What Not. A Prophetic Comedy Read online

  "A little, dear." The vicar got up to carry away his basket of weeds to the bonfire. Mrs. Delmer said, "Daddy's had a worrying time in the parish. Two more poor little abandoned babies."

  "Where were they left this time?" Ivy asked with interest.

  "One at the Police Station, with a note to say the government had driven the parents to this; the other just outside our garden door, with no note at all, but I suppose it's the same old story. We've no clue to either yet; they're not from Little Chantreys, of course, but I suppose we shall trace them in time. Daddy's been making enquiries among the village people; none of them will say, if they know, but Daddy says they're all in a sad state of anger and discontent about the Baby Laws; he thinks they're working up worse every day. There's so much talk of different laws for rich and poor. Of course when people say that, what they always mean is that it's the same law for both, and ought to be different. Even that isn't true, of course, in this case, as the taxes are in proportion to the income; but it certainly does come very hard on the poor. Daddy thinks it his duty to preach about it again to-morrow, and that worries him, because he may get arrested and fined. But he feels it's right. He thinks the country is in real danger of risings and revolts if this goes on. He says the Stop It League is doing its best to stir up rebellion, and that would be such a calamity. And all these poor little babies abandoned or disowned all over the country; it goes to one's heart.... Don't talk about it, darling, it worries Daddy so.... And poor Brown is so little use with the vegetable garden. His Mind Training Course seems really to have quite upset him; he talks and looks so strangely now. And Daddy's worried about Mr. Hawtrey" (the curate), "who's joined the Church Improvement Society and has become dreadfully restless, and keeps saying Daddy ought to join it too."

  Mrs. Delmer sighed, and changed the subject, as the vicar came back, to the amount of blossom there was on the white-heart cherry.

  Ivy went indoors. She went up to the room she shared with Betty. Betty was there, staining a straw hat with Jackson's nut-brown hat-polish.

  Ivy said, "A nice mess you're making. I should think you might remember it's my room as well as yours," and Betty said, "Socks." From which it may be inferred that these sisters, good-humoured in the main to others, were frequently short-tempered to one another.

  Ivy said next, opening a drawer, "I won't stand it. You've been pinching my handkerchiefs."

  Betty replied absently, and as if from habit rather than from reflection, "Haven't been near your old drawer."

  "Liar. There were twelve here this morning and now there are only ten. I've told you before I won't stand having my things pinched. If you're too slack to earn enough to keep yourself in handkerchiefs, you must do without, that's all."

  "I suppose you'd rather I'd used my sleeve at the Whites' tennis this morning, wouldn't you?"

  "I shouldn't care if you had.... Tennis in the morning's a pretty rotten idea anyhow, if you ask me. You're the biggest slacker I ever came across. If I was Daddy I wouldn't keep you eating your head off, even if you aren't clever. You're going on like a girl before the war. Your Training Course doesn't seem to have done you the slightest good, either. It's people like you who'll rot up the whole plan."

  "It's rot anyhow," Betty returned, without interest, turning her hat about critically. "You should just hear the way they're all going on about it in the village. Stuff and nonsense, I call it. And as long as people like me and the village—normal, ordinary people—think it's stuff and nonsense, ... well, it will be stuff and nonsense, that's all."

  "People like you," Ivy retorted witheringly, as she changed her skirt for her country breeches.

  But, after all, that retort didn't dispose of Betty, or the people like Betty ... or the whole vicarage family ... or most of Little Chantreys.... Those people, after all, were going to take more disposing of than that.... They were, quite possibly, going to take more disposing of than anyone yet knew.

  "Silly ass," said Ivy, but with a touch of doubt.

  She thought her new green breeches were rather nice, anyhow, and that seemed to matter more.

  3

  Kitty found her brother Cyril at the End House. Cyril was in a poor way. His publishing business was on the edge of bankruptcy.

  "So much for your abominable Brains Ministry," he complained. "The mass of safe, mediocre stuff on which publishers count for a living while they adventure with the risks is being gradually withdrawn. It simply doesn't come in. Its producers are becoming—many of them—just too intelligent. I'm not imagining this; I know of several cases in which it has happened; of people who have developed just enough distaste for their own work to dry them up altogether. What's worse, there isn't the same sale for such stuff as there was. When the process has gone much further (if ever it does)—so far that a lot of really good stuff is turned out, and read by large numbers of people, business will be all right again. Till then, publishers are in a poor way.... Verse is dropping off, too, like autumn leaves. That's all to the good.... I daresay in another year or two (unless you're wrecked first, which seems probable, by the way) there'll only be about a hundred people left in the country writing anything at all.... Newspapers, of course, go on much the same; that's because you're afraid of them and exempt their staff. Insignificant verse and meaningless novels may die a natural death (though I think it improbable), but Myosotis and the Patriot and the Daily Idiot will go on for ever. You're all such cowards at Whitehall. You dare to ruin unoffending publishers, to browbeat the poor and simple, and to extract gold from the innocent babe unborn, but you daren't risk the favour of the press."

  "No," Kitty agreed. "We certainly daren't.... Not that we've got it, you know, quite the contrary; but we strive for it. I was reading the Herald and Stop It in the train, till I was cold with fear. Stop It veils its meaning delicately, as usual; but it means business.... However, I thought we should have been downed six months ago, yet here we are still. It's like skating on rotten ice so fast that it never breaks. It's fun; it's exciting. And I believe if we go on skating fast, it won't break at all. You see, the government are getting cleverer and cleverer themselves, which will help them to do it skilfully. Chester says his head really does feel clearer after taking the Course; he says so in private life, I mean, not only when he's soft-soaping the public."

  "He'll need," said Anthony, "a jolly clear head before he's through with this job. With every door-step in our towns and villages piled with exposed babies ... it's worse than China. Much worse, because I believe in China they don't get put on door-steps, but left harmlessly out of the way in open fields and no one meddles with them. It's becoming a public nuisance."

  "There is a new branch at the Ministry," said Kitty, "which is concerned exclusively with Uncertificated Babies, how to deal with them."

  "An' how do they deal with them, the poor little ducks?" enquired Pansy, who had just come in from the garden looking more than usually gay and lovely and fantastic in a pink sunbonnet and the kind of dress affected by milkmaids in a chorus.

  Kitty looked at her thoughtfully.

  "I should hardly like to tell you. You mightn't like it. Besides, it's a private department, like the secret room in jam factories where they make the pips. No, Pansy love, I can't possibly tell you.... But they do deal with them, quite effectively."

  Pansy tossed her Cheeper up and down to a gentle music-hall ditty.

  "Who'll buy babies—

  Babies better dead?

  Here's every mental category,

  From C3 down to Z...."

  It was a taking song as she crooned it on the stage, nursing an infant on each arm, and with a baby-chorus crying behind her.

  4

  After breakfast on Sunday morning Kitty remarked that she was going by train to Beaconsfield, where she had arranged to meet Chester for a walk through Burnham Beeches. She as a rule made no secret of her walks with Chester, only occasionally, when self-consciousness took her. After all, why should she? One went walks with all sorts of peopl
e, with any man or woman who liked walking and talking and whom one liked as a companion; it implied nothing. Kitty at times, with all it meant in this instance burning and alive in her consciousness, had to pause to tell herself how little it did imply to others, how she might mention it freely and casually, without fear. Yet might she? The intimacy of the Minister of a Department with one of his clerks was, no doubt, out of the ordinary, not quite like other intimacies; perhaps it did seem odd, and imply things. Perhaps Kitty might have thought so herself, in another case.

  She announced her plan this morning with an extra note of casualness in her voice.

  Pansy said, "Oh, you two. You'll be goin' baby-huntin' in the ditches, I should think, instead of pickin' primroses. I should say you jolly well ought, and you'd better take the Cheeper's pram with you."

  Anthony said, "Exactly what I always try not to do, going out on Sundays with the people from my shop. It spoils the Sabbath rest, the Pisgah's mountain touch. You'd much better come out with Cyril and Pansy and me."

  "I," said Cyril, in his detached manner, "shall be going to Mass."

  5

  They walked up through the depraved mushroom growth round Beaconsfield station to the old town that city set on a hill, lying wide and spacious, with its four Ends stretched out like a cross. Old Beaconsfield is an enchanted city; as it was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so it is to-day, an ancient country town, full of brick walls and old houses, and courtyards and coaching inns, and dignity and romance and great elms. But they left it behind them, and took the lane that runs to Hedgerley, with the cold April wind in their faces.

  They came, four miles on, to the forest of great beeches, where broad glades and grassy rides run in and out through thickets of wild undergrowth and bracken, and ancient twisted boles and slim smooth grey-green stems are set close together under a rustling singing roof of brilliant green, the young, new-born, radiant green of beeches in April. In every hollow and dip of the forest's mossy floor, primroses glimmered in pale pools.

  They sat down by one of these pools to have their lunch.

  After lunch they lay on there and smoked. Chester lay on his back, his hands clasped behind his head, staring up at the green roof. Kitty, her round chin cupped in her two hands, lay and watched his lean, sallow, clever face, foreshortened, with the shadows of the leaves moving on it and his eyes screwed against the sun.

  "Kitty," said Chester presently, "I want to talk to you."

  "M—m." Kitty, having finished her cigarette, was chewing grass.

  He sat up and looked at her, and as he looked his face grew more sallow and his smile died. He stabbed into the soft, damp earth with his stick, and frowned.

  "It's this, my dear. I can't go on any longer with this—this farce. We must end it. I've been meaning to tell you so for some time, but I thought I'd give it a fair trial, just to satisfy us both. Well, we've given it a trial, and it won't work. It isn't good enough. We've got to be more to each other—or less. This—this beastly half-way house was all right for a bit; but we've got on too far now for it.... I should like to know what you think about it."

  Kitty pulled a primrose to pieces, petal by petal, before she answered.

  "One thing I think," she said slowly, "is that I'm different from you. Or is it that women are different from men? Never mind; it doesn't really matter which. But I fancy it's women and men. Anyhow there it is. And the difference is that for me a half-way house would always be better than nothing, while for you it would be worse. Men seem to value being married so much more than women do—and friendship, going about together, having each other to talk to and play with, and all that, seems to matter to them so little. Love seems to take different forms with men and women, and to want different ways of expression.... So it's not much use trying to understand one another about it.... That's the chief thing I think, Nicky."

  He moved impatiently.

  "In fact, you're contented with the present state of things."

  "Oh, no. Not a bit. I want much more. But—if it's all we can have...."

  "It isn't," he said. "We can get married."

  She shook her head, with decision.

  "No. No. No."

  "Quite quietly," he pleaded. "No one would know but ourselves and the registrar and a witness whom we'd murder after the ceremony. Why shouldn't we? What are the reasons why not? There are only two; you ought to marry a certificated person and have an intelligent family; and I oughtn't to have a family at all. Well, you say you don't mean to marry anyone else; so you may as well marry me. So much for the first reason. And of course we wouldn't have a family; so much for the second. Well, then?"

  "There's a third," said Kitty. "And the only important one. There's the look of the thing. I don't care how many people we murder, the secret will leak out. Things always do leak out. Never, in the course of twenty-nine years of endeavour, have I been able to keep anything shady from coming to light sooner or later. It isn't done. You ought to know that, as a government servant. Has any government ever succeeded in keeping its own dark doings secret for long? No; they come out like—like flowers pushing up towards daylight; and then there's the devil to pay. All our shadiest departmental transactions emerge one by one; nothing is hid that shall not be revealed. And our marriage would be the same. Be sure our sin would find us out. And that would be the end of your career, and probably of the Ministry as well; I believe the Ministry will stand or fall with you; and it's already pretty tottery.... It's a pity you can't get exemption; but of course your case is one in which it's absolutely never given.... No, we can't do this thing. You're the Minister of Brains first, and poor Nicky Chester, who would like to marry his girl, a long, long way behind. And the poor girl who would like to marry Nicky Chester—she's not got to count at all.... I don't want to be high-falutin and to talk about principles, only to have a little sense."

  He was watching her moodily from under bent brows, leaning back against a beech-trunk and pulling up little handfuls of damp moss with his thin, unusual fingers.

  "Sense," he repeated. "It is sense, to have what one wants, if it doesn't harm anything or anyone. And I'll tell you another thing—not having it is rotting me up altogether—me and my work. I didn't want to fall in love again; I hoped I'd done with all that; I tried not to take any notice of you. But it was no go, and I can't fall out again, and I'm dead sick of going on like this. And my experience of life, both private and public, has been longer than yours, and, as it happens, I've known of several transactions which haven't come to light and never will; I've perpetrated some myself in the Ministry, which even that clear light which beats upon a hotel hasn't yet exposed, and, heaven helping us, won't. You don't suppose all the dark secrets of the war ever came out? Of course they didn't. There are some that will wait till ... well, till the next war, let's say.... Kitty, let's try it. It's worth the risk, surely. Let's be sporting. We're missing—we're missing the best thing in the world, just out of funk. I thought you always did things, just for the sake of doing them. I thought you never turned your back on life. It isn't like you."

  "Oh," murmured Kitty. "Life.... There's so much of that. This is just one thing out of it."

  "While you want it," he returned, indubitably correct as to this, "it seems a long way the most important thing."

  "It does," she agreed. "There's no comparison at all.... It's queer, isn't it, how strong it is, this odd, desperate wanting of one person out of all the world. It's an extraordinary, enormously strong thing.... But there are other things. There are jokes, and shops, and music, and plays, and pictures, and nice clothes, and Russian politics, and absurd people, and Greek poetry, and the world's failures caged together on one island, and things to eat and to drink, and our careers, and primroses in woods, and the censor.... Good gracious, it's all like an idiotic, glorified revue. We mustn't let the one thing, just because it matters most, matter alone. It's so commonplace. Our hearts aren't broken, and won't break. We're out to have a good time, and we'll let
love and marriage go to the—anywhere they like, if we can't have them.... By the way, if it's any comfort to you (it is to me) I shouldn't make at all a good wife; I'm much nicer as a friend. I want too much out of life. I'm grasping and selfish. You'd find me tiring."

  "I do," he returned. "You're tiring me to death now. I've plenty of friends already, thank you. And what does it matter to me what sort of a wife you'd make? You talk as if you were refusing a secretarial appointment. I want you, not a wife."

  "You've got me," said Kitty, "only not as a wife.... If that's no use to you, we'll give it up. Nicky, I suppose we'd better give it up. It isn't working. I'll go right away. I'll get another job."

  "No," he said gloomily. "There's no need for that. Why should you mess up your career? We needn't meet. We shouldn't naturally meet, unless we made opportunities. I think you're right, that we'd better not meet. What's the good of meeting, just to repeat this sort of scene again and again, and hurt each other? We've reached the breaking point; I can't bear any more.... I think we'd better leave it that you let me know when you change your mind and will marry me. You will, won't you, when you do?"

  "Yes," said Kitty, and could say no more than that because she was on the edge of tears.

  For a moment they clung together, holding each other close. He said, "My dearest dear, I love you. Can't you?... can't you?..." and she whispered, very pale, "I love you. I think I worship you," and laid her cheek on his hand, so that he felt her tears.

  They walked on together through the April afternoon, and it cried to them like a child whom they were betraying and forsaking. There would not be another day like this day, through all the lovely awakening spring and summer.

  6

  Ivy and Betty Delmer, who had been spending the afternoon at Beaconsfield, saw them at Beaconsfield station.