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

| 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 hadn’t 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, that’s 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 doesn’t 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 mayn’t 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 won’t be one of us, anyhow. | | Franklyn | How do you know? | | | This is unanswerable. None of them have anything more to say. |