What Not. A Prophetic Comedy Read online

  Ivy looked with puzzled, thoughtful eyes, which this morning, unusually, were observing people rather than their clothes, at the rest of the congregation, her own brothers and sisters first. The young Delmers were several in number; there was Betty, who had just left school, and showed no signs of "doing" anything, except her hair, the flowers, and occasionally the lamps. For the rest, she played tennis for prizes and hockey for Bucks, went out to tea, and when in doubt dyed her clothes or washed the dogs. There was Charlie, at Cambridge. Charlie was of those for whom the Great War had been allowed to take the place of the Littlego, which was fortunate in his case, as he had managed to get through the one but would probably in no circumstances have got through the other. And there was Reggie, who had got through neither, but had been killed at Cambrai in November, 1917. There were also some little ones, Jane and John, aged twelve and eleven, who, though separated by the length of a seat, still continued to hold communication by Morse, and Jelly, who was named for a once famous admiral and whose age cannot be specified. Jelly was small and stout, sat between his mother and Ivy and stared at his father in the choir-stalls, and from time to time lifted up his voice and laughed, as if he were at a Punch and Judy show.

  On the whole an agreeable family, and well-intentioned (though Ivy and Betty quarrelled continuously and stole each other's things), but certainly to be numbered among the simple, who were urged to get understanding. Would they ever get it? That was the question, for them and for the whole congregation here present, from the smallest, grubbiest school-child furtively sucking bulls'-eyes and wiping its sticky hands upon its teacher's skirt, to the vicar in the pulpit, giving out his text.

  "The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God"; that was the text. Ivy saw a little smile cross the clever and conceited face of Mr. Amherst as it was given out. He settled himself down to listen, expectant of entertainment. He believed that he was in luck. For Mr. Amherst, who did not say in his heart that there was no God, because even in his heart he scorned the affirmation of the obvious, was of those who are sure that all members of the Christian Church are fools (unlike Mr. Arnold Bennett, who tries and fails, he did not even try to think of them as intellectual equals), so he avoided, where he could, the study of clever Christians, and welcomed the evidences of weakness of intellect that crossed his path. He believed that this was going to be a foolish sermon, which, besides amusing them all, would help him in his article on Organised Religion.

  Ivy could not help watching the End House people. Somehow she knew how the sermon was affecting them. She didn't think it funny, but she suspected that they would. Her father wasn't as clever as they were; that was why he failed to say anything that could impress them except as either dull or comic. Brains again. How much they mattered. Clergymen ought to have brains; it seemed very important. They ought to know how to appeal to rich and poor, high and low, wise and simple. This extraordinary thing called religion—(Ivy quite newly and unusually saw it as extraordinary, seeing it for a moment with the eyes of the End House, to all of whom, except Miss Ponsonby and, presumably, Cyril Grammont, it was like fairy lore, like Greek mythology, mediæval archaic nonsense)—this extraordinary lore and the more extraordinary force behind it, was in the hands, mainly (like everything else), of incompetents, clerical and lay, who did not understand it themselves and could not help others to do so. They muddled about with it, as Miss Pomfrey muddled about with office papers.... It would not be surprising if the force suddenly demolished them all, like lightning....

  But such speculations were foreign to Ivy, and she forgot them in examining the hat of Mrs. Peterson, the grocer's wife, which was so noticeable in its excessive simplicity—its decoration consisted wholly of home-grown vegetables—as to convince beholders that Mr. Peterson had not, as some falsely said, made a fortune during the war by cornering margarine.

  2

  Mr. Delmer was talking about the worst form of unwisdom—Atheism; a terrible subject to him, and one he approached with diffidence but resolution, in the face of the unusual pew-full just below him.

  "It is an extraordinary thing," he was saying, "that there are those who actually deny the existence of God. We have, surely, only to think of the immeasurable spaces of the universe—the distance He has set between one thing and another.... It is reported of the Emperor Napoleon that, looking up at the stars one night, he remarked...." Ivy, who had heard this remark of the Emperor Napoleon's before, let her attention wander again to the hats of Mrs. Peterson and others. When she listened once more, the vicar had left Napoleon, though he was still dealing with the heavenly bodies.

  "If an express train, performing sixty miles an hour, were to start off from this planet—were such a thing possible to imagine, which of course it is not—towards the moon, and continue its journey without stops until it arrived, it would reach its destination, according to the calculations of scientists, in exactly 1 year, 8 months, 26 days." (Ivy, who had left school lately enough to remember the distance set by the creator between the earth and the moon, began to work this out in her head; she did not think that her father had got it quite right.) "And, in the face of this, there are those who say that God does not exist. A further thought, yet more wonderful. If the same train, travelling at the same rapid rate, were to leave this earth again, this time for the sun, the time it would take over this journey would be—I ask you, if you can, to imagine it, my friends—no less than 175 years, 1 week, and 6 days...." (Ivy gave it up; it was too difficult without pencil and paper.) "Is it possible that, knowing this, there are still those who doubt God? Yet once more. Imagine, if you can, this train again starting forth, this time bound for the planet Jupiter. Scientists tell us, and we must believe it" (All right, thought Ivy, with relief, if he'd got it out of a book), "that such a journey would take, if performed when Jupiter was at its furthest, 1097 years, 9 months, 2 weeks, 5 days, 10 hours, and a fraction. Can it really be that, confronted with the dizzy thought of these well-nigh incredibly lengthy journeys from one heavenly body to another, there are yet men and women who attribute the universe to the blind workings of what they are pleased to call the Forces of Nature? I ask you to consider earnestly, could any force but God have conceived and executed such great distances? And Jupiter, my friends, is comparatively near at hand. Take instead one of those little (but only apparently little) nameless stars twinkling in the firmament. Imagine our train starting off into space once more...."

  Ivy failed to imagine this; her attention was occupied with the End House seat. The train's last journey had been too much for the tottering self-control of the Grammont family and Vernon Prideaux (nothing ever broke down Mr. Amherst's self-control, and Pansy's thoughts were elsewhere). Prideaux's head rested on his hand, as if he were lost in thought; Kitty and Anthony were shaking, unobtrusively but unmistakably, and Cyril's fine, supercilious chin, set firmly, was quivering. Cyril had, from childhood, had more self-control than the other two, and he was further sustained by his conviction that it would be unthinkably bad form for a Catholic to attend a Protestant service and laugh at it in public.

  They oughtn't, thought Ivy, rather indignantly, to laugh at her father's sermon when he wasn't meaning to be funny. If he saw he would be hurt. One shouldn't laugh in church, anyhow; even Jane and John knew that. These people were no better than Jelly.

  "This Sunday," continued the Vicar, his last star journey safely accomplished, "is the day that has been set aside by our country for prayer and sermons with regard to the proposed increase in the national brain-power. This is, indeed, a sore need: but let us start on the firm foundation of religion. What is wisdom apart from that? Nothing but vanity and emptiness. What is the clever godless man but a fool from the point of view of eternity? What is the godly fool but a heavenly success?" ("He's talking sedition," whispered Kitty to Prideaux. "He'd better have stuck to the trains.")

  But, of course, the vicar continued, if one can combine virtue and intelligence, so much the better. It has been done. There was, e.g. Darw
in. Also General Gordon, St. Paul, and Lord Roberts, who had said with his last breath, in June, 1915, "We've got the men, we've got the money, we've got the munitions; what we now want is a nation on its knees." (Ivy saw Prideaux sit up very straight, as if he would have liked to inform Mr. Delmer that this libel on a dying soldier had long since been challenged and withdrawn.) One can, said the vicar, find many more such examples of this happy combination of virtue and intelligence. There was Queen Victoria, Florence Nightingale, and Lord Rhondda (who in the dark days of famine had led the way in self-denial). Not, unfortunately, the Emperor Napoleon, Friedrich Nietzsche, or the Kaiser Wilhelm II. The good are not always the clever, nor the clever always the good. Some are neither, like the late Crown Prince of Germany (who was now sharing a small island in the Pacific with the Kaiser Wilhelm and MM. Lenin and Trotzky, late of Petrograd, and neither stupid nor exactly, let us hope, bad, but singularly unfortunate and misguided, like so many Russians, whom it is not for us to judge).

  But we should try to be both intelligent and good. We should take every step in our power to improve our minds. (Prideaux began to look more satisfied; this was what sermons to-day ought to be about.) It is our duty to our country to be intelligent citizens, if we can, said the vicar. Reason is what God has differentiated us from the lower animals by. They have instinct, we reason. Truly a noble heritage. We are rather clever already; we have discovered fire, electricity, coal, and invented printing, steam engines, and flying. No reason why we should not improve our minds further still, and invent (under God) more things yet. Only one thing we must affirm; the State should be very careful how it interferes with the domestic lives of its citizens. The State was going rather far in that direction; it savoured unpleasantly of Socialism, a tyranny to which Englishmen did not take kindly. An Englishman's home had always been his castle (even castles, thought some aggrieved members of the congregation, were subject to unpleasant supervision by the police during food scarcity). No race was before us in its respect for law, but also no race was more determined that their personal and domestic relations should not be tampered with. When the State endeavoured to set up a Directorate of Matrimony, and penalised those who did not conform to its regulations, the State was, said the vicar, going too far, even for a State. The old school of laissez-faire, long since discredited as an economic theory, survived as regards the private lives of citizens. It is not the State which has ordained marriage, it is God, and God did not say "Only marry the clever; have no children but clever ones." He said, speaking through the inspired mouth of the writer of the book of Genesis, "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth." ("And, through the inspired mouth of Solomon, 'Desire not a multitude of unprofitable children,'" murmured Anthony Grammont, who knew his Bible in patches, but was apt to get the authorship wrong.)

  The vicar said he was now going to say a bold thing; if it brought him within reach of the law he could not help it. He considered that we ought all, in this matter, to be what are called Conscientious Obstructionists; we ought to protest against this interference, and refuse to pay the taxes levied upon those less intelligent infants sent to us by heaven. He did not say this without much thought and prayer, and it was, of course, a matter for everyone's own conscience, but he felt constrained to bear his witness on this question.

  This came to Ivy as a shock. She had not known that her father was going to bear his witness this morning. She watched Prideaux's face with some anxiety. She admired and feared Prideaux, and thought how angry he must be. Not Miss Grammont; Miss Grammont didn't take these things quite seriously enough to be angry. Ivy sometimes suspected that the whole work of the Ministry of Brains, and, indeed, of every other Ministry, was a joke to her.

  It was a relief to Ivy when her father finished his sermon on a more loyal note, by an urgent exhortation to everyone to go in for the Mind Training Course. We must not be backward, he said, in obeying our country in this righteous cause. He, for his part, intended to go in for it, with his household (Mrs. Delmer looked resigned but a little worried, as if she was mentally fitting in the Mind Training Course with all the other things she had to do, and finding it a close fit) and he hoped everyone in the congregation would do the same. Ivy saw Prideaux's profile become more approving. Perhaps her father had retrieved his reputation for patriotism after all. Anyhow at this point the And Now brought them all to their feet, they sang a hymn (the official hymn composed and issued by the Brains Ministry), had a collection (for the education of imbeciles), a prayer for the enlightenment of dark minds (which perhaps meant the same), and trooped out of church.

  3

  "He ought, of course," said Prideaux at lunch, "to be reported and prosecuted for propaganda contrary to the national interest. But we won't report him; he redeemed himself by his patriotic finish."

  "He is redeemed for evermore by his express train," said Kitty.

  "A most instructive morning," said Amherst.

  "Protestants are wonderful people," said Cyril.

  "I always said that man was a regular pet lamb," said Pansy. "And hadn't he pluck! Fancy givin' it us about that silly old baby tax with you two representatives of the government sitting under him an' freezin' him. I guess I'll have the Cheeper christened first opportunity, just to please him, what, old dear?"

  Anthony, thus addressed, said, "As soon and as often as you like, darling. Don't mind me. Only I suppose you realise that it will mean thinking of a name for him—Sidney, or Bert, or Lloyd George or something."

  "Montmorency," said Pansy promptly. "Monty for short, of course. That'll sound awfully well in revue."

  It should be noted as one up for Mr. Delmer that his sermon, whether or not it brought many of his parishioners to the Government Mind Training Course, had anyhow (unless Pansy forgot again) brought one infant soul into the Christian Church.

  4

  Mrs. Delmer said to Ivy, "I suppose we shall all have to go in for it, dear, as father's told everyone we're going to. But I don't quite know how I'm going to get the time, especially with this new boy so untrustworthy about changing the hens' water when he feeds them and crushing up the bones for them. Perhaps he'll be better when he's taken the course himself. But I half suspect it's not so much stupidity as naughtiness.... Well, well, if father wants us to we must."

  Jane said, kicking stones along the road as she walked, "Shall I be top of my form when I've taken the Course, mother? Shall I, mother? Will John? John was lower than me last week. Shall we, mother?"

  Mrs. Delmer very sensibly observed that, if all the other children in the parish took the course too, as they ought, their relative capacities would remain unchanged. "But if both you and John took a little more pains over your home-work, Jane," she took the opportunity to add, whereupon Jane very naturally changed the subject.

  Betty's contribution was "Brains! What a silly fuss about them. Who wants brains?"

  Which was, indeed, a very pertinent question, and one which Nicholas Chester sometimes sadly asked himself.

  Who, alas, did?

  * * *

  CHAPTER IV

  OUR WEEK

  1

  Brains Week ("Our Week," as it was called by the ladies who sold flags for it) having opened thus auspiciously, flourished along its gallant way like a travelling fair urging people to come and buy, like a tank coaxing people to come in and purchase war bonds, like the War Office before the Military Service Acts, like the Ministry of Food before compulsory rationing. It was, in fact, the last great appeal for voluntary recruits for the higher intelligence; if it failed then compulsion would have to be resorted to. Many people thought that compulsion should in any case be resorted to; what was the good of a government if not to compel? If the Great War hadn't taught it that, it hadn't taught it much. This was the view put forward in many prominent journals; others, who would rather see England free than England clever, advocated with urgency the voluntary scheme, hoping, if it might be, to see England both.

  It was a week of strenuous and galla
nt effort on the part of the Government and its assistants. Every Cinema showed dramas representing the contrasted fates of the Intelligent and the Stupid. Kiosks of Propaganda and Information were set up in every prominent shop. Trafalgar Square was brilliant with posters, a very flower-garden. The Ministry of Brains' artists had given of their best. Pictorial propaganda bloomed on every city wall, "Before and After," "The Rich Man and the Poor Man" (the Rich Man, in a faultless fur coat, observing to the Poor Man in patched reach-me-downs, "Yes, I was always below you at school, wasn't I? But since then I've taken the Mind Training Course, and now money rolls in. Sorry you're down on your luck, old man, but why don't you do as I've done?") and a special poster for underground railways, portraying victims of the perils of the streets—"A will be safe because he has taken the Mind Training Course and is consequently facing the traffic. B will not, because he has refused to improve his mind and has therefore alighted from a motor bus in the wrong direction and with his back to oncoming traffic; he will also be crushed by a street aero, having by his foolish behaviour excited the aviator. B will therefore perish miserably, AND DESERVES TO."

  There were also pictures of human love, that most moving of subjects for art. "Yes, dear, I love you. But we are both C2" (they looked it). "We cannot marry; we must part for ever. You must marry Miss Bryte-Braynes, who has too few teeth and squints, and I must accept Mr. Brilliantine, who puts too much oil on his hair. For beauty is only skin-deep, but wisdom endures for ever. We must THINK OF POSTERITY."

  Nor was Commerce backward in the cause. Every daily paper contained advertisements from our more prominent emporiums, such as "Get tickets for the M.T. Course at Selfswank's. Every taker of a ticket will receive a coupon for our great £1000 lottery. The drawing will be performed in a fortnight from to-day, by the late Prime Minister's wife." (To reassure the anxious it should be said that the late Prime Minister was not deceased but abolished; the country was governed by a United Council, five minds with but a single thought—if that.) "By taking our tickets you benefit yourself, benefit posterity, benefit your country, and stand a good chance of winning A CASH PRIZE."