Jumpers (7 page)

BONES
(
his pencil poised, his eyes wide
): I am enthralled.

GEORGE
: Oh. Well, in simple terms he believes that on the whole people should tell the truth all right, and keep their promises, and so on—but on the sole grounds that if everybody went around telling lies and breaking their word as a matter of course, normal life would be impossible. Of course, he is defining normality in terms of the truth being told and promises being kept, etcetera, so the definition is circular and not worth very much, but the point is it allows him to conclude that telling lies is not
sinful
but simply anti-social.

BONES
: And murder?

GEORGE
: And murder, too, yes.

BONES
: He thinks there's nothing
wrong
with killing people?

GEORGE
: Well, put like that, of course…. But
philosophically
, he doesn't think it's actually, inherently wrong in itself, no.

BONES
(
amazed
): What sort of philosophy is that?

GEORGE
: Mainstream, I'd call it. Orthodox mainstream.
(
BONES
scratches his head
,
GEORGE
gazes at him innocently
.)

BONES
: How would you describe him—this McFee?

GEORGE
: Duncan? Well, he's completely mad, of course. They all are…. Well, Inspector, I'm sorry to have wasted your time, but I don't think there's any need to trouble you further. An Englishman's home is his castle, eh?
(
He opens the Front Door
,
BONES
ignores it
.)

BONES
(
with irony
): In these cases, we
do
like to have a look at the scene of the crime——

GEORGE
: Oh, really? What for?

BONES
: It's traditional…. Where can I find a vase?

GEORGE
: A vase? In the kitchen.

BONES
: About mad McFee—has he got a gun?

GEORGE
: I don't know. I believe he has a fishing-rod——Oh
no
, you don't understand. He wouldn't
kill
anyone. He's against it. He thinks it shouldn't be allowed. He would prefer it to be kept to a minimum. Otherwise—shambles. He's no more capable of killing someone than the Archbishop of Canterbury. (
Small pause
.) Not
as
capable.

BONES
: Well, if that's the case, I don't see any difference whether he thinks he's obeying the Ten Commandments or the rules of tennis.

GEORGE
: The difference is, the rules of tennis can be changed.
(
Immediately: Procession music.
Procession on Screen
.
LIGHT UP
Bedroom
.
BONES
exits to Kitchen
,
GEORGE
closes the Front Door
.
DOTTY
hears the door
.)

DOTTY
: Archie!…
(
DOTTY
has been watching the TV screen. The
JUMPER
is hidden
.
GEORGE
goes to the Bedroom door, and opens it
.)

GEORGE
(
from the doorway
): It's not Archie, it's the police.
(
DOTTY
turns off the TV. The Screen goes white
.)

DOTTY
: What?

GEORGE
: Inspector Bones. It's about last night. Malicious complaints. Allegations.

DOTTY
: What sort of allegations?

GEORGE
(
embarrassed, playing it down
): Anonymous phone call, apparently. Tell you later.
(
He tries to leave, the first of several false exits by him
.
DOTTY
is numb
.)

DOTTY
: Did he mention an acrobat?

GEORGE
: Yes. Don't worry, I'll smooth him over.

DOTTY
:
Smooth him over?

GEORGE
: He's gone to inspect the scene of the crime. What an absurd fuss.

DOTTY
: George… you knew about it?
(
GEORGE
mistakes her gratitude for suspicion
.)

GEORGE
: Look, I'm perfectly willing to take the blame.

DOTTY
: Oh, George… George… will you?
(
She kisses him
.)

GEORGE
: If he's going to be bloody-minded, I'll shoot him in here.

DOTTY
:
Georgie!

GEORGE
: You can try your charms on him. He's dead keen to meet you. (
False exit
.) He seems quite interested in philosophy.

DOTTY
: Oh?

GEORGE
: Yes. I think I can get through to him. Get him to see that one can easily get things out of proportion.

DOTTY
(
enthusiastically
): That's just what Archie said about it.

GEORGE
(
nods, false exit
): Said about what?

DOTTY
: Well, about poor Duncan McFee.

GEORGE
: What about Duncan McFee?

DOTTY
: There's no need to get it out of proportion. It's a great pity, but it's not as though the alternative were immortality.

GEORGE
(
nods; stops nodding
): Sorry?

BONES
(
off stage
): Hello! (
Enters from Kitchen
.)

DOTTY
pushes
GEORGE
out of the Bedroom and closes the door. The Bedroom
BLACKS OUT
.
GEORGE
turns to meet
BONES
who has appeared and is coming upstage, his flowers now in a metal vase
.)

BONES
: Tell me something——Who
are
these acrobats?

GEORGE
: Logical positivists, mainly, with a linguistic analyst or two, a couple of Benthamite Utilitarians… lapsed Kantians and empiricists generally… and of course the usual
Behaviourists… a mixture of the more philosophical members of the university gymnastics team and the more gymnastic members of the Philosophy School. The close association between gymnastics and philosophy is I believe unique to this university and owes itself to the Vice-Chancellor, who is of course a first-rate gymnast, though an indifferent philosopher.
(
BONES
stares at him and then walks into the Study and sits down like a man who needs to sit down
.
GEORGE
follows him
.)
A curious combination of interests, but of course in ancient classical Greece——

BONES
: We are not
in
ancient bloody classical Greece.

GEORGE
: I absolutely agree with you. In fact, I will have nothing to do with it. And in spite of the Vice-Chancellor's insistence that I can jump better than I think, I have always maintained the opposite to be the case…. In the circumstances I was lucky to get the Chair of Moral Philosophy. (
His tone suggests, rightly, that this is not much of a prize
.) Only the Chair of Divinity lies further below the salt, and
that's
been vacant for six months since the last occupant accepted a position as curate in a West Midland diocese.

BONES
: Then why didn't you… jump along with the rest?

GEORGE
: I belong to a school which regards all sudden movements as ill-bred. On the other hand, McFee, who sees professorship as a licence for eccentricity, and whose chief delusion is that Edinburgh is the Athens of the North, very soon learned to jump a great deal better than he ever thought, and was rewarded with the Chair of Logic.

BONES
: Are you telling me that the Professor of Logic is a part-time acrobat?

GEORGE
: Yes. More of a gymnast, really—the acrobatics are just the social side.

BONES
: I find this very hard to believe.

GEORGE
: Oh, really? Why's that?

BONES
(
rising
): I don't like it, Clarence! The way I had it, some raving nutter phones up the station with a lot of bizarre allegations starting off with a female person swinging naked from the chandeliers at Dorothy Moore's Mayfair residence
and ending up with a professor picked off while doing handsprings for the cabaret, and as far as I'm concerned it's got fruit-cake written all over it; so I tell my Sergeant to have a cup of tea and off I go thinking to myself, at last a chance to pay my respects in person, and blow me if it doesn't start to look straight up as soon as I put one foot in the door——Don't go, will you?
(
He has moved to the door, with his vase of flowers, and leaves, closing the Study door behind him. In front of the Bedroom door, he briefly smooths his hair, brushes his lapels with his hands, brings out the gramophone record (which has a picture of
DOTTY
on it), and knocks on the Bedroom door, a
mere tap, and enters the Bedroom.
The light is romantic: pink curtains have been drawn across the french window, and there is a rosy hue to the lighting
.
DOTTY
,
gowned, coiffed, stunning, rises to face the Inspector. Music is heard… romantic Mozartian trumpets, triumphant
.
DOTTY
and
BONES
face each other, frozen like lovers in a dream
.
BONES
raises his head slightly, and the trumpets are succeeded by a loud animal bray, a mating call
,
DOTTY
,
her arms out
towards him, breathes
, ‘Inspector…'
like a verbal caress. From
BONES
'
s lifeless fingers, the vase drops. There is a noise such as would have been made had he dropped it down a long flight of stone stairs
.
BONES
is dumbstruck
.
DOTTY
lets go a long slow smile:
‘Inspector….'
From behind the closed curtains, the stiff dead
JUMPER
falls
into the room like a too-hastily-leaned plank
.
QUICK FADE
to
BLACKOUT
,
in Bedroom only.
None of the sounds have been imaginary: they have come from
GEORGE
'
s coincidental tape-recorder, which he now switches off and rewinds slightly
,
GEORGE
picks up his manuscript, snaps his fingers at the
SECRETARY
,
and starts off
.)

GEORGE
: Professor McFee's introductory paper, which it is my privilege to dispute, has I think been distributed to all of you. In an impressive display of gymnastics, ho ho, thank you, Professor McFee bends over backwards to demonstrate that moral judgements belong to the same class as aesthetic
judgements; that the phrases ‘good man' and ‘good music' are prejudiced in exactly the same way; in short, that goodness, whether in men or in music, depends on your point of view. By discrediting the idea of beauty as an aesthetic absolute, he hopes to discredit by association the idea of goodness as a moral absolute and as a first step he directs us to listen to different kinds of music. (
He reaches for the tape-recorder
.) Professor McFee refers us in particular to the idea of beauty as conceived by Mozart on the one hand, and here I am glad to be able to assist him… (
Plays the Mozart again, very brief
.)… and, on the other hand, as conceived by a group of musicians playing at a wedding feast in a part of Equatorial Africa visited only by the makers of television documentaries, one of which the Professor happened to see on a rare occasion when he wasn't out and about jumping through the Vice-Chancellor's hoop, I can't say that, one of which he happened to see. He invites us to agree with him that beauty is a diverse notion and not a universal one. Personally, I would have agreed to this without demur, but the Professor, whose reading is as wide as his jumping is high…
(
The
SECRETARY
raises her head
.)
… all right, all right, the Professor bolsters up his argument with various literary references including a telling extract from
Tarzan of the Apes
in which the boy Tarzan on seeing his face for the first time reflected in a jungle pool, bewails his human ugliness as compared to the beauty of the apes among whom he had grown up. I won't dwell on Professor McFee's inability to distinguish between fact and fiction, but as regards the musical references it might be worth pointing out that the sounds made by Mozart and the Africans might have certain things in common which are not shared by the sound of, say, a bucket of coal being emptied on to a tin roof. Indeed, I have brought with me tonight two further trumpet recordings, starting off with the trumpeting of an elephant… (
He plays the braying sound heard before
.)… and I invite Professor McFee to admit that the difference between that and his beloved Mozart
may owe more to some mysterious property of the music than to his classically trained ear. Anticipating his reply that the latter sound is more beautiful to an elephant, I riposte with… (
He plays the remaining sound, as heard before
.)… which is the sound made by a trumpet falling down a flight of stone stairs. However, it is not my present concern to dispute Professor McFee's view on aesthetics but only to make clear what those views must lead him to, and they lead him to the conclusion that if the three sets of noises which we might label ‘Mozart', ‘elephant' and ‘stairs', were playing in an empty room where no one could hear them, then it could not be said that within the room any one set of noises was in any way superior to either of the other two. Which may, of course, be the case, but Professor McFee does not stay to consider such a
reductio ad absurdum
, for he has bigger fish to fry, and so he goes on to show, likewise but at even greater length, that the word ‘good' has also meant different things to different people at different times, an exercise which combines simplicity with futility in a measure he does not apparently suspect, for on the one hand it is not a statement which anyone would dispute, and on the other, nothing useful can be inferred from it. It is not in fact a statement about value at all; it is a statement about language and how it is used in a particular society. Nevertheless, up this deeply-rutted garden path, Professor McFee leads us, pointing out items of interest along the way… the tribe which kills its sickly infants, the tribe which eats its aged parents; and so on, without pausing to wonder whether the conditions of group survival or the notion of filial homage might be one thing among the nomads of the Atlas Mountains or in a Brazilian rain forest, and quite another in the Home Counties. Certainly a tribe which believes it confers honour on its elders by eating them is going to be viewed askance by another which prefers to buy them a little bungalow somewhere, and Professor McFee should not be surprised that the notion of honour should manifest itself so differently in peoples so far removed in clime and in culture. What is surely more surprising is that notions such as honour
should manifest themselves at all. For what
is
honour? What are pride, shame, fellow-feeling, generosity and love? If they are instincts, what are instincts? The prevailing temper of modern philosophy is to treat the instinct as a sort of terminus for any train of thought that seeks to trace our impulses to their origins. But what can be said to be the impulse of a genuinely altruistic act? Hobbes might have answered self-esteem, but what is the attraction or the point in thinking better of oneself? What is
better?
A savage who elects to honour his father by eating him as opposed to disposing of the body in some—to him—ignominious way, for example by burying it in a teak box, is making an ethical choice in that he believes himself to be acting as a good savage ought to act. Whence comes this sense of some actions being better than others?—not more useful, or more convenient, or more popular, but simply pointlessly
better?
What, in short, is so good about
good?
Professor McFee succeeds only in showing us that in different situations different actions will be deemed, rightly or wrongly, to be conducive to that good which is independent of time and place and which is knowable but not nameable. It is not nameable because it is not another way or referring to this or that quality which we have decided is virtuous. It is not courage, and it is not honesty or loyalty or kindness. The irreducible fact of goodness is not implicit in one kind of action any more than in its opposite, but in the existence of a relationship between the two. It is the sense of comparisons being in order.
(
Music! Lights! Dorothy Moore
—
in person!
…
In fact, a track from
DOTTY
'
s record, playing in the
Bedroom, and
DOTTY
swinging and miming to it, as
BONES
leaves the Bedroom, the opening of the door triggering off the scene
,
GEORGE
also goes into the Hall, where he meets
BONES
.
We can't hear what they say because the music is loud
.
GEORGE
takes
BONES
downstage to the Kitchen exit, and goes off with him
.
DOTTY
continues to sway and mime: the song is
‘Sentimental Journey'.
The dead
JUMPER
is where he fell.
The
SECRETARY
moves to the typewriter
.