Pygmalion
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 couldn’t spend it better.
HIGGINS [taking out his pocket book and coming between Doolittle and
the piano] This is irresistible. Let’s give him ten. [He offers two
notes to the dustman].
DOOLITTLE. No, Governor. She wouldn’t have the heart to spend ten; and
perhaps I shouldn’t 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 don’t 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. I’ve 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 don’t know no better. If
you don’t you’ll be sorry for it after. If you do, she’ll be sorry for
it after; but better you than her, because you’re a man, and she’s only
a woman and don’t 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. You’re sure you won’t 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! Don’t you know your own daughter?
DOOLITTLE {exclaiming Bly me! it’s Eliza!
HIGGINS {simul- What’s that! This!
PICKERING {taneously By Jove!
LIZA. Don’t I look silly?
HIGGINS. Silly?
MRS. PEARCE [at the door] Now, Mr. Higgins, please don’t 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, ain’t she?
LIZA. I tell you, it’s easy to clean up here. Hot and cold water on
tap, just as much as you like, there is. Woolly towels, there is; and a
towel horse so hot, it burns your fingers. Soft brushes to scrub
yourself, and a wooden bowl of soap smelling like primroses. Now I know
why ladies is so clean. Washing’s a treat for them. Wish they saw what
it is for the like of me!
HIGGINS. I’m glad the bath-room met with your approval.
LIZA. It didn’t: not all of it; and I don’t care who hears me say it.
Mrs. Pearce knows.
HIGGINS. What was wrong, Mrs. Pearce?
MRS. PEARCE [blandly] Oh, nothing, sir. It doesn’t matter.
LIZA. I had a good mind to break it. I didn’t 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. Don’t put it on me, Governor. She ain’t
accustomed to it, you see: that’s all. But she’ll soon pick up your
free-and-easy ways.
LIZA. I’m a good girl, I am; and I won’t pick up no free and easy ways.
HIGGINS. Eliza: if you say again that you’re a good girl, your father
shall take you home.
LIZA. Not him. You don’t 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]. Don’t you give me none of your lip; and don’t let me
hear you giving this gentleman any of it neither, or you’ll 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 ain’t 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. You’ll 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, ma’am. [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. Don’t you believe the old liar. He’d as soon you set a bull-dog
on him as a clergyman. You won’t see him again in a hurry.
HIGGINS. I don’t want to, Eliza. Do you?
LIZA. Not me. I don’t want never to see him again, I don’t. 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. Ain’t 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 don’t 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 wouldn’t speak to them, you know.
PICKERING. Better wait til we get you something really fashionable.
HIGGINS. Besides, you shouldn’t cut your old friends now that you have
risen in the world. That’s what we call snobbery.
LIZA. You don’t call the like of them my friends now, I should hope.
They’ve 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 you’re 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 show. 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, don’t rush about like that, girl [She
shuts the door behind her].
HIGGINS. Pickering: we have taken on a stiff job.
PICKERING [with conviction] Higgins: we have.
ACT III
It is Mrs. Higgins’s at-home day. Nobody has yet arrived. Her
drawing-room, in a flat on Chelsea 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 mustn’t. 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 don’t mind.
[He sits on the settee].
MRS. HIGGINS. Oh! don’t they? Small talk indeed! What about your large
talk? Really, dear, you mustn’t stay.
HIGGINS. I must. I’ve a job for you. A phonetic job.
MRS. HIGGINS. No use, dear. I’m sorry; but I can’t 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 isn’t a phonetic job.
MRS. HIGGINS. You said it was.
HIGGINS. Not your part of it. I’ve picked up a girl.
MRS. HIGGINS. Does that mean that some girl has picked you up?
HIGGINS. Not at all. I don’t 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 can’t be bothered with young women. My idea of a
loveable woman is something 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, they’re 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].
That’s a good boy. Now tell me about the girl.
HIGGINS. She’s coming to see you.