UNIT 4 STAGE AND SCREEN Higgins: Pickering:


[as he shuts the last drawer] Well, I think that’s the whole show. It’s really amazing. I haven’t taken half of it in, you know.


Higgins: Would you like to go over any of it again? Pickering:


Higgins:


[rising and coming to the fi replace, where he plants himself with his back to the fi re] No, thank you: not now. I’m quite done up for this morning.


[following him, and standing beside him on his left] Tired of listening to sounds?


Pickering: Yes. It’s a fearful strain. I rather fancied myself because I can pronounce twenty-four distinct vowel sounds; but your hundred and thirty beat me. I can’t hear a bit of difference between most of them.


Higgins:


[chuckling, and going over to the piano to eat sweets] Oh, that comes with practice. You hear no difference at fi rst; but you keep on listening, and presently you fi nd they’re all as different as A from B. [Mrs Pearce looks in: she is Higgins’s housekeeper] What’s the matter?


Mrs Pearce: Higgins:


[hesitating, evidently perplexed] A young woman asks to see you, sir. A young woman! What does she want?


Mrs Pearce: Well, sir, she says you’ll be glad to see her when you know what she’s come about. She’s quite a common girl, sir. Very common indeed. I should have sent her away, only I thought perhaps you wanted her to talk into your machines. I hope I’ve not done wrong; but really you see such queer people sometimes – you’ll excuse me, I’m sure, sir –


Higgins: Oh, that’s all right, Mrs Pearce. Has she an interesting accent?


Mrs Pearce: Oh, something dreadful, sir, really. I don’t know how you can take an interest in it. Higgins:


[to Pickering] Let’s have her up. Shew her up, Mrs Pearce [he rushes across to his working table and picks out a cylinder to use on the phonograph].


Mrs Pearce: Higgins:


[only half resigned to it] Very well, sir. It’s for you to say. [She goes downstairs].


This is rather a bit of luck. I’ll shew you how I make records. We’ll set her talking: and I’ll take it down fi rst in Bell’s Visible Speech; then in broad Romic; and then we’ll get her on the phonograph so that you can turn her on as often as you like with the written transcript before you.


Mrs Pearce: [returning] This is the young woman, sir.


The fl ower girl enters in state. She has a hat with three ostrich feathers, orange, sky-blue, and red. She has a nearly clean apron and the shoddy coat has been tidied a little. The pathos of this deplorable fi gure, with its innocent vanity and consequential air, touches Pickering, who has already straightened himself in the presence of Mrs Pearce. But as to Higgins, the only distinction he makes between men and women is that when he is neither bullying nor exclaiming to the heavens against some featherweight cross, he coaxes women as a child coaxes its nurse when it wants to get anything out of her.


Higgins:


[brusquely, recognizing her with unconcealed disappointment, and at once, babylike, making an intolerable grievance of it] Why, this is the girl I jotted down last night. She’s no use: I’ve got all the records I want of the Lisson Grove lingo; and I’m not going to waste another cylinder on it. [To the girl] Be off with you: I don’t want you.


pathos:


something that makes you sad or feel pity


deplorable: shockingly bad; disgraceful


consequential: signifi cant or important


The fl ower girl: Don’t you be so saucy. You ain’t heard what I come for yet. [To Mrs Pearce, who is waiting at the door for further instructions] Did you tell him I come in a taxi?


Mrs Pearce: Nonsense, girl! what do you think a gentleman like Mr Higgins cares what you came in?


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