THE ARCHBISHOP.  Yes, Mr Chief Secretary:  the truth.  Like all revolutionary truths, it began as a joke.  As I shewed no signs of ageing after forty-five, my wife used to make fun of me by saying that I was certainly going to live three hundred years.  She was sixty-eight when she died; and the last thing she said to me, as I sat by her bedside holding her hand, was ‘Bill:  you really don’t look fifty.  I wonder—­’ She broke off, and fell asleep wondering, and never awoke.  Then I began to wonder too.  That is the explanation of the three hundred years, Mr Secretary.

CONFUCIUS.  It is very ingenious, Mr Archbishop.  And very well told.

BURGE-LUBIN.  Of course you understand that I don’t for a moment suggest the very faintest doubt of your absolute veracity, Archbishop.  You know that, don’t you?

THE ARCHBISHOP.  Quite, Mr President.  Only you don’t believe me:  that is all.  I do not expect you to.  In your place I should not believe.  You had better have a look at the films. [Pointing to the Accountant General] He believes.

BURGE-LUBIN.  But the drowning?  What about the drowning?  A man might get drowned once, or even twice if he was exceptionally careless.  But he couldn’t be drowned four times.  He would run away from water like a mad dog.

THE ARCHBISHOP.  Perhaps Mr Chief Secretary can guess the explanation of that.

CONFUCIUS.  To keep your secret, you had to die.

BURGE-LUBIN.  But dash it all, man, he isn’t dead.

CONFUCIUS.  It is socially impossible not to do what everybody else does. 
One must die at the usual time.

BARNABAS.  Of course.  A simple point of honour.

CONFUCIUS.  Not at all.  A simple necessity.

BURGE-LUBIN.  Well, I’m hanged if I see it.  I should jolly well live for ever if I could.

THE ARCHBISHOP.  It is not so easy as you think.  You, Mr Chief Secretary, have grasped the difficulties of the position.  Let me remind you, Mr President, that I was over eighty before the 1969 Act for the Redistribution of Income entitled me to a handsome retiring pension.  Owing to my youthful appearance I was prosecuted for attempting to obtain public money on false pretences when I claimed it.  I could prove nothing; for the register of my birth had been blown to pieces by a bomb dropped on a village church years before in the first of the big modern wars.  I was ordered back to work as a man of forty, and had to work for fifteen years more, the retiring age being then fifty-five.

BURGE-LUBIN.  As late as fifty-five!  How did people stand it?

THE ARCHBISHOP.  They made difficulties about letting me go even then, I still looked so young.  For some years I was in continual trouble.  The industrial police rounded me up again and again, refusing to believe that I was over age.  They began to call me The Wandering Jew.  You see how impossible my position was.  I foresaw that in twenty years more my official record would prove me to be seventy-five; my appearance would make it impossible to believe that I was more than forty-five; and my real age would be one hundred and seventeen.  What was I to do?  Bleach my hair?  Hobble about on two sticks?  Mimic the voice of a centenarian?  Better have killed myself.