The Project Gutenberg EBook of Candida, by George Bernard Shaw

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Title: Candida

Author: George Bernard Shaw

Posting Date: June 4, 2009 [EBook #4023]
Release Date: May, 2003
First Posted: October 12, 2001

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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CANDIDA

BERNARD SHAW

1898

ACT I

A fine October morning in the north east suburbs of London, a vast
district many miles away from the London of Mayfair and St. James's,
much less known there than the Paris of the Rue de Rivoli and the
Champs Elysees, and much less narrow, squalid, fetid and airless in its
slums; strong in comfortable, prosperous middle class life;
wide-streeted, myriad-populated; well-served with ugly iron urinals,
Radical clubs, tram lines, and 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 door; but blighted by an intolerable monotony of miles
and miles of graceless, characterless brick houses, black iron
railings, stony pavements, slaty roofs, and respectably ill dressed or
disreputably poorly dressed people, quite accustomed to the place, and
mostly plodding about somebody else's work, which they would not do if
they themselves could help it. The little energy and eagerness that
crop up show 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 of 217 acres, fenced in, not by railings,
but by a wooden paling, and containing plenty of greensward, trees, a
lake for bathers, flower beds with the flowers arranged carefully in
patterns by the admired cockney art of carpet gardening and a sandpit,
imported from