What Not. A Prophetic Comedy Read online

  Thus Miss Grammont, thoughtfully smoking a Cyprus cigarette, summed up the Minister of Brains.

  * * *

  CHAPTER II

  LITTLE CHANTREYS

  1

  Ivy Delmer went home to Little Chantreys on the following Saturday afternoon, after a matinée and tea in town, in the same train, though not the same carriage as Kitty Grammont and Vernon Prideaux, who were presumably spending the week-end at the End House. Ivy travelled home every evening of the week. Miss Grammont had a flat in town, but spent the week-ends when she was not otherwise engaged, with her brother in Little Chantreys, which was embarrassing to Ivy.

  As Ivy got out of the train she saw Miss Grammont's brother and the lady who could scarcely be called her sister-in-law, on the platform, accompanied by a queer-looking man of about forty, with ears rather like a faun's. Anyone, thought Ivy, could have guessed which house in Little Chantreys he was staying at. The week-end people who came to the End House differed widely one from another in body and soul; some looked clever, or handsome, others did not, some were over-dressed, some under, some, like Miss Grammont and her brothers, just right; there were musical people, sporting people, literary or artistic people, stagy people (these last were the friends of Miss Pansy Ponsonby, who was not Miss Grammont's sister-in-law), uncommon people, and common people; but they all, thought Ivy Delmer, had two looks in common—they looked as if they wouldn't get on very well with her father and mother, and they looked as if they didn't read the Bible.

  This second look was differentiated according to the wearer of it. Some of them (like this man to-day) looked as if he didn't read it because it had become so inextricably bound up with vulgar superstition and an impossible religion that he despised it. Some, like Miss Grammont and her brother Anthony, looked as if they didn't read it because they already knew enough of it to be funny about it when they wanted to; others, like Miss Pansy Ponsonby, looked as if she had really once given it a try, but had found it dry and put off further perusal until such time as she lay dying and might want to do something about her future state. And Miss Grammont's brother Cyril looked as if it was a Protestant book, and rather vulgar. Some, again, looked innocent, as if they had never heard of it, others guilty, as if they never wanted to again.

  Ivy Delmer walked home to the Vicarage, hoping rather that the End House wouldn't come to church to-morrow. It was taken, from time to time, with an unaccountable fit of doing this. It made Ivy uncomfortable. Whether or not it came to pray, she could not help having an uneasy suspicion that it stayed to mock.

  2

  "Hullo, old dear," said Miss Pansy Ponsonby, in her rich and resonant drawl, as Kitty and her companion came out of the station. "Here we all are again. And the Cheeper. He's a growin' boy, our Cheeper: he puts on weight. Takes after me: I put on weight when I forget my exercises and don't keep an eye on myself. Don't I, Tony? Mr. Prideaux, isn't it? How do, Mr. Prideaux? Vurry pleased you've come. You know Mr. Amherst, don't you? You clever folks all know each other." Miss Ponsonby, who was not an American, had once performed in the same company as Miss Lee White, and had caught an inflexion or two. She looked with the satisfaction of the hospitable hostess at the little group, and added, "So here we all are. And vurry nice too."

  It was, indeed, not an unpleasing group. Dominating it was Miss Ponsonby herself, very tall, very beautiful, very supple (only a year ago she had been doing her celebrated eel-dance in "Hullo, Peace!"), with long and lovely violet eyes and the best kind of Icilma skin, adorned tastefully but quite unnecessarily with pink paint, white powder, scarlet lip salve, and black lash-darkener. All this was from force of habit: Miss Ponsonby was quite adequately pink, white, scarlet and black in her own person. But, as Kitty observed, having been given by heaven such an absurd thing as a human face, what could one do but make it yet more absurd by these superimposed gaieties? You cannot take a face as a serious thing; it is one of nature's jests, and it is most suitably dealt with as the clown and the pierrot deal with theirs. This was Kitty's point of view; Pansy had none, only habits.

  Pansy was guiding and controlling a motor-pram, in which lay the Cheeper, aged four months (he had no Christian name, having so far evaded both the registrar and the font, and presumably no surname, owing to the peculiar circumstances of his parents). The Cheeper's father, Anthony Grammont, was a fair, pale, good-looking, rather tired young man of seven and twenty, with a slightly plaintive voice; he looked as if he shared, only with more languor, Miss Ponsonby's placid and engaging enjoyment of the world; he had been in one of the hottest corners of France through the European War, and had emerged from it a bored and unambitious colonel, deaf of one ear, adorned with a Military Cross, and determined to repay himself for his expenditure of so much time, energy and health by enjoying the fifty or sixty years which, he piously hoped, remained to him, to the full. Which he was now doing. His professional life was passed on the Stock Exchange.

  Mr. Leslie Amherst, the man like a faun, who was staying with him, was an old friend of the Grammont family. He wrote, and was on the staff of a weekly journal. He was engaged just now on a series of articles on the Forces of Darkness in Darkest Europe. So far he had produced 1. The Legislature, 2. Capitalism, 3. Industrialism, 4. Nationalism, 5. Militarism, 6. The Press, and this week he was writing 7. Organised Religion. (It will no doubt shock some readers to learn that these forces had not all, in spite of the earnest hopes entertained for so long for their overthrowal, yet been overthrown; but truth compels me to state that they had not.) Though Amherst talked like a cynic, and had his affectations, he was an earnest thinker, and sometimes tired his host, who was not, and who had been left by his years of difficult continental sojourn with a supreme distaste for any further probing into the problems of Darkest Europe. Amherst had the advantage, in this matter, of having been a Conscientious Objector to Military Service, so the war had not tired him, and he retained for home use the freshness and vigour of attack which had, in the case of many of his fellow-countrymen, been all used up abroad.

  The End House party was completed by Kitty Grammont, with her round, long-lashed eyes and her air of the ingenuous rake, and Vernon Prideaux, brisk and neat and clever. So there they all were; and very nice, too.

  Kitty kissed her brother and Miss Ponsonby and dug the Cheeper in the ribs in the manner he preferred. She was very fond of them all, and found Miss Ponsonby immeasurably entertaining. Little had she thought, when of old she used joyfully to watch Miss Pansy Ponsonby twist and kick and curl herself about the stage and sing fascinating inanities in her lazy contralto, that they would ever be linked by no common bond. Of course she had known that her brother Anthony was showering flowers, chocolates, suppers, week-ends and air-trips at Miss Ponsonby's nimble feet (the toes of which could bend right back at the joints) but Anthony had been known to shower these things at the feet of others. Certainly Kitty had never expected that he would instal this delightful and expensive being in a real house, have a real infant, and really settle down, albeit socially ostracised in Buckinghamshire because imperfectly married (that was the fault of Pansy's husband, Mr. Jimmie Jenks, who, though he didn't want her himself, selfishly refused to sever the connection irrevocably).

  "What's the afternoon news?" enquired Mr. Amherst, as they walked up to the village.

  "Haven't seen a paper for half an hour," replied Prideaux, who kept his finger on the pulse of the nation and liked his news up to date. "I've got two five o'clock ones with me, though. The Leeds strike is rather worse, the Sheffield one rather better. The aero bus men are coming out on Monday. Dangerous unrest among Sussex shepherds and Cotswold cowmen." (Agricultural labour was now controlled by the State.) "Lord Backwoods has been speaking to his constituents against the Bill for disfranchising Conscientious Obstructionists of the Mental Progress Acts. A thoroughly seditious speech, of course. Poor old chap, his eldest-son has just got engaged to be married, so there'll be another family of Backwoods babies who ought never to exist. It will hit them heavil
y financially.... And the International Police have found another underground gun-factory near Munich, under a band-stand. And it's confirmed that old Tommy Jackson is to be Drink Controller."

  "Another good butler spoilt," observed Anthony Grammont. "He was a jolly good butler once. And he'll be a jolly bad Drink Controller."

  "Dear old Tommy," murmured Miss Ponsonby absently, lifting the Cheeper out of his motor-pram with one strong white hand and balancing him on her ample shoulders. "He was vurry kind to me in the dear old days, when I spent week-ends at Surrey Towers. He used to give me tips on Correct Conduct. I didn't take them; Correct Conduct wasn't what the people there asked me for; but I was grateful to Tommy."

  "If," said Anthony, "there is any member of a government department, existing, fallen, or yet to come, who has not in the dear old days been vurry kind to you, my dear Pansy, I should be rather glad to know his name."

  "Why, certainly," returned Pansy, with cheerful readiness. "Nicky Chester, the Brains Minister who's making himself such an all-round eternal nuisance, doesn't even realise I exist, and if he did he'd think I oughtn't."

  "That's where you're wrong, Pansy," Kitty said. "He thinks everyone ought to exist who does anything as well as you do your things. You're Starred A, aren't you?"

  "I've gone and lost the silly old bus ticket," said Pansy indifferently, "but that's what it said, I think." Starred A meant (in the words of the official definition) first-class ability at a branch of work which would not appear to be a valuable contribution to the general efficiency of the State. The Cheeper, child of a starred A mother and a B3 father (Anthony's brains had been reduced by trench-life; he had been quite intelligent at Oxford), was subject neither to bonus nor tax.

  "Anyhow," went on Pansy, grinning her wide, sweet, leisurely grin, "I think I see Nicky Chester sendin' me round flowers or goodies after a show! He's seen me, you know: he was in a box the first night of 'Hullo, Peace!' He laughed at the political hits, but my turns left him cold; I guess they weren't brainy enough." She tossed the Cheeper in the air and caught him, strongly and easily. "Make him supple young," she observed, "an' by the time he's six he'll be a star Child Gamboller, fit for revue. He takes after me. Already he can put both his big toes in his little mouth at once."

  "Very unusual, surely," remarked Mr. Amherst, looking at the Cheeper through his pince-nez as if he were an insect under a microscope. Mr. Amherst was fellow of an Oxford college, and had the academic touch, and was not yet entirely used to Pansy, a type outside his previous studies, and at no time would he be really used to anyone under eighteen years of age, let alone six months. Possibly this was what his reviewers meant when they said that he lacked the touch of common humanity.

  His attention was diverted from the Cheeper by the parish church, which he inspected with the same curiosity and distaste.

  "Organised Religion, I presume," he commented. "If you've no objection, Anthony, I will attend morning service there to-morrow. It may provide me with some valuable subject matter for my article."

  "We'll all go," said Kitty. "The End House shall set an example to the village. We'll take Cyril, too. He can get a dispensation. It's Brains Sunday, you know, and all patriotic clergymen will be preaching about it. Vernon and I are officially bound to be there."

  "I don't suppose it will be amusing," said Anthony. "But we'll go if you all want to."

  "Church," said Pansy, meditatively regarding the Early Perpendicular tower. "I went one Sunday morning." She paused reminiscently, and added, without chagrin, "The vicar turned me down."

  "He could hardly," said Mr. Amherst civilly, "do otherwise. Your position is not one which is at present recognised by Organised Religion."

  "Oh, he recognised it all right," Pansy explained. "That was just the trouble; he didn't like it.... He's not a bad old sort. He came to call afterwards, and told me all about it. He was quite upset. So was I, wasn't I, old thing?"

  "Not in the least," returned Anthony placidly.

  "I'd only wanted to do the proper thing," Pansy continued her unperturbed narrative, in her singularly beautiful voice. "I was always brought up to go to church now and then. I was confirmed all right. I like to do the proper thing. It only seems fair to the Cheeper to bring him up in the way he should go. I wouldn't care for him to grow up an agnogger, like all you people. But Mr. Delmer said my way of life was too ambiguous to square with comin' to church. Rather a sweet word, don't you think? Because it isn't ambiguous really, you know; not a bit, I'm afraid.... So when the Cheeper turned up, it seemed to me he was a bit ambiguous, too, an' that's why I haven't had him made a little Christian yet. The vicar says he can square that up all right—he called on purpose to tell me—but somehow we've never had the time to fix it, have we, darlin'? Tottie O'Clare promised me she'd be godmother if ever I did have him done...."

  "Pansy," said Anthony, "you're boring Amherst and Prideaux. They're not interested in babies, or baptisms, or Tottie O'Clare."

  Pansy smiled at them all out of her serene violet eyes. She looked like some stately, supple Aphrodite; she might, but for the delicate soupçon of powder and over-red lips, have sat for a madonna.

  "Pansy," said Kitty, "it's the Sistine Madonna you're like; I've got it at last. You're the divine type. You might be from heaven. You're so restful. We all spin and buzz about, trying to get things done, and to be clever and fussy and efficient—and you just are. You happen, like spring, or music. You're not a bit like Chester, but you're ever so much more important. Isn't she, Vernon?"

  "They're both," said Prideaux tactfully, "of enormous importance. And certainly, as you say, not in the least alike. Chester is neither like spring nor music, and certainly one wouldn't call him restful. And I should be a bit surprised to learn that heaven is where he either began or will end his career.... But, I ask you, look at that."

  They were passing the little Town Hall, that stood in the village market place. Its face was plastered with an immense poster, which Prideaux and Kitty surveyed with proprietary pride, Amherst with cynical amusement, Anthony with bored resignation, and Pansy and the Cheeper with placid wonder at the world's folly.

  "Ours is a wonderful government," Kitty commented. "And we are a wonderful ministry. Think of rural England all plastered with that.... I don't believe Chester laughs when he sees it, Vernon. I'm sure he looks at it proudly, like a solemn, earnest little boy."

  "And quite right too," said Prideaux, screwing his glass into his eye the better to read. For this was a new Ministry of Brains poster; new this week. It read, in large type, "Improve your Brains! Go in for the Government Course of Mind Training! It will benefit you, it will benefit your country, it will benefit posterity. Old Age must come. But it need not be a Doddering Old Age. Lay up Good Mental Capacities to meet it, and make it a Fruitful and Happy Time. See what the Mind Training Course has done for others, and let it Do the Same for You."

  Then, in smaller type, "Here are a few reports from those who have benefited by it.

  "From a famous financier. Since I began the Course I have doubled my income and halved those of 750 others. I hope, by the time I have completed the Course, to have ruined twice this number.

  "From a Cabinet Minister. Owing to the Mind Training Course I have now remained in office for over six weeks. I hope to remain for at least three more.

  "From a newspaper proprietor. I have started eight new journals since I took the Course, over-turned three governments, directed four international crises, and successfully represented Great Britain to the natives of the Pacific Islands.

  "From the editor of a notorious weekly paper. I took the Course because I seemed to be losing that unrivalled touch which has made my paper what, I may say, it is. Since taking it, more than my old force has returned, so that I have libelled nine prominent persons and successfully defended six libel actions in the courts. The M.T. Course teaches one to Live at one's Best.

  "From a Civil Servant. Every time a new government department is born I enter it, rendered
competent by the Mind Training Course to fill its highest posts. When the Department falls I leave it, undamaged.

  "From a Publisher. My judgment has been so stimulated by the Course that since taking it I have published five novels so unpleasant that correspondence still rages about them in the columns of the Spectator, and which have consequently achieved ten editions. The Course teaches one why some succeed and others fail.

  "From a Journalist. I now only use the words decimated, literally, annihilated, and proletariat, according to the meanings ascribed to them in the dictionary, do not use pacifism more than three times a day, nor 'very essential' or 'rather unique' at all.

  "From a famous Theologian. Before I undertook the Course I was a Bishop of a disestablished Church. Now my brain is clarified, my eyes are opened, and I am a leader of the Coming Faith. The Course teaches the Meaning of Life.

  "From a former Secretary of State. Since taking the Course I have recognised the importance of keeping myself informed as to public affairs, and now never refer in my public speeches to any speech by another statesman without having previously read a summary of it.

  "From a poet. I can now find rhymes to nearly all my lines, and have given up the old-fashioned habit of free rhythms to which I have been addicted since 1912. I can even find rhymes to indemnity, also a rhyme to War which is neither gore, claw, nor star.

  "From an inveterate writer of letters to newspapers. I no longer do this.

  "From a citizen. I was engaged to be married. Now I am not."

  Then in large type again,

  "All this has happened to Others! Why should it not happen to You? Save yourself, save your country, save the world! How shall wisdom be found, and where is the place of understanding? So asked the Preacher of the ancient world, and got no answer, because then there was none. But the answer is now forthcoming. Wisdom is to be found in the Government Mind Training Course—the M.T.C., as it is affectionately called by thousands of men and women who are deriving benefits from it. Enter for it to-day. For further information apply Mind Training Section, Ministry of Brains, S.W. 1."