BARNABAS. Ah! You begin to smell a rat, do you? You thought yourself
pretty safe. You--

BURGE-LUBIN. Steady, Barnabas. Dont be in a hurry.

_Confucius enters._

THE ARCHBISHOP [_rising_] Good morning, Mr Chief Secretary.

BURGE-LUBIN [_rising in instinctive imitation of the Archbishop_] Honor
us by taking a seat, O sage.

CONFUCIUS. Ceremony is needless. [_He bows to the company, and takes the
chair at the foot of the table_].

_The President and the Archbishop resume their seats._

BURGE-LUBIN. We wish to put a case to you, Confucius. Suppose a man,
instead of conforming to the official estimate of his expectation of
life, were to live for more than two centuries and a half, would the
Accountant General be justified in calling him a thief?

CONFUCIUS. No. He would be justified in calling him a liar.

THE ARCHBISHOP. I think not, Mr Chief Secretary. What do you suppose my
age is?

CONFUCIUS. Fifty.

BURGE-LUBIN. You don't look it. Forty-five; and young for your age.

THE ARCHBISHOP. My age is two hundred and eighty-three.

BARNABAS [_morosely triumphant_] Hmp! Mad, am I?

BURGE-LUBIN. Youre both mad. Excuse me, Archbishop; but this is getting
a bit--well--

THE ARCHBISHOP [_to Confucius_] Mr Chief Secretary: will you, to oblige
me, assume that I have lived nearly three centuries? As a hypothesis?

BURGE-LUBIN. What is a hypothesis?

CONFUCIUS. It does not matter. I understand. [To _the Archbishop_] Am I
to assume that you have lived in your ancestors, or by metempsychosis--

BURGE-LUBIN. Met--Emp--Sy--Good Lord! What a brain, Confucius! What a
brain!

THE ARCHBISHOP. Nothing of that kind. Assume in the ordinary sense that
I was born in the year 1887, and that I have worked continuously in one
profession or another since the year 1910. Am I a thief?

CONFUCIUS. I do not know. Was that one of your professions?

THE ARCHBISHOP. No. I have been nothing worse than an Archbishop, a
President, and a General.

BARNABAS. Has he or has he not robbed the Exchequer by drawing five or
six incomes when he was only entitled to one? Answer me that.

CONFUCIUS. Certainly not. The hypothesis is that he has worked
continuously since 1910. We are now in the year 2170. What is the
official lifetime?

BARNABAS. Seventy-eight. Of course it's an average; and we don't mind a
man here and there going on to ninety, or even, as a curiosity, becoming
a centenarian. But I say that a man who goes beyond that is a swindler.

CONFUCIUS. Seventy-eight into two hundred and eighty-three goes more
than three and a half times. Your department owes the Archbishop two and
a half educations and three and a half retiring pensions.

BARNABAS. Stuff! How can that be?

CONFUCIUS. At what age do your people begin to work for the community?

BURGE-LUBIN. Three. They do certain things every day when they are
three. Just to break them in, you know. But they become self-supporting,
or nearly so, at thirteen.

CONFUCIUS. And at what age do they retire?

BARNABAS. Forty-three.

CONFUCIUS. That is, they do thirty years' work; and they receive
maintenance and education, without working, for thirteen years of
childhood and thirty-five years of superannuation, forty-eight years
in all, for each thirty years' work. The Archbishop has given you 260
years' work, and has received only one education and no superannuation.
You therefore owe him over 300 years of leisure and nearly eight
educations. You are thus heavily in his debt. In other words, he has
effected an enormous national economy by living so long; and you, by
living only seventy-eight years, are profiting at his expense. He is the
benefactor: you are the thief. [_Half rising_] May I now withdraw and
return to my serious business, as my own span is comparatively short?

BURGE-LUBIN. Dont be in a hurry, old chap. [_Confucius sits down
again_]. This hypothecary, or whatever you call it, is put up seriously.
I don't believe it; but if the Archbishop and the Accountant General are
going to insist that it's true, we shall have either to lock them up or
to see the thing through.

BARNABAS. It's no use trying these Chinese subtleties on me. I'm a plain
man; and though I don't understand metaphysics, and don't believe in
them, I understand figures; and if the Archbishop is only entitled to
seventy-eight years, and he takes 283, I say he takes more than he is
entitled to. Get over that if you can.

THE ARCHBISHOP. I have not taken 283 years: I have taken 23 and given
260.

CONFUCIUS. Do your accounts shew a deficiency or a surplus?

BARNABAS. A surplus. Thats what I cant make out. Thats the artfulness of
these people.

BURGE-LUBIN. That settles it. Whats the use of arguing? The Chink says
you are wrong; and theres an end of it.

BARNABAS. I say nothing against the Chink's arguments. But what about my
facts?

CONFUCIUS. If your facts include a case of a man living 283 years, I
advise you to take a few weeks at the seaside.

BARNABAS. Let there be an end of this hinting that I am out of my mind.
Come and look at the cinema record. I tell you this man is Archbishop
Haslam, Archbishop Stickit, President Dickenson, General Bullyboy and
himself into the bargain; all five of them.

THE ARCHBISHOP. I do not deny it. I never have denied it. Nobody has
ever asked me.

BURGE-LUBIN. But damn it, man--I beg your pardon, Archbishop; but
really, really--

THE ARCHBISHOP. Dont mention it. What were you going to say?

BURGE-LUBIN. Well, you were drowned four times over. You are not a cat,
you know.

THE ARCHBISHOP. That is very easy to understand. Consider my situation
when I first made the amazing discovery that I was destined to live
three hundred years! I--

CONFUCIUS [_interrupting him_] Pardon me. Such a discovery was
impossible. You have not made it yet. You may live a million years
if you have already lived two hundred. There is no question of three
hundred years. You have made a slip at the very beginning of your fairy
tale, Mr Archbishop.

BURGE-LUBIN. Good, Confucius! [_To the Archbishop_] He has you there. I
don't see how you can get over that.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Yes: it is quite a good point. But if the Accountant
General will go to the British Museum library, and search the catalogue,
he will find under his own name a curious and now forgotten book, dated
1924, entitled The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas. That gospel was that
men must live three hundred years if civilization is to be saved. It
shewed that this extension of individual human life was possible, and
how it was likely to come about. I married the daughter of one of the
brothers.

BARNABAS. Do you mean to say you claim to be a connection of mine?

THE ARCHBISHOP. I claim nothing. As I have by this time perhaps three or
four million cousins of one degree or another, I have ceased to call on
the family.

BURGE-LUBIN. Gracious heavens! Four million relatives! Is that
calculation correct, Confucius?

CONFUCIUS. In China it might be forty millions if there were no checks
on population.

BURGE-LUBIN. This is a staggerer. It brings home to one--but
[_recovering_] it isnt true, you know. Let us keep sane.

CONFUCIUS [_to the Archbishop_] You wish us to understand that the
illustrious ancestors of the Accountant General communicated to you a
secret by which you could attain the age of three hundred years.

THE ARCHBISHOP. No. Nothing of the kind. They simply believed that
mankind could live any length of time it knew to be absolutely necessary
to save civilization from extinction. I did not share their belief: at
least I was not conscious of sharing it: I thought I was only amused by
it. To me my father-in-law and his brother were a pair of clever
cranks who had talked one another into a fixed idea which had become a
monomania with them. It was not until I got into serious difficulties
with the pension authorities after turning seventy that I began to
suspect the truth.

CONFUCIUS. The truth?

THE ARCHBISHOP. Yes, Mr Chief Secretary: the truth. Like all
revolutionary truths, it began as a joke. As I shewed no signs of ageing
after forty-five, my wife used to make fun of me by saying that I was
certainly going to live three hundred years. She was sixty-eight when
she died; and the last thing she said to me, as I sat by her bedside
holding her hand, was 'Bill: you really don't look fifty. I wonder--'
She broke off, and fell asleep wondering, and never awoke. Then I began
to wonder too. That is the explanation of the three hundred years, Mr
Secretary.

CONFUCIUS. It is very ingenious, Mr Archbishop. And very well told.

BURGE-LUBIN. Of course you understand that _I_ don't for a moment
suggest the very faintest doubt of your absolute veracity, Archbishop.
You know that, don't you?

THE ARCHBISHOP. Quite, Mr President. Only you don't believe me: that is
all. I do not expect you to. In your place I should not believe. You had
better have a look at the films. [_Pointing to the Accountant General_]
He believes.

BURGE-LUBIN. But the drowning? What about the drowning? A man might get
drowned once, or even twice if he was exceptionally careless. But he
couldn't be drowned four times. He would run away from water like a mad
dog.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Perhaps Mr Chief Secretary can guess the explanation of
that.

CONFUCIUS. To keep your secret, you had to die.

BURGE-LUBIN. But dash it all, man, he isn't dead.

CONFUCIUS. It is socially impossible not to do what everybody else does.
One must die at the usual time.

BARNABAS. Of course. A simple point of honour.

CONFUCIUS. Not at all. A simple necessity.

BURGE-LUBIN. Well, I'm hanged if I see it. I should jolly well live for
ever if I could.

THE ARCHBISHOP. It is not so easy as you think. You, Mr Chief Secretary,
have grasped the difficulties of the position. Let me remind you,
Mr President, that I was over eighty before the 1969 Act for the
Redistribution of Income entitled me to a handsome retiring pension.
Owing to my youthful appearance I was prosecuted for attempting to
obtain public money on false pretences when I claimed it. I could prove
nothing; for the register of my birth had been blown to pieces by a bomb
dropped on a village church years before in the first of the big modern
wars. I was ordered back to work as a man of forty, and had to work for
fifteen years more, the retiring age being then fifty-five.

BURGE-LUBIN. As late as fifty-five! How did people stand it?

THE ARCHBISHOP. They made difficulties about letting me go even then, I
still looked so young. For some years I was in continual trouble. The
industrial police rounded me up again and again, refusing to believe
that I was over age. They began to call me The Wandering Jew. You see
how impossible my position was. I foresaw that in twenty years more my
official record would prove me to be seventy-five; my appearance would
make it impossible to believe that I was more than forty-five; and my
real age would be one hundred and seventeen. What was I to do? Bleach
my hair? Hobble about on two sticks? Mimic the voice of a centenarian?
Better have killed myself.

BARNABAS. You ought to have killed yourself. As an honest man you were
entitled to no more than an honest man's expectation of life.

THE ARCHBISHOP. I did kill myself. It was quite easy. I left a suit of
clothes by the seashore during the bathing season, with documents in the
pockets to identify me. I then turned up in a strange place, pretending
that I had lost my memory, and did not know my name or my age or
anything about myself. Under treatment I recovered my health, but not my
memory. I have had several careers since I began this routine of life
and death. I have been an archbishop three times. When I persuaded
the authorities to knock down all our towns and rebuild them from the
foundations, or move them, I went into the artillery, and became a
general. I have been President.

BURGE-LUBIN. Dickenson?

THE ARCHBISHOP. Yes.

BURGE-LUBIN. But they found Dickenson's body: its ashes are buried in St
Paul's.

THE ARCHBISHOP. They almost always found the body. During the bathing
season there are plenty of bodies. I have been cremated again and again.
At first I used to attend my own funeral in disguise, because I had read
about a man doing that in an old romance by an author named Bennett,
from whom I remember borrowing five pounds in 1912. But I got tired of
that. I would not cross the street now to read my latest epitaph.

_The Chief Secretary and the President look very glum. Their incredulity
is vanquished at last._

BURGE-LUBIN. Look here. Do you chaps realize how awful this is? Here we
are sitting calmly in the presence of a man whose death is overdue by
two centuries. He may crumble into dust before our eyes at any moment.

BARNABAS. Not he. He'll go on drawing his pension until the end of the
world.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Not quite that. My expectation of life is only three
hundred years.

BARNABAS. You will last out my time anyhow: that's enough for me.

THE ARCHBISHOP [_coolly_] How do you know?

BARNABAS [_taken aback_] How do I know!

THE ARCHBISHOP. Yes: how do you know? I did not begin even to suspect
until I was nearly seventy. I was only vain of my youthful appearance.
I was not quite serious about it until I was ninety. Even now I am not
sure from one moment to another, though I have given you my reason
for thinking that I have quite unintentionally committed myself to a
lifetime of three hundred years.

BURGE-LUBIN. But how do you do it? Is it lemons? Is it Soya beans? Is
it--

THE ARCHBISHOP. I do not do it. It happens. It may happen to anyone. It
may happen to you.

BURGE-LUBIN [_the full significance of this for himself dawning on him_]
Then we three may be in the same boat with you, for all we know?

THE ARCHBISHOP. You may. Therefore I advise you to be very careful how
you take any step that will make my position uncomfortable.

BURGE-LUBIN. Well, I'm dashed! One of my secretaries was remarking
only this morning how well and young I am looking. Barnabas: I have an
absolute conviction that I am one of the--the--shall I say one of the
victims?--of this strange destiny.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Your great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather
formed the same conviction when he was between sixty and seventy. I knew
him.

BURGE-LUBIN [_depressed_] Ah! But he died.

THE ARCHBISHOP. No.

BURGE-LUBIN [_hopefully_] Do you mean to say he is still alive?

THE ARCHBISHOP. No. He was shot. Under the influence of his belief that
he was going to live three hundred years he became a changed man. He
began to tell people the truth; and they disliked it so much that they
took advantage of certain clauses of an Act of Parliament he had himself
passed during the Four Years War, and had purposely forgotten to repeal
afterwards. They took him to the Tower of London and shot him.

_The apparatus rings._

CONFUCIUS [_answering_] Yes? [_He listens_].

A WOMAN'S VOICE. The Domestic Minister has called.

BURGE-LUBIN [_not quite catching the answer_] Who does she say has
called?

CONFUCIUS. The Domestic Minister.

BARNABAS. Oh, dash it! That awful woman!

BURGE-LUBIN. She certainly is a bit of a terror. I don't exactly know
why; for she is not at all bad-looking.

BARNABAS [_out of patience_] For Heaven's sake, don't be frivolous.

THE ARCHBISHOP. He cannot help it, Mr Accountant General. Three of his
sixteen great-great-great-grandfathers married Lubins.

BURGE-LUBIN. Tut tut! I am not frivolling. _I_ did not ask the lady
here. Which of you did?

CONFUCIUS. It is her official duty to report personally to the President
once a quarter.

BURGE-LUBIN. Oh, that. Then I suppose it's my official duty to receive
her. Theyd better send her in. You don't mind, do you? She will bring us
back to real life. I don't know how you fellows feel; but I'm just going
dotty.

CONFUCIUS [_into the telephone_] The President will receive the Domestic
Minister at once.

_They watch the door in silence for the entrance of the Domestic
Minister._

BURGE-LUBIN [_suddenly, to the Archbishop_] I suppose you have been
married over and over again.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Once. You do not make vows until death when death is
three hundred years off.

_They relapse into uneasy silence. The Domestic Minister enters. She is
a handsome woman, apparently in the prime of life, with elegant, tense,
well held-up figure, and the walk of a goddess. Her expression and
deportment are grave, swift, decisive, awful, unanswerable. She wears a
Dianesque tunic instead of a blouse, and a silver coronet instead of a
gold fillet. Her dress otherwise is not markedly different from that
of the men, who rise as she enters, and incline their heads with
instinctive awe. She comes to the vacant chair between Barnabas and
Confucius._

BURGE-LUBIN [_resolutely genial and gallant_] Delighted to see you, Mrs
Lutestring.

CONFUCIUS. We are honored by your celestial presence.

BARNABAS. Good day, madam.

THE ARCHBISHOP. I have not had the pleasure of meeting you before. I am
the Archbishop of York.

MRS LUTESTRING. Surely we have met, Mr Archbishop. I remember your face.
We--[_she checks herself suddenly_] Ah, no: I remember now: it was
someone else. [_She sits down_]. They all sit down.

THE ARCHBISHOP [_also puzzled_] Are you sure you are mistaken? I also
have some association with your face, Mrs Lutestring. Something like a
door opening continually and revealing you. And a smile of welcome when
you recognized me. Did you ever open a door for me, I wonder?

MRS LUTESTRING. I often opened a door for the person you have just
reminded me of. But he has been dead many years. The rest, except the
Archbishop, look at one another quickly.

CONFUCIUS. May I ask how many years?

MRS LUTESTRING [_struck by his tone, looks at him for a moment with some
displeasure; then replies_] It does not matter. A long time.

BURGE-LUBIN. You mustnt rush to conclusions about the Archbishop, Mrs
Lutestring. He is an older bird than you think. Older than you, at all
events.

MRS LUTESTRING [_with a melancholy smile_] I think not, Mr President.
But the subject is a delicate one. I had rather not pursue it.

CONFUCIUS. There is a question which has not been asked.

MRS LUTESTRING [_very decisively_] If it is a question about my age, Mr
Chief Secretary, it had better not be asked. All that concerns you about
my personal affairs can be found in the books of the Accountant General.

CONFUCIUS. The question I was thinking of will not be addressed to you.
But let me say that your sensitiveness on the point is very strange,
coming from a woman so superior to all common weaknesses as we know you
to be.

MRS LUTESTRING. I may have reasons which have nothing to do with common
weaknesses, Mr Chief Secretary. I hope you will respect them.

CONFUCIUS [_after bowing to her in assent_] I will now put my question.
Have you, Mr Archbishop, any ground for assuming, as you seem to do,
that what has happened to you has not happened to other people as well?

BURGE-LUBIN. Yes, by George! I never thought of that.

THE ARCHBISHOP. I have never met any case but my own.

CONFUCIUS. How do you know?

THE ARCHBISHOP. Well, no one has ever told me that they were in this
extraordinary position.

CONFUCIUS. That proves nothing. Did you ever tell anybody that you were
in it? You never told us. Why did you never tell us?

THE ARCHBISHOP. I am surprised at the question, coming from so astute a
mind as yours, Mr Secretary. When you reach the age I reached before I
discovered what was happening to me, I was old enough to know and fear
the ferocious hatred with which human animals, like all other animals,
turn upon any unhappy individual who has the misfortune to be unlike
themselves in every respect: to be unnatural, as they call it. You will
still find, among the tales of that twentieth-century classic, Wells,
a story of a race of men who grew twice as big as their fellows, and
another story of a man who fell into the hands of a race of blind men.
The big people had to fight the little people for their lives; and the
man with eyes would have had his eyes put out by the blind had he not
fled to the desert, where he perished miserably. Wells's teaching, on
that and other matters, was not lost on me. By the way, he lent me five
pounds once which I never repaid; and it still troubles my conscience.

CONFUCIUS. And were you the only reader of Wells? If there were others
like you, had they not the same reason for keeping the secret?

THE ARCHBISHOP. That is true. But I should know. You short-lived people
are so childish. If I met a man of my own age I should recognize him at
once. I have never done so.

MRS LUTESTRING. Would you recognize a woman of your age, do you think?

THE ARCHBISHOP. I--[_He stops and turns upon her with a searching look,
startled by the suggestion and the suspicion it rouses_].

MRS LUTESTRING. What is your age, Mr Archbishop?

BURGE-LUBIN. Two hundred and eighty-three, he says. That is his little
joke. Do you know, Mrs Lutestring, he had almost talked us into
believing him when you came in and cleared the air with your robust
common sense.

MRS LUTESTRING. Do you really feel that, Mr President? I hear the note
of breezy assertion in your voice. I miss the note of conviction.

BURGE-LUBIN [_jumping up_] Look here. Let us stop talking damned
nonsense. I don't wish to be disagreeable; but it's getting on my
nerves. The best joke won't bear being pushed beyond a certain point.
That point has been reached. I--I'm rather busy this morning. We all
have our hands pretty full. Confucius here will tell you that I have a
heavy day before me.

BARNABAS. Have you anything more important than this thing, if it's
true?

BURGE-LUBIN. Oh, if if, if it's true! But it isn't true.

BARNABAS. Have you anything at all to do?

BURGE-LUBIN. Anything to do! Have you forgotten, Barnabas, that I happen
to be President, and that the weight of the entire public business of
this country is on my shoulders?

BARNABAS. Has he anything to do, Confucius?

CONFUCIUS. He has to be President.

BARNABAS. That means that he has nothing to do.

BURGE-LUBIN [_sulkily_] Very well, Barnabas. Go on making a fool of
yourself. [_He sits down_]. Go on.

BARNABAS. I am not going to leave this room until we get to the bottom
of this swindle.

MRS LUTESTRING [_turning with deadly gravity on the Accountant General_]
This what, did you say?

CONFUCIUS. These expressions cannot be sustained. You obscure the
discussion in using them.

BARNABAS [_glad to escape from her gaze by addressing Confucius_] Well,
this unnatural horror. Will that satisfy you?

CONFUCIUS. That is in order. But we do not commit ourselves to the
implications of the word horror.

THE ARCHBISHOP. By the word horror the Accountant General means only
something unusual.

CONFUCIUS. I notice that the honorable Domestic Minister, on learning
the advanced age of the venerable prelate, shews no sign of surprise or
incredulity.

BURGE-LUBIN. She doesn't take it seriously. Who would? Eh, Mrs
Lutestring?

MRS LUTESTRING. I take it very seriously indeed, Mr President. I see now
that I was not mistaken at first. I have met the Archbishop before.

THE ARCHBISHOP. I felt sure of it. This vision of a door opening to me,
and a woman's face welcoming me, must be a reminiscence of something
that really happened; though I see it now as an angel opening the gate
of heaven.

MRS LUTESTRING. Or a parlor maid opening the door of the house of the
young woman you were in love with?

THE ARCHBISHOP [_making a wry face_] Is that the reality? How these
things grow in our imagination! But may I say, Mrs Lutestring, that the
transfiguration of a parlor maid to an angel is not more amazing than
her transfiguration to the very dignified and able Domestic Minister I
am addressing. I recognize the angel in you. Frankly, I do not recognize
the parlor maid.

BURGE-LUBIN. Whats a parlor maid?

MRS LUTESTRING. An extinct species. A woman in a black dress and white
apron, who opened the house door when people knocked or rang, and was
either your tyrant or your slave. I was a parlor maid in the house of
one of the Accountant General's remote ancestors. [_To Confucius_] You
asked me my age, Mr Chief Secretary, I am two hundred and seventy-four.

BURGE-LUBIN [_gallantly_] You don't look it. You really don't look it.

MRS LUTESTRING [_turning her face gravely towards him_] Look again, Mr
President.

BURGE-LUBIN [_looking at her bravely until the smile fades from his
face, and he suddenly covers his eyes with his hands_] Yes: you do
look it. I am convinced. It's true. Now call up the Lunatic Asylum,
Confucius; and tell them to send an ambulance for me.

MRS LUTESTRING [_to the Archbishop_] Why have you given away your
secret? our secret?

THE ARCHBISHOP. They found it out. The cinema records betrayed me. But I
never dreamt that there were others. Did you?

MRS LUTESTRING. I knew one other. She was a cook. She grew tired, and
killed herself.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Dear me! However, her death simplifies the situation, as
I have been able to convince these gentlemen that the matter had better
go no further.

MRS LUTESTRING. What! When the President knows! It will be all over the
place before the end of the week.

BURGE-LUBIN [_injured_] Really, Mrs Lutestring! You speak as if I were a
notoriously indiscreet person. Barnabas: have I such a reputation?

BARNABAS [_resignedly_] It cant be helped. It's constitutional.

CONFUCIUS. It is utterly unconstitutional. But, as you say, it cannot be
helped.

BURGE-LUBIN [_solemnly_] I deny that a secret of State has ever passed
my lips--except perhaps to the Minister of Health, who is discretion
personified. People think, because she is a negress--

MRS LUTESTRING. It does not matter much now. Once, it would have
mattered a great deal. But my children are all dead.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Yes: the children must have been a terrible difficulty.
Fortunately for me, I had none.

MRS LUTESTRING. There was one daughter who was the child of my very
heart. Some years after my first drowning I learnt that she had lost her
sight. I went to her. She was an old woman of ninety-six, blind. She
asked me to sit and talk with her because my voice was like the voice of
her dead mother.

BURGE-LUBIN. The complications must be frightful. Really I hardly know
whether I do want to live much longer than other people.

MRS LUTESTRING. You can always kill yourself, as cook did; but that
was influenza. Long life is complicated, and even terrible; but it is
glorious all the same. I would no more change places with an ordinary
woman than with a mayfly that lives only an hour.

THE ARCHBISHOP. What set you thinking of it first?

MRS LUTESTRING. Conrad Barnabas's book. Your wife told me it was more
wonderful than Napoleon's Book of Fate and Old Moore's Almanac, which
cook and I used to read. I was very ignorant: it did not seem so
impossible to me as to an educated woman. Yet I forgot all about it, and
married and drudged as a poor man's wife, and brought up children, and
looked twenty years older than I really was, until one day, long after
my husband died and my children were out in the world working for
themselves, I noticed that I looked twenty years younger than I really
was. The truth came to me in a flash.

BURGE-LUBIN. An amazing moment. Your feelings must have been beyond
description. What was your first thought?

MRS LUTESTRING. Pure terror. I saw that the little money I had laid up
would not last, and that I must go out and: work again. They had things
called Old Age Pensions then: miserable pittances for worn-out old
laborers to die on. I thought I should be found out if I went on drawing
it too long. The horror of facing another lifetime of drudgery, of
missing my hard-earned rest and losing my poor little savings, drove
everything else out of my mind. You people nowadays can have no
conception of the dread of poverty that hung over us then, or of the
utter tiredness of forty years' unending overwork and striving to make a
shilling do the work of a pound.

THE ARCHBISHOP. I wonder you did not kill yourself. I often wonder why
the poor in those evil old times did not kill themselves. They did not
even kill other people.

MRS LUTESTRING. You never kill yourself, because you always may as well
wait until tomorrow. And you have not energy or conviction enough to
kill the others. Besides, how can you blame them when you would do as
they do if you were in their place?

BURGE-LUBIN. Devilish poor consolation, that.

MRS LUTESTRING. There were other consolations in those days for people
like me. We drank preparations of alcohol to relieve the strain of
living and give us an artificial happiness.

BURGE-LUBIN {[[_all together,_]} Alcohol! CONFUCIUS {[_making_] } Pfff
...! BARNABAS {[_wry faces_]] } Disgusting.

MRS LUTESTRING. A little alcohol would improve your temper and manners,
and make you much easier to live with, Mr Accountant General.

BURGE-LUBIN [_laughing_] By George, I believe you! Try it, Barnabas.

CONFUCIUS. No. Try tea. It is the more civilized poison of the two.

MRS LUTESTRING. You, Mr President, were born intoxicated with your own
well-fed natural exuberance. You cannot imagine what alcohol was to an
underfed poor woman. I had carefully arranged my little savings so that
I could get drunk, as we called it, once a week; and my only pleasure
was looking forward to that poor little debauch. That is what saved
me from suicide. I could not bear to miss my next carouse. But when
I stopped working, and lived on my pension, the fatigue of my life's
drudgery began to wear off, because, you see, I was not really old. I
recuperated. I looked younger and younger. And at last I was rested
enough to have courage and strength to begin life again. Besides,
political changes were making it easier: life was a little better worth
living for the nine-tenths of the people who used to be mere drudges.
After that, I never turned back or faltered. My only regret now is that
I shall die when I am three hundred or thereabouts. There was only one
thing that made life hard; and that is gone now.

CONFUCIUS. May we ask what that was?

MRS LUTESTRING. Perhaps you will be offended if I tell you.

BURGE-LUBIN. Offended! My dear lady, do you suppose, after such
a stupendous revelation, that anything short of a blow from a
sledge-hammer could produce the smallest impression on any of us?

MRS LUTESTRING. Well, you see, it has been so hard on me never to meet a
grown-up person. You are all such children. And I never was very fond of
children, except that one girl who woke up the mother passion in me. I
have been very lonely sometimes.

BURGE-LUBIN [_again gallant_] But surely, Mrs Lutestring, that has been
your own fault. If I may say so, a lady of your attractions need never
have been lonely.

MRS LUTESTRING. Why?

BURGE-LUBIN. Why! Well--. Well, er--. Well, er er--. Well! [_he gives it
up_].

THE ARCHBISHOP. He means that you might have married. Curious, how
little they understand our position.

MRS LUTESTRING. I did marry. I married again on my hundred and first
birthday. But of course I had to marry an elderly man: a man over sixty.
He was a great painter. On his deathbed he said to me 'It has taken me
fifty years to learn my trade, and to paint all the foolish pictures a
man must paint and get rid of before he comes through them to the
great things he ought to paint. And now that my foot is at last on the
threshold of the temple I find that it is also the threshold of my
tomb.' That man would have been the greatest painter of all time if he
could have lived as long as I. I saw him die of old age whilst he
was still, as he said himself, a gentleman amateur, like all modern
painters.

BURGE-LUBIN. But why had you to marry an elderly man? Why not marry a
young one? or shall I say a middle-aged one? If my own affections were
not already engaged; and if, to tell the truth, I were not a
little afraid of you--for you are a very superior woman, as we all
acknowledge--I should esteem myself happy in--er--er--

MRS LUTESTRING. Mr President: have you ever tried to take advantage of
the innocence of a little child for the gratification of your senses?

BURGE-LUBIN. Good Heavens, madam, what do you take me for? What right
have you to ask me such a question?

MRS LUTESTRING. I am at present in my two hundred and seventy-fifth
year. You suggest that I should take advantage of the innocence of a
child of thirty, and marry it.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Can you shortlived people not understand that as the
confusion and immaturity and primitive animalism in which we live for
the first hundred years of our life is worse in this matter of sex than
in any other, you are intolerable to us in that relation?

BURGE-LUBIN. Do you mean to say, Mrs Lutestring, that you regard me as a
child?

MRS LUTESTRING. Do you expect me to regard you as a completed soul? Oh,
you may well be afraid of me. There are moments when your levity, your
ingratitude, your shallow jollity, make my gorge rise so against you
that if I could not remind myself that you are a child I should be
tempted to doubt your right to live at all.

CONFUCIUS. Do you grudge us the few years we have? you who have three
hundred!

BURGE-LUBIN. You accuse me of levity! Must I remind you, madam, that I
am the President, and that you are only the head of a department?

BARNABAS. Ingratitude too! You draw a pension for three hundred years
when we owe you only seventy-eight; and you call us ungrateful!

MRS LUTESTRING. I do. When I think of the blessings that have been
showered on you, and contrast them with the poverty! the humiliations!
the anxieties! the heartbreak! the insolence and tyranny that were the
daily lot of mankind when I was learning to suffer instead of learning
to live! when I see how lightly you take it all! how you quarrel over
the crumpled leaves in your beds of roses! how you are so dainty about
your work that unless it is made either interesting or delightful to you
you leave it to negresses and Chinamen, I ask myself whether even
three hundred years of thought and experience can save you from being
superseded by the Power that created you and put you on your trial.

BURGE-LUBIN. My dear lady: our Chinese and colored friends are perfectly
happy. They are twenty times better off here than they would be in China
or Liberia. They do their work admirably; and in doing it they set us
free for higher employments.

THE ARCHBISHOP [_who has caught the infection of her indignation_] What
higher employments are you capable of? you that are superannuated at
seventy and dead at eighty!

MRS LUTESTRING. You are not really doing higher work. You are supposed
to make the decisions and give the orders; but the negresses and the
Chinese make up your minds for you and tell you what orders to give,
just as my brother, who was a sergeant in the Guards, used to prompt his
officers in the old days. When I want to get anything done at the Health
Ministry I do not come to you: I go to the black lady who has been the
real president during your present term of office, or to Confucius, who
goes on for ever while presidents come and presidents go.

BURGE-LUBIN. This is outrageous. This is treason to the white race. And
let me tell you, madam, that I have never in my life met the Minister
of Health, and that I protest against the vulgar color prejudice which
disparages her great ability and her eminent services to the State. My
relations with her are purely telephonic, gramophonic, photophonic, and,
may I add, platonic.

THE ARCHBISHOP. There is no reason why you should be ashamed of them in
any case, Mr President. But let us look at the position impersonally.
Can you deny that what is happening is that the English people have
become a Joint Stock Company admitting Asiatics and Africans as
shareholders?

BARNABAS. Nothing like it. I know all about the old joint stock
companies. The shareholders did no work.

THE ARCHBISHOP. That is true; but we, like them, get our dividends
whether we work or not. We work partly because we know there would be no
dividends if we did not, and partly because if we refuse we are regarded
as mentally deficient and put into a lethal chamber. But what do we work
at? Before the few changes we were forced to make by the revolutions
that followed the Four Years War, our governing classes had been so
rich, as it was called, that they had become the most intellectually
lazy and fat-headed people on the face of the earth. There is a good
deal of that fat still clinging to us.

BURGE-LUBIN. As President, I must not listen to unpatriotic criticisms
of our national character, Mr Archbishop.

THE ARCHBISHOP. As Archbishop, Mr President, it is my official duty to
criticize the national character unsparingly. At the canonization of
Saint Henrik Ibsen, you yourself unveiled the monument to him which
bears on its pedestal the noble inscription, 'I came not to call
sinners, but the righteous, to repentance.' The proof of what I say
is that our routine work, and what may be called our ornamental and
figure-head work, is being more and more sought after by the English;
whilst the thinking, organizing, calculating, directing work is done by
yellow brains, brown brains, and black brains, just as it was done in
my early days by Jewish brains, Scottish brains, Italian brains, German
brains. The only white men who still do serious work are those who, like
the Accountant General, have no capacity for enjoyment, and no social
gifts to make them welcome outside their offices.

BARNABAS. Confound your impudence! I had gifts enough to find you out,
anyhow.

THE ARCHBISHOP [_disregarding this outburst_] If you were to kill me as
I stand here, you would have to appoint an Indian to succeed me. I take
precedence today not as an Englishman, but as a man with more than a
century and a half of fully adult experience. We are letting all the
power slip into the hands of the colored people. In another hundred
years we shall be simply their household pets.

BURGE-LUBIN [_reacting buoyantly_] Not the least danger of it. I grant
you we leave the most troublesome part of the labor of the nation to
them. And a good job too: why should we drudge at it? But think of the
activities of our leisure! Is there a jollier place on earth to live
in than England out of office hours? And to whom do we owe that? To
ourselves, not to the niggers. The nigger and the Chink are all right
from Tuesday to Friday; but from Friday to Tuesday they are simply
nowhere; and the real life of England is from Friday to Tuesday.

THE ARCHBISHOP. That is terribly true. In devising brainless amusements;
in pursuing them with enormous vigor, and taking them with eager
seriousness, our English people are the wonder of the world. They always
were. And it is just as well; for otherwise their sensuality would
become morbid and destroy them. What appals me is that their amusements
should amuse them. They are the amusements of boys and girls. They
are pardonable up to the age of fifty or sixty: after that they are
ridiculous. I tell you, what is wrong with us is that we are a non-adult
race; and the Irish and the Scots, and the niggers and Chinks, as you
call them, though their lifetime is as short as ours, or shorter, yet do
somehow contrive to grow up a little before they die. We die in boyhood:
the maturity that should make us the greatest of all the nations lies
beyond the grave for us. Either we shall go under as greybeards with
golf clubs in our hands, or we must will to live longer.

MRS LUTESTRING. Yes: that is it. I could not have expressed it in words;
but you have expressed it for me. I felt, even when I was an ignorant
domestic slave, that we had the possibility of becoming a great nation
within us; but our faults and follies drove me to cynical hopelessness.
We all ended then like that. It is the highest creatures who take the
longest to mature, and are the most helpless during their immaturity. I
know now that it took me a whole century to grow up. I began my serious
life when I was a hundred and twenty. Asiatics cannot control me: I am
not a child in their hands, as you are, Mr President. Neither, I am
sure, is the Archbishop. They respect me. You are not grown up enough
even for that, though you were kind enough to say that I frighten you.

BURGE-LUBIN. Honestly, you do. And will you think me very rude if I
say that if I must choose between a white woman old enough to be my
great-grandmother and a black woman of my own age, I shall probably find
the black woman more sympathetic?

MRS LUTESTRING. And more attractive in color, perhaps?

BURGE-LUBIN. Yes. Since you ask me, more--well, not more attractive:
I do not deny that you have an excellent appearance--but I will say,
richer. More Venetian. Tropical. 'The shadowed livery of the burnished
sun.'

MRS LUTESTRING. Our women, and their favorite story writers, begin
already to talk about men with golden complexions.

CONFUCIUS [_expanding into a smile all across both face and body_]
A-a-a-a-a-h!

BURGE-LUBIN. Well, what of it, madam? Have you read a very interesting
book by the librarian of the Biological Society suggesting that the
future of the world lies with the Mulatto?

MRS LUTESTRING [_rising_] Mr Archbishop: if the white race is to be
saved, our destiny is apparent.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Yes: our duty is pretty clear.

MRS LUTESTRING. Have you time to come home with me and discuss the
matter?

THE ARCHBISHOP [_rising_] With pleasure.

BARNABAS [_rising also and rushing past Mrs Lutestring to the door,
where he turns to bar her way_] No you don't. Burge: you understand,
don't you?

BURGE-LUBIN. No. What is it?

BARNABAS. These two are going to marry.

BURGE-LUBIN. Why shouldn't they, if they want to?

BARNABAS. They don't want to. They will do it in cold blood because
their children will live three hundred years. It mustnt be allowed.

CONFUCIUS. You cannot prevent it. There is no law that gives you power
to interfere with them.

BARNABAS. If they force me to it I will obtain legislation against
marriages above the age of seventy-eight.

THE ARCHBISHOP. There is not time for that before we are married, Mr
Accountant General. Be good enough to get out of the lady's way.

BARNABAS. There is time to send the lady to the lethal chamber before
anything comes of your marriage. Dont forget that.

MRS LUTESTRING. What nonsense, Mr Accountant General! Good afternoon,
Mr President. Good afternoon, Mr Chief Secretary. [_They rise and
acknowledge her salutation with bows. She walks straight at the
Accountant General, who instinctively shrinks out of her way as she
leaves the room_].

THE ARCHBISHOP. I am surprised at you, Mr Barnabas. Your tone was like
an echo from the Dark Ages. [_He follows the Domestic Minister_].

_Confucius, shaking his head and clucking with his tongue in deprecation
of this painful episode, moves to the chair just vacated by the
Archbishop and stands behind it with folded palms, looking at the
President. The Accountant General shakes his fist after the departed
visitors, and bursts into savage abuse of them._

BARNABAS. Thieves! Cursed thieves! Vampires! What are you going to do,
Burge?

BURGE-LUBIN. Do?

BARNABAS. Yes, do. There must be dozens of these people in existence.
Are you going to let them do what the two who have just left us mean to
do, and crowd us off the face of the earth?

BURGE-LUBIN [_sitting down_] Oh, come, Barnabas! What harm are they
doing? Arnt you interested in them? Dont you like them?

BARNABAS. Like them! I hate them. They are monsters, unnatural monsters.
They are poison to me.

BURGE-LUBIN. What possible objection can there be to their living as
long as they can? It does not shorten our lives, does it?

BARNABAS. If I have to die when I am seventy-eight, I don't see
why another man should be privileged to live to be two hundred and
seventy-eight. It does shorten my life, relatively. It makes us
ridiculous. If they grew to be twelve feet high they would make us all
dwarfs. They talked to us as if we were children. There is no love lost
between us: their hatred of us came out soon enough. You heard what the
woman said, and how the Archbishop backed her up?

BURGE-LUBIN. But what can we do to them?

BARNABAS. Kill them.

BURGE-LUBIN. Nonsense!

BARNABAS. Lock them up. Sterilize them somehow, anyhow.

BURGE-LUBIN. But what reason could we give?

BARNABAS. What reason can you give for killing a snake? Nature tells you
to do it.

BURGE-LUBIN. My dear Barnabas, you are out of your mind.

BARNABAS. Havnt you said that once too often already this morning?

BURGE-LUBIN. I don't believe you will carry a single soul with you.

BARNABAS. I understand. I know you. You think you are one of them.

CONFUCIUS. Mr Accountant General: you may be one of them.

BARNABAS. How dare you accuse me of such a thing? I am an honest man,
not a monster. I won my place in public life by demonstrating that the
true expectation of human life is seventy-eight point six. And I will
resist any attempt to alter or upset it to the last drop of my blood if
need be.

BURGE-LUBIN. Oh, tut tut! Come, come! Pull yourself together. How can
you, a descendant of the great Conrad Barnabas, the man who is still
remembered by his masterly Biography of a Black Beetle, be so absurd?

BARNABAS. You had better go and write the autobiography of a jackass. I
am going to raise the country against this horror, and against you, if
you shew the slightest sign of weakness about it.

CONFUCIUS [_very impressively_] You will regret it if you do.

BARNABAS. What is to make me regret it?

CONFUCIUS. Every mortal man and woman in the community will begin to
count on living for three centuries. Things will happen which you do not
foresee: terrible things. The family will dissolve: parents and children
will be no longer the old and the young: brothers and sisters will meet
as strangers after a hundred years separation: the ties of blood will
lose their innocence. The imaginations of men, let loose over the
possibilities of three centuries of life, will drive them mad and wreck
human society. This discovery must be kept a dead secret. [_He sits
down_].

BARNABAS. And if I refuse to keep the secret?

CONFUCIUS. I shall have you safe in a lunatic asylum the day after you
blab.

BARNABAS. You forget that I can produce the Archbishop to prove my
statement.

CONFUCIUS. So can I. Which of us do you think he will support when I
explain to him that your object in revealing his age is to get him
killed?

BARNABAS [_desperate_] Burge: are you going to back up this yellow
abomination against me? Are we public men and members of the Government?
or are we damned blackguards?

CONFUCIUS [_unmoved_] Have you ever known a public man who was not what
vituperative people called a damned blackguard when some inconsiderate
person wanted to tell the public more than was good for it?

BARNABAS. Hold your tongue, you insolent heathen. Burge: I spoke to you.

BURGE-LUBIN. Well, you know, my dear Barnabas, Confucius is a very
long-headed chap. I see his point.

BARNABAS. Do you? Then let me tell you that, except officially, I will
never speak to you again. Do you hear?

BURGE-LUBIN [_cheerfully_] You will. You will.

BARNABAS. And don't you ever dare speak to me again. Do you hear? [_He
turns to the door_].

BURGE-LUBIN. I will. I will. Goodbye, Barnabas. God bless you.

BARNABAS. May you live forever, and be the laughingstock of the whole
world! [_he dashes out in a fury_].

BURGE-LUBIN [_laughing indulgently_] He will keep the secret all right.
I know Barnabas. You neednt worry.

CONFUCIUS [_troubled and grave_] There are no secrets except the secrets
that keep themselves. Consider. There are those films at the Record
Office. We have no power to prevent the Master of the Records from
publishing this discovery made in his department. We cannot silence the
American--who can silence an American?--nor the people who were there
today to receive him. Fortunately, a film can prove nothing but a
resemblance.

BURGE-LUBIN. Thats very true. After all, the whole thing is confounded
nonsense, isnt it?

CONFUCIUS [_raising his head to look at him_] You have decided not to
believe it now that you realize its inconveniences. That is the English
method. It may not work in this case.

BURGE-LUBIN. English be hanged! It's common sense. You know, those two
people got us hypnotized: not a doubt of it. They must have been kidding
us. They were, werent they?

CONFUCIUS. You looked into that woman's face; and you believed.

BURGE-LUBIN. Just so. Thats where she had me. I shouldn't have believed
her a bit if she'd turned her back to me.

CONFUCIUS [_shakes his head slowly and repeatedly_]???

BURGE-LUBIN. You really think--? [_he hesitates_].

CONFUCIUS. The Archbishop has always been a puzzle to me. Ever since
I learnt to distinguish between one English face and another I have
noticed what the woman pointed out: that the English face is not an
adult face, just as the English mind is not an adult mind.

BURGE-LUBIN. Stow it, John Chinaman. If ever there was a race divinely
appointed to take charge of the non-adult races and guide them and train
them and keep them out of mischief until they grow up to be capable of
adopting our institutions, that race is the English race. It is the only
race in the world that has that characteristic. Now!

CONFUCIUS. That is the fancy of a child nursing a doll. But it is ten
times more childish of you to dispute the highest compliment ever paid
you.

BURGE-LUBIN. You call it a compliment to class us as grown-up children.

CONFUCIUS. Not grown-up children, children at fifty, sixty, seventy.
Your maturity is so late that you never attain to it. You have to be
governed by races which are mature at forty. That means that you are
potentially the most highly developed race on earth, and would be
actually the greatest if you could live long enough to attain to
maturity.

BURGE-LUBIN [_grasping the idea at last_] By George, Confucius, youre
right! I never thought of that. That explains everything. We are just
a lot of schoolboys: theres no denying it. Talk to an Englishman about
anything serious, and he listens to you curiously for a moment just as
he listens to a chap playing classical music. Then he goes back to
his marine golf, or motoring, or flying, or women, just like a bit of
stretched elastic when you let it go. [_Soaring to the height of his
theme_] Oh, youre quite right. We are only in our infancy. I ought to
be in a perambulator, with a nurse shoving me along. It's true: it's
absolutely true. But some day we'll grow up; and then, by Jingo, we'll
shew em.