Perivale St. Andrews lies between two Middlesex hills, half climbing the northern one. It is an almost smokeless town of white walls, roofs of narrow green slates or red tiles, tall trees, domes, campaniles, and slender chimney shafts, beautifully situated and beautiful in itself. The best view of it is obtained from the crest of a slope about half a mile to the east, where the high explosives are dealt with. The foundry lies hidden in the depths between, the tops of its chimneys sprouting like huge skittles into the middle distance. Across the crest runs a platform of concrete, with a parapet which suggests a fortification, because there is a huge cannon of the obsolete Woolwich Infant pattern peering across it at the town. The cannon is mounted on an experimental gun carriage: possibly the original model of the Undershaft disappearing rampart gun alluded to by Stephen. The parapet has a high step inside which serves as a seat.
Barbara is leaning over the parapet, looking towards the town. On her right is the cannon; on her left the end of a shed raised on piles, with a ladder of three or four steps up to the door, which opens outwards and has a little wooden landing at the threshold, with a fire bucket in the corner of the landing. The parapet stops short of the shed, leaving a gap which is the beginning of the path down the hill through the foundry to the town. Behind the cannon is a trolley carrying a huge conical bombshell, with a red band painted on it. Further from the parapet, on the same side, is a deck chair, near the door of an office, which, like the sheds, is of the lightest possible construction.
Cusins arrives by the path from the town.
Barbara
Well?
Cusins
Not a ray of hope. Everything perfect, wonderful, real. It only needs a cathedral to be a heavenly city instead of a hellish one.
Barbara
Have you found out whether they have done anything for old Peter Shirley.
Cusins
They have found him a job as gatekeeper and timekeeper. He’s frightfully miserable. He calls the timekeeping brainwork, and says he isn’t used to it; and his gate lodge is so splendid that he’s ashamed to use the rooms, and skulks in the scullery.
Barbara
Poor Peter!
Stephen arrives from the town. He carries a field-glass.
Stephen
Enthusiastically. Have you two seen the place? Why did you leave us?
Cusins
I wanted to see everything I was not intended to see; and Barbara wanted to make the men talk.
Stephen
Have you found anything discreditable?
Cusins
No. They call him Dandy Andy and are proud of his being a cunning old rascal; but it’s all horribly, frightfully, immorally, unanswerably perfect.
Sarah arrives.
Sarah
Heavens! what a place! She crosses to the trolley. Did you see the nursing home!? She sits down on the shell.
Stephen
Did you see the libraries and schools!?
Sarah
Did you see the ballroom and the banqueting chamber in the Town Hall!?
Stephen
Have you gone into the insurance fund, the pension fund, the building society, the various applications of cooperation!?
Undershaft comes from the office, with a sheaf of telegrams in his hands.
Undershaft
Well, have you seen everything? I’m sorry I was called away. Indicating the telegrams. News from Manchuria.
Stephen
Good news, I hope.
Undershaft
Very.
Stephen
Another Japanese victory?
Undershaft
Oh, I don’t know. Which side wins does not concern us here. No: the good news is that the aerial battleship is a tremendous success. At the first trial it has wiped out a fort with three hundred soldiers in it.
Cusins
From the platform. Dummy soldiers?
Undershaft
No: the real thing. Cusins and Barbara exchange glances. Then Cusins sits on the step and buries his face in his hands. Barbara gravely lays her hand on his shoulder, and he looks up at her in a sort of whimsical desperation. Well, Stephen, what do you think of the place?
Stephen
Oh, magnificent. A perfect triumph of organization. Frankly, my dear father, I have been a fool: I had no idea of what it all meant—of the wonderful forethought, the power of organization, the administrative capacity, the financial genius, the colossal capital it represents. I have been repeating to myself as I came through your streets “Peace hath her victories no less renowned than War.” I have only one misgiving about it all.
Undershaft
Out with it.
Stephen
Well, I cannot help thinking that all this provision for every want of your workmen may sap their independence and weaken their sense of responsibility. And greatly as we enjoyed our tea at that splendid restaurant—how they gave us all that luxury and cake and jam and cream for threepence I really cannot imagine!—still you must remember that restaurants break up home life. Look at the continent, for instance! Are you sure so much pampering is really good for the men’s characters?
Undershaft
Well you see, my dear boy, when you are organizing civilization you have to make up your mind whether trouble and anxiety are good things or not. If you decide that they are, then, I take it, you simply don’t organize civilization; and there you are, with trouble and anxiety enough to make us all angels! But if you decide the other way, you may as well go through with it. However, Stephen, our characters are safe here. A sufficient dose of anxiety is always provided by the fact that we may be blown to smithereens at any moment.
Sarah
By the way, papa, where do you make the explosives?
Undershaft
In separate little sheds, like that one. When one of them blows up, it costs very little; and only the people quite close to it are killed.
Stephen, who is quite close to it, looks at it rather scaredly, and moves away quickly to the cannon. At the same moment the door of the shed is thrown abruptly open; and a foreman in overalls and list slippers comes out on the little landing and holds the door open for Lomax, who appears in the doorway.
Lomax
With studied coolness. My good fellow: you needn’t get into a state of nerves. Nothing’s going to happen to you; and I suppose it wouldn’t be the end of the world if anything did. A little bit of British pluck is what you want, old chap. He descends and strolls across to Sarah.
Undershaft
To the foreman. Anything wrong, Bilton?
Bilton
With ironic calm. Gentleman walked into the high explosives shed and lit a cigarette, sir: that’s all.
Undershaft
Ah, quite so. To Lomax. Do you happen to remember what you did with the match?
Lomax
Oh come! I’m not a fool. I took jolly good care to blow it out before I chucked it away.
Undershaft
The top of it was red hot inside, sir.
Lomax
Well, suppose it was! I didn’t chuck it into any of your messes.
Undershaft
Think no more of it, Mr. Lomax. By the way, would you mind lending me your matches?
Lomax
Offering his box. Certainly.
Undershaft
Thanks. He pockets the matches.
Lomax
Lecturing to the company generally. You know, these high explosives don’t go off like gunpowder, except when they’re in a gun. When they’re spread loose, you can put a match to them without the least risk: they just burn quietly like a bit of paper. Warming to the scientific interest of the subject. Did you know that Undershaft? Have you ever tried?
Undershaft
Not on a large scale, Mr. Lomax. Bilton will give you a sample of guncotton when you are leaving if you ask him. You can experiment with it at home. Bilton looks puzzled.
Sarah
Bilton will do nothing of the sort, papa. I suppose it’s your business to blow up the Russians and Japs; but you might really stop short of blowing up poor Cholly. Bilton gives it up and retires into the shed.
Lomax
My ownest, there is no danger. He sits beside her on the shell.
Lady Britomart arrives from the town with a bouquet.
Lady Britomart
Coming impetuously between Undershaft and the deck chair. Andrew: you shouldn’t have let me see this place.
Undershaft
Why, my dear?
Lady Britomart
Never mind why: you shouldn’t have: that’s all. To think of all that Indicating the town. being yours! and that you have kept it to yourself all these years!
Undershaft
It does not belong to me. I belong to it. It is the Undershaft inheritance.
Lady Britomart
It is not. Your ridiculous cannons and that noisy banging foundry may be the Undershaft inheritance; but all that plate and linen, all that furniture and those houses and orchards and gardens belong to us. They belong to me: they are not a man’s business. I won’t give them up. You must be out of your senses to throw them all away; and if you persist in such folly, I will call in a doctor.
Undershaft
Stooping to smell the bouquet. Where did you get the flowers, my dear?
Lady Britomart
Your men presented them to me in your William Morris Labor Church.
Cusins
Springing up. Oh! It needed only that. A Labor Church!
Lady Britomart
Yes, with Morris’s words in mosaic letters ten feet high round the dome. No Man Is Good Enough To Be Another Man’s Master. The cynicism of it!
Undershaft
It shocked the men at first, I am afraid. But now they take no more notice of it than of the ten commandments in church.
Lady Britomart
Andrew: you are trying to put me off the subject of the inheritance by profane jokes. Well, you shan’t. I don’t ask it any longer for Stephen: he has inherited far too much of your perversity to be fit for it. But Barbara has rights as well as Stephen. Why should not Adolphus succeed to the inheritance? I could manage the town for him; and he can look after the cannons, if they are really necessary.
Undershaft
I should ask nothing better if Adolphus were a foundling. He is exactly the sort of new blood that is wanted in English business. But he’s not a foundling; and there’s an end of it.
Cusins
Diplomatically. Not quite. They all turn and stare at him. He comes from the platform past the shed to Undershaft. I think—Mind! I am not committing myself in any way as to my future course—but I think the foundling difficulty can be got over.
Undershaft
What do you mean?
Cusins
Well, I have something to say which is in the nature of a confession.
Sarah
Confession!
Lady Britomart
Barbara
Stephen
Lomax
Oh I say!
Cusins
Yes, a confession. Listen, all. Until I met Barbara I thought myself in the main an honorable, truthful man, because I wanted the approval of my conscience more than I wanted anything else. But the moment I saw Barbara, I wanted her far more than the approval of my conscience.
Lady Britomart
Adolphus!
Cusins
It is true. You accused me yourself, Lady Brit, of joining the Army to worship Barbara; and so I did. She bought my soul like a flower at a street corner; but she bought it for herself.
Undershaft
What! Not for Dionysos or another?
Cusins
Dionysos and all the others are in herself. I adored what was divine in her, and was therefore a true worshipper. But I was romantic about her too. I thought she was a woman of the people, and that a marriage with a professor of Greek would be far beyond the wildest social ambitions of her rank.
Lady Britomart
Adolphus!!
Lomax
Oh I say!!!
Cusins
When I learnt the horrible truth—
Lady Britomart
What do you mean by the horrible truth, pray?
Cusins
That she was enormously rich; that her grandfather was an earl; that her father was the Prince of Darkness—
Undershaft
Chut!
Cusins
—and that I was only an adventurer trying to catch a rich wife, then I stooped to deceive about my birth.
Lady Britomart
Your birth! Now Adolphus, don’t dare to make up a wicked story for the sake of these wretched cannons. Remember: I have seen photographs of your parents; and the Agent General for South Western Australia knows them personally and has assured me that they are most respectable married people.
Cusins
So they are in Australia; but here they are outcasts. Their marriage is legal in Australia, but not in England. My mother is my father’s deceased wife’s sister; and in this island I am consequently a foundling. Sensation. Is the subterfuge good enough, Machiavelli?
Undershaft
Thoughtfully. Biddy: this may be a way out of the difficulty.
Lady Britomart
Stuff! A man can’t make cannons any the better for being his own cousin instead of his proper self She sits down in the deck chair with a bounce that expresses her downright contempt for their casuistry.
Undershaft
To Cusins. You are an educated man. That is against the tradition.
Cusins
Once in ten thousand times it happens that the schoolboy is a born master of what they try to teach him. Greek has not destroyed my mind: it has nourished it. Besides, I did not learn it at an English public school.
Undershaft
Hm! Well, I cannot afford to be too particular: you have cornered the foundling market. Let it pass. You are eligible, Euripides: you are eligible.
Barbara
Coming from the platform and interposing between Cusins and Undershaft. Dolly: yesterday morning, when Stephen told us all about the tradition, you became very silent; and you have been strange and excited ever since. Were you thinking of your birth then?
Cusins
When the finger of Destiny suddenly points at a man in the middle of his breakfast, it makes him thoughtful. Barbara turns away sadly and stands near her mother, listening perturbedly.
Undershaft
Aha! You have had your eye on the business, my young friend, have you?
Cusins
Take care! There is an abyss of moral horror between me and your accursed aerial battleships.
Undershaft
Never mind the abyss for the present. Let us settle the practical details and leave your final decision open. You know that you will have to change your name. Do you object to that?
Cusins
Would any man named Adolphus—any man called Dolly!—object to be called something else?
Undershaft
Good. Now, as to money! I propose to treat you handsomely from the beginning. You shall start at a thousand a year.
Cusins
With sudden heat, his spectacles twinkling with mischief. A thousand! You dare offer a miserable thousand to the son-in-law of a millionaire! No, by Heavens, Machiavelli! you shall not cheat me. You cannot do without me; and I can do without you. I must have two thousand five hundred a year for two years. At the end of that time, if I am a failure, I go. But if I am a success, and stay on, you must give me the other five thousand.
Undershaft
What other five thousand?
Cusins
To make the two years up to five thousand a year. The two thousand five hundred is only half pay in case I should turn out a failure. The third year I must have ten percent on the profits.
Undershaft
Taken aback. Ten percent! Why, man, do you know what my profits are?
Cusins
Enormous, I hope: otherwise I shall require twenty-five percent.
Undershaft
But, Mr. Cusins, this is a serious matter of business. You are not bringing any capital into the concern.
Cusins
What! no capital! Is my mastery of Greek no capital? Is my access to the subtlest thought, the loftiest poetry yet attained by humanity, no capital? my character! my intellect! my life! my career! what Barbara calls my soul! are these no capital? Say another word; and I double my salary.
Undershaft
Be reasonable—
Cusins
Peremptorily. Mr. Undershaft: you have my terms. Take them or leave them.
Undershaft
Recovering himself. Very well. I note your terms; and I offer you half.
Cusins
Disgusted. Half!
Undershaft
Firmly. Half.
Cusins
You call yourself a gentleman; and you offer me half!!
Undershaft
I do not call myself a gentleman; but I offer you half.
Cusins
This to your future partner! your successor! your son-in-law!
Barbara
You are selling your own soul, Dolly, not mine. Leave me out of the bargain, please.
Undershaft
Come! I will go a step further for Barbara’s sake. I will give you three-fifths; but that is my last word.
Cusins
Done!
Lomax
Done in the eye. Why, I only get eight hundred, you know.
Cusins
By the way, Mac, I am a classical scholar, not an arithmetical one. Is three-fifths more than half or less?
Undershaft
More, of course.
Cusins
I would have taken two hundred and fifty. How you can succeed in business when you are willing to pay all that money to a University don who is obviously not worth a junior clerk’s wages!—well! What will Lazarus say?
Undershaft
Lazarus is a gentle romantic Jew who cares for nothing but string quartets and stalls at fashionable theatres. He will get the credit of your rapacity in money matters, as he has hitherto had the credit of mine. You are a shark of the first order, Euripides. So much the better for the firm!
Barbara
Is the bargain closed, Dolly? Does your soul belong to him now?
Cusins
No: the price is settled: that is all. The real tug of war is still to come. What about the moral question?
Lady Britomart
There is no moral question in the matter at all, Adolphus. You must simply sell cannons and weapons to people whose cause is right and just, and refuse them to foreigners and criminals.
Undershaft
Determinedly. No: none of that. You must keep the true faith of an Armorer, or you don’t come in here.
Cusins
What on earth is the true faith of an Armorer?
Undershaft
To give arms to all men who offer an honest price for them, without respect of persons or principles: to aristocrat and republican, to Nihilist and Tsar, to Capitalist and Socialist, to Protestant and Catholic, to burglar and policeman, to black man, white man and yellow man, to all sorts and conditions, all nationalities, all faiths, all follies, all causes and all crimes. The first Undershaft wrote up in his shop If God Gave The Hand, Let Not Man Withhold The Sword. The second wrote up All Have The Right To Fight: None Have The Right To Judge. The third wrote up To Man The Weapon: To Heaven The Victory. The fourth had no literary turn; so he did not write up anything; but he sold cannons to Napoleon under the nose of George the Third. The fifth wrote up Peace Shall Not Prevail Save With A Sword In Her Hand. The sixth, my master, was the best of all. He wrote up Nothing Is Ever Done In This World Until Men Are Prepared To Kill One Another If It Is Not Done. After that, there was nothing left for the seventh to say. So he wrote up, simply, Unashamed.
Cusins
My good Machiavelli, I shall certainly write something up on the wall; only, as I shall write it in Greek, you won’t be able to read it. But as to your Armorer’s faith, if I take my neck out of the noose of my own morality I am not going to put it into the noose of yours. I shall sell cannons to whom I please and refuse them to whom I please. So there!
Undershaft
From the moment when you become Andrew Undershaft, you will never do as you please again. Don’t come here lusting for power, young man.
Cusins
If power were my aim I should not come here for it. You have no power.
Undershaft
None of my own, certainly.
Cusins
I have more power than you, more will. You do not drive this place: it drives you. And what drives the place?
Undershaft
Enigmatically. A will of which I am a part.
Barbara
Startled. Father! Do you know what you are saying; or are you laying a snare for my soul?
Cusins
Don’t listen to his metaphysics, Barbara. The place is driven by the most rascally part of society, the money hunters, the pleasure hunters, the military promotion hunters; and he is their slave.
Undershaft
Not necessarily. Remember the Armorer’s Faith. I will take an order from a good man as cheerfully as from a bad one. If you good people prefer preaching and shirking to buying my weapons and fighting the rascals, don’t blame me. I can make cannons: I cannot make courage and conviction. Bah! You tire me, Euripides, with your morality mongering. Ask Barbara: she understands. He suddenly takes Barbara’s hands, and looks powerfully into her eyes. Tell him, my love, what power really means.
Barbara
Hypnotized. Before I joined the Salvation Army, I was in my own power; and the consequence was that I never knew what to do with myself. When I joined it, I had not time enough for all the things I had to do.
Undershaft
Approvingly. Just so. And why was that, do you suppose?
Barbara
Yesterday I should have said, because I was in the power of God. She resumes her self-possession, withdrawing her hands from his with a power equal to his own. But you came and showed me that I was in the power of Bodger and Undershaft. Today I feel—oh! how can I put it into words? Sarah: do you remember the earthquake at Cannes, when we were little children?—how little the surprise of the first shock mattered compared to the dread and horror of waiting for the second? That is how I feel in this place today. I stood on the rock I thought eternal; and without a word of warning it reeled and crumbled under me. I was safe with an infinite wisdom watching me, an army marching to Salvation with me; and in a moment, at a stroke of your pen in a cheque book, I stood alone; and the heavens were empty. That was the first shock of the earthquake: I am waiting for the second.
Undershaft
Come, come, my daughter! Don’t make too much of your little tinpot tragedy. What do we do here when we spend years of work and thought and thousands of pounds of solid cash on a new gun or an aerial battleship that turns out just a hairsbreadth wrong after all? Scrap it. Scrap it without wasting another hour or another pound on it. Well, you have made for yourself something that you call a morality or a religion or whatnot. It doesn’t fit the facts. Well, scrap it. Scrap it and get one that does fit. That is what is wrong with the world at present. It scraps its obsolete steam engines and dynamos; but it won’t scrap its old prejudices and its old moralities and its old religions and its old political constitutions. What’s the result? In machinery it does very well; but in morals and religion and politics it is working at a loss that brings it nearer bankruptcy every year. Don’t persist in that folly. If your old religion broke down yesterday, get a newer and a better one for tomorrow.
Barbara
Oh how gladly I would take a better one to my soul! But you offer me a worse one. Turning on him with sudden vehemence. Justify yourself: show me some light through the darkness of this dreadful place, with its beautifully clean workshops, and respectable workmen, and model homes.
Undershaft
Cleanliness and respectability do not need justification, Barbara: they justify themselves. I see no darkness here, no dreadfulness. In your Salvation shelter I saw poverty, misery, cold and hunger. You gave them bread and treacle and dreams of heaven. I give from thirty shillings a week to twelve thousand a year. They find their own dreams; but I look after the drainage.
Barbara
And their souls?
Undershaft
I save their souls just as I saved yours.
Barbara
Revolted. You saved my soul! What do you mean?
Undershaft
I fed you and clothed you and housed you. I took care that you should have money enough to live handsomely—more than enough; so that you could be wasteful, careless, generous. That saved your soul from the seven deadly sins.
Barbara
Bewildered. The seven deadly sins!
Undershaft
Yes, the deadly seven. Counting on his fingers. Food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from Man’s neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted. I lifted them from your spirit. I enabled Barbara to become Major Barbara; and I saved her from the crime of poverty.
Cusins
Do you call poverty a crime?
Undershaft
The worst of crimes. All the other crimes are virtues beside it: all the other dishonors are chivalry itself by comparison. Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing: a murder here and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then: what do they matter? they are only the accidents and illnesses of life: there are not fifty genuine professional criminals in London. But there are millions of poor people, abject people, dirty people, ill fed, ill clothed people. They poison us morally and physically: they kill the happiness of society: they force us to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us down into their abyss. Only fools fear crime: we all fear poverty. Pah! Turning on Barbara. you talk of your half-saved ruffian in West Ham: you accuse me of dragging his soul back to perdition. Well, bring him to me here; and I will drag his soul back again to salvation for you. Not by words and dreams; but by thirty-eight shillings a week, a sound house in a handsome street, and a permanent job. In three weeks he will have a fancy waistcoat; in three months a tall hat and a chapel sitting; before the end of the year he will shake hands with a duchess at a Primrose League meeting, and join the Conservative Party.
Barbara
And will he be the better for that?
Undershaft
You know he will. Don’t be a hypocrite, Barbara. He will be better fed, better housed, better clothed, better behaved; and his children will be pounds heavier and bigger. That will be better than an American cloth mattress in a shelter, chopping firewood, eating bread and treacle, and being forced to kneel down from time to time to thank heaven for it: knee drill, I think you call it. It is cheap work converting starving men with a Bible in one hand and a slice of bread in the other. I will undertake to convert West Ham to Muhammadanism on the same terms. Try your hand on my men: their souls are hungry because their bodies are full.
Barbara
And leave the east end to starve?
Undershaft
His energetic tone dropping into one of bitter and brooding remembrance. I was an east ender. I moralized and starved until one day I swore that I would be a full-fed free man at all costs—that nothing should stop me except a bullet, neither reason nor morals nor the lives of other men. I said “Thou shalt starve ere I starve”; and with that word I became free and great. I was a dangerous man until I had my will: now I am a useful, beneficent, kindly person. That is the history of most self-made millionaires, I fancy. When it is the history of every Englishman we shall have an England worth living in.
Lady Britomart
Stop making speeches, Andrew. This is not the place for them.
Undershaft
Punctured. My dear: I have no other means of conveying my ideas.
Lady Britomart
Your ideas are nonsense. You got oil because you were selfish and unscrupulous.
Undershaft
Not at all. I had the strongest scruples about poverty and starvation. Your moralists are quite unscrupulous about both: they make virtues of them. I had rather be a thief than a pauper. I had rather be a murderer than a slave. I don’t want to be either; but if you force the alternative on me, then, by Heaven, I’ll choose the braver and more moral one. I hate poverty and slavery worse than any other crimes whatsoever. And let me tell you this. Poverty and slavery have stood up for centuries to your sermons and leading articles: they will not stand up to my machine guns. Don’t preach at them: don’t reason with them. Kill them.
Barbara
Killing. Is that your remedy for everything?
Undershaft
It is the final test of conviction, the only lever strong enough to overturn a social system, the only way of saying Must. Let six hundred and seventy fools loose in the street; and three policemen can scatter them. But huddle them together in a certain house in Westminster; and let them go through certain ceremonies and call themselves certain names until at last they get the courage to kill; and your six hundred and seventy fools become a government. Your pious mob fills up ballot papers and imagines it is governing its masters; but the ballot paper that really governs is the paper that has a bullet wrapped up in it.
Cusins
That is perhaps why, like most intelligent people, I never vote.
Undershaft
Vote! Bah! When you vote, you only change the names of the cabinet. When you shoot, you pull down governments, inaugurate new epochs, abolish old orders and set up new. Is that historically true, Mr. Learned Man, or is it not?
Cusins
It is historically true. I loathe having to admit it. I repudiate your sentiments. I abhor your nature. I defy you in every possible way. Still, it is true. But it ought not to be true.
Undershaft
Ought, ought, ought, ought, ought! Are you going to spend your life saying ought, like the rest of our moralists? Turn your oughts into shalls, man. Come and make explosives with me. Whatever can blow men up can blow society up. The history of the world is the history of those who had courage enough to embrace this truth. Have you the courage to embrace it, Barbara?
Lady Britomart
Barbara, I positively forbid you to listen to your father’s abominable wickedness. And you, Adolphus, ought to know better than to go about saying that wrong things are true. What does it matter whether they are true if they are wrong?
Undershaft
What does it matter whether they are wrong if they are true?
Lady Britomart
Rising. Children: come home instantly. Andrew: I am exceedingly sorry I allowed you to call on us. You are wickeder than ever. Come at once.
Barbara
Shaking her head. It’s no use running away from wicked people, mamma.
Lady Britomart
It is every use. It shows your disapprobation of them.
Barbara
It does not save them.
Lady Britomart
I can see that you are going to disobey me. Sarah: are you coming home or are you not?
Sarah
I daresay it’s very wicked of papa to make cannons; but I don’t think I shall cut him on that account.
Lomax
Pouring oil on the troubled waters. The fact is, you know, there is a certain amount of tosh about this notion of wickedness. It doesn’t work. You must look at facts. Not that I would say a word in favor of anything wrong; but then, you see, all sorts of chaps are always doing all sorts of things; and we have to fit them in somehow, don’t you know. What I mean is that you can’t go cutting everybody; and that’s about what it comes to. Their rapt attention to his eloquence makes him nervous. Perhaps I don’t make myself clear.
Lady Britomart
You are lucidity itself, Charles. Because Andrew is successful and has plenty of money to give to Sarah, you will flatter him and encourage him in his wickedness.
Lomax
Unruffled. Well, where the carcass is, there will the eagles be gathered, don’t you know. To Undershaft. Eh? What?
Undershaft
Precisely. By the way, may I call you Charles?
Lomax
Delighted. Cholly is the usual ticket.
Undershaft
To Lady Britomart. Biddy—
Lady Britomart
Violently. Don’t dare call me Biddy. Charles Lomax: you are a fool. Adolphus Cusins: you are a Jesuit. Stephen: you are a prig. Barbara: you are a lunatic. Andrew: you are a vulgar tradesman. Now you all know my opinion; and my conscience is clear, at all events She sits down again with a vehemence that almost wrecks the chair.
Undershaft
My dear, you are the incarnation of morality. She snorts. Your conscience is clear and your duty done when you have called everybody names. Come, Euripides! it is getting late; and we all want to get home. Make up your mind.
Cusins
Understand this, you old demon—
Lady Britomart
Adolphus!
Undershaft
Let him alone, Biddy. Proceed, Euripides.
Cusins
You have me in a horrible dilemma. I want Barbara.
Undershaft
Like all young men, you greatly exaggerate the difference between one young woman and another.
Barbara
Quite true, Dolly.
Cusins
I also want to avoid being a rascal.
Undershaft
With biting contempt. You lust for personal righteousness, for self-approval, for what you call a good conscience, for what Barbara calls salvation, for what I call patronizing people who are not so lucky as yourself.
Cusins
I do not: all the poet in me recoils from being a good man. But there are things in me that I must reckon with: pity—
Undershaft
Pity! The scavenger of misery.
Cusins
Well, love.
Undershaft
I know. You love the needy and the outcast: you love the oppressed races, the negro, the Indian ryot, the Pole, the Irishman. Do you love the Japanese? Do you love the Germans? Do you love the English?
Cusins
No. Every true Englishman detests the English. We are the wickedest nation on earth; and our success is a moral horror.
Undershaft
That is what comes of your gospel of love, is it?
Cusins
May I not love even my father-in-law?
Undershaft
Who wants your love, man? By what right do you take the liberty of offering it to me? I will have your due heed and respect, or I will kill you. But your love! Damn your impertinence!
Cusins
Grinning. I may not be able to control my affections, Mac.
Undershaft
You are fencing, Euripides. You are weakening: your grip is slipping. Come! try your last weapon. Pity and love have broken in your hand: forgiveness is still left.
Cusins
No: forgiveness is a beggar’s refuge. I am with you there: we must pay our debts.
Undershaft
Well said. Come! you will suit me. Remember the words of Plato.
Cusins
Starting. Plato! You dare quote Plato to me!
Undershaft
Plato says, my friend, that society cannot be saved until either the Professors of Greek take to making gunpowder, or else the makers of gunpowder become Professors of Greek.
Cusins
Oh, tempter, cunning tempter!
Undershaft
Come! choose, man, choose.
Cusins
But perhaps Barbara will not marry me if I make the wrong choice.
Barbara
Perhaps not.
Cusins
Desperately perplexed. You hear—
Barbara
Father: do you love nobody?
Undershaft
I love my best friend.
Lady Britomart
And who is that, pray?
Undershaft
My bravest enemy. That is the man who keeps me up to the mark.
Cusins
You know, the creature is really a sort of poet in his way. Suppose he is a great man, after all!
Undershaft
Suppose you stop talking and make up your mind, my young friend.
Cusins
But you are driving me against my nature. I hate war.
Undershaft
Hatred is the coward’s revenge for being intimidated. Dare you make war on war? Here are the means: my friend Mr. Lomax is sitting on them.
Lomax
Springing up. Oh I say! You don’t mean that this thing is loaded, do you? My ownest: come off it.
Sarah
Sitting placidly on the shell. If I am to be blown up, the more thoroughly it is done the better. Don’t fuss, Cholly.
Lomax
To Undershaft, strongly remonstrant. Your own daughter, you know.
Undershaft
So I see. To Cusins. Well, my friend, may we expect you here at six tomorrow morning?
Cusins
Firmly. Not on any account. I will see the whole establishment blown up with its own dynamite before I will get up at five. My hours are healthy, rational hours: eleven to five.
Undershaft
Come when you please: before a week you will come at six and stay until I turn you out for the sake of your health. Calling. Bilton! He turns to Lady Britomart, who rises. My dear: let us leave these two young people to themselves for a moment. Bilton comes from the shed. I am going to take you through the guncotton shed.
Undershaft
Barring the way. You can’t take anything explosive in here, Sir.
Lady Britomart
What do you mean? Are you alluding to me?
Undershaft
Unmoved. No, ma’am. Mr. Undershaft has the other gentleman’s matches in his pocket.
Lady Britomart
Abruptly. Oh! I beg your pardon. She goes into the shed.
Undershaft
Quite right, Bilton, quite right: here you are. He gives Bilton the box of matches. Come, Stephen. Come, Charles. Bring Sarah. He passes into the shed.
Bilton opens the box and deliberately drops the matches into the fire-bucket.
Lomax
Oh I say! Bilton stolidly hands him the empty box. Infernal nonsense! Pure scientific ignorance! He goes in.
Sarah
Am I all right, Bilton?
Undershaft
You’ll have to put on list slippers, miss: that’s all. We’ve got em inside. She goes in.
Stephen
Very seriously to Cusins. Dolly, old fellow, think. Think before you decide. Do you feel that you are a sufficiently practical man? It is a huge undertaking, an enormous responsibility. All this mass of business will be Greek to you.
Cusins
Oh, I think it will be much less difficult than Greek.
Stephen
Well, I just want to say this before I leave you to yourselves. Don’t let anything I have said about right and wrong prejudice you against this great chance in life. I have satisfied myself that the business is one of the highest character and a credit to our country. Emotionally. I am very proud of my father. I—Unable to proceed, he presses Cusins’ hand and goes hastily into the shed, followed by Bilton.
Barbara and Cusins, left alone together, look at one another silently.
Cusins
Barbara: I am going to accept this offer.
Barbara
I thought you would.
Cusins
You understand, don’t you, that I had to decide without consulting you. If I had thrown the burden of the choice on you, you would sooner or later have despised me for it.
Barbara
Yes: I did not want you to sell your soul for me any more than for this inheritance.
Cusins
It is not the sale of my soul that troubles me: I have sold it too often to care about that. I have sold it for a professorship. I have sold it for an income. I have sold it to escape being imprisoned for refusing to pay taxes for hangmen’s ropes and unjust wars and things that I abhor. What is all human conduct but the daily and hourly sale of our souls for trifles? What I am now selling it for is neither money nor position nor comfort, but for reality and for power.
Barbara
You know that you will have no power, and that he has none.
Cusins
I know. It is not for myself alone. I want to make power for the world.
Barbara
I want to make power for the world too; but it must be spiritual power.
Cusins
I think all power is spiritual: these cannons will not go off by themselves. I have tried to make spiritual power by teaching Greek. But the world can never be really touched by a dead language and a dead civilization. The people must have power; and the people cannot have Greek. Now the power that is made here can be wielded by all men.
Barbara
Power to burn women’s houses down and kill their sons and tear their husbands to pieces.
Cusins
You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother’s milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes. This power which only tears men’s bodies to pieces has never been so horribly abused as the intellectual power, the imaginative power, the poetic, religious power that can enslave men’s souls. As a teacher of Greek I gave the intellectual man weapons against the common man. I now want to give the common man weapons against the intellectual man. I love the common people. I want to arm them against the lawyer, the doctor, the priest, the literary man, the professor, the artist, and the politician, who, once in authority, are the most dangerous, disastrous, and tyrannical of all the fools, rascals, and impostors. I want a democratic power strong enough to force the intellectual oligarchy to use its genius for the general good or else perish.
Barbara
Is there no higher power than that? Pointing to the shell.
Cusins
Yes: but that power can destroy the higher powers just as a tiger can destroy a man: therefore man must master that power first. I admitted this when the Turks and Greeks were last at war. My best pupil went out to fight for Hellas. My parting gift to him was not a copy of Plato’s Republic, but a revolver and a hundred Undershaft cartridges. The blood of every Turk he shot—if he shot any—is on my head as well as on Undershaft’s. That act committed me to this place forever. Your father’s challenge has beaten me. Dare I make war on war? I dare. I must. I will. And now, is it all over between us?
Barbara
Touched by his evident dread of her answer. Silly baby Dolly! How could it be?
Cusins
Overjoyed. Then you—you—you—Oh for my drum! He flourishes imaginary drumsticks.
Barbara
Angered by his levity. Take care, Dolly, take care. Oh, if only I could get away from you and from father and from it all! if I could have the wings of a dove and fly away to heaven!
Cusins
And leave me!
Barbara
Yes, you, and all the other naughty mischievous children of men. But I can’t. I was happy in the Salvation Army for a moment. I escaped from the world into a paradise of enthusiasm and prayer and soul saving; but the moment our money ran short, it all came back to Bodger: it was he who saved our people: he, and the Prince of Darkness, my papa. Undershaft and Bodger: their hands stretch everywhere: when we feed a starving fellow creature, it is with their bread, because there is no other bread; when we tend the sick, it is in the hospitals they endow; if we turn from the churches they build, we must kneel on the stones of the streets they pave. As long as that lasts, there is no getting away from them. Turning our backs on Bodger and Undershaft is turning our backs on life.
Cusins
I thought you were determined to turn your back on the wicked side of life.
Barbara
There is no wicked side: life is all one. And I never wanted to shirk my share in whatever evil must be endured, whether it be sin or suffering. I wish I could cure you of middle-class ideas, Dolly.
Cusins
Gasping. Middle cl—! A snub! A social snub to me! from the daughter of a foundling!
Barbara
That is why I have no class, Dolly: I come straight out of the heart of the whole people. If I were middle-class I should turn my back on my father’s business; and we should both live in an artistic drawing-room, with you reading the reviews in one corner, and I in the other at the piano, playing Schumann: both very superior persons, and neither of us a bit of use. Sooner than that, I would sweep out the guncotton shed, or be one of Bodger’s barmaids. Do you know what would have happened if you had refused papa’s offer?
Cusins
I wonder!
Barbara
I should have given you up and married the man who accepted it. After all, my dear old mother has more sense than any of you. I felt like her when I saw this place—felt that I must have it—that never, never, never could I let it go; only she thought it was the houses and the kitchen ranges and the linen and china, when it was really all the human souls to be saved: not weak souls in starved bodies, crying with gratitude for a scrap of bread and treacle, but fullfed, quarrelsome, snobbish, uppish creatures, all standing on their little rights and dignities, and thinking that my father ought to be greatly obliged to them for making so much money for him—and so he ought. That is where salvation is really wanted. My father shall never throw it in my teeth again that my converts were bribed with bread. She is transfigured. I have got rid of the bribe of bread. I have got rid of the bribe of heaven. Let God’s work be done for its own sake: the work he had to create us to do because it cannot be done by living men and women. When I die, let him be in my debt, not I in his; and let me forgive him as becomes a woman of my rank.
Cusins
Then the way of life lies through the factory of death?
Barbara
Yes, through the raising of hell to heaven and of man to God, through the unveiling of an eternal light in the Valley of The Shadow. Seizing him with both hands. Oh, did you think my courage would never come back? did you believe that I was a deserter? that I, who have stood in the streets, and taken my people to my heart, and talked of the holiest and greatest things with them, could ever turn back and chatter foolishly to fashionable people about nothing in a drawing-room? Never, never, never, never: Major Barbara will die with the colors. Oh! and I have my dear little Dolly boy still; and he has found me my place and my work. Glory Hallelujah! She kisses him.
Cusins
My dearest: consider my delicate health. I cannot stand as much happiness as you can.
Barbara
Yes: it is not easy work being in love with me, is it? But it’s good for you. She runs to the shed, and calls, childlike. Mamma! Mamma! Bilton comes out of the shed, followed by Undershaft. I want Mamma.
Undershaft
She is taking off her list slippers, dear. He passes on to Cusins. Well? What does she say?
Cusins
She has gone right up into the skies.
Lady Britomart
Coming from the shed and stopping on the steps, obstructing Sarah, who follows with Lomax. Barbara clutches like a baby at her mother’s skirt. Barbara: when will you learn to be independent and to act and think for yourself? I know as well as possible what that cry of “Mamma, Mamma,” means. Always running to me!
Sarah
Touching Lady Britomart’s ribs with her finger tips and imitating a bicycle horn. Pip! pip!
Lady Britomart
Highly indignant. How dare you say Pip! pip! to me, Sarah? You are both very naughty children. What do you want, Barbara?
Barbara
I want a house in the village to live in with Dolly. Dragging at the skirt. Come and tell me which one to take.
Undershaft
To Cusins. Six o’clock tomorrow morning, my young friend.