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\title{Major Barbara}


\author{George Bernard Shaw}

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\vspace*{\stretch{1}}

\noindent This public-domain (U.S.) text was produced by Dudley P.\ Duck,
and by Eve Sobol, South Bend, Indiana, USA. The preface and the play
itself, which had been made available as separate texts in Project
Gutenberg ({}``pmbrb10'' and {}``mjbrb10'', respectively), were
subsequently re-joined into a single document. The text was then converted
to \LaTeX{} using \textbf{GutenMark} software and re-edited%
\footnote{The purpose of re-editing was to enforce a particular style of formatting---but
deeper alterations were made as well. The principal issues were these:
The spelling of the name {}``Baines'' was made consistent (instead
of {}``Barnes'' or {}``Brines''); emphasis was added to numerous
words; an entire sentence in Act II containing Greek-language text
was added. I would also note, incidentally, that extensive sections
of the play are in dialect, and that the representations of these
passages differ drastically from the printed version I used for comparison
(namely, the 1956 Modern Library edition). Finally, the text partially---but
not completely---follows Shaw's odd spelling rules. For example, {}``Mr.''
and {}``Mrs.'' appear as {}``Mr'' and {}``Mrs'', but {}``can't''
and {}``don't'' do \emph{not} appear as {}``cant'' and {}``dont''.
However, as it was never my intention to re-proof the \emph{content}
of the Project Gutenberg text, and as it is possible that different
printed editions differ among themselves, I did not often venture
to alter dialect nor to restore Shaw's spelling rules.---R.\ Burkey%
} by Ron Burkey. Report problems to info@sandroid.org.

\noindent \begin{center}Revision: A\\
Date: 01/11/03\end{center}

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\chapter*{\raggedright PREFACE TO MAJOR BARBARA: FIRST AID TO CRITICS}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{PREFACE TO MAJOR BARBARA:\\
FIRST AID TO CRITICS}

\markboth{MAJOR BARBARA}{PREFACE}

\emph{N.B.} The Euripidean verses in the second act of \emph{Major
Barbara} are not by me, or even directly by Euripides. They are by
Professor Gilbert Murray, whose English version of \emph{The Baccha}
came into our dramatic literature with all the impulsive power of
an original work shortly before \emph{Major Barbara} was begun. The
play, indeed, stands indebted to him in more ways than one. G.\ B.\ S.

Before dealing with the deeper aspects of \emph{Major Barbara}, let
me, for the credit of English literature, make a protest against an
unpatriotic habit into which many of my critics have fallen. Whenever
my view strikes them as being at all outside the range of, say, an
ordinary suburban churchwarden, they conclude that I am echoing Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche, Ibsen, Strindberg, Tolstoy, or some other heresiarch in
northern or eastern Europe.

I confess there is something flattering in this simple faith in my
accomplishment as a linguist and my erudition as a philosopher. But
I cannot tolerate the assumption that life and literature is so poor
in these islands that we must go abroad for all dramatic material
that is not common and all ideas that are not superficial. I therefore
venture to put my critics in possession of certain facts concerning
my contact with modern ideas.

About half a century ago, an Irish novelist, Charles Lever, wrote
a story entitled \emph{A Day's Ride: A Life's Romance}. It was published
by Charles Dickens in \emph{Household Words}, and proved so strange
to the public taste that Dickens pressed Lever to make short work
of it. I read scraps of this novel when I was a child; and it made
an enduring impression on me. The hero was a very romantic hero, trying
to live bravely, chivalrously, and powerfully by dint of mere romance-fed
imagination, without courage, without means, without knowledge, without
skill, without anything real except his bodily appetites. Even in
my childhood I found in this poor devil's unsuccessful encounters
with the facts of life, a poignant quality that romantic fiction lacked.
The book, in spite of its first failure, is not dead: I saw its title
the other day in the catalogue of Tauchnitz.

Now why is it that when I also deal in the tragi-comic irony of the
conflict between real life and the romantic imagination, no critic
ever affiliates me to my countryman and immediate forerunner, Charles
Lever, whilst they confidently derive me from a Norwegian author of
whose language I do not know three words, and of whom I knew nothing
until years after the Shavian \textit{Anschauung} was already unequivocally
declared in books full of what came, ten years later, to be perfunctorily
labelled Ibsenism. I was not Ibsenist even at second hand; for Lever,
though he may have read Henri Beyle, alias Stendhal, certainly never
read Ibsen. Of the books that made Lever popular, such as \emph{Charles
O'Malley} and \emph{Harry Lorrequer}, I know nothing but the names
and some of the illustrations. But the story of the day's ride and
life's romance of Potts (claiming alliance with \textit{\emph{Pozzo}}
\textit{\emph{di}} \textit{\emph{Borgo}}) caught me and fascinated
me as something strange and significant, though I already knew all
about Alnaschar and Don Quixote and Simon Tappertit and many another
romantic hero mocked by reality. From the plays of Aristophanes to
the tales of Stevenson that mockery has been made familiar to all
who are properly saturated with letters.

Where, then, was the novelty in Lever's tale? Partly, I think, in
a new seriousness in dealing with Potts's disease. Formerly, the contrast
between madness and sanity was deemed comic: Hogarth shows us how
fashionable people went in parties to Bedlam to laugh at the lunatics.
I myself have had a village idiot exhibited to me as some thing irresistibly
funny. On the stage the madman was once a regular comic figure; that
was how Hamlet got his opportunity before Shakespear touched him.
The originality of Shakespear's version lay in his taking the lunatic
sympathetically and seriously, and thereby making an advance towards
the eastern consciousness of the fact that lunacy may be inspiration
in disguise, since a man who has more brains than his fellows necessarily
appears as mad to them as one who has less. But Shakespear did not
do for Pistol and Parolles what he did for Hamlet. The particular
sort of madman they represented, the romantic makebeliever, lay outside
the pale of sympathy in literature: he was pitilessly despised and
ridiculed here as he was in the east under the name of Alnaschar,
and was doomed to be, centuries later, under the name of Simon Tappertit.
When Cervantes relented over Don Quixote, and Dickens relented over
Pickwick, they did not become impartial: they simply changed sides,
and became friends and apologists where they had formerly been mockers.

In Lever's story there is a real change of attitude. There is no relenting
towards Potts: he never gains our affections like Don Quixote and
Pickwick: he has not even the infatuate courage of Tappertit. But
we dare not laugh at him, because, somehow, we recognize ourselves
in Potts. We may, some of us, have enough nerve, enough muscle, enough
luck, enough tact or skill or address or knowledge to carry things
off better than he did; to impose on the people who saw through him;
to fascinate Katinka (who cut Potts so ruthlessly at the end of the
story); but for all that, we know that Potts plays an enormous part
in ourselves and in the world, and that the social problem is not
a problem of story-book heroes of the older pattern, but a problem
of Pottses, and of how to make men of them. To fall back on my old
phrase, we have the feeling---one that Alnaschar, Pistol, Parolles,
and Tappertit never gave us---that Potts is a piece of really scientific
natural history as distinguished from comic story telling. His author
is not throwing a stone at a creature of another and inferior order,
but making a confession, with the effect that the stone hits everybody
full in the conscience and causes their self-esteem to smart very
sorely. Hence the failure of Lever's book to please the readers of
\emph{Household Words}. That pain in the self-esteem nowadays causes
critics to raise a cry of Ibsenism. I therefore assure them that the
sensation first came to me from Lever and may have come to him from
Beyle, or at least out of the Stendhalian atmosphere. I exclude the
hypothesis of complete originality on Lever's part, because a man
can no more be completely original in that sense than a tree can grow
out of air.

Another mistake as to my literary ancestry is made whenever I violate
the romantic convention that all women are angels when they are not
devils; that they are better looking than men; that their part in
courtship is entirely passive; and that the human female form is the
most beautiful object in nature. Schopenhauer wrote a splenetic essay
which, as it is neither polite nor profound, was probably intended
to knock this nonsense violently on the head. A sentence denouncing
the idolized form as ugly has been largely quoted. The English critics
have read that sentence; and I must here affirm, with as much gentleness
as the implication will bear, that it has yet to be proved that they
have dipped any deeper. At all events, whenever an English playwright
represents a young and marriageable woman as being anything but a
romantic heroine, he is disposed of without further thought as an
echo of Schopenhauer. My own case is a specially hard one, because,
when I implore the critics who are obsessed with the Schopenhaurian
formula to remember that playwrights, like sculptors, study their
figures from life, and not from philosophic essays, they reply passionately
that I am not a playwright and that my stage figures do not live.
But even so, I may and do ask them why, if they must give the credit
of my plays to a philosopher, they do not give it to an English philosopher?
Long before I ever read a word by Schopenhauer, or even knew whether
he was a philosopher or a chemist, the Socialist revival of the eighteen-eighties
brought me into contact, both literary and personal, with Mr Ernest
Belfort Bax, an English Socialist and philosophic essayist, whose
handling of modern feminism would provoke romantic protests from Schopenhauer
himself, or even Strindberg. As a matter of fact I hardly noticed
Schopenhauer's disparagements of women when they came under my notice
later on, so thoroughly had Mr Bax familiarized me with the homoist
attitude, and forced me to recognize the extent to which public opinion,
and consequently legislation and jurisprudence, is corrupted by feminist
sentiment.

But Mr Bax's essays were not confined to the Feminist question. He
was a ruthless critic of current morality. Other writers have gained
sympathy for dramatic criminals by eliciting the alleged {}``soul
of goodness in things evil''; but Mr Bax would propound some quite
undramatic and apparently shabby violation of our commercial law and
morality, and not merely defend it with the most disconcerting ingenuity,
but actually prove it to be a positive duty that nothing but the certainty
of police persecution should prevent every right-minded man from at
once doing on principle. The Socialists were naturally shocked, being
for the most part morbidly moral people; but at all events they were
saved later on from the delusion that nobody but Nietzsche had ever
challenged our mercanto-Christian morality. I first heard the name
of Nietzsche from a German mathematician, Miss Borchardt, who had
read my \emph{Quintessence of Ibsenism}, and told me that she saw
what I had been reading: namely, Nietzsche's \textit{Jenseits} \textit{von}
\textit{Gut} \emph{und Böse}. Which I protest I had never seen, and
could not have read with any comfort, for want of the necessary German,
if I had seen it.

Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer, is the victim in England of a single
much quoted sentence containing the phrase {}``big blonde beast.''
On the strength of this alliteration it is assumed that Nietzsche
gained his European reputation by a senseless glorification of selfish
bullying as the rule of life, just as it is assumed, on the strength
of the single word Superman (\textit{\"{U}bermensch}) borrowed by
me from Nietzsche, that I look for the salvation of society to the
despotism of a single Napoleonic Superman, in spite of my careful
demonstration of the folly of that outworn infatuation. But even the
less recklessly superficial critics seem to believe that the modern
objection to Christianity as a pernicious slave-morality was first
put forward by Nietzsche. It was familiar to me before I ever heard
of Nietzsche. The late Captain Wilson, author of several queer pamphlets,
propagandist of a metaphysical system called Comprehensionism, and
inventor of the term {}``Crosstianity'' to distinguish the retrograde
element in Christendom, was wont thirty years ago, in the discussions
of the Dialectical Society, to protest earnestly against the beatitudes
of the Sermon on the Mount as excuses for cowardice and servility,
as destructive of our will, and consequently of our honor and manhood.
Now it is true that Captain Wilson's moral criticism of Christianity
was not a historical theory of it, like Nietzsche's; but this objection
cannot be made to Mr Stuart-Glennie, the successor of Buckle as a
philosophic historian, who has devoted his life to the elaboration
and propagation of his theory that Christianity is part of an epoch
(or rather an aberration, since it began as recently as 6000BC and
is already collapsing) produced by the necessity in which the numerically
inferior white races found themselves to impose their domination on
the colored races by priestcraft, making a virtue and a popular religion
of drudgery and submissiveness in this world not only as a means of
achieving saintliness of character but of securing a reward in heaven.
Here you have the slave-morality view formulated by a Scotch philosopher
long before English writers began chattering about Nietzsche.

As Mr Stuart-Glennie traced the evolution of society to the conflict
of races, his theory made some sensation among Socialists---that is,
among the only people who were seriously thinking about historical
evolution at all---by its collision with the class-conflict theory
of Karl Marx. Nietzsche, as I gather, regarded the slave-morality
as having been invented and imposed on the world by slaves making
a virtue of necessity and a religion of their servitude. Mr Stuart-Glennie
regards the slave-morality as an invention of the superior white race
to subjugate the minds of the inferior races whom they wished to exploit,
and who would have destroyed them by force of numbers if their minds
had not been subjugated. As this process is in operation still, and
can be studied at first hand not only in our Church schools and in
the struggle between our modern proprietary classes and the proletariat,
but in the part played by Christian missionaries in reconciling the
black races of Africa to their subjugation by European Capitalism,
we can judge for ourselves whether the initiative came from above
or below. My object here is not to argue the historical point, but
simply to make our theatre critics ashamed of their habit of treating
Britain as an intellectual void, and assuming that every philosophical
idea, every historic theory, every criticism of our moral, religious
and juridical institutions, must necessarily be either imported from
abroad, or else a fantastic sally (in rather questionable taste) totally
unrelated to the existing body of thought. I urge them to remember
that this body of thought is the slowest of growths and the rarest
of blossomings, and that if there is such a thing on the philosophic
plane as a matter of course, it is that no individual can make more
than a minute contribution to it. In fact, their conception of clever
persons parthenogenetically bringing forth \textit{\emph{complete}}
original \textit{\emph{cosmogonies}} by dint of sheer {}``brilliancy''
is part of that ignorant credulity which is the despair of the honest
philosopher, and the opportunity of the religious impostor.


\section*{\raggedright THE GOSPEL OF ST.\ ANDREW UNDERSHAFT}

\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{THE GOSPEL OF ST.\ ANDREW\\
UNDERSHAFT}

It is this credulity that drives me to help my critics out with \emph{Major
Barbara} by telling them what to say about it. In the millionaire
Undershaft I have represented a man who has become intellectually
and spiritually as well as practically conscious of the irresistible
natural truth which we all abhor and repudiate: to wit, that the greatest
of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty, and that our first duty---a
duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed---is
not to be poor. {}``Poor but honest,'' {}``the respectable poor,''
and such phrases are as intolerable and as immoral as {}``drunken
but amiable,'' {}``fraudulent but a good after-dinner speaker,''
{}``splendidly criminal,'' or the like. Security, the chief pretence
of civilization, cannot exist where the worst of dangers, the danger
of poverty, hangs over everyone's head, and where the alleged protection
of our persons from violence is only an accidental result of the existence
of a police force whose real business is to force the poor man to
see his children starve whilst idle people overfeed pet dogs with
the money that might feed and clothe them.

It is exceedingly difficult to make people realize that an evil is
an evil. For instance, we seize a man and deliberately do him a malicious
injury: say, imprison him for years. One would not suppose that it
needed any exceptional clearness of wit to recognize in this an act
of diabolical cruelty. But in England such a recognition provokes
a stare of surprise, followed by an explanation that the outrage is
punishment or justice or something else that is all right, or perhaps
by a heated attempt to argue that we should all be robbed and murdered
in our beds if such senseless villainies as sentences of imprisonment
were not committed daily. It is useless to argue that even if this
were true, which it is not, the alternative to adding crimes of our
own to the crimes from which we suffer is not helpless submission.
Chickenpox is an evil; but if I were to declare that we must either
submit to it or else repress it sternly by seizing everyone who suffers
from it and punishing them by inoculation with smallpox, I should
be laughed at; for though nobody could deny that the result would
be to prevent chickenpox to some extent by making people avoid it
much more carefully, and to effect a further apparent prevention by
making them conceal it very anxiously, yet people would have sense
enough to see that the deliberate propagation of smallpox was a creation
of evil, and must therefore be ruled out in favor of purely humane
and hygienic measures. Yet in the precisely parallel case of a man
breaking into my house and stealing my wife's diamonds I am expected
as a matter of course to steal ten years of his life, torturing him
all the time. If he tries to defeat that monstrous retaliation by
shooting me, my survivors hang him. The net result suggested by the
police statistics is that we inflict atrocious injuries on the burglars
we catch in order to make the rest take effectual precautions against
detection; so that instead of saving our wives' diamonds from burglary
we only greatly decrease our chances of ever getting them back, and
increase our chances of being shot by the robber if we are unlucky
enough to disturb him at his work.

But the thoughtless wickedness with which we scatter sentences of
imprisonment, torture in the solitary cell and on the plank bed, and
flogging, on moral invalids and energetic rebels, is as nothing compared
to the stupid levity with which we tolerate poverty as if it were
either a wholesome tonic for lazy people or else a virtue to be embraced
as St Francis embraced it. If a man is indolent, let him be poor.
If he is drunken, let him be poor. If he is not a gentleman, let him
be poor. If he is addicted to the fine arts or to pure science instead
of to trade and finance, let him be poor. If he chooses to spend his
urban eighteen shillings a week or his agricultural thirteen shillings
a week on his beer and his family instead of saving it up for his
old age, let him be poor. Let nothing be done for {}``the undeserving'':
let him be poor. Serve him right! Also---somewhat inconsistently---
blessed are the poor!

Now what does this Let Him Be Poor mean? It means let him be weak.
Let him be ignorant. Let him become a nucleus of disease. Let him
be a standing exhibition and example of ugliness and dirt. Let him
have rickety children. Let him be cheap and let him drag his fellows
down to his price by selling himself to do their work. Let his habitations
turn our cities into poisonous congeries of slums. Let his daughters
infect our young men with the diseases of the streets and his sons
revenge him by turning the nation's manhood into scrofula, cowardice,
cruelty, hypocrisy, political imbecility, and all the other fruits
of oppression and malnutrition. Let the undeserving become still less
deserving; and let the deserving lay up for himself, not treasures
in heaven, but horrors in hell upon earth. This being so, is it really
wise to let him be poor? Would he not do ten times less harm as a
prosperous burglar, incendiary, ravisher or murderer, to the utmost
limits of humanity's comparatively negligible impulses in these directions?
Suppose we were to abolish all penalties for such activities, and
decide that poverty is the one thing we will not tolerate---that every
adult with less than, say, \pounds{}365 a year, shall be painlessly
but inexorably killed, and every hungry half naked child forcibly
fattened and clothed, would not that be an enormous improvement on
our existing system, which has already destroyed so many civilizations,
and is visibly destroying ours in the same way?

Is there any radicle of such legislation in our parliamentary system?
Well, there are two measures just sprouting in the political soil,
which may conceivably grow to something valuable. One is the institution
of a Legal Minimum Wage. The other, Old Age Pensions. But there is
a better plan than either of these. Some time ago I mentioned the
subject of Universal Old Age Pensions to my fellow Socialist Mr Cobden-Sanderson,
famous as an artist-craftsman in bookbinding and printing. {}``Why
not Universal Pensions for Life?'' said Cobden-Sanderson. In saying
this, he solved the industrial problem at a stroke. At present we
say callously to each citizen: {}``If you want money, earn it,''
as if his having or not having it were a matter that concerned himself
alone. We do not even secure for him the opportunity of earning it:
on the contrary, we allow our industry to be organized in open dependence
on the maintenance of {}``a reserve army of unemployed'' for the
sake of {}``elasticity.'' The sensible course would be Cobden-Sanderson's:
that is, to give every man enough to live well on, so as to guarantee
the community against the possibility of a case of the malignant disease
of poverty, and then (necessarily) to see that he earned it.

Undershaft, the hero of \emph{Major Barbara}, is simply a man who,
having grasped the fact that poverty is a crime, knows that when society
offered him the alternative of poverty or a lucrative trade in death
and destruction, it offered him, not a choice between opulent villainy
and humble virtue, but between energetic enterprise and cowardly infamy.
His conduct stands the Kantian test, which Peter Shirley's does not.
Peter Shirley is what we call the honest poor man. Undershaft is what
we call the wicked rich one: Shirley is Lazarus, Undershaft Dives.
Well, the misery of the world is due to the fact that the great mass
of men act and believe as Peter Shirley acts and believes. If they
acted and believed as Undershaft acts and believes, the immediate
result would be a revolution of incalculable beneficence. To be wealthy,
says Undershaft, is with me a point of honor for which I am prepared
to kill at the risk of my own life. This preparedness is, as he says,
the final test of sincerity. Like Froissart's medieval hero, who saw
that {}``to rob and pill was a good life,'' he is not the dupe of
that public sentiment against killing which is propagated and endowed
by people who would otherwise be killed themselves, or of the mouth-honor
paid to poverty and obedience by rich and insubordinate do-nothings
who want to rob the poor without courage and command them without
superiority. Froissart's knight, in placing the achievement of a good
life before all the other duties---which indeed are not duties at
all when they conflict with it, but plain wickednesses---behaved bravely,
admirably, and, in the final analysis, public-spiritedly. Medieval
society, on the other hand, behaved very badly indeed in organizing
itself so stupidly that a good life could be achieved by robbing and
pilling. If the knight's contemporaries had been all as resolute as
he, robbing and pilling would have been the shortest way to the gallows,
just as, if we were all as resolute and clearsighted as Undershaft,
an attempt to live by means of what is called {}``an independent
income'' would be the shortest way to the lethal chamber. But as,
thanks to our political imbecility and personal cowardice (fruits
of poverty both), the best imitation of a good life now procurable
is life on an independent income, all sensible people aim at securing
such an income, and are, of course, careful to legalize and moralize
both it and all the actions and sentiments which lead to it and support
it as an institution. What else can they do? They know, of course,
that they are rich because others are poor. But they cannot help that:
it is for the poor to repudiate poverty when they have had enough
of it. The thing can be done easily enough: the demonstrations to
the contrary made by the economists, jurists, moralists and sentimentalists
hired by the rich to defend them, or even doing the work gratuitously
out of sheer folly and abjectness, impose only on the hirers.

The reason why the independent income-tax payers are not solid in
defence of their position is that since we are not medieval rovers
through a sparsely populated country, the poverty of those we rob
prevents our having the good life for which we sacrifice them. Rich
men or aristocrats with a developed sense of life---men like Ruskin
and William Morris and Kropotkin---have enormous social appetites
and very fastidious personal ones. They are not content with handsome
houses: they want handsome cities. They are not content with bediamonded
wives and blooming daughters: they complain because the charwoman
is badly dressed, because the laundress smells of gin, because the
sempstress is anemic, because every man they meet is not a friend
and every woman not a romance. They turn up their noses at their neighbors'
drains, and are made ill by the architecture of their neighbors' houses.
Trade patterns made to suit vulgar people do not please them (and
they can get nothing else): they cannot sleep nor sit at ease upon
{}``slaughtered'' cabinet makers' furniture. The very air is not
good enough for them: there is too much factory smoke in it. They
even demand abstract conditions: justice, honor, a noble moral atmosphere,
a mystic nexus to replace the cash nexus. Finally they declare that
though to rob and pill with your own hand on horseback and in steel
coat may have been a good life, to rob and pill by the hands of the
policeman, the bailiff, and the soldier, and to underpay them meanly
for doing it, is not a good life, but rather fatal to all possibility
of even a tolerable one. They call on the poor to revolt, and, finding
the poor shocked at their ungentlemanliness, despairingly revile the
proletariat for its {}``damned wantlessness'' (\emph{verdammte Bedurfnislosigkeit}).

So far, however, their attack on society has lacked simplicity. The
poor do not share their tastes nor understand their art-criticisms.
They do not want the simple life, nor the esthetic life; on the contrary,
they want very much to wallow in all the costly vulgarities from which
the elect souls among the rich turn away with loathing. It is by surfeit
and not by abstinence that they will be cured of their hankering after
unwholesome sweets. What they do dislike and despise and are ashamed
of is poverty. To ask them to fight for the difference between the
Christmas number of the \emph{Illustrated London News} and the Kelmscott
Chaucer is silly: they prefer the \emph{News}. The difference between
a stockbroker's cheap and dirty starched white shirt and collar and
the comparatively costly and carefully dyed blue shirt of William
Morris is a difference so disgraceful to Morris in their eyes that
if they fought on the subject at all, they would fight in defence
of the starch. {}``Cease to be slaves, in order that you may become
cranks'' is not a very inspiring call to arms; nor is it really improved
by substituting saints for cranks. Both terms denote men of genius;
and the common man does not want to live the life of a man of genius:
he would much rather live the life of a pet collie if that were the
only alternative. But he does want more money. Whatever else he may
be vague about, he is clear about that. He may or may not prefer \emph{Major
Barbara} to the Drury Lane pantomime; but he always prefers five hundred
pounds to five hundred shillings.

Now to deplore this preference as sordid, and teach children that
it is sinful to desire money, is to strain towards the extreme possible
limit of impudence in lying, and corruption in hypocrisy. The universal
regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization, the
one sound spot in our social conscience. Money is the most important
thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity
and beauty as conspicuously and undeniably as the want of it represents
illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness and ugliness. Not the least
of its virtues is that it destroys base people as certainly as it
fortifies and dignifies noble people. It is only when it is cheapened
to worthlessness for some, and made impossibly dear to others, that
it becomes a curse. In short, it is a curse only in such foolish social
conditions that life itself is a curse. For the two things are inseparable:
money is the counter that enables life to be distributed socially:
it is life as truly as sovereigns and bank notes are money. The first
duty of every citizen is to insist on having money on reasonable terms;
and this demand is not complied with by giving four men three shillings
each for ten or twelve hours' drudgery and one man a thousand pounds
for nothing. The crying need of the nation is not for better morals,
cheaper bread, temperance, liberty, culture, redemption of fallen
sisters and erring brothers, nor the grace, love and fellowship of
the Trinity, but simply for enough money. And the evil to be attacked
is not sin, suffering, greed, priestcraft, kingcraft, demagogy, monopoly,
ignorance, drink, war, pestilence, nor any other of the scapegoats
which reformers sacrifice, but simply poverty.

Once take your eyes from the ends of the earth and fix them on this
truth just under your nose; and Andrew Undershaft's views will not
perplex you in the least. Unless indeed his constant sense that he
is only the instrument of a Will or Life Force which uses him for
purposes wider than his own, may puzzle you. If so, that is because
you are walking either in artificial Darwinian darkness, or to mere
stupidity. All genuinely religious people have that consciousness.
To them Undershaft the Mystic will be quite intelligible, and his
perfect comprehension of his daughter the Salvationist and her lover
the Euripidean republican natural and inevitable. That, however, is
not new, even on the stage. What is new, as far as I know, is that
article in Undershaft's religion which recognizes in Money the first
need and in poverty the vilest sin of man and society.

This dramatic conception has not, of course, been attained \emph{per
saltum}. Nor has it been borrowed from Nietzsche or from any man born
beyond the Channel. The late Samuel Butler, in his own department
the greatest English writer of the latter half of the XIX century,
steadily inculcated the necessity and morality of a conscientious
Laodiceanism in religion and of an earnest and constant sense of the
importance of money. It drives one almost to despair of English literature
when one sees so extraordinary a study of English life as Butler's
posthumous \emph{Way of All Flesh} making so little impression that
when, some years later, I produce plays in which Butler's extraordinarily
fresh, free and future-piercing suggestions have an obvious share,
I am met with nothing but vague cacklings about Ibsen and Nietzsche,
and am only too thankful that they are not about Alfred de Musset
and Georges Sand. Really, the English do not deserve to have great
men. They allowed Butler to die practically unknown, whilst I, a comparatively
insignificant Irish journalist, was leading them by the nose into
an advertisement of me which has made my own life a burden. In Sicily
there is a \textit{Via} \textit{Samuele} \emph{Butler}. When an English
tourist sees it, he either asks {}``Who the devil was \textit{\emph{Samuele}}
Butler?'' or wonders why the Sicilians should perpetuate the memory
of the author of \emph{Hudibras}.

Well, it cannot be denied that the English are only too anxious to
recognize a man of genius if somebody will kindly point him out to
them. Having pointed myself out in this manner with some success,
I now point out Samuel Butler, and trust that in consequence I shall
hear a little less in future of the novelty and foreign origin of
the ideas which are now making their way into the English theatre
through plays written by Socialists. There are living men whose originality
and power are as obvious as Butler's; and when they die that fact
will be discovered. Meanwhile I recommend them to insist on their
own merits as an important part of their own business.


\section*{\raggedright THE SALVATION ARMY}

\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{THE SALVATION ARMY}

When \emph{Major Barbara} was produced in London, the second act was
reported in an important northern newspaper as a withering attack
on the Salvation Army, and the despairing ejaculation of Barbara deplored
by a London daily as a tasteless blasphemy. And they were set right,
not by the professed critics of the theatre, but by religious and
philosophical publicists like Sir Oliver Lodge and Dr Stanton Coit,
and strenuous Nonconformist journalists like Mr William Stead, who
not only understood the act as well as the Salvationists themselves,
but also saw it in its relation to the religious life of the nation,
a life which seems to lie not only outside the sympathy of many of
our theatre critics, but actually outside their knowledge of society.
Indeed nothing could be more ironically curious than the confrontation
\emph{Major Barbara} effected of the theatre enthusiasts with the
religious enthusiasts. On the one hand was the playgoer, always seeking
pleasure, paying exorbitantly for it, suffering unbearable discomforts
for it, and hardly ever getting it. On the other hand was the Salvationist,
repudiating gaiety and courting effort and sacrifice, yet always in
the wildest spirits, laughing, joking, singing, rejoicing, drumming,
and tambourining: his life flying by in a flash of excitement, and
his death arriving as a climax of triumph. And, if you please, the
playgoer despising the Salvationist as a joyless person, shut out
from the heaven of the theatre, self-condemned to a life of hideous
gloom; and the Salvationist mourning over the playgoer as over a prodigal
with vine leaves in his hair, careering outrageously to hell amid
the popping of champagne corks and the ribald laughter of sirens!
Could misunderstanding be more complete, or sympathy worse misplaced?

Fortunately, the Salvationists are more accessible to the religious
character of the drama than the playgoers to the gay energy and artistic
fertility of religion. They can see, when it is pointed out to them,
that a theatre, as a place where two or three are gathered together,
takes from that divine presence an inalienable sanctity of which the
grossest and profanest farce can no more deprive it than a hypocritical
sermon by a snobbish bishop can desecrate Westminster Abbey. But in
our professional playgoers this indispensable preliminary conception
of sanctity seems wanting. They talk of actors as mimes and mummers,
and, I fear, think of dramatic authors as liars and pandars, whose
main business is the voluptuous soothing of the tired city speculator
when what he calls the serious business of the day is over. Passion,
the life of drama, means nothing to them but primitive sexual excitement:
such phrases as {}``impassioned poetry'' or {}``passionate love
of truth'' have fallen quite out of their vocabulary and been replaced
by {}``passional crime'' and the like. They assume, as far as I
can gather, that people in whom passion has a larger scope are passionless
and therefore uninteresting. Consequently they come to think of religious
people as people who are not interesting and not amusing. And so,
when Barbara cuts the regular Salvation Army jokes, and snatches a
kiss from her lover across his drum, the devotees of the theatre think
they ought to appear shocked, and conclude that the whole play is
an elaborate mockery of the Army. And then either hypocritically rebuke
me for mocking, or foolishly take part in the supposed mockery! Even
the handful of mentally competent critics got into difficulties over
my demonstration of the economic deadlock in which the Salvation Army
finds itself. Some of them thought that the Army would not have taken
money from a distiller and a cannon founder: others thought it should
not have taken it: all assumed more or less definitely that it reduced
itself to absurdity or hypocrisy by taking it. On the first point
the reply of the Army itself was prompt and conclusive. As one of
its officers said, they would take money from the devil himself and
be only too glad to get it out of his hands and into God's. They gratefully
acknowledged that publicans not only give them money but allow them
to collect it in the bar---sometimes even when there is a Salvation
meeting outside preaching teetotalism. In fact, they questioned the
verisimilitude of the play, not because Mrs Baines took the money,
but because Barbara refused it.

On the point that the Army ought not to take such money, its justification
is obvious. It must take the money because it cannot exist without
money, and there is no other money to be had. Practically all the
spare money in the country consists of a mass of rent, interest, and
profit, every penny of which is bound up with crime, drink, prostitution,
disease, and all the evil fruits of poverty, as inextricably as with
enterprise, wealth, commercial probity, and national prosperity. The
notion that you can earmark certain coins as tainted is an unpractical
individualist superstition. None the less the fact that all our money
is tainted gives a very severe shock to earnest young souls when some
dramatic instance of the taint first makes them conscious of it. When
an enthusiastic young clergyman of the Established Church first realizes
that the Ecclesiastical Commissioners receive the rents of sporting
public houses, brothels, and sweating dens; or that the most generous
contributor at his last charity sermon was an employer trading in
female labor cheapened by prostitution as unscrupulously as a hotel
keeper trades in waiters' labor cheapened by tips, or commissionaire's
labor cheapened by pensions; or that the only patron who can afford
to rebuild his church or his schools or give his boys' brigade a gymnasium
or a library is the son-in-law of a Chicago meat King, that young
clergyman has, like Barbara, a very bad quarter hour. But he cannot
help himself by refusing to accept money from anybody except sweet
old ladies with independent incomes and gentle and lovely ways of
life. He has only to follow up the income of the sweet ladies to its
industrial source, and there he will find Mrs Warren's profession
and the poisonous canned meat and all the rest of it. His own stipend
has the same root. He must either share the world's guilt or go to
another planet. He must save the world's honor if he is to save his
own. This is what all the Churches find just as the Salvation Army
and Barbara find it in the play. Her discovery that she is her father's
accomplice; that the Salvation Army is the accomplice of the distiller
and the dynamite maker; that they can no more escape one another than
they can escape the air they breathe; that there is no salvation for
them through personal righteousness, but only through the redemption
of the whole nation from its vicious, lazy, competitive anarchy: this
discovery has been made by everyone except the Pharisees and (apparently)
the professional playgoers, who still wear their Tom Hood shirts and
underpay their washerwomen without the slightest misgiving as to the
elevation of their private characters, the purity of their private
atmospheres, and their right to repudiate as foreign to themselves
the coarse depravity of the garret and the slum. Not that they mean
any harm: they only desire to be, in their little private way, what
they call gentlemen. They do not understand Barbara's lesson because
they have not, like her, learnt it by taking their part in the larger
life of the nation.


\section*{\raggedright BARBARA'S RETURN TO THE COLORS.}

\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{BARBARAS RETURN TO THE\\
COLORS}

Barbara's return to the colors may yet provide a subject for the dramatic
historian of the future. To go back to the Salvation Army with the
knowledge that even the Salvationists themselves are not saved yet;
that poverty is not blessed, but a most damnable sin; and that when
General Booth chose Blood and Fire for the emblem of Salvation instead
of the Cross, he was perhaps better inspired than he knew: such knowledge,
for the daughter of Andrew Undershaft, will clearly lead to something
hopefuller than distributing bread and treacle at the expense of Bodger.

It is a very significant thing, this instinctive choice of the military
form of organization, this substitution of the drum for the organ,
by the Salvation Army. Does it not suggest that the Salvationists
divine that they must actually fight the devil instead of merely praying
at him? At present, it is true, they have not quite ascertained his
correct address. When they do, they may give a very rude shock to
that sense of security which he has gained from his experience of
the fact that hard words, even when uttered by eloquent essayists
and lecturers, or carried unanimously at enthusiastic public meetings
on the motion of eminent reformers, break no bones. It has been said
that the French Revolution was the work of Voltaire, Rousseau and
the Encyclopedists. It seems to me to have been the work of men who
had observed that virtuous indignation, caustic criticism, conclusive
argument and instructive pamphleteering, even when done by the most
earnest and witty literary geniuses, were as useless as praying, things
going steadily from bad to worse whilst the Social Contract and the
pamphlets of Voltaire were at the height of their vogue. Eventually,
as we know, perfectly respectable citizens and earnest philanthropists
connived at the September massacres because hard experience had convinced
them that if they contented themselves with appeals to humanity and
patriotism, the aristocracy, though it would read their appeals with
the greatest enjoyment and appreciation, flattering and admiring the
writers, would none the less continue to conspire with foreign monarchists
to undo the revolution and restore the old system with every circumstance
of savage vengeance and ruthless repression of popular liberties.

The nineteenth century saw the same lesson repeated in England. It
had its Utilitarians, its Christian Socialists, its Fabians (still
extant): it had Bentham, Mill, Dickens, Ruskin, Carlyle, Butler, Henry
George, and Morris. And the end of all their efforts is the Chicago
described by Mr Upton Sinclair, and the London in which the people
who pay to be amused by my dramatic representation of Peter Shirley
turned out to starve at forty because there are younger slaves to
be had for his wages, do not take, and have not the slightest intention
of taking, any effective step to organize society in such a way as
to make that everyday infamy impossible. I, who have preached and
pamphleteered like any Encyclopedist, have to confess that my methods
are no use, and would be no use if I were Voltaire, Rousseau, Bentham,
Mill, Dickens, Carlyle, Ruskin, George, Butler, and Morris all rolled
into one, with Euripides, More, Moliere, Shakespear, Beaumarchais,
Swift, Goethe, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Moses and the prophets all thrown in
(as indeed in some sort I actually am, standing as I do on all their
shoulders). The problem being to make heroes out of cowards, we paper
apostles and artist-magicians have succeeded only in giving cowards
all the sensations of heroes whilst they tolerate every abomination,
accept every plunder, and submit to every oppression. Christianity,
in making a merit of such submission, has marked only that depth in
the abyss at which the very sense of shame is lost. The Christian
has been like Dickens' doctor in the debtor's prison, who tells the
newcomer of its ineffable peace and security: no duns; no tyrannical
collectors of rates, taxes, and rent; no importunate hopes nor exacting
duties; nothing but the rest and safety of having no further to fall.

Yet in the poorest corner of this soul-destroying Christendom vitality
suddenly begins to germinate again. Joyousness, a sacred gift long
dethroned by the hellish laughter of derision and obscenity, rises
like a flood miraculously out of the fetid dust and mud of the slums;
rousing marches and impetuous dithyrambs rise to the heavens from
people among whom the depressing noise called {}``sacred music''
is a standing joke; a flag with Blood and Fire on it is unfurled,
not in murderous rancor, but because fire is beautiful and blood a
vital and splendid red; Fear, which we flatter by calling Self, vanishes;
and transfigured men and women carry their gospel through a transfigured
world, calling their leader General, themselves captains and brigadiers,
and their whole body an Army: praying, but praying only for refreshment,
for strength to fight, and for needful \textit{money} (a notable sign,
that); preaching, but not preaching submission; daring ill-usage and
abuse, but not putting up with more of it than is inevitable; and
practising what the world will let them practise, including soap and
water, color and music. There is danger in such Activity; and where
there is danger there is hope. Our present security is nothing, and
can be nothing, but evil made irresistible.


\section*{\textit{\emph{\raggedright W}}EAKNESSES OF THE SAL\-V\-A\-TION
ARMY\emph{.}}

\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{WEAKNESSES OF THE\\
SALVATION ARMY}

For the present, however, it is not my business to flatter the Salvation
Army. Rather must I point out to it that it has almost as many weaknesses
as the Church of England itself. It is building up a business organization
which will compel it eventually to see that its present staff of enthusiast-commanders
shall be succeeded by a bureaucracy of men of business who will be
no better than bishops, and perhaps a good deal more unscrupulous.
That has always happened sooner or later to great orders founded by
saints; and the order founded by St William Booth is not exempt from
the same danger. It is even more dependent than the Church on rich
people who would cut off supplies at once if it began to preach that
indispensable revolt against poverty which must also be a revolt against
riches. It is hampered by a heavy contingent of pious elders who are
not really Salvationists at all, but Evangelicals of the old school.
It still, as Commissioner Howard affirms, {}``sticks to Moses,''
which is flat nonsense at this time of day if the Commissioner means,
as I am afraid he does, that the Book of Genesis contains a trustworthy
scientific account of the origin of species, and that the god to whom
Jephthah sacrificed his daughter is any less obviously a tribal idol
than Dagon or Chemosh.

Further, there is still too much other-worldliness about the Army.
Like Frederick's grenadier, the Salvationist wants to live for ever
(the most monstrous way of crying for the moon); and though it is
evident to anyone who has ever heard General Booth and his best officers
that they would work as hard for human salvation as they do at present
if they believed that death would be the end of them individually,
they and their followers have a bad habit of talking as if the Salvationists
were heroically enduring a very bad time on earth as an investment
which will bring them in dividends later on in the form, not of a
better life to come for the whole world, but of an eternity spent
by themselves personally in a sort of bliss which would bore any active
person to a second death. Surely the truth is that the Salvationists
are unusually happy people. And is it not the very diagnostic of true
salvation that it shall overcome the fear of death? Now the man who
has come to believe that there is no such thing as death, the change
so called being merely the transition to an exquisitely happy and
utterly careless life, has not overcome the fear of death at all:
on the contrary, it has overcome him so completely that he refuses
to die on any terms whatever. I do not call a Salvationist really
saved until he is ready to lie down cheerfully on the scrap heap,
having paid scot and lot and something over, and let his eternal life
pass on to renew its youth in the battalions of the future.

Then there is the nasty lying habit called confession, which the Army
encourages because it lends itself to dramatic oratory, with plenty
of thrilling incident. For my part, when I hear a convert relating
the \textit{\emph{violences}} and oaths and blasphemies he was guilty
of before he was saved, making out that he was a very terrible fellow
then and is the most contrite and chastened of Christians now, I believe
him no more than I believe the millionaire who says he came up to
London or Chicago as a boy with only three halfpence in his pocket.
Salvationists have said to me that Barbara in my play would never
have been taken in by so transparent a humbug as Snobby Price; and
certainly I do not think Snobby could have taken in any experienced
Salvationist on a point on which the Salvationist did not wish to
be taken in. But on the point of conversion all Salvationists wish
to be taken in; for the more obvious the sinner the more obvious the
miracle of his conversion. When you advertize a converted burglar
or reclaimed drunkard as one of the attractions at an experience meeting,
your burglar can hardly have been too burglarious or your drunkard
too drunken. As long as such attractions are relied on, you will have
your Snobbies claiming to have beaten their mothers when they were
as a matter of prosaic fact habitually beaten by them, and your Rummies
of the tamest respectability pretending to a past of reckless and
dazzling vice. Even when confessions are sincerely autobiographic
there is no reason to assume at once that the impulse to make them
is pious or the interest of the hearers wholesome. It might as well
be assumed that the poor people who insist on showing appalling ulcers
to district visitors are convinced hygienists, or that the curiosity
which sometimes welcomes such exhibitions is a pleasant and creditable
one. One is often tempted to suggest that those who pester our police
superintendents with confessions of murder might very wisely be taken
at their word and executed, except in the few cases in which a real
murderer is seeking to be relieved of his guilt by confession and
expiation. For though I am not, I hope, an unmerciful person, I do
not think that the inexorability of the deed once done should be disguised
by any ritual, whether in the confessional or on the scaffold.

And here my disagreement with the Salvation Army, and with all propagandists
of the Cross (to which I object as I object to all gibbets) becomes
deep indeed. Forgiveness, absolution, atonement, are figments: punishment
is only a pretence of cancelling one crime by another; and you can
no more have forgiveness without vindictiveness than you can have
a cure without a disease. You will never get a high morality from
people who conceive that their misdeeds are revocable and pardonable,
or in a society where absolution and expiation are officially provided
for us all. The demand may be very real; but the supply is spurious.
Thus Bill Walker, in my play, having assaulted the Salvation Lass,
presently finds himself overwhelmed with an intolerable conviction
of sin under the skilled treatment of Barbara. Straightway he begins
to try to unassault the lass and deruffianize his deed, first by getting
punished for it in kind, and, when that relief is denied him, by fining
himself a pound to compensate the girl. He is foiled both ways. He
finds the Salvation Army as inexorable as fact itself. It will not
punish him: it will not take his money. It will not tolerate a redeemed
ruffian: it leaves him no means of salvation except ceasing to be
a ruffian. In doing this, the Salvation Army instinctively grasps
the central truth of Christianity and discards its central superstition:
that central truth being the vanity of revenge and punishment, and
that central superstition the salvation of the world by the gibbet.

For, be it noted, Bill has assaulted an old and starving woman also;
and for this worse offence he feels no remorse whatever, because she
makes it clear that her malice is as great as his own. {}``Let her
have the law of me, as she said she would,'' says Bill: {}``what
I done to her is no more on what you might call my conscience than
sticking a pig.'' This shows a perfectly natural and wholesome state
of mind on his part. The old woman, like the law she threatens him
with, is perfectly ready to play the game of retaliation with him:
to rob him if he steals, to flog him if he strikes, to murder him
if he kills. By example and precept the law and public opinion teach
him to impose his will on others by anger, violence, and cruelty,
and to wipe off the moral score by punishment. That is sound Crosstianity.
But this Crosstianity has got entangled with something which Barbara
calls Christianity, and which unexpectedly causes her to refuse to
play the hangman's game of Satan casting out Satan. She refuses to
prosecute a drunken ruffian; she converses on equal terms with a blackguard
whom no lady could be seen speaking to in the public street: in short,
she behaves as illegally and unbecomingly as possible under the circumstances.
Bill's conscience reacts to this just as naturally as it does to the
old woman's threats. He is placed in a position of unbearable moral
inferiority, and strives by every means in his power to escape from
it, whilst he is still quite ready to meet the abuse of the old woman
by attempting to smash a mug on her face. And that is the triumphant
justification of Barbara's Christianity as against our system of judicial
punishment and the vindictive villain-thrashings and {}``poetic justice''
of the romantic stage.

For the credit of literature it must be pointed out that the situation
is only partly novel. Victor Hugo long ago gave us the epic of the
convict and the bishop's candlesticks, of the Crosstian policeman
annihilated by his encounter with the Christian Valjean. But Bill
Walker is not, like Valjean, romantically changed from a demon into
an angel. There are millions of Bill Walkers in all classes of society
to-day; and the point which I, as a professor of natural psychology,
desire to demonstrate, is that Bill, without any change in his character
whatsoever, will react one way to one sort of treatment and another
way to another.

In proof I might point to the sensational object lesson provided by
our commercial millionaires to-day. They begin as brigands: merciless,
unscrupulous, dealing out ruin and death and slavery to their competitors
and employees, and facing desperately the worst that their competitors
can do to them. The history of the English factories, the American
trusts, the exploitation of African gold, diamonds, ivory and rubber,
outdoes in villainy the worst that has ever been imagined of the buccaneers
of the Spanish Main. Captain Kidd would have marooned a modern Trust
magnate for conduct unworthy of a gentleman of fortune. The law every
day seizes on unsuccessful scoundrels of this type and punishes them
with a cruelty worse than their own, with the result that they come
out of the torture house more dangerous than they went in, and renew
their evil doing (nobody will employ them at anything else) until
they are again seized, again tormented, and again let loose, with
the same result.

But the successful scoundrel is dealt with very differently, and very
Christianly. He is not only forgiven: he is idolized, respected, made
much of, all but worshipped. Society returns him good for evil in
the most extravagant overmeasure. And with what result? He begins
to idolize himself, to respect himself, to live up to the treatment
he receives. He preaches sermons; he writes books of the most edifying
advice to young men, and actually persuades himself that he got on
by taking his own advice; he endows educational institutions; he supports
charities; he dies finally in the odor of sanctity, leaving a will
which is a monument of public spirit and bounty. And all this without
any change in his character. The spots of the leopard and the stripes
of the tiger are as brilliant as ever; but the conduct of the world
towards him has changed; and his conduct has changed accordingly.
You have only to reverse your attitude towards him--- to lay hands
on his property, revile him, assault him, and he will be a brigand
again in a moment, as ready to crush you as you are to crush him,
and quite as full of pretentious moral reasons for doing it.

In short, when Major Barbara says that there are no scoundrels, she
is right: there are no absolute scoundrels, though there are impracticable
people of whom I shall treat presently. Every practicable man (and
woman) is a potential scoundrel and a potential good citizen. What
a man is depends on his character; but what he does, and what we think
of what he does, depends on his circumstances. The characteristics
that ruin a man in one class make him eminent in another. The characters
that behave differently in different circumstances behave alike in
similar circumstances. Take a common English character like that of
Bill Walker. We meet Bill everywhere: on the judicial bench, on the
episcopal bench, in the Privy Council, at the War Office and Admiralty,
as well as in the Old Bailey dock or in the ranks of casual unskilled
labor. And the morality of Bill's characteristics varies with these
various circumstances. The faults of the burglar are the qualities
of the financier: the manners and habits of a duke would cost a city
clerk his situation. In short, though character is independent of
circumstances, conduct is not; and our moral judgments of character
are not: both are circumstantial. Take any condition of life in which
the circumstances are for a mass of men practically alike: felony,
the House of Lords, the factory, the stables, the gipsy encampment
or where you please! In spite of diversity of character and temperament,
the conduct and morals of the individuals in each group are as predicable
and as alike in the main as if they were a flock of sheep, morals
being mostly only social habits and circumstantial necessities. Strong
people know this and count upon it. In nothing have the master-minds
of the world been distinguished from the ordinary suburban season-ticket
holder more than in their straightforward perception of the fact that
mankind is practically a single species, and not a menagerie of gentlemen
and bounders, villains and heroes, cowards and daredevils, peers and
peasants, grocers and aristocrats, artisans and laborers, washerwomen
and duchesses, in which all the grades of income and caste represent
distinct animals who must not be introduced to one another or intermarry.
Napoleon constructing a galaxy of generals and courtiers, and even
of monarchs, out of his collection of social nobodies; Julius C\ae{}sar
appointing as governor of Egypt the son of a freedman---one who but
a short time before would have been legally disqualified for the post
even of a private soldier in the Roman army; Louis XI making his barber
his privy councillor: all these had in their different ways a firm
hold of the scientific fact of human equality, expressed by Barbara
in the Christian formula that all men are children of one father.
A man who believes that men are naturally divided into upper and lower
and middle classes morally is making exactly the same mistake as the
man who believes that they are naturally divided in the same way socially.
And just as our persistent attempts to found political institutions
on a basis of social inequality have always produced long periods
of destructive friction relieved from time to time by violent explosions
of revolution; so the attempt---will Americans please note---to found
moral institutions on a basis of moral inequality can lead to nothing
but unnatural Reigns of the Saints relieved by licentious Restorations;
to Americans who have made divorce a public institution turning the
face of Europe into one huge sardonic smile by refusing to stay in
the same hotel with a Russian man of genius who has changed wives
without the sanction of South Dakota; to grotesque hypocrisy, cruel
persecution, and final utter confusion of conventions and compliances
with benevolence and respectability. It is quite useless to declare
that all men are born free if you deny that they are born good. Guarantee
a man's goodness and his liberty will take care of itself. To guarantee
his freedom on condition that you approve of his moral character is
formally to abolish all freedom whatsoever, as every man's liberty
is at the mercy of a moral indictment, which any fool can trump up
against everyone who violates custom, whether as a prophet or as a
rascal. This is the lesson Democracy has to learn before it can become
anything but the most oppressive of all the priesthoods.

Let us now return to Bill Walker and his case of conscience against
the Salvation Army. Major Barbara, not being a modern Tetzel, or the
treasurer of a hospital, refuses to sell Bill absolution for a sovereign.
Unfortunately, what the Army can afford to refuse in the case of Bill
Walker, it cannot refuse in the case of Bodger. Bodger is master of
the situation because he holds the purse strings. {}``Strive as you
will,'' says Bodger, in effect: {}``me you cannot do without. You
cannot save Bill Walker without my money.'' And the Army answers,
quite rightly under the circumstances, {}``We will take money from
the devil himself sooner than abandon the work of Salvation.'' So
Bodger pays his conscience-money and gets the absolution that is refused
to Bill. In real life Bill would perhaps never know this. But I, the
dramatist, whose business it is to show the connexion between things
that seem apart and unrelated in the haphazard order of events in
real life, have contrived to make it known to Bill, with the result
that the Salvation Army loses its hold of him at once.

But Bill may not be lost, for all that. He is still in the grip of
the facts and of his own conscience, and may find his taste for blackguardism
permanently spoiled. Still, I cannot guarantee that happy ending.
Let anyone walk through the poorer quarters of our cities when the
men are not working, but resting and chewing the cud of their reflections;
and he will find that there is one expression on every mature face:
the expression of cynicism. The discovery made by Bill Walker about
the Salvation Army has been made by every one of them. They have found
that every man has his price; and they have been foolishly or corruptly
taught to mistrust and despise him for that necessary and salutary
condition of social existence. When they learn that General Booth,
too, has his price, they do not admire him because it is a high one,
and admit the need of organizing society so that he shall get it in
an honorable way: they conclude that his character is unsound and
that all religious men are hypocrites and allies of their sweaters
and oppressors. They know that the large subscriptions which help
to support the Army are endowments, not of religion, but of the wicked
doctrine of docility in poverty and humility under oppression; and
they are rent by the most agonizing of all the doubts of the soul,
the doubt whether their true salvation must not come from their most
abhorrent passions, from murder, envy, greed, stubbornness, rage,
and terrorism, rather than from public spirit, reasonableness, humanity,
generosity, tenderness, delicacy, pity and kindness. The confirmation
of that doubt, at which our newspapers have been working so hard for
years past, is the morality of militarism; and the justification of
militarism is that circumstances may at any time make it the true
morality of the moment. It is by producing such moments that we produce
violent and sanguinary revolutions, such as the one now in progress
in Russia and the one which Capitalism in England and America is daily
and diligently provoking.

At such moments it becomes the duty of the Churches to evoke all the
powers of destruction against the existing order. But if they do this,
the existing order must forcibly suppress them. Churches are suffered
to exist only on condition that they preach submission to the State
as at present capitalistically organized. The Church of England itself
is compelled to add to the thirty-six articles in which it formulates
its religious tenets, three more in which it apologetically protests
that the moment any of these articles comes in conflict with the State
it is to be entirely renounced, abjured, violated, abrogated and abhorred,
the policeman being a much more important person than any of the Persons
of the Trinity. And this is why no tolerated Church nor Salvation
Army can ever win the entire confidence of the poor. It must be on
the side of the police and the military, no matter what it believes
or disbelieves; and as the police and the military are the instruments
by which the rich rob and oppress the poor (on legal and moral principles
made for the purpose), it is not possible to be on the side of the
poor and of the police at the same time. Indeed the religious bodies,
as the almoners of the rich, become a sort of auxiliary police, taking
off the insurrectionary edge of poverty with coals and blankets, bread
and treacle, and soothing and cheering the victims with hopes of immense
and inexpensive happiness in another world when the process of working
them to premature death in the service of the rich is complete in
this.


\section*{\raggedright CHRISTIANITY AND ANARCHISM}

\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{CHRISTIANITY AND ANARCHISM}

Such is the false position from which neither the Salvation Army nor
the Church of England nor any other religious organization whatever
can escape except through a reconstitution of society. Nor can they
merely endure the State passively, washing their hands of its sins.
The State is constantly forcing the consciences of men by violence
and cruelty. Not content with exacting money from us for the maintenance
of its soldiers and policemen, its gaolers and executioners, it forces
us to take an active personal part in its proceedings on pain of becoming
ourselves the victims of its violence. As I write these lines, a sensational
example is given to the world. A royal marriage has been celebrated,
first by sacrament in a cathedral, and then by a bullfight having
for its main amusement the spectacle of horses gored and disembowelled
by the bull, after which, when the bull is so exhausted as to be no
longer dangerous, he is killed by a cautious matador. But the ironic
contrast between the bullfight and the sacrament of marriage does
not move anyone. Another contrast---that between the splendor, the
happiness, the atmosphere of kindly admiration surrounding the young
couple, and the price paid for it under our abominable social arrangements
in the misery, squalor and degradation of millions of other young
couples---is drawn at the same moment by a novelist, Mr Upton Sinclair,
who chips a corner of the veneering from the huge meat packing industries
of Chicago, and shows it to us as a sample of what is going on all
over the world underneath the top layer of prosperous plutocracy.
One man is sufficiently moved by that contrast to pay his own life
as the price of one terrible blow at the responsible parties. Unhappily
his poverty leaves him also ignorant enough to be duped by the pretence
that the innocent young bride and bridegroom, put forth and crowned
by plutocracy as the heads of a State in which they have less personal
power than any policeman, and less influence than any chairman of
a trust, are responsible. At them accordingly he launches his sixpennorth
of fulminate, missing his mark, but scattering the bowels of as many
horses as any bull in the arena, and slaying twenty-three persons,
besides wounding ninety-nine. And of all these, the horses alone are
innocent of the guilt he is avenging: had he blown all Madrid to atoms
with every adult person in it, not one could have escaped the charge
of being an accessory, before, at, and after the fact, to poverty
and prostitution, to such wholesale massacre of infants as Herod never
dreamt of, to plague, pestilence and famine, battle, murder and lingering
death---perhaps not one who had not helped, through example, precept,
connivance, and even clamor, to teach the dynamiter his well-learnt
gospel of hatred and vengeance, by approving every day of sentences
of years of imprisonment so infernal in its unnatural stupidity and
panic-stricken cruelty, that their advocates can disavow neither the
dagger nor the bomb without stripping the mask of justice and humanity
from themselves also. Be it noted that at this very moment there appears
the biography of one of our dukes, who, being Scotch, could argue
about politics, and therefore stood out as a great brain among our
aristocrats. And what, if you please, was his grace's favorite historical
episode, which he declared he never read without intense satisfaction?
Why, the young General Bonapart's pounding of the Paris mob to pieces
in 1795, called in playful approval by our respectable classes {}``the
whiff of grapeshot,'' though Napoleon, to do him justice, took a
deeper view of it, and would fain have had it forgotten. And since
the Duke of Argyll was not a demon, but a man of like passions with
ourselves, by no means rancorous or cruel as men go, who can doubt
that all over the world proletarians of the ducal kidney are now revelling
in {}``the whiff of dynamite'' (the flavor of the joke seems to
evaporate a little, does it not?) because it was aimed at the class
they hate even as our \textit{argute} duke hated what he called the
mob.

In such an atmosphere there can be only one sequel to the Madrid explosion.
All Europe burns to emulate it. Vengeance! More blood! Tear {}``the
Anarchist beast'' to shreds. Drag him to the scaffold. Imprison him
for life. Let all civilized States band together to drive his like
off the face of the earth; and if any State refuses to join, make
war on it. This time the leading London newspaper, anti-Liberal and
therefore anti-Russian in politics, does not say {}``Serve you right''
to the victims, as it did, in effect, when Bobrikofl, and De Plehve,
and Grand Duke Sergius, were in the same manner unofficially fulminated
into fragments. No: fulminate our rivals in Asia by all means, ye
brave Russian revolutionaries; but to aim at an English princess---monstrous!\ hideous!\ hound
down the wretch to his doom; and observe, please, that we are a civilized
and merciful people, and, however much we may regret it, must not
treat him as Ravaillac and Damiens were treated. And meanwhile, since
we have not yet caught him, let us soothe our quivering nerves with
the bullfight, and comment in a courtly way on the unfailing tact
and good taste of the ladies of our royal houses, who, though presumably
of full normal natural tenderness, have been so effectually broken
in to fashionable routine that they can be taken to see the horses
slaughtered as helplessly as they could no doubt be taken to a gladiator
show, if that happened to be the mode just now.

Strangely enough, in the midst of this raging fire of malice, the
one man who still has faith in the kindness and intelligence of human
nature is the fulminator, now a hunted wretch, with nothing, apparently,
to secure his triumph over all the prisons and scaffolds of infuriate
Europe except the revolver in his pocket and his readiness to discharge
it at a moment's notice into his own or any other head. Think of him
setting out to find a gentleman and a Christian in the multitude of
human wolves howling for his blood. Think also of this: that at the
very first essay he finds what he seeks, a veritable grandee of Spain,
a noble, high-thinking, unterrified, malice-void soul, in the guise---of
all masquerades in the world!---of a modern editor. The Anarchist
wolf, flying from the wolves of plutocracy, throws himself on the
honor of the man. The man, not being a wolf (nor a London editor),
and therefore not having enough sympathy with his exploit to be made
bloodthirsty by it, does not throw him back to the pursuing wolves---gives
him, instead, what help he can to escape, and sends him off acquainted
at last with a force that goes deeper than dynamite, though you cannot
make so much of it for sixpence. That righteous and honorable high
human deed is not wasted on Europe, let us hope, though it benefits
the fugitive wolf only for a moment. The plutocratic wolves presently
smell him out. The fugitive shoots the unlucky wolf whose nose is
nearest; shoots himself; and then convinces the world, by his photograph,
that he was no monstrous freak of reversion to the tiger, but a good
looking young man with nothing abnormal about him except his appalling
courage and resolution (that is why the terrified shriek Coward at
him): one to whom murdering a happy young couple on their wedding
morning would have been an unthinkably unnatural abomination under
rational and kindly human circumstances.

Then comes the climax of irony and blind stupidity. The wolves, balked
of their meal of fellow-wolf, turn on the man, and proceed to torture
him, after their manner, by imprisonment, for refusing to fasten his
teeth in the throat of the dynamiter and hold him down until they
came to finish him.

Thus, you see, a man may not be a gentleman nowadays even if he wishes
to. As to being a Christian, he is allowed some latitude in that matter,
because, I repeat, Christianity has two faces. Popular Christianity
has for its emblem a gibbet, for its chief sensation a sanguinary
execution after torture, for its central mystery an insane vengeance
bought off by a trumpery expiation. But there is a nobler and profounder
Christianity which affirms the sacred mystery of Equality, and forbids
the glaring futility and folly of vengeance, often politely called
punishment or justice. The gibbet part of Christianity is tolerated.
The other is criminal felony. Connoisseurs in irony are well aware
of the fact that the only editor in England who denounces punishment
as radically wrong, also repudiates Christianity; calls his paper
\emph{The Freethinker}; and has been imprisoned for two years for
blasphemy.


\section*{\raggedright SANE CONCLUSIONS}

\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{SANE CONCLUSIONS}

And now I must ask the excited reader not to lose his head on one
side or the other, but to draw a sane moral from these grim absurdities.
It is not good sense to propose that laws against crime should apply
to principals only and not to accessories whose consent, counsel,
or silence may secure impunity to the principal. If you institute
punishment as part of the law, you must punish people for refusing
to punish. If you have a police, part of its duty must be to compel
everybody to assist the police. No doubt if your laws are unjust,
and your policemen agents of oppression, the result will be an unbearable
violation of the private consciences of citizens. But that cannot
be helped: the remedy is, not to license everybody to thwart the law
if they please, but to make laws that will command the public assent,
and not to deal cruelly and stupidly with lawbreakers. Everybody disapproves
of burglars; but the modern burglar, when caught and overpowered by
a householder usually appeals, and often, let us hope, with success,
to his captor not to deliver him over to the useless horrors of penal
servitude. In other cases the lawbreaker escapes because those who
could give him up do not consider his breech of the law a guilty action.
Sometimes, even, private tribunals are formed in opposition to the
official tribunals; and these private tribunals employ assassins as
executioners, as was done, for example, by Mahomet before he had established
his power officially, and by the Ribbon lodges of Ireland in their
long struggle with the landlords. Under such circumstances, the assassin
goes free although everybody in the district knows who he is and what
he has done. They do not betray him, partly because they justify him
exactly as the regular Government justifies its official executioner,
and partly because they would themselves be assassinated if they betrayed
him: another method learnt from the official government. Given a tribunal,
employing a slayer who has no personal quarrel with the slain; and
there is clearly no moral difference between official and unofficial
killing.

In short, all men are anarchists with regard to laws which are against
their consciences, either in the preamble or in the penalty. In London
our worst anarchists are the magistrates, because many of them are
so old and ignorant that when they are called upon to administer any
law that is based on ideas or knowledge less than half a century old,
they disagree with it, and being mere ordinary homebred private Englishmen
without any respect for law in the abstract, na\"{i}vely set the
example of violating it. In this instance the man lags behind the
law; but when the law lags behind the man, he becomes equally an anarchist.
When some huge change in social conditions, such as the industrial
revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, throws our
legal and industrial institutions out of date, Anarchism becomes almost
a religion. The whole force of the most energetic geniuses of the
time in philosophy, economics, and art, concentrates itself on demonstrations
and reminders that morality and law are only conventions, fallible
and continually obsolescing. Tragedies in which the heroes are bandits,
and comedies in which law-abiding and conventionally moral folk are
compelled to satirize themselves by outraging the conscience of the
spectators every time they do their duty, appear simultaneously with
economic treatises entitled {}``What is Property? Theft!''\ and
with histories of {}``The Conflict between Religion and Science.''

Now this is not a healthy state of things. The advantages of living
in society are proportionate, not to the freedom of the individual
from a code, but to the complexity and subtlety of the code he is
prepared not only to accept but to uphold as a matter of such vital
importance that a lawbreaker at large is hardly to be tolerated on
any plea. Such an attitude becomes impossible when the only men who
can make themselves heard and remembered throughout the world spend
all their energy in raising our gorge against current law, current
morality, current respect ability, and legal property. The ordinary
man, uneducated in social theory even when he is schooled in Latin
verse, cannot be set against all the laws of his country and yet persuaded
to regard law in the abstract as vitally necessary to society. Once
he is brought to repudiate the laws and institutions he knows, he
will repudiate the very conception of law and the very groundwork
of institutions, ridiculing human rights, extolling brainless methods
as {}``historical,'' and tolerating nothing except pure empiricism
in conduct, with dynamite as the basis of politics and vivisection
as the basis of science. That is hideous; but what is to be done?
Here am I, for instance, by class a respectable man, by common sense
a hater of waste and disorder, by intellectual constitution legally
minded to the verge of pedantry, and by temperament apprehensive and
economically disposed to the limit of old-maidishness; yet I am, and
have always been, and shall now always be, a revolutionary writer,
because our laws make law impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom;
our property is organized robbery; our morality is an impudent hypocrisy;
our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or malexperienced dupes,
our power wielded by cowards and weaklings, and our honor false in
all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons;
but that does not make my attacks any less encouraging or helpful
to people who are its enemies for bad reasons. The existing order
may shriek that if I tell the truth about it, some foolish person
may drive it to become still worse by trying to assassinate it. I
cannot help that, even if I could see what worse it could do than
it is already doing. And the disadvantage of that worst even from
its own point of view is that society, with all its prisons and bayonets
and whips and ostracisms and starvations, is powerless in the face
of the Anarchist who is prepared to sacrifice his own life in the
battle with it. Our natural safety from the cheap and devastating
explosives which every Russian student can make, and every Russian
grenadier has learnt to handle in Manchuria, lies in the fact that
brave and resolute men, when they are rascals, will not risk their
skins for the good of humanity, and, when they are sympathetic enough
to care for humanity, abhor murder, and never commit it until their
consciences are outraged beyond endurance. The remedy is, simply not
to outrage their consciences.

Do not be afraid that they will not make allowances. All men make
very large allowances indeed before they stake their own lives in
a war to the death with society. Nobody demands or expects the millennium.
But there are two things that must be set right, or we shall perish,
like Rome, of soul atrophy disguised as empire. The first is, that
the daily ceremony of dividing the wealth of the country among its
inhabitants shall be so conducted that no crumb shall go to any able-bodied
adults who are not producing by their personal exertions not only
a full equivalent for what they take, but a surplus sufficient to
provide for their superannuation and pay back the debt due for their
nurture.

The second is that the deliberate infliction of malicious injuries
which now goes on under the name of punishment be abandoned; so that
the thief, the ruffian, the gambler, and the beggar, may without inhumanity
be handed over to the law, and made to understand that a State which
is too humane to punish will also be too thrifty to waste the life
of honest men in watching or restraining dishonest ones. That is why
we do not imprison dogs. We even take our chance of their first bite.
But if a dog delights to bark and bite, it goes to the lethal chamber.
That seems to me sensible. To allow the dog to expiate his bite by
a period of torment, and then let him loose in a much more savage
condition (for the chain makes a dog savage) to bite again and expiate
again, having meanwhile spent a great deal of human life and happiness
in the task of chaining and feeding and tormenting him, seems to me
idiotic and superstitious. Yet that is what we do to men who bark
and bite and steal. It would be far more sensible to put up with their
vices, as we put up with their illnesses, until they give more trouble
than they are worth, at which point we should, with many apologies
and expressions of sympathy, and some generosity in complying with
their last wishes, then, place them in the lethal chamber and get
rid of them. Under no circumstances should they be allowed to expiate
their misdeeds by a manufactured penalty, to subscribe to a charity,
or to compensate the victims. If there is to be no punishment there
can be no forgiveness. We shall never have real moral responsibility
until everyone knows that his deeds are irrevocable, and that his
life depends on his usefulness. Hitherto, alas!\ humanity has never
dared face these hard facts. We frantically scatter conscience money
and invent systems of conscience banking, with expiatory penalties,
atonements, \textit{\emph{redemptions}}, salvations, hospital subscription
lists and what not, to enable us to contract-out of the moral code.
Not content with the old scapegoat and sacrificial lamb, we deify
human saviors, and pray to miraculous virgin intercessors. We attribute
mercy to the inexorable; soothe our consciences after committing murder
by throwing ourselves on the bosom of divine love; and shrink even
from our own gallows because we are forced to admit that it, at least,
is irrevocable---as if one hour of imprisonment were not as irrevocable
as any execution!

If a man cannot look evil in the face without illusion, he will never
know what it really is, or combat it effectually. The few men who
have been able (relatively) to do this have been called cynics, and
have sometimes had an abnormal share of evil in themselves, corresponding
to the abnormal strength of their minds; but they have never done
mischief unless they intended to do it. That is why great scoundrels
have been beneficent rulers whilst amiable and privately harmless
monarchs have ruined their countries by trusting to the hocus-pocus
of innocence and guilt, reward and punishment, virtuous indignation
and pardon, instead of standing up to the facts without either malice
or mercy. Major Barbara stands up to Bill Walker in that way, with
the result that the ruffian who cannot get hated, has to hate himself.
To relieve this agony be tries to get punished; but the Salvationist
whom he tries to provoke is as merciless as Barbara, and only prays
for him. Then he tries to pay, but can get nobody to take his money.
His doom is the doom of Cain, who, failing to find either a savior,
a policeman, or an almoner to help him to pretend that his brother's
blood no longer cried from the ground, had to live and die a murderer.
Cain took care not to commit another murder, unlike our railway shareholders
(I am one) who kill and maim shunters by hundreds to save the cost
of automatic couplings, and make atonement by annual subscriptions
to deserving charities. Had Cain been allowed to pay off his score,
he might possibly have killed Adam and Eve for the mere sake of a
second luxurious reconciliation with God afterwards. Bodger, you may
depend on it, will go on to the end of his life poisoning people with
bad whisky, because he can always depend on the Salvation Army or
the Church of England to negotiate a redemption for him in consideration
of a trifling percentage of his profits. There is a third condition
too, which must be fulfilled before the great teachers of the world
will cease to scoff at its religions. Creeds must become intellectually
honest. At present there is not a single credible established religion
in the world. That is perhaps the most stupendous fact in the whole
world-situation. This play of mine, \emph{Major Barbara}, is, I hope,
both true and inspired; but whoever says that it all happened, and
that faith in it and understanding of it consist in believing that
it is a record of an actual occurrence, is, to speak according to
Scripture, a fool and a liar, and is hereby solemnly denounced and
cursed as such by me, the author, to all posterity.

\noindent \begin{center}\noun{London, June 1906.}\end{center}


\chapter*{\raggedright ACT I}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{ACT I}

\markboth{MAJOR BARBARA}{ACT I}

\emph{It is after dinner on a January night, in the library in Lady
Britomart Undershaft's house in Wilton Crescent. A large and comfortable
settee is in the middle of the room, upholstered in dark leather.
A person sitting on it} \textit{(it is vacant at present}\emph{) would
have, on his right, Lady Britomart's writing table, with the lady
herself busy at it; a smaller writing table behind him on his left;
the door behind him on Lady Britomart's side; and a window with a
window seat directly on his left. Near the window is an armchair.}

\emph{Lady Britomart is a woman of fifty or thereabouts, well dressed
and yet careless of her dress, well bred and quite reckless of her
breeding, well mannered and yet appallingly outspoken and indifferent
to the opinion of her interlocutory, amiable and yet peremptory, arbitrary,
and high-tempered to the last bearable degree, and withal a very typical
managing matron of the upper class, treated as a naughty child until
she grew into a scolding mother, and finally settling down with plenty
of practical ability and worldly experience, limited in the oddest
way with domestic and class limitations, conceiving the universe exactly
as if it were a large house in Wilton Crescent, though handling her
corner of it very effectively on that assumption, and being quite
enlightened and liberal as to the books in the library, the pictures
on the walls, the music in the portfolios, and the articles in the
papers.}

\emph{Her son, Stephen, comes in. He is a gravely correct young man
under 25, taking himself very seriously, but still in some awe of
his mother, from childish habit and bachelor shyness rather than from
any weakness of character.}

STEPHEN. What's the matter?

LADY BRITOMART. Presently, Stephen.

\emph{Stephen submissively walks to the settee and sits down. He takes
up} The Speaker\emph{.}

LADY BRITOMART. Don't begin to read, Stephen. I shall require all
your attention.

STEPHEN. It was only while I was waiting---

LADY BRITOMART. Don't make excuses, Stephen. {[}\textit{He puts down}
\textit{\emph{The Speaker}}{]}. Now! {[}\textit{She finishes her writing;
rises; and comes to the settee}{]}. I have not kept you waiting very
long, I think.

STEPHEN. Not at all, mother.

LADY BRITOMART. Bring me my cushion. {[}\textit{He takes the cushion
from the chair at the desk and arranges it for her as she sits down
on the settee}{]}. Sit down. {[}\textit{He sits down and fingers
his tie nervously}{]}. Don't fiddle with your tie, Stephen: there
is nothing the matter with it.

STEPHEN. I beg your pardon. {[}\textit{He fiddles with his watch
chain instead}{]}.

LADY BRITOMART. Now are you attending to me, Stephen?

STEPHEN. Of course, mother.

LADY BRITOMART. No: it's \emph{not} of course. I want something much
more than your everyday matter-of-course attention. I am going to
speak to you very seriously, Stephen. I wish you would let that chain
alone.

STEPHEN {[}\textit{hastily relinquishing the chain}{]} Have I done
anything to annoy you, mother? If so, it was quite unintentional.

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{astonished}{]} Nonsense! {[}\textit{With
some remorse}{]} My poor boy, did you think I was angry with you?

STEPHEN. What is it, then, mother? You are making me very uneasy.

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{squaring herself at him rather aggressively}{]}
Stephen: may I ask how soon you intend to realize that you are a grown-up
man, and that I am only a woman?

STEPHEN {[}\textit{amazed}{]} Only a---

LADY BRITOMART. Don't repeat my words, please: It is a most aggravating
habit. You must learn to face life seriously, Stephen. I really cannot
bear the whole burden of our family affairs any longer. You must advise
me: you must assume the responsibility.

STEPHEN. I!

LADY BRITOMART. Yes, you, of course. You were 24 last June. You've
been at Harrow and Cambridge. You've been to India and Japan. You
must know a lot of things now; unless you have wasted your time most
scandalously. Well, \emph{advise} me.

STEPHEN {[}\textit{much perplexed}{]} You know I have never interfered
in the household---

LADY BRITOMART. No: I should think not. I don't want you to order
the dinner.

STEPHEN. I mean in our family affairs.

LADY BRITOMART. Well, you must interfere now; for they are getting
quite beyond me.

STEPHEN {[}\textit{troubled}{]} I have thought sometimes that perhaps
I ought; but really, mother, I know so little about them; and what
I do know is so painful---it is so impossible to mention some things
to you---{[}\textit{he stops, ashamed}{]}.

LADY BRITOMART. I suppose you mean your father.

STEPHEN {[}\textit{almost inaudibly}{]} Yes.

LADY BRITOMART. My dear: we can't go on all our lives not mentioning
him. Of course you were quite right not to open the subject until
I asked you to; but you are old enough now to be taken into my confidence,
and to help me to deal with him about the girls.

STEPHEN. But the girls are all right. They are engaged.

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{complacently}{]} Yes: I have made a very
good match for Sarah. Charles Lomax will be a millionaire at 35. But
that is ten years ahead; and in the meantime his trustees cannot under
the terms of his father's will allow him more than \pounds{}800 a
year.

STEPHEN. But the will says also that if he increases his income by
his own exertions, they may double the increase.

LADY BRITOMART. Charles Lomax's exertions are much more likely to
decrease his income than to increase it. Sarah will have to find at
least another \pounds{}800 a year for the next ten years; and even
then they will be as poor as church mice. And what about Barbara?
I thought Barbara was going to make the most brilliant career of all
of you. And what does she do? Joins the Salvation Army; discharges
her maid; lives on a pound a week; and walks in one evening with a
professor of Greek whom she has picked up in the street, and who pretends
to be a Salvationist, and actually plays the big drum for her in public
because he has fallen head over ears in love with her.

STEPHEN. I was certainly rather taken aback when I heard they were
engaged. Cusins is a very nice fellow, certainly: nobody would ever
guess that he was born in Australia; but---

LADY BRITOMART. Oh, Adolphus Cusins will make a very good husband.
After all, nobody can say a word against Greek: it stamps a man at
once as an educated gentleman. And my family, thank Heaven, is not
a pig-headed Tory one. We are Whigs, and believe in liberty. Let snobbish
people say what they please: Barbara shall marry, not the man they
like, but the man \emph{I} like.

STEPHEN. Of course I was thinking only of his income. However, he
is not likely to be extravagant.

LADY BRITOMART. Don't be too sure of that, Stephen. I know your quiet,
simple, refined, poetic people like Adolphus---quite content with
the best of everything! They cost more than your extravagant people,
who are always as mean as they are second rate. No: Barbara will need
at least \pounds{}2000 a year. You see it means two additional households.
Besides, my dear, you must marry soon. I don't approve of the present
fashion of philandering bachelors and late marriages; and I am trying
to arrange something for you.

STEPHEN. It's very good of you, mother; but perhaps I had better arrange
that for myself.

LADY BRITOMART. Nonsense!\ you are much too young to begin matchmaking:
you would be taken in by some pretty little nobody. Of course I don't
mean that you are not to be consulted: you know that as well as I
do. {[}\textit{Stephen closes his lips and is silent}{]}. Now don't
sulk, Stephen.

STEPHEN. I am not sulking, mother. What has all this got to do with---with---with
my father?

LADY BRITOMART. My dear Stephen: where is the money to come from?
It is easy enough for you and the other children to live on my income
as long as we are in the same house; but I can't keep four families
in four separate houses. You know how poor my father is: he has barely
seven thousand a year now; and really, if he were not the Earl of
Stevenage, he would have to give up society. He can do nothing for
us: he says, naturally enough, that it is absurd that he should be
asked to provide for the children of a man who is rolling in money.
You see, Stephen, your father must be fabulously wealthy, because
there is always a war going on somewhere.

STEPHEN. You need not remind me of that, mother. I have hardly ever
opened a newspaper in my life without seeing our name in it. The Undershaft
torpedo! The Undershaft quick firers! The Undershaft ten inch! the
Undershaft disappearing rampart gun! the Undershaft submarine! and
now the Undershaft aerial battleship! At Harrow they called me the
Woolwich Infant. At Cambridge it was the same. A little brute at King's
who was always trying to get up revivals, spoilt my Bible---your first
birthday present to me---by writing under my name, {}``Son and heir
to Undershaft and Lazarus, Death and Destruction Dealers: address,
Christendom and Judea.'' But that was not so bad as the way I was
kowtowed to everywhere because my father was making millions by selling
cannons.

LADY BRITOMART. It is not only the cannons, but the war loans that
Lazarus arranges under cover of giving credit for the cannons. You
know, Stephen, it's perfectly scandalous. Those two men, Andrew Undershaft
and Lazarus, positively have Europe under their thumbs. That is why
your father is able to behave as he does. He is above the law. Do
you think Bismarck or Gladstone or Disraeli could have openly defied
every social and moral obligation all their lives as your father has?
They simply wouldn't have dared. I asked Gladstone to take it up.
I asked \emph{The Times} to take it up. I asked the Lord Chamberlain
to take it up. But it was just like asking them to declare war on
the Sultan. They \emph{wouldn't}. They said they couldn't touch him.
I believe they were afraid.

STEPHEN. What could they do? He does not actually break the law.

LADY BRITOMART. Not break the law! He is always breaking the law.
He broke the law when he was born: his parents were not married.

STEPHEN. Mother! Is that true?

LADY BRITOMART. Of course it's true: that was why we separated.

STEPHEN. He married without letting you know this!

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{rather taken aback by this inference}{]}
Oh no. To do Andrew justice, that was not the sort of thing he did.
Besides, you know the Undershaft motto: Unashamed. Everybody knew.

STEPHEN. But you said that was why you separated.

LADY BRITOMART. Yes, because he was not content with being a foundling
himself: he wanted to disinherit you for another foundling. That was
what I couldn't stand.

STEPHEN {[}\textit{ashamed}{]} Do you mean for---for---for---

LADY BRITOMART. Don't stammer, Ste\-ph\-en. Speak distinctly.

STEPHEN. But this is so frightful to me, mother. To have to speak
to you about such things!

LADY BRITOMART. It's not pleasant for me, either, especially if you
are still so childish that you must make it worse by a display of
embarrassment. It is only in the middle classes, Stephen, that people
get into a state of dumb helpless horror when they find that there
are wicked people in the world. In our class, we have to decide what
is to be done with wicked people; and nothing should disturb our self
possession. Now ask your question properly.

STEPHEN. Mother: you have no consideration for me. For Heaven's sake
either treat me as a child, as you always do, and tell me nothing
at all; or tell me everything and let me take it as best I can.

LADY BRITOMART. Treat you as a child! What do you mean? It is most
unkind and ungrateful of you to say such a thing. You know I have
never treated any of you as children. I have always made you my companions
and friends, and allowed you perfect freedom to do and say whatever
you liked, so long as you liked what I could approve of.

STEPHEN {[}\textit{desperately}{]} I daresay we have been the very
imperfect children of a very perfect mother; but I do beg you to let
me alone for once, and tell me about this horrible business of my
father wanting to set me aside for another son.

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{amazed}{]} Another son! I never said anything
of the kind. I never dreamt of such a thing. This is what comes of
interrupting me.

STEPHEN. But you said---

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{cutting him short}{]} Now be a good boy,
Stephen, and listen to me patiently. The Undershafts are descended
from a foundling in the parish of St Andrew Undershaft in the city.
That was long ago, in the reign of James the First. Well, this foundling
was adopted by an armorer and gun-maker. In the course of time the
foundling succeeded to the business; and from some notion of gratitude,
or some vow or something, he adopted another foundling, and left the
business to him. And that foundling did the same. Ever since that,
the cannon business has always been left to an adopted foundling named
Andrew Undershaft.

STEPHEN. But did they never marry? Were there no legitimate sons?

LADY BRITOMART. Oh yes: they married just as your father did; and
they were rich enough to buy land for their own children and leave
them well provided for. But they always adopted and trained some foundling
to succeed them in the business; and of course they always quarrelled
with their wives furiously over it. Your father was adopted in that
way; and he pretends to consider himself bound to keep up the tradition
and adopt somebody to leave the business to. Of course I was not going
to stand that. There may have been some reason for it when the Undershafts
could only marry women in their own class, whose sons were not fit
to govern great estates. But there could be no excuse for passing
over my son.

STEPHEN {[}\textit{dubiously}{]} I am afraid I should make a poor
hand of managing a cannon foundry.

LADY BRITOMART. Nonsense!\ you could easily get a manager and pay
him a salary.

STEPHEN. My father evidently had no great opinion of my capacity.

LADY BRITOMART. Stuff, child!\ you were only a baby: it had nothing
to do with your capacity. Andrew did it on principle, just as he did
every perverse and wicked thing on principle. When my father remonstrated,
Andrew actually told him to his face that history tells us of only
two successful institutions: one the Undershaft firm, and the other
the Roman Empire under the Antonines. That was because the Antonine
emperors all adopted their successors. Such rubbish! The Stevenages
are as good as the Antonines, I hope; and you are a Stevenage. But
that was Andrew all over. There you have the man! Always clever and
unanswerable when he was defending nonsense and wickedness: always
awkward and sullen when he had to behave sensibly and decently!

STEPHEN. Then it was on my account that your home life was broken
up, mother. I am sorry.

LADY BRITOMART. Well, dear, there were other differences. I really
cannot bear an immoral man. I am not a Pharisee, I hope; and I should
not have minded his merely \emph{doing} wrong things: we are none
of us perfect. But your father didn't exactly do wrong things: he
said them and thought them: that was what was so dreadful. He really
had a sort of religion of wrongness just as one doesn't mind men practising
immorality so long as they own that they are in the wrong by preaching
morality; so I couldn't forgive Andrew for preaching immorality while
he practised morality. You would all have grown up without principles,
without any knowledge of right and wrong, if he had been in the house.
You know, my dear, your father was a very attractive man in some ways.
Children did not dislike him; and he took advantage of it to put the
wickedest ideas into their heads, and make them quite unmanageable.
I did not dislike him myself: very far from it; but nothing can bridge
over moral disagreement.

STEPHEN. All this simply bewilders me, mother. People may differ about
matters of opinion, or even about religion; but how can they differ
about right and wrong? Right is right; and wrong is wrong; and if
a man cannot distinguish them properly, he is either a fool or a rascal:
that's all.

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{touched}{]} That's my own boy {[}\textit{she
pats his cheek}{]}! Your father never could answer that: he used to
laugh and get out of it under cover of some affectionate nonsense.
And now that you understand the situation, what do you advise me to
do?

STEPHEN. Well, what \emph{can} you do?

LADY BRITOMART. I must get the money somehow.

STEPHEN. We cannot take money from him. I had rather go and live in
some cheap place like Bedford Square or even Hampstead than take a
farthing of his money.

LADY BRITOMART. But after all, Stephen, our present income comes from
Andrew.

STEPHEN {[}\textit{shocked}{]} I never knew that.

LADY BRITOMART. Well, you surely didn't suppose your grandfather had
anything to give me. The Stevenages could not do everything for you.
We gave you social position. Andrew had to contribute \emph{something}.
He had a very good bargain, I think.

STEPHEN {[}\textit{bitterly}{]} We are utterly dependent on him and
his cannons, then!

LADY BRITOMART. Certainly not: the money is settled. But he provided
it. So you see it is not a question of taking money from him or not:
it is simply a question of how much. I don't want any more for myself.

STEPHEN. Nor do I.

LADY BRITOMART. But Sarah does; and Barbara does. That is, Charles
Lomax and Adolphus Cusins will cost them more. So I must put my pride
in my pocket and ask for it, I suppose. That is your advice, Stephen,
is it not?

STEPHEN. No.

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{sharply}{]} Stephen!

STEPHEN. Of course if you are det\-er\-m\-ined---

LADY BRITOMART. I am not determined: I ask your advice; and I am waiting
for it. I will not have all the responsibility thrown on my shoulders.

STEPHEN {[}\textit{obstinately}{]} I would die sooner than ask him
for another penny.

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{resignedly}{]} You mean that I must ask
him. Very well, Stephen: It shall be as you wish. You will be glad
to know that your grandfather concurs. But he thinks I ought to ask
Andrew to come here and see the girls. After all, he must have some
natural affection for them.

STEPHEN. Ask him here!!!

LADY BRITOMART. Do \emph{not} repeat my words, Stephen. Where else
can I ask him?

STEPHEN. I never expected you to ask him at all.

LADY BRITOMART. Now don't tease, Stephen. Come!\ you see that it
is necessary that he should pay us a visit, don't you?

STEPHEN {[}\textit{reluctantly}{]} I suppose so, if the girls cannot
do without his money.

LADY BRITOMART. Thank you, Stephen: I knew you would give me the right
advice when it was properly explained to you. I have asked your father
to come this evening. {[}\textit{Stephen bounds from his seat}{]}
Don't jump, Stephen: it fidgets me.

STEPHEN {[}\textit{in utter consternation}{]} Do you mean to say that
my father is coming here to-night---that he may be here at any moment?

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{looking at her watch}{]} I said nine. {[}\textit{He
gasps. She rises}{]}. Ring the bell, please. {[}\textit{Stephen goes
to the smaller writing table; presses a button on it; and sits at
it with his elbows on the table and his head in his hands, outwitted
and overwhelmed}{]}. It is ten minutes to nine yet; and I have to
prepare the girls. I asked Charles Lomax and Adolphus to dinner on
purpose that they might be here. Andrew had better see them in case
he should cherish any delusions as to their being capable of supporting
their wives. {[}\textit{The butler enters: Lady Britomart goes behind
the settee to speak to him}{]}. Morrison: go up to the drawingroom
and tell everybody to come down here at once. {[}\textit{Morrison
withdraws. Lady Britomart turns to Stephen}{]}. Now remember, Stephen,
I shall need all your countenance and authority. {[}\textit{He rises
and tries to recover some vestige of these attributes}{]}. Give me
a chair, dear. {[}\textit{He pushes a chair forward from the wall
to where she stands, near the smaller writing table. She sits down;
and he goes to the armchair, into which he throws himself}{]}. I don't
know how Barbara will take it. Ever since they made her a major in
the Salvation Army she has developed a propensity to have her own
way and order people about which quite cows me sometimes. It's not
ladylike: I'm sure I don't know where she picked it up. Anyhow, Barbara
shan't bully me; but still it's just as well that your father should
be here before she has time to refuse to meet him or make a fuss.
Don't look nervous, Stephen, it will only encourage Barbara to make
difficulties. I am nervous enough, goodness knows; but I don't show
it.

\emph{Sarah and Barbara come in with their respective young men, Charles
Lomax and Adolphus Cusins. Sarah is slender, bored, and mundane. Barbara
is robuster, jollier, much more energetic. Sarah is fashionably dressed:
Barbara is in Salvation Army uniform. Lomax, a young man about town,
is like many other young men about town. He is affected with a frivolous
sense of humor which plunges him at the most inopportune moments into
paroxysms of imperfectly suppressed laughter. Cusins is a spectacled
student, slight, thin haired, and sweet voiced, with a more complex
form of Lomax's complaint. His sense of humor is intellectual and
subtle, and is complicated by an appalling temper. The lifelong struggle
of a benevolent temperament and a high conscience against impulses
of inhuman ridicule and fierce impatience has set up a chronic strain
which has visibly wrecked his constitution. He is a most implacable,
determined, tenacious, intolerant person who by mere force of character
presents himself as---and indeed actually is---considerate, gentle,
explanatory, even mild and apologetic, capable possibly of murder,
but not of cruelty or coarseness. By the operation of some instinct
which is not merciful enough to blind him with the illusions of love,
he is obstinately bent on marrying Barbara. Lomax likes Sarah and
thinks it will be rather a lark to marry her. Consequently he has
not attempted to resist Lady Britomart's arrangements to that end.}

\emph{All four look as if they had been having a good deal of fun
in the drawingroom. The girls enter first, leaving the swains outside.
Sarah comes to the settee. Barbara comes in after her and stops at
the door.}

BARBARA. Are Cholly and Dolly to come in?

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{forcibly}{]} Barbara: I will not have Charles
called Cholly: the vulgarity of it positively makes me ill.

BARBARA. It's all right, mother. Cholly is quite correct nowadays.
Are they to come in?

LADY BRITOMART. Yes, if they will behave themselves.

BARBARA {[}\textit{through the door}{]} Come in, Dolly, and behave
yourself.

\emph{Barbara comes to her mother's writing table. Cusins enters smiling,
and wanders towards Lady Britomart.}

SARAH {[}\textit{calling}{]} Come in, Cholly. {[}\textit{Lomax enters,
controlling his features very imperfectly, and places himself vaguely
between Sarah and Barbara}{]}.

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{peremptorily}{]} Sit down, all of you. {[}\textit{They
sit. Cusins crosses to the window and seats himself there. Lomax takes
a chair. Barbara sits at the writing table and Sarah on the settee}{]}.
I don't in the least know what you are laughing at, Adolphus. I am
surprised at you, though I expected nothing better from Charles Lomax.

CUSINS {[}\textit{in a remarkably gentle voice}{]} Barbara has been
trying to teach me the West Ham Salvation March.

LADY BRITOMART. I see nothing to laugh at in that; nor should you
if you are really converted.

CUSINS {[}\textit{sweetly}{]} You were not present. It was really
funny, I believe.

LOMAX. Ripping.

LADY BRITOMART. Be quiet, Charles. Now listen to me, children. Your
father is coming here this evening. {[}\textit{General stupefaction}{]}.

LOMAX {[}\textit{remonstrating}{]} Oh I say!

LADY BRITOMART. You are not called on to say anything, Charles.

SARAH. Are you serious, mother?

LADY BRITOMART. Of course I am serious. It is on your account, Sarah,
and also on Charles's. {[}\textit{Silence. Charles looks painfully
unworthy}{]}. I hope you are not going to object, Barbara.

BARBARA. I!\ why should I? My father has a soul to be saved like
anybody else. He's quite welcome as far as I am concerned.

LOMAX {[}\textit{still remonstrant}{]} But really, don't you know!
Oh I say!

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{frigidly}{]} What do you wish to convey,
Charles?

LOMAX. Well, you must admit that this is a bit thick.

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{turning with ominous suavity to Cusins}{]}
Adolphus: you are a professor of Greek. Can you translate Charles
Lomax's remarks into reputable English for us?

CUSINS {[}\textit{cautiously}{]} If I may say so, Lady Brit, I think
Charles has rather happily expressed what we all feel. Homer, speaking
of Autolycus, uses the same phrase. \emph{$\pi $$\upsilon $$\kappa $$\iota $$\nu $\`{o}}$\nu $
$\delta $\'{o}$\mu $\emph{o$\nu $ $\epsilon $$\lambda $$\theta $$\epsilon $$\iota $$\nu $}
means a bit thick.

LOMAX {[}\textit{handsomely}{]} Not that I mind, you know, if Sarah
don't.

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{crushingly}{]} Thank you. Have I \emph{your}
permission, Adolphus, to invite my own husband to my own house?

CUSINS {[}\textit{gallantly}{]} You have my unhesitating support in
everything you do.

LADY BRITOMART. Sarah: have you nothing to say?

SARAH. Do you mean that he is coming regularly to live here?

LADY BRITOMART. Certainly not. The spare room is ready for him if
he likes to stay for a day or two and see a little more of you; but
there are limits.

SARAH. Well, he can't eat us, I suppose. \emph{I} don't mind.

LOMAX {[}\textit{chuckling}{]} I wonder how the old man will take
it.

LADY BRITOMART. Much as the old woman will, no doubt, Charles.

LOMAX {[}\textit{abashed}{]} I didn't mean---at least---

LADY BRITOMART. You didn't \emph{think}, Charles. You never do; and
the result is, you never mean anything. And now please attend to me,
children. Your father will be quite a stranger to us.

LOMAX. I suppose he hasn't seen Sarah since she was a little kid.

LADY BRITOMART. Not since she was a little kid, Charles, as you express
it with that elegance of diction and refinement of thought that seem
never to desert you. Accordingly---er--- {[}\textit{impatiently}{]}
Now I have forgotten what I was going to say. That comes of your provoking
me to be sarcastic, Charles. Adolphus: will you kindly tell me where
I was.

CUSINS {[}\textit{sweetly}{]} You were saying that as Mr Undershaft
has not seen his children since they were babies, he will form his
opinion of the way you have brought them up from their behavior to-night,
and that therefore you wish us all to be particularly careful to conduct
ourselves well, especially Charles.

LOMAX. Look here: Lady Brit didn't say that.

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{vehemently}{]} I did, Charles. Adolphus's
recollection is perfectly correct. It is most important that you should
be good; and I do beg you for once not to pair off into opposite corners
and giggle and whisper while I am speaking to your father.

BARBARA. All right, mother. We'll do you credit.

LADY BRITOMART. Remember, Charles, that Sarah will want to feel proud
of you instead of ashamed of you.

LOMAX. Oh I say! There's nothing to be exactly proud of, don't you
know.

LADY BRITOMART. Well, try and look as if there was.

\emph{Morrison, pale and dismayed, breaks into the room in unconcealed
disorder.}

MORRISON. Might I speak a word to you, my lady?

LADY BRITOMART. Nonsense! Show him up.

MORRISON. Yes, my lady. {[}\textit{He goes}{]}.

LOMAX. Does Morrison know who he is?

LADY BRITOMART. Of course. Morrison has always been with us.

LOMAX. It must be a regular corker for him, don't you know.

LADY BRITOMART. Is this a moment to get on my nerves, Charles, with
your outrageous expressions?

LOMAX. But this is something out of the ordinary, really---

MORRISON {[}\textit{at the door}{]} The---er---Mr Undershaft. {[}\textit{He
retreats in confusion}{]}.

\emph{Andrew Undershaft comes in. All rise. Lady Britomart meets him
in the middle of the room behind the settee.}

\emph{Andrew is, on the surface, a stoutish, easygoing elderly man,
with kindly patient manners, and an engaging simplicity of character.
But he has a watchful, deliberate, waiting, listening face, and formidable
reserves of power, both bodily and mental, in his capacious chest
and long head. His gentleness is partly that of a strong man who has
learnt by experience that his natural grip hurts ordinary people unless
he handles them very carefully, and partly the mellowness of age and
success. He is also a little shy in his present very delicate situation.}

LADY BRITOMART. Good evening, Andrew.

UNDERSHAFT. How d'ye do, my dear.

LADY BRITOMART. You look a good deal older.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{apologetically}{]} I \emph{am} somewhat older. {[}\textit{With
a touch of courtship}{]} Time has stood still with you.

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{promptly}{]} Rubbish! This is your family.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{surprised}{]} Is it so large? I am sorry to
say my memory is failing very badly in some things. {[}\textit{He
offers his hand with paternal kindness to Lomax}{]}.

LOMAX {[}\textit{jerkily shaking his hand}{]} Ahdedoo.

UNDERSHAFT. I can see you are my eldest. I am very glad to meet you
again, my boy.

LOMAX {[}\textit{remonstrating}{]} No but look here don't you know---{[}\textit{Overcome}{]}
Oh I say!

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{recovering from momentary speechlessness}{]}
Andrew: do you mean to say that you don't remember how many children
you have?

UNDERSHAFT. Well, I am afraid I---. They have grown so much---er.
Am I making any ridiculous mistake? I may as well confess: I recollect
only one son. But so many things have happened since, of course---er---

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{decisively}{]} Andrew: you are talking nonsense.
Of course you have only one son.

UNDERSHAFT. Perhaps you will be good enough to introduce me, my dear.

LADY BRITOMART. That is Charles Lomax, who is engaged to Sarah.

UNDERSHAFT. My dear sir, I beg your pardon.

LOMAX. Notatall. Delighted, I assure you.

LADY BRITOMART. This is Stephen.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{bowing}{]} Happy to make your acquaintance,
Mr Stephen. Then {[}\textit{going to Cusins}{]} \emph{you} must be
my son. {[}\textit{Taking Cusins' hands in his}{]} How are you, my
young friend? {[}\textit{To Lady Britomart}{]} He is very like you,
my love.

CUSINS. You flatter me, Mr Undershaft. My name is Cusins: engaged
to Barbara. {[}\textit{Very explicitly}{]} That is Major Barbara
Undershaft, of the Salvation Army. That is Sarah, your second daughter.
This is Stephen Undershaft, your son.

UNDERSHAFT. My dear Stephen, I \emph{beg} your pardon.

STEPHEN. Not at all.

UNDERSHAFT. Mr Cusins: I am much indebted to you for explaining so
precisely. {[}\textit{Turning to Sarah}{]} Barbara, my dear---

SARAH {[}\textit{prompting him}{]} Sarah.

UNDERSHAFT. Sarah, of course. {[}\textit{They shake hands. He goes
over to Barbara}{]} Barbara---I am right this time, I hope.

BARBARA. Quite right. {[}\textit{They shake hands}{]}.

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{resuming command}{]} Sit down, all of you.
Sit down, Andrew. {[}\textit{She comes forward and sits on the settle.
Cusins also brings his chair forward on her left. Barbara and Stephen
resume their seats. Lomax gives his chair to Sarah and goes for another}{]}.

UNDERSHAFT. Thank you, my love.

LOMAX {[}\textit{conversationally, as he brings a chair forward between
the writing table and the settee, and offers it to Undershaft}{]}
Takes you some time to find out exactly where you are, don't it?

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{accepting the chair}{]} That is not what embarrasses
me, Mr Lomax. My difficulty is that if I play the part of a father,
I shall produce the effect of an intrusive stranger; and if I play
the part of a discreet stranger, I may appear a callous father.

LADY BRITOMART. There is no need for you to play any part at all,
Andrew. You had much better be sincere and natural.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{submissively}{]} Yes, my dear: I daresay that
will be best. {[}\textit{Making himself comfortable}{]} Well, here
I am. Now what can I do for you all?

LADY BRITOMART. You need not do anything, Andrew. You are one of the
family. You can sit with us and enjoy yourself.

\emph{Lomax's too long suppressed mirth explodes in agonized neighings.}

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{outraged}{]} Charles Lomax: if you can behave
yourself, behave yourself. If not, leave the room.

LOMAX. I'm awfully sorry, Lady Brit; but really, you know, upon my
soul! {[}\textit{He sits on the settee between Lady Britomart and
Undershaft, quite overcome}{]}.

BARBARA. Why don't you laugh if you want to, Cholly? It's good for
your inside.

LADY BRITOMART. Barbara: you have had the education of a lady. Please
let your father see that; and don't talk like a street girl.

UNDERSHAFT. Never mind me, my dear. As you know, I am not a gentleman;
and I was never educated.

LOMAX {[}\textit{encouragingly}{]} Nobody'd know it, I assure you.
You look all right, you know.

CUSINS. Let me advise you to study Greek, Mr Undershaft. Greek scholars
are privileged men. Few of them know Greek; and none of them know
anything else; but their position is unchallengeable. Other languages
are the qualifications of waiters and commercial travellers: Greek
is to a man of position what the hallmark is to silver.

BARBARA. Dolly: don't be insincere. Cholly: fetch your concertina
and play something for us.

LOMAX {[}\textit{doubtfully to Undershaft}{]} Perhaps that sort of
thing isn't in your line, eh?

UNDERSHAFT. I am particularly fond of music.

LOMAX {[}\textit{delighted}{]} Are you? Then I'll get it. {[}\textit{He
goes upstairs for the instrument}{]}.

UNDERSHAFT. Do you play, Barbara?

BARBARA. Only the tambourine. But Cholly's teaching me the concertina.

UNDERSHAFT. Is Cholly also a member of the Salvation Army?

BARBARA. No: he says it's bad form to be a dissenter. But I don't
despair of Cholly. I made him come yesterday to a meeting at the dock
gates, and take the collection in his hat.

LADY BRITOMART. It is not my doing, Andrew. Barbara is old enough
to take her own way. She has no father to advise her.

BARBARA. Oh yes she has. There are no orphans in the Salvation Army.

UNDERSHAFT. Your father there has a great many children and plenty
of experience, eh?

BARBARA {[}\textit{looking at him with quick interest and nodding}{]}
Just so. How did \emph{you} come to understand that? {[}\textit{Lomax
is heard at the door trying the concertina}{]}.

LADY BRITOMART. Come in, Charles. Play us something at once.

LOMAX. Righto! {[}\textit{He sits down in his former place, and preludes}{]}.

UNDERSHAFT. One moment, Mr Lomax. I am rather interested in the Salvation
Army. Its motto might be my own: Blood and Fire.

LOMAX {[}\textit{shocked}{]} But not your sort of blood and fire,
you know.

UNDERSHAFT. My sort of blood cleanses: my sort of fire purifies.

BARBARA. So do ours. Come down to-morrow to my shelter---the West
Ham shelter---and see what we're doing. We're going to march to a
great meeting in the Assembly Hall at Mile End. Come and see the shelter
and then march with us: it will do you a lot of good. Can you play
anything?

UNDERSHAFT. In my youth I earned pennies, and even shillings occasionally,
in the streets and in public house parlors by my natural talent for
stepdancing. Later on, I became a member of the Undershaft orchestral
society, and performed passably on the tenor trombone.

LOMAX {[}\textit{scandalized}{]} Oh I say!

BARBARA. Many a sinner has played himself into heaven on the trombone,
thanks to the Army.

LOMAX {[}\textit{to Barbara, still rather shocked}{]} Yes; but what
about the cannon business, don't you know? {[}\textit{To Undershaft}{]}
Getting into heaven is not exactly in your line, is it?

LADY BRITOMART. Charles!!!

LOMAX. Well; but it stands to reason, don't it? The cannon business
may be necessary and all that: we can't get on without cannons; but
it isn't right, you know. On the other hand, there may be a certain
amount of tosh about the Salvation Army---I belong to the Established
Church myself---but still you can't deny that it's religion; and you
can't go against religion, can you? At least unless you're downright
immoral, don't you know.

UNDERSHAFT. You hardly appreciate my position, Mr Lomax---

LOMAX {[}\textit{hastily}{]} I'm not saying anything against you personally,
you know.

UNDERSHAFT. Quite so, quite so. But consider for a moment. Here I
am, a manufacturer of mutilation and murder. I find myself in a specially
amiable humor just now because, this morning, down at the foundry,
we blew twenty-seven dummy soldiers into fragments with a gun which
formerly destroyed only thirteen.

LOMAX {[}\textit{leniently}{]} Well, the more destructive war becomes,
the sooner it will be abolished, eh?

UNDERSHAFT. Not at all. The more destructive war becomes the more
fascinating we find it. No, Mr Lomax, I am obliged to you for making
the usual excuse for my trade; but I am not ashamed of it. I am not
one of those men who keep their morals and their business in watertight
compartments. All the spare money my trade rivals spend on hospitals,
cathedrals and other receptacles for conscience money, I devote to
experiments and researches in improved methods of destroying life
and property. I have always done so; and I always shall. Therefore
your Christmas card moralities of peace on earth and goodwill among
men are of no use to me. Your Christianity, which enjoins you to resist
not evil, and to turn the other cheek, would make me a bankrupt. My
morality---my religion---must have a place for cannons and torpedoes
in it.

STEPHEN {[}\textit{coldly---almost sullenly}{]} You speak as if there
were half a dozen moralities and religions to choose from, instead
of one true morality and one true religion.

UNDERSHAFT. For me there is only one true morality; but it might not
fit you, as you do not manufacture aerial battleships. There is only
one true morality for every man; but every man has not the same true
morality.

LOMAX {[}\textit{overtaxed}{]} Would you mind saying that again? I
didn't quite follow it.

CUSINS. It's quite simple. As Euripides says, one man's meat is another
man's poison morally as well as physically.

UNDERSHAFT. Precisely.

LOMAX. Oh, that. Yes, yes, yes. True. True.

STEPHEN. In other words, some men are honest and some are scoundrels.

BARBARA. Bosh. There are no scoundrels.

UNDERSHAFT. Indeed? Are there any good men?

BARBARA. No. Not one. There are neither good men nor scoundrels: there
are just children of one Father; and the sooner they stop calling
one another names the better. You needn't talk to me: I know them.
I've had scores of them through my hands: scoundrels, criminals, infidels,
philanthropists, missionaries, county councillors, all sorts. They're
all just the same sort of sinner; and there's the same salvation ready
for them all.

UNDERSHAFT. May I ask have you ever saved a maker of cannons?

BARBARA. No. Will you let me try?

UNDERSHAFT. Well, I will make a bargain with you. If I go to see you
to-morrow in your Salvation Shelter, will you come the day after to
see me in my cannon works?

BARBARA. Take care. It may end in your giving up the cannons for the
sake of the Salvation Army.

UNDERSHAFT. Are you sure it will not end in your giving up the Salvation
Army for the sake of the cannons?

BARBARA. I will take my chance of that.

UNDERSHAFT. And I will take my chance of the other. {[}\textit{They
shake hands on it}{]}. Where is your shelter?

BARBARA. In West Ham. At the sign of the cross. Ask anybody in Canning
Town. Where are your works?

UNDERSHAFT. In Perivale St Andrews. At the sign of the sword. Ask
anybody in Europe.

LOMAX. Hadn't I better play something?

BARBARA. Yes. Give us Onward, Christian Soldiers.

LOMAX. Well, that's rather a strong order to begin with, don't you
know. Suppose I sing Thou'rt passing hence, my brother. It's much
the same tune.

BARBARA. It's too melancholy. You get saved, Cholly; and you'll pass
hence, my brother, without making such a fuss about it.

LADY BRITOMART. Really, Barbara, you go on as if religion were a pleasant
subject. Do have some sense of propriety.

UNDERSHAFT. I do not find it an unpleasant subject, my dear. It is
the only one that capable people really care for.

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{looking at her watch}{]} Well, if you are
determined to have it, I insist on having it in a proper and respectable
way. Charles: ring for prayers. {[}\textit{General amazement. Stephen
rises in dismay}{]}.

LOMAX {[}\textit{rising}{]} Oh I say!

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{rising}{]} I am afraid I must be going.

LADY BRITOMART. You cannot go now, Andrew: it would be most improper.
Sit down. What will the servants think?

UNDERSHAFT. My dear: I have conscientious scruples. May I suggest
a compromise? If Barbara will conduct a little service in the drawingroom,
with Mr Lomax as organist, I will attend it willingly. I will even
take part, if a trombone can be procured.

LADY BRITOMART. Don't mock, Andrew.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{shocked---to Barhara}{]} You don't think I am
mocking, my love, I hope.

BARBARA. No, of course not; and it wouldn't matter if you were: half
the Army came to their first meeting for a lark. {[}\textit{Rising}{]}
Come along. Come, Dolly. Come, Cholly. {[}\textit{She goes out with
Undershaft, who opens the door for her. Cusins rises}{]}.

LADY BRITOMART. I will not be disobeyed by everybody. Adolphus: sit
down. Charles: you may go. You are not fit for prayers: you cannot
keep your countenance.

LOMAX. Oh I say! {[}\textit{He goes out}{]}.

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{continuing}{]} But you, Adolphus, can behave
yourself if you choose to. I insist on your staying.

CUSINS. My dear Lady Brit: there are things in the family prayer book
that I couldn't bear to hear you say.

LADY BRITOMART. What things, pray?

CUSINS. Well, you would have to say before all the servants that we
have done things we ought not to have done, and left undone things
we ought to have done, and that there is no health in us. I cannot
bear to hear you doing yourself such an unjustice, and Barbara such
an injustice. As for myself, I flatly deny it: I have done my best.
I shouldn't dare to marry Barbara---I couldn't look you in the face---if
it were true. So I must go to the drawingroom.

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{offended}{]} Well, go. {[}\textit{He starts
for the door}{]}. And remember this, Adolphus {[}\textit{he turns
to listen}{]}: I have a very strong suspicion that you went to the
Salvation Army to worship Barbara and nothing else. And I quite appreciate
the very clever way in which you systematically humbug me. I have
found you out. Take care Barbara doesn't. That's all.

CUSINS {[}\textit{with unruffled sweetness}{]} Don't tell on me. {[}\textit{He
goes out}{]}.

LADY BRITOMART. Sarah: if you want to go, go. Anything's better than
to sit there as if you wished you were a thousand miles away.

SARAH {[}\textit{languidly}{]} Very well, mamma. {[}\textit{She goes}{]}.

\emph{Lady Britomart, with a sudden flounce, gives way to a little
gust of tears.}

STEPHEN {[}\textit{going to her}{]} Mother: what's the matter?

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{swishing away her tears with her handkerchief}{]}
Nothing. Foolishness. You can go with him, too, if you like, and leave
me with the servants.

STEPHEN. Oh, you mustn't think that, mother. I---I don't like him.

LADY BRITOMART. The others do. That is the injustice of a woman's
lot. A woman has to bring up her children; and that means to restrain
them, to deny them things they want, to set them tasks, to punish
them when they do wrong, to do all the unpleasant things. And then
the father, who has nothing to do but pet them and spoil them, comes
in when all her work is done and steals their affection from her.

STEPHEN. He has not stolen our affection from you. It is only curiosity.

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{violently}{]} I won't be consoled, Stephen.
There is nothing the matter with me. {[}\textit{She rises and goes
towards the door}{]}.

STEPHEN. Where are you going, mother?

LADY BRITOMART. To the drawingroom, of course. {[}\textit{She goes
out. Onward, Christian Soldiers, on the concertina, with tambourine
accompaniment, is heard when the door opens}{]}. Are you coming, Stephen?

STEPHEN. No. Certainly not. {[}\textit{She goes. He sits down on
the settee, with compressed lips and an expression of strong dislike}{]}.

\noindent \begin{center}\noun{End of Act I}\end{center}


\chapter*{\raggedright ACT II}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{ACT II}

\markboth{MAJOR BARBARA}{ACT II}

\emph{The yard of the West Ham shelter of the Salvation Army is a
cold place on a January morning. The building itself, an old warehouse,
is newly whitewashed. Its gabled end projects into the yard in the
middle, with a door on the ground floor, and another in the loft above
it without any balcony or ladder, but with a pulley rigged over it
for hoisting sacks. Those who come from this central gable end into
the yard have the gateway leading to the street on their left, with
a stone horse-trough just beyond it, and, on the right, a penthouse
shielding a table from the weather. There are forms at the table;
and on them are seated a man and a woman, both much down on their
luck, finishing a meal of bread} \textit{(one thick slice each, with
margarine and golden syrup}\emph{) and diluted milk.}

\emph{The man, a workman out of employment, is young, agile, a talker,
a poser, sharp enough to be capable of anything in reason except honesty
or altruistic considerations of any kind. The woman is a commonplace
old bundle of poverty and hard-worn humanity. She looks sixty and
probably is forty-five. If they were rich people, gloved and muffed
and well wrapped up in furs and overcoats, they would be numbed and
miserable; for it is a grindingly cold, raw, January day; and a glance
at the background of grimy warehouses and leaden sky visible over
the whitewashed walls of the yard would drive any idle rich person
straight to the Mediterranean. But these two, being no more troubled
with visions of the Mediterranean than of the moon, and being compelled
to keep more of their clothes in the pawnshop, and less on their persons,
in winter than in summer, are not depressed by the cold: rather are
they stung into vivacity, to which their meal has just now given an
almost jolly turn. The man takes a pull at his mug, and then gets
up and moves about the yard with his hands deep in his pockets, occasionally
breaking into a stepdance.}

THE WOMAN. Feel better otter your meal, sir?

THE MAN. No. Call that a meal! Good enough for you, props; but wot
is it to me, an intelligent workin man.

THE WOMAN. Workin man! Wot are you?

THE MAN. Painter.

THE WOMAN {[}\textit{sceptically}{]} Yus, I dessay.

THE MAN. Yus, you dessay! I know. Every loafer that can't do nothink
calls isself a painter. Well, I'm a real painter: grainer, finisher,
thirty-eight bob a week when I can get it.

THE WOMAN. Then why don't you go and get it?

THE MAN. I'll tell you why. Fust: I'm intelligent---fffff!\ it's
rotten cold here {[}\textit{he dances a step or two}{]}---yes: intelligent
beyond the station o life into which it has pleased the capitalists
to call me; and they don't like a man that sees through em. Second,
an intelligent bein needs a doo share of appiness; so I drink somethink
cruel when I get the chawnce. Third, I stand by my class and do as
little as I can so's to leave arf the job for me fellow workers. Fourth,
I'm fly enough to know wots inside the law and wots outside it; and
inside it I do as the capitalists do: pinch wot I can lay me ands
on. In a proper state of society I am sober, industrious and honest:
in Rome, so to speak, I do as the Romans do. Wots the consequence?
When trade is bad---and it's rotten bad just now---and the employers
az to sack arf their men, they generally start on me.

THE WOMAN. What's your name?

THE MAN. Price. Bronterre O'Brien Price. Usually called Snobby Price,
for short.

THE WOMAN. Snobby's a carpenter, ain't it? You said you was a painter.

PRICE. Not that kind of snob, but the genteel sort. I'm too uppish,
owing to my intelligence, and my father being a Chartist and a reading,
thinking man: a stationer, too. I'm none of your common hewers of
wood and drawers of water; and don't you forget it. {[}\textit{He
returns to his seat at the table, and takes up his mug}{]}. Wots \emph{your}
name?

THE WOMAN. Rummy Mitchens, sir.

PRICE {[}\textit{quaffing the remains of his milk to her}{]} Your
elth, Miss Mitchens.

RUMMY {[}\textit{correcting him}{]} Missis Mitchens.

PRICE. Wot! Oh Rummy, Rummy! Respectable married woman, Rummy, gittin
rescued by the Salvation Army by pretendin to be a bad un. Same old
game!

RUMMY. What am I to do? I can't starve. Them Salvation lasses is dear
good girls; but the better you are, the worse they likes to think
you were before they rescued you. Why shouldn't they av a bit o credit,
poor loves? They're worn to rags by their work. And where would they
get the money to rescue us if we was to let on we're no worse than
other people? You know what ladies and gentlemen are.

PRICE. Thievin swine! Wish I ad their job, Rummy, all the same. Wot
does Rummy stand for? Pet name props?

RUMMY. Short for Romola.

PRICE. For wot!?

RUMMY. Romola. It was out of a new book. Somebody me mother wanted
me to grow up like.

PRICE. We're companions in misfortune, Rummy. Both on us got names
that nobody cawnt pronounce. Consequently I'm Snobby and you're Rummy
because Bill and Sally wasn't good enough for our parents. Such is
life!

RUMMY. Who saved you, Mr Price? Was it Major Barbara?

PRICE. No: I come here on my own. I'm goin to be Bronterre O'Brien
Price, the converted painter. I know wot they like. I'll tell em how
I blasphemed and gambled and wopped my poor old mother---

RUMMY {[}\textit{shocked}{]} Used you to beat your mother?

PRICE. Not likely. She used to beat me. No matter: you come and listen
to the converted painter, and you'll hear how she was a pious woman
that taught me me prayers at er knee, an how I used to come home drunk
and drag her out o bed be er snow white airs, an lam into er with
the poker.

RUMMY. That's what's so unfair to us women. Your confessions is just
as big lies as ours: you don't tell what you really done no more than
us; but you men can tell your lies right out at the meetins and be
made much of for it; while the sort o confessions we az to make az
to be wispered to one lady at a time. It ain't right, spite of all
their piety.

PRICE. Right! Do you spose the Army'd be allowed if it went and did
right? Not much. It combs our air and makes us good little blokes
to be robbed and put upon. But I'll play the game as good as any of
em. I'll see somebody struck by lightnin, or hear a voice sayin {}``Snobby
Price: where will you spend eternity?'' I'll ave a time of it, I
tell you.

RUMMY. You won't be let drink, though.

PRICE. I'll take it out in gorspellin, then. I don't want to drink
if I can get fun enough any other way.

\emph{Jenny Hill, a pale, overwrought, pretty Salvation lass of 18,
comes in through the yard gate, leading Peter Shirley, a half hardened,
half worn-out elderly man, weak with hunger.}

JENNY {[}\textit{supporting him}{]} Come!\ pluck up. I'll get you
something to eat. You'll be all right then.

PRICE {[}\textit{rising and hurrying officiously to take the old man
off Jenny's hands}{]} Poor old man! Cheer up, brother: you'll find
rest and peace and appiness ere. Hurry up with the food, miss: e's
fair done. {[}\textit{Jenny hurries into the shelter}{]}. Ere, buck
up, daddy! She's fetchin y'a thick slice o breadn treacle, an a mug
o skyblue. {[}\textit{He seats him at the corner of the table}{]}.

RUMMY {[}\textit{gaily}{]} Keep up your old art! Never say die!

SHIRLEY. I'm not an old man. I'm ony 46. I'm as good as ever I was.
The grey patch come in my hair before I was thirty. All it wants is
three pennorth o hair dye: am I to be turned on the streets to starve
for it? Holy God! I've worked ten to twelve hours a day since I was
thirteen, and paid my way all through; and now am I to be thrown into
the gutter and my job given to a young man that can do it no better
than me because I've black hair that goes white at the first change?

PRICE {[}\textit{cheerfully}{]} No good jawrin about it. You're ony
a jumped-up, jerked-off, orspittle-turned-out incurable of an ole
workin man: who cares about you? Eh? Make the thievin swine give you
a meal: they've stole many a one from you. Get a bit o your own back. {[}\textit{Jenny
returns with the usual meal}{]}. There you are, brother. Awsk a blessin
an tuck that into you.

SHIRLEY {[}\textit{looking at it ravenously but not touching it, and
crying like a child}{]} I never took anything before.

JENNY {[}\textit{petting him}{]} Come, come!\ the Lord sends it to
you: he wasn't above taking bread from his friends; and why should
you be? Besides, when we find you a job you can pay us for it if you
like.

SHIRLEY {[}\textit{eagerly}{]} Yes, yes: that's true. I can pay you
back: it's only a loan. {[}\textit{Shivering}{]} Oh Lord!\ oh Lord!
{[}\textit{He turns to the table and attacks the meal ravenously}{]}.

JENNY. Well, Rummy, are you more comfortable now?

RUMMY. God bless you, lovey! You've fed my body and saved my soul,
haven't you? {[}\textit{Jenny, touched, kisses her}{]} Sit down and
rest a bit: you must be ready to drop.

JENNY. I've been going hard since morning. But there's more work than
we can do. I mustn't stop.

RUMMY. Try a prayer for just two minutes. You'll work all the better
after.

JENNY {[}\textit{her eyes lighting up}{]} Oh isn't it wonderful how
a few minutes prayer revives you! I was quite lightheaded at twelve
o'clock, I was so tired; but Major Barbara just sent me to pray for
five minutes; and I was able to go on as if I had only just begun. {[}\textit{To
Price}{]} Did you have a piece of bread?

PAIGE {[}\textit{with unction}{]} Yes, miss; but I've got the piece
that I value more; and that's the peace that passeth hall hannerstennin.

RUMMY {[}\textit{fervently}{]} Glory Hallelujah!

\emph{Bill Walker, a rough customer of about 25, appears at the yard
gate and looks malevolently at Jenny.}

JENNY. That makes me so happy. When you say that, I feel wicked for
loitering here. I must get to work again.

\emph{She is hurrying to the shelter, when the new-comer moves quickly
up to the door and intercepts her. His manner is so threatening that
she retreats as he comes at her truculently, driving her down the
yard.}

BILL. I know you. You're the one that took away my girl. You're the
one that set er agen me. Well, I'm goin to av er out. Not that I care
a curse for her or you: see? But I'll let er know; and I'll let you
know. I'm goin to give er a doin that'll teach er to cut away from
me. Now in with you and tell er to come out afore I come in and kick
er out. Tell er Bill Walker wants er. She'll know what that means;
and if she keeps me waitin it'll be worse. You stop to jaw back at
me; and I'll start on you: d'ye hear? There's your way. In you go. {[}\textit{He
takes her by the arm and slings her towards the door of the shelter.
She falls on her hand and knee. Rummy helps her up again}{]}.

PRICE {[}\textit{rising, and venturing irresolutely towards Bill}{]}.
Easy there, mate. She ain't doin you no arm.

BILL. Who are you callin mate? {[}\textit{Standing over him threateningly}{]}.
You're goin to stand up for her, are you? Put up your ands.

RUMMY {[}\textit{running indignantly to him to scold him}{]}. Oh,
you great brute--- {[}\textit{He instantly swings his left hand back
against her face. She screams and reels back to the trough, where
she sits down, covering her bruised face with her hands and rocking
and moaning with pain}{]}.

JENNY {[}\textit{going to her}{]}. Oh God forgive you! How could you
strike an old woman like that?

BILL {[}\textit{seizing her by the hair so violently that she also
screams, and tearing her away from the old woman}{]}. You Gawd forgive
me again and I'll Gawd forgive you one on the jaw that'll stop you
prayin for a week. {[}\textit{Holding her and turning fiercely on
Price}{]}. Av you anything to say agen it? Eh?

PRICE {[}\textit{intimidated}{]}. No, matey: she ain't anything to
do with me.

BILL. Good job for you! I'd put two meals into you and fight you with
one finger after, you starved cur. {[}\textit{To Jenny}{]} Now are
you goin to fetch out Mog Habbijam; or am I to knock your face off
you and fetch her myself?

JENNY {[}\textit{writhing in his grasp}{]} Oh please someone go in
and tell Major Barbara---{[}\textit{she screams again as he wrenches
her head down; and Price and Rummy, flee into the shelter}{]}.

BILL. You want to go in and tell your Major of me, do you?

JENNY. Oh please don't drag my hair. Let me go.

BILL. Do you or don't you? {[}\textit{She stifles a scream}{]}. Yes
or no.

JENNY. God give me strength---

BILL {[}\textit{striking her with his fist in the face}{]} Go and
show her that, and tell her if she wants one like it to come and interfere
with me. {[}\textit{Jenny, crying with pain, goes into the shed.
He goes to the form and addresses the old man}{]}. Here: finish your
mess; and get out o my way.

SHIRLEY {[}\textit{springing up and facing him fiercely, with the
mug in his hand}{]} You take a liberty with me, and I'll smash you
over the face with the mug and cut your eye out. Ain't you satisfied---young
whelps like you---with takin the bread out o the mouths of your elders
that have brought you up and slaved for you, but you must come shovin
and cheekin and bullyin in here, where the bread o charity is sickenin
in our stummicks?

BILL {[}\textit{contemptuously, but backing a little}{]} Wot good
are you, you old palsy mug? Wot good are you?

SHIRLEY. As good as you and better. I'll do a day's work agen you
or any fat young soaker of your age. Go and take my job at Horrockses,
where I worked for ten year. They want young men there: they can't
afford to keep men over forty-five. They're very sorry---give you
a character and happy to help you to get anything suited to your years---sure
a steady man won't be long out of a job. Well, let em try \emph{you}.
They'll find the differ. What do \emph{you} know? Not as much as how
to beeyave yourself---layin your dirty fist across the mouth of a
respectable woman!

BILL. Don't provoke me to lay it acrost yours: d'ye hear?

SHIRLEY {[}\textit{with blighting contempt}{]} Yes: you like an old
man to hit, don't you, when you've finished with the women. I ain't
seen you hit a young one yet.

BILL {[}\textit{stung}{]} You lie, you old soupkitchener, you. There
was a young man here. Did I offer to hit him or did I not?

SHIRLEY. Was he starvin or was he not? Was he a man or only a crosseyed
thief an a loafer? Would you hit my son-in-law's brother?

BILL. Who's he?

SHIRLEY. Todger Fairmile o Balls Pond. Him that won \pounds{}20 off
the Japanese wrastler at the music hall by standin out 17 minutes
4 seconds agen him.

BILL {[}\textit{sullenly}{]} I'm no music hall wrastler. Can he box?

SHIRLEY. Yes: an you can't.

BILL. Wot! I can't, can't I? Wot's that you say {[}\textit{threatening
him}{]}?

SHIRLEY {[}\textit{not budging an inch}{]} Will you box Todger Fairmile
if I put him on to you? Say the word.

BILL. {[}\textit{subsiding with a slouch}{]} I'll stand up to any
man alive, if he was ten Todger Fairmiles. But I don't set up to be
a perfessional.

SHIRLEY {[}\textit{looking down on him with unfathomable disdain}{]}
\emph{You} box! Slap an old woman with the back o your hand! You hadn't
even the sense to hit her where a magistrate couldn't see the mark
of it, you silly young lump of conceit and ignorance. Hit a girl in
the jaw and ony make her cry! If Todger Fairmile'd done it, she wouldn't
a got up inside o ten minutes, no more than you would if he got on
to you. Yah! I'd set about you myself if I had a week's feedin in
me instead o two months starvation. {[}\textit{He returns to the
table to finish his meal}{]}.

BILL {[}\textit{following him and stooping over him to drive the taunt
in}{]} You lie!\ you have the bread and treacle in you that you come
here to beg.

SHIRLEY {[}\textit{bursting into tears}{]} Oh God!\ it's true: I'm
only an old pauper on the scrap heap. {[}\textit{Furiously}{]} But
you'll come to it yourself; and then you'll know. You'll come to it
sooner than a teetotaller like me, fillin yourself with gin at this
hour o the mornin!

BILL. I'm no gin drinker, you old liar; but when I want to give my
girl a bloomin good idin I like to av a bit o devil in me: see? An
here I am, talkin to a rotten old blighter like you sted o givin her
wot for. {[}\textit{Working himself into a rage}{]} I'm goin in there
to fetch her out. {[}\textit{He makes vengefully for the shelter
door}{]}.

SHIRLEY. You're goin to the station on a stretcher, more likely; and
they'll take the gin and the devil out of you there when they get
you inside. You mind what you're about: the major here is the Earl
o Stevenage's granddaughter.

BILL {[}\textit{checked}{]} Garn!

SHIRLEY. You'll see.

BILL {[}\textit{his resolution oozing}{]} Well, I ain't done nothin
to er.

SHIRLEY. Spose she said you did!\ who'd believe you?

BILL {[}\textit{very uneasy, skulking back to the corner of the penthouse}{]}
Gawd! There's no jastice in this country. To think wot them people
can do! I'm as good as er.

SHIRLEY. Tell her so. It's just what a fool like you would do.

\emph{Barbara, brisk and businesslike, comes from the shelter with
a note book, and addresses herself to Shirley. Bill, cowed, sits down
in the corner on a form, and turns his back on them.}

BARBARA. Good morning.

SHIRLEY {[}\textit{standing up and taking off his hat}{]} Good morning,
miss.

BARBARA. Sit down: make yourself at home. {[}\textit{He hesitates;
but she puts a friendly hand on his shoulder and makes him obey}{]}.
Now then!\ since you've made friends with us, we want to know all
about you. Names and addresses and trades.

SHIRLEY. Peter Shirley. Fitter. Chucked out two months ago because
I was too old.

BARBARA {[}\textit{not at all surprised}{]} You'd pass still. Why
didn't you dye your hair?

SHIRLEY. I did. Me age come out at a coroner's inquest on me daughter.

BARBARA. Steady?

SHIRLEY. Teetotaller. Never out of a job before. Good worker. And
sent to the knockers like an old horse!

BARBARA. No matter: if you did your part God will do his.

SHIRLEY {[}\textit{suddenly stubborn}{]} My religion's no concern
of anybody but myself.

BARBARA {[}\textit{guessing}{]} \emph{I} know. Secularist?

SHIRLEY {[}\textit{hotly}{]} Did I offer to deny it?

BARBARA. Why should you? My own father's a Secularist, I think. Our
Father---yours and mine---fulfils himself in many ways; and I daresay
he knew what he was about when he made a Secularist of you. So buck
up, Peter!\ we can always find a job for a steady man like you. {[}\textit{Shirley,
disarmed, touches his hat. She turns from him to Bill}{]}. What's
your name?

BILL {[}\textit{insolently}{]} Wot's that to you?

BARBARA {[}\textit{calmly making a note}{]} Afraid to give his name.
Any trade?

BILL. Who's afraid to give his name? {[}\textit{Doggedly, with a sense
of heroically defying the House of Lords in the person of Lord Stevenage}{]}
If you want to bring a charge agen me, bring it. {[}\textit{She waits,
unruffled}{]}. My name's Bill Walker.

BARBARA {[}\textit{as if the name were familiar: trying to remember
how}{]} Bill Walker? {[}\textit{Recollecting}{]} Oh, I know: you're
the man that Jenny Hill was praying for inside just now. {[}\textit{She
enters his name in her note book}{]}.

BILL. Who's Jenny Hill? And what call has she to pray for me?

BARBARA. I don't know. Perhaps it was you that cut her lip.

BILL {[}\textit{defiantly}{]} Yus, it \emph{was} me that cat her lip.
Aw aint afride o \emph{you}.

BARBARA. How could you be, since you're not afraid of God? You're
a brave man, Mr Walker. It takes some pluck to do \emph{our} work
here; but none of us dare lift our hand against a girl like that,
for fear of her father in heaven.

BILL {[}\textit{sullenly}{]} I want none o your cantin jaw. I suppose
you think I come here to beg from you, like this damaged lot here.
Not me. I don't want your bread and scrape and catlap. I don't believe
in your Gawd, no more than you do yourself.

BARBARA {[}\textit{sunnily apologetic and ladylike, as on a new footing
with him}{]} Oh, I beg your pardon for putting your name down, Mr
Walker. I didn't understand. I'll strike it out.

BILL {[}\textit{taking this as a slight, and deeply wounded by it}{]}
Eah!\ you let my name alone. Ain't it good enough to be in your book?

BARBARA {[}\textit{considering}{]} Well, you see, there's no use putting
down your name unless I can do something for you, is there? What's
your trade?

BILL {[}\textit{still smarting}{]} That's no concern o yours.

BARBARA. Just so. {[}\textit{very businesslike}{]} I'll put you down
as {[}\textit{writing}{]} the man who---struck---poor little Jenny
Hill---in the mouth.

BILL {[}\textit{rising threateningly}{]} See here. I've ad enough
o this.

BARBARA {[}\textit{quite sunny and fearless}{]} What did you come
to us for?

BILL. I come for my girl, see? I come to take her out o this and to
break er jaws for her.

BARBARA {[}\textit{complacently}{]} You see I was right about your
trade. {[}\textit{Bill, on the point of retorting furiously, finds
himself, to his great shame and terror, in danger of crying instead.
He sits down again suddenly}{]}. What's her name?

BILL {[}\textit{dogged}{]} Er name's Mog Abbijam: thats wot her name
is.

BARBARA. Oh, she's gone to Canning Town, to our barracks there.

BILL {[}\textit{fortified by his resentment of Mog's perfidy}{]} is
she? {[}\textit{Vindictively}{]} Then I'm goin to Kennintahn arter
her. {[}\textit{He crosses to the gate; hesitates; finally comes
back at Barbara}{]}. Are you lyin to me to get shut o me?

BARBARA. I don't want to get shut of you. I want to keep you here
and save your soul. You'd better stay: you're going to have a bad
time today, Bill.

BILL. Who's goin to give it to me? \emph{You}, preps.

BARBARA. Someone you don't believe in. But you'll be glad afterwards.

BILL {[}\textit{slinking off}{]} I'll go to Kennintahn to be out o
the reach o your tongue. {[}\textit{Suddenly turning on her with
intense malice}{]} And if I don't find Mog there, I'll come back and
do two years for you, selp me Gawd if I don't!

BARBARA {[}\textit{a shade kindlier, if possible}{]} It's no use,
Bill. She's got another bloke.

BILL. Wot!

BARBARA. One of her own converts. He fell in love with her when he
saw her with her soul saved, and her face clean, and her hair washed.

BILL {[}\textit{surprised}{]} Wottud she wash it for, the carroty
slut? It's red.

BARBARA. It's quite lovely now, because she wears a new look in her
eyes with it. It's a pity you're too late. The new bloke has put your
nose out of joint, Bill.

BILL. I'll put his nose out o joint for him. Not that I care a curse
for her, mind that. But I'll teach her to drop me as if I was dirt.
And I'll teach him to meddle with my Judy. Wots iz bleedin name?

BARBARA. Sergeant Todger Fairmile.

SHIRLEY {[}\textit{rising with grim joy}{]} I'll go with him, miss.
I want to see them two meet. I'll take him to the infirmary when it's
over.

BILL {[}\textit{to Shirley, with undissembled misgiving}{]} Is that
im you was speakin on?

SHIRLEY. That's him.

BILL. Im that wrastled in the music all?

SHIRLEY. The competitions at the National Sportin Club was worth nigh
a hundred a year to him. He's gev em up now for religion; so he's
a bit fresh for want of the exercise he was accustomed to. He'll be
glad to see you. Come along.

BILL. Wots is weight?

SHIRLEY. Thirteen four. {[}\textit{Bill's last hope expires}{]}.

BARBARA. Go and talk to him, Bill. He'll convert you.

SHIRLEY. He'll convert your head into a mashed potato.

BILL {[}\textit{sullenly}{]} I ain't afraid of him. I ain't afraid
of ennybody. But he can lick me. She's done me. {[}\textit{He sits
down moodily on the edge of the horse trough}{]}.

SHIRLEY. You ain't goin. I thought not. {[}\textit{He resumes his
seat}{]}.

BARBARA {[}\textit{calling}{]} Jenny!

JENNY {[}\textit{appearing at the shelter door with a plaster on the
corner of her mouth}{]} Yes, Major.

BARBARA. Send Rummy Mitchens out to clear away here.

JENNY. I think she's afraid.

BARBARA {[}\textit{her resemblance to her mother flashing out for
a moment}{]} Nonsense!\ she must do as she's told.

JENNY {[}\textit{calling into the shelter}{]} Rummy: the Major says
you must come.

\emph{Jenny comes to Barbara, purposely keeping on the side next Bill,
lest he should suppose that she shrank from him or bore malice.}

BARBARA. Poor little Jenny! Are you tired? {[}\textit{Looking at the
wounded cheek}{]} Does it hurt?

JENNY. No: it's all right now. It was nothing.

BARBARA {[}\textit{critically}{]} It was as hard as he could hit,
I expect. Poor Bill! You don't feel angry with him, do you?

JENNY. Oh no, no, no: indeed I don't, Major, bless his poor heart!
{[}\textit{Barbara kisses her; and she runs away merrily into the
shelter. Bill writhes with an agonizing return of his new and alarming
symptoms, but says nothing. Rummy Mitchens comes from the shelter}{]}.

BARBARA {[}\textit{going to meet Rummy}{]} Now Rummy, bustle. Take
in those mugs and plates to be washed; and throw the crumbs about
for the birds.

\emph{Rummy takes the three plates and mugs; but Shirley takes back
his mug from her, as there it still come milk left in it.}

RUMMY. There ain't any crumbs. This ain't a time to waste good bread
on birds.

PRICE {[}\textit{appearing at the shelter door}{]} Gentleman come
to see the shelter, Major. Says he's your father.

BARBARA. All right. Coming. {[}\textit{Snobby goes back into the
shelter, followed by Barbara}{]}.

RUMMY {[}\textit{stealing across to Bill and addressing him in a subdued
voice, but with intense conviction}{]} I'd av the lor of you, you
flat eared pignosed potwalloper, if she'd let me. You're no gentleman,
to hit a lady in the face. {[}\textit{Bill, with greater things moving
in him, takes no notice}{]}.

SHIRLEY {[}\textit{following her}{]} Here!\ in with you and don't
get yourself into more trouble by talking.

RUMMY {[}\textit{with hauteur}{]} I ain't ad the pleasure o being
hintroduced to you, as I can remember. {[}\textit{She goes into the
shelter with the plates}{]}.

BILL {[}\textit{savagely}{]} Don't you talk to me, d'ye hear. You
lea me alone, or I'll do you a mischief. I'm not dirt under \emph{your}
feet, anyway.

SHIRLEY {[}\textit{calmly}{]} Don't you be afeerd. You ain't such
prime company that you need expect to be sought after. {[}\textit{He
is about to go into the shelter when Barbara comes out, with Undershaft
on her right}{]}.

BARBARA. Oh there you are, Mr Shirley! {[}\textit{Between them}{]}
This is my father: I told you he was a Secularist, didn't I? Perhaps
you'll be able to comfort one another.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{startled}{]} A Secularist! Not the least in
the world: on the contrary, a confirmed mystic.

BARBARA. Sorry, I'm sure. By the way, papa, what is your religion---in
case I have to introduce you again?

UNDERSHAFT. My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is
my religion.

BARBARA. Then I'm afraid you and Mr Shirley wont be able to comfort
one another after all. You're not a Millionaire, are you, Peter?

SHIRLEY. No; and proud of it.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{gravely}{]} Poverty, my friend, is not a thing
to be proud of.

SHIRLEY {[}\textit{angrily}{]} Who made your millions for you? Me
and my like. What's kep us poor? Keepin you rich. I wouldn't have
your conscience, not for all your income.

UNDERSHAFT. I wouldn't have your income, not for all your conscience,
Mr Shirley. {[}\textit{He goes to the penthouse and sits down on
a form}{]}.

BARBARA {[}\textit{stopping Shirley adroitly as he is about to retort}{]}
You wouldn't think he was my father, would you, Peter? Will you go
into the shelter and lend the lasses a hand for a while: we're worked
off our feet.

SHIRLEY {[}\textit{bitterly}{]} Yes: I'm in their debt for a meal,
ain't I?

BARBARA. Oh, not because you're in their debt; but for love of them,
Peter, for love of them. {[}\textit{He cannot understand, and is
rather scandalized}{]}. There! Don't stare at me. In with you; and
give that conscience of yours a holiday {[}\textit{bustling him into
the shelter}{]}.

SHIRLEY {[}\textit{as he goes in}{]} Ah!\ it's a pity you never was
trained to use your reason, miss. You'd have been a very taking lecturer
on Secularism.

\emph{Barbara turns to her father.}

UNDERSHAFT. Never mind me, my dear. Go about your work; and let me
watch it for a while.

BARBARA. All right.

UNDERSHAFT. For instance, what's the matter with that out-patient
over there?

BARBARA {[}\textit{looking at Bill, whose attitude has never changed,
and whose expression of brooding wrath has deepened}{]} Oh, we shall
cure him in no time. Just watch. {[}\textit{She goes over to Bill
and waits. He glances up at her and casts his eyes down again, uneasy,
but grimmer than ever}{]}. It \emph{would} be nice to just stamp on
Mog Habbijam's face, wouldn't it, Bill?

BILL {[}\textit{starting up from the trough in consternation}{]} It's
a lie: I never said so. {[}\textit{She shakes her head}{]}. Who told
you wot was in my mind?

BARBARA. Only your new friend.

BILL. Wot new friend?

BARBARA. The devil, Bill. When he gets round people they get miserable,
just like you.

HILL {[}\textit{with a heartbreaking attempt at devil-may-care cheerfulness}{]}
I ain't miserable. {[}\textit{He sits down again, and stretches his
legs in an attempt to seem indifferent}{]}.

BARBARA. Well, if you're happy, why don't you look happy, as we do?

BILL {[}\textit{his legs curling back in spite of him}{]} I'm appy
enough, I tell you. Why don't you lea me alown? Wot av I done to \emph{you}?
I ain't smashed \emph{your} face, av I?

BARBARA {[}\textit{softly: wooing his soul}{]} It's not me that's
getting at you, Bill.

BILL. Who else is it?

BARBARA. Somebody that doesn't intend you to smash women's faces,
I suppose. Somebody or something that wants to make a man of you.

BILL {[}\textit{blustering}{]} Make a man o \emph{me}! Ain't I a man?\ eh?\ ain't
I a man? Who sez I'm not a man?

BARBARA. There's a man in you somewhere, I suppose. But why did he
let you hit poor little Jenny Hill? That wasn't very manly of him,
was it?

BILL {[}\textit{tormented}{]} Av done with it, I tell you. Chock it.
I'm sick of your Jenny Ill and er silly little face.

BARBARA. Then why do you keep thinking about it? Why does it keep
coming up against you in your mind? You're not getting converted,
are you?

BILL {[}\textit{with conviction}{]} Not ME. Not likely. Not arf.

BARBARA. That's right, Bill. Hold out against it. Put out your strength.
Don't let's get you cheap. Todger Fairmile said he wrestled for three
nights against his Salvation harder than he ever wrestled with the
Jap at the music hall. He gave in to the Jap when his arm was going
to break. But he didn't give in to his salvation until his heart was
going to break. Perhaps you'll escape that. You haven't any heart,
have you?

BILL. Wot dye mean? Wy ain't I got a art the same as ennybody else?

BARBARA. A man with a heart wouldn't have bashed poor little Jenny's
face, would he?

BILL {[}\textit{almost crying}{]} Ow, \emph{will} you lea me alown?
Av I ever offered to meddle with \emph{you}, that you come noggin
and provowkin me lawk this? {[}\textit{He writhes convulsively from
his eyes to his toes}{]}.

BARBARA {[}\textit{with a steady soothing hand on his arm and a gentle
voice that never lets him go}{]} It's your soul that's hurting you,
Bill, and not me. We've been through it all ourselves. Come with us,
Bill. {[}\textit{He looks wildly round}{]}. To brave manhood on earth
and eternal glory in heaven. {[}\textit{He is on the point of breaking
down}{]}. Come. {[}\textit{A drum is heard in the shelter; and Bill,
with a gasp, escapes from the spell as Barbara turns quickly. Adolphus
enters from the shelter with a big drum}{]}. Oh!\ there you are,
Dolly. Let me introduce a new friend of mine, Mr Bill Walker. This
is my bloke, Bill: Mr Cusins. {[}\textit{Cusins salutes with his
drumstick}{]}.

BILL. Goin to marry im?

BARBARA. Yes.

BILL {[}\textit{fervently}{]} Gawd elp im! Gawd elp im!

BARBARA. Why? Do you think he won't be happy with me?

BILL. I've only ad to stand it for a mornin: e'll av to stand it for
a lifetime.

CUSINS. That is a frightful reflection, Mr Walker. But I can't tear
myself away from her.

BILL. Well, I can. {[}\textit{To Barbara}{]} Eah!\ do you know where
I'm goin to, and wot I'm goin to do?

BARBARA. Yes: you're going to heaven; and you're coming back here
before the week's out to tell me so.

BILL. You lie. I'm goin to Kennintahn, to spit in Todger Fairmile's
eye. I bashed Jenny Ill's face; and now I'll get me own face bashed
and come back and show it to er. E'll it me ardern I it er. That'll
make us square. {[}\textit{To Adolphus}{]} Is that fair or is it
not? You're a genlmn: you oughter know.

BARBARA. Two black eyes wont make one white one, Bill.

BILL. I didn't ast \emph{you}. Cawn't you never keep your mahth shut?
I ast the genlmn.

CUSINS {[}\textit{reflectively}{]} Yes: I think you're right, Mr Walker.
Yes: I should do it. It's curious: it's exactly what an ancient Greek
would have done.

BARBARA. But what good will it do?

CUSINS. Well, it will give Mr Fairmile some exercise; and it will
satisfy Mr Walker's soul.

BILL. Rot!\ there ain't no sach a thing as a soul. Ah kin you tell
wether I've a soul or not? You never seen it.

BARBARA. I've seen it hurting you when you went against it.

BILL {[}\textit{with compressed aggravation}{]} If you was my girl
and took the word out o me mahth lawk thet, I'd give you suthink you'd
feel urtin, so I would. {[}\textit{To Adolphus}{]} You take my tip,
mate. Stop er jawr; or you'll die afore your time. {[}\textit{With
intense expression}{]} Wore aht: thets wot you'll be: wore aht. {[}\textit{He
goes away through the gate}{]}.

CUSINS {[}\textit{looking after him}{]} I wonder!

BARBARA. Dolly!\ {[}\textit{indignant, in her moth\-er's manner}{]}.

CUSINS. Yes, my dear, it's very wearing to be in love with you. If
it lasts, I quite think I shall die young.

BARBARA. Should you mind?

CUSINS. Not at all. {[}\textit{He is suddenly softened, and kisses
her over the drum, evidently not for the first time, as people cannot
kiss over a big drum without practice. Undershaft coughs}{]}.

BARBARA. It's all right, papa, we've not forgotten you. Dolly: explain
the place to papa: I haven't time. {[}\textit{She goes busily into
the shel\-t\-er}{]}.

\emph{Undershaft and Adolpbus now have the yard to themselves. Undershaft,
seated on a form, and still keenly attentive, looks hard at Adolphus.
Adolphus looks hard at him.}

UNDERSHAFT. I fancy you guess something of what is in my mind, Mr
Cusins. {[}\textit{Cusins flourishes his drumsticks as if in the
art of beating a lively rataplan, but makes no sound}{]}. Exactly
so. But suppose Barbara finds you out!

CUSINS. You know, I do not admit that I am imposing on Barbara. I
am quite genuinely interested in the views of the Salvation Army.
The fact is, I am a sort of collector of religions; and the curious
thing is that I find I can believe them all. By the way, have you
any religion?

UNDERSHAFT. Yes.

CUSINS. Anything out of the common?

UNDERSHAFT. Only that there are two things necessary to Salvation.

CUSINS {[}\textit{disappointed, but polite}{]} Ah, the Church Catechism.
Charles Lomax also belongs to the Established Church.

UNDERSHAFT. The two things are---

CUSINS. Baptism and---

UNDERSHAFT. No. Money and gunpowder.

CUSINS {[}\textit{surprised, but interested}{]} That is the general
opinion of our governing classes. The novelty is in hearing any man
confess it.

UNDERSHAFT. Just so.

CUSINS. Excuse me: is there any place in your religion for honor,
justice, truth, love, mercy and so forth?

UNDERSHAFT. Yes: they are the graces and luxuries of a rich, strong,
and safe life.

CUSINS. Suppose one is forced to choose between them and money or
gunpowder?

UNDERSHAFT. Choose money \emph{and} gunpowder; for without enough
of both you cannot afford the others.

CUSINS. That is your religion?

UNDERSHAFT. Yes.

\emph{The cadence of this reply makes a full close in the conversation.
Cusins twists his face dubiously and contemplates Undershaft. Undershaft
contemplates him.}

CUSINS. Barbara won't stand that. You will have to choose between
your religion and Barbara.

UNDERSHAFT. So will you, my friend. She will find out that that drum
of yours is hollow.

CUSINS. Father Undershaft: you are mistaken: I am a sincere Salvationist.
You do not understand the Salvation Army. It is the army of joy, of
love, of courage: it has banished the fear and remorse and despair
of the old hellridden evangelical sects: it marches to fight the devil
with trumpet and drum, with music and dancing, with banner and palm,
as becomes a sally from heaven by its happy garrison. It picks the
waster out of the public house and makes a man of him: it finds a
worm wriggling in a back kitchen, and lo!\ a woman! Men and women
of rank too, sons and daughters of the Highest. It takes the poor
professor of Greek, the most artificial and self-suppressed of human
creatures, from his meal of roots, and lets loose the rhapsodist in
him; reveals the true worship of Dionysos to him; sends him down the
public street drumming dithyrambs {[}\textit{he plays a thundering
flourish on the drum}{]}.

UNDERSHAFT. You will alarm the shelter.

CUSINS. Oh, they are accustomed to these sudden ecstasies of piety.
However, if the drum worries you--- {[}\textit{he pockets the drumsticks;
unhooks the drum; and stands it on the ground opposite the gateway}{]}.

UNDERSHAFT. Thank you.

CUSINS. You remember what Euripides says about your money and gunpowder?

UNDERSHAFT. No.

CUSINS {[}\textit{declaiming}{]} \begin{verse}\footnotesize\addtolength{\parindent}{-0.3in}

\hspace{1.5in}One and another\\*

In money and guns may outpass his brother;\\*

And men in their millions float and flow\\*

And seethe with a million hopes as leaven;\\*

And they win their will; or they miss their will;\\*

And their hopes are dead or are pined for still:\\*

\hspace{0.5in}But whoe'er can know\\*

\hspace{0.5in}As the long days go\\*

That to live is happy, has found his heaven.

\end{verse} My translation: what do you think of it?

UNDERSHAFT. I think, my friend, that if you wish to know, as the long
days go, that to live is happy, you must first acquire money enough
for a decent life, and power enough to be your own master.

CUSINS. You are damnably discouraging. {[}\textit{He resumes his
declamation}{]}. \begin{verse}\footnotesize\addtolength{\parindent}{-0.3in}\ \\

\hspace{0.25in}Is it so hard a thing to see\\*

\hspace{0.25in}That the spirit of God---whate'er it be---\\*

\mbox{The Law that abides and changes not, ages long,}\\*

\mbox{The Eternal and Nature-born: these things be strong.}\\*

\mbox{What else is Wisdom? What of Man's endeavor,}\\*

Or God's high grace so lovely and so great?\\*

\mbox{To stand from fear set free? to breathe and wait?}\\*

To hold a hand uplifted over Fate?\\*

And shall not Barbara be loved for ever?\\

\ \end{verse}

UNDERSHAFT. Euripides mentions Barbara, does he?

CUSINS. It is a fair translation. The word means Loveliness.

UNDERSHAFT. May I ask---as Barbara's father---how much a year she
is to be loved for ever on?

CUSINS. As Barbara's father, that is more your affair than mine. I
can feed her by teaching Greek: that is about all.

UNDERSHAFT. Do you consider it a good match for her?

CUSINS {[}\textit{with polite obstinacy}{]} Mr Undershaft: I am in
many ways a weak, timid, ineffectual person; and my health is far
from satisfactory. But whenever I feel that I must have anything,
I get it, sooner or later. I feel that way about Barbara. I don't
like marriage: I feel intensely afraid of it; and I don't know what
I shall do with Barbara or what she will do with me. But I feel that
I and nobody else must marry her. Please regard that as settled.---Not
that I wish to be arbitrary; but why should I waste your time in discussing
what is inevitable?

UNDERSHAFT. You mean that you will stick at nothing not even the conversion
of the Salvation Army to the worship of Dionysos.

CUSINS. The business of the Salvation Army is to save, not to wrangle
about the name of the pathfinder. Dionysos or another: what does it
matter?

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{rising and approaching him}{]} Professor Cusins
you are a young man after my own heart.

CUSINS. Mr Undershaft: you are, as far as I am able to gather, a most
infernal old rascal; but you appeal very strongly to my sense of ironic
humor.

\emph{Undershaft mutely offers his hand. They shake.}

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{suddenly concentrating himself}{]} And now to
business.

CUSINS. Pardon me. We were discussing religion. Why go back to such
an uninteresting and unimportant subject as business?

UNDERSHAFT. Religion is our business at present, because it is through
religion alone that we can win Barbara.

CUSINS. Have you, too, fallen in love with Barbara?

UNDERSHAFT. Yes, with a father's love.

CUSINS. A father's love for a grown-up daughter is the most dangerous
of all infatuations. I apologize for mentioning my own pale, coy,
mistrustful fancy in the same breath with it.

UNDERSHAFT. Keep to the point. We have to win her; and we are neither
of us Methodists.

CUSINS. That doesn't matter. The power Barbara wields here---the power
that wields Barbara herself---is not Calvinism, not Presbyterianism,
not Methodism---

UNDERSHAFT. Not Greek Paganism either, eh?

CUSINS. I admit that. Barbara is quite original in her religion.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{triumphantly}{]} Aha! Barbara Undershaft would
be. Her inspiration comes from within herself.

CUSINS. How do you suppose it got there?

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{in towering excitement}{]} It is the Undershaft
inheritance. I shall hand on my torch to my daughter. She shall make
my converts and preach my gospel

CUSINS. What! Money and gunpowder!

UNDERSHAFT. Yes, money and gunpowder; freedom and power; command of
life and command of death.

CUSINS {[}\textit{urbanely: trying to bring him down to earth}{]}
This is extremely interesting, Mr Undershaft. Of course you know that
you are mad.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{with redoubled force}{]} And you?

CUSINS. Oh, mad as a hatter. You are welcome to my secret since I
have discovered yours. But I am astonished. Can a madman make cannons?

UNDERSHAFT. Would anyone else than a madman make them? And now {[}\textit{with
surging energy}{]} question for question. Can a sane man translate
Euripides?

CUSINS. No.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{reining him by the shoulder}{]} Can a sane woman
make a man of a waster or a woman of a worm?

CUSINS {[}\textit{reeling before the storm}{]} Father Colossus---Mammoth
Millionaire---

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{pressing him}{]} Are there two mad people or
three in this Salvation shelter to-day?

CUSINS. You mean Barbara is as mad as we are!

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{pushing him lightly off and resuming his equanimity
suddenly and completely}{]} Pooh, Professor!\ let us call things
by their proper names. I am a millionaire; you are a poet; Barbara
is a savior of souls. What have we three to do with the common mob
of slaves and idolaters? {[}\textit{He sits down again with a shrug
of contempt for the mob}{]}.

CUSINS. Take care! Barbara is in love with the common people. So am
I.\ Have you never felt the romance of that love?

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{cold and sardonic}{]} Have you ever been in
love with Poverty, like St Francis? Have you ever been in love with
Dirt, like St Simeon? Have you ever been in love with disease and
suffering, like our nurses and philanthropists? Such passions are
not virtues, but the most unnatural of all the vices. This love of
the common people may please an earl's granddaughter and a university
professor; but I have been a common man and a poor man; and it has
no romance for me. Leave it to the poor to pretend that poverty is
a blessing: leave it to the coward to make a religion of his cowardice
by preaching humility: we know better than that. We three must stand
together above the common people: how else can we help their children
to climb up beside us? Barbara must belong to us, not to the Salvation
Army.

CUSINS. Well, I can only say that if you think you will get her away
from the Salvation Army by talking to her as you have been talking
to me, you don't know Barbara.

UNDERSHAFT. My friend: I never ask for what I can buy.

CUSINS {[}\textit{in a white fury}{]} Do I understand you to imply
that you can buy Barbara?

UNDERSHAFT. No; but I can buy the Salvation Army.

CUSINS. Quite impossible.

UNDERSHAFT. You shall see. All religious organizations exist by selling
themselves to the rich.

CUSINS. Not the Army. That is the Church of the poor.

UNDERSHAFT. All the more reason for buying it.

CUSINS. I don't think you quite know what the Army does for the poor.

UNDERSHAFT. Oh yes I do. It draws their teeth: that is enough for
me---as a man of business---

CUSINS. Nonsense! It makes them sob\-er---

UNDERSHAFT. I prefer sober workmen. The profits are larger.

CUSINS.\ ---honest---

UNDERSHAFT. Honest workmen are the most economical.

CUSINS.\ ---attached to their homes---

UNDERSHAFT. So much the better: they will put up with anything sooner
than change their shop.

CUSINS.\ ---happy---

UNDERSHAFT. An invaluable safeguard against revolution.

CUSINS.\ ---unselfish---

UNDERSHAFT. Indifferent to their own interests, which suits me exactly.

CUSINS.\ ---with their thoughts on heavenly things---

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{rising}{]} And not on Trade Unionism nor Socialism.
Excellent.

CUSINS {[}\textit{revolted}{]} You really are an infernal old rascal.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{indicating Peter Shirley, who has just came
from the shelter and strolled dejectedly down the yard between them}{]}
And this is an honest man!

SHIRLEY. Yes; and what av I got by it?\ {[}\textit{he passes on bitterly
and sits on the form, in the corner of the penthouse}{]}.

\emph{Snobby Price, beaming sanctimoniously, and Jenny Hill, with
a tambourine full of coppers, come from the shelter and go to the
drum, on which Jenny begins to count the money.}

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{replying to Shirley}{]} Oh, your employers must
have got a good deal by it from first to last. {[}\textit{He sits
on the table, with one foot on the side form. Cusins, overwhelmed,
sits down on the same form nearer the shelter. Barbara comes from
the shelter to the middle of the yard. She is excited and a little
overwrought}{]}.

BARBARA. We've just had a splendid experience meeting at the other
gate in Cripps's lane. I've hardly ever seen them so much moved as
they were by your confession, Mr Price.

PRICE. I could almost be glad of my past wickedness if I could believe
that it would elp to keep hathers stright.

BARBARA. So it will, Snobby. How much, Jenny?

JENNY. Four and tenpence, Major.

BARBARA. Oh Snobby, if you had given your poor mother just one more
kick, we should have got the whole five shillings!

PRICE. If she heard you say that, miss, she'd be sorry I didn't. But
I'm glad. Oh what a joy it will be to her when she hears I'm saved!

UNDERSHAFT. Shall I contribute the odd twopence, Barbara? The millionaire's
mite, eh? {[}\textit{He takes a couple of pennies from his pocket.}{]}

BARBARA. How did you make that twopence?

UNDERSHAFT. As usual. By selling cannons, torpedoes, submarines, and
my new patent Grand Duke hand grenade.

BARBARA. Put it back in your pocket. You can't buy your Salvation
here for twopence: you must work it out.

UNDERSHAFT. Is twopence not enough? I can afford a little more, if
you press me.

BARBARA. Two million millions would not be enough. There is bad blood
on your hands; and nothing but good blood can cleanse them. Money
is no use. Take it away. {[}\textit{She turns to Cusins}{]}. Dolly:
you must write another letter for me to the papers. {[}\textit{He
makes a wry face}{]}. Yes: I know you don't like it; but it must be
done. The starvation this winter is beating us: everybody is unemployed.
The General says we must close this shelter if we cant get more money.
I force the collections at the meetings until I am ashamed, don't
I, Snobby?

PRICE. It's a fair treat to see you work it, miss. The way you got
them up from three-and-six to four-and-ten with that hymn, penny by
penny and verse by verse, was a caution. Not a Cheap Jack on Mile
End Waste could touch you at it.

BARBARA. Yes; but I wish we could do without it. I am getting at last
to think more of the collection than of the people's souls. And what
are those hatfuls of pence and halfpence? We want thousands!\ tens
of thousands!\ hundreds of thousands! I want to convert people, not
to be always begging for the Army in a way I'd die sooner than beg
for myself.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{in profound irony}{]} Genuine unselfishness
is capable of anything, my dear.

BARBARA {[}\textit{unsuspectingly, as she turns away to take the money
from the drum and put it in a cash bag she carries}{]} Yes, isn't
it? {[}\textit{Undershaft looks sardonically at Cusins}{]}.

CUSINS {[}\textit{aside to Undershaft}{]} Me\-ph\-i\-s\-t\-o\-phe\-l\-es!
Machiavelli!

BARBARA {[}\textit{tears coming into her eyes as she ties the bag
and pockets it}{]} How are we to feed them? I can't talk religion
to a man with bodily hunger in his eyes. {[}\textit{Almost breaking
down}{]} It's frightful.

JENNY {[}\textit{running to her}{]} Major, dear---

BARBARA {[}\textit{rebounding}{]} No: don't comfort me. It will be
all right. We shall get the money.

UNDERSHAFT. How?

JENNY. By praying for it, of course. Mrs Baines says she prayed for
it last night; and she has never prayed for it in vain: never once. {[}\textit{She
goes to the gate and looks out into the street}{]}.

BARBARA {[}\textit{who has dried her eyes and regained her composure}{]}
By the way, dad, Mrs Baines has come to march with us to our big meeting
this afternoon; and she is very anxious to meet you, for some reason
or other. Perhaps she'll convert you.

UNDERSHAFT. I shall be delighted, my dear.

JENNY {[}\textit{at the gate: excitedly}{]} Major! Major! Here's that
man back again.

BARBARA. What man?

JENNY. The man that hit me. Oh, I hope he's coming back to join us.

\emph{Bill Walker, with frost on his jacket, comes through the gate,
his hands deep in his pockets and his chin sunk between his shoulders,
like a cleaned-out gambler. He halts between Barbara and the drum.}

BARBARA. Hullo, Bill! Back already!

BILL {[}\textit{nagging at her}{]} Bin talkin ever sense, av you?

BARBARA. Pretty nearly. Well, has Tod\-g\-er paid you out for poor
Jenny's jaw?

BILL. \emph{No} he ain't.

BARBARA. I thought your jacket looked a bit snowy.

BILL. So it is snowy. You want to know where the snow come from, don't
you?

BARBARA. Yes.

BILL. Well, it come from off the ground in Parkinses Corner in Kennintahn.
It got rubbed off be my shoulders see?

BARBARA. Pity you didn't rub some off with your knees, Bill! That
would have done you a lot of good.

BILL {[}\textit{with your mirthless humor}{]} I was saving another
man's knees at the time. E was kneelin on my ed, so e was.

JENNY. Who was kneeling on your head?

BILL. Todger was. E was prayin for me: prayin comfortable with me
as a carpet. So was Mog. So was the ole bloomin meetin. Mog she sez
{}``O Lord break is stubborn spirit; but don't urt is dear art.''
That was wot she said. {}``Don't urt is dear art''! An er bloke---
thirteen stun four!---kneelin wiv all is weight on me. Funny, ain't
it?

JENNY. Oh no. We're so sorry, Mr Walker.

BARBARA {[}\textit{enjoying it frankly}{]} Nonsense!\ of course it's
funny. Served you right, Bill! You must have done something to him
first.

BILL {[}\textit{doggedly}{]} I did wot I said I'd do. I spit in is
eye. E looks up at the sky and sez, {}``O that I should be fahnd
worthy to be spit upon for the gospel's sake!''\ a sez; an Mog sez
{}``Glory Allelloolier!''; an then a called me Brother, an dahned
me as if I was a kid and a was me mother washin me a Setterda nawt.
I adn't just no show wiv im at all. Arf the street prayed; an the
tother arf larfed fit to split theirselves. {[}\textit{To Barbara}{]}
There!\ are you settisfawd nah?

BARBARA {[}\textit{her eyes dancing}{]} Wish I'd been there, Bill.

BILL. Yes: you'd a got in a hextra bit o talk on me, wouldn't you?

JENNY. I'm so sorry, Mr Walker.

BILL {[}\textit{fiercely}{]} Don't you go bein sorry for me: you've
no call. Listen ere. I broke your jawr.

JENNY. No, it didn't hurt me: indeed it didn't, except for a moment.
It was only that I was frightened.

BILL. I don't want to be forgive be you, or be ennybody. Wot I did
I'll pay for. I tried to get me own jawr broke to settisfaw you---

JENNY {[}\textit{distressed}{]} Oh no---

BILL {[}\textit{impatiently}{]} Tell y'I did: cawn't you listen to
wot's bein told you? All I got be it was bein made a sight of in the
public street for me pains. Well, if I cawn't settisfaw you one way,
I can another. Listen ere! I ad two quid saved agen the frost; an
I've a pahnd of it left. A mate o mine last week ad words with the
Judy e's goin to marry. E give er wot-for; an e's bin fined fifteen
bob. E ad a right to it er because they was goin to be marrid; but
I adn't no right to it you; so put anather fawv bob on an call it
a pahnd's worth. {[}\textit{He produces a sovereign}{]}. Ere's the
money. Take it; and let's av no more o your forgivin an prayin and
your Major jawrin me. Let wot I done be done and paid for; and let
there be a end of it.

JENNY. Oh, I couldn't take it, Mr Walker. But if you would give a
shilling or two to poor Rummy Mitchens!\ you really did hurt her;
and she's old.

BILL {[}\textit{contemptuously}{]} Not likely. I'd give her anather
as soon as look at er. Let her av the lawr o me as she threatened!
She ain't forgiven me: not mach. Wot I done to er is not on me mawnd---wot
she {[}\textit{indicating Barbara}{]} might call on me conscience---no
more than stickin a pig. It's this Christian game o yours that I won't
av played agen me: this bloomin forgivin an noggin an jawrin that
makes a man that sore that iz lawf's a burdn to im. I won't av it,
I tell you; so take your money and stop throwin your silly bashed
face hup agen me.

JENNY. Major: may I take a little of it for the Army?

BARBARA. No: the Army is not to be bought. We want your soul, Bill;
and we'll take nothing less.

BILL {[}\textit{bitterly}{]} I know. It ain't enough. Me an me few
shillins is not good enough for you. You're a earl's grendorter, you
are. Nothin less than a underd pahnd for you.

UNDERSHAFT. Come, Barbara!\ you could do a great deal of good with
a hundred pounds. If you will set this gentleman's mind at ease by
taking his pound, I will give the other ninety-nine {[}\textit{Bill,
astounded by such opulence, instinctively touches his cap}{]}.

BARBARA. Oh, you're too extravagant, papa. Bill offers twenty pieces
of silver. All you need offer is the other ten. That will make the
standard price to buy anybody who's for sale. I'm not; and the Army's
not. {[}\textit{To Bill}{]} You'll never have another quiet moment,
Bill, until you come round to us. You can't stand out against your
salvation.

BILL {[}\textit{sullenly}{]} I cawn't stend aht agen music all wrastlers
and artful tongued women. I've offered to pay. I can do no more. Take
it or leave it. There it is. {[}\textit{He throws the sovereign on
the drum, and sits down on the horse-trough. The coin fascinates Snobby
Price, who takes an early opportunity of dropping his cap on it}{]}.

\emph{Mrs Baines comes from the shelter. She is dressed as a Salvation
Army Commissioner. She is an earnest looking woman of about 40, with
a caressing, urgent voice, and an appealing manner.}

BARBARA. This is my father, Mrs Baines. {[}\textit{Undershaft comes
from the table, taking his hat off with marked civility}{]}. Try what
you can do with him. He won't listen to me, because he remembers what
a fool I was when I was a baby. {[}\textit{She leaves them together
and chats with Jenny}{]}.

MRS BAINES. Have you been shown over the shelter, Mr Undershaft? You
know the work we're doing, of course.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{very civilly}{]} The whole nation knows it,
Mrs Baines.

MRS BAINES. No, Sir: the whole nation does not know it, or we should
not be crippled as we are for want of money to carry our work through
the length and breadth of the land. Let me tell you that there would
have been rioting this winter in London but for us.

UNDERSHAFT. You really think so?

MRS BAINES. I know it. I remember 1886, when you rich gentlemen hardened
your hearts against the cry of the poor. They broke the windows of
your clubs in Pall Mall.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{gleaming with approval of their method}{]} And
the Mansion House Fund went up next day from thirty thousand pounds
to seventy-nine thousand! I remember quite well.

MRS BAINES. Well, won't you help me to get at the people? They won't
break windows then. Come here, Price. Let me show you to this gentleman
{[}\textit{Price comes to be inspected}{]}. Do you remember the window
breaking?

PRICE. My ole father thought it was the revolution, ma'am.

MRS BAINES. Would you break windows now?

PRICE. Oh no ma'm. The windows of eaven av bin opened to me. I know
now that the rich man is a sinner like myself.

RUMMY {[}\textit{appearing above at the loft door}{]} Snobby Price!

SNOBBY. Wot is it?

RUMMY. Your mother's askin for you at the other gate in Crippses Lane.
She's heard about your confession {[}\textit{Price turns pale}{]}.

MRS BAINES. Go, Mr Price; and pray with her.

JENNY. You can go through the shelter, Snobby.

PRICE {[}\textit{to Mrs Baines}{]} I couldn't face her now; ma'am,
with all the weight of my sins fresh on me. Tell her she'll find her
son at ome, waitin for her in prayer. {[}\textit{He skulks off through
the gate, incidentally stealing the sovereign on his way out by picking
up his cap from the drum}{]}.

MRS BAINES {[}\textit{with swimming eyes}{]} You see how we take the
anger and the bitterness against you out of their hearts, Mr Undershaft.

UNDERSHAFT. It is certainly most convenient and gratifying to all
large employers of labor, Mrs Baines.

MRS BAINES. Barbara: Jenny: I have good news: most wonderful news. {[}\textit{Jenny
runs to her}{]}. My prayers have been answered. I told you they would,
Jenny, didn't I?

JENNY. Yes, yes.

BARBARA {[}\textit{moving nearer to the drum}{]} Have we got money
enough to keep the shelter open?

MRS BAINES. I hope we shall have enough to keep all the shelters open.
Lord Saxmundham has promised us five thousand pounds---

BARBARA. Hooray!

JENNY. Glory!

MRS BAINES.\ ---if---

BARBARA. {}``If!'' If what?

MRS BAINES. If five other gentlemen will give a thousand each to make
it up to ten thousand.

BARBARA. Who is Lord Saxmundham? I never heard of him.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{who has pricked up his ears at the peer's name,
and is now watching Barbara curiously}{]} A new creation, my dear.
You have heard of Sir Horace Bodger?

BARBARA. Bodger! Do you mean the distiller? Bodger's whisky!

UNDERSHAFT. That is the man. He is one of the greatest of our public
benefactors. He restored the cathedral at Hakington. They made him
a baronet for that. He gave half a million to the funds of his party:
they made him a baron for that.

SHIRLEY. What will they give him for the five thousand?

UNDERSHAFT. There is nothing left to give him. So the five thousand,
I should think, is to save his soul.

MRS BAINES. Heaven grant it may! Oh Mr Undershaft, you have some very
rich friends. Can't you help us towards the other five thousand? We
are going to hold a great meeting this afternoon at the Assembly Hall
in the Mile End Road. If I could only announce that one gentleman
had come forward to support Lord Saxmundham, others would follow.
Don't you know somebody? Couldn't you? Wouldn't you?\ {[}\textit{her
eyes fill with tears}{]} oh, think of those poor people, Mr Undershaft:
think of how much it means to them, and how little to a great man
like you.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{sardonically gallant}{]} Mrs Baines: you are
irresistible. I can't disappoint you; and I can't deny myself the
satisfaction of making Bodger pay up. You shall have your five thousand
pounds.

MRS BAINES. Thank God!

UNDERSHAFT. You don't thank me?

MRS BAINES. Oh sir, don't try to be cynical: don't be ashamed of being
a good man. The Lord will bless you abundantly; and our prayers will
be like a strong fortification round you all the days of your life. {[}\textit{With
a touch of caution}{]} You will let me have the cheque to show at
the meeting, won't you? Jenny: go in and fetch a pen and ink. {[}\textit{Jenny
runs to the shelter door}{]}.

UNDERSHAFT. Do not disturb Miss Hill: I have a fountain pen. {[}\textit{Jenny
halts. He sits at the table and writes the cheque. Cusins rises to
make more room for him. They all watch him silently}{]}.

BILL {[}\textit{cynically, aside to Barbara, his voice and accent
horribly debased}{]} Wot prawce Selvytion nah?

BARBARA. Stop. {[}\textit{Undershaft stops writing: they all turn
to her in surprise}{]}. Mrs Baines: are you really going to take this
money?

MRS BAINES {[}\textit{astonished}{]} Why not, dear?

BARBARA. Why not! Do you know what my father is? Have you forgotten
that Lord Saxmundham is Bodger the whisky man? Do you remember how
we implored the County Council to stop him from writing Bodger's Whisky
in letters of fire against the sky; so that the poor drink-ruined
creatures on the embankment could not wake up from their snatches
of sleep without being reminded of their deadly thirst by that wicked
sky sign? Do you know that the worst thing I have had to fight here
is not the devil, but Bodger, Bodger, Bodger, with his whisky, his
distilleries, and his tied houses? Are you going to make our shelter
another tied house for him, and ask me to keep it?

BILL. Rotten dranken whisky it is too.

MRS BAINES. Dear Barbara: Lord Saxmundham has a soul to be saved like
any of us. If heaven has found the way to make a good use of his money,
are we to set ourselves up against the answer to our prayers?

BARBARA. I know he has a soul to be saved. Let him come down here;
and I'll do my best to help him to his salvation. But he wants to
send his cheque down to buy us, and go on being as wicked as ever.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{with a reasonableness which Cusins alone perceives
to be ironical}{]} My dear Barbara: alcohol is a very necessary article.
It heals the sick---

BARBARA. It does nothing of the sort.

UNDERSHAFT. Well, it assists the doctor: that is perhaps a less questionable
way of putting it. It makes life bearable to millions of people who
could not endure their existence if they were quite sober. It enables
Parliament to do things at eleven at night that no sane person would
do at eleven in the morning. Is it Bodger's fault that this inestimable
gift is deplorably abused by less than one per cent of the poor? {[}\textit{He
turns again to the table; signs the cheque; and crosses it}{]}.

MRS BAINES. Barbara: will there be less drinking or more if all those
poor souls we are saving come to-morrow and find the doors of our
shelters shut in their faces? Lord Saxmundham gives us the money to
stop drinking---to take his own business from him.

CUSINS {[}\textit{impishly}{]} Pure self-sacrifice on Bodger's part,
clearly! Bless dear Bodger! {[}\textit{Barbara almost breaks down
as Adolpbus, too, fails her}{]}.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{tearing out the cheque and pocketing the book
as be rises and goes past Cusins to Mrs Baines}{]} I also, Mrs Baines,
may claim a little disinterestedness. Think of my business!\ think
of the widows and orphans!\ the men and lads torn to pieces with
shrapnel and poisoned with lyddite {[}\textit{Mrs Baines shrinks;
but he goes on remorselessly}{]}!\ the oceans of blood, not one drop
of which is shed in a really just cause!\ the ravaged crops!\ the
peaceful peasants forced, women and men, to till their fields under
the fire of opposing armies on pain of starvation!\ the bad blood
of the fierce little cowards at home who egg on others to fight for
the gratification of their national vanity! All this makes money for
me: I am never richer, never busier than when the papers are full
of it. Well, it is your work to preach peace on earth and goodwill
to men. {[}\textit{Mrs Baines's face lights up again}{]}. Every convert
you make is a vote against war. {[}\textit{Her lips move in prayer}{]}.
Yet I give you this money to help you to hasten my own commercial
ruin. {[}\textit{He gives her the cheque}{]}.

CUSINS {[}\textit{mounting the form in an ecstasy of mischief}{]}
The millennium will be inaugurated by the unselfishness of Undershaft
and Bodger. Oh be joyful! {[}\textit{He takes the drumsticks from
his pockets and flourishes them}{]}.

MRS BAINES {[}\textit{taking the cheque}{]} The longer I live the
more proof I see that there is an Infinite Goodness that turns everything
to the work of salvation sooner or later. Who would have thought that
any good could have come out of war and drink? And yet their profits
are brought today to the feet of salvation to do its blessed work. {[}\textit{She
is affected to tears}{]}.

JENNY {[}\textit{running to Mrs Baines and throwing her arms round
her}{]} Oh dear!\ how blessed, how glorious it all is!

CUSINS {[}\textit{in a convulsion of irony}{]} Let us seize this unspeakable
moment. Let us march to the great meeting at once. Excuse me just
an instant. {[}\textit{He rushes into the shelter. Jenny takes her
tambourine from the drum head}{]}.

MRS BAINES. Mr Undershaft: have you ever seen a thousand people fall
on their knees with one impulse and pray? Come with us to the meeting.
Barbara shall tell them that the Army is saved, and saved through
you.

CUSINS {[}\textit{returning impetuously from the shelter with a flag
and a trombone, and coming between Mrs Baines and Undershaft}{]} You
shall carry the flag down the first street, Mrs Baines {[}\textit{he
gives her the flag}{]}. Mr Undershaft is a gifted trombonist: he shall
intone an Olympian diapason to the West Ham Salvation March. {[}\textit{Aside
to Undershaft, as he forces the trombone on him}{]} Blow, Machiavelli,
blow.

UNDBRSHAFT {[}\textit{aside to him, as he takes the trombone}{]} The
trumpet in Zion! {[}\textit{Cusins rushes to the drum, which he takes
up and puts on. Undershaft continues, aloud}{]} I will do my best.
I could vamp a bass if I knew the tune.

CUSINS. It is a wedding chorus from one of Donizetti's operas; but
we have converted it. We convert everything to good here, including
Bodger. You remember the chorus. {}``For thee immense rejoicing---\emph{immenso
giubilo---immenso giubilo}.'' {[}\textit{With drum} \textit{\emph{obbligato}}{]}
Rum tum ti tum tum, tum tum ti ta---

BARBARA. Dolly: you are breaking my heart.

CUSINS. What is a broken heart more or less here? Dionysos Undershaft
has descended. I am possessed.

MRS BAINES. Come, Barbara: I must have my dear Major to carry the
flag with me.

JENNY. Yes, yes, Major darling.

CUSINS {[}\textit{snatches the tambourine out of Jenny's hand and
mutely ofers it to Barbara}{]}.

BARBARA {[}\textit{coming forward a little as she puts the offer behind
her with a shudder, whilst Cusins recklessly tosses the tambourine
back to Jenny and goes to the gate}{]} I can't come.

JENNY. Not come!

MRS BAINES {[}\textit{with tears in her eyes}{]} Barbara: do you think
I am wrong to take the money?

BARBARA {[}\textit{impulsively going to her and kissing her}{]} No,
no: God help you, dear, you must: you are saving the Army. Go; and
may you have a great meeting!

JENNY. But arn't you coming?

BARBARA. No. {[}\textit{She begins taking off the silver S brooch
from her collar}{]}.

MRS BAINES. Barbara: what are you doing?

JENNY. Why are you taking your badge off? You can't be going to leave
us, Major.

BARBARA {[}\textit{quietly}{]} Father: come here.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{coming to her}{]} My dear! {[}\textit{Seeing
that she is going to pin the badge on his collar, he retreats to the
penthouse in some alarm}{]}.

BARBARA {[}\textit{following him}{]} Don't be frightened. {[}\textit{She
pins the badge on and steps back towards the table, showing him to
the others}{]} There! It's not much for \pounds{}5000 is it?

MRS BAINES. Barbara: if you won't come and pray \emph{with} us, promise
me you will pray \emph{for} us.

BARBARA. I can't pray now. Perhaps I shall never pray again.

MRS BAINES. Barbara!

JENNY. Major!

BARBARA {[}\textit{almost delirious}{]} I can't bear any more. Quick
march!

CUSINS {[}\textit{calling to the procession in the street outside}{]}
Off we go. Play up, there! \emph{Immenso giubilo}. {[}\textit{He
gives the time with his drum; and the band strikes up the march, which
rapidly becomes more distant as the procession moves briskly away}{]}.

MRS BAINES. I must go, dear. You're overworked: you will be all right
tomorrow. We'll never lose you. Now Jenny: step out with the old flag.
Blood and Fire! {[}\textit{She marches out through the gate with her
flag}{]}.

JENNY. Glory Hallelujah!\ {[}\textit{flourishing her tambourine and
marching}{]}.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{to Cusins, as he marches out past him easing
the slide of his trombone}{]} {}``My ducats and my daughter''!

CUSINS {[}\textit{following him out}{]} Money and gunpowder!

BARBARA. Drunkenness and Murder! My God: why hast thou forsaken me?

\emph{She sinks on the form with her face buried in her hands. The
march passes away into silence. Bill Walker steals across to her.}

BILL {[}\textit{taunting}{]} Wot prawce Selvytion nah?

SHIRLEY. Don't you hit her when she's down.

BILL. She it me wen aw wiz dahn. Waw shouldn't I git a bit o me own
back?

BARBARA {[}\textit{raising her head}{]} I didn't take \emph{your}
money, Bill. {[}\textit{She crosses the yard to the gate and turns
her back on the two men to hide her face from them}{]}.

BILL {[}\textit{sneering after her}{]} Naow, it warn't enough for
you. {[}\textit{Turning to the drum, he misses the money}{]}. Ellow!
If you ain't took it summun else az. Were's it gorn? Blame me if Jenny
Ill didn't take it arter all!

RUMMY {[}\textit{screaming at him from the loft}{]} You lie, you dirty
blackguard! Snobby Price pinched it off the drum wen e took ap iz
cap. I was ap ere all the time an see im do it.

BILL. Wot! Stowl maw money! Waw didn't you call thief on him, you
silly old mucker you?

RUMMY. To serve you aht for ittin me acrost the face. It's cost y'pahnd,
that az. {[}\textit{Raising a p\ae{}an of squalid triumph}{]} I
done you. I'm even with you. I've ad it aht o y---. {[}\textit{Bill
snatches up Shirley's mug and hurls it at her. She slams the loft
door and vanishes. The mug smashes against the door and falls in fragments}{]}.

BILL {[}\textit{beginning to chuckle}{]} Tell us, ole man, wot o'clock
this morrun was it wen im as they call Snobby Prawce was sived?

BARBARA {[}\textit{turning to him more composedly, and with unspoiled
sweetness}{]} About half past twelve, Bill. And he pinched your pound
at a quarter to two. I know. Well, you can't afford to lose it. I'll
send it to you.

BILL {[}\textit{his voice and accent suddenly improving}{]} Not if
I was to starve for it. I ain't to be bought.

SHIRLEY. Ain't you? You'd sell yourself to the devil for a pint o
beer; ony there ain't no devil to make the offer.

BILL {[}\textit{unshamed}{]} So I would, mate, and often av, cheerful.
But she cawn't buy me. {[}\textit{Approaching Barbara}{]} You wanted
my soul, did you? Well, you ain't got it.

BARBARA. I nearly got it, Bill. But we've sold it back to you for
ten thousand pounds.

SHIRLEY. And dear at the money!

BARBARA. No, Peter: it was worth more than money.

BILL {[}\textit{salvationproof}{]} It's no good: you cawn't get rahnd
me nah. I don't blieve in it ; and I've seen today that I was right. {[}\textit{Going}{]}
So long, old soupkitchener! Ta, ta, Major Earl's Grendorter! {[}\textit{Turning
at the gate}{]} Wot prawce Selvytion nah? Snobby Prawce! Ha!\ ha!

BARBARA {[}\textit{offering her hand}{]} Goodbye, Bill.

BILL {[}\textit{taken aback, half plucks his cap off then shoves it
on again defiantly}{]} Git aht. {[}\textit{Barbara drops her hand,
discouraged. He has a twinge of remorse}{]}. But thet's aw rawt, you
knaow. Nathink pasnl. Naow mellice. So long, Judy. {[}\textit{He
goes}{]}.

BARBARA. No malice. So long, Bill.

SHIRLEY {[}\textit{shaking his head}{]} You make too much of him,
miss, in your innocence.

BARBARA {[}\textit{going to him}{]} Peter: I'm like you now. Cleaned
out, and lost my job.

SHIRLEY. You've youth an hope. That's two better than me. That's hope
for you.

BARBARA. I'll get you a job, Peter, the youth will have to be enough
for me. {[}\textit{She counts her money}{]}. I have just enough left
for two teas at Lockharts, a Rowton doss for you, and my tram and
bus home. {[}\textit{He frowns and rises with offended pride. She
takes his arm}{]}. Don't be proud, Peter: it's sharing between friends.
And promise me you'll talk to me and not let me cry. {[}\textit{She
draws him towards the gate}{]}.

SHIRLEY. Well, I'm not accustomed to talk to the like of you---

BARBARA {[}\textit{urgently}{]} Yes, yes: you must talk to me. Tell
me about Tom Paine's books and Bradlaugh's lectures. Come along.

SHIRLEY. Ah, if you would only read Tom Paine in the proper spirit,
miss! {[}\textit{They go out through the gate together}{]}.

\noindent \begin{center}\noun{End of Act II}\end{center}


\chapter*{\raggedright ACT III}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{ACT III}

\markboth{Major Barbara}{ACT III}

\emph{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 dresss, 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!

\emph{Barbara says nothing; but an expression of pain passes over
her face.}

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{warning him in low tones to be careful}{]}
Charles!

LOMAX {[}\textit{much concerned, sitting down sympathetically on the
settee beside Barbara}{]} I'm awfully sorry, Barbara. You know I helped
you all I could with the concertina and so forth. {[}\textit{Momentously}{]}
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 {[}\textit{pressing his hand}{]} Thank you for your sympathy,
Cholly. Now go and spoon with Sarah.

LOMAX {[}\textit{rising and going to Sarah}{]} 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!

\emph{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 {[}\textit{sitting down beside her}{]} 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.

\begin{tabular}{@{}l|p{1.6in}}
LADY BRITOMART. &
Adolphus! \\
SARAH. &
Dolly! \\
BARBARA. &
Dolly! \\
LOMAX. &
Oh I say!\\
\end{tabular}

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 {[}\textit{patiently}{]} 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. {[}\textit{To Barbara}{]} 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 \pounds{}5000. 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 {[}\textit{disingenuously}{]} Well---er---well, possibly, as
a collector of religions---

LOMAX {[}\textit{cunningly}{]} 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 {[}\textit{out of countenance}{]} 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 \emph{The} \emph{Spectator}
or \emph{The Times}. You had better confine yourself to \emph{The
Times}. You will find that there is a certain amount of tosh about
\emph{The Times}; but at least its language is reputable.

LOMAX {[}\textit{overwhelmed}{]} You are so awfully strong-minded,
Lady Brit---

LADY BRITOMART. Rubbish! {[}\textit{Morrison comes in}{]}. What is
it?

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

LADY BRITOMART. Well, let him in. {[}\textit{Morrison hesitates}{]}.
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. {[}\textit{He withdraws}{]}.

LADY BRITOMART. Children: go and get ready. {[}\textit{Sarah and
Barbara go upstairs for their out-of-door wrap}{]}. Charles: go and
tell Stephen to come down here in five minutes: you will find him
in the drawing room. {[}\textit{Charles goes}{]}. Adolphus: tell
them to send round the carriage in about fifteen minutes. {[}\textit{Adolphus
goes}{]}.

MORRISON {[}\textit{at the door}{]} Mr Undershaft.

\emph{Undershaft comes in. Morrison goes out.}

UNDERSHAFT. Alone! How fortunate!

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{rising}{]} Don't be sentimental, Andrew.
Sit down. {[}\textit{She sits on the settee: he sits beside her, on
her left. She comes to the point before he has time to breathe}{]}.
Sarah must have \pounds{}800 a year until Charles Lomax comes into
his property. Barbara will need more, and need it permanently, because
Adolphus hasn't any property.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{resignedly}{]} 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 {[}\textit{rather wearily}{]} 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. \emph{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 found\-ling.

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 {[}\textit{pouting}{]} Then go away.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{deprecatory}{]} 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 {[}\textit{obstinately}{]} 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 {[}\textit{disconcerted}{]} It won't stay unless it's pinned
{[}\textit{he fumbles at it with childish grimaces}{]}---

\emph{Stephen comes in.}

STEPHEN {[}\textit{at the door}{]} I beg your pardon {[}\textit{about
to retire}{]}.

LADY BRITOMART. No: come in, Stephen. {[}\textit{Stephen comes forward
to his mother's writing table.}{]}

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{not very cordially}{]} Good afternoon.

STEPHEN {[}\textit{coldly}{]} Good afternoon.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{to Lady Britomart}{]} He knows all about the
tradition, I suppose?

LADY BRITOMART. Yes. {[}\textit{To Stephen}{]} It is what I told
you last night, Stephen.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{sulkily}{]} I understand you want to come into
the cannon business.

STEPHEN.\ \textit{I} go into trade! Certainly not.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{opening his eyes, greatly eased in mind and
manner}{]} Oh!\ in that case\mbox{---!}

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 {[}\textit{rising}{]} 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.
{[}\textit{He moves towards Stephen as if to shake hands with him}{]}.

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{rising and interposing}{]} Stephen: I cannot
allow you to throw away an enormous property like this.

STEPHEN {[}\textit{stiffly}{]} Mother: there must be an end of treating
me as a child, if you please. {[}\textit{Lady Britomart recoils,
deeply wounded by his tone}{]}. 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! {[}\textit{She sits down again; and her eyes
fill with tears}{]}.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{with grave compassion}{]} 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 {[}\textit{stopping him}{]} Yes, yes, yes, yes: that's
all right, Stephen. She wont 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. {[}\textit{He resumes his seat}{]}. 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 {[}\textit{who has pulled herself together strongly}{]}
I quite understand, Stephen. By all means go your own way if you feel
strong enough. {[}\textit{Stephen sits down magisterially in the
chair at the writing table with an air of affirming his majority}{]}.

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? {[}\textit{Stephen makes an impatient movement}{]}.
Well, come!\ is there \emph{anything} you know or care for?

STEPHEN {[}\textit{rising and looking at him steadily}{]} I know the
difference between right and wrong.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{hugely tickled}{]} 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 {[}\textit{keeping his temper with difficulty}{]} You are
pleased to be facetious. I pretend to nothing more than any honorable
English gentleman claims as his birthright {[}\textit{he sits down
angrily}{]}.

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 HRITOMART {[}\textit{uneasily}{]} 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 {[}\textit{springing up again}{]} 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. {[}\textit{He
thrusts his hands in his pockets, and walks angrily across to the
window}{]}.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{with a touch of brutality}{]} The government
of your country! \textit{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 \emph{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.
\textit{I} am going back to my counting house to pay the piper and
call the tune.

STEPHEN {[}\textit{actually smiling, and putting his hand on his father's
shoulder with indulgent patronage}{]} Really, my dear father, it is
impossible to be angry with you. You don't know how absurd all this
sounds to \emph{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 \emph{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!

\emph{Stephen goes to the smaller writing table and busies himself
with his letters.}

\emph{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. {[}\textit{Lady
Britomart leaves the room.}{]}

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{to Sarah}{]} Good day, my dear. Good afternoon,
Mr Lomax.

LOMAX {[}\textit{vaguely}{]} Ahdedoo.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{to Cusins}{]} quite well after last night, Euripides,
eh?

CUSINS. As well as can be expected.

UNDERSHAFT. That's right. {[}\textit{To Barbara}{]} So you are coming
to see my death and devastation factory, Barbara?

BARBARA {[}\textit{at the window}{]} You came yesterday to see my
salvation factory. I promised you a return visit.

LOMAX {[}\textit{coming forward between Sarah and Undershaft}{]} 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. {[}\textit{To
Undershaft, with sudden solemnity}{]} 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 {[}\textit{much taken aback}{]} Oh I \emph{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--- {[}\textit{Magnanimously}{]}
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 {[}\textit{appalled at the prospect of confronting Wilton Crescent
in an unpainted motor}{]} 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. {[}\textit{He hurries
out to secure his seat in the carriage. Sarah follows him}{]}.

CUSINS. {[}\textit{moodily walking across to Lady Britomart's writing
table}{]} 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 {[}\textit{scandalized}{]} 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 {[}\textit{revolted}{]} 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. {[}\textit{With intense conviction}{]}
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 {[}\textit{her face lighting up}{]} 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. {[}\textit{She
takes her father's hands and kisses them}{]}. 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. {[}\textit{She goes out}{]}.

CUSINS. My guardian angel! {[}\textit{To Undershaft}{]} Avaunt! {[}\textit{He
follows Barbara}{]}.

STEPHEN {[}\textit{quietly, at the writing table}{]} 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. {[}\textit{He
goes out}{]}.

\emph{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 {[}\textit{embarrassed}{]} Mother---

LADY BRITOMART. Don't be apologetic, Stephen. And don't forget that
you have outgrown your mother. {[}\textit{She goes out}{]}.

\emph{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.}

\emph{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.}

\emph{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!

\emph{Stephen arrives from the town. He carries a fieldglass.}

STEPHEN {[}\textit{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.

\emph{Sarah arrives.}

SARAH. Heavens!\ what a place! {[}\textit{She crosses to the trolley}{]}.
Did you see the nursing home!? {[}\textit{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 co-operation!?

\emph{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. {[}\textit{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 {[}\textit{from the platform}{]} Dummy soldiers?

UNDERSHAFT. No: the real thing. {[}\textit{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.

\emph{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 {[}\textit{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 \emph{you} want, old chap. {[}\textit{He
descends and strolls across to Sarah}{]}.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{to the foreman}{]} Anything wrong, Bilton?

BILTON {[}\textit{with ironic calm}{]} Gentleman walked into the high
explosives shed and lit a cigaret, sir: that's all.

UNDERSHAFT. Ah, quite so. {[}\textit{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.

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 {[}\textit{offering his box}{]} Certainly.

UNDERSHAFT. Thanks. {[}\textit{He pockets the matches}{]}.

LOMAX {[}\textit{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. {[}\textit{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 gun cotton when you are leaving if you ask him. You can
experiment with it at home. {[}\textit{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. {[}\textit{Bilton gives it up and
retires into the shed}{]}.

LOMAX. My ownest, there is no danger. {[}\textit{He sits beside her
on the shell}{]}.

\emph{Lady Britomart arrives from the town with a bouquet.}

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{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 {[}\textit{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 \emph{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 {[}\textit{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 {[}\textit{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. \noun{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 {[}\textit{diplomatically}{]} Not quite. {[}\textit{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 \emph{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.

\begin{tabular}{@{}l|p{1.6in}}
SARAH. &
Confession! \\
LADY BRITOMART. &
Confession! \\
BARBARA. &
Confession! \\
STEPHEN. &
Confession!\\
\end{tabular}

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 \emph{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. {[}\textit{Sensation}{]}. Is the subterfuge good enough,
Machiavelli?

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{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 {[}\textit{she sits
down in the deck chair with a bounce that expresses her downright
contempt for their casuistry.}{]}

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{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 {[}\textit{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. {[}\textit{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. {[}\textit{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 per cent on the profits.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{taken aback}{]} 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 {[}\textit{peremptorily}{]} Mr Undershaft: you have my terms.
Take them or leave them.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{recovering himself}{]} Very well. I note your
terms; and I offer you half.

CUSINS {[}\textit{disgusted}{]} Half!

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{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, \textit{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 {[}\textit{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 \noun{If God Gave the Hand, Let Not Man Withhold
the Sword}. The second wrote up \noun{All Have the Right to Fight:
None Have the Right to Judge}. The third wrote up \noun{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 \noun{Peace Shall
Not Prevail Save with a Sword in Her Hand}. The sixth, my master,
was the best of all. He wrote up \noun{Nothing is Ever Done in this
World Until Men are Prepard 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, \noun{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. \emph{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 {[}\textit{enigmatically}{]} A will of which I am a part.

BARBARA {[}\textit{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: \emph{She} understands. {[}\textit{He
suddenly takes Barbara's hands, and looks powerfully into her eyes}{]}.
Tell him, my love, what power really means.

BARBARA {[}\textit{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 {[}\textit{approvingly}{]} Just so. And why was that, do
you suppose?

BARBARA. Yesterday I should have said, because I was in the power
of God. {[}\textit{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 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. {[}\textit{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 {[}\textit{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 {[}\textit{bewildered}{]} The seven deadly sins!

UNDERSHAFT. Yes, the deadly seven. {[}\textit{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!\ {[}\textit{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 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 {[}\textit{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 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 {[}\textit{punctured}{]} My dear: I have no other means
of conveying my ideas.

LADY BRITOMART. Your ideas are nonsense. You got on 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 {[}\textit{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 {[}\textit{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 {[}\textit{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. {[}\textit{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 {[}\textit{unruffled}{]} Well, where the carcase is, there will
the eagles be gathered, don't you know. {[}\textit{To Undershaft}{]}
Eh? What?

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

LOMAX. Delighted. Cholly is the usual ticket.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{to Lady Britomart}{]} Bid\-dy---

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{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 {[}\textit{she sits down again with a vehemence
that almost wrecks the chair}{]}.

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

SARAH {[}\textit{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 {[}\textit{to Undershaft, strongly remonstrant}{]} Your own
daughter, you know.

UNDERSHAFT. So I see. {[}\textit{To Cusins}{]} Well, my friend, may
we expect you here at six tomorrow morning?

CUSINS {[}\textit{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. {[}\textit{Calling}{]}
Bilton! {[}\textit{He turns to Lady Britomart, who rises}{]}. My dear:
let us leave these two young people to themselves for a moment. {[}\textit{Bilton
comes from the shed}{]}. I am going to take you through the gun cotton
shed.

BILTON {[}\textit{barring the way}{]} You can't take anything explosive
in here, Sir.

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

BILTON {[}\textit{unmoved}{]} No, ma'am. Mr Undershaft has the other
gentleman's matches in his pocket.

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{abruptly}{]} Oh! I beg your pardon. {[}\textit{She
goes into the shed}{]}.

UNDERSHAFT. Quite right, Bilton, quite right: here you are. {[}\textit{He
gives Bilton the box of matches}{]}. Come, Stephen. Come, Charles.
Bring Sarah. {[}\textit{He passes into the shed}{]}.

\emph{Bilton opens the box and deliberately drops the matches into
the fire-bucket.}

LOMAX. Oh I say! {[}\textit{Bilton stolidly hands him the empty box}{]}.
Infernal nonsense! Pure scientific ignorance! {[}\textit{He goes in}{]}.

SARAH. Am I all right, Bilton?

BILTON. You'll have to put on list slippers, miss: that's all. We've
got em inside. {[}\textit{She goes in}{]}.

STEPHEN {[}\textit{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. {[}\textit{Emotionally}{]}
I am very proud of my father. I--- {[}\textit{Unable to proceed, he
presses Cusins' hand and goes hastily into the shed, followed by Bilton}{]}.

\emph{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 {[}\textit{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 \emph{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 {[}\textit{touched by his evident dread of her answer}{]}
Silly baby Dolly! How could it be?

CUSINS {[}\textit{overjoyed}{]} Then you---you---you--- Oh for my
drum! {[}\textit{He flourishes imaginary drumsticks}{]}.

BARBARA {[}\textit{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 {[}\textit{gasping}{]} Middle cl---! A snub! A social snub
to \emph{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. {[}\textit{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 he 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. {[}\textit{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 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! {[}\textit{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. {[}\textit{She runs to the shed, and calls, childlike}{]}
Mamma! Mamma! {[}\textit{Bilton comes out of the shed, followed by
Undershaft}{]}. I want Mamma.

UNDERSHAFT. She is taking off her list slippers, dear. {[}\textit{He
passes on to Cusins}{]}. Well? What does she say?

CUSINS. She has gone right up into the skies.

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{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 {[}\textit{touching Lady Britomart's ribs with her finger tips
and imitating a bicycle horn}{]} Pip! Pip!

LADY BRITOMART {[}\textit{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. {[}\textit{Dragging
at the skirt}{]} Come and tell me which one to take.

UNDERSHAFT {[}\textit{to Cusins}{]} Six o'clock tomorrow morning,
my young friend. 
\end{document}
