2
Present Day
In the first years after the war an impressive-looking gentleman of 50 is seated writing in a well-furnished spacious study. He is dressed in black. His coat is a frock-coat; his tie is white; and his waistcoat, though it is not quite a clergyman’s waistcoat, and his collar, though it buttons in front instead of behind, combine with the prosperity indicated by his surroundings, and his air of personal distinction, to suggest the clerical dignitary. Still, he is clearly neither dean nor bishop; he is rather too starkly intellectual for a popular Free Church enthusiast; and he is not careworn enough to be a great headmaster.
The study windows, which have broad comfortable window seats, overlook Hampstead Heath towards London. Consequently, it being a fine afternoon in spring, the room is sunny. As you face these windows, you have on your right the fireplace, with a few logs smouldering in it, and a couple of comfortable library chairs on the hearthrug; beyond it and beside it the door; before you the writing-table, at which the clerical gentleman sits a little to your left facing the door with his right profile presented to you; on your left a settee; and on your right a couple of Chippendale chairs. There is also an upholstered square stool in the middle of the room, against the writing-table. The walls are covered with bookshelves above and lockers beneath.
The door opens; and another gentleman, shorter than the clerical one, within a year or two of the same age, dressed in a well-worn tweed lounge suit, with a short beard and much less style in his bearing and carriage, looks in.
THE CLERICAL GENTLEMAN [familiar and by no means cordial] Hallo! I didn’t expect you until the five o’clock train.
THE TWEEDED GENTLEMAN [coming in very slowly] I have something on my mind. I thought I’d come early.
THE CLERICAL GENTLEMAN [throwing down his pen] What is on your mind?
THE TWEEDED GENTLEMAN [sitting down on the stool, heavily preoccupied with his thought] I have made up my mind at last about the time. I make it three hundred years.
THE CLERICAL GENTLEMAN [sitting up energetically] Now that is extraordinary. Most extraordinary. The very last words I wrote when you interrupted me were ‘at least three centuries.’ [He snatches up his manuscript, and points to it]. Here it is: [reading] ‘the term of human life must be extended to at least three centuries.’
THE TWEEDED GENTLEMAN. How did you arrive at it?
A parlor maid opens the door, ushering in a young clergyman.
THE PARLOR MAID. Mr Haslam. [She withdraws].
The visitor is so very unwelcome that his host forgets to rise; and the two brothers stare at the intruder, quite unable to conceal their dismay. Haslam, who has nothing clerical about him except his collar, and wears a snuff-colored suit, smiles with a frank school-boyishness that makes it impossible to be unkind to him, and explodes into obviously unpremeditated speech.
HASLAM. I’m afraid I’m an awful nuisance. I’m the rector; and I suppose one ought to call on people.
THE TWEEDED GENTLEMAN [in ghostly tones] We’re not Church people, you know.
HASLAM. Oh, I don’t mind that, if you don’t. The Church people here are mostly as dull as ditch-water. I have heard such a lot about you; and there are so jolly few people to talk to. I thought you perhaps wouldn’t mind. Do you mind? for of course I’ll go like a shot if I’m in the way.
THE CLERICAL GENTLEMAN [rising, disarmed] Sit down, Mr–er?
HASLAM. Haslam.
THE CLERICAL GENTLEMAN. Mr Haslam.
THE TWEEDED GENTLEMAN [rising and offering him the stool] Sit down. [He retreats towards the Chippendale chairs].
HASLAM [sitting down on the stool] Thanks awfully.
THE CLERICAL GENTLEMAN [resuming his seat] This is my brother Conrad, Professor of Biology at Jarrowfields University: Dr. Conrad Barnabas. My name is Franklyn: Franklyn Barnabas. I was in the Church myself for some years.
HASLAM [sympathizing] Yes: one cant help it. If theres a living in the family, or one’s Governor knows a patron, one gets shoved into the Church by one’s parents.
CONRAD [sitting down on the furthest Chippendale with a snort of amusement] Mp!
FRANKLYN. One gets shoved out of it, sometimes, by one’s conscience.
HASLAM. Oh yes; but where is a chap like me to go? I’m afraid I’m not intellectual enough to split straws when theres a job in front of me, and nothing better for me to do. I daresay the Church was a bit thick for you; but it’s good enough for me. It will last my time, anyhow [he laughs good-humoredly].
FRANKLYN [with renewed energy] There again! You see, Con. It will last his time. Life is too short for men to take it seriously.
HASLAM. Thats a way of looking at it, certainly.
FRANKLYN. I was not shoved into the Church, Mr Haslam: I felt it to be my vocation to walk with God, like Enoch. After twenty years of it I realized that I was walking with my own ignorance and self-conceit, and that I was not within a hundred and fifty years of the experience and wisdom I was pretending to.
HASLAM. Now I come to think of it, old Methuselah must have had to think twice before he took on anything for life. If I thought I was going to live nine hundred and sixty years, I don’t think I should stay in the Church.
FRANKLYN. If men lived even a third of that time, the Church would be very different from the thing it is.
CONRAD. If I could count on nine hundred and sixty years I could make myself a real biologist, instead of what I am now: a child trying to walk. Are you sure you might not become a good clergyman if you had a few centuries to do it in?
HASLAM. Oh, theres nothing much the matter with me: it’s quite easy to be a decent parson. It’s the Church that chokes me off. I couldnt stick it for nine hundred years. I should chuck it. You know, sometimes, when the bishop, who is the most priceless of fossils, lets off something more than usually out-of-date, the bird starts in my garden.
FRANKLYN. The bird?
HASLAM. Oh yes. Theres a bird there that keeps on singing ‘Stick it or chuck it: stick it or chuck it’–just like that–for an hour on end in the spring. I wish my father had found some other shop for me.
The parlor maid comes back.
THE PARLOR MAID. Any letters for the post, sir?
FRANKLYN. These. [He proffers a basket of letters. She comes to the table and takes them].
HASLAM [to the maid] Have you told Mr Barnabas yet?
THE PARLOR MAID [flinching a little] No, sir.
FRANKLYN. Told me what?
HASLAM. She is going to leave you?
FRANKLYN. Indeed? I’m sorry. Is it our fault, Mr Haslam?
HASLAM. Not a bit. She is jolly well off here.
THE PARLOR MAID [reddening] I have never denied it, sir: I couldnt ask for a better place. But I have only one life to live; and I maynt get a second chance. Excuse me, sir; but the letters must go to catch the post. [She goes out with the letters.]
The two brothers look inquiringly at Haslam.
HASLAM. Silly girl! Going to marry a village woodman and live in a hovel with him and a lot of kids tumbling over one another, just because the fellow has poetic-looking eyes and a moustache.
CONRAD [demurring] She said it was because she had only one life.
HASLAM. Same thing, poor girl! The fellow persuaded her to chuck it; and when she marries him she’ll have to stick it. Rotten state of things, I call it.
CONRAD. You see, she hasnt time to find out what life really means. She has to die before she knows.
HASLAM [agreeably] Thats it.
FRANKLYN. She hasnt time to form a well-instructed conscience.
HASLAM [still more cheerfully] Quite.
FRANKLYN. It goes deeper. She hasnt time to form a genuine conscience at all. Some romantic points of honor and a few conventions. A world without conscience: that is the horror of our condition.
HASLAM [beaming] Simply fatuous. [Rising] Well, I suppose I’d better be going. It’s most awfully good of you to put up with my calling.
CONRAD [in his former low ghostly tone] You neednt go, you know, if you are really interested.
HASLAM [fed up] Well, I’m afraid I ought to–I really must get back–I have something to do in the–
FRANKLYN [smiling benignly and rising to proffer his hand] Goodbye.
CONRAD [gruffly, giving him up as a bad job] Goodbye.
HASLAM. Goodbye. Sorry–er–
As the rector moves to shake hands with Franklyn, feeling that he is making a frightful mess of his departure, a vigorous sunburnt young lady with hazel hair cut to the level of her neck, like an Italian youth in a Gozzoli picture, comes in impetuously. She seems to have nothing on but her short skirt, her blouse, her stockings, and a pair of Norwegian shoes: in short, she is a Simple-Lifer.
THE SIMPLE-LIFER [swooping on Conrad and kissing him] Hallo, Nunk. Youre before your time.
CONRAD. Behave yourself. Theres a visitor.
She turns quickly and sees the rector. She instinctively switches at her Gozzoli fringe with her fingers, but gives it up as hopeless.
FRANKLYN. Mr Haslam, our new rector. [To Haslam] My daughter Cynthia.
CONRAD. Usually called Savvy, short for Savage.
SAVVY. I usually call Mr Haslam Bill, short for William. [She strolls to the hearthrug, and surveys them calmly from that commanding position].
FRANKLYN. You know him?
SAVVY. Rather. Sit down, Bill.
FRANKLYN. Mr Haslam is going, Savvy. He has an engagement.
SAVVY. I know. I’m the engagement.
CONRAD. In that case, would you mind taking him into the garden while I talk to your father?
SAVVY [to Haslam] Tennis?
HASLAM. Rather!
SAVVY. Come on. [She dances out. He runs boyishly after her].
FRANKLYN [leaving his table and beginning to walk up and down the room discontentedly] Savvy’s manners jar on me. They would have horrified her grandmother.
CONRAD [obstinately] They are happier manners than Mother’s manners.
FRANKLYN. Yes: they are franker, wholesomer, better in a hundred ways. And yet I squirm at them. I cannot get it out of my head that Mother was a well-mannered woman, and that Savvy has no manners at all.
CONRAD. There wasnt any pleasure in Mother’s fine manners. That makes a biological difference.
FRANKLYN. But there was beauty in Mother’s manners, grace in them, style in them: above all, decision in them. Savvy is such a cub.
CONRAD. So she ought to be, at her age.
FRANKLYN. There it comes again! Her age! her age!
CONRAD. You want her to be fully grown at eighteen. You want to force her into a stuck-up, artificial, premature self-possession before she has any self to possess. You just let her alone: she is right enough for her years.
FRANKLYN. I have let her alone; and look at the result! Like all the other young people who have been let alone, she becomes a Socialist. That is, she becomes hopelessly demoralized.
CONRAD. Well, arnt you a Socialist?
FRANKLYN. Yes; but that is not the same thing. You and I were brought up in the old bourgeois morality. We were taught bourgeois manners and bourgeois points of honor. Bourgeois manners may be snobbish manners: there may be no pleasure in them, as you say; but they are better than no manners. Many bourgeois points of honor may be false; but at least they exist. The women know what to expect and what is expected of them. Savvy doesn’t. She is a Bolshevist and nothing else. She has to improvise her manners and her conduct as she goes along. It’s often charming, no doubt; but sometimes she puts her foot in it frightfully; and then I feel that she is blaming me for not teaching her better.
CONRAD. Well, you have something better to teach her now, at all events.
FRANKLYN. Yes: but it is too late. She doesn’t trust me now. She doesn’t talk about such things to me. She doesnt read anything I write. She never comes to hear me lecture. I am out of it as far as Savvy is concerned. [He resumes his seat at the writing-table].
CONRAD. I must have a talk to her.
FRANKLYN. Perhaps she will listen to you. You are not her father.
CONRAD. I sent her my last book. I can break the ice by asking her what she made of it.
FRANKLYN. When she heard you were coming, she asked me whether all the leaves were cut, in case it fell into your hands. She hasnt read a word of it.
CONRAD [rising indignantly] What!
FRANKLYN [inexorably] Not a word of it.
CONRAD [beaten] Well, I suppose it’s only natural. Biology is a dry subject for a girl; and I am a pretty dry old codger.
[He sits down again resignedly].
FRANKLYN. Brother: if that is so; if biology as you have worked at it, and religion as I have worked at it, are dry subjects like the old stuff they taught under these names, and we two are dry old codgers, like the old preachers and professors, then the Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas is a delusion. Unless this withered thing religion, and this dry thing science, have come alive in our hands, alive and intensely interesting, we may just as well go out and dig the garden until it is time to dig our graves. [The parlor maid returns. Franklyn is impatient at the interruption]. Well? what is it now?
THE PARLOR MAID. Mr Joyce Burge on the telephone, sir. He wants to speak to you.
FRANKLYN [astonished] Mr Joyce Burge!
THE PARLOR MAID. Yes, sir.
FRANKLYN [to Conrad] What on earth does this mean? I havnt heard from him nor exchanged a word with him for years. I resigned the chairmanship of the Liberal Association and shook the dust of party politics from my feet before he was Prime Minister in the Coalition. Of course, he dropped me like a hot potato.
CONRAD. Well, now that the Coalition has chucked him out, and he is only one of the half-dozen leaders of the Opposition, perhaps he wants to pick you up again.
THE PARLOR MAID [warningly] He is holding the line, sir.
FRANKLYN. Yes: all right [he hurries out].
The parlor maid goes to the hearthrug to make up the fire. Conrad rises and strolls to the middle of the room, where he stops and looks quizzically down at her.
CONRAD. So you have only one life to live, eh?
THE PARLOR MAID [dropping on her knees in consternation] I meant no offence, sir.
CONRAD. You didn’t give any. But you know you could live a devil of a long life if you really wanted to.
THE PARLOR MAID [sitting down on her heels] Oh, dont say that, sir. It’s so unsettling.
CONRAD. Why? Have you been thinking about it?
THE PARLOR MAID. It would never have come into my head if you hadnt put it there, sir. Me and cook had a look at your book.
CONRAD. What!
You and cook Had a look At my book!
And my niece wouldn’t open it! The prophet is without honor in his own family. Well, what do you think of living for several hundred years? Are you going to have a try for it?
THE PARLOR MAID. Well, of course youre not in earnest, sir. But it does set one thinking, especially when one is going to be married.
CONRAD. What has that to do with it? He may live as long as you, you know.
THE PARLOR MAID. Thats just it, sir. You see, he must take me for better for worse, til death do us part. Do you think he would be so ready to do that, sir, if he thought it might be for several hundred years?
CONRAD. Thats true. And what about yourself?
THE PARLOR MAID. Oh, I tell you straight out, sir, I’d never promise to live with the same man as long as that. I wouldnt put up with my own children as long as that. Why, cook figured it out, sir, that when you were only 200, you might marry your own great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson and not even know who he was.
CONRAD. Well, why not? For all you know, the man you are going to marry may be your great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother’s great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson.
THE PARLOR MAID. But do you think it would ever be thought respectable, sir?
CONRAD. My good girl, all biological necessities have to be made respectable whether we like it or not; so you neednt worry yourself about that.
Franklyn returns and crosses the room to his chair, but does not sit down. The parlor maid goes out.
CONRAD. Well, what does Joyce Burge want?
FRANKLYN. Oh, a silly misunderstanding. I have promised to address a meeting in Middlesborough; and some fool has put it into the papers that I am ‘coming to Middlesborough,’ without any explanation. Of course, now that we are on the eve of a general election, political people think I am coming there to contest the parliamentary seat. Burge knows that I have a following, and thinks I could get into the House of Commons and head a group there. So he insists on coming to see me. He is staying with some people at Dollis Hill, and can be here in five or ten minutes, he says.
CONRAD. But didn’t you tell him that it’s a false alarm?
FRANKLYN. Of course I did; but he wont believe me.
CONRAD. Called you a liar, in fact?
FRANKLYN. No: I wish he had: any sort of plain speaking is better than the nauseous sham good fellowship our democratic public men get up for shop use. He pretends to believe me, and assures me his visit is quite disinterested; but why should he come if he has no axe to grind? These chaps never believe anything they say themselves; and naturally they cannot believe anything anyone else says.
CONRAD [rising] Well, I shall clear out. It was hard enough to stand the party politicians before the war; but now that they have managed to half kill Europe between them, I cant be civil to them, and I dont see why I should be.
FRANKLYN. Wait a bit. We have to find out how the world will take our new gospel. [Conrad sits down again]. Party politicians are still unfortunately an important part of the world. Suppose we try it on Joyce Burge.
CONRAD. How can you? You can tell things only to people who can listen. Joyce Burge has talked so much that he has lost the power of listening. He doesnt listen even in the House of Commons.
Savvy rushes in breathless, followed by Haslam, who remains timidly just inside the door.
SAVVY [running to Franklyn] I say! Who do you think has just driven up in a big car?
FRANKLYN. Mr Joyce Burge, perhaps.
SAVVY [disappointed] Oh, they know, Bill. Why didnt you tell us he was coming? I have nothing on.
HASLAM. I’d better go, hadnt I?
CONRAD. You just wait here, both of you. When you start yawning, Joyce Burge will take the hint, perhaps.
SAVVY [to Franklyn] May we?
FRANKLYN. Yes, if you promise to behave yourself.
SAVVY [making a wry face] That will be a treat, wont it?
THE PARLOR MAID [entering and announcing] Mr Joyce Burge.
Haslam hastily moves to the fireplace; and the parlor maid goes out and shuts the door when the visitor has passed in.
FRANKLYN [hurrying past Savvy to his guest with the false cordiality he has just been denouncing] Oh! Here you are. Delighted to see you. [He shakes Burge’s hand, and introduces Savvy] My daughter.
SAVVY [not daring to approach] Very kind of you to come.
Joyce Burge stands fast and says nothing; but he screws up his cheeks into a smile at each introduction, and makes his eyes shine in a very winning manner. He is a well-fed man turned fifty, with broad forehead, and grey hair which, his neck being short, falls almost to his collar.
FRANKLYN. Mr Haslam, our rector.
Burge conveys an impression of shining like a church window; and Haslam seizes the nearest library chair on the hearth, and swings it round for Burge between the stool and Conrad. He then retires to the window seat at the other side of the room, and is joined by Savvy. They sit there, side by side, hunched up with their elbows on their knees and their chins on their hands, providing Burge with a sort of Stranger’s Gallery during the ensuing sitting.
FRANKLYN. I forget whether you know my brother Conrad. He is a biologist.
BURGE [suddenly bursting into energetic action and shaking hands heartily with Conrad] By reputation only, but very well, of course. How I wish I could have devoted myself to biology! I have always been interested in rocks and strata and volcanoes and so forth: they throw such a light on the age of the earth. [With conviction] There is nothing like biology. ‘The cloud-capped towers, the solemn binnacles, the gorgeous temples, the great globe itself: yea, all that it inherit shall dissolve, and, like this influential pageant faded, leave not a rack behind.’ Thats biology, you know: good sound biology. [He sits down. So do the others, Franklyn on the stool, and Conrad on his Chippendale]. Well, my dear Barnabas, what do you think of the situation? Dont you think the time has come for us to make a move?
FRANKLYN. The time has always come to make a move.
BURGE. How true! But what is the move to be? You are a man of enormous influence. We know that. Weve always known it. We have to consult you whether we like it or not. We–
FRANKLYN [interrupting firmly] I never meddle in party politics now.
SAVVY. It’s no use saying you have no influence, daddy. Heaps of people swear by you.
BURGE [shining at her] Of course they do. Come! let me prove to you what we think of you. Shall we find you a first-rate constituency to contest at the next election? One that wont cost you a penny. A metropolitan seat. What do you say to the Strand?
FRANKLYN. My dear Burge, I am not a child. Why do you go on wasting your party funds on the Strand? You know you cannot win it.
BURGE. We cannot win it; but you–
FRANKLYN. Oh, please!
SAVVY. The Strand’s no use, Mr Burge. I once canvassed for a Socialist there. Cheese it.
BURGE. Cheese it!
HASLAM [spluttering with suppressed laughter] Priceless!
SAVVY. Well, I suppose I shouldnt say cheese it to a Right Honorable. But the Strand, you know! Do come off it.
FRANKLYN. You must excuse my daughter’s shocking manners, Burge; but I agree with her that popular democratic statesmen soon come to believe that everyone they speak to is an ignorant dupe and a born fool into the bargain.
BURGE [laughing genially] You old aristocrat, you! But believe me, the instinct of the people is sound–
CONRAD [cutting in sharply] Then why are you in the Opposition instead of in the Government?
BURGE [shewing signs of temper under this heckling] I deny that I am in the Opposition morally. The Government does not represent the country. I was chucked out of the Coalition by a Tory conspiracy. The people want me back. I dont want to go back.
FRANKLYN [gently remonstrant] My dear Burge: of course you do.
BURGE [turning on him] Not a bit of it. I want to cultivate my garden. I am not interested in politics: I am interested in roses. I havnt a scrap of ambition. I went into politics because my wife shoved me into them, bless her! But I want to serve my country. What else am I for? I want to save my country from the Tories. They dont represent the people. The man they have made Prime Minister has never represented the people; and you know it. Lord Dunreen is the bitterest old Tory left alive. What has he to offer to the people?
FRANKLYN [cutting in before Burge can proceed–as he evidently intends–to answer his own question] I will tell you. He has ascertainable beliefs and principles to offer. The people know where they are with Lord Dunreen. They know what he thinks right and what he thinks wrong. With your followers they never know where they are. With you they never know where they are.
BURGE [amazed] With me!
FRANKLYN. Well, where are you? What are you?
BURGE. Barnabas: you must be mad. You ask me what I am?
FRANKLYN. I do.
BURGE. I am, if I mistake not, Joyce Burge, pretty well known throughout Europe, and indeed throughout the world, as the man who–unworthily perhaps, but not quite unsuccessfully–held the helm when the ship of State weathered the mightiest hurricane that has ever burst with earth-shaking violence on the land of our fathers.
FRANKLYN. I know that. I know who you are. And the earth-shaking part of it to me is that though you were placed in that enormously responsible position, neither I nor anyone else knows what your beliefs are, or even whether you have either beliefs or principles. What we did know was that your Government was formed largely of men who regarded you as a robber of henroosts, and whom you regarded as enemies of the people.
BURGE [adroitly, as he thinks] I agree with you. I agree with you absolutely. I dont believe in coalition governments.
FRANKLYN. Precisely. Yet you formed two.
BURGE. Why? Because we were at war. That is what you fellows never would realize. The Hun was at the gate. Our country, our lives, the honor of our wives and mothers and daughters, the tender flesh of our innocent babes, were at stake. Was that a time to argue about principles?
FRANKLYN. I should say it was the time of all others to confirm the resolution of our own men and gain the confidence and support of public opinion throughout the world by a declaration of principle. Do you think the Hun would ever have come to the gate if he had known that it would be shut in his face on principle? Did he not hold his own against you until America boldly affirmed the democratic principle and came to our rescue? Why did you let America snatch that honor from England?
BURGE. Barnabas: America was carried away by words, and had to eat them at the Peace Conference. Beware of eloquence: it is the bane of popular speakers like you.
FRANKLYN [simultaneous w/ Savvy & Haslam] Well!!
SAVVY [simultaneous w/ Franklyn & Haslam] I like that!
HASLAM [simultaneous w/ Franklyn & Savvy] Priceless!
BURGE [continuing remorselessly] Come down to facts. It wasn’t principle that won the war: it was the British fleet and the blockade. America found the talk: I found the shells. You cannot win wars by principles; but you can win elections by them. There I am with you. You want the next election to be fought on principles: that is what it comes to, doesnt it?
FRANKLYN. I dont want it to be fought at all! An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood: a mud bath for every soul concerned in it. You know very well that it will not be fought on principle.
BURGE. On the contrary it will be fought on nothing else. I believe a program is a mistake. I agree with you that principle is what we want.
FRANKLYN. Principle without program, eh?
BURGE. Exactly. There it is in three words.
FRANKLYN. Why not in one word? Platitudes. That is what principle without program means.
BURGE [puzzled but patient, trying to get at Franklyn’s drift in order to ascertain his price] I have not made myself clear. Listen. I am agreeing with you. I am on your side. I am accepting your proposal. There isnt going to be any more coalition. This time there wont be a Tory in the Cabinet. Every candidate will have to pledge himself to Free Trade, slightly modified by consideration for our Overseas Dominions; to Disestablishment; to Reform of the House of Lords; to a revised scheme of Taxation of Land Values; and to doing something or other to keep the Irish quiet. Does that satisfy you?
FRANKLYN. It does not even interest me. Suppose your friends do commit themselves to all this! What does it prove about them except that they are hopelessly out of date even in party politics? that they have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing since 1885? What is it to me that they hate the Church and hate the landed gentry; that they are jealous of the nobility, and have shipping shares instead of manufacturing businesses in the Midlands? I can find you hundreds of the most sordid rascals, or the most densely stupid reactionaries, with all these qualifications.
BURGE. Personal abuse proves nothing. Do you suppose the Tories are all angels because they are all members of the Church of England?
FRANKLYN. No; but they stand together as members of the Church of England, whereas your people, in attacking the Church, are all over the shop. The supporters of the Church are of one mind about religion: its enemies are of a dozen minds. The Churchmen are a phalanx: your people are a mob in which atheists are jostled by Plymouth Brethren, and Positivists by Pillars of Fire. You have with you all the crudest unbelievers and all the crudest fanatics.
BURGE. We stand, as Cromwell did, for liberty of conscience, if that is what you mean.
FRANKLYN. How can you talk such rubbish over the graves of your conscientious objectors? All law limits liberty of conscience: if a man’s conscience allows him to steal your watch or to shirk military service, how much liberty do you allow it? Liberty of conscience is not my point.
BURGE [testily] I wish you would come to your point. Half the time you are saying that you must have principles; and when I offer you principles you say they wont work.
FRANKLYN. You have not offered me any principles. Your party shibboleths are not principles. If you get into power again you will find yourself at the head of a rabble of Socialists and anti-Socialists, of Jingo Imperialists and Little Englanders, of cast-iron Materialists and ecstatic Quakers, of Christian Scientists and Compulsory Inoculationists, of Syndicalists and Bureaucrats: in short, of men differing fiercely and irreconcilably on every principle that goes to the root of human society and destiny; and the impossibility of keeping such a team together will force you to sell the pass again to the solid Conservative Opposition.
BURGE [rising in wrath] Sell the pass again! You accuse me of having sold the pass!
FRANKLYN. When the terrible impact of real warfare swept your parliamentary sham warfare into the dustbin, you had to go behind the backs of your followers and make a secret agreement with the leaders of the Opposition to keep you in power on condition that you dropped all legislation of which they did not approve. And you could not even hold them to their bargain; for they presently betrayed the secret and forced the coalition on you.
BURGE. I solemnly declare that this is a false and monstrous accusation.
FRANKLYN. Do you deny that the thing occurred? Were the uncontradicted reports false? Were the published letters forgeries?
BURGE. Certainly not. But I did not do it. I was not Prime Minister then. It was that old dotard, that played-out old humbug Lubin. He was Prime Minister then, not I.
FRANKLYN. Do you mean to say you did not know?
BURGE [sitting down again with a shrug] Oh, I had to be told. But what could I do? If we had refused we might have had to go out of office.
FRANKLYN. Precisely.
BURGE. Well, could we desert the country at such a crisis? The Hun was at the gate. Everyone has to make sacrifices for the sake of the country at such moments. We had to rise above party; and I am proud to say we never gave party a second thought. We stuck to–
CONRAD. Office?
SURGE [turning on him] Yes, sir, to office: that is, to responsibility, to danger, to heart-sickening toil, to abuse and misunderstanding, to a martyrdom that made us envy the very soldiers in the trenches. If you had had to live for months on aspirin and bromide of potassium to get a wink of sleep, you wouldn’t talk about office as if it were a catch.
FRANKLYN. Still, you admit that under our parliamentary system Lubin could not have helped himself?
BURGE. On that subject my lips are closed. Nothing will induce me to say one word against the old man. I never have; and I never will. Lubin is old: he has never been a real statesman: he is as lazy as a cat on a hearthrug: you cant get him to attend to anything: he is good for nothing but getting up and making speeches with a peroration that goes down with the back benches. But I say nothing against him. I gather that you do not think much of me as a statesman; but at all events I can get things done. I can hustle: even you will admit that. But Lubin! Oh my stars, Lubin!! If you only knew–
The parlor maid opens the door and announces a visitor.
THE PARLOR MAID. Mr Lubin.
SURGE [bounding from his chair] Lubin! Is this a conspiracy?
They all rise in amazement, staring at the door. Lubin enters: a man at the end of his sixties, a Yorkshireman with the last traces of Scandinavian flax still in his white hair, undistinguished in stature, unassuming in his manner, and taking his simple dignity for granted, but wonderfully comfortable and quite self-assured in contrast to the intellectual restlessness of Franklyn and the mesmeric self-assertiveness of Burge. His presence suddenly brings out the fact that they are unhappy men, ill at ease, square pegs in round holes, whilst he flourishes like a primrose.
The parlor maid withdraws.
LUBIN [coming to Franklyn] How do you do, Mr Barnabas? [He speaks very comfortably and kindly, much as if he were the host, and Franklyn an embarrassed but welcome guest]. I had the pleasure of meeting you once at the Mansion House. I think it was to celebrate the conclusion of the hundred years peace with America.
FRANKLYN [shaking hands] It was long before that: a meeting about Venezuela, when we were on the point of going to war with America.
LUBIN [not at all put out] Yes: you are quite right. I knew it was something about America. [He pats Franklyn’s hand]. And how have you been all this time? Well, eh?
FRANKLYN [smiling to soften the sarcasm] A few vicissitudes of health naturally in so long a time.
LUBIN. Just so. Just so. [Looking round at Savvy] The young lady is–?
FRANKLYN. My daughter, Savvy.
Savvy comes from the window between her father and Lubin.
LUBIN [taking her hand affectionately in both his] And why has she never come to see us?
BURGE. I don’t know whether you have noticed, Lubin, that I am present.
Savvy takes advantage of this diversion to slip away to the settee, where she is stealthily joined by Haslam, who sits down on her left.
LUBIN [seating himself in Burge’s chair with ineffable comfortableness] My dear Burge: if you imagine that it is possible to be within ten miles of your energetic presence without being acutely aware of it, you do yourself the greatest injustice. How are you? And how are your good newspaper friends? [Burge makes an explosive movement; but Lubin goes on calmly and sweetly] And what are you doing here with my old friend Barnabas, if I may ask?
BURGE [sitting down in Conrad’s chair, leaving him standing uneasily in the corner] Well, just what you are doing, if you want to know. I am trying to enlist Mr Barnabas’s valuable support for my party.
LUBIN. Your party, eh? The newspaper party?
BURGE. The Liberal Party. The party of which I have the honor to be leader.
LUBIN. Have you now? Thats very interesting; for I thought I was the leader of the Liberal Party. However, it is very kind of you to take it off my hands, if the party will let you.
BURGE. Do you suggest that I have not the support and confidence of the party?
LUBIN. I dont suggest anything, my dear Burge. Mr Barnabas will tell you that we all think very highly of you. The country owes you a great deal. During the war, you did very creditably over the munitions; and if you were not quite so successful with the peace, nobody doubted that you meant well.
BURGE. Very kind of you, Lubin. Let me remark that you cannot lead a progressive party without getting a move on.
LUBIN. You mean you cannot. I did it for ten years without the least difficulty. And very comfortable, prosperous, pleasant years they were.
BURGE. Yes; but what did they end in?
LUBIN. In you, Burge. You don’t complain of that, do you?
BURGE [fiercely] In plague, pestilence, and famine; battle, murder, and sudden death.
LUBIN [with an appreciative chuckle] The Nonconformist can quote the prayer-book for his own purposes, I see. How you enjoyed yourself over that business, Burge! Do you remember the Knock-Out Blow?
BURGE. It came off: don’t forget that. Do you remember fighting to the last drop of your blood?
LUBIN [unruffled, to Franklyn] By the way, I remember your brother Conrad–a wonderful brain and a dear good fellow–explaining to me that I couldn’t fight to the last drop of my blood, because I should be dead long before I came to it. Most interesting, and quite true. He was introduced to me at a meeting where the suffragettes kept disturbing me. They had to be carried out kicking and making a horrid disturbance.
CONRAD. No: it was later, at a meeting to support the Franchise Bill which gave them the vote.
LUBIN [discovering Conrad’s presence for the first time] Youre right: it was. I knew it had something to do with women. My memory never deceives me. Thank you. Will you introduce me to this gentleman, Barnabas?
CONRAD [not at all affably] I am the Conrad in question. [He sits down in dudgeon on the vacant Chippendale].
LUBIN. Are you? [Looking at him pleasantly] Yes: of course you are. I never forget a face. But [with an arch turn of his eyes to Savvy] your pretty niece engaged all my powers of vision.
BURGE. I wish youd be serious, Lubin. God knows we have passed through times terrible enough to make any man serious.
LUBIN. I do not think I need to be reminded of that. In peace time I used to keep myself fresh for my work by banishing all worldly considerations from my mind on Sundays; but war has no respect for the Sabbath; and there have been Sundays within the last few years on which I have had to play as many as sixty-six games of bridge to keep my mind off the news from the front.
BURGE [scandalized] Sixty-six games of bridge on Sunday!!!
LUBIN. You probably sang sixty-six hymns. But as I cannot boast either your admirable voice or your spiritual fervor, I had to fall back on bridge.
FRANKLYN. If I may go back to the subject of your visit, it seems to me that you may both be completely superseded by the Labor Party.
BURGE. But I am in the truest sense myself a Labor leader. I–[he stops, as Lubin has risen with a half-suppressed yawn, and is already talking calmly, but without a pretence of interest].
LUBIN. The Labor Party! Oh no, Mr Barnabas. No, no, no, no, no. [He moves in Savvy’s direction]. There will be no trouble about that. Of course we must give them a few seats: more, I quite admit, than we should have dreamt of leaving to them before the war; but–[by this time he has reached the sofa where Savvy and Haslam are seated. He sits down between them; takes her hand; and drops the subject of Labor]. Well, my dear young lady? What is the latest news? Whats going on? Have you seen Shoddy’s new play? Tell me all about it, and all about the latest books, and all about everything.
SAVVY. You have not met Mr Haslam. Our Rector.
LUBIN [who has quite overlooked Haslam] Never heard of him. Is he any good?
FRANKLYN. I was introducing him. This is Mr Haslam.
HASLAM. How d’ye do?
LUBIN. I beg your pardon, Mr Haslam. Delighted to meet you. [To Savvy] Well, now, how many books have you written?
SAVVY [rather overwhelmed but attracted] None. I don’t write.
LUBIN. You dont say so; Well, what do you do? Music? Skirt-dancing?
SAVVY. I dont do anything.
LUBIN. Thank God! You and I were born for one another. Who is your favorite poet, Sally?
SAVVY. Savvy.
LUBIN. Savvy! I never heard of him. Tell me all about him. Keep me up to date.
SAVVY. It’s not a poet. I am Savvy, not Sally.
LUBIN. Savvy! Thats a funny name, and very pretty. Savvy. It sounds Chinese. What does it mean?
CONRAD. Short for Savage.
LUBIN [patting her hand] La belle Sauvage.
HASLAM [rising and surrendering Savvy to Lubin by crossing to the fireplace] I suppose the Church is out of it as far as progressive politics are concerned.
BURGE. Nonsense! That notion about the Church being unprogressive is one of those shibboleths that our party must drop. The Church is all right essentially. Get rid of the establishment; get rid of the bishops; get rid of the candlesticks; get rid of the 39 articles; and the Church of England is just as good as any other Church; and I don’t care who hears me say so.
LUBIN. It doesn’t matter a bit who hears you say so, my dear Burge. [To Savvy] Who did you say your favorite poet was?
SAVVY. I dont make pets of poets. Who’s yours?
LUBIN. Horace.
SAVVY. Horace who?
LUBIN. Quintus Horatius Flaccus: the noblest Roman of them all, my dear.
SAVVY. Oh, if he is dead, that explains it. I have a theory that all the dead people we feel especially interested in must have been ourselves. You must be Horace’s reincarnation.
LUBIN [delighted] That is the very most charming and penetrating and intelligent thing that has ever been said to me. Barnabas: will you exchange daughters with me? I can give you your choice of two.
FRANKLYN. Man proposes. Savvy disposes.
LUBIN. What does Savvy say?
BURGE. Lubin: I came here to talk politics.
LUBIN. Yes: you have only one subject, Burge. I came here to talk to Savvy. Take Burge into the next room, Barnabas; and let him rip.
BURGE [half-angry, half-indulgent] No; but really, Lubin, we are at a crisis–
LUBIN. My dear Burge, life is a disease; and the only difference between one man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives. You are always at the crisis; I am always in the convalescent stage. I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while.
SAVVY [half-rising] Perhaps I’d better run away. I am distracting you.
LUBIN [making her sit down again] Not at all, my dear. You are only distracting Burge. Jolly good thing for him to be distracted by a pretty girl. Just what he needs.
BURGE. I sometimes envy you, Lubin. The great movement of mankind, the giant sweep of the ages, passes you by and leaves you standing.
LUBIN. It leaves me sitting, and quite comfortable, thank you. Go on sweeping. When you are tired of it, come back; and you will find England where it was, and me in my accustomed place, with Miss Savvy telling me all sorts of interesting things.
SAVVY [who has been growing more and more restless] Dont let him shut you up, Mr Burge. You know, Mr Lubin, I am frightfully interested in the Labor movement, and in Theosophy, and in reconstruction after the war, and all sorts of things. I daresay the flappers in your smart set are tremendously flattered when you sit beside them and are nice to them as you are being nice to me; but I am not smart; and I am no use as a flapper. I am dowdy and serious. I want you to be serious. If you refuse, I shall go and sit beside Mr Burge, and ask him to hold my hand.
LUBIN. He wouldnt know how to do it, my dear. Burge has a reputation as a profligate–
BURGE [starting] Lubin: this is monstrous. I–
LUBIN [continuing]–but he is really a model of domesticity. His name is coupled with all the most celebrated beauties; but for him there is only one woman; and that is not you, my dear, but his very charming wife.
BURGE. You are destroying my character in the act of pretending to save it. Have the goodness to confine yourself to your own character and your own wife. Both of them need all your attention.
LUBIN. I have the privilege of my age and of my transparent innocence. I have not to struggle with your volcanic energy.
BURGE [with an immense sense of power] No, by George!
FRANKLYN. I think I shall speak both for my brother and myself, and possibly also for my daughter, if I say that since the object of your visit and Mr Joyce Burge’s is to some extent political, we should hear with great interest something about your political aims, Mr Lubin.
LUBIN [assenting with complete good humor, and becoming attentive, clear, and businesslike in his tone] By all means, Mr Barnabas. What we have to consider first, I take it, is what prospect there is of our finding you beside us in the House after the next election.
FRANKLYN. When I speak of politics, Mr Lubin, I am not thinking of elections, or available seats, or party funds, or the registers, or even, I am sorry to have to add, of parliament as it exists at present. I had much rather you talked about bridge than about electioneering: it is the more interesting game of the two.
BURGE. He wants to discuss principles, Lubin.
LUBIN [very cool and clear] I understand Mr Barnabas quite well. But elections are unsettled things; principles are settled things.
CONRAD [impatiently] Great Heavens!–
LUBIN [interrupting him with quiet authority] One moment, Dr Barnabas. The main principles on which modern civilized society is founded are pretty well understood among educated people. That is what our dangerously half-educated masses and their pet demagogues–if Burge will excuse that expression–
BURGE. Dont mind me. Go on. I shall have something to say presently.
LUBIN.–that is what our dangerously half-educated people do not realize. Take all this fuss about the Labor Party, with its imaginary new principles and new politics. The Labor members will find that the immutable laws of political economy take no more notice of their ambitions and aspirations than the law of gravitation. I speak, if I may say so, with knowledge; for I have made a special, study of the Labor question.
FRANKLYN [with interest and some surprise] Indeed?
LUBIN. Yes. It occurred quite at the beginning of my career. I was asked to deliver an address to the students at the Working Men’s College; and I was strongly advised to comply, as Gladstone and Morley and others were doing that sort of thing at the moment. It was rather a troublesome job, because I had not gone into political economy at the time. As you know, at the university I was a classical scholar; and my profession was the Law. But I looked up the text-books, and got up the case most carefully. I found that the correct view is that all this Trade Unionism and Socialism and so forth is founded on the ignorant delusion that wages and the production and distribution of wealth can be controlled by legislation or by any human action whatever. They obey fixed scientific laws, which have been ascertained and settled finally by the highest economic authorities. Naturally I do not at this distance of time remember the exact process of reasoning; but I can get up the case again at any time in a couple of days; and you may rely on me absolutely, should the occasion arise, to deal with all these ignorant and unpractical people in a conclusive and convincing way, except, of course, as far as it may be advisable to indulge and flatter them a little so as to let them down without creating ill feeling in the working-class electorate. In short, I can get that lecture up again almost at a moment’s notice.
SAVVY. But, Mr Lubin, I have had a university education too; and all this about wages and distribution being fixed by immutable laws of political economy is obsolete rot.
FRANKLYN [shocked] Oh, my dear! That is not polite.
LUBIN. No, no, no. Dont scold her. She mustnt be scolded. [To Savvy] I understand. You are a disciple of Karl Marx.
SAVVY. No, no. Karl Marx’s economics are all rot.
LUBIN [at last a little taken aback] Dear me!
SAVVY. You must excuse me, Mr Lubin; but it’s like hearing a man talk about the Garden of Eden.
CONRAD. Why shouldnt he talk about the Garden of Eden? It was a first attempt at biology anyhow.
LUBIN [recovering his self-possession] I am sound on the Garden of Eden. I have heard of Darwin.
SAVVY. But Darwin is all rot.
LUBIN. What! Already!
SAVVY. It’s no good your smiling at me like a Cheshire cat, Mr Lubin; and I am not going to sit here mumchance like an old-fashioned goody goody wife while you men monopolize the conversation and pay out the very ghastliest exploded drivel as the latest thing in politics. I am not giving you my own ideas, Mr Lubin, but just the regular orthodox science of today. Only the most awful old fossils think that Socialism is bad economics and that Darwin invented Evolution. Ask Papa. Ask Uncle. Ask the first person you meet in the street. [She rises and crosses to Haslam]. Give me a cigaret, Bill, will you?
HASLAM. Priceless. [He complies].
FRANKLYN. Savvy has not lived long enough to have any manners, Mr Lubin; but that is where you stand with the younger generation. Dont smoke, dear.
Savvy, with a shrug of rather mutinous resignation, throws the cigaret into the fire. Haslam, on the point of lighting one for himself, changes his mind.
LUBIN [shrewd and serious] Mr Barnabas: I confess I am surprised; and I will not pretend that I am convinced. But I am open to conviction. I may be wrong.
BURGE [in a burst of irony] Oh no. Impossible! Impossible!
LUBIN. Yes, Mr Barnabas, though I do not possess Burge’s genius for being always wrong, I have been in that position once or twice. I could not conceal from you, even if I wished to, that my time has been so completely filled by my professional work as a lawyer, and later on by my duties as leader of the House of Commons in the days when Prime Ministers were also leaders–
BURGE [stung] Not to mention bridge and smart society.
LUBIN.–not to mention the continual and trying effort to make Burge behave himself, that I have not been able to keep my academic reading up to date. I have kept my classics brushed up out of sheer love for them; but my economics and my science, such as they were, may possibly be a little rusty. Yet I think I may say that if you and your brother will be so good as to put me on the track of the necessary documents, I will undertake to put the case to the House or to the country to your entire satisfaction. You see, as long as you can shew these troublesome half-educated people who want to turn the world upside down that they are talking nonsense, it really does not matter very much whether you do it in terms of what Miss Barnabas calls obsolete rot or in terms of what her granddaughter will probably call unmitigated tosh. I have no objection whatever to denounce Karl Marx. Anything I can say against Darwin will please a large body of sincerely pious voters. If it will be easier to carry on the business of the country on the understanding that the present state of things is to be called Socialism, I have no objection in the world to call it Socialism. There is the precedent of the Emperor Constantine, who saved the society of his own day by agreeing to call his Imperialism Christianity. Mind: I must not go ahead of the electorate. You must not call a voter a Socialist until–
FRANKLYN. Until he is a Socialist. Agreed.
LUBIN. Oh, not at all. You need not wait for that. You must not call him a Socialist until he wishes to be called a Socialist: that is all. Surely you would not say that I must not address my constituents as gentlemen until they are gentlemen. I address them as gentlemen because they wish to be so addressed. [He rises from the sofa and goes to Franklyn, placing a reassuring hand on his shoulder]. Do not be afraid of Socialism, Mr Barnabas. You need not tremble for your property or your position or your dignity. England will remain what England is, no matter what new political names may come into vogue. I do not intend to resist the transition to Socialism. You may depend on me to guide it, to lead it, to give suitable expression to its aspirations, and to steer it clear of Utopian absurdities. I can honestly ask for your support on the most advanced Socialist grounds no less than on the soundest Liberal ones.
BURGE. In short, Lubin, youre incorrigible. You dont believe anything is going to change. The millions are still to toil–the people–my people–for I am a man of the people–
LUBIN [interrupting him contemptuously] Dont be ridiculous, Burge. You are a country solicitor, further removed from the people, more foreign to them, more jealous of letting them up to your level, than any duke or any archbishop.
BURGE [hotly] I deny it. You think I have never been poor. You think I have never cleaned my own boots. You think my fingers have never come out through the soles when I was cleaning them. You think–
LUBIN. I think you fall into the very common mistake of supposing that it is poverty that makes the proletarian and money that makes the gentleman. You are quite wrong. You never belonged to the people: you belonged to the impecunious. Impecuniosity and broken boots are the lot of the unsuccessful middle class, and the commonplaces of the early struggles of the professional and younger son class. I defy you to find a farm laborer in England with broken boots. Call a mechanic one of the poor, and he’ll punch your head. When you talk to your constituents about the toiling millions, they don’t consider that you are referring to them. They are all third cousins of somebody with a title or a park. I am a Yorkshireman, my friend. I know England; and you don’t. If you did you would know–
SURGE. What do you know that I don’t know?
LUBIN. I know that we are taking up too much of Mr Barnabas’s time. [Franklyn rises]. May I take it, my dear Barnabas, that I may count on your support if we succeed in forcing an election before the new register is in full working order?
SURGE [rising also] May the party count on your support? I say nothing about myself. Can the party depend on you? Is there any question of yours that I have left unanswered?
CONRAD. We havnt asked you any, you know.
BURGE. May I take that as a mark of confidence?
CONRAD. If I were a laborer in your constituency, I should ask you a biological question?
LUBIN. No you wouldnt, my dear Doctor. Laborers never ask questions.
BURGE. Ask it now. I have never flinched from being heckled. Out with it. Is it about the land?
CONRAD. No.
SURGE. Is it about the Church?
CONRAD. No.
BURGE. Is it about the House of Lords?
CONRAD. No.
BURGE. Is it about Proportional Representation?
CONRAD. No.
SURGE. Is it about Free Trade?
CONRAD. No.
SURGE. Is it about the priest in the school?
CONRAD. No.
BURGE. Is it about Ireland?
CONRAD. No.
BURGE. Is it about Germany?
CONRAD. No.
BURGE. Well, is it about Republicanism? Come! I wont flinch. Is it about the Monarchy?
CONRAD. No.
SURGE. Well, what the devil is it about, then?
CONRAD. You understand that I am asking the question in the character of a laborer who earned thirteen shillings a week before the war and earns thirty now, when he can get it?
BURGE. Yes: I understand that. I am ready for you. Out with it.
CONRAD. And whom you propose to represent n parliament?
SURGE. Yes, yes, yes. Come on.
CONRAD. The question is this. Would you allow your son to marry my daughter, or your daughter to marry my son?
BURGE [taken aback] Oh, come! Thats not a political question.
CONRAD. Then, as a biologist, I don’t take the slightest interest in your politics; and I shall not walk across the street to vote for you or anyone else at the election. Good evening.
LUBIN. Serve you right, Burge! Dr Barnabas: you have my assurance that my daughter shall marry the man of her choice, whether he be lord or laborer. May I count on your support?
SURGE [hurling the epithet at him] Humbug!
SAVVY. Stop. [They all stop short in the movement of leave-taking to look at her]. Daddy: are you going to let them off like this? How are they to know anything if nobody ever tells them? If you don’t, I will.
CONRAD. You cant. You didn’t read my book; and you know nothing about it. You just hold your tongue.
SAVVY. I just wont, Nunk. I shall have a vote when I am thirty; and I ought to have it now. Why are these two ridiculous people to be allowed to come in and walk over us as if the world existed only to play their silly parliamentary game?
FRANKLYN [severely] Savvy: you really must not be uncivil to our guests.
SAVVY. I’m sorry. But Mr Lubin didn’t stand on much ceremony with me, did he? And Mr Burge hasnt addressed a single word to me. I’m not going to stand it. You and Nunk have a much better program than either of them. It’s the only one we are going to vote for; and they ought to be told about it for the credit of the family and the good of their own souls. You just tip them a chapter from the gospel of the brothers Barnabas, Daddy.
Lubin and Burge turn inquiringly to Franklyn, suspecting a move to form a new party.
FRANKLYN. It is quite true, Mr Lubin, that I and my brother have a little program of our own which–
CONRAD [interrupting] It’s not a little program: it’s an almighty big one. It’s not our own: it’s the program of the whole of civilization.
BURGE. Then why split the party before you have put it to us? For God’s sake let us have no more splits. I am here to learn. I am here to gather your opinions and represent them. I invite you to put your views before me. I offer myself to be heckled. You have asked me only an absurd non-political question.
FRANKLYN. Candidly, I fear our program will be thrown away on you. It would not interest you.
BURGE [with challenging audacity] Try. Lubin can go if he likes; but I am still open to new ideas, if only I can find them.
FRANKLYN [to Lubin] Are you prepared to listen, Mr Lubin; or shall I thank you for your very kind and welcome visit, and say good evening?
LUBIN [sitting down resignedly on the settee, but involuntarily making a movement which looks like the stifling of a yawn] With pleasure, Mr Barnabas. Of course you know that before I can adopt any new plank in the party platform, it will have to reach me through the National Liberal Federation, which you can approach through your local Liberal and Radical Association.
FRANKLYN. I could recall to you several instances of the addition to your party program of measures of which no local branch of your Federation had ever dreamt. But I understand that you are not really interested. I will spare you, and drop the subject.
LUBIN [waking up a little] You quite misunderstand me. Please do not take it in that way. I only–
BURGE [talking him down] Never mind the Federation: I will answer for the Federation. Go on, Barnabas: go on. Never mind Lubin [he sits down in the chair from which Lubin first displaced him].
FRANKLYN. Our program is only that the term of human life shall be extended to three hundred years.
LUBIN [softly] Eh?
BURGE [explosively] What!
SAVVY. Our election cry is ‘Back to Methuselah!’
HASLAM. Priceless!
Lubin and Surge look at one another.
CONRAD. No. We are not mad.
SAVVY. Theyre not joking either. They mean it.
LUBIN [cautiously] Assuming that, in some sense which I am for the moment unable to fathom, you are in earnest, Mr Barnabas, may I ask what this has to do with politics?
FRANKLYN. The connection is very evident. You are now, Mr Lubin, within immediate reach of your seventieth year. Mr Joyce Surge is your junior by about eleven years. You will go down to posterity as one of a European group of immature statesmen and monarchs who, doing the very best for your respective countries of which you were capable, succeeded in all-but-wrecking the civilization of Europe, and did, in effect, wipe out of existence many millions of its inhabitants.
BURGE. Less than a million.
FRANKLYN. That was our loss alone.
BURGE. Oh, if you count foreigners–!
HAS LAM. God counts foreigners, you know.
SAVVY [with intense satisfaction] Well said, Bill.
FRANKLYN. I am not blaming you. Your task was beyond human capacity. What with our huge armaments, our terrible engines of destruction, our systems of coercion manned by an irresistible police, you were called on to control powers so gigantic that one shudders at the thought of their being entrusted even to an infinitely experienced and benevolent God, much less to mortal men whose whole life does not last a hundred years.
BURGE. We won the war: don’t forget that.
FRANKLYN. No: the soldiers and sailors won it, and left you to finish it. And you were so utterly incompetent that the multitudes of children slain by hunger in the first years of peace made us all wish we were at war again.
CONRAD. It’s no use arguing about it. It is now absolutely certain that the political and social problems raised by our civilization cannot be solved by mere human mushrooms who decay and die when they are just beginning to have a glimmer of the wisdom and knowledge needed for their own government.
LUBIN. Quite an interesting idea, Doctor. Extravagant. Fantastic. But quite interesting. When I was young I used to feel my human limitations very acutely.
BURGE. God knows I have often felt that I could not go on if it had not been for the sense that I was only an instrument in the hands of a Power above us.
CONRAD. I’m glad you both agree with us, and with one another.
LUBIN. I have not gone so far as that, I think. After all, we have had many very able political leaders even within your recollection and mine.
FRANKLYN. Have you read the recent biographies–Dilke’s, for instance–which revealed the truth about them?
LUBIN. I did not discover any new truth revealed in these books, Mr Barnabas.
FRANKLYN. What! Not the truth that England was governed all that time by a little woman who knew her own mind?
SAVVY. Hear, hear!
LUBIN. That often happens. Which woman do you mean?
FRANKLYN. Queen Victoria, to whom your Prime Ministers stood in the relation of naughty children whose heads she knocked together when their tempers and quarrels became intolerable. Within thirteen years of her death Europe became a hell.
SURGE. Quite true. That was because she was piously brought up, and regarded herself as an instrument. If a statesman remembers that he is only an instrument, and feels quite sure that he is rightly interpreting the divine purpose, he will come out all right, you know.
FRANKLYN. The Kaiser felt like that. Did he come out all right?
SURGE. Well, let us be fair, even to the Kaiser. Let us be fair.
FRANKLYN. Were you fair to him when you won an election on the program of hanging him?
SURGE. Stuff! I am the last man alive to hang anybody; but the people wouldnt listen to reason. Besides, I knew the Dutch wouldnt give him up.
SAVVY. Oh, don’t start arguing about poor old Bill. Stick to our point. Let these two gentlemen settle the question for themselves. Mr Burge: do you think Mr Lubin is fit to govern England?
SURGE. No. Frankly, I dont.
LUBIN [remonstrant] Really!
CONRAD. Why?
BURGE. Because he has no conscience: thats why.
LUBIN [shocked and amazed] Oh!
FRANKLYN. Mr Lubin: do you consider Joyce Burge qualified to govern England?
LUBIN [with dignified emotion, wounded, but without bitterness] Excuse me, Mr Barnabas; but before I answer that question I want to say this. Burge: we have had differences of opinion; and your newspaper friends have said hard things of me. But we worked together for years; and I hope I have done nothing to justify you in the amazing accusation you have just brought against me. Do you realize that you said that I have no conscience?
BURGE. Lubin: I am very accessible to an appeal to my emotions; and you are very cunning in making such appeals. I will meet you to this extent. I dont mean that you are a bad man. I dont mean that I dislike you, in spite of your continual attempts to discourage and depress me. But you have a mind like a looking-glass. You are very clear and smooth and lucid as to what is standing in front of you. But you have no foresight and no hindsight. You have no vision and no memory. You have no continuity; and a man without continuity can have neither conscience nor honor from one day to another. The result is that you have always been a damned bad minister; and you have sometimes been a damned bad friend. Now you can answer Barnabas’s question and take it out of me to your heart’s content. He asked you was I fit to govern England.
LUBIN [recovering himself] After what has just passed I sincerely wish I could honestly say yes, Burge. But it seems to me that you have condemned yourself out of your own mouth. You represent something which has had far too much influence and popularity in this country since Joseph Chamberlain set the fashion; and that is mere energy without intellect and without knowledge. Your mind is not a trained mind: it has not been stored with the best information, nor cultivated by intercourse with educated minds at any of our great seats of learning. As I happen to have enjoyed that advantage, it follows that you do not understand my mind. Candidly, I think that disqualifies you. The peace found out your weaknesses.
BURGE. Oh! What did it find out in you?
LUBIN. You and your newspaper confederates took the peace out of my hands. The peace did not find me out because it did not find me in.
FRANKLYN. Come! Confess, both of you! You were only flies on the wheel. The war went England’s way; but the peace went its own way, and not England’s way nor any of the ways you had so glibly appointed for it. Your peace treaty was a scrap of paper before the ink dried on it. The statesmen of Europe were incapable of governing Europe. What they needed was a couple of hundred years training and experience: what they had actually had was a few years at the bar or in a counting-house or on the grouse moors and golf courses. And now we are waiting, with monster cannons trained on every city and seaport, and huge aeroplanes ready to spring into the air and drop bombs every one of which will obliterate a whole street, and poison gases that will strike multitudes dead with a breath, until one of you gentlemen rises in his helplessness to tell us, who are as helpless as himself, that we are at war again.
CONRAD. Aha! What consolation will it be for us then that you two are able to tell off one another’s defects so cleverly in your afternoon chat?
BURGE [angrily] If you come to that, what consolation will it be that you two can sit there and tell both of us off? you, who have had no responsibility! you, who havnt lifted a finger, as far as I know, to help us through this awful crisis which has left me ten years older than my proper age! Can you tell me a single thing you did to help us during the whole infernal business?
CONRAD. We’re not blaming you: you hadnt lived long enough. No more had we. Cant you see that three-score-and-ten, though it may be long enough for a very crude sort of village life, isnt long enough for a complicated civilization like ours? Flinders Petrie has counted nine attempts at civilization made by people exactly like us; and every one of them failed just as ours is failing. They failed because the citizens and statesmen died of old age or over-eating before they had grown out of schoolboy games and savage sports and cigars and champagne. The signs of the end are always the same: Democracy, Socialism, and Votes for Women. We shall go to smash within the lifetime of men now living unless we recognize that we must live longer.
LUBIN. I am glad you agree with me that Socialism and Votes for Women are signs of decay.
FRANKLYN. Not at all: they are only the difficulties that overtax your capacity. If you cannot organize Socialism you cannot organize civilized life; and you will relapse into barbarism accordingly.
SAVVY. Hear, hear!
SURGE. A useful point. We cannot put back the clock.
HASLAM. I can. Ive often done it.
LUBIN. Tut tut! My dear Burge: what are you dreaming of? Mr Barnabas: I am a very patient man. But will you tell me what earthly use or interest there is in a conclusion that cannot be realized? I grant you that if we could live three hundred years we should all be, perhaps wiser, certainly older. You will grant me in return, I hope, that if the sky fell we should all catch larks.
FRANKLYN. Your turn now, Conrad. Go ahead.
CONRAD. I don’t think it’s any good. I don’t think they want to live longer than usual.
LUBIN. Although I am a mere child of 69, I am old enough to have lost, the habit of crying for the moon.
BURGE. Have you discovered the elixir of life or have you not? If not, I agree with Lubin that you are wasting our time.
CONRAD. Is your time of any value?
SURGE [unable to believe his ears] My time of any value! What do you mean?
LUBIN [smiling comfortably] From your high scientific point of view, I daresay, none whatever, Professor. In any case I think a little perfectly idle discussion would do Burge good. After all, we might as well hear about the elixir of life as read novels, or whatever Burge does when he is not playing golf on Walton Heath. What is your elixir, Dr Barnabas? Lemons? Sour milk? Or what is the latest?
SURGE. We were just beginning to talk seriously; and now you snatch at the chance of talking rot. [He rises]. Good evening. [He turns to the door].
CONRAD [rudely] Die as soon as you like. Good evening.
BURGE [hesitating] Look here. I took sour milk twice a day until Metchnikoff died. He thought it would keep him alive for ever; and he died of it.
CONRAD. You might as well have taken sour beer.
BURGE. You believe in lemons?
CONRAD. I wouldn’t eat a lemon for ten pounds.
BURGE [sitting down again] What do you recommend?
CONRAD [rising with a gesture of despair] Whats the use of going on, Frank? Because I am a doctor, and because they think I have a bottle to give them that will make them live for ever, they are listening to me for the first time with their mouths open and their eyes shut. Thats their notion of science.
SAVVY. Steady, Nunk! Hold the fort.
CONRAD [growls and sits down]!!!
LUBIN. You volunteered the consultation, Doctor. I may tell you that, far from sharing the credulity as to science which is now the fashion, I am prepared to demonstrate that during the last fifty years, though the Church has often been wrong, and even the Liberal Party has not been infallible, the men of science have always been wrong.
CONRAD. Yes: the fellows you call men of science. The people who make money by it, and their medical hangers-on. But has anybody been right?
LUBIN. The poets and story tellers, especially the classical poets and story tellers, have been, in the main, right. I will ask you not to repeat this as my opinion outside; for the vote of the medical profession and its worshippers is not to be trifled with.
FRANKLYN. You are quite right: the poem is our real clue to biological science. The most scientific document we possess at present is, as your grandmother would have told you quite truly, the story of the Garden of Eden.
BURGE [pricking up his ears] Whats that? If you can establish that, Barnabas, I am prepared to hear you out with my very best attention. I am listening. Go on.
FRANKLYN. Well, you remember, don’t you, that in the Garden of Eden Adam and Eve were not created mortal, and that natural death, as we call it, was not a part of life, but a later and quite separate invention?
SURGE. Now you mention it, thats true. Death came afterwards.
LUBIN. What about accidental death? That was always possible.
FRANKLYN. Precisely. Adam and Eve were hung up between two frightful possibilities. One was the extinction of mankind by their accidental death. The other was the prospect of living for ever. They could bear neither. They decided that they would just take a short turn of a thousand years, and meanwhile hand on their work to a new pair. Consequently, they had to invent natural birth and natural death, which are, after all, only modes of perpetuating life without putting on any single creature the terrible burden of immortality.
LUBIN. I see. The old must make room for the new.
SURGE. Death is nothing but making room. Thats all there is in it or ever has been in it.
FRANKLYN. Yes; but the old must not desert their posts until the new are ripe for them. They desert them now two hundred years too soon.
SAVVY. I believe the old people are the new people reincarnated, Nunk. I suspect I am Eve. I am very fond of apples; and they always disagree with me.
CONRAD. You are Eve, in a sense. The Eternal Life persists; only It wears out Its bodies and minds and gets new ones, like new clothes. You are only a new hat and frock on Eve.
FRANKLYN. Yes. Bodies and minds ever better and better fitted to carry out Its eternal pursuit.
LUBIN [with quiet scepticism] What pursuit, may one ask, Mr Barnabas?
FRANKLYN. The pursuit of omnipotence and omniscience. Greater power and greater knowledge: these are what we are all pursuing even at the risk of our lives and the sacrifice of our pleasures. Evolution is that pursuit and nothing else. It is the path to godhead. A man differs from a microbe only in being further on the path.
LUBIN. And how soon do you expect this modest end to be reached?
FRANKLYN. Never, thank God! As there is no limit to power and knowledge there can be no end. ‘The power and the glory, world without end’: have those words meant nothing to you?
BURGE [pulling out an old envelope] I should like to make a note of that. [He does so].
CONRAD. There will always be something to live for.
SURGE [pocketing his envelope and becoming more and more businesslike] Right: I have got that. Now what about sin? What about the Fall? How do you work them in?
CONRAD. I don’t work in the Fall. The Fall is outside Science. But I daresay Frank can work it in for you.
SURGE [to Franklyn] I wish you would, you know. It’s important. Very important.
FRANKLYN. Well, consider it this way. It is clear that when Adam and Eve were immortal it was necessary that they should make the earth an extremely comfortable place to live in.
BURGE. True. If you take a house on a ninety-nine years lease, you spend a good deal of money on it. If you take it for three months you generally have a bill for dilapidations to pay at the end of them.
FRANKLYN. Just so. Consequently, when Adam had the Garden of Eden on a lease for ever, he took care to make it what the house agents call a highly desirable country residence. But the moment he invented death, and became a tenant for life only, the place was no longer worth the trouble. It was then that he let the thistles grow. Life was so short that it was no longer worth his while to do anything thoroughly well.
BURGE. Do you think that is enough to constitute what an average elector would consider a Fall? Is it tragic enough?
FRANKLYN. That is only the first step of the Fall. Adam did not fall down that step only: he fell down a whole flight. For instance, before he invented birth he dared not have lost his temper; for if he had killed Eve he would have been lonely and barren to all eternity. But when he invented birth, and anyone who was killed could be replaced, he could afford to let himself go. He undoubtedly invented wife-beating; and that was another step down. One of his sons invented meat-eating. The other was horrified at the innovation. With the ferocity which is still characteristic of bulls and other vegetarians, he slew his beefsteak-eating brother, and thus invented murder. That was a very steep step. It was so exciting that all the others began to kill one another for sport, and thus invented war, the steepest step of all. They even took to killing animals as a means of killing time, and then, of course, ate them to save the long and difficult labor of agriculture. I ask you to contemplate our fathers as they came crashing down all the steps of this Jacob’s ladder that reached from paradise to a hell on earth in which they had multiplied the chances of death from violence, accident, and disease until they could hardly count on three score and ten years of life, much less the thousand that Adam had been ready to face! With that picture before you, will you now ask me where was the Fall? You might as well stand at the foot of Snowdon and ask me where is the mountain. The very children see it so plainly that they compress its history into a two line epic:
Old Daddy Long Legs wouldn’t say his prayers:
Take him by the hind legs and throw him downstairs.
LUBIN [still immovably sceptical] And what does Science say to this fairy tale, Doctor Barnabas? Surely Science knows nothing of Genesis, or of Adam and Eve.
CONRAD. Then it isnt Science: thats all. Science has to account for everything; and everything includes the Bible.
FRANKLYN. The Book of Genesis is a part of nature like any other part of nature. The fact that the tale of the Garden of Eden has survived and held the imagination of men spellbound for centuries, whilst hundreds of much more plausible and amusing stories have gone out of fashion and perished like last year’s popular song, is a scientific fact; and Science is bound to explain it. You tell me that Science knows nothing of it. Then Science is more ignorant than the children at any village school.
CONRAD. Of course if you think it more scientific to say that what we are discussing is not Adam and Eve and Eden, but the phylogeny of the blastoderm–
SAVVY. You neednt swear, Nunk.
CONRAD. Shut up, you: I am not swearing. [To Lubin] If you want the professional humbug of rewriting the Bible in words of four syllables, and pretending it’s something new, I can humbug you to your heart’s content. I can call Genesis Phylogenesis. Let the Creator say, if you like, ‘I will establish an antipathetic symbiosis between thee and the female, and between thy blastoderm and her blastoderm.’ Nobody will understand you; and Savvy will think you are swearing. The meaning is the same.
HASLAM. Priceless. But it’s quite simple. The one version is poetry: the other is science.
FRANKLYN. The one is classroom jargon: the other is inspired human language.
LUBIN [calmly reminiscent] One of the few modern authors into whom I have occasionally glanced is Rousseau, who was a sort of Deist like Burge–
BURGE [interrupting him forcibly] Lubin: has this stupendously important communication which Professor Barnabas has just made to us: a communication for which I shall be indebted to him all my life long: has this, I say, no deeper effect on you than to set you pulling my leg by trying to make out that I am an infidel?
LUBIN. It’s very interesting and amusing, Burge; and I think I see a case in it. I think I could undertake to argue it in an ecclesiastical court. But important is hardly a word I should attach to it.
BURGE. Good God! Here is this professor: a man utterly removed from the turmoil of our political life: devoted to pure learning in its most abstract phases; and I solemnly declare he is the greatest politician, the most inspired party leader, in the kingdom. I take off my hat to him. I, Joyce Burge, give him best. And you sit there purring like an Angora cat, and can see nothing in it!
CONRAD [opening his eyes widely] Hallo! What have I done to deserve this tribute?
SURGE. Done! You have put the Liberal Party into power for the next thirty years, Doctor: thats what you’ve done.
CONRAD. God forbid!
BURGE. It’s all up with the Church now. Thanks to you, we go to the country with one cry and one only. Back to the Bible! Think of the effect on the Nonconformist vote. You gather that in with one hand; and you gather in the modern scientific sceptical professional vote with the other. The village atheist and the first cornet in the local Salvation Army band meet on the village green and shake hands. You take your school children, your Bible class under the Cowper-Temple clause, into the museum. You shew the kids the Piltdown skull; and you say, ‘Thats Adam. Thats Eve’s husband.’ You take the spectacled science student from the laboratory in Owens College; and when he asks you for a truly scientific history of Evolution, you put into his hand The Pilgrim’s Progress. You–[Savvy and Haslam explode into shrieks of merriment]. What are you two laughing at?
SAVVY. Oh, go on, Mr Burge. Dont stop.
HASLAM. Priceless!
FRANKLYN. Would thirty years of office for the Liberal Party seem so important to you, Mr Burge, if you had another two and a half centuries to live?
BURGE [decisively] No. You will have to drop that part of it. The constituencies wont swallow it.
LUBIN [seriously] I am not so sure of that, Burge. I am not sure that it may not prove the only point they will swallow.
BURGE. It will be no use to us even if they do. It’s not a party point. It’s as good for the other side as for us.
LUBIN. Not necessarily. If we get in first with it, it will be associated in the public mind with our party. Suppose I put it forward as a plank in our program that we advocate the extension of human life to three hundred years! Dunreen, as leader of the opposite party, will be bound to oppose me: to denounce me as a visionary and so forth. By doing so he will place himself in the position of wanting to rob the people of two hundred and thirty years of their natural life. The Unionists will become the party of Premature Death; and we shall become the Longevity party.
BURGE [shaken] You really think the electorate would swallow it?
LUBIN. My dear Burge: is there anything the electorate will not swallow if it is judiciously put to them? But we must make sure of our ground. We must have the support of the men of science. Is there serious agreement among them, Doctor, as to the possibility of such an evolution as you have described?
CONRAD. Yes. Ever since the reaction against Darwin set in at the beginning of the present century, all scientific opinion worth counting has been converging rapidly upon Creative Evolution.
FRANKLYN. Poetry has been converging on it: philosophy has been converging on it: religion has been converging on it. It is going to be the religion of the twentieth century: a religion that has its intellectual roots in philosophy and science just as medieval Christianity had its intellectual roots in Aristotle.
LUBIN. But surely any change would be so extremely gradual that–
CONRAD. Dont deceive yourself. It’s only the politicians who improve the world so gradually that nobody can see the improvement. The notion that Nature does not proceed by jumps is only one of the budget of plausible lies that we call classical education. Nature always proceeds by jumps. She may spend twenty thousand years making up her mind to jump; but when she makes it up at last, the jump is big enough to take us into a new age.
LUBIN [impressed] Fancy my being leader of the party for the next three hundred years!
BURGE. What!!
LUBIN. Perhaps hard on some of the younger men. I think in fairness I shall have to step aside to make room after another century or so: that is, if Mimi can be persuaded to give up Downing Street.
BURGE. This is too much. Your colossal conceit blinds you to the most obvious necessity of the political situation.
LUBIN. You mean my retirement. I really cannot see that it is a necessity. I could not see it when I was almost an old man–or at least an elderly one. Now that it appears that I am a young man, the case for it breaks down completely. [To Conrad] May I ask are there any alternative theories? Is there a scientific Opposition?
CONRAD. Well, some authorities hold that the human race is a failure, and that a new form of life, better adapted to high civilization, will supersede us as we have superseded the ape and the elephant.
BURGE. The superman: eh!
CONRAD. No. Some being quite different from us.
LUBIN. Is that altogether desirable?
FRANKLYN. I fear so. However that may be, we may be quite sure of one thing. We shall not be let alone. The force behind evolution, call it what you will, is determined to solve the problem of civilization; and if it cannot do it through us, it will produce some more capable agents. Man is not God’s last word: God can still create. If you cannot do His work He will produce some being who can.
BURGE [with zealous reverence] What do we know about Him, Barnabas? What does anyone know about Him?
CONRAD. We know this about Him with absolute certainty. The power my brother calls God proceeds by the method of Trial and Error; and if we turn out to be one of the errors, we shall go the way of the mastodon and the megatherium and all the other scrapped experiments.
LUBIN [rising and beginning to walk up and down the room with his considering cap on] I admit that I am impressed, gentlemen. I will go so far as to say that your theory is likely to prove more interesting than ever Welsh Disestablishment was. But as a practical politician–hm! Eh, Burge?
CONRAD. We are not practical politicians. We are out to get something done. Practical politicians are people who have mastered the art of using parliament to prevent anything being done.
FRANKLYN. When we get matured statesmen and citizens–
LUBIN [stopping short] Citizens! Oh! Are the citizens to live three hundred years as well as the statesmen?
CONRAD. Of course.
LUBIN. I confess that had not occurred to me [he sits down abruptly, evidently very unfavorably affected by this new light].
Savvy and Haslam look at one another with unspeakable feelings.
BURGE. Do you think it would be wise to go quite so far at first? Surely it would be more prudent to begin with the best men.
FRANKLYN. You need not be anxious about that. It will begin with the best men.
LUBIN. I am glad to hear you say so. You see, we must put this into a practical parliamentary shape.
BURGE. We shall have to draft a Bill: that is the long and the short of it. Until you have your Bill drafted you don’t know what you are really doing: that is my experience.
LUBIN. Quite so. My idea is that whilst we should interest the electorate in this as a sort of religious aspiration and personal hope, using it at the same time to remove their prejudices against those of us who are getting on in years, it would be in the last degree upsetting and even dangerous to enable everyone to live longer than usual. Take the mere question of the manufacture of the specific, whatever it may be! There are forty millions of people in the country. Let me assume for the sake of illustration that each person would have to consume, say, five ounces a day of the elixir. That would be–let me see–five times three hundred and sixty-five is–um–twenty-five–thirty-two–eighteen–eighteen hundred and twenty-five ounces a year: just two ounces over the hundredweight.
BURGE. Two million tons a year, in round numbers, of stuff that everyone would clamor for: that men would trample down women and children in the streets to get at. You couldnt produce it. There would be blue murder. It’s out of the question. We must keep the actual secret to ourselves.
CONRAD [staring at them] The actual secret! What on earth is the man talking about?
BURGE. The stuff. The powder. The bottle. The tabloid. Whatever it is. You said it wasnt lemons.
CONRAD. My good sir: I have no powder, no bottle, no tabloid. I am not a quack: I am a biologist. This is a thing thats going to happen.
LUBIN [completely let down] Going to happen! Oh! Is that all? [He looks at his watch].
BURGE. Going to happen! What do you mean? Do you mean that you cant make it happen?
CONRAD. No more than I could have made you happen.
FRANKLYN. We can put it into men’s heads that there is nothing to prevent its happening but their own will to die before their work is done, and their own ignorance of the splendid work there is for them to do.
CONRAD. Spread that knowledge and that conviction; and as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow, the thing will happen.
FRANKLYN. We don’t know where or when or to whom it will happen. It may happen first to someone in this room.
HASLAM. It wont happen to me: thats jolly sure.
CONRAD. It might happen to anyone. It might happen to the parlor maid. How do we know?
SAVVY. The parlor maid! Oh, thats nonsense, Nunk.
LUBIN [once more quite comfortable] I think Miss Savvy has delivered the final verdict.
BURGE. Do you mean to say that you have nothing more practical to offer than the mere wish to live longer? Why, if people could live by merely wishing to, we should all be living for ever already! Everybody would like to live for ever. Why don’t they?
CONRAD. Pshaw! Everybody would like to have a million of money. Why havnt they? Because the men who would like to be millionaires wont save sixpence even with the chance of starvation staring them in the face. The men who want to live for ever wont cut off a glass of beer or a pipe of tobacco, though they believe the teetotallers and non-smokers live longer. That sort of liking is not willing. See what they do when they know they must.
FRANKLYN. Do not mistake mere idle fancies for the tremendous miracle-working force of Will nerved to creation by a conviction of Necessity. I tell you men capable of such willing, and realizing its necessity, will do it reluctantly, under inner compulsion, as all great efforts are made. They will hide what they are doing from themselves: they will take care not to know what they are doing. They will live three hundred years, not because they would like to, but because the soul deep down in them will know that they must, if the world is to be saved.
LUBIN [turning to Franklyn and patting him almost paternally] Well, my dear Barnabas, for the last thirty years the post has brought me at least once a week a plan from some crank or other for the establishment of the millennium. I think you are the maddest of all the cranks; but you are much the most interesting. I am conscious of a very curious mixture of relief and disappointment in finding that your plan is all moonshine, and that you have nothing practical to offer us. But what a pity! It is such a fascinating idea! I think you are too hard on us practical men; but there are men in every Government, even on the Front Bench, who deserve all you say. And now, before dropping the subject, may I put just one question to you? An idle question, since nothing can come of it; but still–
FRANKLYN. Ask your question.
LUBIN. Why do you fix three hundred years as the exact figure?
FRANKLYN. Because we must fix some figure. Less would not be enough; and more would be more than we dare as yet face.
LUBIN. Pooh! I am quite prepared to face three thousand, not to say three million.
CONRAD. Yes, because you don’t believe you Will be called on to make good your word.
FRANKLYN [gently] Also, perhaps, because you have never been troubled much by vision of the future.
BURGE [with intense conviction] The future does not exist for Henry Hopkins Lubin.
LUBIN. If by the future you mean the millennial delusions which you use as a bunch of carrots to lure the uneducated British donkey to the polling booth to vote for you, it certainly does not.
SURGE. I can see the future not only because, if I may say so in all humility, I have been gifted with a certain power of spiritual vision, but because I have practised as a solicitor. A solicitor has to advise families. He has to think of the future and know the past. His office is the real modern confessional. Among other things he has to make people’s wills for them. He has to shew them how to provide for their daughters after their deaths. Has it occurred to you, Lubin, that if you live three hundred years, your daughters will have to wait a devilish long time for their money?
FRANKLYN. The money may not wait for them. Few investments flourish for three hundred years.
SAVVY. And what about before your death? Suppose they didn’t get married! Imagine a girl living at home with her mother and on her father for three hundred years! Theyd murder her if she didn’t murder them first.
LUBIN. By the way, Barnabas, is your daughter to keep her good looks all the time?
FRANKLYN. Will it matter? Can you conceive the most hardened flirt going on flirting for three centuries? At the end of half the time we shall hardly notice whether it is a woman or a man we are speaking to.
LUBIN [not quite relishing this ascetic prospect] Hm! [He rises]. Ah, well: you must come and tell my wife and my young people all about it; and you will bring your daughter with you, of course. [He shakes hands with Savvy]. Goodbye. [He shakes hands with Franklyn]. Goodbye, Doctor. [He shakes hands with Conrad]. Come on, Burge: you must really tell me what line you are going to take about the Church at the election?
BURGE. Havnt you heard? Havnt you taken in the revelation that has been vouchsafed to us? The line I am going to take is Back to Methuselah.
LUBIN [decisively] Dont be ridiculous, Burge. You don’t suppose, do you, that our friends here are in earnest, or that our very pleasant conversation has had anything to do with practical politics! They have just been pulling our legs very wittily. Come along. [He goes out, Franklyn politely going with him, but shaking his head in mute protest].
BURGE [shaking Conrad’s hand] It’s beyond the old man, Doctor. No spiritual side to him: only a sort of classical side that goes down with his own set. Besides, he’s done, gone, past, burnt out, burst up; thinks he is our leader and is only our rag and bottle department. But you may depend on me. I will work this stunt of yours in. I see its value. [He begins moving towards the door with Conrad]. Of course I cant put it exactly in your way; but you are quite right about our needing something fresh; and I believe an election can be fought on the death rate and on Adam and Eve as scientific facts. It will take the Opposition right out of its depth. And if we win there will be an O.M. for somebody when the first honors list comes round [by this time he has talked himself out of the room and out of earshot, Conrad accompanying him].
Savvy and Haslam, left alone, seize each other in an ecstasy of amusement, and jazz to the settee, where they sit down again side by side.
HASLAM [caressing her] Darling! what a priceless humbug old Lubin is!
SAVVY. Oh, sweet old thing! I love him. Burge is a flaming fraud if you like.
HASLAM. Did you notice one thing? It struck me as rather curious.
SAVVY. What?
HASLAM. Lubin and your father have both survived the war. But their sons were killed in it.
SAVVY [sobered] Yes. Jim’s death killed mother.
HASLAM. And they never said a word about it!
SAVVY. Well, why should they? The subject didn’t come up. I forgot about it too; and I was very fond of Jim.
HASLAM. I didn’t forget it, because I’m of military age; and if I hadnt been a parson I’d have had to go out and be killed too. To me the awful thing about their political incompetence was that they had to kill their own sons. It was the war casualty lists and the starvation afterwards that finished me up with politics and the Church and everything else except you.
SAVVY. Oh, I was just as bad as any of them. I sold flags in the streets in my best clothes; and–hsh! [she jumps up and pretends to be looking for a book on the shelves behind the settee].
Franklyn and Conrad return, looking weary and glum.
CONRAD. Well, thats how the gospel of the brothers Barnabas is going to be received! [He drops into Burge’s chair].
FRANKLYN [going back to his seat at the table] It’s no use. Were you convinced, Mr Haslam?
HASLAM. About our being able to live three hundred years? Frankly no.
CONRAD [to Savvy] Nor you, I suppose?
SAVVY. Oh, I don’t know. I thought I was for a moment. I can believe, in a sort of way, that people might live for three hundred years. But when you came down to tin tacks, and said that the parlor maid might, then I saw how absurd it was.
FRANKLYN. Just so. We had better hold our tongues about it, Con. We should only be laughed at, and lose the little credit we earned on false pretences in the days of our ignorance.
CONRAD. I daresay. But Creative Evolution doesnt stop while people are laughing. Laughing may even lubricate its job.
SAVVY. What does that mean?
CONRAD. It means that the first man to live three hundred years maynt have the slightest notion that he is going to do it, and may be the loudest laugher of the lot.
SAVVY. Or the first woman?
CONRAD [assenting] Or the first woman.
HASLAM. Well, it wont be one of us, anyhow.
FRANKLYN. How do you know?
This is unanswerable. None of them have anything more to say.