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Page 14
UNDERSHAFT. I am particularly fond of music.
LOMAX [delighted] Are you? Then I'll get it. [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 [looking at him with quick interest and nodding] Just so.
How did you come to understand that? [Lomax is heard at the door
trying the concertina].
LADY BRITOMART. Come in, Charles. Play us something at once.
LOMAX. Righto! [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 [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 [scandalized] Oh I say!
BARBARA. Many a sinner has played himself into heaven on the
trombone, thanks to the Army.
LOMAX [to Barbara, still rather shocked] Yes; but what about the
cannon business, don't you know? [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 [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.
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