Back to Methuselah · Part IV · Act I (2/2) (2/5)

| The Elderly Gentleman | Certainly. I have no wish to force my conversation on any man who does not desire it. Perhaps you would like to take a nap. If so, pray do not stand on ceremony. | | The Man | What is a nap? | | The Elderly Gentleman | Exasperated, going to him and speaking with great precision and distinctness. A nap, my friend, is a brief period of sleep which overtakes superannuated persons when they endeavor to entertain unwelcome visitors or to listen to scientific lectures. Sleep. Sleep. Bawling into his ear. Sleep. | | The Man | I tell you I am nearly a secondary. I never sleep. | | The Elderly Gentleman | Awestruck. Good Heavens! | | | A young woman with the number one on her cap arrives by land. She looks no older than Savvy Barnabas, whom she somewhat resembles, looked a thousand years before. Younger, if anything. | | The Young Woman | Is this the patient? | | The Man | Scrambling up. This is Zoo. *To Zoo*. Call him Daddy. | | The Elderly Gentleman | Vehemently. No. | | The Man | Ignoring the interruption. Bless you for taking him off my hands! I have had as much of him as I can bear. He goes down the steps and disappears. | | The Elderly Gentleman | Ironically taking off his hat and making a sweeping bow from the edge of the pier in the direction of the Atlantic Ocean. Good afternoon, sir; and thank you very much for your extraordinary politeness, your exquisite consideration for my feelings, your courtly manners. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Clapping his hat on again. Pig! Ass! | | Zoo | Laughs very heartily at him. !!! | | The Elderly Gentleman | Turning sharply on her. Good afternoon, madam. I am sorry to have had to put your friend in his place; but I find that here as elsewhere it is necessary to assert myself if I am to be treated with proper consideration. I had hoped that my position as a guest would protect me from insult. | | Zoo | Putting my friend in his place. That is some poetic expression, is it not? What does it mean? | | The Elderly Gentleman | Pray, is there no one in these islands who understands plain English? | | Zoo | Well, nobody except the oracles. They have to make a special historical study of what we call the dead thought. | | The Elderly Gentleman | Dead thought! I have heard of the dead languages, but never of the dead thought. | | Zoo | Well, thoughts die sooner than languages. I understand your language; but I do not always understand your thought. The oracles will understand you perfectly. Have you had your consultation yet? | | The Elderly Gentleman | I did not come to consult the oracle, madam. I am here simply as a gentleman travelling for pleasure in the company of my daughter, who is the wife of the British Prime Minister, and of General Aufsteig, who, I may tell you in confidence, is really the Emperor of Turania, the greatest military genius of the age. | | Zoo | Why should you travel for pleasure! Can you not enjoy yourself at home? | | The Elderly Gentleman | I wish to see the World. | | Zoo | It is too big. You can see a bit of it anywhere. | | The Elderly Gentleman | Out of patience. Damn it, madam, you don’t want to spend your life looking at the same bit of it! Checking himself. I beg your pardon for swearing in your presence. | | Zoo | Oh! That is swearing, is it? I have read about that. It sounds quite pretty. Dammitmaddam, dammitmaddam, dammitmaddam, dammitmaddam. Say it as often as you please: I like it. | | The Elderly Gentleman | Expanding with intense relief. Bless you for those profane but familiar words! Thank you, thank you. For the first time since I landed in this terrible country I begin to feel at home. The strain which was driving me mad relaxes: I feel almost as if I were at the club. Excuse my taking the only available seat: I am not so young as I was. He sits on the bollard. Promise me that you will not hand me over to one of these dreadful tertiaries or secondaries or whatever you call them. | | Zoo | Never fear. They had no business to give you in charge to Zozim. You see he is just on the verge of becoming a secondary; and these adolescents will give themselves the airs of tertiaries. You naturally feel more at home with a flapper like me. She makes herself comfortable on the sacks. | | The Elderly Gentleman | Flapper? What does that mean? | | Zoo | It is an archaic word which we still use to describe a female who is no longer a girl and is not yet quite adult. | | The Elderly Gentleman | A very agreeable age to associate with, I find. I am recovering rapidly. I have a sense of blossoming like a flower. May I ask your name? | | Zoo | Zoo. | | The Elderly Gentleman | Miss Zoo. | | Zoo | Not Miss Zoo. Zoo. | | The Elderly Gentleman | Precisely. Er⁠—Zoo what? | | Zoo | No. Not Zoo What. Zoo. Nothing but Zoo. | | The Elderly Gentleman | Puzzled. Mrs. Zoo, perhaps. | | Zoo | No. Zoo. Can’t you catch it? Zoo. | | The Elderly Gentleman | Of course. Believe me, I did not really think you were married: you are obviously too young; but here it is so hard to feel sure⁠—er⁠— | | Zoo | Hopelessly puzzled. What? | | The Elderly Gentleman | Marriage makes a difference, you know. One can say things to a married lady that would perhaps be in questionable taste to anyone without that experience. | | Zoo | You are getting out of my depth: I don’t understand a word you are saying. Married and questionable taste convey nothing to me. Stop, though. Is married an old form of the word mothered? | | The Elderly Gentleman | Very likely. Let us drop the subject. Pardon me for embarrassing you. I should not have mentioned it. | | Zoo | What does embarrassing mean? | | The Elderly Gentleman | Well, really! I should have thought that so natural and common a condition would be understood as long as human nature lasted. To embarrass is to bring a blush to the cheek. | | Zoo | What is a blush? | | The Elderly Gentleman | Amazed. Don’t you blush??? | | Zoo | Never heard of it. We have a word flush, meaning a rush of blood to the skin. I have noticed it in my babies, but not after the age of two. | | The Elderly Gentleman | Your babies!!! I fear I am treading on very delicate ground; but your appearance is extremely youthful; and if I may ask how many⁠—? | | Zoo | Only four as yet. It is a long business with us. I specialize in babies. My first was such a success that they made me go on. I⁠— | | The Elderly Gentleman | Reeling on the bollard. Oh! dear! | | Zoo | What’s the matter? Anything wrong? | | The Elderly Gentleman | In Heaven’s name, madam, how old are you? | | Zoo | Fifty-six. | | The Elderly Gentleman | My knees are trembling. I fear I am really ill. Not so young as I was. | | Zoo | I noticed that you are not strong on your legs yet. You have many of the ways and weaknesses of a baby. No doubt that is why I feel called on to mother you. You certainly are a very silly little Daddy. | | The Elderly Gentleman | Stimulated by indignation. My name, I repeat, is Joseph Popham Bolge Bluebin Barlow, O.M. | | Zoo | What a ridiculously long name! I can’t call you all that. What did your mother call you? | | The Elderly Gentleman | You recall the bitterest struggles of my childhood. I was sensitive on the point. Children suffer greatly from absurd nicknames. My mother thoughtlessly called me Iddy Toodles. I was called Iddy until I went to school, when I made my first stand for children’s rights by insisting on being called at least Joe. At fifteen I refused to answer to anything shorter than Joseph. At eighteen I discovered that the name Joseph was supposed to indicate an unmanly prudery because of some old story about a Joseph who rejected the advances of his employer’s wife: very properly in my opinion. I then became Popham to my family and intimate friends, and Mister Barlow to the rest of the world. My mother slipped back into Iddy when her faculties began to fail her, poor woman; but I could not resent that, at her age. | | Zoo | Do you mean to say that your mother bothered about you after you were ten? | | The Elderly Gentleman | Naturally, madam. She was my mother. What would you have had her do? | | Zoo | Go on to the next, of course. After eight or nine children become quite uninteresting, except to themselves. I shouldn’t know my two eldest if I met them. | | The Elderly Gentleman | Again drooping. I am dying. Let me die. I wish to die. | | Zoo | Going to him quickly and supporting him. Hold up. Sit up straight. What’s the matter? | | The Elderly Gentleman | Faintly. My spine, I think. Shock. Concussion. | | Zoo | Maternally. Pow wow wow! What is there to shock you? Shaking him playfully. There! Sit up; and be good. | | The Elderly Gentleman | Still feebly. Thank you. I am better now. | | Zoo | Resuming her seat on the sacks. But what was all the rest of that long name for? There was a lot more of it. Blops Booby or something. | | The Elderly Gentleman | Impressively. Bolge Bluebin, madam: a historical name. Let me inform you that I can trace my family back for more than a thousand years, from the Eastern Empire to its ancient seat in these islands, to a time when two of my ancestors, Joyce Bolge and Hengist Horsa Bluebin, wrestled with one another for the prime ministership of the British Empire, and occupied that position successively with a glory of which we can in these degenerate days form but a faint conception. When I think of these mighty men, lions in war, sages in peace, not babblers and charlatans like the pygmies who now occupy their places in Baghdad, but strong silent men, ruling an empire on which the sun never set, my eyes fill with tears: my heart bursts with emotion: I feel that to have lived but to the dawn of manhood in their day, and then died for them, would have been a nobler and happier lot than the ignominious ease of my present longevity. | | Zoo | Longevity! She laughs. | | The Elderly Gentleman | Yes, madam, relative longevity. As it is, I have to be content and proud to know that I am descended from both those heroes. | | Zoo | You must be descended from every Briton who was alive in their time. Don’t you know that? | | The Elderly Gentleman | Do not quibble, madam. I bear their names, Bolge and Bluebin; and I hope I have inherited something of their majestic spirit. Well, they were born in these islands. I repeat, these islands were then, incredible as it now seems, the centre of the British Empire. When that centre shifted to Baghdad, and the Englishman at last returned to the true cradle of his race in Mesopotamia, the western islands were cast off, as they had been before by the Roman Empire. But it was to the British race, and in these islands, that the greatest miracle in history occurred. | | Zoo | Miracle? | | The Elderly Gentleman | Yes: the first man to live three hundred years was an Englishman. The first, that is, since the contemporaries of Methuselah. | | Zoo | Oh, that! | | The Elderly Gentleman | Yes, that, as you call it so flippantly. Are you aware, madam, that at that immortal moment the English race had lost intellectual credit to such an extent that they habitually spoke of one another as fatheads? Yet England is now a sacred grove to which statesmen from all over the earth come to consult English sages who speak with the experience of two and a half centuries of life. The land that once exported cotton shirts and hardware now exports nothing but wisdom. You see before you, madam, a man utterly weary of the weekend riverside hotels of the Euphrates, the minstrels and pierrots on the sands of the Persian Gulf, the toboggans and funiculars of the Hindu Kush. Can you wonder that I turn, with a hungry heart, to the mystery and beauty of these haunted islands, thronged with spectres from a magic past, made holy by the footsteps of the wise men of the West. Consider this island on which we stand, the last foothold of man on this side of the Atlantic: this Ireland, described by the earliest bards as an emerald gem set in a silver sea! Can I, a scion of the illustrious British race, ever forget that when the Empire transferred its seat to the East, and said to the turbulent Irish race which it had oppressed but never conquered, “At last we leave you to yourselves; and much good may it do you,” the Irish as one man uttered the historic shout “No: we’ll be damned if you do,” and emigrated to the countries where there was still a Nationalist question, to India, Persia, and Korea, to Morocco, Tunis, and Tripoli. In these countries they were ever foremost in the struggle for national independence; and the world rang continually with the story of their sufferings and wrongs. And what poem can do justice to the end, when it came at last? Hardly two hundred years had elapsed when the claims of nationality were so universally conceded that there was no longer a single country on the face of the earth with a national grievance or a national movement. Think of the position of the Irish, who had lost all their political faculties by disuse except that of nationalist agitation, and who owed their position as the most interesting race on earth solely to their sufferings! The very countries they had helped to set free boycotted them as intolerable bores. The communities which had once idolized them as the incarnation of all that is adorable in the warm heart and witty brain, fled from them as from a pestilence. To regain their lost prestige, the Irish claimed the city of Jerusalem, on the ground that they were the lost tribes of Israel; but on their approach the Jews abandoned the city and redistributed themselves throughout Europe. It was then that these devoted Irishmen, not one of whom had ever seen Ireland, were counselled by an English Archbishop, the father of the oracles, to go back to their own country. This had never once occurred to them, because there was nothing to prevent them and nobody to forbid them. They jumped at the suggestion. They landed here: here in Galway Bay, on this very ground. When they reached the shore the older men and women flung themselves down and passionately kissed the soil of Ireland, calling on the young to embrace the earth that had borne their ancestors. But the young looked gloomily on, and said “There is no earth, only stone.” You will see by looking round you why they said that: the fields here are of stone: the hills are capped with granite. They all left for England next day; and no Irishman ever again confessed to being Irish, even to his own children; so that when that generation passed away the Irish race vanished from human knowledge. And the dispersed Jews did the same lest they should be sent back to Palestine. Since then the world, bereft of its Jews and its Irish, has been a tame dull place. Is there no pathos for you in this story? Can you not understand now why I am come to visit the scene of this tragic effacement of a race of heroes and poets? | | Zoo | We still tell our little children stories like that, to help them to understand. But such things do not happen really. That scene of the Irish landing here and kissing the ground might have happened to a hundred people. It couldn’t have happened to a hundred thousand: you know that as well as I do. And what a ridiculous thing to call people Irish because they live in Ireland! you might as well call them Airish because they live in air. They must be just the same as other people. Why do you short-livers persist in making up silly stories about the world and trying to act as if they were true? Contact with truth hurts and frightens you: you escape from it into an imaginary vacuum in which you can indulge your desires and hopes and loves and hates without any obstruction from the solid facts of life. You love to throw dust in your own eyes. |