beginning of your fairy tale, Mr. Archbishop.
Burge-Lubin
Good, Confucius! To the Archbishop. He has you there. I don’t see how you can get over that.
The Archbishop
Yes: it is quite a good point. But if the Accountant General will go to the British Museum library, and search the catalogue, he will find under his own name a curious and now forgotten book, dated , entitled The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas. That gospel was that men must live three hundred years if civilization is to be saved. It showed that this extension of individual human life was possible, and how it was likely to come about. I married the daughter of one of the brothers.
Barnabas
Do you mean to say you claim to be a connection of mine?
The Archbishop
I claim nothing. As I have by this time perhaps three or four million cousins of one degree or another, I have ceased to call on the family.
Burge-Lubin
Gracious heavens! Four million relatives! Is that calculation correct, Confucius?
Confucius
In China it might be forty millions if there were no checks on population.
Burge-Lubin
This is a staggerer. It brings home to one—but recovering it isn’t true, you know. Let us keep sane.
Confucius
To the Archbishop. You wish us to understand that the illustrious ancestors of the Accountant General communicated to you a secret by which you could attain the age of three hundred years.
The Archbishop
No. Nothing of the kind. They simply believed that mankind could live any length of time it knew to be absolutely necessary to save civilization from extinction. I did not share their belief: at least I was not conscious of sharing it: I thought I was only amused by it. To me my father-in-law and his brother were a pair of clever cranks who had talked one another into a fixed idea which had become a monomania with them. It was not until I got into serious difficulties with the pension authorities after turning seventy that I began to suspect the truth.
Confucius
The truth?
The Archbishop
Yes, Mr. Chief Secretary: the truth. Like all revolutionary truths, it began as a joke. As I showed no signs of ageing after forty-five, my wife used to make fun of me by saying that I was certainly going to live three hundred years. She was sixty-eight when she died; and the last thing she said to me, as I sat by her bedside holding her hand, was “Bill: you really don’t look fifty. I wonder—” She broke off, and fell asleep wondering, and never awoke. Then I began to wonder too. That is the explanation of the three hundred years, Mr. Secretary.
Confucius
It is very ingenious, Mr. Archbishop. And very well told.
Burge-Lubin
Of course you understand that I don’t for a moment suggest the very faintest doubt of your absolute veracity, Archbishop. You know that, don’t you?
The Archbishop
Quite, Mr. President. Only you don’t believe me: that is all. I do not expect you to. In your place I should not believe. You had better have a look at the films. Pointing to the Accountant General. He believes.
Burge-Lubin
But the drowning? What about the drowning? A man might get drowned once, or even twice if he was exceptionally careless. But he couldn’t be drowned four times. He would run away from water like a mad dog.
The Archbishop
Perhaps Mr. Chief Secretary can guess the explanation of that.
Confucius
To keep your secret, you had to die.
Burge-Lubin
But dash it all, man, he isn’t dead.
Confucius
It is socially impossible not to do what everybody else does. One must die at the usual time.
Barnabas
Of course. A simple point of honour.
Confucius
Not at all. A simple necessity.
Burge-Lubin
Well, I’m hanged if I see it. I should jolly well live forever if I could.
The Archbishop
It is not so easy as you think. You, Mr. Chief Secretary, have grasped the difficulties of the position. Let me remind you, Mr. President, that I was over eighty before the Act for the Redistribution of Income entitled me to a handsome retiring pension. Owing to my youthful appearance I was prosecuted for attempting to obtain public money on false pretences when I claimed it. I could prove nothing; for the register of my birth had been blown to pieces by a bomb dropped on a village church years before in the first of the big modern wars. I was ordered back to work as a man of forty, and had to work for fifteen years more, the retiring age being then fifty-five.
Burge-Lubin
As late as fifty-five! How did people stand it?
The Archbishop
They made difficulties about letting me go even then, I still looked so young. For some years I was in continual trouble. The industrial police rounded me up again and again, refusing to believe that I was over age. They began to call me The Wandering Jew. You see how impossible my position was. I foresaw that in twenty years more my official record would prove me to be seventy-five; my appearance would make it impossible to believe that I was more than forty-five; and my real age would be one hundred and seventeen. What was I to do? Bleach my hair? Hobble about on two sticks? Mimic the voice of a centenarian? Better have killed myself.
Barnabas
You ought to have killed yourself. As an honest man you were entitled to no more than an honest man’s expectation of life.
The Archbishop
I did kill myself. It was quite easy. I left a suit of clothes by the seashore during the bathing season, with documents in the pockets to identify me. I then turned up in a strange place, pretending that I had lost my memory, and did not know my name or my age or anything about myself. Under treatment I recovered my health, but not my memory. I have had several careers since I began this routine of life and death. I have been an archbishop
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