The Thing Happens: A.D. 2170/Act I, § iv
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 fat-headed 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 figure-head 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.
BURGE-LUBIN [reacting buoyantly] Not the least danger of it. I grant you we leave the most troublesome part of the labor of the nation to them. And a good job too: why should we drudge at it? But think of the activities of our leisure! Is there a jollier place on earth to live in than England out of office hours? And to whom do we owe that? To ourselves, not to the niggers. The nigger and the Chink are all right from Tuesday to Friday; but from Friday to Tuesday they are simply nowhere; and the real life of England is from Friday to Tuesday.
THE ARCHBISHOP. That is terribly true. In devising brainless amusements; in pursuing them with enormous vigor, and taking them with eager seriousness, our English people are the wonder of the world. They always were. And it is just as well; for otherwise their sensuality would become morbid and destroy them. What appals me is that their amusements should amuse them. They are the amusements of boys and girls. They are pardonable up to the age of fifty or sixty: after that they are ridiculous. I tell you, what is wrong with us is that we are a non-adult race; and the Irish and the Scots, and the niggers and Chinks, as you call them, though their lifetime is as short as ours, or shorter, yet do somehow contrive to grow up a little before they die. We die in boyhood: the maturity that should make us the greatest of all the nations lies beyond the grave for us. Either we shall go under as greybeards with golf clubs in our hands, or we must will to live longer.
MRS LUTESTRING. Yes: that is it. I could not have expressed it in words; but you have expressed it for me. I felt, even when I was an ignorant domestic slave, that we had the possibility of becoming a great nation within us; but our faults and follies drove me to cynical hopelessness. We all ended then like that. It is the highest creatures who take the longest to mature, and are the most helpless during their immaturity. I know now that it took me a whole century to grow up. I began my serious life when I was a hundred and twenty. Asiatics cannot control me: I am not a child in their hands, as you are, Mr President. Neither, I am sure, is the Archbishop. They respect me. You are not grown up enough even for that, though you were kind enough to say that I frighten you.
BURGE-LUBIN. Honestly, you do. And will you think me very rude if I say that if I must choose between a white woman old enough to be my great-grandmother and a black woman of my own age, I shall probably find the black woman more sympathetic?
MRS LUTESTRING. And more attractive in color, perhaps?
BURGE-LUBIN. Yes. Since you ask me, more—well, not more attractive: I do not deny that you have an excellent appearance—but I will say, richer. More Venetian. Tropical. 'The shadowed livery of the burnished sun.'
MRS LUTESTRING. Our women, and their favorite story writers, begin already to talk about men with golden complexions.
CONFUCIUS [expanding into a smile all across both face and body] A-a-a-a-a-h!
BURGE-LUBIN. Well, what of it, madam? Have you read a very interesting book by the librarian of the Biological Society suggesting that the future of the world lies with the Mulatto?
MRS LUTESTRING [rising] Mr Archbishop: if the white race is to be saved, our destiny is apparent.
THE ARCHBISHOP. Yes: our duty is pretty clear.
MRS LUTESTRING. Have you time to come home with me and discuss the matter?
THE ARCHBISHOP [rising] With pleasure.
BARNABAS [rising also and rushing past Mrs Lutestring to the door, where he turns to bar her way] No you don't. Burge: you understand, don't you?
BURGE-LUBIN. No. What is it?
BARNABAS. These two are going to marry.
BURGE-LUBIN. Why shouldn't they, if they want to?
BARNABAS. They don't want to. They will do it in cold blood because their children will live three hundred years. It mustnt be allowed.
CONFUCIUS. You cannot prevent it. There is no law that gives you power to interfere with them.
BARNABAS. If they force me to it I will obtain legislation against marriages above the age of seventy-eight.
THE ARCHBISHOP. There is not time for that before we are married, Mr Accountant General. Be good enough to get out of the lady's way.
BARNABAS. There is time to send the lady to the lethal chamber before anything comes of your marriage. Dont forget that.
MRS LUTESTRING. What nonsense, Mr Accountant General! Good afternoon, Mr President. Good afternoon, Mr Chief Secretary. [They rise and acknowledge her salutation with bows. She walks straight at the Accountant General, who instinctively shrinks out of her way as she leaves the room.]
THE ARCHBISHOP. I am surprised at you, Mr Barnabas. Your tone was like an echo from the Dark Ages. [He follows the Domestic Minister].
- Confucius, shaking his head and clucking with his tongue in deprecation of this painful episode, moves to the chair just vacated by the Archbishop and stands behind it with folded palms, looking at the President. The Accountant General shakes his fist after the departed visitors, and bursts into savage abuse of them.
BARNABAS. Thieves! Cursed thieves! Vampires! What are you going to do, Burge?
BURGE-LUBIN. Do?
BARNABAS. Yes, do. There must be dozens of these people in existence. Are you going to let them do what the two who have just left us mean to do, and crowd us off the face of the earth?
BURGE-LUBIN [sitting down] Oh, come, Barnabas! What harm are they doing? Arnt you interested in them? Dont you like them?
BARNABAS. Like them! I hate them. They are monsters, unnatural monsters. They are poison to me.
BURGE-LUBIN. What possible objection can there be to their living as long as they can? It does not shorten our lives, does it?
BARNABAS. If I have to die when I am seventy-eight, I don't see why another man should be privileged to live to be two hundred and seventy-eight. It does shorten my life, relatively. It makes us ridiculous. If they grew to be twelve feet high they would make us all dwarfs. They talked to us as if we were children. There is no love lost between us: their hatred of us came out soon enough. You heard what the woman said, and how the Archbishop backed her up?
BURGE-LUBIN. But what can we do to them?
BARNABAS. Kill them.
BURGE-LUBIN. Nonsense!
BARNABAS. Lock them up. Sterilize them somehow, anyhow.
BURGE-LUBIN. But what reason could we give?
BARNABAS. What reason can you give for killing a snake? Nature tells you to do it.
BURGE-LUBIN. My dear Barnabas, you are out of your mind.
BARNABAS. Havnt you said that once too often already this morning?
BURGE-LUBIN. I don't believe you will carry a single soul with you.
BARNABAS. I understand. I know you. You think you are one of them.
CONFUCIUS. Mr Accountant General: you may be one of them.
BARNABAS. How dare you accuse me of such a thing? I am an honest man, not a monster. I won my place in public life by demonstrating that the true expectation of human life is seventy-eight point six. And I will resist any attempt to alter or upset it to the last drop of my blood if need be.
BURGE-LUBIN. Oh, tut tut! Come, come! Pull yourself together. How can you, a descendant of the great Conrad Barnabas, the man who is still remembered by his masterly Biography of a Black Beetle, be so absurd?
BARNABAS. You had better go and write the autobiography of a jackass. I am going to raise the country against this horror, and against you, if you shew the slightest sign of weakness about it.
CONFUCIUS [very impressively] You will regret it if you do.
BARNABAS. What is to make me regret it?
CONFUCIUS. Every mortal man and woman in the community will begin to count on living for three centuries. Things will happen which you do not foresee: terrible things. The family will dissolve: parents and children will be no longer the old and the young: brothers and sisters will meet as strangers after a hundred years separation: the ties of blood will lose their innocence. The imaginations of men, let loose over the possibilities of three centuries of life, will drive them mad and wreck human society. This discovery must be kept a dead secret. [He sits down].
BARNABAS. And if I refuse to keep the secret?
CONFUCIUS. I shall have you safe in a lunatic asylum the day after you blab.
BARNABAS. You forget that I can produce the Archbishop to prove my statement.
CONFUCIUS. So can I. Which of us do you think he will support when I explain to him that your object in revealing his age is to get him killed?
BARNABAS [desperate] Burge: are you going to back up this yellow abomination against me? Are we public men and members of the Government? or are we damned blackguards?
CONFUCIUS [unmoved] Have you ever known a public man who was not what vituperative people called a damned blackguard when some inconsiderate person wanted to tell the public more than was good for it?
BARNABAS. Hold your tongue, you insolent heathen. Burge: I spoke to you.
BURGE-LUBIN. Well, you know, my dear Barnabas, Confucius is a very long-headed chap. I see his point.
BARNABAS. Do you? Then let me tell you that, except officially, I will never speak to you again. Do you hear?
BURGE-LUBIN [cheerfully] You will. You will.
BARNABAS. And don't you ever dare speak to me again. Do you hear? [He turns to the door].
BURGE-LUBIN. I will. I will. Goodbye, Barnabas. God bless you.
BARNABAS. May you live forever, and be the laughingstock of the whole world! [he dashes out in a fury].
BURGE-LUBIN [laughing indulgently] He will keep the secret all right. I know Barnabas. You neednt worry.
CONFUCIUS [troubled and grave] There are no secrets except the secrets that keep themselves. Consider. There are those films at the Record Office. We have no power to prevent the Master of the Records from publishing this discovery made in his department. We cannot silence the American—who can silence an American?—nor the people who were there today to receive him. Fortunately, a film can prove nothing but a resemblance.
BURGE-LUBIN. Thats very true. After all, the whole thing is confounded nonsense, isnt it?
CONFUCIUS [raising his head to look at him] You have decided not to believe it now that you realize its inconveniences. That is the English method. It may not work in this case.
BURGE-LUBIN. English be hanged! It's common sense. You know, those two people got us hypnotized: not a doubt of it. They must have been kidding us. They were, werent they?
CONFUCIUS. You looked into that woman's face; and you believed.
BURGE-LUBIN. Just so. Thats where she had me. I shouldn't have believed her a bit if she'd turned her back to me.
CONFUCIUS [shakes his head slowly and repeatedly]???
BURGE-LUBIN. You really think—? [He hesitates.]
CONFUCIUS. The Archbishop has always been a puzzle to me. Ever since I learnt to distinguish between one English face and another I have noticed what the woman pointed out: that the English face is not an adult face, just as the English mind is not an adult mind.
BURGE-LUBIN. Stow it, John Chinaman. If ever there was a race divinely appointed to take charge of the non-adult races and guide them and train them and keep them out of mischief until they grow up to be capable of adopting our institutions, that race is the English race. It is the only race in the world that has that characteristic. Now!
CONFUCIUS. That is the fancy of a child nursing a doll. But it is ten times more childish of you to dispute the highest compliment ever paid you.
BURGE-LUBIN. You call it a compliment to class us as grown-up children.
CONFUCIUS. Not grown-up children, children at fifty, sixty, seventy. Your maturity is so late that you never attain to it. You have to be governed by races which are mature at forty. That means that you are potentially the most highly developed race on earth, and would be actually the greatest if you could live long enough to attain to maturity.
BURGE-LUBIN [grasping the idea at last] By George, Confucius, youre right! I never thought of that. That explains everything. We are just a lot of schoolboys: theres no denying it. Talk to an Englishman about anything serious, and he listens to you curiously for a moment just as he listens to a chap playing classical music. Then he goes back to his marine golf, or motoring, or flying, or women, just like a bit of stretched elastic when you let it go. [Soaring to the height of his theme] Oh, youre quite right. We are only in our infancy. I ought to be in a perambulator, with a nurse shoving me along. It's true: it's absolutely true. But some day we'll grow up; and then, by Jingo, we'll shew em.
CONFUCIUS. The Archbishop is an adult. When I was a child I was dominated and intimidated by people whom I now know to have been weaker and sillier than I, because there was some mysterious quality in their mere age that overawed me. I confess that, though I have kept up appearances, I have always been afraid of the Archbishop.
BURGE-LUBIN. Between ourselves, Confucius, so have I.
CONFUCIUS. It is this that convinced me. It was this in the woman's face that convinced you. Their new departure in the history of the race is no fraud. It does not even surprise me.
BURGE-LUBIN. Oh, come! Not surprise you! It's your pose never to be surprised at anything; but if you are not surprised at this you are not human.
CONFUCIUS. I am staggered, just as a man may be staggered by an explosion for which he has himself laid the charge and lighted the fuse. But I am not surprised, because, as a philosopher and a student of evolutionary biology, I have come to regard some such development as this as inevitable. If I had not thus prepared myself to be credulous, no mere evidence of films and well-told tales would have persuaded me to believe. As it is, I do believe.
BURGE-LUBIN. Well, that being settled, what the devil is to happen next? Whats the next move for us?
CONFUCIUS. We do not make the next move. The next move will be made by the Archbishop and the woman.
BURGE-LUBIN. Their marriage?
CONFUCIUS. More than that. They have made the momentous discovery that they are not alone in the world.
BURGE-LUBIN. You think there are others?
CONFUCIUS. There must be many others. Each of them believes that he or she is the only one to whom the miracle has happened. But the Archbishop knows better now. He will advertise in terms which only the longlived people will understand. He will bring them together and organize them. They will hasten from all parts of the earth. They will become a great Power.
BURGE-LUBIN [a little alarmed] I say, will they? I suppose they will. I wonder is Barnabas right after all? Ought we to allow it?
CONFUCIUS. Nothing that we can do will stop it. We cannot in our souls really want to stop it: the vital force that has produced this change would paralyse our opposition to it, if we were mad enough to oppose. But we will not oppose. You and I may be of the elect, too.
BURGE-LUBIN. Yes: thats what gets us every time. What the deuce ought we to do? Something must be done about it, you know.
CONFUCIUS. Let us sit still, and meditate in silence on the vistas before us.
BURGE-LUBIN. By George, I believe youre right. Let us.
They sit meditating, the Chinaman naturally, the President with visible effort and intensity. He is positively glaring into the future when the voice of the Negress is heard.
THE NEGRESS. Mr President.
BURGE-LUBIN [joyfully] Yes. [Taking up a peg] Are you at home?
THE NEGRESS. No. Omega, zero, x squared.
- The President rapidly puts the peg in the switchboard; works the dial; and presses the button. The screen becomes transparent; and the Negress, brilliantly dressed, appears on what looks like the bridge of a steam yacht in glorious sea weather. The installation with which she is communicating is beside the binnacle.
CONFUCIUS [looking round, and recoiling with a shriek of disgust] Ach! Avaunt! Avaunt! [He rushes from the room].
BURGE-LUBIN. What part of the coast is that?
THE NEGRESS. Fishguard Bay. Why not run over and join me for the afternoon? I am disposed to be approachable at last.
BURGE-LUBIN. But Fishguard! Two hundred and seventy miles.
THE NEGRESS. There is a lightning express on the Irish Air Service at half-past sixteen. They will drop you by a parachute in the bay. The dip will do you good. I will pick you up and dry you and give you a first-rate time.
BURGE-LUBIN. Delightful. But a little risky, isnt it?
THE NEGRESS. Risky! I thought you were afraid of nothing.
BURGE-LUBIN. I am not exactly afraid; but—
THE NEGRESS [offended] But you think it is not good enough. Very well [she raises her hand to take the peg out of her switchboard].
BURGE-LUBIN [imploringly] No: stop: let me explain: hold the line just one moment. Oh, please.
THE NEGRESS [waiting with her hand poised over the peg] Well?
BURGE-LUBIN. The fact is, I have been behaving very recklessly for some time past under the impression that my life would be so short that it was not worth bothering about. But I have just learnt that I may live—well, much longer than I expected. I am sure your good sense will tell you that this alters the case. I—
THE NEGRESS [with suppressed rage] Oh, quite. Pray don't risk your precious, life on my account. Sorry for troubling you. Goodbye. [She snatches out her peg and vanishes].
BURGE-LUBIN [urgently] No: please hold on. I can convince you—[a loud buzz-uzz-uzz]. Engaged! Who is she calling up now? [Represses the button and calls] The Chief Secretary. Say I want to see him again, just for a moment.
CONFUCIUS'S VOICE. Is the woman gone?
BURGE-LUBIN. Yes, yes: it's all right. Just a moment, if—[Confucius returns] Confucius: I have some important business at Fishguard. The Irish Air Service can drop me in the bay by parachute. I suppose it's quite safe, isnt it?
CONFUCIUS. Nothing is quite safe. The air service is as safe as any other travelling service. The parachute is safe. But the water is not safe.
BURGE-LUBIN. Why? They will give me an unsinkable tunic, wont they?
CONFUCIUS. You will not sink; but the sea is very cold. You may get rheumatism for life.
BURGE-LUBIN. For life! That settles it: I wont risk it.
CONFUCIUS. Good. You have at last become prudent: you are no longer what you call a sportsman: you are a sensible coward, almost a grown-up man. I congratulate you.
BURGE-LUBIN [resolutely] Coward or no coward, I will not face an eternity of rheumatism for any woman that ever was born. [He rises and goes to the rack for his fillet] I have changed my mind: I am going home. [He cocks the fillet rakishly] Good evening.
CONFUCIUS. So early? If the Minister of Health rings you up, what shall I tell her?
BURGE-LUBIN. Tell her to go to the devil. [He goes out].
CONFUCIUS [shaking his head, shocked at the President's impoliteness] No. No, no, no, no, no. Oh, these English! these crude young civilizations! Their manners! Hogs. Hogs.