George Bernard Shaw - Pygmalion and Three Other Plays

ELLIE Only half an hour ago I became Captain Shotover’s white wife.

MRS HUSHABYE Ellie! What nonsense! Where?

ELLIE In heaven, where all true marriages are made.

LADY UTTERWORD Really, Miss Dunn! Really, papa!

MANGAN He told me I was too old! And him a mummy!

HECTOR [ quoting Shelley ]

“Their altar the grassy earth outspread: And their priest the muttering wind.” [320] Near quotation from “Rosalind and Helen: A Modern Eclogue,” by English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (179 2- 1822); Shaw has changed “our” to “their.”

ELLIE Yes: I, Ellie Dunn, give my broken heart and my strong sound soul to its natural captain, my spiritual husband and second father.

She draws the captain’s arm through hers, and pats his hand. The captain remains fast asleep.

MRS HUSHABYE Oh, that’s very clever of you, pettikins. Very clever. Alfred, you could never have lived up to Ellie.You must be content with a little share of me.

MANGAN [ sniffing and wiping his eyes ] It isn’t kind — [ his emotion chokes him. ] .

LADY UTTERWORD You are well out of it, Mr Mangan. Miss Dunn is the most conceited young woman I have met since I came back to England.

MRS HUSHABYE Oh, Ellie isn’t conceited. Are you, pettikins?

ELLIE I know my strength now, Hesione.

MANGAN Brazen, I call you. Brazen.

MRS HUSHABYE Tut, tut, Alfred: don’t be rude. Don’t you feel how lovely this marriage night is, made in heaven? Aren’t you happy, you and Hector? Open your eyes: Addy and Ellie look beautiful enough to please the most fastidious man: we live and love and have not a care in the world. We women have managed all that for you. Why in the name of common sense do you go on as if you were two miserable wretches? CAPTAIN SHOTOVER I tell you happiness is no good. You can be happy when you are only half alive. I am happier now I am half dead than ever I was in my prime. But there is no blessing on my happiness.

ELLIE [ her face lighting up ] Life with a blessing! that is what I want. Now I know the real reason why I couldn’t marry Mr Mangan: there would be no blessing on our marriage. There is a blessing on my broken heart. There is a blessing on your beauty, Hesione. There is a blessing on your father’s spirit. Even on the lies of Marcus there is a blessing; but on Mr Mangan’s money there is none.

MANGAN I don’t understand a word of that.

ELLIE Neither do I. But I know it means something.

MANGAN Don’t say there was any difficulty about the blessing. I was ready to get a bishop to marry us.

MRS HUSHABYE Isn’t he a fool, pettikins?

HECTOR [ fiercely ] Do not scorn the man. We are all fools.

MAZZINI, in pyjamas and a richly colored silk dressing-gown, comes from the house, on LADY UTTERWORD’s side.

MRS HUSHABYE Oh! here comes the only man who ever resisted me. What’s the matter, Mr Dunn? Is the house on fire?

MAZZINI Oh, no: nothing’s the matter: but really it’s impossible to go to sleep with such an interesting conversation going on under one’s window, and on such a beautiful night too. I just had to come down and join you all. What has it all been about?

MRS HUSHABYE Oh, wonderful things, soldier of freedom.

HECTOR For example, Mangan, as a practical business man, has tried to undress himself and has failed ignominiously; whilst you, as an idealist, have succeeded brilliantly.

MAZZINI I hope you don’t mind my being like this, Mrs Hushabye. [ He sits down on the campstool. ]

MRS HUSHABYE On the contrary, I could wish you always like that.

LADY UTTERWORD Your daughter’s match is off, Mr Dunn. It seems that Mr Mangan, whom we all supposed to be a man of property, owns absolutely nothing.

MAZZINI Well, of course I knew that, Lady Utterword. But if people believe in him and are always giving him money, whereas they don’t believe in me and never give me any, how can I ask poor Ellie to depend on what I can do for her?

MANGAN Don’t you run away with this idea that I have nothing. I —

HECTOR Oh, don’t explain. We understand. You have a couple of thousand pounds in exchequer bills, 50,000 shares worth tenpence a dozen, and half a dozen tabloids of cyanide of potassium to poison yourself with when you are found out. That’s the reality of your millions.

MAZZINI Oh no, no, no. He is quite honest: the businesses are genuine and perfectly legal.

HECTOR [ disgusted ] Yah! Not even a great swindler!

MANGAN So you think. But I’ve been too many for some honest men, for all that.

LADY UTTERWORD There is no pleasing you, Mr Mangan. You are determined to be neither rich nor poor, honest nor dishonest.

MANGAN There you go again. Ever since I came into this silly house I have been made to look like a fool, though I’m as good a man in this house as in the city.

ELLIE [ musically ] Yes: this silly house, this strangely happy house, this agonizing house, this house without foundations. I shall call it Heartbreak House.

MRS HUSHABYE Stop, Ellie; or I shall howl like an animal. {72} 72 12 (p. 624) “Stop, Ellie; or I shall howl like an animal”: Through Hesione’s near-breakdown, Shaw is alluding (again) to the final scene of King Lear, when Lear enters with the body of Cordelia in his arms and commands everyone to “Howl, howl, howl.” Lear is reduced to a grieving animal howling out its raw pain. It is such grief over the cataclysm of the war that keeps threatening to break through the surface of the play, as here in Hesione’s attempt to suppress her despair.

MANGAN [ breaks into a low snivelling ]!!!

MRS HUSHABYE There! you have set Alfred off.

ELLIE I like him best when he is howling.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER Silence! [MANGAN subsides into silence. ] I say, let the heart break in silence.

HECTOR Do you accept that name for your house?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER It is not my house: it is only my kennel.

HECTOR We have been too long here. We do not live in this house: we haunt it.

LADY UTTERWORD [ heart torn ] It is dreadful to think how you have been here all these years while I have gone round the world. I escaped young; but it has drawn me back. It wants to break my heart too. But it shan’t. I have left you and it behind. It was silly of me to come back. I felt sentimental about papa and Hesione and the old place. I felt them calling to me.

MAZZINI I But what a very natural and kindly and charming human feeling, Lady Utterword!

LADY UTTERWORD So I thought, Mr Dunn. But I know now that it was only the last of my influenza. I found that I was not remembered and not wanted.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER You left because you did not want us. Was there no heartbreak in that for your father? {73} 73 13 (p. 625) “Was there no heartbreak in that for your father?”: Shotover’s humiliation here in the confession of how his daughter Addy’s leaving home broke his heart shows how deeply Shaw has embedded King Lear in Heartbreak House; just as Lear’s denial of his own mortality manifests itself in his incestuous impulse to keep his daughter Cordelia to himself, so too does Captain Shotover’s resistance to crashing the ship of state on the rocks manifest itself in his spiritual marriage to Ellie, who, as befits the dream-like state of the action, can be both his daughter and his wife. The issue of Ellie’s marrying the older Mangan, a man her adored father’s age, is Shaw’ s version of the first part of King Lear, where Cordelia must first reject her father’s demands on her. You tore yourself up by the roots; and the ground healed up and brought forth fresh plants and forgot you. What right had you to come back and probe old wounds?