60 Plays: The George Bernard Shaw Edition (Illustrated). GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

window of St. Dominic’s Parsonage, from which not a single chimney is visible. The parsonage is a semi-detached villa 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 on the park. In this room, the only sittingroom 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 right hand end of a long table, which stands across the window, so that he can cheer himself with the view of the park at his elbow. At the opposite end of the table, adjoining it, is a little table; only half the width of 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 cabinet photograph in a frame. Behind him the right hand wall, recessed above the fireplace, is fitted with bookshelves, on which an adept eye can measure the parson’s divinity and casuistry by a complete set of Browning’s poems and Maurice’s Theological Essays, and guess at his politics from 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. Opposite him on the left, near the typewriter, is the door. Further down the room, 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 japanned flower painted coal scuttle at one side, a miniature chair for a boy or girl on the other, a nicely varnished wooden mantelpiece, with neatly moulded shelves, tiny bits of mirror let into the panels, and 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 Virgin of the Assumption, 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 advertised “drawingroom suite” of the pushing suburban furniture dealer; but there is nothing useless or pretentious in the room. The paper and panelling are dark, throwing the big cheery window and the park outside into strong relief.

      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 to interfere in their business without impertinence. His well-spring of spiritual 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, a good forehead, with the brows somewhat blunt, and the eyes bright and eager, a mouth resolute, but not particularly well cut, and a substantial nose, with the mobile, spreading nostrils of the dramatic orator, but, like all his features, void 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, rather 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 (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 can’t 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 only come on Mondays and Thursdays. Have you the diary there?

      PROSERPINE (taking up the diary). Yes.

      MORELL. Have I any lecture on for next Monday?

      PROSERPINE (referring to 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 can’t come. They’re only half a dozen ignorant and conceited costermongers without five shillings between them.

      MORELL (amused). Ah; but you see they’re near relatives of mine, Miss Garnett.

      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 don’t believe it. Everybody says it: nobody believes it — nobody. (Briskly, getting back to business.) Well, well! Come, Miss Proserpine, can’t 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. You’re invited to dine with the Founder’s Company.

      MORELL. That’ll 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 Hendlam’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 person, with nothing positively unbearable about him except a habit of speaking with his lips carefully closed for half an inch from each corner, a finicking arthulation, and a set of horribly corrupt vowels, notably ow for o, this being his chief means of bringing Oxford refinement to bear on Hackney vulgarity. Morell, whom he has won over by a doglike devotion, looks up indulgently from The Church Reformer as he enters, 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? Isn’t that so, Miss Prossy?

      PROSERPINE (sharply). Miss Garnett, if you please.

      LEXY. I beg your pardon — Miss Garnett.

      PROSERPINE. You’ve got to do all the work to-day.

      LEXY. 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: don’t 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 to-day.

      LEXY.