Back to Methuselah · Part III (2/2) (4/6)

| Confucius | I notice that the honorable Domestic Minister, on learning the advanced age of the venerable prelate, shows no sign of surprise or incredulity. | | Burge-Lubin | She doesn’t take it seriously. Who would? Eh, Mrs. Lutestring? | | Mrs. Lutestring | I take it very seriously indeed, Mr. President. I see now that I was not mistaken at first. I have met the Archbishop before. | | The Archbishop | I felt sure of it. This vision of a door opening to me, and a woman’s face welcoming me, must be a reminiscence of something that really happened; though I see it now as an angel opening the gate of heaven. | | Mrs. Lutestring | Or a parlor maid opening the door of the house of the young woman you were in love with? | | The Archbishop | Making a wry face. Is that the reality? How these things grow in our imagination! But may I say, Mrs. Lutestring, that the transfiguration of a parlor maid to an angel is not more amazing than her transfiguration to the very dignified and able Domestic Minister I am addressing. I recognize the angel in you. Frankly, I do not recognize the parlor maid. | | Burge-Lubin | What’s a parlor maid? | | Mrs. Lutestring | An extinct species. A woman in a black dress and white apron, who opened the house door when people knocked or rang, and was either your tyrant or your slave. I was a parlor maid in the house of one of the Accountant General’s remote ancestors. To Confucius. You asked me my age, Mr. Chief Secretary, I am two hundred and seventy-four. | | Burge-Lubin | Gallantly. You don’t look it. You really don’t look it. | | Mrs. Lutestring | Turning her face gravely towards him. Look again, Mr. President. | | Burge-Lubin | Looking at her bravely until the smile fades from his face, and he suddenly covers his eyes with his hands. Yes: you do look it. I am convinced. It’s true. Now call up the Lunatic Asylum, Confucius; and tell them to send an ambulance for me. | | Mrs. Lutestring | To the Archbishop. Why have you given away your secret? our secret? | | The Archbishop | They found it out. The cinema records betrayed me. But I never dreamt that there were others. Did you? | | Mrs. Lutestring | I knew one other. She was a cook. She grew tired, and killed herself. | | The Archbishop | Dear me! However, her death simplifies the situation, as I have been able to convince these gentlemen that the matter had better go no further. | | Mrs. Lutestring | What! When the President knows! It will be all over the place before the end of the week. | | Burge-Lubin | Injured. Really, Mrs. Lutestring! You speak as if I were a notoriously indiscreet person. Barnabas: have I such a reputation? | | Barnabas | Resignedly. It can’t be helped. It’s constitutional. | | Confucius | It is utterly unconstitutional. But, as you say, it cannot be helped. | | Burge-Lubin | Solemnly. I deny that a secret of State has ever passed my lips⁠—except perhaps to the Minister of Health, who is discretion personified. People think, because she is a negress⁠— | | Mrs. Lutestring | It does not matter much now. Once, it would have mattered a great deal. But my children are all dead. | | The Archbishop | Yes: the children must have been a terrible difficulty. Fortunately for me, I had none. | | Mrs. Lutestring | There was one daughter who was the child of my very heart. Some years after my first drowning I learnt that she had lost her sight. I went to her. She was an old woman of ninety-six, blind. She asked me to sit and talk with her because my voice was like the voice of her dead mother. | | Burge-Lubin | The complications must be frightful. Really I hardly know whether I do want to live much longer than other people. | | Mrs. Lutestring | You can always kill yourself, as cook did; but that was influenza. Long life is complicated, and even terrible; but it is glorious all the same. I would no more change places with an ordinary woman than with a mayfly that lives only an hour. | | The Archbishop | What set you thinking of it first? | | Mrs. Lutestring | Conrad Barnabas’s book. Your wife told me it was more wonderful than Napoleon’s Book of Fate and Old Moore’s Almanac, which cook and I used to read. I was very ignorant: it did not seem so impossible to me as to an educated woman. Yet I forgot all about it, and married and drudged as a poor man’s wife, and brought up children, and looked twenty years older than I really was, until one day, long after my husband died and my children were out in the world working for themselves, I noticed that I looked twenty years younger than I really was. The truth came to me in a flash. | | Burge-Lubin | An amazing moment. Your feelings must have been beyond description. What was your first thought? | | Mrs. Lutestring | Pure terror. I saw that the little money I had laid up would not last, and that I must go out and work again. They had things called Old Age Pensions then: miserable pittances for worn-out old laborers to die on. I thought I should be found out if I went on drawing it too long. The horror of facing another lifetime of drudgery, of missing my hard-earned rest and losing my poor little savings, drove everything else out of my mind. You people nowadays can have no conception of the dread of poverty that hung over us then, or of the utter tiredness of forty years’ unending overwork and striving to make a shilling do the work of a pound. | | The Archbishop | I wonder you did not kill yourself. I often wonder why the poor in those evil old times did not kill themselves. They did not even kill other people. | | Mrs. Lutestring | You never kill yourself, because you always may as well wait until tomorrow. And you have not energy or conviction enough to kill the others. Besides, how can you blame them when you would do as they do if you were in their place? | | Burge-Lubin | Devilish poor consolation, that. | | Mrs. Lutestring | There were other consolations in those days for people like me. We drank preparations of alcohol to relieve the strain of living and give us an artificial happiness. | | | All together, making wry faces. | | Burge-Lubin | Alcohol! | | Confucius | Pfff⁠ ⁠… ! | | Barnabas | Disgusting. | | Mrs. Lutestring | A little alcohol would improve your temper and manners, and make you much easier to live with, Mr. Accountant General. | | Burge-Lubin | Laughing. By George, I believe you! Try it, Barnabas. | | Confucius | No. Try tea. It is the more civilized poison of the two. | | Mrs. Lutestring | You, Mr. President, were born intoxicated with your own well-fed natural exuberance. You cannot imagine what alcohol was to an underfed poor woman. I had carefully arranged my little savings so that I could get drunk, as we called it, once a week; and my only pleasure was looking forward to that poor little debauch. That is what saved me from suicide. I could not bear to miss my next carouse. But when I stopped working, and lived on my pension, the fatigue of my life’s drudgery began to wear off, because, you see, I was not really old. I recuperated. I looked younger and younger. And at last I was rested enough to have courage and strength to begin life again. Besides, political changes were making it easier: life was a little better worth living for the nine-tenths of the people who used to be mere drudges. After that, I never turned back or faltered. My only regret now is that I shall die when I am three hundred or thereabouts. There was only one thing that made life hard; and that is gone now. | | Confucius | May we ask what that was? | | Mrs. Lutestring | Perhaps you will be offended if I tell you. | | Burge-Lubin | Offended! My dear lady, do you suppose, after such a stupendous revelation, that anything short of a blow from a sledgehammer could produce the smallest impression on any of us? | | Mrs. Lutestring | Well, you see, it has been so hard on me never to meet a grown-up person. You are all such children. And I never was very fond of children, except that one girl who woke up the mother passion in me. I have been very lonely sometimes. | | Burge-Lubin | Again gallant. But surely, Mrs. Lutestring, that has been your own fault. If I may say so, a lady of your attractions need never have been lonely. | | Mrs. Lutestring | Why? | | Burge-Lubin | Why! Well⁠—. Well, er⁠—. Well, er er⁠—. Well! He gives it up. | | The Archbishop | He means that you might have married. Curious, how little they understand our position. | | Mrs. Lutestring | I did marry. I married again on my hundred and first birthday. But of course I had to marry an elderly man: a man over sixty. He was a great painter. On his deathbed he said to me “It has taken me fifty years to learn my trade, and to paint all the foolish pictures a man must paint and get rid of before he comes through them to the great things he ought to paint. And now that my foot is at last on the threshold of the temple I find that it is also the threshold of my tomb.” That man would have been the greatest painter of all time if he could have lived as long as I. I saw him die of old age whilst he was still, as he said himself, a gentleman amateur, like all modern painters. | | Burge-Lubin | But why had you to marry an elderly man? Why not marry a young one? or shall I say a middle-aged one? If my own affections were not already engaged; and if, to tell the truth, I were not a little afraid of you⁠—for you are a very superior woman, as we all acknowledge⁠—I should esteem myself happy in⁠—er⁠—er⁠— | | Mrs. Lutestring | Mr. President: have you ever tried to take advantage of the innocence of a little child for the gratification of your senses? | | Burge-Lubin | Good Heavens, madam, what do you take me for? What right have you to ask me such a question? | | Mrs. Lutestring | I am at present in my two hundred and seventy-fifth year. You suggest that I should take advantage of the innocence of a child of thirty, and marry it. | | The Archbishop | Can you short-lived people not understand that as the confusion and immaturity and primitive animalism in which we live for the first hundred years of our life is worse in this matter of sex than in any other, you are intolerable to us in that relation? | | Burge-Lubin | Do you mean to say, Mrs. Lutestring, that you regard me as a child? | | Mrs. Lutestring | Do you expect me to regard you as a completed soul? Oh, you may well be afraid of me. There are moments when your levity, your ingratitude, your shallow jollity, make my gorge rise so against you that if I could not remind myself that you are a child I should be tempted to doubt your right to live at all. | | Confucius | Do you grudge us the few years we have? you who have three hundred! | | Burge-Lubin | You accuse me of levity! Must I remind you, madam, that I am the President, and that you are only the head of a department? | | Barnabas | Ingratitude too! You draw a pension for three hundred years when we owe you only seventy-eight; and you call us ungrateful! | | Mrs. Lutestring | I do. When I think of the blessings that have been showered on you, and contrast them with the poverty! the humiliations! the anxieties! the heartbreak! the insolence and tyranny that were the daily lot of mankind when I was learning to suffer instead of learning to live! when I see how lightly you take it all! how you quarrel over the crumpled leaves in your beds of roses! how you are so dainty about your work that unless it is made either interesting or delightful to you you leave it to negresses and Chinamen, I ask myself whether even three hundred years of thought and experience can save you from being superseded by the Power that created you and put you on your trial. | | Burge-Lubin | My dear lady: our Chinese and colored friends are perfectly happy. They are twenty times better off here than they would be in China or Liberia. They do their work admirably; and in doing it they set us free for higher employments. | | The Archbishop | Who has caught the infection of her indignation. What higher employments are you capable of? you that are superannuated at seventy and dead at eighty! | | Mrs. Lutestring | You are not really doing higher work. You are supposed to make the decisions and give the orders; but the negresses and the Chinese make up your minds for you and tell you what orders to give, just as my brother, who was a sergeant in the Guards, used to prompt his officers in the old days. When I want to get anything done at the Health Ministry I do not come to you: I go to the black lady who has been the real president during your present term of office, or to Confucius, who goes on forever while presidents come and presidents go. | | Burge-Lubin | This is outrageous. This is treason to the white race. And let me tell you, madam, that I have never in my life met the Minister of Health, and that I protest against the vulgar color prejudice which disparages her great ability and her eminent services to the State. My relations with her are purely telephonic, gramophonic, photophonic, and, may I add, platonic. | | The Archbishop | There is no reason why you should be ashamed of them in any case, Mr. President. But let us look at the position impersonally. Can you deny that what is happening is that the English people have become a Joint Stock Company admitting Asiatics and Africans as shareholders? | | Barnabas | Nothing like it. I know all about the old joint stock companies. The shareholders did no work. | | The Archbishop | That is true; but we, like them, get our dividends whether we work or not. We work partly because we know there would be no dividends if we did not, and partly because if we refuse we are regarded as mentally deficient and put into a lethal chamber. But what do we work at? Before the few changes we were forced to make by the revolutions that followed the Four Years War, our governing classes had been so rich, as it was called, that they had become the most intellectually lazy and fatheaded people on the face of the earth. There is a good deal of that fat still clinging to us. | | Burge-Lubin | As President, I must not listen to unpatriotic criticisms of our national character, Mr. Archbishop. | | The Archbishop | As Archbishop, Mr. President, it is my official duty to criticize the national character unsparingly. At the canonization of Saint Henrik Ibsen, you yourself unveiled the monument to him which bears on its pedestal the noble inscription, “I came not to call sinners, but the righteous, to repentance.” The proof of what I say is that our routine work, and what may be called our ornamental and figurehead work, is being more and more sought after by the English; whilst the thinking, organizing, calculating, directing work is done by yellow brains, brown brains, and black brains, just as it was done in my early days by Jewish brains, Scottish brains, Italian brains, German brains. The only white men who still do serious work are those who, like the Accountant General, have no capacity for enjoyment, and no social gifts to make them welcome outside their offices. | | Barnabas | Confound your impudence! I had gifts enough to find you out, anyhow. | | The Archbishop | Disregarding this outburst. If you were to kill me as I stand here, you would have to appoint an Indian to succeed me. I take precedence today not as an Englishman, but as a man with more than a century and a half of fully adult experience. We are letting all the power slip into the hands of the colored people. In another hundred years we shall be simply their household pets. |