Major Barbara (Act 3) de George Bernard Shaw

Next day after lunch Lady Britomart is writing in the library in Wilton Crescent. Sarah is reading in the armchair near the window. Barbara, in ordinary dress, pale and brooding, is on the settee. Charley Lomax enters. Coming forward between the settee and the writing table, he starts on seeing Barbara fashionably attired and in low spirits.

LOMAX
You've left off your uniform!

Barbara says nothing; but an expression of pain passes over her face.

LADY BRITOMART
Charles!

LOMAX
I'm awfully sorry, Barbara. You know I helped you all I could with the concertina and so forth. Still, I have never shut my eyes to the fact that there is a certain amount of tosh about the Salvation Army. Now the claims of the Church of England--

LADY BRITOMART
That's enough, Charles. Speak of something suited to your mental capacity.

LOMAX
But surely the Church of England is suited to all our capacities.

BARBARA
Thank you for your sympathy, Cholly. Now go and spoon with Sarah.

LOMAX
How is my ownest today?

SARAH
I wish you wouldn't tell Cholly to do things, Barbara. He always comes straight and does them. Cholly: we're going to the works at Perivale St. Andrews this afternoon.
LOMAX
What works?

SARAH
The cannon works.

LOMAX
What! Your governor's shop!

SARAH
Yes.

LOMAX
Oh I say!

Cusins enters in poor condition. He also starts visibly when he sees Barbara without her uniform.

BARBARA
I expected you this morning, Dolly. Didn't you guess that?

CUSINS
I'm sorry. I have only just breakfasted.

SARAH
But we've just finished lunch.
BARBARA
Have you had one of your bad nights?

CUSINS
No: I had rather a good night: in fact, one of the most remarkable nights I have ever passed.

BARBARA
The meeting?

CUSINS
No: after the meeting.

LADY BRITOMART
You should have gone to bed after the meeting. What were you doing?

CUSINS
Drinking.

LADY BRITOMART
{Adolphus! SARAH. {Dolly! BARBARA. {Dolly! LOMAX. {Oh I say!

LADY BRITOMART
What were you drinking, may I ask?

CUSINS
A most devilish kind of Spanish burgundy, warranted free from added alcohol: a Temperance burgundy in fact. Its richness in natural alcohol made any addition superfluous.
BARBARA
Are you joking, Dolly?

CUSINS
No. I have been making a night of it with the nominal head of this household: that is all.

LADY BRITOMART
Andrew made you drunk!

CUSINS
No: he only provided the wine. I think it was Dionysos who made me drunk. I told you I was possessed.

LADY BRITOMART
You're not sober yet. Go home to bed at once.

CUSINS
I have never before ventured to reproach you, Lady Brit; but how could you marry the Prince of Darkness?
LADY BRITOMART. It was much more excusable to marry him than to get drunk with him. That is a new accomplishment of Andrew's, by the way. He usen't to drink.

CUSINS
He doesn't now. He only sat there and completed the wreck of my moral basis, the rout of my convictions, the purchase of my soul. He cares for you, Barbara. That is what makes him so dangerous to me.

BARBARA
That has nothing to do with it, Dolly. There are larger loves and diviner dreams than the fireside ones. You know that, don't you?

CUSINS
Yes: that is our understanding. I know it. I hold to it. Unless he can win me on that holier ground he may amuse me for a while; but he can get no deeper hold, strong as he is.

BARBARA
Keep to that; and the end will be right. Now tell me what happened at the meeting?

CUSINS
It was an amazing meeting. Mrs Baines almost died of emotion. Jenny Hill went stark mad with hysteria. The Prince of Darkness played his trombone like a madman: its brazen roarings were like the laughter of the damned. 117 conversions took place then and there. They prayed with the most touching sincerity and gratitude for Bodger, and for the anonymous donor of the 5000 pounds. Your father would not let his name be given.

LOMAX
That was rather fine of the old man, you know. Most chaps would have wanted the advertisement.

CUSINS
He said all the charitable institutions would be down on him like kites on a battle field if he gave his name.

LADY BRITOMART
That's Andrew all over. He never does a proper thing without giving an improper reason for it.

CUSINS
He convinced me that I have all my life been doing improper things for proper reasons.

LADY BRITOMART
Adolphus: now that Barbara has left the Salvation Army, you had better leave it too. I will not have you playing that drum in the streets.

CUSINS
Your orders are already obeyed, Lady Brit.

BARBARA
Dolly: were you ever really in earnest about it? Would you have joined if you had never seen me?

CUSINS
Well--er--well, possibly, as a collector of religions--

LOMAX
Not as a drummer, though, you know. You are a very clearheaded brainy chap, Cholly; and it must have been apparent to you that there is a certain amount of tosh about--

LADY BRITOMART
Charles: if you must drivel, drivel like a grown-up man and not like a schoolboy.

LOMAX
Well, drivel is drivel, don't you know, whatever a man's age.

LADY BRITOMART
In good society in England, Charles, men drivel at all ages by repeating silly formulas with an air of wisdom. Schoolboys make their own formulas out of slang, like you. When they reach your age, and get political private secretaryships and things of that sort, they drop slang and get their formulas out of The Spectator or The Times. You had better confine yourself to The Times. You will find that there is a certain amount of tosh about The Times; but at least its language is reputable.

LOMAX
You are so awfully strong-minded, Lady Brit--

LADY BRITOMART
Rubbish! . What is it?

MORRISON
If you please, my lady, Mr Undershaft has just drove up to the door.

LADY BRITOMART
Well, let him in. . What's the matter with you?

MORRISON
Shall I announce him, my lady; or is he at home here, so to speak, my lady?

LADY BRITOMART
Announce him.
MORRISON. Thank you, my lady. You won't mind my asking, I hope. The occasion is in a manner of speaking new to me.

LADY BRITOMART
Quite right. Go and let him in.

MORRISON
Thank you, my lady. .

LADY BRITOMART
Children: go and get ready. . Charles: go and tell Stephen to come down here in five minutes: you will find him in the drawing room. . Adolphus: tell them to send round the carriage in about fifteen minutes. .

MORRISON
Mr Undershaft.

Undershaft comes in. Morrison goes out.

UNDERSHAFT
Alone! How fortunate!

LADY BRITOMART
Don't be sentimental, Andrew. Sit down. . Sarah must have 800 pounds a year until Charles Lomax comes into his property. Barbara will need more, and need it permanently, because Adolphus hasn't any property.

UNDERSHAFT
Yes, my dear: I will see to it. Anything else? for yourself, for instance?

LADY BRITOMART
I want to talk to you about Stephen.

UNDERSHAFT
Don't, my dear. Stephen doesn't interest me.

LADY BRITOMART
He does interest me. He is our son.

UNDERSHAFT
Do you really think so? He has induced us to bring him into the world; but he chose his parents very incongruously, I think. I see nothing of myself in him, and less of you.

LADY BRITOMART
Andrew: Stephen is an excellent son, and a most steady, capable, highminded young man. YOU are simply trying to find an excuse for disinheriting him.

UNDERSHAFT
My dear Biddy: the Undershaft tradition disinherits him. It would be dishonest of me to leave the cannon foundry to my son.

LADY BRITOMART
It would be most unnatural and improper of you to leave it to anyone else, Andrew. Do you suppose this wicked and immoral tradition can be kept up for ever? Do you pretend that Stephen could not carry on the foundry just as well as all the other sons of the big business houses?

UNDERSHAFT
Yes: he could learn the office routine without understanding the business, like all the other sons; and the firm would go on by its own momentum until the real Undershaft--probably an Italian or a German--would invent a new method and cut him out.

LADY BRITOMART
There is nothing that any Italian or German could do that Stephen could not do. And Stephen at least has breeding.

UNDERSHAFT
The son of a foundling! nonsense!

LADY BRITOMART
My son, Andrew! And even you may have good blood in your veins for all you know.

UNDERSHAFT
True. Probably I have. That is another argument in favor of a foundling.

LADY BRITOMART
Andrew: don't be aggravating. And don't be wicked. At present you are both.

UNDERSHAFT
This conversation is part of the Undershaft tradition, Biddy. Every Undershaft's wife has treated him to it ever since the house was founded. It is mere waste of breath. If the tradition be ever broken it will be for an abler man than Stephen.

LADY BRITOMART
Then go away.

UNDERSHAFT
Go away!

LADY BRITOMART
Yes: go away. If you will do nothing for Stephen, you are not wanted here. Go to your foundling, whoever he is; and look after him.

UNDERSHAFT
The fact is, Biddy--

LADY BRITOMART
Don't call me Biddy. I don't call you Andy.

UNDERSHAFT
I will not call my wife Britomart: it is not good sense. Seriously, my love, the Undershaft tradition has landed me in a difficulty. I am getting on in years; and my partner Lazarus has at last made a stand and insisted that the succession must be settled one way or the other; and of course he is quite right. You see, I haven't found a fit successor yet.

LADY BRITOMART
There is Stephen.

UNDERSHAFT
That's just it: all the foundlings I can find are exactly like Stephen.

LADY BRITOMART
Andrew!!

UNDERSHAFT
I want a man with no relations and no schooling: that is, a man who would be out of the running altogether if he were not a strong man. And I can't find him. Every blessed foundling nowadays is snapped up in his infancy by Barnardo homes, or School Board officers, or Boards of Guardians; and if he shows the least ability, he is fastened on by schoolmasters; trained to win scholarships like a racehorse; crammed with secondhand ideas; drilled and disciplined in docility and what they call good taste; and lamed for life so that he is fit for nothing but teaching. If you want to keep the foundry in the family, you had better find an eligible foundling and marry him to Barbara.

LADY BRITOMART
Ah! Barbara! Your pet! You would sacrifice Stephen to Barbara.

UNDERSHAFT
Cheerfully. And you, my dear, would boil Barbara to make soup for Stephen.

LADY BRITOMART
Andrew: this is not a question of our likings and dislikings: it is a question of duty. It is your duty to make Stephen your successor.

UNDERSHAFT
Just as much as it is your duty to submit to your husband. Come, Biddy! these tricks of the governing class are of no use with me. I am one of the governing class myself; and it is waste of time giving tracts to a missionary. I have the power in this matter; and I am not to be humbugged into using it for your purposes.

LADY BRITOMART
Andrew: you can talk my head off; but you can't change wrong into right. And your tie is all on one side. Put it straight.

UNDERSHAFT
It won't stay unless it's pinned --

Stephen comes in.

STEPHEN
I beg your pardon .

LADY BRITOMART
No: come in, Stephen.

UNDERSHAFT
Good afternoon.

STEPHEN
Good afternoon.

UNDERSHAFT
He knows all about the tradition, I suppose?

LADY BRITOMART
Yes. It is what I told you last night, Stephen.

UNDERSHAFT
I understand you want to come into the cannon business.

STEPHEN
_I_ go into trade! Certainly not.

UNDERSHAFT
Oh! in that case--!

LADY BRITOMART
Cannons are not trade, Stephen. They are enterprise.

STEPHEN
I have no intention of becoming a man of business in any sense. I have no capacity for business and no taste for it. I intend to devote myself to politics.

UNDERSHAFT
My dear boy: this is an immense relief to me. And I trust it may prove an equally good thing for the country. I was afraid you would consider yourself disparaged and slighted. .

LADY BRITOMART
Stephen: I cannot allow you to throw away an enormous property like this.

STEPHEN
Mother: there must be an end of treating me as a child, if you please. . Until last night I did not take your attitude seriously, because I did not think you meant it seriously. But I find now that you left me in the dark as to matters which you should have explained to me years ago. I am extremely hurt and offended. Any further discussion of my intentions had better take place with my father, as between one man and another.

LADY BRITOMART
Stephen! .

UNDERSHAFT
You see, my dear, it is only the big men who can be treated as children.

STEPHEN
I am sorry, mother, that you have forced me--

UNDERSHAFT
Yes, yes, yes, yes: that's all right, Stephen. She won't interfere with you any more: your independence is achieved: you have won your latchkey. Don't rub it in; and above all, don't apologize. . Now what about your future, as between one man and another--I beg your pardon, Biddy: as between two men and a woman.

LADY BRITOMART
I quite understand, Stephen. By all means go your own way if you feel strong enough. .

UNDERSHAFT
It is settled that you do not ask for the succession to the cannon business.

STEPHEN
I hope it is settled that I repudiate the cannon business.

UNDERSHAFT
Come, come! Don't be so devilishly sulky: it's boyish. Freedom should be generous. Besides, I owe you a fair start in life in exchange for disinheriting you. You can't become prime minister all at once. Haven't you a turn for something? What about literature, art and so forth?

STEPHEN
I have nothing of the artist about me, either in faculty or character, thank Heaven!

UNDERSHAFT
A philosopher, perhaps? Eh?

STEPHEN
I make no such ridiculous pretension.

UNDERSHAFT
Just so. Well, there is the army, the navy, the Church, the Bar. The Bar requires some ability. What about the Bar?

STEPHEN
I have not studied law. And I am afraid I have not the necessary push--I believe that is the name barristers give to their vulgarity--for success in pleading.

UNDERSHAFT
Rather a difficult case, Stephen. Hardly anything left but the stage, is there? .
Well, come! is there anything you know or care for?

STEPHEN
I know the difference between right and wrong.

UNDERSHAFT
You don't say so! What! no capacity for business, no knowledge of law, no sympathy with art, no pretension to philosophy; only a simple knowledge of the secret that has puzzled all the philosophers, baffled all the lawyers, muddled all the men of business, and ruined most of the artists: the secret of right and wrong. Why, man, you're a genius, master of masters, a god! At twenty-four, too!

STEPHEN
You are pleased to be facetious. I pretend to nothing more than any honorable English gentleman claims as his birthright .

UNDERSHAFT
Oh, that's everybody's birthright. Look at poor little Jenny Hill, the Salvation lassie! she would think you were laughing at her if you asked her to stand up in the street and teach grammar or geography or mathematics or even drawingroom dancing; but it never occurs to her to doubt that she can teach morals and religion. You are all alike, you respectable people. You can't tell me the bursting strain of a ten-inch gun, which is a very simple matter; but you all think you can tell me the bursting strain of a man under temptation. You daren't handle high explosives; but you're all ready to handle honesty and truth and justice and the whole duty of man, and kill one another at that game. What a country! what a world!

LADY BRITOMART
What do you think he had better do, Andrew?

UNDERSHAFT
Oh, just what he wants to do. He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career. Get him a private secretaryship to someone who can get him an Under Secretaryship; and then leave him alone. He will find his natural and proper place in the end on the Treasury bench.

STEPHEN
I am sorry, sir, that you force me to forget the respect due to you as my father. I am an Englishman; and I will not hear the Government of my country insulted. .

UNDERSHAFT
The government of your country! _I_ am the government of your country: I, and Lazarus. Do you suppose that you and half a dozen amateurs like you, sitting in a row in that foolish gabble shop, can govern Undershaft and Lazarus? No, my friend: you will do what pays US. You will make war when it suits us, and keep peace when it doesn't. You will find out that trade requires certain measures when we have decided on those measures. When I want anything to keep my dividends up, you will discover that my want is a national need. When other people want something to keep my dividends down, you will call out the police and military. And in return you shall have the support and applause of my newspapers, and the delight of imagining that you are a great statesman. Government of your country! Be off with you, my boy, and play with your caucuses and leading articles and historic parties and great leaders and burning questions and the rest of your toys. _I_ am going back to my counting house to pay the piper and call the tune.

STEPHEN
Really, my dear father, it is impossible to be angry with you. You don't know how absurd all this sounds to ME. You are very properly proud of having been industrious enough to make money; and it is greatly to your credit that you have made so much of it. But it has kept you in circles where you are valued for your money and deferred to for it, instead of in the doubtless very oldfashioned and behind-the-times public school and university where I formed my habits of mind. It is natural for you to think that money governs England; but you must allow me to think I know better.

UNDERSHAFT
And what does govern England, pray?

STEPHEN
Character, father, character.

UNDERSHAFT
Whose character? Yours or mine?

STEPHEN
Neither yours nor mine, father, but the best elements in the English national character.

UNDERSHAFT
Stephen: I've found your profession for you. You're a born journalist. I'll start you with a hightoned weekly review. There!
Stephen goes to the smaller writing table and busies himself with his letters.

Sarah, Barbara, Lomax, and Cusins come in ready for walking. Barbara crosses the room to the window and looks out. Cusins drifts amiably to the armchair, and Lomax remains near the door, whilst Sarah comes to her mother.

SARAH
Go and get ready, mamma: the carriage is waiting.

UNDERSHAFT
Good day, my dear. Good afternoon, Mr. Lomax.

LOMAX
Ahdedoo.

UNDERSHAFT
quite well after last night, Euripides, eh?

CUSINS
As well as can be expected.

UNDERSHAFT
That's right. So you are coming to see my death and devastation factory, Barbara?

BARBARA
You came yesterday to see my salvation factory. I promised you a return visit.

LOMAX
You'll find it awfully interesting. I've been through the Woolwich Arsenal; and it gives you a ripping feeling of security, you know, to think of the lot of beggars we could kill if it came to fighting. Still, it must be rather an awful reflection for you, from the religious point of view as it were. You're getting on, you know, and all that.

SARAH
You don't mind Cholly's imbecility, papa, do you?

LOMAX
Oh I say!

UNDERSHAFT
Mr Lomax looks at the matter in a very proper spirit, my dear.

LOMAX
Just so. That's all I meant, I assure you.

SARAH
Are you coming, Stephen?

STEPHEN
Well, I am rather busy--er-- Oh well, yes: I'll come. That is, if there is room for me.

UNDERSHAFT
I can take two with me in a little motor I am experimenting with for field use. You won't mind its being rather unfashionable.
It's not painted yet; but it's bullet proof.

LOMAX
Oh I say!

SARAH
The carriage for me, thank you. Barbara doesn't mind what she's seen in.

LOMAX
I say, Dolly old chap: do you really mind the car being a guy? Because of course if you do I'll go in it. Still--

CUSINS
I prefer it.

LOMAX
Thanks awfully, old man. Come, Sarah. .

CUSINS
Why are we two coming to this Works Department of Hell? that is what I ask myself.

BARBARA
I have always thought of it as a sort of pit where lost creatures with blackened faces stirred up smoky fires and were driven and tormented by my father? Is it like that, dad?

UNDERSHAFT
My dear! It is a spotlessly clean and beautiful hillside town.

CUSINS
With a Methodist chapel? Oh do say there's a Methodist chapel.

UNDERSHAFT
There are two: a primitive one and a sophisticated one. There is even an Ethical Society; but it is not much patronized, as my men are all strongly religious. In the High Explosives Sheds they object to the presence of Agnostics as unsafe.

CUSINS
And yet they don't object to you!

BARBARA
Do they obey all your orders?

UNDERSHAFT
I never give them any orders. When I speak to one of them it is "Well, Jones, is the baby doing well? and has Mrs Jones made a good recovery?" "Nicely, thank you, sir." And that's all.

CUSINS
But Jones has to be kept in order. How do you maintain discipline among your men?

UNDERSHAFT
I don't. They do. You see, the one thing Jones won't stand is any rebellion from the man under him, or any assertion of social equality between the wife of the man with 4 shillings a week less than himself and Mrs Jones! Of course they all rebel against me, theoretically. Practically, every man of them keeps the man just below him in his place. I never meddle with them. I never bully them. I don't even bully Lazarus. I say that certain things are to be done; but I don't order anybody to do them. I don't say, mind you, that there is no ordering about and snubbing and even bullying. The men snub the boys and order them about; the carmen snub the sweepers; the artisans snub the unskilled laborers; the foremen drive and bully both the laborers and artisans; the assistant engineers find fault with the foremen; the chief engineers drop on the assistants; the departmental managers worry the chiefs; and the clerks have tall hats and hymnbooks and keep up the social tone by refusing to associate on equal terms with anybody. The result is a colossal profit, which comes to me.

CUSINS
You really are a--well, what I was saying yesterday.

BARBARA
What was he saying yesterday?

UNDERSHAFT
Never mind, my dear. He thinks I have made you unhappy. Have I?

BARBARA
Do you think I can be happy in this vulgar silly dress? I! who have worn the uniform. Do you understand what you have done to me? Yesterday I had a man's soul in my hand. I set him in the way of life with his face to salvation. But when we took your money he turned back to drunkenness and derision. I will never forgive you that. If I had a child, and you destroyed its body with your explosives--if you murdered Dolly with your horrible guns--I could forgive you if my forgiveness would open the gates of heaven to you. But to take a human soul from me, and turn it into the soul of a wolf! that is worse than any murder.

UNDERSHAFT
Does my daughter despair so easily? Can you strike a man to the heart and leave no mark on him?

BARBARA
Oh, you are right: he can never be lost now: where was my faith?

CUSINS
Oh, clever clever devil!

BARBARA
You may be a devil; but God speaks through you sometimes. . You have given me back my happiness: I feel it deep down now, though my spirit is troubled.

UNDERSHAFT
You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.

BARBARA
Well, take me to the factory of death, and let me learn something more. There must be some truth or other behind all this frightful irony. Come, Dolly. .

CUSINS
My guardian angel! Avaunt! .

STEPHEN
You must not mind Cusins, father. He is a very amiable good fellow; but he is a Greek scholar and naturally a little eccentric.

UNDERSHAFT
Ah, quite so. Thank you, Stephen. Thank you. .

Stephen smiles patronizingly; buttons his coat responsibly; and crosses the room to the door. Lady Britomart, dressed for out-of-doors, opens it before he reaches it. She looks round far the others; looks at Stephen; and turns to go without a word.

STEPHEN
Mother--

LADY BRITOMART
Don't be apologetic, Stephen. And don't forget that you have outgrown your mother. .

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 fieldglass.

STEPHEN
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! . Did you see the nursing home!? .

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 co-operation!?

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. 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
Dummy soldiers?

UNDERSHAFT
No: the real thing. . 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
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. .

UNDERSHAFT
Anything wrong, Bilton?

BILTON
Gentleman walked into the high explosives shed and lit a cigaret, sir: that's all.

UNDERSHAFT
Ah, quite so. 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.

BILTON
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
Certainly.

UNDERSHAFT
Thanks. .

LOMAX
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. Did you know that Undershaft? Have you ever tried?

UNDERSHAFT
Not on a large scale, Mr Lomax. Bilton will give you a sample of gun cotton when you are leaving if you ask him. You can experiment with it at home. .

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. .

LOMAX
My ownest, there is no danger. .

Lady Britomart arrives from the town with a bouquet.

LADY BRITOMART
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 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
Where did you get the flowers, my dear?

LADY BRITOMART
Your men presented them to me in your William Morris Labor Church.

CUSINS
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
Not quite. . 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
{ LADY BRITOMART. { Confession! 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. . Is the subterfuge good enough, Machiavelli?

UNDERSHAFT
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

UNDERSHAFT
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
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. .

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
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 per cent on the profits.

UNDERSHAFT
Ten per cent! Why, man, do you know what my profits are?

CUSINS
Enormous, I hope: otherwise I shall require twenty-five per cent.

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
Mr Undershaft: you have my terms. Take them or leave them.

UNDERSHAFT
Very well. I note your terms; and I offer you half.

CUSINS
Half!

UNDERSHAFT
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
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
A will of which I am a part.

BARBARA
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. . Tell him, my love, what power really means.

BARBARA
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
Just so. And why was that, do you suppose?

BARBARA
Yesterday I should have said, because I was in the power of God. . 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 what not. 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. . 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
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
The seven deadly sins!

UNDERSHAFT
Yes, the deadly seven. 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! 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 Mahometanism 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
I was an east ender. I moralized and starved until one day I swore that I would be a fullfed 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
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
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
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
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. 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
Well, where the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered, don't you know. Eh? What?

UNDERSHAFT
Precisely. By the way, may I call you Charles?

LOMAX
Delighted. Cholly is the usual ticket.

UNDERSHAFT
Biddy--

LADY BRITOMART
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 .

UNDERSHAFT
My dear, you are the incarnation of morality. . 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
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
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
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
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
Oh I say! You don't mean that this thing is loaded, do you? My ownest: come off it.

SARAH
If I am to be blown up, the more thoroughly it is done the better. Don't fuss, Cholly.

LOMAX
Your own daughter, you know.

UNDERSHAFT
So I see. Well, my friend, may we expect you here at six tomorrow morning?

CUSINS
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. Bilton! . My dear: let us leave these two young people to themselves for a moment.
. I am going to take you through the gun cotton shed.

BILTON
You can't take anything explosive in here, Sir.

LADY BRITOMART
What do you mean? Are you alluding to me?

BILTON
No, ma'am. Mr Undershaft has the other gentleman's matches in his pocket.

LADY BRITOMART
Oh! I beg your pardon. .

UNDERSHAFT
Quite right, Bilton, quite right: here you are. . Come, Stephen. Come, Charles. Bring Sarah. .

Bilton opens the box and deliberately drops the matches into the fire-bucket.

LOMAX
Oh I say! . Infernal nonsense! Pure scientific ignorance! .

SARAH
Am I all right, Bilton?

BILTON
You'll have to put on list slippers, miss: that's all. We've got em inside. .

STEPHEN
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. I am very proud of my father. I-- .

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 ?

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 for ever. 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
Silly baby Dolly! How could it be?

CUSINS
Then you--you--you-- Oh for my drum! .

BARBARA
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
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 drawingroom, 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 or 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. . 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. 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 drawingroom? 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! .

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. Mamma! Mamma! . I want Mamma.

UNDERSHAFT
She is taking off her list slippers, dear. . Well? What does she say?

CUSINS
She has gone right up into the skies.

LADY BRITOMART
. 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
Pip! Pip!

LADY
BRITOMART 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. Come and tell me which one to take.

UNDERSHAFT
Six o'clock tomorrow morning, my young friend.