What Not. A Prophetic Comedy Page 13

  But Kitty, whose heart was not fixed, entered upon all the changing scenes of life with a readiness to embrace any point of view, though not indeed to be bound to it, and an even greater willingness to tell anything in earth or heaven that it ought to be stopped.

  She told Prideaux that she was considering this offer. Prideaux said, "That thing! Its very name condemns it. It's on the wrong tack. You shouldn't be out to stop things; they've got to go on.... If it's journalism you want, why don't you apply for a job on Intelligence?" Intelligence, or the Weekly Bulletin of the Brains Ministry (to give it its sub-title, humorously chosen by one who visualised either the public or the Ministry as a sick man) was a weekly journal issued by the Ministry, and its aim was, besides reporting the Ministry's work, decisions and pronouncements for each week, to correlate all its local activities and keep them in touch with headquarters, and to collect reports from over the country as to the state of the public mind. It was for official circulation only. "Why not?" repeated Prideaux, struck by this idea. "It would be quite enough of a change: you would probably be one of the travelling reporters and send bright little anecdotes from the countryside; I know they want some more reporters. Why don't you apply? I'll speak to M.B.B. about you if you like." (M.B.B. was the department which edited the Bulletin.)

  "Would it be interesting?" Kitty wondered.

  Prideaux thought it would. "Besides," he added, "you'd remain attached to the Ministry that way, and could return to headquarters later on if you wanted to.... And meanwhile you'd see all the fun.... We're in for a fairly lively time, and it would be a pity to miss it. We're bound to slip up over the A.S.E. before the month's over. And probably over the exemption of Imbeciles and the Abandoned Babies, too. And the journalists; that's going to be a bad snag. Oh, it'll be interesting all right. If it wasn't for Chester's remarkable gift of getting on people's right side, it would be a poor look-out. But Chester'd pull most things through. If they'd put him at the head of the Recruiting job during the war, I believe he'd have pulled even the Review of Exceptions through without a row.... Well now, what about trying for this job?"

  "All right," Kitty agreed. "If you think there's any chance of my getting it. I don't mind much what I do, so long as I have a change from this hotel."

  On Prideaux's recommendation she did get the job, and was transferred from her branch to M.B.B. as a travelling reporter for Intelligence. She renounced Stop It with some regret; there was a whimsical element about Stop It which appealed to her, and which must almost necessarily be lacking in an official journal; but the career of travelling reporter seemed to have possibilities. Besides the more weighty reports from the countryside, a page of Intelligence was devoted each week to anecdotes related in the engagingly sudden and irrelevant manner of our cheaper daily Press; as, "A woman appealed before the Cuckfield Tribunal for exemption from the Mind Training Course on the grounds that she had made an uncertificated marriage and had since had twins, and must, therefore, be of a mental level which unfitted her to derive benefit from the Course." "Three babies have been found abandoned in a ditch between Amersham and Chesham Bois." "The Essex Farmers' Association have produced a strain of hens which lay an egg each day all the year round. The farmers ascribe this to the improvement in their methods caused by the Mind Training Course." "In reply to a tinplate worker who applied for Occupational Exemption from the Mental Progress Act, the Chairman of the Margam Tribunal said ..." (one of the witty things which chairmen do say, and which need not here be reported). It was, apparently, the business of the reporters to collect (or invent) and communicate these trivial anecdotes, as well as more momentous news, as of unrest at Nottingham, the state of intelligence or otherwise among Suffolk agriculturists, and so forth.

  Kitty rather hoped to be sent to Ireland, which was, as often, in an interesting and dubious state. Ireland was excluded from the Brains Acts, as from other Acts. But she was being carefully watched, with a view to including her when it seemed that it might be safe to do so. Meanwhile those of her population who were considered by the English government to be in no need of it were profiting by the Mind Training Course, while the mass of the peasantry were instructed by their priests to shun such unholy heretic learning as they would the devil. But on the whole it seemed possible that the strange paths pointed out by the Brains Ministry might eventually lead to the solution of the Irish Question. (What the Irish Question at that moment was, I will not here attempt to explain: it must be sufficient to remark that there will always be one.)

  5

  But Kitty was not sent to Ireland. She was sent about England; first to Cambridge. Cambridge was not averse to having its mind improved; there is a sweet reasonableness about Cambridge. It knows how important brains are. Also it had an affection for Chester, who had been at Trinity. So reports from Cambridge as regards the Brains Acts were on the whole favourable, in spite of some unrest (for different reasons) at Kings, Downing, and Trinity Hall, and slight ferment of revolt down at Barnwell. There was, indeed, a flourishing branch of the S.I.L. (Stop It League) in the University, but its attention was not directed at the moment particularly to stopping the work of the Ministry of Brains.

  It was, of course, a queer and quite new Cambridge which Kitty investigated. She had known the pre-war Cambridge; there had intervened the war Cambridge, that desolated and desolating thing, and now there had sprung up, on the other side of that dividing gulf, a Cambridge new and without precedent; a Cambridge half full of young war veterans, with the knowledge of red horizons, battle, murder, and sudden death, in their careless, watchful, experienced eyes; when they lounged about the streets or hurried to lectures, they dropped, against their will, into step; they were brown, and hard, and tired, and found it hard to concentrate on books; they had forgotten their school knowledge, and could not get through Littlegoes, and preferred their beds to sleeping in the open, that joy of pampered youth which has known neither battle-fields or Embankment seats.

  The other half were the boys straight from school; and between these two divisions rolled the Great European War, across which they could with difficulty make themselves understood each by the other.

  It was a Cambridge which had broken with history, for neither of these sections had any links with the past, any traditions to hand down. The only people who had these were the dons and Fellows and the very few undergraduates who, having broken off their University career to fight, had, after long years, returned to it again. These moved like ghosts among their old haunts; but their number was so inconsiderable as hardly to count. It was, to all intents and purposes, a new Cambridge, a clean sheet; and it was interesting to watch what was being inscribed upon it.

  But with such observations, apart from those of them which were connected with the attitude of Cambridge towards the Brains Ministry, neither Kitty nor this story are concerned. The story of the new Cambridge will have to be written some day by a member of it, and should be well worth reading.

  From Cambridge Kitty went to travel Cambridgeshire, which was in a state of quiet, albeit grudging, East Anglian acceptance and slow assimilation.

  Far different were the northern midlands, which were her next destination. Here, indeed, was revolt in process of ferment; revolt which had to be continually uncorked and aired that it might not ferment too much. The uncorking and airing was done by means of conferences, at which the tyrannised and the tyrants each said their say. These heart-to-heart talks have a soothing effect (sometimes) on the situation; at other times not. As conducted by the Minister of Brains, they certainly had. Chester was something more than soothing; he was inspiring. While he was addressing a meeting, he made it believe that intelligence was the important thing; more important than liberty, more important than the satisfaction of immediate desires. He made intelligence a flaming idea, like patriotism, freedom, peace, democracy, the eight-hour day, or God; and incidentally he pointed out that it would lead to most of these things; and they believed him. When he showed how, in the past, the lack of intell
igence had led to national ruin, economic bondage, war, autocracy, poverty, sweating, and vice, they believed that too. When he said, "Look at the European War," they looked. When he went on, "Without centuries of stupidity everywhere the war would never have been; without stupidity the war, if it had been, would have been very differently conducted; without stupidity we need never have another war, but with stupidity we inevitably shall, League of Nations or not," they all roared and cheered.

  So he went about saying these things, convincing and propitiating labour everywhere; labour, that formidable monster dreaded and cajoled by all good statesmen; labour, twice as formidable since in the Great War it had learned the ways of battle and the possibility and the power of the union of arms and the man.

  * * *

  CHAPTER IX

  THE COMMON HERD

  1

  It was after such a meeting, at Chesterfield, at the end of July, that Kitty and the Minister next met. Kitty was at that time writing up the Derbyshire towns for the Bulletin. She attended the Chesterfield meeting officially. It was a good one; Chester spoke well, and the audience (mainly colliers) listened well.

  It was a very hot evening. The Town Hall was breathless, and full of damp, coal-grimed, imperfectly-cleaned faces. Kitty too was damp, though she was wearing even less than usual. Chester was damp and white, and looked, for all his flame and ardour, which carried the meeting along with him, fatigued and on edge. Kitty, herself fatigued and on edge, watched him, seeing the way his hands moved nervously on the table as he spoke.

  It was while he was talking about the demand for increased wages among colliers to facilitate the payment of the taxes on uncertificated babies, that he saw Kitty. His eyes stayed on hers for a moment, and he paused in the middle of a sentence ... "defeat the whole purpose of the Act," he finished it, and looked elsewhere. Kitty was startled by his pause; it was not like him. Normally he, so used to public speaking, so steeled against emergencies, so accustomed to strange irruptions into the flow of his speech, would surely have carried on without a break or a sign. That he had not done so showed him to be in a highly nervous state, thought Kitty, something like her own in this hot weather, through her continual travellings by train and staying in lodgings and writing absurd reports.

  Across the length of the hall she saw nothing now but that thin, slouching figure, the gestures of those nervous, flexible hands, that white, damp face, with its crooked eyebrows and smile.

  It was so long since she had seen him and spoken to him; something in her surged up at the sight of him and turned her giddy and faint. It was perilously hot; the heat soaked all one's will away and left one limp.... Did he too feel like that?

  2

  He looked at her once more, just before the end, and his eyes said, "Wait for me."

  She waited, in the front of a little group by the door through which he was to come out. He came out with his secretary, and the mayor, and others; he was talking to them. When he saw her he stopped openly, and said, so that all could hear, "How do you do, Miss Grammont. I haven't seen you for some time. You're doing this reporting work for the Bulletin now, aren't you? I want to talk to you about that. If you'll give me the address I'll come round in about half an hour and see you about it."

  She gave him the address of her rooms in Little Darkgate Street, and he nodded and walked on. He had done it well; no one thought it strange, or anything but all in the way of business. Ministers have to be good at camouflage, at throwing veils over situations; it is part of their job.

  Kitty went back to her lodgings, and washed again, for the seventeenth time that day, and tried if she would feel less hot and less pale and more the captain of her soul in another and even filmier blouse. But she grew hotter, and paler, and less the captain of anything at all.

  At 9.30 Chester came. He too was hot and pale and captain of nothing. He had not even the comfort of a filmy blouse.

  He said, "My dear—my dear," and no more for a little time. Then he said, "My dearest, this has got to stop. I can't stand it. We've got to marry."

  Kitty said, "Oh well. I suppose we have." She was too hot, too limp, too tired, to suppose anything else.

  "At once," said Chester. "I'll get a licence.... We must get it done at some small place in the country where they don't know who we are. I must take another name for it.... There's a place I sometimes stay at, in the Chilterns. They are rather stupid there—even now," he added, with the twist of a rueful smile. "I think it should be pretty safe. Anyhow I don't think I much care; we're going to do it."

  They spoke low in the dim, breathless room, with its windows opened wide on to the breathless street.

  "I have wanted you," said Chester. "I have wanted you extremely badly these last three months. I have never wanted anything so much. It has been a—a hideous time, taking it all round."

  "You certainly," said Kitty, "look as if it had. So do I—don't I? It's partly heat and dirt, with both of us—the black of this town soaks in—and partly tiredness, and partly, for you, the strain of your ministerial responsibilities, no doubt; but I think a little of it is our broken hearts.... Nicky, I'm too limp to argue or fight. I know it's all wrong, what we're going to do; but I'm like you—I don't think I much care. We'll get married in your stupid village, under a false name. That counts, does it? Oh, all right. I shouldn't particularly mind if it didn't, you know. I'll do without the registry business altogether if you think it's safer. After all, what's the odds? It comes to the same thing in the end, only with less fuss. And it's no one's business but ours."

  "No," Chester said. "I think that would be a mistake. Wrong. I don't approve of this omitting of the legal bond; it argues a lack of the sense of social ethics; it opens the door to a state of things which is essentially uncivilised, lacking in self-control and intelligence. I don't like it. It always strikes me as disagreeable and behind the times; a step backwards. No, we won't do that. I'd rather take the greater risk of publicity. I'm dropping one principle, but I don't want to drop more than I need."

  Kitty laughed silently, and slipped her hand into his. "All right, you shan't. We'll get tied up properly at your country registry, and keep some of our principles and hang the risk.... I oughtn't to let you, you know. If it comes out it will wreck your career and perhaps wreck the Ministry and endanger the intellect of the country. We may be sowing the seeds of another World War; but—oh, I'm bored with being high-principled about it."

  "It's too late to be that," said Chester. "We've got to go ahead now."

  He consulted his pocket-book and said that he was free on August 10th, and that they would then get married and go to Italy for a fortnight's holiday together. They made the other arrangements that have to be made in these peculiar circumstances, and then Chester went back to his hotel.

  The awful, airless, panting night through which the Chesterfield furnaces flamed, lay upon the queer, crooked black city like a menace. Kitty, leaning out of her window and listening to Chester's retreating steps echoing up the street, ran her fingers through her damp dark hair, because her head ached, and murmured, "I don't care. I don't care. What's the good of living if you can't have what you want?"

  Which expressed an instinct common to the race, and one which would in the end bring to nothing the most strenuous efforts of social and ethical reformers.

  3

  They got married. Chester took, for the occasion, the name of Gilbert Lewis; it was surprising how easy this was. The witness looked attentively at him, but probably always looked like that at the people getting married. Neither he nor the registrar looked intelligent, or as if they were connecting Chester's face with anything they had seen before.

  After the performance they went to Italy for a fortnight. Italy in August is fairly safe from English visitors. They stayed at Cogoleto, a tiny fishing town fifteen miles up the coast from Genoa, shut in a little bay between the olive hills and the sea. To this sheltered coast through the summer months people come from the hot towns inland and fill every
lodging and inn and pitch tents on the shore, and pass serene, lazy, amphibious days in and out of a sea which has the inestimable advantage over English seas that it is always at hand.

  The Chesters too passed amphibious days. They would rise early, while the sea lay cool and smooth and pale and pearly in the morning light, and before the sand burnt their feet as they walked on it, and slip in off the gently shelving shore, and swim and swim and swim. They were both good swimmers. Chester was the stronger and faster, but Kitty could do more tricks. She could turn somersaults like an eel, and sit at the bottom of the sea playing with pebbles, with open eyes gazing up through clear green depths. When they bathed from a boat, she turned head over heels backwards from the bows, and shot under the boat and came up neatly behind the stern. Chester too could perform fairly well; their energy and skill excited the amazed admiration of the bagnanti, who seldom did more than splash on the sea's edge or bob up and down with swimming belts a few yards out. Chester and Kitty would swim out for a mile, then lie on their backs and float, gazing up into the sea-blue sky, before the sun had climbed high enough to burn and blind. Then they would swim back and return to the inn and put on a very few clothes and have their morning coffee, and then walk up the coast, taking lunch, to some little lonely cove in the shadow of rocks, where they would spend the heat of the day in and out of the sea. When they came out of the water they lay on the burning sands and dried themselves, and talked or read. When the heat of the day had passed a little, and the sea lay very smooth and still in the late afternoon, with no waves at all, only a gentle, whispering swaying to and fro, they would go further afield; climbing up the steep stone-paved mule-tracks that wound up the hills behind, passing between grey olive groves and lemon and orange gardens and vineyards of ripening vines and little rough white farmhouses, till they reached the barer, wilder hill slopes of pines and rocks, where the hot sweetness of myrtle and juniper stirred with each tiny moving of sea air.