Pygmalion and Three Other Plays Page 17

  UNDERSHAFT Aha! You have had your eye on the business, my young friend, have you?

  CUSINS Take care! There is an abyss of moral horror between me and your accursed aerial battleships.

  UNDERSHAFT Never mind the abyss for the present. Let us settle the practical details and leave your final decision open. You know that you will have to change your name. Do you object to that?

  CUSINS Would any man named Adolphus — any man called Dolly! — object to be called something else?

  UNDERSHAFT Good. Now, as to money! I propose to treat you handsomely from the beginning. You shall start at a thousand a year.

  CUSINS [with sudden heat, his spectacles twinkling with mischief ] A thousand! You dare offer a miserable thousand to the son-in-law of a millionaire! No, by Heavens, Machiavelli! you shall not cheat m e. 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 [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 [peremptorily] Mr. Undershaft: you have my terms. Take them or leave them.

  UNDERSHAFT [recovering himself] Very well. I note your terms; and I offer you half.

  CUSINS [disgusted] Half!

  UNDERSHAFT [firmly] Half.

  CUSINS You call yourself a gentleman; and you offer me half!!

  UNDERSHAFT I do not call myself a gentleman; but I offer you half.

  CUSINS This to your future partner! your successor! your son-in-law!

  BARBARA You are selling your own soul, Dolly, not mine. Leave me out of the bargain, please.

  UNDERSHAFT Come! I will go a step further for Barbara’s sake. I will give you three fifths; but that is my last word.

  CUSINS Done!

  LOMAX Done in the eye. Why, I only get eight hundred, you know.

  CUSINS By the way, Mac, I am a classical scholar, not an arithmetical one. Is three fifths more than half or less?

  UNDERSHAFT More, of course.

  CUSINS I would have taken two hundred and fifty. How you can succeed in business when you are willing to pay all that money to a University don who is obviously not worth a junior clerk’s wages! — well! What will Lazarus say?

  UNDERSHAFT Lazarus is a gentle romantic Jew who cares for nothing but string quartets and stalls at fashionable theatres. He will get the credit of your rapacity in money matters, as he has hitherto had the credit of mine. You are a shark of the first order, Euripides. So much the better for the firm!

  BARBARA Is the bargain closed, Dolly? Does your soul belong to him now?

  CUSINS No: the price is settled: that is all. The real tug of war is still to come. What about the moral question?

  LADY BRITOMART There is no moral question in the matter at all, Adolphus. You must simply sell cannons and weapons to people whose cause is right and just, and refuse them to foreigners and criminals.

  UNDERSHAFT [determinedly] No: none of that.You must keep the true faith of an Armorer, or you dont come in here.

  CUSINS What on earth is the true faith of an Armorer?

  UNDERSHAFT To give arms to all men who offer an honest price for them, without respect of persons or principles: to aristocrat and republican, to Nihilist and Tsar, to Capitalist and Socialist, to Protestant and Catholic, to burglar and policeman, to black man white man and yellow man, to all sorts and conditions, all nationalities, all faiths, all follies, all causes and all crimes. The first Undershaft wrote up in his shop IF GOD GAVE THE HAND, LET NOT MAN WITHHOLD THE SWORD. The second wrote up ALL HAVE THE RIGHT TO FIGHT: NONE HAVE THE RIGHT TO JUDGE. The third wrote up TO MAN THE WEAPON: TO HEAVEN THE VICTORY. The fourth had no literary turn; so he did not write up anything; but he sold cannons to Napoleon under the nose of George the Third. The fifth wrote up PEACE SHALL NOT PREVAIL SAVE WITH A SWORD IN HER HAND. The sixth, my master, was the best of all. He wrote up NOTHING IS EVER DONE IN THIS WORLD UNTIL MEN ARE PREPARED TO KILL ONE ANOTHER IF IT IS NOT DONE. After that, there was nothing left for the seventh to say. So he wrote up, simply, UNASHAMED.

  CUSINS My good Machiavelli, I shall certainly write something up on the wall; only, as I shall write it in Greek, you wont 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. Dont come here lusting for power, young man.

  CUSINS If power were my aim I should not come here for it. You have no power.

  UNDERSHAFT None of my own, certainly.

  CUSINS I have more power than you, more will. You do not drive this place: it drives you. And what drives the place?

  UNDERSHAFT [enigmatically] A will of which I am a part.

  BARBARA [startled] Father! Do you know what you are saying; or are you laying a snare for my soul?{34}

  CUSINS Dont 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, dont blame me. I can make cannons: I cannot make courage and conviction. Bah! You tire me, Euripides, with your morality mongering. Ask Barbara: she understands. [He suddenly takes BARBARA’s hands, and looks powerfully into her eyes.] Tell him, my love, what power really means.

  BARBARA [hypnotized] Before I joined the Salvation Army, I was in my own power; and the consequence was that I never knew what to do with myself. When I joined it, I had not time enough for all the things I had to do.

  UNDERSHAFT [approvingly] Just so. And why was that, do you suppose?

  BARBARA Yesterday I should have said, because I was in the power of God. [She resumes her self-possession, withdrawing her hands from his with a power equal to his own.] But you came and shewed me that I was in the power of Bodger and Undershaft. Today I feel — oh! how can I put 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! dont 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 religi
on or what not. It doesnt 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 wont scrap its old prejudices and its old moralities and its old religions and its old political constitutions. Whats 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. Dont persist in that folly. If your old religion broke down yesterday, get a newer and a better one for tomorrow.

  BARBARA Oh how gladly I would take a better one to my soul! But you offer me a worse one. [Turning on him with sudden vehemence.] Justify yourself: shew me some light through the darkness of this dreadful place, with its beautifully clean workshops, and respectable workmen, and model homes.

  UNDERSHAFT Cleanliness and respectability do not need justification, Barbara: they justify themselves. I see no darkness here, no dreadfulness. In your Salvation shelter I saw poverty, misery, cold and hunger. You gave them bread and treacle and dreams of heaven. I give from thirty shillings a week to twelve thousand a year. They find their own dreams; but I look after the drainage.

  BARBARA And their souls?

  UNDERSHAFT I save their souls just as I saved yours.

  BARBARA [revolted] You saved my soul! What do you mean?

  UNDERSHAFT I fed you and clothed you and housed you. I took care that you should have money enough to live handsomely — more than enough; so that you could be wasteful, careless, generous. That saved your soul from the seven deadly sins.

  BARBARA [bewildered] The seven deadly sins!

  UNDERSHAFT Yes, the deadly seven. [Counting on his fingers.) Food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from Man’s neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted. I lifted them from your spirit. I enabled Barbara to become Major Barbara; and I saved her from the crime of poverty.

  CUSINS Do you call poverty a crime?

  UNDERSHAFT The worst of crimes. All the other crimes are virtues beside it: all the other dishonors are chivalry itself by comparison. Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing: a murder here and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then: what do they matter? they are only the accidents and illnesses of life: there are not fifty genuine professional criminals in London. But there are millions of poor people, abject people, dirty people, ill fed, ill clothed people. They poison us morally and physically: they kill the happiness of society: they force us to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us down into their abyss. Only fools fear crime: we all fear poverty. Pah! [turning on Barbara] you talk of your half-saved ruffian in West Ham: you accuse me of dragging his soul back to perdition. Well, bring him to me here; and I will drag his soul back again to salvation for you. Not by words and dreams; but by thirty-eight shillings a week, a sound house in a handsome street, and a permanent job. In three weeks he will have a fancy waistcoat; in three months a tall hat and a chapel sitting;[76] before the end of the year he will shake hands with a duchess at a Primrose League[77] meeting, and join the Conservative Party.

  BARBARA And will he be the better for that?

  UNDERSHAFT You know he will. Dont 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[78] 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 Ma hometanism on the same terms. Try your hand on m y men: their souls are hungry because their bodies are full.

  BARBARA And leave the east end to starve?

  UNDERSHAFT [his energetic tone dropping into one of bitter and brooding remembrance] I was an east ender. I moralized and starved until one day I swore that I would be a full-fed free man at all costs — that nothing should stop me except a bullet, neither reason nor morals nor the lives of other men. I said “Thou shalt starve ere I starve”; and with that word I became free and great. I was a dangerous man until I had my will: now I am a useful, beneficent, kindly person. That is the history of most self-made millionaires, I fancy. When it is the history of every Englishman we shall have an England worth living in.

  LADY BRITOMART Stop making speeches, Andrew. This is not the place for them.

  UNDERSHAFT [punctured] My dear: I have no other means of conveying my ideas.

  LADY BRITOMART Your ideas are nonsense. You got 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 dont 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. Dont preach at them: dont 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;[79] and let them go through certain ceremonies and call themselves certain names until at last they get the courage to kill; and your six hundred and seventy fools become a government. Your pious mob fills up ballot papers and imagines it is governing its masters; but the ballot paper that really governs is the paper that has a bullet wrapped up in it.

  CUSINS That is perhaps why, like most intelligent people, I never vote.

  UNDERSHAFT Vote! Bah! When you vote, you only change the names of the cabinet. When you shoot, you pull down governments, inaugurate new epochs, abolish old orders and set up new. Is that historically true, Mr. Learned Man, or is it not?

  CUSINS It is historically true. I loathe having to admit it. I repudiate your sentiments. I abhor your nature. I defy you in every possible way. Still, it is true. But it ought not to be true.

  UNDERSHAFT Ought, ought, ought, ought, ought! Are you going to spend your life saying ought, like the rest of our moralists? Turn your oughts into shalls, man. Come and make explosives with me. Whatever can blow men up can blow society up. The history of the world is the history of those who had courage enough to embrace this truth. Have you the courage to embrace it, Barbara?

  LADY BRITOMART Barbara, I positively forbid you to listen to your father’s abominable wickedness. And you, Adolphus, ought to know better than to go about saying that wrong things are true. What does it matter whether they are true if they are wrong?

  UNDERSHAFT What does it matter whether they are wrong if they are true?

  LADY BRITOMART [rising] Children: come home instantly. Andrew: I am exceedingly sorry I allowed you to call on us. You are wickeder than ever. Come at once.

  BARBARA [shaking her head] It’s no use running away from wicked people, mamma.

  LADY BRITOMART It is every use. It shews 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 dont think I shall cut him on that account.

  LOMAX [pouring oil on the troubled waters] The fact is, you know, there is a certain amount of tosh about this notion of wickedn
ess. It doesnt 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, dont you know. What I mean is that you cant go cutting everybody; and thats about what it comes to. [Their rapt attention to his eloquence makes him nervous.] Perhaps I dont make myself clear.

  LADY BRITOMART You are lucidity itself, Charles. Because Andrew is successful and has plenty of money to give to Sarah, you will flatter him and encourage him in his wickedness.

  LOMAX [unruffled] Well, where the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered, dont you know. [To UNDERSHAFT. ] Eh? What?

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

  LOMAX Delighted. Cholly is the usual ticket.

  UNDERSHAFT [to LADY BRITOMART] Biddy —

  LADY BRITOMART [violently] Dont 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 m y conscience is clear, at all events [she sits down again with a vehemence that almost wrecks the chair].

  UNDERSHAFT My dear: you are the incarnation of morality. [She snorts.] Your conscience is clear and your duty done when you have called everybody names. Come, Euripides! it is getting late; and we all want to get home. Make up your mind.

  CUSINS Understand this, you old demon —

  LADY BRITOMART Adolphus!

  UNDERSHAFT Let him alone, Biddy. Proceed, Euripides.

  CUSINS You have me in a horrible dilemma. I want Barbara.

  UNDERSHAFT Like all young men, you greatly exaggerate the difference between one young woman and another.

  BARBARA Quite true, Dolly.

  CUSINS I also want to avoid being a rascal.

  UNDERSHAFT [with biting contempt] You lust for personal righteousness, for self-approval, for what you call a good conscience, for what Barbara calls salvation, for what I call patronizing people who are not so lucky as yourself.