphtheria right enough the year before. I saw
her with my own eyes. Fairly blue with it, she was. They all
thought she was dead; but my father he kept ladling gin down
her throat til she came to so sudden that she bit the bowl off
the spoon.
MRS EYNSFORD HILL (startled) Dear me!
LIZA (piling up the indictment) What call would a woman with that
strength in her have to die of influenza? What become of her
new straw hat that should have come to me? Somebody pinched it;
and what I say is, them as pinched it done her in.
MRS EYNSFORD HILL. What does doing her in mean?
HIGGINS (hastily) Oh, thats the new small talk. To do a person in
means to kill them.
MRS EYNSFORD HILL (to Eliza, horrified) You surely dont believe
that your aunt was killed?
LIZA. Do I not! Them she lived with would have killed her for a
hat-pin, let alone a hat.
MRS EYNSFORD HILL. But it cant have been right for your father to
pour spirits down her throat like that. It might have killed
her.
LIZA. Not her. Gin was mother's milk to her. Besides, he'd poured
so much down his own throat that he knew the good of it.
MRS EYNSFORD HILL. Do you mean that he drank?
LIZA. Drank! My word! Something chronic.
MRS EYNSFORD HILL. How dreadful for you!
LIZA. Not a bit. It never did him no harm what I could see. But
then he did not keep it up regular. (Cheerfully) On the burst,
as you might say, from time to time. And always more agreeable
when he had a drop in. When he was out of work, my mother used
to give him fourpence and tell him to go out and not come back
until he'd drunk himself cheerful and loving-like. Theres lots
of women has to make their husbands drunk to make them fit to
live with. (Now quite at her ease) You see, it's like this. If
a man has a bit of a conscience, it always takes him when he's
sober; and then it makes him low-spirited. A drop of booze just
takes that off and makes him happy. (To Freddy, who is in
convulsions of suppressed laughter) Here! what are you
sniggering at?
FREDDY. The new small talk. You do it so awfully well.
LIZA. If I was doing it proper, what was you laughing at? (To
Higgins) Have I said anything I oughtnt?
MRS HIGGINS (interposing) Not at all, Miss Doolittle.
LIZA. Well, thats a mercy, anyhow. (Expansively) What I always say
is-
HIGGINS (rising and looking at his watch) Ahem!
LIZA (looking round at him; taking the hint; and rising) Well: I
must go. (They all rise. Freddy goes to the door). So pleased
to have met you. Goodbye. (She shakes hands with Mrs Higgins).
MRS HIGGINS. Goodbye.
LIZA. Goodbye, Colonel Pickering.
PICKERING. Goodbye, Miss Doolittle. (They shake hands).
LIZA (nodding to the others) Goodbye, all.
FREDDY (opening the door for her) Are you walking across the Park,
Miss Doolittle? If so-
LIZA. Walk! Not bloody likely. (Sensation). I am going in a taxi.
(She goes out).
-
Pickering gasps and sits down. Freddy goes out on the balcony to
catch another glimpse of Eliza.
-
MRS EYNSFORD HILL (suffering from shock) Well, I really cant get
used to the new ways.
CLARA (throwing herself discontentedly into the Elizabethan chair)
Oh, it's all right, Mamma, quite right. People will think we
never go anywhere or see anybody if you are so old-fashioned.
MRS EYNSFORD HILL. I daresay I am very old-fashioned; but I do hope
you wont begin using that expression, Clara. I have got
accustomed to hear you talking about men as rotters, and
calling everything filthy and beastly; though I do think it
horrible and unladylike. But this last is really too much. Dont
you think so, Colonel Pickering?
PICKERING. Dont ask me. Ive been away in India for several years;
and manners have changed so much that I sometimes dont know
whether I'm at a respectable dinner-table or in a ship's
forecastle.
CLARA. It's all a matter of habit. Theres no right or wrong in it.
Nobody means anything by it. And it's so quaint, and gives such
a smart emphasis to things that are not in themselves very
witty. I find the new small talk delightful and quite innocent.
MRS EYNSFORD HILL (rising) Well, after that, I think it's time for
us to go.
-
Pickering and Higgins rise.
-
CLARA (rising) Oh yes: we have three at-homes to go to still.
Goodbye, Mrs Higgins. Goodbye, Colonel Pickering. Goodbye,
Professor Higgins.
HIGGINS (coming grimly at her from the divan, and accompanying her
to the door) Goodbye. Be sure you try on that small talk at the
three at-homes. Dont be nervous about it. Pitch it in strong.
CLARA (all smiles) I will. Goodbye. Such nonsense, all this early
Victorian prudery!
HIGGINS (tempting her) Such damned nonsense!
CLARA. Such bloody nonsense!
MRS EYNSFORD HILL (convulsively) Clara!
CLARA. Ha! ha! (She goes out radiant, conscious of being thoroughly
up to date, and is heard descending the stairs in a stream of
silvery laughter).
FREDDY (to the heavens at large) Well, I ask you- (He gives it up,
and comes to Mrs Higgins). Goodbye.
MRS HIGGINS (shaking hands) Goodbye. Would you like to meet Miss
Doolittle again?
FREDDY (eagerly) Yes, I should, most awfully.
MRS HIGGINS. Well, you know my days.
FREDDY. Yes. Thanks awfully. Goodbye. (He goes out).
MRS EYNSFORD HILL. Goodbye, Mr Higgins.
HIGGINS. Goodbye. Goodbye.
MRS EYNSFORD HILL (to Pickering) It's no use. I shall never be able
to bring myself to use that word.
PICKERING. Dont. It's not compulsory, you know. Youll get on quite
well without it.
MRS EYNSFORD HILL. Only, Clara is so down on me if I am not
positively reeking with the latest slang. Goodbye.
PICKERING. Goodbye (They shake hands).
MRS EYNSFORD HILL (to Mrs Higgins) You mustnt mind Clara.
(Pickering, catching from her lowered tone that this is not
meant for him to hear, discreetly joins Higgins at the window).
We're so poor! and she gets so few parties, poor child! She
doesnt quite know. (Mrs Higgins, seeing that her eyes are
moist, takes her hand sympathetically and goes with her to the
door). But the boy is nice. Dont you think so?
MRS HIGGINS. Oh, quite nice. I shall always be delighted to see
him.
MRS EYNSFORD HILL. Thank you, dear. Goodbye. (She goes out).
HIGGINS (eagerly) Well? Is Eliza presentable? (He swoops on his
mother and drags her to the ottoman, where she sits down in
Eliza's place with her son on her left)?
-
Pickering returns to his chair on her right.
-
MRS HIGGINS. You silly boy, of course she's not presentable: She's
a triumph of your art and of her dressmaker's; but if you
suppose for a moment that she doesnt give herself away in every
sentence she utters, you must be perfectly cracked about her.
PICKERING. But dont you think something might be done? I mean
something to eliminate the sanguinary element from her
conversation.
MRS HIGGINS. Not as long as she is in Henry's hands.
HIGGINS (aggrieved) Do you mean that my language is improper?
MRS HIGGINS. No, dearest: it would be quite proper- say on a canal
barge; but it would not be proper for her at a garden party.
HIGGINS (deeply injured) Well I must say-
PICKERING (interrupting him) Come, Higgins: you must learn to know
yourself. I havnt heard such language as yours since we used to
review the volunteers in Hyde Park twenty years ago.
HIGGINS (sulkily) Oh, well, if you say so, I suppose I dont always
talk like a bishop.
MRS HIGGINS (quieting Henry with a touch) Colonel Pickering: will
you tell me what is the exact state of things in Wimpole
Street?
PICKERING (cheerfully: as if this completely changed the subject)
Well, I have come to live there with Henry. We work together at
my Indian Dialects; and we think it more convenient-
MRS HIGGINS. Quite so. I know all about that: it's an excellent
arrangement. But where does this girl live?
HIGGINS. With us, of course. Where should she live?
MRS HIGGINS. But on what terms? Is she a servant? If not, what is
she?
PICKERING (slowly) I think I know what you mean, Mrs Higgins.
HIGGINS. Well, dash me if I do! Ive had to work at the girl every
day for months to get her to her present pitch. Besides, she's
useful. She knows where my things are, and remembers my
appointments and so forth.
MRS HIGGINS. How does your housekeeper get on with her?
HIGGINS. Mrs Pearce? Oh, she's jolly glad to get so much taken off
her hands; for before Eliza came, she used to have to find
things and remind me of my appointments. But she's got some
silly bee in her bonnet about Eliza. She keeps saying "You dont
think, sir": doesnt she, Pick?
PICKERING. Yes: thats the formula. "You dont think, sir." Thats the
end of every conversation about Eliza.
HIGGINS. As if I ever stop thinking about the girl and her
confounded vowels and consonants. I'm worn out, thinking about
her, and watching her lips and her teeth and her tongue, not to
mention her soul, which is the quaintest of the lot.
MRS HIGGINS. You certainly are a pretty pair of babies, playing
with your live doll.
HIGGINS. Playing! The hardest job I ever tackled: make no mistake
about that, mother. But you have no idea how frightfully
interesting it is to take a human being and change her into a
quite different human being by creating a new speech for her.
It's filling up the deepest gulf that separates class from
class and soul from soul.
PICKERING (drawing his chair closer to Mrs Higgins and bending over
to her eagerly) Yes: it's enormously interesting. I assure you,
Mrs Higgins, we take Eliza very seriously. Every week- every
day almost- there is some new change. (Closer again) We keep
records of every stage- dozens of gramophone disks and
photographs-
HIGGINS (assailing her at the other ear) Yes, by George: it's the
most absorbing experiment I ever tackled. She regularly fills
our lives up: doesnt she, Pick?
PICKERING. We're always talking Eliza.
HIGGINS. Teaching Eliza.
PICKERING. Dressing Eliza.
MRS HIGGINS. What!
HIGGINS. Inventing new Elizas.
-
(speaking together).
HIGGINS. You know, she has the most extraordinary quickness of ear:
PICKERING. I assure you, my dear Mrs Higgins, that girl
HIGGINS. just like a parrot. Ive tried her with every
PICKERING.is a genius. She can play the piano quite beautifully.
HIGGINS. possible sort of sound that a human being can make-
PICKERING. We have taken her to classical concerts and to music
HIGGINS. Continental dialects, African dialects, Hottentot
PICKERING. halls; and it's all the same to her: she plays
everything
HIGGINS. clicks, things it took me years to get hold of; and
PICKERING. she hears right off when she comes home, whether it's
HIGGINS. she picks them up like a shot, right away, as if she had
PICKERING. Beethoven and Brahms or Lehar and Lionel Monckton;
HIGGINS. been at it all her life.
PICKERING. though six months ago, she'd never as much as touched a
piano-
-
MRS HIGGINS (putting her fingers in her ears, as they are by this
time shouting one another down with an intolerable noise)
Sh-sh-sh- sh! (They stop).
PICKERING. I beg your pardon. (He draws his chair back
apologetically).
HIGGINS. Sorry. When Pickering starts shouting nobody can get a
word in edgeways.
MRS HIGGINS. Be quiet, Henry. Colonel Pickering: dont you realize
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that when Eliza walked into Wimpole Street, something walked in
with her?
PICKERING. Her father did. But Henry soon got rid of him.
MRS HIGGINS. It would have been more to the point if her mother
had. But as her mother didnt something else did.
PICKERING. But what?
MRS HIGGINS (unconsciously dating herself by the word) A problem.
PICKERING. Oh, I see. The problem of how to pass her off as a lady.
HIGGINS. I'll solve that problem. Ive half solved it already.
MRS HIGGINS. No, you two infinitely stupid male creatures: the
problem of what is to be done with her afterwards.
HIGGINS. I dont see anything in that. She can go her own way, with
all the advantages I have given her.
MRS HIGGINS. The advantages of that poor woman who was here just
now! The manners and habits that disqualify a fine lady from
earning her own living without giving her a fine lady's income!
Is that what you mean?
PICKERING (indulgently, being rather bored) Oh, that will be all
right, Mrs Higgins. (He rises to go).
HIGGINS (rising also) We'll find her some light employment.
PICKERING. She's happy enough. Dont you worry about her. Goodbye.
(He shakes hands as if he were consoling a frightened child,
and makes for the door).
HIGGINS. Anyhow, theres no good bothering now. The thing's done.
Goodbye, Mother. (He kisses her, and follows Pickering).
PICKERING (turning for a final consolation) There are plenty of
openings. We'll do whats right. Goodbye.
HIGGINS (to Pickering as they go out together) Lets take her to the
Shakespear exhibition at Earls Court.
PICKERING. Yes: lets. Her remarks will be delicious.
HIGGINS. She'll mimic all the people for us when we get home.
PICKERING. Ripping. (Both are heard laughing as they go
downstairs).
MRS HIGGINS (rises with an impatient bounce, and returns to her
work at the writing-table. She sweeps a litter of disarranged
papers out of her way; snatches a sheet of paper from her
stationery case; and tries resolutely to write. At the third
line she gives it up; flings down her pen; grips the table
angrily and exclaims) Oh, men! men!! men!!!
ACT_FOUR
ACT FOUR
-
THE Wimpole Street laboratory. Midnight. Nobody in the room. The
clock on the mantelpiece strikes twelve. The fire is not alight: it is
a summer night.
Presently Higgins and Pickering are heard on the stairs.
-
HIGGINS (calling down to Pickering) I say, Pick: lock up, will you?
I shant be going out again.
PICKERING. Right. Can Mrs Pearce go to bed? We dont want anything
more, do we?
HIGGINS. Lord, no!
-
Eliza opens the door and is seen on the lighted landing in opera
clock, brilliant evening dress, and diamonds, with fan, flowers, and
all accessories. She comes to the hearth, and switches on the electric
lights there. She is tired: her pallor contrasts strongly with her
dark eyes and hair; and her expression is almost tragic. She takes off
her cloak; puts her fan and flowers on the piano; and sits down on the
bench, brooding and silent. Higgins, in evening dress, with overcoat
and hat, comes in, carrying a smoking jacket which he has picked up
downstairs. He takes off the hat and overcoat; throws them
carelessly on the newspaper stand; disposes of his coat in the same
way; puts on the smoking jacket; and throws himself wearily into the
easy-chair at the hearth. Pickering, similarly attired, comes in. He
also takes off his hat and overcoat, and is about to throw them on
Higgins's when he hesitates.
-
PICKERING. I say: Mrs Pearce will row if we leave these things
lying about in the drawing room.
HIGGINS. Oh, chuck them over the bannisters into the hall. She'll
find them there in the morning and put them away all right.
She'll think we were drunk.
PICKERING. We are, slightly. Are there any letters?
HIGGINS. I didnt look. (Pickering takes the overcoats and hats and
goes downstairs. Higgins begins half singing half yawning an
air from La Fanciulla del Golden West. Suddenly he stops and
exclaims) I wonder where the devil my slippers are!
-
Eliza looks at him darkly; then rises suddenly and leaves the room.
Higgins yawns again, and resumes his song.
Pickering returns, with the contents of the letter-box in his hand.
-
PICKERING. Only circulars, and this coroneted billet-doux for you.
(He throws the circulars into the fender, and posts himself on
the hearthrug, with his back to the grate).
HIGGINS (glancing at the billet-doux) Money-lender. (He throws the
letter after the circulars).
-
Eliza returns with a pair of large down-at-heel slippers. She places
them on the carpet before Higgins, and sits as before without a word.
-
HIGGINS (yawning again) Oh Lord! What an evening! What a crew! What
a silly tomfoolery! (He raises his shoe to unlace it, and
catches sight of the slippers. He stops unlacing and looks at
them as if they had appeared there of their own accord). Oh!
theyre there, are they?
PICKERING (stretching himself) Well, I feel a bit tired. It's been
a long day. The garden party, a dinner party, and the opera!
Rather too much of a good thing. But youve won your bet,
Higgins. Eliza did the trick, and something to spare, eh?
HIGGINS (fervently) Thank God it's over!
-
Eliza flinches violently; but they take no notice of her; and she
recovers herself and sits stonily as before.
-
PICKERING. Were you nervous at the garden party? I was. Eliza
didnt seem a bit nervous.
HIGGINS. Oh, she wasnt nervous. I knew she'd be all right. No: it's
the strain of putting the job through all these months that has
told on me. It was interesting enough at first, while we were
at the phonetics; but after that I got deadly sick of it. If I
hadnt backed myself to do it I should have chucked the whole
thing up two months ago. It was a silly notion: the whole thing
has been a bore.
PICKERING. Oh come! the garden party was frightfully exciting. My
heart began beating like anything.
HIGGINS. Yes, for the first three minutes. But when I saw we were
going to win hands down, I felt like a bear in a cage, hanging
about doing nothing. The dinner was worse: sitting gorging
there for over an hour, with nobody but a damned fool of a
fashionable woman to talk to! I tell you, Pickering, never
again for me. No more artificial duchesses. The whole thing has
been simple purgatory.
PICKERING. Youve never been broken in properly to the social
routine. (Strolling over to the piano) I rather enjoy dipping
into it occasionally myself: it makes me feel young again.
Anyhow, it was a great success: an immense success. I was quite
frightened once or twice because Eliza was doing it so well.
You see, lots of the real people cant do it at all: theyre such
fools that they think style comes by nature to people in their
position; and so they never learn. Theres always something
professional about doing a thing superlatively well.
HIGGINS. Yes: thats what drives me mad: the silly people dont know
their own silly business. (Rising) However, it's over and done
with; and now I can go to bed at last without dreading
tomorrow.
-
Eliza's beauty becomes murderous.
-
PICKERING. I think I shall turn in too. Still, it's been a great
occasion: a triumph for you. Goodnight. (He goes).
HIGGINS (following him) Goodnight. (Over his shoulder, at the door)
Put out the lights, Eliza; and tell Mrs Pearce not to make
coffee for me in the morning: I'll take tea. (He goes out).
-
Eliza tries to control herself and feel indifferent as she rises and
walks across to the hearth to switch off the lights. By the time she
gets there she is on the point of screaming. She sits down in
Higgins's chair and holds on hard to the arms. Finally she gives way
and flings herself furiously on the floor, raging.
-
HIGGINS (in despairing wrath outside) What the devil have I done
with my slippers? (He appears at the door).
LIZA (snatching up the slippers, and hurling them at him one after
the other with all her force) There are your slippers. And
there. Take your slippers; and may you never have a day's luck
with them!
HIGGINS (astounded) What on earth-! (He comes to her). Whats the
matter? Get up. (He pulls her up). Anything wrong?
LIZA (breathless) Nothing wrong- with you. Ive won your bet for
you, havnt I? Thats enough for you. I dont matter, I suppose.
HIGGINS. You won my bet! You! Presumptuous insect! I won it. What
did you throw those slippers at me for?
LIZA. Because I wanted to smash your face. I'd like to kill you,
you selfish brute. Why didnt you leave me where you picked me
out of- in the gutter? You thank God it's all over, and that
now you can throw me back again there, do you? (She crisps her
fingers frantically).
HIGGINS (looking at her in cool wonder) The creature is nervous,
after all.
LIZA (gives a suffocated scream of fury, and instinctively darts
her nails at his face)!!
HIGGINS (catching her wrists) Ah! would you? Claws in, you cat. How
dare you shew your temper to me? Sit down and be quiet. (He
throws her roughly into the easy-chair).
LIZA (crushed by superior strength and weight) Whats to become of
me? Whats to become of me?
HIGGINS. How the devil do I know whats to become of you? What does
it matter what becomes of you?
LIZA. You dont care. I know you dont care. You wouldnt care if I
was dead. I'm nothing to you- not so much as them slippers.
HIGGINS (thundering) Those slippers.
LIZA (with bitter submission) Those slippers. I didnt think it made
any difference now.
-
A pause, Eliza hopeless and crushed. Higgins a little uneasy.
-
HIGGINS (in his loftiest manner) Why have you begun going on like
this? May I ask whether you complain of your treatment here?
LIZA. No.
HIGGINS. Has anybody behaved badly to you? Colonel Pickering? Mrs
Pearce? Any of the servants?
LIZA. No.
HIGGINS. I presume you dont pretend that I have treated you badly?
LIZA. No.
HIGGINS. I am glad to hear it. (He moderates his tone). Perhaps
youre tired after the strain of the day. Will you have a glass
of champagne? (He moves towards the door).
LIZA. No. (Recollecting her manners) Thank you.
HIGGINS (good-humored again) This has been coming on you for some
days. I suppose it was natural for you to be anxious about the
garden party. But thats all over now. (He pats her kindly on
the shoulder. She writhes). Theres nothing more to worry about.
LIZA. No. Nothing more for you to worry about. (She suddenly rises
and gets away from him by going to the piano bench, where she
sits and hides her face). Oh God! I wish I was dead.
HIGGINS (staring after her in sincere surprise) Why? In Heaven's
name, why? (Reasonably, going to her) Listen to me, Eliza. All
this irritation is purely subjective.
LIZA. I dont understand. I'm too ignorant.
HIGGINS. It's only imagination. Low spirits and nothing else.
Nobody's hurting you. Nothing's wrong. You go to bed like a
good girl and sleep it off. Have a little cry and say your
prayers: that will make you comfortable.
LIZA. I heard your prayers. "Thank God it's all over!"
HIGGINS (impatiently) Well, dont you thank God it's all over? Now
you are free and can do what you like.
LIZA (pulling herself together in desperation) What am I fit for?
What have you left me fit for? Where am I to go? What am I to
do? Whats to become of me?
HIGGINS (enlightened, but not at all impressed) Oh thats whats
worrying you, is it? (He thrusts his hands into his pockets,
and walks about in his usual manner, rattling the contents of
his pockets, as if condescending to a trivial subject out of
pure kindness). I shouldnt bother about it if I were you. I
should imagine you wont have much difficulty in settling
yourself somewhere or other, though I hadnt quite realized that
you were going away. (She looks quickly at him: he does not
look at her, but examines the dessert stand on the piano and
decides that he will eat an apple). You might marry, you know.
(He bites a large piece out of the apple and munches it
noisily). You see, Eliza, all men are not confirmed old
bachelors like me and the Colonel. Most men are the marrying
sort (poor devils!); and youre not bad-looking: it's quite a
pleasure to look at you sometimes- not now, of course, because
youre crying and looking as ugly as the very devil; but when
youre all right and quite yourself, youre what I should call
attractive. That is, to the people in the marrying line, you
understand. You go to bed and have a good nice rest; and then
get up and look at yourself in the glass; and you wont feel so
cheap.
-
Eliza again looks at him, speechless, and does not stir.
The look is quite lost on him: he eats his apple with a dreamy
expression of happiness, as it is quite a good one.
-
HIGGINS (a genial afterthought occurring to him) I daresay my
mother could find some chap or other who would do very well.
LIZA. We were above that at the corner of Tottenham Court Road.
HIGGINS (waking up) What do you mean?
LIZA. I sold flowers. I didnt sell myself. Now youve made a lady of
me I'm not fit to sell anything else. I wish youd left me where
you found me.
HIGGINS (slinging the core of the apple decisively into the grate)
Tosh, Eliza. Dont you insult human relations by dragging all
this cant about buying and selling into it. You neednt marry
the fellow if you dont like him.
LIZA. What else am I to do?
HIGGINS. Oh, lots of things. What about your old idea of a
florist's shop? Pickering could set you up in one: he has lots
of money. (Chuckling) He'll have to pay for all those togs you
have been wearing today; and that, with the hire of the
jewellery, will make a big hole in two hundred pounds. Why, six
months ago you would have thought it the millennium to have a
flower shop of your own. Come! youll be all right. I must clear
off to bed: I'm devilish sleepy. By the way, I came down for
something: I forget what it was.
LIZA. Your slippers.
HIGGINS. Oh yes, of course. You shied them at me. (He picks them
up, and is going out when she rises and speaks to him).
LIZA. Before you go, sir-
HIGGINS (dropping the slippers in his surprise at her calling him
Sir) Eh?
LIZA. Do my clothes belong to me or to Colonel Pickering?
HIGGINS (coming back into the room as if her question were the very
climax of unreason) What the devil use would they be to
Pickering?
LIZA. He might want them for the next girl you pick up to
experiment on.
HIGGINS (shocked and hurt) Is that the way you feel towards us?
LIZA. I dont want to hear anything more about that. All I want to
know is whether anything belongs to me. My own clothes were
burnt.
HIGGINS. But what does it matter? Why need you start bothering
about that in the middle of the night?
LIZA. I want to know what I may take away with me. I dont want to
be accused of stealing.
HIGGINS (now deeply wounded) Stealing! You shouldnt have said that,
Eliza. That shews a want of feeling.
LIZA. I'm sorry. I'm only a common ignorant girl; and in my station
I have to be careful. There cant be any feelings between the
like of you and the like of me. Please will you tell me what
belongs to me and what doesnt?
HIGGINS (very sulky) You may take the whole damned houseful if you
like. Except the jewels. Theyre hired. Will that satisfy you?
(He turns on his heel and is about to go in extreme dudgeon).
LIZA (drinking in his emotion like nectar, and nagging him to
provoke a further supply) Stop, please. (She takes off her
jewels). Will you take these to your room and keep them safe? I
dont want to run the risk of their being missing.
HIGGINS (furious) Hand them over. (She puts them into his hands).
If these belonged to me instead of to the jeweller, I'd ram
them down your ungrateful throat. (He perfunctorily thrusts
them into his pockets, unconsciously decorating himself with
the protruding ends of the chains).
LIZA (taking a ring off) This ring isnt the jeweller's: it's the
one you bought me in Brighton. I dont want it now. (Higgins
dashes the ring violently into the fireplace, and turns on her
so threateningly that she crouches over the piano with her
hands over her face, and exclaims) Dont you hit me.
HIGGINS. Hit you! You infamous creature, how dare you accuse me of
such a thing? It is you who have hit me. You have wounded me to
the heart.
LIZA (thrilling with hidden joy) I'm glad. Ive got a little of my
own back, anyhow.
HIGGINS (with dignity, in his finest professional style) You have
caused me to lose my temper: a thing that has hardly ever
happened to me before. I prefer to say nothing more to-night. I
am going to bed.
LIZA (pertly) Youd better leave a note for Mrs Pearce about the
coffee; for she wont be told by me.
HIGGINS (formally) Damn Mrs Pearce; and damn the coffee; and damn
you; and damn my own folly in having lavished my hard-earned
knowledge and the treasure of my regard and intimacy on a
heartless guttersnipe. (He goes out with impressive decorum,
and spoils it by slamming the door savagely).
-
Eliza smiles for the first time; expresses her feelings by a wild
pantomine in which an imitation of Higgins's exit is confused with her
own triumph; and finally goes down on her knees on the hearthrug to
look for the ring.
ACT_FIVE
ACT FIVE
-
MRS HIGGINS'S drawing room. She is at her writing-table as before.
The parlor-maid comes in.
-
THE PARLOR-MAID (at the door) Mr Henry, maam, is downstairs with
Colonel Pickering.
MRS HIGGINS. Well, shew them up.
THE PARLOR-MAID. Theyre using the telephone, maam. Telephoning to
the police, I think.
MRS HIGGINS. What!
THE PARLOR-MAID (coming further in and lowering her voice) Mr Henry
is in a state, maam. I thought I'd better tell you.
MRS HIGGINS. If you had told me that Mr Henry was not in a state it
would have been more surprising. Tell them to come up when
theyve finished with the police. I suppose he's lost something.
THE PARLOR-MAID. Yes, maam (going).
MRS HIGGINS. Go upstairs and tell Miss Doolittle that Mr Henry and
the Colonel are here. Ask her not to come down til I send for
her.
THE PARLOR-MAID. Yes, maam.
-
Higgins bursts in. He is, as the parlor-maid has said, in a state.
-
HIGGINS. Look here, mother: heres a confounded thing!
MRS HIGGINS. Yes, dear. Good morning. (He checks his impatience and
kisses her, whilst the parlor-maid goes out). What is it?
HIGGINS. Eliza's bolted.
MRS HIGGINS (calmly continuing her writing) You must have
frightened her.
HIGGINS. Frightened her! nonsense! She was left last night, as
usual, to turn out the lights and all that; and instead of
going to bed she changed her clothes and went right off: her
bed wasnt slept in. She came in a cab for her things before
seven this morning; and that fool Mrs Pearce let her have them
without telling me a word about it. What am I to do?
MRS HIGGINS. Do without, I'm afraid, Henry. The girl has a perfect
right to leave if she chooses.
HIGGINS (wandering distractedly across the room) But I cant find
anything. I dont know what appointments Ive got. I'm-
(Pickering comes in. Mrs Higgins puts down her pen and turns
away from the writing-table).
PICKERING (shaking hands) Good morning, Mrs Higgins. Has Henry told
you? (He sits down on the ottoman).
HIGGINS. What does that ass of an inspector say? Have you offered a
reward?
MRS HIGGINS (rising in indignant amazement) You dont mean to say
you have set the police after Eliza.
HIGGINS. Of course. What are the police for? What else could we do?
(He sits in the Elizabethan chair).
PICKERING. The inspector made a lot of difficulties. I really think
he suspected us of some improper purpose.
MRS HIGGINS. Well, of course he did. What right have you to go to
the police and give the girl's name as if she were a thief, or
a lost umbrella, or something? Really! (She sits down again,
deeply vexed).
HIGGINS. But we want to find her.
PICKERING. We cant let her go like this, you know, Mrs Higgins.
What were we to do?
MRS HIGGINS. You have no more sense, either of you, than two
children. Why-
-
The parlor-maid comes in and breaks off the conversation.
-
THE PARLOR-MAID. Mr Henry: a gentleman wants to see you very
particular. He's been sent on from Wimpole Street.
HIGGINS. Oh, bother! I cant see anyone now. Who is it?
THE PARLOR-MAID. A Mr Doolittle, sir.
PICKERING. Doolittle! Do you mean the dustman?
THE PARLOR-MAID. Dustman! Oh no, sir: a gentleman.
HIGGINS (springing up excitedly) By George, Pick, it's some
relative of hers that she's gone to. Somebody we know nothing
about. (To the parlor-maid) Send him up, quick.
THE PARLOR-MAID. Yes, sir. (She goes).
HIGGINS (eagerly, going to his mother) Genteel relatives! now we
shall hear something. (He sits down in the Chippendale chair).
MRS HIGGINS. Do you know any of her people?
PICKERING. Only her father: the fellow we told you about.
THE PARLOR-MAID (announcing) Mr Doolittle. (She withdraws).
-
Doolittle enters. He is brilliantly dressed ina new fashionable
frock-coat, with white waistcoat and grey trousers. A flower in his
buttonhole, a dazzling silk hat, and patent leather shoes complete the
effect. He is too concerned with the business he has come on to notice
Mrs Higgins. He walks straight to Higgins, and accosts him with
vehement reproach.
-
DOOLITTLE (indicating his own person) See here! Do you see this?
You done this.
HIGGINS. Done what, man?
DOOLITTLE. This, I tell you. Look at it. Look at this hat. Look at
this coat.
PICKERING. Has Eliza been buying you clothes?
DOOLITTLE. Eliza! not she. Why would she buy me clothes?
MRS HIGGINS. Good morning, Mr Doolittle. Wont you sit down?
DOOLITTLE (taken aback as he becomes conscious that he has
forgotten his hostess) Asking your pardon, maam. (He approaches
her and shakes her proffered hand.) Thank you. (He sits down on
the ottoman, on Pickering's right). I am that full of what has
happened to me that I cant think of anything else.
HIGGINS. What the dickens has happened to you?
DOOLITTLE. I shouldnt mind if it had only happened to me: anything
might happen to anybody and nobody to blame but Providence, as
you might say. But this is something that you done to me: yes,
you, Henry Higgins.
HIGGINS. Have you found Eliza? Thats the point.
DOOLITTLE. Have you lost her?
HIGGINS. Yes.
DOOLITTLE. You have all the luck, you have. I aint found her; but
she'll find me quick enough now after what you done to me.
MRS HIGGINS. But what has my son done to you, Mr Doolittle?
DOOLITTLE. Done to me! Ruined me. Destroyed my happiness. Tied me
up and delivered me into the hands of middle class morality.
HIGGINS (rising intolerantly and standing over Doolittle) Youre
raving. Youre drunk. Youre mad. I gave you five pounds. After
that I had two conversations with you, at half-a-crown an hour.
Ive never seen you since.
DOOLITTLE. Oh! Drunk! am I? Mad? am I? Tell me this. Did you or did
you not write a letter to an old blighter in America that was
giving five millions to found Moral Reform Societies all over
the world, and that wanted you to invent a universal language
for him?
HIGGINS. What! Ezra D. Wannafeller! He's dead. (He sits down again
carelessly).
DOOLITTLE. Yes: he's dead; and I'm done for. Now did you or did you
not write a letter to him to say that the most original
moralist at present in England, to the best of your knowledge,
was Alfred Doolittle, a common dustman?
HIGGINS. Oh, after your first visit I remember making some silly
joke of the kind.
DOOLITTLE. Ah! you may well call it a silly joke. It put the lid on
me right enough. Just give him the chance he wanted to shew
that Americans is not like us: that they recognize and respect
merit in every class of life, however humble. Them words is in
his blooming will, in which, Henry Higgins, thanks to your
silly joking, he leaves me a share in his Pre-digested Cheese
Trust worth three thousand a year on condition that I lecture
for his Wannafeller Moral Reform World League as often as they
ask me up to six times a year.
HIGGINS. The devil he does! Whew! (Brightening suddenly) What a
lark!
PICKERING. A safe thing for you, Doolittle. They wont ask you
twice.
DOOLITTLE. It aint the lecturing I mind. I'll lecture them blue in
the face, I will, and not turn a hair. It's making a gentleman
of me that I object to. Who asked him to make a gentleman of
me? I was happy. I was free. I touched pretty nigh everybody
for money when I wanted it, same as I touched you, Henry
Higgins. Now I am worrited; tied neck and heels; and everybody
touches me for money. It's a fine thing for you, says my
solicitor. Is it? says I. You mean it's a good thing for you, I
says. When I was a poor man and had a solicitor once when they
found a pram in the dust cart, he got me off, and got shut of
me and got me shut of him as quick as he could. Same with the
doctors: used to shove me out of the hospital before I could
hardly stand on my legs, and nothing to pay. Now they finds out
that I'm not a healthy man and cant live unless they looks
after me twice a day. In the house I'm not let do a hand's turn
for myself: somebody else must do it and touch me for it. A
year ago I hadnt a relative in the world except two or three
that wouldnt speak to me. Now Ive fifty, and not a decent
week's wages among the lot of them. I have to live for others
and not for myself: thats middle class morality. You talk of
losing Eliza. Dont you be anxious: I bet she's on my doorstep
by this: she that could support herself easy by selling flowers
if I wasnt respectable. And the next one to touch me will be
you, Henry Higgins. I'll have to learn to speak middle class
language from you, instead of speaking proper English. Thats
where you come in; and I daresay thats what you done it for.
MRS HIGGINS. But, my dear Mr Doolittle, you need not suffer all
this if you are really in earnest. Nobody can force you to
accept this bequest. You can repudiate it. Isnt that so,
Colonel Pickering?
PICKERING. I believe so.
DOOLITTLE (softening his manner in deference to her sex) Thats the
tragedy of it, maam. It's easy to say chuck it; but I havnt the
nerve. Which of us has? We're all intimidated. Intimidated,
maam: thats what we are. What is there for me if I chuck it but
the workhouse in my old age? I have to dye my hair already to
keep my job as a dustman. If I was one of the deserving poor,
and had put by a bit, I could chuck it; but then why should I,
acause the deserving poor might as well be millionaires for all
the happiness they ever has. They dont know what happiness is.
But I, as one of the undeserving poor, have nothing between me
and the pauper's uniform but this here blasted three thousand a
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year that shoves me into the middle class. (Excuse the
expression, maam; youd use it yourself if you had my
provocation.) Theyve got you every way you turn: it's a choice
between the Skilly of the workhouse and the Char Bydis of the
middle class; and I havnt the nerve for the workhouse.
Intimidated: thats what I am. Broke. Bought up. Happier
men than me will call for my dust, and touch me for their tip;
and I'll look on helpless, and envy them. And thats what your
son has brought me to. (He is overcome by emotion).
MRS HIGGINS. Well, I'm very glad youre not going to do anything
foolish, Mr Doolittle. For this solves the problem of Eliza's
future. You can provide for her now.
DOOLITTLE (with melancholy resignation) Yes, maam: I'm expected to
provide for everyone now, out of three thousand a year.
HIGGINS (jumping up) Nonsense! he cant provide for her. He shant
provide for her. She doesnt belong to him. I paid him five
pounds for her. Doolittle: either youre an honest man or a
rogue.
DOOLITTLE (tolerantly) A little of both, Henry, like the rest of
us: a little of both.
HIGGINS. Well, you took that money for the girl; and you have no
right to take her as well.
MRS HIGGINS. Henry: dont be absurd. If you want to know where Eliza
is, she is upstairs.
HIGGINS (amazed) Upstairs!!! Then I shall jolly soon fetch her
downstairs. (He makes resolutely for the door).
MRS HIGGINS (rising and following him) Be quiet, Henry. Sit down.
HIGGINS. I-
MRS HIGGINS. Sit down, dear; and listen to me.
HIGGINS. Oh very well, very well, very well. (He throws himself
ungraciously on the ottoman, with his face towards the
windows). But I think you might have told us this half an hour
ago.
MRS HIGGINS. Eliza came to me this morning. She passed the night
partly walking about in a rage, partly trying to throw herself
into the river and being afraid to, and partly in the Carlton
Hotel. She told me of the brutal way you two treated her.
HIGGINS (bounding up again) What!
PICKERING (rising also) My dear Mrs Higgins, she's been telling you
stories. We didnt treat her brutally. We hardly said a word to
her; and we parted on particularly good terms. (Turning on
Higgins) Higgins: did you bully her after I went to bed?
HIGGINS. Just the other way about. She threw my slippers in my
face. She behaved in the most outrageous way. I never gave her
the slightest provocation. The slippers came bang into my face
the moment I entered the room- before I had uttered a word. And
used perfectly awful language.
PICKERING (astonished) But why? What did we do to her?
MRS HIGGINS. I think I know pretty well what you did. The girl is
naturally rather affectionate, I think. Isnt she, Mr Doolittle?
DOOLITTLE. Very tender-hearted, maam. Takes after me.
MRS HIGGINS. Just so. She had become attached to you both. She
worked very hard for you, Henry. I dont think you quite realize
what anything in the nature of brain work means to a girl like
that. Well, it seems that when the great day of trial came, and
she did this wonderful thing for you without making a single
mistake, you two sat there and never said a word to her, but
talked together of how glad you were that it was all over and
how you had been bored with the whole thing. And then you were
surprised because she threw your slippers at you! I should
have thrown the fire-irons at you.
HIGGINS. We said nothing except that we were tired and wanted to go
to bed. Did we, Pick?
PICKERING (shrugging his shoulders) That was all.
MRS HIGGINS (ironically) Quite sure?
PICKERING. Absolutely. Really, that was all.
MRS HIGGINS. You didnt thank her, or pet her, or admire her, or
tell her how splendid she'd been.
HIGGINS (impatiently) But she knew all about that. We didnt make
speeches to her, if thats what you mean.
PICKERING (conscience stricken) Perhaps we were a little
inconsiderate. Is she very angry?
MRS HIGGINS (returning to her place at the writing-table) Well, I'm
afraid she wont go back to Wimpole Street, especially now that
Mr Doolittle is able to keep up the position you have thrust on
her; but she says she is quite willing to meet you on friendly
terms and to let bygones be bygones.
HIGGINS (furious) Is she, by George? Ho!
MRS HIGGINS. If you promise to behave yourself, Henry, I'll ask her
to come down. If not, go home; for you have taken up quite
enough of my time.
HIGGINS. Oh, all right. Very well. Pick: you behave yourself. Let
us put on our best Sunday manners for this creature that we
picked out of the mud. (He flings himself sulkily into the
Elizabethan chair).
DOOLITTLE (remonstrating) Now, now, Henry Higgins! have some
consideration for my feelings as a middle class man.
MRS HIGGINS. Remember your promise, Henry. (She presses the
bell-button on the writing-table). Mr Doolittle: will you be so
good as to step out on the balcony for a moment. I dont want
Eliza to have the shock of your news until she has made it up
with these two gentlemen. Would you mind?
DOOLITTLE. As you wish, lady. Anything to help Henry to keep her
off my hands. (He disappears through the window).
-
The parlor-maid answers the bell. Pickering sits down in Doolittle's
place.
-
MRS HIGGINS. Ask Miss Doolittle to come down, please.
THE PARLOR-MAID. Yes, maam. (She goes out).
MRS HIGGINS. Now, Henry: be good.
HIGGINS. I am behaving myself perfectly.
PICKERING. He is doing his best, Mrs Higgins.
-
A pause. Higgins throws back his head; stretches out his legs; and
begins to whistle.
-
MRS HIGGINS. Henry, dearest, you dont look at all nice in that
attitude.
HIGGINS (pulling himself together) I was not trying to look nice,
mother.
MRS HIGGINS. It doesnt matter, dear. I only wanted to make you
speak.
HIGGINS. Why?
MRS HIGGINS. Because you cant speak and whistle at the same time.
-
Higgins groans. Another very trying pause.
-
HIGGINS (springing up, out of patience) Where the devil is that
girl? Are we to wait here all day?
-
Eliza enters, sunny, self-possessed, and giving a staggeringly
convincing exhibition of ease of manner. She carries a little
work-basket, and is very much at home. Pickering is too much taken
aback to rise.
-
LIZA. How do you do, Professor Higgins? Are you quite well?
HIGGINS (choking) Am I- (He can say no more).
LIZA. But of course you are: you are never ill. So glad to see you
again, Colonel Pickering. (He rises hastily; and they shake
hands). Quite chilly this morning, isnt it? (She sits down on
his left. He sits beside her).
HIGGINS. Dont you dare try this game on me. I taught it to you; and
it doesnt take me in. Get up and come home; and dont be a fool.
-
Eliza takes a piece of needlework from her basket, and begins to
stitch at it, without taking the least notice of this outburst.
-
MRS HIGGINS. Very nicely put, indeed, Henry. No woman could resist
such an invitation.
HIGGINS. You let her alone, mother. Let her speak for herself. You
will jolly soon see whether she has an idea that I havnt put
into her head or a word that I havnt put into her mouth. I tell
you I have created this thing out of the squashed cabbage
leaves of Covent Garden; and now she pretends to play the fine
lady with me.
MRS HIGGINS (placidly) Yes, dear; but youll sit down, wont you?
-
Higgins sits down again, savagely.
-
LIZA (to Pickering, taking no apparent notice of Higgins, and
working away deftly) Will you drop me altogether now that the
experiment is over, Colonel Pickering?
PICKERING. Oh dont. You mustnt think of it as an experiment. It
shocks me, somehow.
LIZA. Oh, I'm only a squashed cabbage leaf-
PICKERING (impulsively) No.
LIZA (continuing quietly)- but I owe so much to you that I should
be very unhappy if you forgot me.
PICKERING. It's very kind of you to say so, Miss Doolittle.
LIZA. It's not because you paid for my dresses. I know you are
generous to everybody with money. But it was from you that I
learnt really nice manners; and that is what makes one a lady,
isnt it? You see it was so very difficult for me with the
example of Professor Higgins always before me. I was brought up
to be just like him, unable to control myself, and using bad
language on the slightest provocation. And I should never have
known that ladies and gentlemen didnt behave like that if you
hadnt been there.
HIGGINS. Well!!
PICKERING. Oh, thats only his way, you know. He doesnt mean it.
LIZA. Oh, I didnt mean it either, when I was a flower girl. It was
only my way. But you see I did it; and thats what makes the
difference after all.
PICKERING. No doubt. Still, he taught you to speak; and I couldnt
have done that, you know.
LIZA (trivially) Of course: that is his profession.
HIGGINS. Damnation!
LIZA (continuing) It was just like learning to dance in the
fashionable way: there was nothing more than that in it. But do
you know what began my real education?
PICKERING. What?
LIZA (stopping her work for a moment) Your calling me Miss
Doolittle that day when I first came to Wimpole Street. That
was the beginning of self-respect for me. (She resumes her
stitching). And there were a hundred little things you never
noticed, because they came naturally to you. Things about
standing up and taking off your hat and opening doors-
PICKERING. Oh, that was nothing.
LIZA. Yes: things that shewed you thought and felt about me as if I
were something better than a scullery-maid; though of course I
know you would have been just the same to a scullery-maid if
she had been let into the drawing room. You never took off your
boots in the dining room when I was there.
PICKERING. You mustnt mind that. Higgins takes off his boots all
over the place.
LIZA. I know. I am not blaming him. It is his way, isnt it? But it
made such a difference to me that you didnt do it. You see,
really and truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up (the
dressing and the proper way of speaking, and so on), the
difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she
behaves, but how she's treated. I shall always be a flower girl
to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower
girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you,
because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.
MRS HIGGINS. Please dont grind your teeth, Henry.
PICKERING. Well, this is really very nice of you, Miss Doolittle.
LIZA. I should like you to call me Eliza, now, if you would.
PICKERING. Thank you. Eliza, of course.
LIZA. And I should like Professor Higgins to call me Miss
Doolittle.
HIGGINS. I'll see you damned first.
MRS HIGGINS. Henry! Henry!
PICKERING (laughing) Why dont you slang back at him? Dont stand it.
It would do him a lot of good.
LIZA. I cant. I could have done it once; but now I cant go back to
it. Last night, when I was wandering about, a girl spoke to me;
and I tried to get back into the old way with her; but it was
no use. You told me, you know, that when a child is brought to
a foreign country, it picks up the language in a few weeks, and
forgets its own. Well, I am a child in your country. I have
forgotten my own language, and can speak nothing but yours.
Thats the real break-off with the corner of Tottenham Court
Road. Leaving Wimpole Street finishes it.
PICKERING (much alarmed) Oh! but youre coming back to Wimpole
Street, arnt you? Youll forgive Higgins?
HIGGINS (rising) Forgive! Will she, by George! Let her go. Let her
find out how she can get on without us. She will relapse into
the gutter in three weeks without me at her elbow.
-
Doolittle appears at the centre window. With a look of dignified
reproach at Higgins, he comes slowly and silently to his daughter,
who, with her back to the window, is unconscious of his approach.
-
PICKERING. He's incorrigible, Eliza. You wont relapse, will you?
LIZA. No: not now. Never again. I have learnt my lesson. I dont
believe I could utter one of the old sounds if I tried.
(Doolittle touches her on her left shoulder. She drops her
work, losing her self-possession utterly at the spectacle of
her father's splendor) A-a-a-a-a-ah-ow-ooh!
HIGGINS (with a crow of triumph) Aha! Just so. A-a-a-a-ahowooh!
A-a-a-a-ahowooh! A-a-a-a-ahowooh! Victory! Victory! (He throws
himself on the divan, folding his arms, and spraddling
arrogantly).
DOOLITTLE. Can you blame the girl? Dont look at me like that,
Eliza. It aint my fault. Ive come into some money.
LIZA. You must have touched a millionaire this time, dad.
DOOLITTLE. I have. But I'm dressed something special today. I'm
going to St George's, Hanover Square. Your stepmother is going
to marry me.
LIZA (angrily) Youre going to let yourself down to marry that low
common woman!
PICKERING (quietly) He ought to, Eliza. (To Doolittle) Why has she
changed her mind?
DOOLITTLE (sadly) Intimidated, Governor. Intimidated. Middle class
morality claims its victim. Wont you put on your hat, Liza, and
come and see me turned off?
LIZA. If the Colonel says I must, I- I'll (almost sobbing) I'll
demean myself. And get insulted for my pains, like enough.
DOOLITTLE. Dont be afraid: she never comes to words with anyone
now, poor woman! respectability has broke all the spirit out of
her.
PICKERING (squeezing Eliza's elbow gently) Be kind to them, Eliza.
Make the best of it.
LIZA (forcing a little smile for him through her vexation) Oh well,
just to shew theres no ill feeling. I'll be back in a moment.
(She goes out).
DOOLITTLE (sitting down beside Pickering) I feel uncommon nervous
about the ceremony, Colonel. I wish youd come and see me
through it.
PICKERING. But youve been through it before, man. You were married
to Eliza's mother.
DOOLITTLE. Who told you that, Colonel?
PICKERING. Well, nobody told me. But I concluded- naturally-
DOOLITTLE. No: that aint the natural way, Colonel: it's only the
middle class way. My way was always the undeserving way. But
dont say nothing to Eliza. She dont know: I always had a
delicacy about telling her.
PICKERING. Quite right. We'll leave it so, if you dont mind.
DOOLITTLE. And youll come to the church, Colonel, and put me
through straight?
PICKERING. With pleasure. As far as a bachelor can.
MRS HIGGINS. May I come, Mr Doolittle? I should be very sorry to
miss your wedding.
DOOLITTLE. I should indeed be honored by your condescension, maam;
and my poor old woman would take it as a tremenjous compliment.
She's been very low, thinking of the happy days that are no
more.
MRS HIGGINS (rising) I'll order the carriage and get ready. (The
men rise, except Higgins). I shant be more than fifteen
minutes. (As she goes to the door Eliza comes in, hatted and
buttoning her gloves). I'm going to the church to see your
father married, Eliza. You had better come in the brougham with
me. Colonel Pickering can go on with the bridegroom.
-
Mrs Higgins goes out. Eliza comes to the middle of the room
between the centre window and the ottoman. Pickering joins her.
-
DOOLITTLE. Bridegroom! What a word! It makes a man realize his
position, somehow. (He takes up his hat and goes towards the
door).
PICKERING. Before I go, Eliza, do forgive Higgins and come back to
us.
LIZA. I dont think papa would allow me. Would you, dad?
DOOLITTLE (sad but magnanimous) They played you off very cunning,
Eliza, them two sportsmen. If it had been only one of them, you
could have nailed him. But you see, there was two; and one of
them chaperoned the other, as you might say. (To Pickering) It
was artful of you, Colonel; but I bear no malice: I should have
done the same myself. I been the victim of one woman after
another all my life; and I dont grudge you two getting the
better of Eliza. I shant interfere. It's time for us to go,
Colonel. So long, Henry. See you in St George's, Eliza. (He
goes out).
PICKERING (coaxing) Do stay with us, Eliza. (He follows Doolittle).
-
Eliza goes out on the balcony to avoid being alone with Higgins.
He rises and joins her there. She immediately comes back into the room
and makes for the door; but he goes along the balcony quickly and gets
his back to the door before she reaches it.
-
HIGGINS. Well, Eliza, youve had a bit of your own back, as you call
it. Have you had enough? and are you going to be reasonable? Or
do you want any more?
LIZA. You want me back only to pick up your slippers and put up
with your tempers and fetch and carry for you.
HIGGINS. I havnt said I wanted you back at all.
LIZA. Oh, indeed. Then what are we talking about?
HIGGINS. About you, not about me. If you come back I shall treat
you just as I have always treated you. I cant change my nature;
and I dont intend to change my manners. My manners are exactly
the same as Colonel Pickering's.
LIZA. Thats not true. He treats a flower girl as if she was a
duchess.
HIGGINS. And I treat a duchess as if she was a flower girl.
LIZA. I see. (She turns away composedly, and sits on the ottoman,
facing the window). The same to everybody.
HIGGINS. Just so.
LIZA. Like father.
HIGGINS (grinning, a little taken down) Without accepting the
comparison at all points, Eliza, it's quite true that your
father is not a snob, and that he will be quite at home in any
station of life to which his eccentric destiny may call him.
(Seriously) The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners
or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but
having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving
as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class
carriages, and one soul is as good as another.
LIZA. Amen. You are a born preacher.
HIGGINS (irritated) The question is not whether I treat you rudely,
but whether you ever heard me treat anyone else better.
LIZA (with sudden sincerity) I dont care how you treat me. I dont
mind your swearing at me. I shouldnt mind a black eye: Ive had
one before this. But (standing up and facing him) I wont be
passed over.
HIGGINS. Then get out of my way; for I wont stop for you. You talk
about me as if I were a motor bus.
LIZA. So you are a motor bus: all bounce and go, and no
consideration for anyone. But I can do without you: dont think
I cant.
HIGGINS. I know you can. I told you you could.
LIZA (wounded, getting away from him to the other side of the
ottoman with her face to the hearth) I know you did, you brute.
You wanted to get rid of me.
HIGGINS. Liar.
LIZA. Thank you. (She sits down with dignity).
HIGGINS. You never asked yourself, I suppose, whether I could do
without you.
LIZA (earnestly) Dont you try to get round me. Youll have to do
without me.
HIGGINS (arrogant) I can do without anybody. I have my own soul: my
own spark of divine fire. But (with sudden humility) I shall
miss you, Eliza. (He sits down near her on the ottoman). I have
learnt something from your idiotic notions: I confess that
humbly and gratefully. And I have grown accustomed to your
voice and appearance. I like them, rather.
LIZA. Well, you have both of them on your gramophone and in your
book of photographs. When you feel lonely without me, you can
turn the machine on. It's got no feelings to hurt.
HIGGINS. I cant turn your soul on. Leave me those feelings; and you
can take away the voice and the face. They are not you.
LIZA. Oh, you are a devil. You can twist the heart in a girl as
easy as some could twist her arms to hurt her. Mrs Pearce
warned me. Time and again she has wanted to leave you; and you
always got round her at the last minute. And you dont care a
bit for her. And you dont care a bit for me.
HIGGINS. I care for life, for humanity; and you are a part of it
that has come my way and been built into my house. What more
can you or anyone ask?
LIZA. I wont care for anybody that doesnt care for me.
HIGGINS. Commercial principles, Eliza. Like (reproducing her Covent
Garden pronunciation with professional exactness) s'yollin
voylets (selling violets), isnt it?
LIZA. Dont sneer at me. It's mean to sneer at me.
HIGGINS. I have never sneered in my life. Sneering doesnt become
either the human face or the human soul. I am expressing my
righteous contempt for Commercialism. I dont and wont trade in
affection. You call me a brute because you couldnt buy a claim
on me by fetching my slippers and finding my spectacles. You
were a fool: I think a woman fetching a man's slippers is a
disgusting sight: did I ever fetch your slippers? I think a
good deal more of you for throwing them in my face. No use
slaving for me and then saying you want to be cared for: who
cares for a slave? If you come back, come back for the sake of
good fellowship; for youll get nothing else. Youve had a
thousand times as much out of me as I have out of you; and if
you dare to set up your little dog's tricks of fetching and
carrying slippers against my creation of a Duchess Eliza, I'll
slam the door in your silly face.
LIZA. What did you do it for if you didnt care for me?
HIGGINS (heartily) Why, because it was my job.
LIZA. You never thought of the trouble it would make for me.
HIGGINS. Would the world ever have been made if its maker had been
afraid of making trouble? Making life means making trouble.
Theres only one way of escaping trouble; and thats killing
things. Cowards, you notice, are always shrieking to have
troublesome people killed.
LIZA. I'm no preacher: I dont notice things like that. I notice
that you dont notice me.
HIGGINS (jumping up and walking about intolerantly) Eliza: youre an
idiot. I waste the treasures of my Miltonic mind by spreading
them before you. Once for all, understand that I go my way and
do my work without caring twopence what happens to either of
us. I am not intimidated, like your father and your stepmother.
So you can come back or go to the devil: which you please.
LIZA. What am I to come back for?
HIGGINS (bouncing up on his knees on the ottoman and leaning over it
to her) For the fun of it. Thats why I took you on.
LIZA (with averted face) And you may throw me out to-morrow if I
dont do everything you want me to?
HIGGINS. Yes; and you may walk out to-morrow if I dont do
everything you want me to.
LIZA. And live with my stepmother?
HIGGINS. Yes, or sell flowers.
LIZA. Oh! if I only could go back to my flower basket! I should be
independent of both you and father and all the world! Why did
you take my independence from me? Why did I give it up? I'm a
slave now, for all my fine clothes.
HIGGINS. Not a bit. I'll adopt you as my daughter and settle money
on you if you like. Or would you rather marry Pickering?
LIZA (looking fiercely round at him) I wouldnt marry you if you
asked me; and youre nearer my age than what he is.
HIGGINS (gently) Than he is: not "than what he is."
LIZA (losing her temper and rising) I'll talk as I like. Youre not
my teacher now.
HIGGINS (reflectively) I dont suppose Pickering would, though. He's
as confirmed an old bachelor as I am.
LIZA. Thats not what I want; and dont you think it. Ive always had
chaps enough wanting me that way. Freddy Hill writes to me
twice and three times a day, sheets and sheets.
HIGGINS (disagreeably surprised) Damn his impudence! (He recoils
and finds himself sitting on his heels).
LIZA. He has a right to if he likes, poor lad. And he does love me.
HIGGINS (getting off the ottoman) You have no right to encourage
him.
LIZA. Every girl has a right to be loved.
HIGGINS. What! By fools like that?
LIZA. Freddy's not a fool. And if he's weak and poor and wants me,
may be he'd make me happier than my betters that bully me and
dont want me.
HIGGINS. Can he make anything of you? Thats the point.
LIZA. Perhaps I could make something of him. But I never thought of
us making anything of one another; and you never think of
anything else. I only want to be natural.
HIGGINS. In short, you want me to be as infatuated about you as
Freddy? Is that it?
LIZA. No I dont. Thats not the sort of feeling I want from you. And
dont you be too sure of yourself or of me. I could have been a
bad girl if I'd liked. Ive seen more of some things than you,
for all your learning. Girls like me can drag gentlemen down to
make love to them easy enough. And they wish each other dead
the next minute.
HIGGINS. Of course they do. Then what in thunder are we quarrelling
about?
LIZA (much troubled) I want a little kindness. I know I'm a common
ignorant girl, and you a book-learned gentleman; but I'm not
dirt under your feet. What I done (correcting herself) what I
did was not for the dresses and the taxis: I did it because we
were pleasant together and I come- came- to care for you; not
to want you to make love to me, and not forgetting the
difference between us, but more friendly like.
HIGGINS. Well, of course. Thats just how I feel. And how Pickering
feels. Eliza: youre a fool.
LIZA. Thats not a proper answer to give me (she sinks on the chair
at the writing-table in tears).
HIGGINS. It's all youll get until you stop being a common idiot. If
youre going to be a lady, youll have to give up feeling
neglected if the men you know dont spend half their time
snivelling over you and the other half giving you black eyes.
If you cant stand the coldness of my sort of life, and the
strain of it, go back to the gutter. Work til you are more a
brute than a human being; and then cuddle and squabble and
drink til you fall asleep. Oh, it's a fine life, the life of
the gutter. It's real: it's warm: it's violent: you can feel it
through the thickest skin: you can taste it and smell it
without any training or any work. Not like Science and
Literature and Classical Music and Philosophy and Art. You find
me cold, unfeeling, selfish, dont you? Very well: be off with
you to the sort of people you like. Marry some sentimental hog
or other with lots of money, and a thick pair of lips to kiss
you with and a thick pair of boots to kick you with. If you
cant appreciate what youve got, youd better get what you can
appreciate.
LIZA (desperate) Oh, you are a cruel tyrant. I cant talk to you:
you turn everything against me: I'm always in the wrong. But
you know very well all the time that youre nothing but a bully.
You know I cant go back to the gutter, as you call it, and that
I have no real friends in the world but you and the Colonel.
You know well I couldnt bear to live with a low common man
after you two; and it's wicked and cruel of you to insult me by
pretending I could. You think I must go back to Wimpole Street
because I have nowhere else to go but father's. But dont you be
too sure that you have me under your feet to be trampled on and
talked down. I'll marry Freddy, I will, as soon as he's able to
support me.
HIGGINS (sitting down beside her) Rubbish! you shall marry an
ambassador. You shall marry the Governor-General of India or
the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, or somebody who wants a
deputy-queen. I'm not goint to have my masterpiece thrown away
on Freddy.
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2010-05-10 21:16:51
LIZA. You think I like you to say that. But I havnt forgot what you
said a minute ago; and I wont be coaxed round as if I was a
baby or a puppy. If I cant have kindness, I'll have
independence.
HIGGINS. Independence? Thats middle class blasphemy. We are all
dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
LIZA (rising determinedly) I'll let you see whether I'm dependent
on you. If you can preach, I can teach. I'll go and be a
teacher.
HIGGINS. Whatll you teach, in heaven's name?
LIZA. What you taught me. I'll teach phonetics.
HIGGINS. Ha! ha! ha!
LIZA. I'll offer myself as an assistant to Professor Nepean.
HIGGINS (rising in a fury) What! That impostor! that humbug! that
toadying ignoramus! Teach him my methods! my discoveries! You
take one step in his direction and I'll wring your neck. (He
lays hands on her). Do you hear?
LIZA (defiantly non-resistant) Wring away. What do I care? I knew
youd strike me some day. (He lets her go, stamping with rage at
having forgotten himself, and recoils so hastily that he
stumbles back into his seat on the ottoman). Aha! Now I know
how to deal with you. What a fool I was not to think of it
before! You cant take away the knowledge you gave me. You said
I had a finer ear than you. And I can be civil and kind to
people, which is more than you can. Aha! Thats done you, Henry
Higgins, it has. Now I dont care that (snapping her fingers)
for your bullying and your big talk. I'll advertize it in the
papers that your duchess is only a flower girl that you taught,
and that she'll teach anybody to be a duchess just the same in
six months for a thousand guineas. Oh, when I think of myself
crawling under your feet and being trampled on and called
names, when all the time I had only to lift up my finger to be
as good as you, I could just kick myself.
HIGGINS (wondering at her) You damned impudent slut, you! But it's
better than snivelling; better than fetching slippers and
finding spectacles, isnt it? (Rising) By George, Eliza, I said
I'd make a woman of you; and I have. I like you like this.
LIZA. Yes: you turn round and make up to me now that I'm not afraid
of you, and can do without you.
HIGGINS. Of course I do, you little fool. Five minutes ago you were
like a millstone round my neck. Now youre a tower of strength:
a consort battleship. You and I and Pickering will be three old
bachelors together instead of only two men and a silly girl.
-
Mrs Higgins returns, dressed for the wedding. Eliza instantly
becomes cool and elegant.
-
MRS HIGGINS. The carriage is waiting, Eliza. Are you ready?
LIZA. Quite. Is the Professor coming?
MRS HIGGINS. Certainly not. He cant behave himself in church. He
makes remarks out loud all the time on the clergyman's
pronunciation.
LIZA. Then I shall not see you again, Professor. Goodbye. (She goes
to the door).
MRS HIGGINS (coming to Higgins) Goodbye, dear.
HIGGINS. Goodbye, mother. (He is about to kiss her, when he
recollects something). Oh, by the way, Eliza, order a ham and a
Stilton cheese, will you? And buy me a pair of reindeer gloves,
number eights, and a tie to match that new suit of mine, at
Eale & Binman's. You can choose the color. (His cheerful,
careless, vigorous voice shews that he is incorrigible.).
LIZA (disdainfully) Buy them yourself. (She sweeps out).
MRS HIGGINS. I'm afraid youve spoiled that girl, Henry. But never
mind, dear: I'll buy the tie and gloves.
HIGGINS. Oh, dont bother. She'll buy em all right enough. Goodbye.
-
* * * * * *
-
The rest of the story need not be shewn in action, and indeed, would
hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so enfeebled by their
lazy dependence on the ready-mades and reach-me-downs of the ragshop
in which Romance keeps its stock of "happy endings" to misfit all
stories. Now, the history of Eliza Doolittle, though called a
romance because the transfiguration it records seems exceedingly
improbable, is common enough. Such transfigurations have been achieved
by hundreds of resolutely ambitious young women since Nell Gwynne
set them the example by playing queens and fascinating kings in the
theatre in which she began by selling oranges. Nevertheless, people in
all directions have assumed, for no other reason than that she
became the heroine of a romance, that she must have married the hero
of it. This is unbearable, not only because her little drama, if acted
on such a thoughtless assumption, must be spoiled, but because the
true sequel is patent to anyone with a sense of human nature in
general, and of feminine instinct in particular.
Eliza, in telling Higgins she would not marry him if he asked her,
was not coquetting: she was announcing a well-considered decision.
When a bachelor interests, and dominates, and teaches, and becomes
important to a spinster, as Higgins with Eliza, she always, if she has
character enough to be capable of it, considers very seriously
indeed whether she will play for becoming that bachelor's wife,
especially if he is so little interested in marriage that a determined
and devoted woman might capture him if she set herself resolutely to
do it. Her decision will depend a good deal on whether she is really
free to choose; and that, again, will depend on her age and income. If
she is at the end of her youth, and has no security for her
livelihood, she will marry him because she must marry anybody who will
provide for her. But at Eliza's age a good-looking girl does not
feel that pressure: she feels free to pick and choose. She is
therefore guided by her instinct in the matter. Eliza's instinct tells
her not to marry Higgins. It does not tell her to give him up. It is
not in the slightest doubt as to his remaining one of the strongest
personal interests in her life. It would be very sorely strained if
there was another woman likely to supplant her with him. But as she
feels sure of him on that last point, she has no doubt at all as to
her course, and would not have any, even if the difference of twenty
years in age, which seems so great to youth, did not exist between
them.
As our own instincts are not appealed to by her conclusion, let us
see whether we cannot discover some reason in it. When Higgins excused
his indifference to young women on the ground that they had an
irresistible rival in his mother, he gave the clue to his inveterate
old-bachelordom. The case is uncommon only to the extent that
remarkable mothers are uncommon. If an imaginative boy has a
sufficiently rich mother who has intelligence, personal grace, dignity
of character without harshness, and a cultivated sense of the best art
of her time to enable her to make her house beautiful, she sets a
standard for him against which very few women can struggle besides
effecting for him a disengagement of his affections, his sense of
beauty, and his idealism from his specifically sexual impulses. This
makes him a standing puzzle to the huge number of uncultivated
people who have been brought up in tasteless homes by commonplace or
disagreeable parents, and to whom, consequently, literature, painting,
sculpture, music, and affectionate personal relations come as modes of
sex if they come at all. The word passion means nothing else to
them; and that Higgins could have a passion for phonetics and idealize
his mother instead of Eliza, would seem to them absurd and
unnatural. Nevertheless, when we look round and see that hardly anyone
is too ugly or disagreeable to find a wife or a husband if he or she
wants one, whilst many old maids and bachelors are above the average
in quality and culture, we cannot help suspecting that the
disentanglement of sex from the associations with which it is so
commonly confused, a disentanglement which persons of genius achieve
by sheer intellectual analysis, is sometimes produced or aided by
parental fascination.
Now, though Eliza was incapable of thus explaining to herself
Higgins's formidable powers of resistance to the charm that prostrated
Freddy at the first glance, she was instinctively aware that she could
never obtain a complete grip of him, or come between him and his
mother (the first necessity of the married woman). To put it
shortly, she knew that for some mysterious reason he had not the
makings of a married man in him, according to her conception of a
husband as one to whom she would be his nearest and fondest and
warmest interest. Even had there been no mother-rival, she would still
have refused to accept an interest in herself that was secondary to
philosophic interests. Had Mrs Higgins died, there would still have
been Milton and the Universal Alphabet. Landor's remark that to
those who have the greatest power of loving, love is a secondary
affair, would not have recommended Landor to Eliza. Put that along
with her resentment of Higgins's domineering superiority, and her
mistrust of his coaxing cleverness in getting round her and evading
her wrath when he had gone too far with his impetuous bullying, and
you will see that Eliza's instinct had good grounds for warning her
not to marry her Pygmalion.
And now, whom did Eliza marry? For if Higgins was a predestinate old
bachelor, she was most certainly not a predestinate old maid. Well,
that can be told very shortly to those who have not guessed it from
the indications she has herself given them.
Almost immediately after Eliza is stung into proclaiming her
considered determination not to marry Higgins, she mentions the fact
that young Mr Frederick Eynsford Hill is pouring out his love for
her daily through the post. Now Freddy is young, practically twenty
years younger than Higgins: he is a gentleman (or, as Eliza would
qualify him, a toff), and speaks like one; he is nicely dressed, is
treated by the Colonel as an equal, loves her unaffectedly, and is not
her master, nor ever likely to dominate her in spite of his
advantage of social standing. Eliza has no use for the foolish
romantic tradition that all women love to be mastered, if not actually
bullied and beaten. "When you go to women" says Nietzsche, "take
your whip with you." Sensible despots have never confined that
precaution to women: they have taken their whips with them when they
have dealt with men, and been slavishly idealized by the men over whom
they have flourished the whip much more than by women. No doubt
there are slavish women as well as slavish men; and women, like men,
admire those that are stronger than themselves. But to admire a strong
person and to live under that strong person's thumb are two
different things. The weak may not be admired and hero-worshipped; but
they are by no means disliked or shunned; and they never seem to
have the least difficulty in marrying people who are too good for
them. They may fail in emergencies; but life is not one long
emergency: it is mostly a string of situations for which no
exceptional strength is needed, and with which even rather weak people
can cope if they have a stronger partner to help them out.
Accordingly, it is a truth everywhere in evidence that strong
people, masculine or feminine, not only do not marry stronger
people, but do not shew any preference for them in selecting their
friends. When a lion meets another with a louder roar "the first
lion thinks the last a bore." The man or woman who feels strong enough
for two, seeks for every other quality in a partner than strength.
The converse is also true. Weak people want to marry strong people
who do not frighten them too much; and this often leads them to make
the mistake we describe metaphorically as "biting off more than they
can chew." They want too much for too little; and when the bargain
is unreasonable beyond all bearing, the union becomes impossible: it
ends in the weaker party being either discarded or borne as a cross,
which is worse. People who are not only weak, but silly or obtuse as
well, are often in these difficulties.
This being the state of human affairs, what is Eliza fairly sure
to do when she is placed between Freddy and Higgins? Will she look
forward to a lifetime of fetching Higgins's slippers or to a
lifetime of Freddy fetching hers? There can be no doubt about the
answer. Unless Freddy is biologically repulsive to her, and Higgins
biologically attractive to a degree that overwhelms all her other
instincts, she will, if she marries either of them, marry Freddy.
And that is just what Eliza did.
Complications ensued; but they were economic, not romantic. Freddy
had no money and no occupation. His mother's jointure, a last relic of
the opulence of Largelady Park, had enabled her to struggle along in
Earlscourt with an air of gentility, but not to procure any serious
secondary education for her children, much less give the boy a
profession. A clerkship at thirty shillings a week was beneath
Freddy's dignity, and extremely distasteful to him besides. His
prospects consisted of a hope that if he kept up appearances
somebody would do something for him. The something appeared vaguely to
his imagination as a private secretaryship or a sinecure of some sort.
To his mother it perhaps appeared as a marriage to some lady of
means who could not resist her boy's niceness. Fancy her feelings when
he married a flower girl who had become disclassed under extraordinary
circumstances which were now notorious!
It is true that Eliza's situation did not seem wholly ineligible.
Her father, though formerly a dustman, and now fantastically
disclassed, had become extremely popular in the smartest society by
a social talent which triumphed over every prejudice and every
disadvantage. Rejected by the middle class, which he loathed, he had
shot up at once into the highest circles by his wit, his dustmanship
(which he carried like a banner), and his Nietzschean transcendence of
good and evil. At intimate ducal dinners he sat on the right hand of
the Duchess; and in country houses he smoked in the pantry and was
made much of by the butler when he was not feeding in the dining
room and being consulted by cabinet ministers. But he found it
almost as hard to do all this on four thousand a year as Mrs
Eynsford Hill to live in Earlscourt on an income so pitiably smaller
that I have not the heart to disclose its exact figure. He
absolutely refused to add the last straw to his burden by contributing
to Eliza's support.
Thus Freddy and Eliza, now Mr and Mrs Eynsford Hill, would have
spent a penniless honeymoon but for a wedding present of L 500 from
the Colonel to Eliza. It lasted a long time because Freddy did not
know how to spend money, never having had any to spend, and Eliza,
socially trained by a pair of old bachelors, wore her clothes as
long as they held together and looked pretty, without the least regard
to their being many months out of fashion. Still, L 500 will not last
two young people for ever; and they both knew, and Eliza felt as well,
that they must shift for themselves in the end. She could quarter
herself on Wimpole Street because it had come to be her home; but
she was quite aware that she ought not to quarter Freddy there, and
that it would not be good for his character if she did.
Not that the Wimpole Street bachelors objected. When she consulted
them, Higgins declined to be bothered about her housing problem when
that solution was so simple. Eliza's desire to have Freddy in the
house with her seemed of no more importance than if she had wanted
an extra piece of bedroom furniture. Pleas as to Freddy's character,
and the moral obligation on him to earn his own living, were lost on
Higgins. He denied that Freddy had any character, and declared that if
he tried to do any useful work some competent person would have the
trouble of undoing it: a procedure involving a net loss to the
community, and great unhappiness to Freddy himself, who was
obviously intended by Nature for such light work as amusing Eliza,
which, Higgins declared, was a much more useful and honorable
occupation than working in the city. When Eliza referred again to
her project of teaching phonetics, Higgins abated not a jot of his
violent opposition to it. He said she was not within ten years of
being qualified to meddle with his pet subject; and as it was
evident that the Colonel agreed with him, she felt she could not go
against them in this grave matter, and that she had no right,
without Higgins's consent, to exploit the knowledge he had given
her; for his knowledge seemed to her as much his private property as
his watch: Eliza was no communist. Besides, she was superstitiously
devoted to them both, more entirely and frankly after her marriage
than before it.
It was the Colonel who finally solved the problem, which had cost
him much perplexed cogitation. He one day asked Eliza, rather shyly,
whether she had quite given up her notion of keeping a flower shop.
She replied that she had thought of it, but had put it out of her
head, because the Colonel had said, that day at Mrs Higgins's, that it
would never do. The Colonel confessed that when he said that, he had
not quite recovered from the dazzling impression of the day before.
They broke the matter to Higgins that evening. The sole comment
vouchsafed by him very nearly led to a serious quarrel with Eliza.
It was to the effect that she would have in Freddy an ideal errand
boy.
Freddy himself was next sounded on the subject. He said he had
been thinking of a shop himself; though it had presented itself to his
pennilessness as a small place in which Eliza should sell tobacco at
one counter whilst he sold newspapers at the opposite one. But he
agreed that it would be extraordinarily jolly to go early every
morning with Eliza to Covent Garden and buy flowers on the scene of
their first meeting: a sentiment which earned him many kisses from his
wife. He added that he had always been afraid to propose anything of
the sort, because Clara would make an awful row about a step that must
damage her matrimonial chances, and his mother could not be expected
to like it after clinging for so many years to that step of the social
ladder on which retail trade is impossible.
This difficulty was removed by an event highly unexpected by
Freddy's mother. Clara, in the course of her incursions into those
artistic circles which were the highest within her reach, discovered
that her conversational qualifications were expected to include a
grounding in the novels of Mr H. G. Wells. She borrowed them in
various directions so energetically that she swallowed them all within
two months. The result was a conversion of a kind quite common
today. A modern Acts of the Apostles would fill fifty whole Bibles
if anyone were capable of writing it.
Poor Clara, who appeared to Higgins and his mother as a disagreeable
and ridiculous person, and to her own mother as in some inexplicable
way a social failure, had never seen herself in either light; for,
though to some extent ridiculed and mimicked in West Kensington like
everybody else there, she was accepted as a rational and normal- or
shall we say inevitable?- sort of human being. At worst they called
her The Pusher; but to them no more than to herself had it ever
occurred that she was pushing the air, and pushing it in a wrong
direction. Still, she was not happy. She was growing desperate. Her
one asset, the fact that her mother was what the Epsom greengrocer
called a carriage lady, had no exchange value, apparently. It had
prevented her from getting educated, because the only education she
could have afforded was education with the Earlscourt greengrocer's
daughter. It had led her to seek the society of her mother's class;
and that class simply would not have her, because she was much
poorer than the greengrocer, and, far from being able to afford a
maid, could not afford even a housemaid, and had to scrape along at
home with an illiberally treated general servant. Under such
circumstances nothing could give her an air of being a genuine product
of Largelady Park. And yet its tradition made her regard a marriage
with anyone within her reach as an unbearable humiliation.
Commercial people and professional people in a small way were odious
to her. She ran after painters and novelists; but she did not charm
them; and her bold attempts to pick up and practise artistic and
literary talk irritated them. She was, in short, an utter failure,
an ignorant, incompetent, pretentious, unwelcome, penniless, useless
little snob; and though she did not admit these disqualifications (for
nobody ever faces unpleasant truths of this kind until the possibility
of a way out dawns on them) she felt their effects too keenly to be
satisfied with her position.
Clara had a startling eyeopener when, on being suddenly wakened to
enthusiasm by a girl of her own age who dazzled her and produced in
her a gushing desire to take her for a model, and gain her friendship,
she discovered that this exquisite apparition had graduated from the
gutter in a few months time. It shook her so violently, that when Mr
H. G. Wells lifted her on the point of his puissant pen, and placed
her at the angle of view from which the life she was leading and the
society to which she clung appeared in its true relation to real human
needs and worthy social structure, he effected a conversion and a
conviction of sin comparable to the most sensational feats of
General Booth or Gypsy Smith. Clara's snobbery went bang. Life
suddenly began to move with her. Without knowing how or why, she began
to make friends and enemies. Some of the acquaintances to whom she had
been a tedious or indifferent or ridiculous affliction, dropped her:
others became cordial. To her amazement she found that some "quite
nice" people were saturated with Wells, and that this accessibility to
ideas was the secret of their niceness. People she had thought
deeply religious, and had tried to conciliate on that tack with
disastrous results, suddenly took an interest in her, and revealed a
hostility to conventional religion which she had never conceived
possible except among the most desperate characters. They made her
read Galsworthy; and Galsworthy exposed the vanity of Largelady Park
and finished her. It exasperated her to think that the dungeon in
which she had languished for so many unhappy years had been unlocked
all the time, and that the impulses she had so carefully struggled
with and stifled for the sake of keeping well with society, were
precisely those by which alone she could have come into any sort of
sincere human contact. In the radiance of these discoveries, and the
tumult of their reaction, she made a fool of herself as freely and
conspicuously as when she so rashly adopted Eliza's expletive in Mrs
Higgins's drawing room; for the new-born Wellsian had to find her
bearings almost as ridiculously as a baby; but nobody hates a baby for
its ineptitudes, or thinks the worse of it for trying to eat the
matches; and Clara lost no friends by her follies. They laughed at her
to her face this time; and she had to defend herself and fight it
out as best she could.
When Freddy paid a visit to Earlscourt (which he never did when he
could possibly help it) to make the desolating announcement that he
and his Eliza were thinking of blackening the Largelady scutcheon by
opening a shop, he found the little household already convulsed by a
prior announcement from Clara that she also was going to work in an
old furniture shop in Dover Street, which had been started by a fellow
Wellsian. This appointment Clara owed, after all, to her old social
accomplishment of Push. She had made up her mind that, cost what it
might, she would see Mr Wells in the flesh; and she had achieved her
end at a garden party. She had better luck than so rash an
enterprise deserved. Mr Wells came up to her expectations. Age had not
withered him, nor could custom stale his infinite variety in half an
hour. His pleasant neatness and compactness, his small hands and feet,
his teeming ready brain, his unaffected accessibility, and a certain
fine apprehensiveness which stamped him as susceptible from his
topmost hair to his tipmost toe, proved irresistible. Clara talked
of nothing else for weeks and weeks afterwards. And as she happened to
talk to the lady of the furniture shop, and that lady also desired
above all things to know Mr Wells and sell pretty things to him, she
offered Clara a job on the chance of achieving that end through her.
And so it came about that Eliza's luck held, and the expected
opposition to the flower shop melted away. The shop is in the arcade
of a railway station not very far from the Victoria and Albert Museum;
and if you live in that neighborhood you may go there any day and
buy a buttonhole from Eliza.
Now here is a last opportunity for romance. Would you not like to be
assured that the shop was an immense success, thanks to Eliza's charms
and her early business experience in Covent Garden? Alas! the truth is
the truth: the shop did not pay for a long time, simply because
Eliza and her Freddy did not know how to keep it. True, Eliza had
not to begin at the very beginning: she knew the names and prices of
the cheaper flowers; and her elation was unbounded when she found that
Freddy, like all youths educated at cheap, pretentious, and thoroughly
inefficient schools, knew a little Latin. It was very little, but
enough to make him appear to her a Porson or Bentley, and to put him
at his ease with botanical nomenclature. Unfortunately he knew nothing
else; and Eliza, though she could count money up to eighteen shillings
or so, and had acquired a certain familiarity with the language of
Milton from her struggles to qualify herself for winning Higgins's
bet, could not write out a bill without utterly disgracing the
establishment. Freddy's power of stating in Latin that Balbus built
a wall and that Gaul was divided into three parts did not carry with
it the slightest knowledge of accounts or business: Colonel
Pickering had to explain to him what a cheque book and a bank
account meant. And the pair were by no means easily teachable.
Freddy backed up Eliza in her obstinate refusal to believe that they
could save money by engaging a bookkeeper with some knowledge of the
business. How, they argued, could you possibly save money by going
to extra expense when you already could not make both ends meet? But
the Colonel, after making the ends meet over and over again, at last
gently insisted; and Eliza, humbled to the dust by having to beg
from him so often, and stung by the uproarious derision of Higgins, to
whom the notion of Freddy succeeding at anything was a joke that never
palled, grasped the fact that business, like phonetics, has to be
learned.
On the piteous spectacle of the pair spending their evenings in
shorthand schools and polytechnic classes, learning bookkeeping and
typewriting with incipient junior clerks, male and female, from the
elementary schools, let me not dwell. There were even classes at the
London School of Economics, and a humble personal appeal to the
director of that institution to recommend a course bearing on the
flower business. He, being a humorist, explained to them the method of
the celebrated Dickensian essay on Chinese Metaphysics by the
gentleman who read an article on China and an article on Metaphysics
and combined the information. He suggested that they should combine
the London School with Kew Gardens. Eliza, to whom the procedure of
the Dickensian gentleman seemed perfectly correct (as in fact it
was) and not in the least funny (which was only her ignorance), took
the advice with entire gravity. But the effort that cost her the
deepest humiliation was a request to Higgins, whose pet artistic
fancy, next to Milton's verse, was calligraphy, and who himself
wrote a most beautiful Italian hand, that he would teach her to write.
He declared that she was congenitally incapable of forming a single
letter worthy of the least of Milton's words; but she persisted; and
again he suddenly threw himself into the task of teaching her with a
combination of stormy intensity, concentrated patience, and occasional
bursts of interesting disquisition on the beauty and nobility, the
august mission and destiny, of human handwriting. Eliza ended by
acquiring an extremely uncommercial script which was a positive
extension of her personal beauty, and spending three times as much
on stationery as anyone else because certain qualities and shapes of
paper became indispensable to her. She could not even address an
envelope in the usual way because it made the margins all wrong.
Their commercial schooldays were a period of disgrace and despair
for the young couple. They seemed to be learning nothing about
flower shops. At last they gave it up as hopeless, and shook the
dust of the shorthand schools, and the polytechnics, and the London
School of Economics from their feet for ever. Besides, the business
was in some mysterious way beginning to take care of itself. They
had somehow forgotten their objections to employing other people. They
came to the conclusion that their own way was the best, and that
they had really a remarkable talent for business. The Colonel, who had
been compelled for some years to keep a sufficient sum on current
account at his bankers to make up their deficits, found that the
provision was unnecessary: the young people were prospering. It is
true that there was not quite fair play between them and their
competitors in trade. Their week-ends in the country cost them
nothing, and saved them the price of their Sunday dinners; for the
motor car was the Colonel's; and he and Higgins paid the hotel
bills. Mr F. Hill, florist and greengrocer (they soon discovered
that there was money in asparagus; and asparagus led to other
vegetables), had an air which stamped the business as classy; and in
private life he was still Frederick Eynsford Hill, Esquire. Not that
there was any swank about him: nobody but Eliza knew that he had
been christened Frederick Challoner. Eliza herself swanked like
anything.
That is all. That is how it has turned out. It is astonishing how
much Eliza still manages to meddle in the housekeeping at Wimpole
Street in spite of the shop and her own family. And it is notable that
though she never nags her husband, and frankly loves the Colonel as if
she were his favorite daughter, she has never got out of the habit
of nagging Higgins that was established on the fatal night when she
won his bet for him. She snaps his head off on the faintest
provocation, or on none. He no longer dares to tease her by assuming
an abysmal inferiority of Freddy's mind to his own. He storms and
bullies and derides; but she stands up to him so ruthlessly that the
Colonel has to ask her from time to time to be kinder to Higgins;
and it is the only request of his that brings a mulish expression into
her face. Nothing but some emergency or calamity great enough to break
down all likes and dislikes, and throw them both back on their
common humanity- and may they be spared any such trial!- will ever
alter this. She knows that Higgins does not need her, just as her
father did not need her. The very scrupulousness with which he told
her that day that he had become used to having her there, and
dependent on her for all sorts of little services, and that he
should miss her if she went away (it would never have occurred to
Freddy or the Colonel to say anything of the sort) deepens her inner
certainty that she is "no more to him than them slippers"; yet she has
a sense, too, that his indifference is deeper than the infatuation
of commoner souls. She is immensely interested in him. She has even
secret mischievous moments in which she wishes she could get him
alone, on a desert island, away from all ties and with nobody else
in the world to consider, and just drag him off his pedestal and see
him making love like any common man. We all have private
imaginations of that sort. But when it comes to business, to the
life that she really leads as distinguished from the life of dreams
and fancies, she likes Freddy and she likes the Colonel; and she
does not like Higgins and Mr Doolittle. Galatea never does quite
like Pygmalion: his relation to her is too godlike to be altogether
agreeable.
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THE END