What Not. A Prophetic Comedy Read online

  "But all these marriage laws," said a painter who was walking out with the vicarage housemaid and foresaw financial ruin if they got married, "they won't help, as I can see, to give us control of the state."

  Dixon told him he must look to the future, to his children, in fact. The painter threw a forward glance at his children, not yet born; it left him cold. Anyhow, if he married Nellie they'd probably die young, from starvation.

  But, in the main, Dixon's discourse on democracy was popular. Dixon was a popular speaker with working-men; he had the right touch. But squires did not like him. Captain Ambrose disliked him very much. It was just democracy, and all this socialism, that was spoiling the country.

  Mr. Delmer ventured to say that he thought the private and domestic lives of the public ought not to be tampered with.

  "Why not?" enquired Stephen Dixon, and Mr. Delmer had not, at the moment, an answer ready. "When everything else is being tampered with," added Dixon. "And surely the more we tamper (if you put it like that) in the interests of progress, the further removed we are from savages."

  Mr. Delmer looked puzzled for a moment, then committed himself, without sufficient preliminary thought, to a doubtful statement, "Human love ought to be free," which raised a cheer.

  "Free love," Dixon returned promptly, "has never, surely, been advocated by the best thinkers of Church or State," and while Mr. Delmer blushed, partly at his own carelessness, partly at the delicacy of the subject, and partly because Pansy Ponsonby was standing at his elbow, Dixon added, "Love, like anything else, wants regulating, organising, turning to the best uses. Otherwise, we become, surely, no better than the other animals...."

  "Isn't he just terribly fierce," observed Pansy in her smiling contralto, to the world at large.

  Mr. Delmer said uncomfortably, "You mistake me, sir. I was not advocating lawless love. I am merely maintaining that love—if we must use the word—should not be shackled by laws relating to things which are of less importance than itself, such as the cultivation of the intelligence."

  "Is it of less importance?" Dixon challenged him.

  "The greatest of these three," began the vicar, inaptly, because he was flustered.

  "Quite so," said Dixon; "but St. Paul, I think, doesn't include intelligence in his three. St. Paul, I believe, was able enough himself to know how much ability matters in the progress of religion. And, if we are to quote St. Paul, he, of course, was no advocate of matrimony, but I think, when carried out at all, he would have approved of its being carried out on the best possible principles, not from mere casual impulse and desire.... Freedom," continued Dixon, with the dreamy and kindled eye which always denoted with him that he was on a pet topic, "what is freedom? I beg—I do beg," he added hastily, "that no one will tell me it is mastery of ourselves. I have heard that before. It is no such thing. Mastery of ourselves is a fine thing; freedom is, or would be if anyone ever had such a thing, an absurdity, a monstrosity. It would mean that there would be nothing, either external or internal, to prevent us doing precisely what we like. No laws of nature, of morality, of the State, of the Church, of Society...."

  Dr. Cross caught Kitty's eye behind him.

  "He's off," she murmured. "We must stop him."

  Kitty coughed twice, with meaning. It was a signal agreed upon between the three when the others thought that the speaker was on the wrong tack. Dixon recalled himself from Freedom with a jerk, and began to talk about the coming Mind Training Act. He discoursed upon its general advantages to the citizen, and concluded by saying that Miss Grammont, a member of the Ministry of Brains, would now explain to them the Act in detail, and answer any questions they might wish to put. This Miss Grammont proceeded to do. And this was the critical moment of the meeting, for the audience, who desired no Act at all, had to be persuaded that the Act would be a good Act. Kitty outlined it, thinking how much weaker both Acts and words sound on village greens than in offices, which is certainly a most noteworthy fact, and one to be remembered by all politicians and makers of laws. Perhaps it is the unappreciative and unstimulating atmosphere of stolid distaste which is so often, unfortunately, to be met with in villages.... Villages are so stupid; they will not take the larger view, nor see why things annoying to them personally are necessary for the public welfare. Kitty wished she were instead addressing a northern manufacturing town, which would have been much fiercer but which would have understood more about it.

  She dealt with emphasis on the brighter sides of the Act, i.e. the clauses dealing with the pecuniary compensation people would receive for the loss of time and money which might be involved in undergoing the Training Course, and those relating to exemptions. When she got to the Tribunals, a murmur of disapproval sounded.

  "They tribunals—we're sick to death of them," someone said. "Look at the people there are walking about the countryside exempted from the Marriage Acts, when better men and women has to obey them. The tribunals were bad enough during the war, everyone knows, but nothing to what they are now. We don't want any more of those."

  This was an awkward subject, as Captain Ambrose was a reluctant chairman of the Local Mental Progress Tribunal. He fidgeted and prodded the ground with his stick, while Kitty said, "I quite agree with you. We don't. But if there are to be exemptions from the Act, local tribunals are necessary. You can't have individual cases decided by the central authorities who know nothing of the circumstances. Tribunals must be appointed who can be relied on to grant exemptions fairly, on the grounds specified in the Act."

  She proceeded to enumerate these grounds. One of them was such poverty of mental calibre that the possessor was judged quite incapable of benefiting by the course. A look of hope dawned on several faces; this might, it was felt, be a way out. The applicant, Kitty explained, would be granted exemption if suffering from imbecility, extreme feeble-mindedness, any form of genuine mania, acute, intermittent, chronic, delusional, depressive, obsessional, lethargic....

  Dixon coughed twice, thinking the subject depressing and too technical for the audience, and Kitty proceeded to outline the various forms of exemption which might be held, a more cheerful topic. She concluded, remembering the Minister's instructions, by drawing an inspiring picture of the changed aspect life would bear after the mind had been thus improved; how it would become a series of open doors, of chances taken, instead of a dull closed house. Everything would be so amusing, so possible, such fun. And they would get on; they would grow rich; there would be perpetual peace and progress instead of another great war, which was, alas, all too possible if the world remained as stupid as it had been up to the present....

  Here Kitty's eye lighted unintentionally on her brother Anthony's face, with the twist of a cynical grin on it, and she collapsed from the heights of eloquence. It never did for the Grammonts to encounter each other's eyes when they were being exalted; the memories and experiences shared by brothers and sisters rose cynically, like rude gamins, to mock and bring them down.

  Kitty said, "If anyone would like to ask any questions...." and got off the tub.

  Someone enquired, after the moment of blankness which usually follows this invitation, what they would be taught, exactly.

  Kitty said there would be many different courses, adapted to differing requirements. But, in the main, everyone would be taught to use to the best advantage such intelligence as they might have, in that state of life to which it might please God to call them.

  "And how," pursued the enquirer, a solid young blacksmith, "will the teachers know what that may be?"

  Kitty explained that they wouldn't, exactly, of course, but the minds which took the course would be so sharpened and improved as to tackle any work better than before. But there would also be forms to be filled in, stating approximately what was each individual's line in life.

  After another pause a harassed-looking woman at the back said plaintively, "I'm sure it's all very nice, miss, but it does seem as if such things might be left to the men. They've more time, as it were. You
see, miss, when you've done out the house and got the children's meals and put them to bed and cleaned up and all, not to mention washing-day, and ironing—well, you've not much time left to improve the mind, have you?"

  It was Dr. Cross who pointed out that, the mind once improved, these household duties would take, at most, half the time they now did. "I know that, ma'am," the tired lady returned. "I've known girls who set out to improve their minds, readin' and that, and their house duties didn't take them any time at all, and nice it was for their families. What I say is, mind improvement should be left to the men, who've time for such things; women are mostly too busy, and if they aren't they should be."

  Several men said "Hear, hear" to this. Rural England, as Dr. Cross sometimes remarked, was still regrettably eastern, or German, in its feminist views, even now that, since the war, so many more thousands of women were perforce independent wage-earners, and even now that they had the same political rights as men. Stephen flung forth a few explosive views on invidious sex distinctions, another pet topic of his, and remarked that, in the Christian religion, at least, there was neither male nor female. A shade of scepticism on the faces of several women might be taken to hint at a doubt whether the Christian religion, in this or in most other respects, was life as it was lived, and at a certainty that it was time for them to go home and get the supper. They began to drift away, with their children round them, gossiping to each other of more interesting things than Mind Training. For, after all, if it was to be it was, and where was the use of talking?

  4

  It was getting dusk. The male part of the audience also fell away, to talk in the roads while supper was preparing. Only the vicar was left, and Captain Ambrose, and Anthony Grammont, and Pansy, who came up to talk to Kitty.

  "My dear," said Pansy, "I feel absolutely flattened out by your preacher, with his talk of 'the other animals,' and organised love. Now Mr. Delmer was sweet to me—he said it ought to be free, an' I know he doesn't really think so, but only said it for my sake and Tony's. But your man's terrifyin'. I'm almost frightened to have him sleep at the End House to-night; I'm afraid he'll set fire to the sheets, he's so hot. Won't you introduce me?"

  But Dixon was at this moment engaged in talking to the vicar, who, not to be daunted and brow-beaten by the notorious Stephen Dixon, was manfully expounding his position to him and Dr. Cross, while Captain Ambrose backed him up.

  "They may be all night, I should judge from the look of them," said Kitty, who by now knew her clergyman and her doctor well. "Let's leave them at it and come home; Tony can bring them along when they're ready."

  The End House had offered its hospitality to all the three Explainers, and they were spending the night there instead of, as usual, at the village inn. Kitty and Pansy were overtaken before they reached it by Anthony and Dr. Cross and Dixon.

  Pansy said, with her sweet, ingratiating smile, "I was sayin' to Kitty, Mr. Dixon, that you made me feel quite bad with your talk about free love."

  "I'm sorry," said Dixon, "but it was the vicar who talked of that, not I. I talked of organised love. I never talk of free love: I don't like it."

  "I noticed you didn't," said Pansy. "That's just what I felt so bad about. Mind you, I think you're awfully right, only it takes so much livin' up to, doesn't it? with things tangled up as they are.... Sure you don't mind stayin' with us, I suppose?" She asked it innocently, rolling at him a sidelong glance from her beautiful music-hall eyes.

  Dixon looked at sea. "Mind?..."

  "Well, you might, mightn't you, as ours is free." Then, at his puzzled stare, "Why, Kitty, you surely told him!"

  "I'm afraid I never thought of it," Kitty faltered. "She means," she explained, turning to the two guests, "that she and my brother aren't exactly married, you know. They can't be, because Pansy has a husband somewhere. They would if they could; they'd prefer it."

  "We'd prefer it," Pansy echoed, a note of wistfulness in her calm voice. "Ever so much. It's much nicer, isn't it?—as you were sayin'. We think so too, don't we, old man?" She turned to Anthony but he had stalked ahead, embarrassed by the turn the conversation was taking. He was angry with Kitty for not having explained the situation beforehand, angry with Pansy for explaining it now, and angry with Dixon for not understanding without explanation.

  "But I do hope," Pansy added to both her guests, slipping on her courteous and queenly manner, "that you will allow it to make no difference."

  Dr. Cross said, "Of course not. What do you imagine?" She was a little worried by the intrusion of these irrelevant domestic details into a hitherto interesting evening. Pansy's morals were her own concern, but it was a pity that her taste should allow her to make this awkward scene.

  But Dixon stopped, and, looking his hostess squarely in the face—they were exactly of a height—said, "I am sorry, but I am afraid it does make a difference. I hate being rude, and I am most grateful to you for your hospitable invitation; but I must go to the inn instead."

  Pansy stared back, and a slow and lovely rose colour overspread her clear face. She was not used to being rebuffed by men.

  "I'm frightfully sorry," Stephen Dixon repeated, reddening too. "But, you see, if I slept at your house it would be seeming to acquiesce in something which I believe it to be tremendously important not to acquiesce in.... Put it that I'm a prig ... anyhow, there it is.... Will you apologise for me to your brother?" he added to Kitty, who was looking on helplessly, conscious that the situation was beyond her. "And please forgive me—I know it seems unpardonable rudeness." He held out his hand to Pansy, tentatively. She took it, without malice. Pansy was not a rancorous woman.

  "That's all right, Mr. Dixon. If you can't swallow our ways, you just can't, and there's an end of it. Lots of people can't, you know. Good night. I hope you'll be comfortable."

  5

  Kitty looked after him with a whistle.

  "I'm fearfully sorry, Pansy love. I never thought to expatiate beforehand on Tony and you.... I introduced you as Miss Ponsonby—but I suppose he never noticed, or thought you were the Cheeper's governess or something. Who'd have thought he'd take on like that? But you never know, with the clergy; they're so unaccountable."

  "I'm relieved, a bit," Pansy said. "I was frightened of him, that's a fact."

  Dr. Cross said, "The queer thing about Stephen Dixon is that you never know when he'll take a thing in this way and when he won't. I've known him sit at tea in the houses of the lowest slum criminals—by the way, that is surely the scriptural line—and I've known him cut in the street people who were doing the same things in a different way—a sweating shopowner, for instance. I sometimes think it depends with him on the size and comfort of the house the criminal lives in, which is too hopelessly illogical, you'd think, for an intelligent man like him. I lose my patience with him sometimes, I confess. But anyhow he knows his own mind."

  "He's gone," Pansy said to Anthony, who was waiting for them at the gate. "He thinks it's important not to acquiesce in us. So he's gone to the inn.... By the way, I nearly told him that the innkeeper is leading a double life too—ever so much worse than ours—but I thought it would be too unkind, he'd have had to sleep on the green."

  "Well," Anthony said crossly, "we can get on without him. But another time, darling, I wish you'd remember that there's not the least need to explain our domestic affairs in the lane to casual acquaintances, even if they do happen to be spending the night. It's simply not done, you know! It makes a most embarrassing situation all round. I know you're not shy, but you might remember that I am."

  "Sorry, old dear," said Pansy. "There's been so much explainin' this evenin' that I suppose I caught it.... You people," she added to Dr. Cross and Kitty, "have got awkwarder things to explain than I have. I'd a long sight rather have to explain free love than love by Act of Parliament."

  "But on the whole," said the doctor, relieved to have got on to that subject again after the rather embarrassing interlude of private affairs, "I thought the meeting this evening n
ot bad. What did you think, Miss Grammont?"

  "I should certainly," said Kitty, "have expected it to have been worse. If I had been one of the audience, it would have been."

  6

  Some of the subsequent meetings of that campaign, in fact, were. But not all. On the whole, as Dr. Cross put it, they were not bad.

  "It's a toss-up," said Dixon at the end, "how the country is going to take this business. There's a chance, a good fighting chance, that they may rise to the idea and accept it, even if they can't like it. It depends a lot on how it's going to be worked, and that depends on the people at the top. And for the people at the top, all one can say is that there's a glimmer of hope. Chester himself has got imagination; and as long as a man's got that he may pull through, even if he's head of a government department.... Of course one main thing is not to make pledges; they can't be kept; everyone knows they can't be kept, as situations change, and when they break there's a row.... Another thing—the rich have got to set the example; they must drop this having their fun and paying for it, which the poor can't afford. If that's allowed there'll be revolution. Perhaps anyhow there'll be revolution. And revolutions aren't always the useful things they ought to be; they sometimes lead to reaction. Oh, you Brains people have got to be jolly careful."

  A week later the Mind Training Bill became an Act. It did, in fact, seem to be a toss-up how the public, that strange, patient, unaccountable dark horse, were going to take it. That they took it at all, and that they continued to take the Mental Progress Act, was ascribed by observant people largely to the queer, growing, and quite peculiar influence of Nicholas Chester. It was an odd influence for a minister of the government to have in this country; one would have almost have supposed him instead a power of the Press, the music-hall stage, or the cinema world. It behoved him, as Dixon said to be jolly careful.

  * * *

  CHAPTER VI

  THE SIMPLE HUMAN EMOTIONS