What Not. A Prophetic Comedy Read online

1

  During the period which followed the Explanation Campaign, Kitty Grammont was no longer bored by her work, no longer even merely entertained. It had acquired a new flavour; the flavour of adventure and romance which comes from a fuller understanding and a more personal identification; from, in fact, knowing more about it at first-hand.

  Also, she got to know the Minister better. At the end of August they spent a week-end at the same country house. They were a party of four, besides their host's family; a number which makes for intimacy. Their hostess was a Cambridge friend of Kitty's, their host a man high up in the Foreign Office, his natural force of personality obscured pathetically by that apprehensive, defiant, defensive manner habitual and certainly excusable in these days in the higher officials of that department and of some of the other old departments; a manner that always seemed to be saying, "All right, we know we've made the devil of a mess for two centuries and more, and we know you all want to be rid of us. But we'd jolly well like to know if you think you could have worked things any better yourselves. Anyhow, we mean to stick here till we're chucked out."

  How soon would it be, wondered Kitty, before the officials of the Ministry of Brains wore that same look? It must come to them; it must come to all who govern, excepting only the blind, the crass, the impervious. It must have been worn by the members of the Witan during the Danish invasions; by Strafford before 1642; by Pharaoh's councillors when Moses was threatening plagues; by M. Milivkoff before March, 1917; by Mr. Lloyd George during much of the Great War.

  But it was not worn yet by Nicholas Chester.

  2

  He sat down by Kitty after dinner. They did not talk shop, but they were linked by the strong bond of shop shared and untalked. There was between them the relationship, unlike any other (for no relationship ever is particularly like any other) of those who are doing, though on very different planes, the same work, and both doing it well; the relationship, in fact, of a government official to his intelligent subordinates. (There is also the relationship of a government official to his unintelligent subordinates; this is a matter too painful to be dwelt on in these pages.)

  But this evening, as they talked, it became apparent to Kitty that, behind the screen of this relationship, so departmental, so friendly, so emptied of sex, a relationship quite other and more personal and human, which had come into embryo being some weeks ago, was developing with rapidity. They found pleasure in one another this evening as human beings in the world at large, the world outside ministry walls. That was rather fun. And next morning Chester asked her to come a walk with him, and on the walk the new relationship burgeoned like flowers in spring. They did not avoid shop now that they were alone together; they talked of the Department, of the new Act, of the efforts of other countries on the same lines, of anything else they liked. They talked of Russian politics (a conversation I cannot record, the subject being too difficult for any but those who have the latest developments under their eyes, and, indeed, not always quite easy even for them). They talked of the National Theatre, of animals they had kept and cabinet ministers they had known; of poets, pictures, and potato puddings; of, in fact, the things one does talk about on walks. They told each other funny stories of prominent persons; she told him some of the funny stories about himself which circulated in the Ministry; he told her about his experiences when, in order to collect information as to the state of the intelligence of the country before the ministry was formed, he had sojourned in a Devonshire fishing village disguised as a fisherman, and in Hackney Wick disguised as a Jew, and had in both places got the better of everyone round him excepting only the other Hackney Jews, who had got the better of him. (It was in consequence of this that Jews—such Jews as had not yet been forcibly repatriated in the Holy City—were exempted from the provisions of the Mental Progress Act and the Mind Training Act. It would be a pity if Jews were to become any cleverer.)

  It will be seen, therefore, that their conversation was of an ordinary description, that might take place between any two people of moderate intelligence on any walk. The things chiefly to be observed about it were that Chester, a silent person when he was not in the mood to talk, talked a good deal, as if he liked talking to-day, and that when Kitty was talking he watched her with a curious, interested, pleased look in his deep little eyes.

  And that was all, before lunch; the makings, in fact, of a promising friendship.

  After tea there was more. They sat in a beech wood together, and told each other stories of their childhoods. He did not, Kitty observed, mention those of his family who were less intelligent than the rest; no doubt, with his views on the importance of intellect, he found it too depressing a subject. And after dinner, when they said good-night, he held her hand but as long as all might or so very little longer, and asked if she would dine with him on Thursday. It was the look in his eyes at that moment which sent Kitty up to bed with the staggering perception of the dawning of a new and third relationship—not the official relationship, and not the friendship which had grown out of it, but something still more simple and human. He, probably, was unaware of it; the simple human emotions were of no great interest to Nicholas Chester, whose thoughts ran on other and more complex businesses. One might surmise that he might fall very deeply in love before he knew anything much about it. Kitty, on the other hand, would always know, had, in fact, always known, everything she was doing in that way, as in most others. She would track the submersion, step by step, amused, interested, concerned. This way is the best; not only do you get more out of the affair so, but you need not allow yourself, or the other party concerned, to be involved more deeply than you think advisable.

  So, safe in her bedroom, standing, in fact, before the looking-glass, she faced the glimpse of a possibility that staggered her, bringing mirth to her eyes and a flutter to her throat.

  "Good God!" (Kitty had at times an eighteenth-century emphasis of diction, following in the steps of the heroines of Jane Austen and Fanny Burney, who dropped oaths elegantly, like flowers.) "Good God! He begins to think of me." Then, quickly, followed the thought, to tickle her further, "Is it right? Is it convenable? Should ministers look like that at their lady clerks? Or does he think that, as he's uncertificated and no hopes of an outcome can be roused in me, he may look as he likes?"

  She unhooked her dress, gazing at her reflection with solemn eyes, which foresaw the potentialities of a remarkable situation.

  But what was, in fact, quite obvious, was that no situation could possibly be allowed to arise.

  Only, if it did.... Well, it would have its humours. And, after all, should one turn one's back on life, in whatever curious guise it might offer itself? Kitty, at any rate, never yet had done this. She had once accepted the invitation of a Greek brigand at Thermopylæ to show her, and her alone, his country home in the rocky fastnesses of Velukhi, a two days' journey from civilisation; she had spent a week-end as guest-in-chief of a Dervish at Yuzgat; she had walked unattended through the Black Forest (with, for defence, a walking-stick and a hat-pin) and she had become engaged to Neil Desmond. Perhaps it was because she was resourceful and could trust her natural wits to extricate her, that she faced with temerity the sometimes awkward predicaments in which she might find herself involved through this habit of closing no door on life. The only predicament from which she had not, so far, succeeded in emerging, was her engagement; here she had been baffled by the elusive quality which defeated her efforts not by resistance but by merely slipping out of hearing.

  And if this was going to turn into another situation ... well, then, she would have had one more in her life. But, after all, very likely it wasn't.

  "Ministers," Kitty soliloquised, glancing mentally at the queer, clever, humorous face which had looked at her so oddly, "ministers, surely, are made of harder stuff than that. And prouder. Ministers, surely, even if they permit themselves to flirt a little with the clerks of their departments, don't let it get serious. It isn't done. You flatter yourself, my poor child. Your h
ead has been turned because he laughed when you tried to be funny, and because, for lack of better company or thinking your pink frock would go with his complexion, he walked out with you twice, and because he held your hand and looked into your eyes. You are becoming one of those girls who think that whenever a man looks at them as if he liked the way they do their hair, he wants to kiss them at once and marry them at last...."

  3

  "What's amusing you, Kate?" her hostess enquired, coming in with her hair over her shoulders and her Cambridge accent.

  "Nothing, Anne," replied Kitty, after a meditative pause, "that I can possibly ever tell you. Merely my own low thoughts. They always were low, as you'll remember."

  "They certainly were," said Anne.

  4

  This chapter, as will by this time have been observed, deals with the simple human emotions, their development and growth. But it will not be necessary to enter into tedious detail concerning them. They did develop; they did grow; and to indicate this it will only be necessary to select a few outstanding scenes of different dates.

  On September 2nd, which was the Thursday after the week-end above described, Kitty dined with Chester, and afterwards they went to a picture palace to see "The Secret of Success," one of their own propaganda dramas. It had been composed by the bright spirits in the Propaganda Department of the Ministry, and was filmed and produced at government expense. The cinematograph, the stage, and the Press were now used extensively as organs to express governmental points of view; after all, if you have to have such things, why not make them useful? Chester smiled sourly over it, but acquiesced. The chief of such organs were of course the new State Theatre (anticipated with such hope by earnest drama-lovers for so many years) and the various State cinemas, and the Hidden Hand, the government daily paper; but even over the unofficial stage and film the shadow of the State lay black.

  The Secret of Success depicted lurid episodes in the careers of two young men; the contrast was not, as in other drama, between virtue and vice, but between Intelligence and the Reverse. Everywhere Intelligence triumphed, and the Reverse was shamed and defeated. Intelligence found the hidden treasure, covered itself with glory, emerged triumphant from yawning chasms, flaming buildings, and the most suspicious situations, rose from obscure beginnings to titles, honours and position, and finally won the love of a pure and wealthy girl, who jilted the brainless youth of her own social rank to whom she had previously engaged herself but who had, in every encounter of wits with his intelligent rival, proved himself of no account, and who was finally revealed in a convict's cell, landed there by his conspicuous lack of his rival's skill in disengaging himself from compromising situations. Intelligence, with his bride on his arm, visited him in his cell, and gazed on him with a pitying shake of the head, observing, "But for the Government Mind Training Course, I might be in your shoes to-day." Finally, their two faces were thrown on the screen, immense and remarkable, the one wearing over his ethereal eyes the bar of Michael Angelo, the other with a foolish, vacant eye and a rabbit mouth that was ever agape.

  This drama was sandwiched between The Habits of the Kola Bear, and How his Mother-in-law Came to Stay, and after it Chester and Kitty went out and walked along the Embankment.

  It was one of those brilliant, moonlit, raidless nights which still seemed so strange, so almost flat, in their eventlessness. Instinctively they strained their ears for guns; but they heard nothing but the rushing of traffic in earth and sky.

  5

  "The State," said Chester, "is a great debaucher. It debauches literature, art, the press, the stage, and the Church; but I don't think even its worst enemies can say it has debauched the cinema stage.... What a people we are; good Lord, what a people!"

  "As long as we leave Revue alone, I don't much mind what else we do," Kitty said. "Revue is England's hope, I believe. Because it's the only art in which all the forms of expression come in—talking, music, singing, dancing, gesture—standing on your head if nothing else will express you at the moment.... I believe Revue is going to be tremendous. Look how its stupidities and vulgarities have been dropping away from it lately, this last year has made a new thing of it altogether; it's beginning to try to show the whole of life as lived.... Oh, we must leave Revue alone.... I sometimes think it's so much the coming thing that I can't be happy till I've chucked my job and gone into it, as one of a chorus. I should feel I was truly serving my country then; it would be a real thing, instead of this fantastic lunacy I'm involved in now...."

  At times Kitty forgot she was talking to the Minister who had created the fantastic lunacy.

  "You can't leave the Ministry," said the Minister curtly. "You can't be spared."

  Kitty was annoyed with him for suddenly being serious and literal and even cross, and was just going to tell him she should jolly well leave the Ministry whenever she liked, when some quality in his abrupt gravity caught the words from her lips.

  "We haven't got industrial conscription to that extent yet," she merely said, weakly.

  It was all he didn't say to her in the moment's pause that followed which was revealing; all that seemed to be forced back behind his guarded lips. What he did say, presently, was "No, more's the pity. It'll come, no doubt."

  And, talking of industrial conscription, they walked back.

  What stayed with Kitty was the odd, startled, doubtful look he had given her in that moment's pause; almost as if he were afraid of something.

  6

  Kitty took at this time to sleeping badly; even worse, that is to say, than usual. In common with many others, she always did so when she was particularly interested in anyone. She read late, then lay and stared into the dark, her thoughts turning and twisting in her brain, till, for the sake of peace, she turned on the light again and read something; something cold, soothing, remote from life as now lived, like Aristophanes, Racine, or Bernard Shaw. Attaining by these means to a more detached philosophy, she would drift at last from the lit stage where life chattered and gesticulated, and creep behind the wings, and so find sleep, so little before it was time to wake that she began the day with a jaded feeling of having been up all night.

  On one such morning she came down to find a letter from Neil Desmond in its thin foreign envelope addressed in his flat, delicate hand. He wrote from a Pacific island where he was starting a newspaper for the benefit of the political prisoners confined there; it was to be called "Freedom" (in the British Isles no paper of this name would be allowed, but perhaps the Pacific Island censorship was less strict) and he wanted Kitty to come and be sub-editor....

  Kitty, instead of lunching out that day, took sandwiches to the office and spent the luncheon-hour breaking off her engagement again. The reason why Neil never got these letters was the very reason which impelled her to write them—the lack of force about him which made his enterprises so ephemeral, and kept him ever moving round the spinning world to try some new thing.

  Force. How important it was. First Brains, to perceive and know what things we ought to do, then Power, faithfully to fulfil the same. In another twenty or thirty years, perhaps the whole British nation would be full of both these qualities, so full that the things in question really would get done. And then what? Kitty's mind boggled at the answer to this. It might be strangely upsetting....

  She stamped her letter and lit a cigarette. The room, empty but for her, had that curious, flat, dream-like look of arrested activity which belongs to offices in the lunch hour. If you watch an office through that empty hour of suspension you may decipher its silent, patient, cynical comment (slowly growing into distinctness like invisible ink) on the work of the morning which has been, and of the afternoon which is to be. Kitty watched it, amused, then yawned and read Stop It, the newest weekly paper. It was a clever paper, for it had succeeded so far (four numbers) in not getting suppressed, and also in not committing itself precisely to any direct statement as to what it wanted stopped. It was produced by the Stop It Club, and the government lived in hope
s of discovering one day, by well-timed police raids on the Club premises, sufficient lawless matter to justify it in suppressing both the Club and the paper. For Dora had recently been trying to retrieve her character in the eyes of those who blackened it, and was endeavouring to act in a just and temperate manner, and only to suppress those whose guilt was proven. Last Sunday, for instance, a Stop It procession had been allowed to parade through the city with banners emblazoned with the ambiguous words. There were, of course, so many things that, it was quite obvious, should be stopped; the command might have been addressed to those of the public who were grumbling, or to the government who were giving them things to grumble at; to writers who were producing books, journalists producing papers, parliaments producing laws, providence producing the weather, or the agents of any other regrettable activity at the moment in progress. Indeed, the answer to the enquiry "Stop what?" might so very plausibly be "Stop it all," that it was a profitless question.

  It was just after two that the telephone on Prideaux's table rang. (Kitty was working in Prideaux's room now.) "Hullo," said a voice in answer to hers, "Mr. Prideaux there? Or anyone else in his room I can speak to? The Minister speaking."

  Not his P.S. nor his P.A., but the Minister himself; an unusual, hardly seemly occurrence, due, no doubt, to lunch-time. Kitty was reminded of a story someone had told her of a pert little office flapper at one end of a telephone, chirping, "Hullo, who is it?" and the answer, slow, dignified, and crushing, from one of our greater peers—"Lord Blankson ..." (pause) "HIMSELF."

  "Mr. Prideaux isn't in yet," said Kitty. "Can I give him a message?"

  There was a moment's pause before the Minister's voice, somehow grown remote, said, "No, thanks, it's all right. I'll ring him up later."

  He rang off abruptly. (After all, how can one ring off in any other way?) He had said, "Or anyone else in his room I can speak to," as if he would have left a message with any chance clerk; but he had not, apparently, wished to hold any parley with her, even over the telephone, which though it has an intimacy of its own (marred a little by a listening exchange) is surely a sufficiently remote form of intercourse. But it seemed that he was avoiding her, keeping her at a distance, ringing her off; his voice had sounded queer, abrupt, embarrassed, as if he was shy of her. Perhaps he had thought things over and perceived that he had been encouraging one of his clerks to step rather too far out of her position; perhaps he was afraid her head might be a little turned, that she might think he was seeking her out....