Books: Pygmalion

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8

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 wouldn't marry YOU if you
asked me; and you're 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. You're
not my teacher now.

HIGGINS [reflectively] I don't suppose Pickering would, though.
He's as confirmed an old bachelor as I am.

LIZA. That's not what I want; and don't you think it. I've 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
don't want me.

HIGGINS. Can he MAKE anything of you? That's 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 don't. That's not the sort of feeling I want from you.
And don't you be too sure of yourself or of me. I could have been
a bad girl if I'd liked. I've 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. That's just how I feel. And how
Pickering feels. Eliza: you're a fool.

LIZA. That's not a proper answer to give me [she sinks on the
chair at the writing-table in tears].

HIGGINS. It's all you'll get until you stop being a common idiot.
If you're going to be a lady, you'll have to give up feeling
neglected if the men you know don't spend half their time
snivelling over you and the other half giving you black eyes. If
you can't 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,
don't 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 can't appreciate what you've got, you'd
better get what you can appreciate.

LIZA [desperate] Oh, you are a cruel tyrant. I can't talk to you:
you turn everything against me: I'm always in the wrong. But you
know very well all the time that you're nothing but a bully. You
know I can't 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 couldn't 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 don't 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 going to have my masterpiece thrown away on Freddy.

LIZA. You think I like you to say that. But I haven't forgot what
you said a minute ago; and I won't be coaxed round as if I was a
baby or a puppy. If I can't have kindness, I'll have
independence.

HIGGINS. Independence? That's 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. What'll 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
you'd 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 can't
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! That's done you, Henry Higgins, it has. Now I
don't 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, isn't 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 you're 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 can't 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. Good bye. [She
goes to the door].

MRS. HIGGINS [coming to Higgins] Good-bye, dear.

HIGGINS. Good-bye, 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 shows that he is incorrigible].

LIZA [disdainfully] Buy them yourself. [She sweeps out].

MRS. HIGGINS. I'm afraid you've spoiled that girl, Henry. But
never mind, dear: I'll buy you the tie and gloves.

HIGGINS [sunnily] Oh, don't bother. She'll buy em all right
enough. Good-bye.

They kiss. Mrs. Higgins runs out. Higgins, left alone, rattles
his cash in his pocket; chuckles; and disports himself in a
highly self-satisfied manner.

***********************

The rest of the story need not be shown in action, and indeed,
would hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so
enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-makes 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 of 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 show 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 declassee 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 500
pounds 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, 500 pounds 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 green grocer'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.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8