Man-woman relationships -- Drama; Marriage -- Drama
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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