Pygmalion and Three Other Plays (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (50 page)

RIDGEON Well, did you find us so very cruel, after all? They tell me that though you have dropped me, you stay for weeks with the Bloomfield Boningtons and the Walpoles. I think it must be true, because they never mention you to me now.

JENNIFER The animals in Sir Ralph’s house are like spoiled children. When Mr Walpole had to take a splinter out of the mastiff’s paw, I had to hold the poor dog myself; and Mr Walpole had to turn Sir Ralph out of the room. And Mrs Walpole has to tell the gardener not to kill wasps when Mr Walpole is looking. But there are doctors who are naturally cruel; and there are others who get used to cruelty and are callous about it. They blind themselves to the souls of animals; and that blinds them to the souls of men and women. You made a dreadful mistake about Louis; but you would not have made it if you had not trained yourself to make the same mistake about dogs. You saw nothing in them but dumb brutes; and so you could see nothing in him but a clever brute.

RIDGEON
[with sudden resolution]
I made no mistake whatever about him.

JENNIFER Oh, doctor!

RIDGEON
[obstinately]
I made no mistake whatever about him.

JENNIFER Have you forgotten that he died?

RIDGEON
[with a sweep of his hand towards the pictures]
He is not dead. He is there.
[Taking up the book]
And there.

JENNIFER
[springing up with blazing eyes]
Put that down. How dare you touch it?

RIDGEON I am very sorry. I see I had better go.

JENNIFER
[putting the book down]
I beg your pardon. I—I forgot myself. But it is not yet—it is a private copy.

RIDGEON But for me it would have been a very different book.

JENNIFER But for you it would have been a longer one.

RIDGEON You know then that I killed him?

JENNIFER [
suddenly moved and softened]
Oh, doctor, if you acknowledge that—if you have confessed it to yourself—if you realize what you have done, then there is forgiveness. I trusted in your strength instinctively at first; then I thought I had mistaken callousness for strength. Can you blame me? But if it was really strength—if it was only such a mistake as we all make sometimes—it will make me so happy to be friends with you again.

RIDGEON I tell you I made no mistake. I cured Blenkinsop: was there any mistake there?

JENNIFER He recovered. Oh, dont be foolishly proud, doctor. Confess to a failure, and save our friendship. Remember, Sir Ralph gave Louis your medicine; and it made him worse.

RIDGEON I cant be your friend on false pretences. Something has got me by the throat: the truth must come out. I used that medicine myself on Blenkinsop. It did not make him worse. It is a dangerous medicine: it cured Blenkinsop: it killed Louis Dubedat. When I handle it, it cures. When another man handles it, it kills—sometimes.

JENNIFER [
naïvely: not yet taking it all in]
Then why did you let Sir Ralph give it to Louis?

RIDGEON I’m going to tell you. I did it because I was in love with you.

JENNIFER [
innocently surprised]
In lo—You! an elderly man!

RIDGEON [
thunderstruck, raising his fists to heaven]
Dubedat: thou art avenged!
[He drops his hands and collapses on the bench
]. I never thought of that. I suppose I appear to you a ridiculous old fogey.

JENNIFER But surely—I did not mean to offend you, indeed—but you must be at least twenty years older than I am.

RIDGEON Oh, quite. More, perhaps. In twenty years you will understand how little difference that makes.

JENNIFER But even so, how could you think that I—his wife—could ever think of y o u—

RIDGEON
[stopping her with a nervous waving of his fingers
] Yes, yes, yes, yes: I quite understand: you neednt rub it in.

JENNIFER But—oh, it is only dawning on me now—I was so surprised at first—do you dare to tell me that it was to gratify a miserable jealousy that you deliberately—oh! oh! you murdered him.

RIDGEON I think I did. It really comes to that.

I suppose—yes: I killed him.

JENNIFER And you tell me that! to my face! callously! You are not afraid!

RIDGEON I am a doctor: I have nothing to fear. It is not an in dictable offence to call in B. B. Perhaps it ought to be; but it isnt.

JENNIFER I did not mean that. I meant afraid of my taking the law into my own hands, and killing you.

RIDGEON I am so hopelessly idiotic about you that I should not mind it a bit. You would always remember me if you did that.

JENNIFER I shall remember you always as a little man who tried to kill a great one.

RIDGEON Pardon me. I succeeded.

JENNIFER
[with quiet conviction]
No. Doctors think they hold the keys of life and death; but it is not their will that is fulfilled. I dont believe you made any difference at all.

RIDGEON Perhaps not. But I intended to.

JENNIFER
[looking at him amazedly: not without pity]
And you tried to destroy that wonderful and beautiful life merely because you grudged him a woman whom you could never have expected to care for you!

RIDGEON Who kissed my hands. Who believed in me. Who told me her friendship lasted until death.

JENNIFER And whom you were betraying.

RIDGEON No. Whom I was saving.

JENNIFER [
gently
] Pray, doctor, from what?

RIDGE ON From making a terrible discovery. From having your life laid waste.

JENNIFER How?

RIDGEON No matter. I h a v e saved you. I have been the best friend you ever had. You are happy. You are well. His works are an imperishable joy and pride for you.

JENNIFER And you think that is y o u r doing. Oh doctor, doctor! Sir Patrick is right: you do think you are a little god. How can you be so silly? Y o u did not paint those pictures which are my imperishable joy and pride: y o u did not speak the words that will always be heavenly music in my ears. I listen to them now whenever I am tired or sad. That is why I am always happy.

RIDGEON Yes, now that he is dead. Were you always happy when he was alive?

JENNIFER
[wounded]
Oh, you are cruel, cruel. When he was alive I did not know the greatness of my blessing. I worried meanly about little things. I was unkind to him. I was unworthy of him.

RIDGEON [
laughingbitterly
]Ha!

JENNIFER Dont insult me: dont blaspheme. [
She snatches up the book and presses it to her heart in a paroxysm of remorse, exclaiming]
Oh, my King of Men!

RIDGEON King of Men! Oh, this is too monstrous, too grotesque. We cruel doctors have kept the secret from you faithfully; but it is like all secrets: it will not not keep itself. The buried truth germinates and breaks through to the light.

JENNIFER What truth?

RIDGEON What truth! Why, that Louis Dubedat, King of Men, was the most entire and perfect scoundrel, the most miraculously mean rascal, the most callously selfish blackguard that ever made a wife miserable.

JENNIFER [
unshaken: calm and lovely
] He made his wife the happiest woman in the world, doctor.

RIDGEON No: by all thats true on earth, he made his widow the happiest woman in the world; but it was I who made her a widow. And her happiness is my justification and my reward. Now you know what I did and what I thought of him. Be as angry with me as you like: at least you know me as I really am. If you ever come to care for an elderly man, you will know what you are caring for.

JENNIFER
[kind and quiet]
I am not angry with you any more, Sir Colenso. I knew quite well that you did not like Louis; but it is not your fault: you dont understand: that is all. You never could have believed in him. It is just like your not believing in my religion: it is a sort of sixth sense that you have not got. And [
with a gentle reassuring movement towards him]
dont think that you have shocked me so dreadfully. I know quite well what you mean by his selfishness. He sacrificed everything for his art. In a certain sense he had even to sacrifice everybody—

RIDGEON Everybody except himself. By keeping that back he lost the right to sacrifice you, and gave me the right to sacrifice him. Which I did.

JENNIFER
[shaking her head, pitying his error]
He was one of the men who know what women know: that self-sacrifice is vain and cowardly.

RIDGEON Yes, when the sacrifice is rejected and thrown away. Not when it becomes the food of godhead.

JENNIFER I dont understand that. And I cant argue with you: you are clever enough to puzzle me, but not to shake me. You are so utterly, so wildly wrong; so incapable of appreciating Louis—

RIDGEON Oh!
[taking up the SECRETARY’s list]
I have marked five pictures as sold to me.

JENNIFER They will not be sold to you. Louis’ creditors insisted on selling them; but this is my birthday; and they were all bought in for me this morning by my husband.

RIDGEON By whom?!!!

JENNIFER By my husband.

RIDGEON [
gabbling and stuttering]
What husband? Whose husband? Which husband? Whom? how? what? Do you mean to say that you have married again?

JENNIFER Do you forget that Louis disliked widows, and that people who have married happily once always marry again?

RIDGEON Then I have committed a purely disinterested murder!

THE SECRETARY Just got the first batch of catalogues in time. The doors are open.

JENNIFER [
to RIDGEON, politely
] So glad you like the pictures, Sir Colenso. Good morning.

RIDGEON Good morning.
[He goes towards the door; hesitates; turns to say something more; gives it up as a bad job; and goes].

PYGMALION

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 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. There 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, Melville Bell
¹
was dead; but Alexander J. Ellis
^fp
was still a living 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,
^fq
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
^fr
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 libelous, 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 six-penny manual
^fs
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,
^ft
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.
^fu
The four and six-penny manual, mostly in his lithographed handwriting, that was never vulgarly advertized, may perhaps some day 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.