Back to Methuselah · Part II (2/2) (4/7)

| 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 cigarette, 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. Don’t smoke, dear. | | | Savvy*, with a shrug of rather mutinous resignation, throws the cigarette 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 show 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, you’re incorrigible. You don’t 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. Don’t 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— | | Burge | 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? | | Burge | 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 haven’t 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 wouldn’t, 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. | | Burge | 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. | | Burge | Is it about Free Trade? | | Conrad | No. | | Burge | 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 won’t flinch. Is it about the Monarchy? | | Conrad | No. | | Burge | 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 in parliament? | | Burge | 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! That’s 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? | | Burge | 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 can’t. You didn’t read my book; and you know nothing about it. You just hold your tongue. | | Savvy | I just won’t, 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 hasn’t 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 nonpolitical 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 Burge* look at one another. | | Conrad | No. We are not mad. | | Savvy | They’re 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 Burge 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—! | | Haslam | 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. | | Burge | 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? | | Burge | 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? | | Burge | Stuff! I am the last man alive to hang anybody; but the people wouldn’t listen to reason. Besides, I knew the Dutch wouldn’t 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? | | Burge | No. Frankly, I don’t. | | Lubin | Remonstrant. Really! | | Conrad | Why? | | Burge | Because he has no conscience: that’s 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? |