UCIUS. 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.

BARNABAS. You ought to have killed yourself. As an honest man you were
entitled to no more than an honest man's expectation of life.

THE ARCHBISHOP. I did kill myself. It was quite easy. I left a suit of
clothes by the seashore during the bathing season, with documents in the
pockets to identify me. I then turned up in a strange place, pretending
that I had lost my memory, and did not know my name or my age or
anything about myself. Under treatment I recovered my health, but not my
memory. I have had several careers since I began this routine of life
and death. I have been an archbishop three times. When I persuaded
the authorities to knock down all our towns and rebuild them from the
foundations, or move them, I went into the artillery, and became a
general. I have been President.

BURGE-LUBIN. Dickenson?

THE ARCHBISHOP. Yes.

BURGE-LUBIN. But they found Dickenson's body: its ashes are buried