What Not. A Prophetic Comedy Read online

  Miss Grammont yawned, because the day was yet so young, and followed Miss Delmer up the steps of the hotel.

  4

  The Ministry of Brains, a vast organisation, had many sections. There was the Propaganda Section, which produced pamphlets and organised lectures and cinema shows (Miss Grammont had been lent temporarily to this section by her own branch); there was the Men's Education Section, the Women's, and the Children's; the Section which dealt with brain-tests, examinations, certificates, and tribunals, and the Section which was concerned with the direction of the intellects of the Great Unborn. Ivy Delmer was attached to this section, and Mr. Delmer, when he heard about it, was not altogether sure it was quite nice for her.

  "She surely shouldn't know they have any," he had said to his wife, who was weeding, and replied absently, "Any what, dear? Who?"

  "Intellects," the vicar said. "The Unborn. Besides, they haven't." He was frowning, and jerking out dandelions from the lawn with a spud.

  "Oh, that's not it, dear," Mrs. Delmer reassured him vaguely. "Not the just unborn, you know. The—the ever so long unborn. All this arrangement of who ought to marry who. Quite silly, of course, but no harm for Ivy in that way. After all, there's no reason why she shouldn't know that children often inherit their brains from their parents."

  The vicar admitted that, even for their precious and very young Ivy, there was no great harm in this.

  The Section in question was, as Mrs. Delmer had stated, concerned with the encouragement and discouragement of alliances in proportion as they seemed favourable or otherwise to the propagation of intelligence in the next generation. There were numerous and complicated regulations on the subject, which could not, of course, be enforced; the Ministry's methods were those of stimulation, reward and punishment, rather than of coercion. There were bonuses on the births of the babies of parents conforming to the regulations, and penal taxes on unregulated infants, taxes increasing in proportion to the flagrancy of the parents' disobedience, so that the offspring of parents of very low mental calibre brought with them financial ruin. Everyone held a Ministry of Brains form, showing his or her mental category, officially ascertained and registered. If you were classified A, your brains were certified to be of the highest order, and you were recommended to take a B2 or B3 partner (these were the quite intelligent). To ally yourself with another A or a B1 was regarded as wasteful, there not being nearly enough of these to go round, and your babies would receive much smaller bonuses. If you were classed C1, C2, or C3, your babies would receive no encouragement, unless you had diluted their folly with an A partner; if you chose to unite with another C they were heavily fined, and if you were below C3 (i.e. uncertificated) they were fined still more heavily, by whomsoever diluted, and for the third and subsequent infants born under such conditions you would be imprisoned. (Only the Ministry had not been working long enough for anyone to have yet met with this fate. The children of unions perpetrated before the Mental Progress Act were at present exempt.) Families among the lower grades and among the uncertificated were thus drastically discouraged. You were uncertificated for matrimonial purposes not only if you were very stupid, but if, though yourself of brilliant mental powers, you had actual deficiency in your near family. If you were in this case, your form was marked "A (Deficiency)."

  And so on: the details of the regulations, their intricacies and tangled knots, the endless and complicated special arrangements which were made with various groups and classes of persons, may be easily imagined, or (rather less easily, because the index is poor) found in the many volumes of the Ministry of Brains Instructions.

  Anyhow, to room number 13, which was among the many rooms where this vast and intricate subject was dealt with, Ivy Delmer was summoned this Monday morning to take down a letter for Vernon Prideaux.

  5

  Vernon Prideaux was a fair, slim, neat, eye-glassed young man; his appearance and manners were approved by Ivy Delmer's standards and his capabilities by the heads of his department. His intellectual category was A; he had an impatient temper, a ready tongue, considerable power over papers (an important gift, not possessed by all civil servants), resource in emergency, competence in handling situations and persons, decided personal charm, was the son of one of our more notorious politicians, and had spent most of the war in having malaria on the Struma front, with one interesting break when he was recalled to England by his former department to assist in the drawing up of a new Bill, dealing with a topic on which he was an expert. He was, after all this, only thirty now, so had every reason for believing, as he did, that he would accomplish something in this world before he left it. He had been sucked into the activities of the new Ministry like so many other able young men and women, and was finding it both entertaining and not devoid of scope for his talents.

  Ivy Delmer admired him a good deal. She sat at his side with her notebook and pencil, her soft, wide mouth a little parted, waiting for him to begin. He was turning over papers impatiently. He was in a rather bad temper, because of his new secretary, of whom he only demanded a little common sense and did not get it, and he would have to get rid of her, always a tiresome process. He couldn't trust her with anything, however simple; she always made a hash of it, and filled up the gaps, which were profound, in her recollection of his instructions with her own ideas, which were not. He had on Saturday given her some forms to fill up, stock forms which were always sent in reply to a particular kind of letter from the public. The form was supposed merely to say, "In reply to your letter with reference to your position as regards the tax [or bonus] on your prospective [or potential, or existing] infant, I am to inform you that your case is one for the decision of the Local Tribunals set up under the Mental Progress Act, to whom your application should have been made." Miss Pomfrey, who was young and full of zeal for the cause (she very reasonably wished that the Mental Progress Act had been in existence before her parents had married), had added on her own account to one such letter, "It was the stupidity of people like you who caused the Great War," and put it this morning with the other forms on Prideaux's table for signing. Prideaux had enquired, fighting against what he knew to be a disproportionate anger with her, didn't she really know better by now than to think that letters like that would be sent? Miss Pomfrey had sighed. She did not know better than that by now. She knew hardly anything. She was not intelligent, even as B3's went. In fact, her category was probably a mistake. Her babies, if ever she had any, would be of a mental calibre that did not bear contemplation. They would probably cause another Great War.

  So Prideaux, who had also other worries, was out of temper.

  "Sorry, Miss Delmer.... Ah, here we are." He fidgeted about with a file, then began to dictate a letter, in his quick, light, staccato voice. Ivy, clenching the tip of her pink tongue between her teeth, raced after him.

  "Sir,

  "In reply to your letter of 26th May with reference to the taxation on babies born to your employees and their consequent demand for increased wages, I am instructed by the Minister of Brains to inform you that this point is receiving his careful attention, in connection with the general economic question involved by the terms of Ministry of Brains Instruction 743, paragraph 3...."

  Prideaux paused, and frowned nervously at his secretary, who was conducting a fruitless conversation over his telephone, an occupation at which she did not shine.

  "Hullo ... yes ... I can't quite hear ... who are you, please?... Oh ... yes, he's here.... But rather busy, you know.... Dictating.... Yes, dictating.... Who did you say wanted him, please?... Oh, I see...."

  "What is it, Miss Pomfrey?" Prideaux broke in, making her start.

  "It's the Minister's secretary," she explained, without covering the receiver. "He says will you go to the Minister. There's a deputation—of bishops, I think he said. About the new Instruction about Clergymen's Babies.... But I said you were busy dictating...."

  Prideaux had jumped to his feet, frowning, and was at the door.

  "You'
d better make a note that I'm never busy dictating or doing anything else when the Minister sends for me," he shot at her as he left the room.

  "And now he's cross," Miss Pomfrey murmured sadly.

  "I daresay he's only angry at being interrupted," said Ivy Delmer, who had been at the same secretarial college as Miss Pomfrey and thought that her days in the Ministry of Brains were numbered.

  "I do make him cross," Miss Pomfrey observed, accepting the fact with resignation, as one of the sad, inevitable fatalities of life, and returned to her indexing. She had been set to make an index of those Ministry of Brains Instructions which had come out that month. She had only got to the 11th of the month. The draught fluttered the pages about. Ivy Delmer watched the Instructions waving to and fro in the breeze—number 801, Agriculturists, 798, Conscientious Obstructionists, 897, Residents in Ireland, 674, Parents of more than three children.... How many there were, thought Ivy, as she watched. How clever the people who dealt with such things needed to be. She thought of her father's village, and the people in it, the agriculturists, the parents of more than three children, all the little human community of lives who were intimately affected by one or other of these instructions, and the fluttering pages emerged from the dry realm to which such as Ivy relegate printed matter and ideas, and took vivid human life. It mattered, all this complicated fabric of regulations and rules and agreements and arrangements; it touched the living universe that she knew—the courting boys and girls on stiles in Buckinghamshire lanes, Emmeline, the Vicarage housemaid, who had married Sid Dean last month, Mr. and Mrs. White at the farm, all the great stupid pathetic aggrieved public, neatly filed letters from whom covered every table in the Ministry, awaiting reply, their very hand-writing and spelling calculated to touch any heart but a civil servant's....

  Ivy found a moment in which to hope that everyone in the Ministry was being very careful and painstaking about this business, before she reverted to wondering whether or not she liked the colour which Miss Pomfrey had dyed her jersey.

  Having decided that she didn't, and also that she had better go away and wait for Mr. Prideaux to send for her again, she departed.

  6

  Vernon Prideaux, having given his assistance to the Minister in the matter of the third clause of the new Clergymen's Babies Instruction, left the Minister and the deputation together and returned to his room via the Propaganda Branch, which he visited in order to ask Miss Grammont to dine with him that evening. He and Kitty Grammont had known one another for some years. They had begun at Cambridge, where Prideaux had been two years the senior, and had kept up an intermittent friendship ever since, which had, since their association in the Ministry, grown into intimacy.

  Prideaux found Kitty writing a pamphlet. She was rather good at this form of literature, having a concise and clear-cut style and an instinct for stopping on the right word. Some pamphleteers have not this art: they add a sentence or two more, and undo their effect. The pamphlet on which Miss Grammont was at this moment engaged was intended for the perusal of the working woman, and bore the conversational title, "The Nation takes an interest in Your Affairs: will You not take an interest in the Affairs of the Nation?" Which, as Miss Grammont observed, took rather a long time to say, but may have been worth it.

  "Dine with you? I'll be charmed. Where and when?"

  "My rooms, eight o'clock. I've got my parents and the Minister coming."

  "Oh, the Minister."

  "Do you mind?"

  "No, I'm proud to meet him. I've never yet met him over food, so to speak, only officially. I admire our Chester more every day he lives, don't you? Nature made him and then broke the die."

  "Wonderful man," Prideaux agreed. "Extraordinary being.... A happy touch with bishops, too. Picked that up in the home, no doubt; his father's one. Liking's another thing, of course.... By the way, do you know what his category is? However, this is gossip. I must get back and discover what's the latest perpetration of my new secretary. See you to-night, then."

  He left the room. Kitty Grammont observed with satisfaction, for she was critical of such things, how well his clothes fitted him, wondered what he had nearly told her about the Minister's category, finished her pamphlet, and sent it out for typing. She had an idea that this pamphlet might not get passed by the censor, and wanted to find out. For the censor was cautious about pamphlets, wisely opining that you cannot be too careful. Pamphlets may, and usually do, deal with dangerous or indecent topics, such as the Future. If sufficiently dangerous and indecent, they become Leaflets, and are suppressed on sight. There were dangerous and explosive words, like Peace, War, and Freedom which the censor dealt with drastically. The danger of the word Peace dated, of course, from the days when Peace had not yet arrived and discussion of it was therefore improper, like the discussion of an unborn infant. By the time it did arrive, its relegation to the region of Things we do not Mention had become a habit, not lightly to be laid aside, so that a Ministry of Brains pamphlet entitled "The Peace of Fools" had been strangled before birth, the censor being very naturally unable to believe that it did not refer in some mysterious way to the negotiations which had ended hostilities, whereas as a matter of fact it was all about the foolish content of stupid people who went on submitting to diseases which a little intelligent thought would have prevented. There had also perished, owing to the same caution on the censor's part, and, it must be presumed, to the same guilty conscience on the part of the Government, a booklet published by Messrs. Mowbray in a purple paper cover with a gold cross on it, called "The Peace which passeth understanding," not to mention a new edition of Burke's "Regicide Peace," and one or two other works of which the censor, whose reading was obliged to be mainly twentieth century, mistook the date. And, if treatises concerning Peace were suspected from force of habit, works on War were discouraged also, on the sound British principle that the stress of a great Peace is not the time to talk of War; we must first deal with Peace, and then we may think about War; but One Thing At Once, and do not let us cry War, War, when there is no war. But there may be one day, argued the pamphleteers, and might it not be well to prepare our minds for it? To which the answer very properly was, No; Britons do not look ahead. They Come Through, instead. And anyhow it was treachery to those who were spending their energies on this righteous peace to discuss a premature war, which could neither be just nor lasting.

  Another improper subject, naturally, was Liberty. That needs no explanation; it has always been improper in well-regulated countries, like Eugenics, or the Poor, and has received no encouragement from authority. Notwithstanding this, so many improper works upon it, in every conceivable form, have always been produced, that the censors had to engage a special clerk, who had just obtained a first class in English Literature at Oxford, and who therefore had books and pamphlets of all dates fresh in her memory, to check their researches and inform them when their energies were superfluous. Not that all the books of former centuries on this topic were to be encouraged, for, after all, one period is in some respects singularly like another, and the same reflections strangely germane to both. Naturally, therefore, when the literary clerk, seeing advertised a new and cheap edition of Robert Hall's "Sentiments proper to the present crisis," and, remembering the trend of this work, sent for it (having sold her own copy at Blackwell's when she went down), and read such remarks as "Freedom, driven from every spot on the continent, has sought an asylum in a country which she always chose for her favourite abode, but she is pursued even here and threatened with destruction.... It is for you to decide whether this freedom shall yet survive, or be clothed with a funeral pall and be wrapped in eternal gloom"—very properly she reported the matter to headquarters, and the cheap edition was called in.

  Equally naturally there perished (without the help of the literary clerk, who was not asked to judge of twentieth century literature) various collections of Free Verse, for which the Poetry Bookshop was successfully raided, a tract of the sort which is dropped about trains, published
by the Evangelical Tract Society and called "Throw off your Chains!", "Citizens of a Free City," which was found at Mowbray's, and bore on its title page the statement "Jerusalem ... is free" (a manifest and seditious untruth, as we, of course, held Jerusalem, in trust for the Jews), and many others of like tendency, such as works on Free Food, Free Drink, Free Housing, Free Love, Free Thought, and Labour, in Chains. Even fiction was suspect. A novel entitled The Dangers of Dora, by the well-known author of The Perils of Pauline and The Exploits of Elaine, was suppressed, in spite of what should have been the reassuring fact that Dora, like Pauline and Elaine before her, triumphantly worsted all her foes in the end, and emerged smiling and safe on the last page. Publishers were known to demand the alteration of a title if the name Dora occurred in it, such wholesome respect did the Censor's methods inspire.

  It will therefore be readily understood that even government departments had to go warily in this matter.

  The Minister of Brains held pamphlet propaganda to be of the greatest importance. A week ago the workers in the propaganda section had been sent for and interviewed by the Minister in person. This personal contact had, for the time being, oddly weighted Miss Grammont's too irresponsible levity, kindled her rather cynical coolness, given her something almost like zeal. That was one thing about the Minister—he set other people on fire. Another was that his manners were bad but unexpected, and a third that he looked like a cross between M. Kerensky, a member of the Geddes family, and Mr. Nelson Keys.