Jumpers (9 page)

ARCHIE
: Long jump. My main interest, however, is the
trampoline.

BONES
: Mine is show business generally.

ARCHIE
: Really? Well, nowadays, of course, I do more theory than practice, but if trampoline acts appeal to you at all, a vacancy has lately occurred in a little team I run, mainly for our own amusement with a few social engagements thrown in——

BONES
: Just a minute, just a minute!—what happened to
Professor McFee?

ARCHIE
: Exactly. I regret to tell you he is dead.

BONES
: I realize he is
dead
——

ARCHIE
: Shocking tragedy. I am entirely to blame.

BONES
: You, too, sir?

ARCHIE
: Yes, Inspector.

BONES
: Very chivalrous, sir, but I'm afraid it won't wash.
(
He addresses the drapes, loudly
.) Miss Moore, is there any-thing you wish to say at this stage?

DOTTY
(
her head appearing
): Sorry?

BONES
: My dear—we are all
sorry
——
(
DOTTY
disappears
.)

ARCHIE
: Just a moment! I will not have a patient of mine brow-beaten by the police.

BONES
(
thoughtfully
): Patient…

ARCHIE
: Yes. As you can see I have been taking a dermatographical reading.

BONES
(
indicating the dermatograph
): This? What does it do?

ARCHIE
: It reads the skin, electronically; hence dermatograph.

BONES
: Why is it connected to the television set?

ARCHIE
: We'll get the read-back on the screen. All kinds of disturbances under the skin show up on the surface, if we can learn to read it, and we are learning.

BONES
: Disturbances? Mental disturbances?

ARCHIE
: Among other things.

BONES
(
a new intimacy
): Sir Jim——

ARCHIE
: Archie——

BONES
: Sir Archie, might I have a word with you, in private?

ARCHIE
: Just what I was about to suggest. (
He opens the Bedroom door
.) Shall we step outside…?
(
BONES
steps into the Hall
.)

DOTTY
:… Things don't seem so bad after all. So to speak.
(ARCHIE
follows
BONES
into the Hall. Fade out on Bedroom
,
ARCHIE
and
BONES
move towards Kitchen exit
.)

BONES
: This is just between you and me, Sigmund. I understand your feelings only too well. What decent man could stand aside while that beautiful, frail creature——(
In the Study
,
GEORGE
has resumed
…)

GEORGE
: The study of moral philosophy is an attempt to determine what we mean when we say that something is good and that something else is bad. Not all value judgements, however, are the proper study of the moral philosopher. Language is a finite instrument crudely applied to an infinity of ideas, and one consequence of the failure to take account of this is that modern philosophy has made itself ridiculous by analysing such statements as, ‘This is a good bacon sandwich,' or, ‘Bedser had a good wicket.' (
The
SECRETARY
raises her head at
‘
Bedser'
.) Bedser!—Good God, B-E-D-S… (
Fade on Study
.
ARCHIE
and
BONES
re-enter
.)

ARCHIE
: Please come to the point, Inspector. The plain facts are that while performing some modest acrobatics for the entertainment of Miss Moore's party-guests, Professor McFee was killed by a bullet fired from the outer darkness. We all saw him shot, but none of us saw who shot him. With the possible exception of McFee's fellow gymnasts, anybody could have fired the shot, and anybody could have had a reason for doing so, including, incidentally, myself.

BONES
: And what might
your
motive be, sir?

ARCHIE
: Who knows? Perhaps McFee, my faithful protégé, had secretly turned against me, gone off the rails and decided that he was St. Paul to Moore's Messiah.

BONES
: Doesn't seem much of a reason.

ARCHIE
: It depends. Moore himself is not important—he is our tame believer, pointed out to visitors in much the same spirit as we point out the magnificent stained glass in what is now the gymnasium. But McFee was the guardian and
figurehead of philosophical orthodoxy, and if he threatened to start calling on his masters to return to the true path, then I'm afraid it would certainly have been an ice-pick in the back of the skull.

DOTTY
(
off
): Darling!

ARCHIE
: And then again, perhaps it was Dorothy. Or someone.
(
Smiles
.)

DOTTY
(
off
): Darling!

BONES
: My advice to you is, number one, get her lawyer over here——

ARCHIE
: That will not be necessary. I am Miss Moore's legal adviser.

BONES
: Number two, completely off the record, get her off on expert evidence—nervous strain, appalling pressure, and one day—snap!—blackout, can't remember a thing. Put her in the box and you're half-way there. The other half is, get something on Mad Jock McFee, and if you don't get a Scottish judge it'll be three years probation and the sympathy of the court.

ARCHIE
: This is most civil of you, Inspector, but a court appearance would be most embarrassing to my client and patient; and three years' probation is not an insignificant curtailment of a person's liberty.

BONES
: For God's sake, man, we're talking about a murder charge.

ARCHIE
: You are. What I had in mind is that McFee, suffering from nervous strain brought on by the appalling pressure of overwork—for which I blame myself entirely—left here last night in a mood of deep depression, and wandered into the park, where he crawled into a large plastic bag and shot himself…
(
Pause
,
BONES
opens his mouth to speak
.)
… leaving this note… (
ARCHIE
produces it from his pocket
.)… which was found in the bag together with his body by some gymnasts on an early morning keep-fit run. (
Pause
,
BONES
opens his mouth to speak
.)
Here is the coroner's certificate.
(
ARCHIE
produces another note, which
BONES
takes from him
.
BONES
reads it
.)

BONES
: Is this genuine?

ARCHIE
(
testily
): Of course it's genuine. I'm a coroner, not a forger.
(
BONES
hands the certificate back, and almost comes to attention
.)

BONES
: Sir Archibald Bouncer——

ARCHIE
: Jumper.

BONES
: Sir Archibald Jumper, I must——

ARCHIE
: Now, I judge from your curiously formal and some-what dated attitude, that you are deaf to offers of large sums of money for favours rendered.

BONES
: I didn't hear that.

ARCHIE
: Exactly. On the other hand, I think you are a man who feels that his worth has not been recognized. Other men have got on—younger men, flashier men… Superintendants… Commissioners….

BONES
: There may be something in that.

ARCHIE
: I dare say your ambitions do not stop with the Police
Force, even.

BONES
: Oh?

ARCHIE
: Inspector, my patronage is not extensive, but it is select.
I can offer prestige, the respect of your peers and almost unlimited credit among the local shopkeepers—in short, the Chair of Divinity is yours for the asking.

BONES
: The Chair of Divinity?

ARCHIE
: Not perhaps, the Chair which is in the eye of the hurricane nowadays, but a professorship will still be regarded as a distinction come the day—early next week, in all probability—when the Police Force will be thinned out to a ceremonial front for the peace-keeping activities of the Army.

BONES
: I see. Well, until that happens, I should still like to know—if McFee shot himself inside a plastic bag, where is the gun?

ARCHIE
(
awed
): Very good thinking indeed! On consideration I can give you the Chair of Logic, but that is my last offer.

BONES
: This is a British murder enquiry and some degree of
justice must be seen to be more or less done.

ARCHIE
: I must say I find your attitude lacking in flexibility.
What makes you so sure that it
was
Miss Moore who shot McFee?

BONES
: I have a nose for these things.

ARCHIE
: With the best will in the world I can't give the Chair of
Logic to a man who relies on nasal intuition.

DOTTY
(
off
): Help!
(
BONES
reacts
,
ARCHIE
restrains him
.)

ARCHIE
: It's all right—just exhibitionism: what we psychiatrists call ‘a cry for help'.

BONES
: But it
was
a cry for help.

ARCHIE
: Perhaps I'm not making myself clear.
All
exhibitionism is a cry for help, but a cry for help
as such
is only exhibitionism.

DOTTY
(
off
): MURDER!
(
BONES
rushes to the Bedroom, which remains dark
,
ARCHIE
looks at his watch and leaves towards the Kitchen. In the Study
GEORGE
resumes
.)

GEORGE
:… whereas a spell with the heavy roller would improve it from Bradman's point of view and worsen it from Bedser's…
Likewise, to say that this is a good bacon sandwich is only to say that by the criteria applied by like-minded lovers of bacon sandwiches, this one is worthy of approbation. The word good is reducible to other properties such as crisp, lean and unadulterated by tomato sauce. You will have seen at once that to a man who likes his bacon sandwiches underdone, fatty and smothered in ketchup, this would be a rather
poor
bacon sandwich. By subjecting any given example to similar analysis, the modern school, in which this university has played so lamentable a part, has satisfied itself that all statements implying goodness or badness, whether in conduct or in bacon sandwiches, are not statements of
fact
but merely expressions of feeling, taste or vested interest.
But when we say that the Good Samaritan acted well, we are surely expressing more than a circular prejudice about behaviour. We mean he acted kindly—selflessly—
well
. And
what is our approval of kindness based on if not on the intuition that kindness is simply good in itself and cruelty is not. A man who sees that he is about to put his foot down on a beetle in his path, decides to step on it or not to. Why? What process is at work? And what is that quick blind mindless connection suddenly made and lost by the man who didn't see the beetle but only heard the crunch? (
Towards the end of this speech
,
ARCHIE
re-enters and quietly lets himself into the Study
.)
It is ironic that the school which denies the claims of the intuition to know good when it sees it, is itself the product of the pioneer work set out in his
Principia Ethica
by the late G. E. Moore, an intuitionist philosopher whom I respected from afar but who, for reasons which will be found adequate by logical spirits, was never in when I called. Moore did not believe in God, but I do not hold that against him—for of all forms of wishful thinking, humanism demands the greatest sympathy—and at least by insisting that goodness was a fact, and on his right to recognize it when he saw it, Moore avoided the moral limbo devised by his successors, who are in the unhappy position of having to admit that one man's idea of good is no more meaningful than another man's whether he be St. Francis or—Vice-Chancellor! (
For he has noticed
ARCHIE
in the mirror
,
ARCHIE
comes forward
.)

ARCHIE
: An inept comparison, if I may say so. I'm very fond of animals. (
He picks up
PAT
.) What do you call it?

GEORGE
: Pat.

ARCHIE
: Pat!… what a lovely name.

GEORGE
: It's a good name for a tortoise, being sexually ambiguous. I also have a hare called Thumper, somewhere…. By the way, I wasn't really comparing
you
with——

ARCHIE
: Quite understand. You were going to say Hitler or
Stalin or Nero… the argument always gets back to some lunatic tyrant, the
reductio ad absurdum
of the new ethics, and the dog-eared trump card of the intuitionists.

GEORGE
(
rising to that
): Well, why not? When I push
my
convictions
to absurdity,
I
arrive at God—which is at least as embarrassing nowadays. (
Pause
.) All I know is that I think that I know that I know that nothing can be created out of nothing, that my moral conscience is different from the rules of my tribe, and that there is more in me than meets the microscope—and because of
that
I'm lumbered with this incredible, indescribable and definitely shifty
God
, the trump card of atheism.