Plays Pleasant Page 11

  BLUNTSCHLI [stupefied] Twenty-three!

  Raina snaps the photograph contemptuously from his hand; tears it up; throws the pieces in his face; and sweeps back to her former place.

  SERGIUS [with grim enjoyment of his rival’s discomfiture] Bluntschli: my one last belief is gone. Your sagacity is a fraud, like everything else. You have less sense than even I!

  BLUNTSCHLI [overwhelmed] Twenty-three! Twenty-three!! [He considers], Hm! [Swiftly making up his mind and coming to his host] In that case, Major Petkoff, I beg to propose formally to become a suitor for your daughter’s hand, in place of Major Saranoff retired.

  RAINA. You dare!

  BLUNTSCHLI. If you were twenty-three when you said those things to me this afternoon, I shall take them seriously.

  CATHERINE [loftily polite] I doubt, sir, whether you quite realize either my daughter’s position or that of Major Sergius Saranoff, whose place you propose to take. The Petkoffs and the Saranoffs are known as the richest and most important families in the country. Our position is almost historical: we can go back for twenty years.

  PETKOFF. Oh, never mind that, Catherine. [To Bluntschli] We should be most happy, Bluntschli, if it were only a question of your position; but hang it, you know, Raina is accustomed to a very comfortable establishment. Sergius keeps twenty horses.

  BLUNTSCHLI. But who wants twenty horses ? We’re not going to keep a circus.

  CATHERINE [severely] My daughter, sir, is accustomed to a first-rate stable.

  RAINA. Hush, mother: youre making me ridiculous.

  BLUNTSCHLI. Oh well, if it comes to a question of an establishment, here goes! [He darts impetuously to the table; seizes the papers in the blue envelope; and turns to Sergius]. How many horses did you say ?

  SERGIUS. Twenty, noble Switzer.

  BLUNTSCHLI. I have two hundred horses. [They are amazed]. How many carriages ?

  SERGIUS. Three.

  BLUNTSCHLI. I have seventy. Twenty-four of them will hold twelve inside, besides two on the box, without counting the driver and conductor. How many tablecloths have you ?

  SERGIUS. How the deuce do I know ?

  BLUNTSCHLI. Have you four thousand ?

  SERGIUS. No.

  BLUNTSCHLI. I have. I have nine thousand six hundred pairs of sheets and blankets, with two thousand four hundred eider-down quilts. I have ten thousand knives and forks, and the same quantity of dessert spoons. I have three hundred servants. I have six palatial establishments, besides two livery stables, a tea gardens, and a private house. I have four medals for distinguished services; I have the rank of an officer and the standing of a gentleman; and I have three native languages. Shew me any man in Bulgaria that can offer as much!

  PETKOFF [with childish awe] Are you Emperor of Switzerland ?

  BLUNTSCHLI. My rank is the highest known in Switzerland: I am a free citizen.

  CATHERINE. Then, Captain Bluntschli, since you are my daughter’s choice –

  RAINA [mutinously] He’s not.

  CATHERINE [ignoring her] – I shall not stand in the way of her happiness. [Petkoff is about to speak] That is Major Petkoff’s feeling also.

  PETKOFF. Oh, I shall be only too glad. Two hundred horses! Whew!

  SERGIUS. What says the lady ?

  RAINA [pretending to sulk] The lady says that he can keep his tablecloths and his omnibuses. I am not here to be sold to the highest bidder. [She turns her back on him].

  BLUNTSCHLI. I wont take that answer. I appealed to you as a fugitive, a beggar, and a starving man. You accepted me. You gave me your hand to kiss, your bed to sleep in, and your roof to shelter me.

  RAINA. I did not give them to the Emperor of Switzerland.

  BLUNTSCHLI. Thats just what I say. [He catches her by the shoulders and turns her face-to-face with him]. Now tell us whom you did give them to.

  RAINA [succumbing with a shy smile] To my chocolate cream soldier.

  BLUNTSCHLI [with a boyish laugh of delight] Thatll do. Thank you. [He looks at his watch and suddenly becomes businesslike]. Time’s up, Major. Youve managed those regiments so well that youre sure to be asked to get rid of some of the infantry of the Timok division. Send them home by way of Lom Palanka. Saranoff: dont get married until I come back: I shall be here punctually at five in the evening on Tuesday fortnight. Gracious ladies [his heels click] good evening. [He makes them a military bow, and goes].

  SERGIUS. What a man! Is he a man!

  CANDIDA

  Candida produced in London (privately) 1900, (publicly) 1904; in New York, 1903; in Brussels, 1907 (the first performance of a Shaw play in French); in Paris, 1908 (the first Shaw performance in France)

  CANDIDA

  ACT I

  A fine morning in October 1894 in the north east quarter of London, a vast district miles away from the London of Mayfair and St James’s, and much less narrow, squalid, fetid and airless in its slums. It is strong in unfashionable middle class life: wide-streeted; myriad-populated; well served with ugly iron urinals, Radical clubs, and tram lines carrying a perpetual stream of yellow cars; enjoying in its main thoroughfares the luxury of grass-grown ‘front gardens’ untrodden by the foot of man save as to the path from the gate to the hall doors blighted by a callously endured monotony of miles and miles of unlovely brick houses, black iron railings, stony pavements, slated roofs, and respectably ill dressed or disreputably worse dressed people, quite accustomed to the place, and mostly plodding uninterestedly about somebody else’s work. The little energy and eagerness that crop up shew themselves in cockney cupidity and business ‘push’. Even the policemen and the chapels are not infrequent enough to break the monotony. The sun is shining cheerfully: there is no fog; and though the smoke effectually prevents anything, whether faces and hands or bricks and mortar, from looking fresh and clean, it is not hanging heavily enough to trouble a Londoner.

  This desert of unattractiveness has its oasis. Near the outer end of the Hackney Road is a park of217 acres, fenced in, not by railings, but by a wooden paling, and containing plenty of greensward, trees, a lake for bathers, flower beds which are triumphs of the admired cockney art of carpet gardening, and a sandpit, originally imported from the seaside for the delight of children, but speedily deserted on its becoming a natural vermin preserve for all the petty fauna of Kings-land, Hackney, and Hoxton. A bandstand, an unfurnished forum for religious, anti-religious, and political orators, cricket pitches, a gymnasium, and an old fashioned stone kiosk are among its attracttions. Wherever the prospect is bounded by trees or rising green grounds, it is a pleasant place. Where the ground stretches flat to the grey palings, with bricks and mortar, sky signs, crowded chimneys and smoke beyond, the prospect makes it desolate and sordid.

  The best view of Victoria Park is commanded by the front window of St Dominic’s Parsonage, from which not a brick is visible. The parsonage is semi-detached, with a front garden and a porch. Visitors go up the flight of steps to the porch: tradespeople and members of the family go down by a door under the steps to the basement, with a breakfast room, used for all meals, in front, and the kitchen at the back. Upstairs, on the level of the hall door, is the drawingroom, with its large plate glass window looking out on the park. In this, the only sitting room that can be spared from the children and the family meals, the parson, the Reverend James Mavor Morell, does his work. He is sitting in a strong round backed revolving chair at the end of a long table, which stands across the window, so that he can cheer himself with a view of the park over his left shoulder. At the opposite end of the table, adjoining it, is a little table only half as wide as the other, with a typewriter on it. His typist is sitting at this machine, with her back to the window. The large table is littered with pamphlets, journals, letters, nests of drawers, an office diary, postage scales and the like. A spare chair for visitors having business with the parson is in the middle, turned to his end. Within reach of his hand is a stationery case, and a photograph in a frame. The wall behind him is fitted with bookshelves, on which an
adept eye can measure the parson’s casuistry and divinity by Maurice’s Theological Essays and a complete set of Browning’s poems, and the reformer’s politics by a yellow backed Progress and Poverty, Fabian Essays, A Dream of John Ball, Marx’s Capital, and half a dozen other literary landmarks in Socialism. Facing him on the other side of the room, near the typewriter, is the door. Further down opposite the fireplace, a bookcase stands on a cellaret, with a sofa near it. There is a generous fire burning; and the hearth, with a comfortable armchair and a black japanned flower-painted coal scuttle at one side, a miniature chair for children on the other, a varnished wooden mantelpiece, with neatly moulded shelves, tiny bits of mirror let into the panels, a travelling clock in a leather case (the inevitable wedding present), and on the wall above a large autotype of the chief figure in Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin, is very inviting. Altogether the room is the room of a good housekeeper, vanquished, as far as the table is concerned, by an untidy man, but elsewhere mistress of the situation. The furniture, in its ornamental aspect, betrays the style of the advertized ‘drawingroom suite’ of the pushing suburban furniture dealer; but there is nothing useless or pretentious in the room, money being too scarce in the house of an east end parson to be wasted on snobbish trimmings.

  The Reverend James Mavor Morell is a Christian Socialist clergyman of the Church of England, and an active member of the Guild of St Matthew and the Christian Social Union. A vigorous, genial, popular man of forty, robust and goodlooking, full of energy, with pleasant, hearty, considerate manners, and a sound unaffected voice, which he uses with the clean athletic articulation of a practised orator, and with a wide range and perfect command of expression. He is a first rate clergyman, able to say what he likes to whom he likes, to lecture people without setting himself up against them, to impose his authority on them without humiliating them, and, on occasion, to interfere in their business without impertinence. His well-spring of enthusiasm and sympathetic emotion has never run dry for a moment: he still eats and sleeps heartily enough to win the daily battle between exhaustion and recuperation triumphantly. Withal, a great baby, pardonably vain of his powers and unconsciously pleased with himself. He has a healthy complexion: good forehead, with the brows somewhat blunt, and the eyes bright and eager, mouth resolute but not particularly well cut, and a substantial nose, with the mobile spreading nostrils of the dramatic orator, void, like all his features, of subtlety.

  The typist, Miss Proserpine Garnett, is a brisk little woman of about 30, of the lower middle class, neatly but cheaply dressed in a black merino skirt and a blouse, notably pert and quick of speech, and not very civil in her manner, but sensitive and affectionate. She is clattering away busily at her machine whilst Morell opens the last of his morning’s letters. He realizes its contents with a comic groan of despair.

  PROSERPINE. Another lecture?

  MORELL. Yes. The Hoxton Freedom Group want me to address them on Sunday morning [he lays great emphasis on Sunday, this being the unreasonable part of the business]. What are they?

  PROSERPINE. Communist Anarchists, I think.

  MORELL. Just like Anarchists not to know that they cant have a parson on Sunday! Tell them to come to church if they want to hear me: it will do them good. Say I can come on Mondays and Thursdays only. Have you the diary there?

  PROSERPINE [taking up the diary] Yes.

  MORELL. Have I any lecture on for next Monday?

  PROSERPINE [referring to the diary] Tower Hamlets Radical Club.

  MORELL. Well, Thursday then?

  PROSERPINE. English Land Restoration League.

  MORELL. What next?

  PROSERPINE. Guild of St Matthew on Monday. Independent Labor Party, Greenwich Branch, on Thursday. Monday, Social-Democratic Federation, Mile End Branch. Thursday, first Confirmation class. [Impatiently] Oh, I’d better tell them you cant come. Theyre only half a dozen ignorant and conceited costermongers without five shillings between them.

  MORELL [amused] Ah; but you see theyre near relatives of mine.

  PROSERPINE [staring at him] Relatives of yours!

  MORELL. Yes: we have the same father – in Heaven.

  PROSERPINE [relieved] Oh, is that all?

  MORELL [with a sadness which is a luxury to a man whose voice expresses it so finely] Ah, you dont believe it. Everybody says it: nobody believes it: nobody. [Briskly, getting back to business] Well, well! Come, Miss Proserpine: cant you find a date for the costers? what about the 25th? That was vacant the day before yesterday.

  PROSERPINE [referring to diary] Engaged. The Fabian Society.

  MORELL. Bother the Fabian Society! Is the 28th gone too?

  PROSERPINE. City dinner. Youre invited to dine with the Founders’ Company.

  MORELL. Thatll do: I’ll go to the Hoxton Group of Freedom instead. [She enters the engagement in silence, with implacable disparagement of the Hoxton Anarchists in every line of her face.Morell bursts open the cover of a copy of The Church Reformer, which has come by post, and glances through Mr Stewart Headlam’s leader and the Guild of St Matthew news. These proceedings are presently enlivened by the appearance of Morell’s curate, the Reverend Alexander Mill, a young gentleman gathered by Morell from the nearest University settlement, whither he had come from Oxford to give the east end of London the benefit of his university training. He is a conceitedly well intentioned, enthusiastic, immature novice, with nothing positively unbearable about him except a habit of speaking with his lips carefully closed a full half inch from each corner for the sake of a finicking articulation and a set of university vowels, this being his chief means so far of bringing his Oxford refinement (as he calls his habits) to bear on Hackney vulgarity. Morell, whom he has won over by a doglike devotion, looks up indulgently from The Church Reformer, and remarks] Well, Lexy? Late again, as usual!

  LEXY. I’m afraid so. I wish I could get up in the morning.

  MORELL [exulting in his own energy] Ha! ha! [Whimsically] Watch and pray. Lexy: watch and pray.

  LEXY. I know. [Rising wittily to the occasion] But how can I watch and pray when I am asleep? Isnt that so, Miss Prossy? [He makes for the warmth of the fire].

  PROSERPINE [sharply] Miss Garnett, if you please.

  LEXY. I beg your pardon. Miss Garnett.

  PROSERPINE. Youve got to do all the work today.

  LEXY [on the hearth] Why?

  PROSERPINE. Never mind why. It will do you good to earn your supper before you eat it, for once in a way, as I do. Come! dont dawdle. You should have been off on your rounds half an hour ago.

  LEXY [perplexed] Is she in earnest, Morell?

  MORELL [in the highest spirits; his eyes dancing] Yes. I am going to dawdle today.

  LEXY. You! You dont know how.

  MORELL [rising] Ha! ha! Dont I? I’m going to have this morning all to myself. My wife’s coming back; she’s due here at 11. 45.

  LEXY [surprised] Coming back already! with the children? I thought they were to stay to the end of the month.

  MORELL. So they are: she’s only coming up for two days, to get some flannel things for Jimmy, and to see how we’re getting on without her.

  LEXY [anxiously] But, my dear Morell, if what Jimmy and Fluffy had was scarlatina, do you think it wise –

  MORELL. Scarlatina! Rubbish! it was German measles. I brought it into the house myself from the Pycroft Street school. A parson is like a doctor, my boy: he must face infection as a soldier must face bullets. [He claps Lexy manfully on the shoulders]. Catch the measles if you can, Lexy: she’ll nurse you; and what a piece of luck that will be for you! Eh?

  LEXY [smiling uneasily] It’s so hard to understand you about Mrs Morell –

  MORELL [tenderly] Ah, my boy, get married; get married to a good woman; and then youll understand. Thats a foretaste of what will be best in the Kingdom of Heaven we are trying to establish on earth. That will cure you of dawdling. An honest man feels that he must pay Heaven for every hour of happiness with a good spell of hard unselfish work to make ot
hers happy. We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it. Get a wife like my Candida; and youll always be in arrear with your repayment. [He pats Lexy affectionately and moves to leave the room].

  LEXY. Oh, wait a bit: I forgot. [Morell halts and turns with the door knob in his hand]. Your father-in-law is coming round to see you.

  Morell, surprised and not pleased, shuts the door again, with a complete change of manner.

  MORELL. Mr Burgess?

  LEXY. Yes. I passed him in the park, arguing with somebody. He asked me to let you know that he was coming.

  MORELL [half incredulous] But he hasnt called here for three years. Are you sure, Lexy? Youre not joking, are you?

  LEXY [earnestly] No sir, really.

  MORELL [thoughtfully] Hm! Time for him to take another look at Candida before she grows out of his knowledge. [He resigns himself to the inevitable, and goes out].

  Lexy looks after him with beaming worship. Miss Garnett, not being able to shake Lexy, relieves her feelings by worrying the typewriter.

  LEXY. What a good man! What a thorough loving soul he is! [He takes Morell’s place at the table, making himself very comfortable as he takes out a cigaret].

  PROSERPINE [impatiently, pulling the letter she has been working at off the typewriter and folding it] Oh, a man ought to be able to be fond of his wife without making a fool of himself about her.

  LEXY [shocked] Oh, Miss Prossy!

  PROSERPINE [snatching at the stationery case for an envelope, in which she encloses the letter as she speaks] Candida here, and Candida there, and Candida everywhere! [She licks the envelope]. It’s enough to drive anyone out of their senses [thumping the envelope to make it stick] to hear a woman raved about in that absurd manner merely because she’s got good hair and a tolerable figure.

  LEXY [with reproachful gravity] I think her extremely beautiful, Miss Garnett. [He takes the photograph up; looks at it; and adds, with even greater impressiveness] extremely beautiful. How fine her eyes are!