Books: Pygmalion

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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 his 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 school days 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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