What Not. A Prophetic Comedy

by Rose Macaulay

  There was a queer, violent strength about the Minister.

  But when he smiled it was as if someone had flashed a torch on lowering cliffs, and lit them into extraordinary and elf-like beauty. Kitty knew already that he could be witty; she suddenly perceived now that he could be sweet—a bad word, but there seemed no other.

  He ate another rock bun, and another. But they were small. His eyes fell on Kitty, eating a jam sandwich. But his thoughts were elsewhere.

  "Yes, it was me that had to tie it up for him," Ivy Delmer was saying to another typist. "Luckily I've done First Aid. But I felt like fainting.... The blood.... I don't like him, you know; his manners are so funny and his dictating is so difficult; but I must say I did admire his pluck.... He never thanked me or anything—he wouldn't, of course. Not that I minded a scrap about that...."

  5

  When Kitty got home to her flat that evening, she found the Boomerang on the floor. (It was on the floor owing to the lack of a letter-box.) The Boomerang was a letter from herself, addressed to Neil Desmond, Esq., and she wrote it and despatched it every few months or so, whenever, in fact, she had, at the moment, nothing better to do. On such days as Bank Holidays, when she spent them at the office but official work did not press, Kitty tidied the drawers of her table and wrote to break off her engagement. The drawers got tidied all right, but it is doubtful whether the engagement could ever be considered to have got broken off, owing to the letter breaking it being a boomerang. It was a boomerang because Neil Desmond, Esq. was a person of no fixed address. He wrote long and thrilling letters to Kitty (which, if her correspondence had been raided by the police, would probably have subjected her to arrest—he had himself for long been liable to almost every species of arrest, so could hardly be further incriminated), but when she wrote to the address he gave he was no longer ever there, and so her letters returned to her like homing pigeons. So the position was that Neil was engaged to Kitty, and Kitty had so far failed to disengage herself from Neil. Neil was that friend who has been already referred to as one whose revolutions always went under. Kitty had met him first in Greece, in April, 1914. She had since decided that he was probably at his best in Greece. In July he had been arming to fight Carson's rebels when the outbreak of the European War disappointed him. The parts played by him in the European War were many and various, and, from the British point of view, mostly regrettable. He followed Sir Roger Casement through many adventures, and only just escaped sharing in the last of all. He partook in the Sinn Fein rising of Easter, 1916 (muffed, as usual, Kitty had commented), and had then disappeared, and had mysteriously emerged again in Petrograd a year later, to help with the Russian revolution. Wherever, in fact, a revolution was, Neil Desmond was sure to be. He had had, as may be imagined, a busy and satisfactory summer and autumn there, and had many interesting, if impermanent, friends, such as Kerensky, Protopopoff (whom, however, he did not greatly care for), Kaledin, Lenin, Trotzky, Mr. Arthur Ransome, and General Korniloff. (It might be thought that the politics of this last-named would not have been regarded by Neil with a favourable eye, but he was, anyhow, making a revolution which did not come off.) In January, 1918, Neil had got tired of Russia (this is liable to occur) and gone off to America, where he had for some time been doing something or other, no doubt discreditable, with an Irish-American league. Then a revolution which seemed to require his assistance broke out in Equador, which kept him occupied for some weeks. After that he had gone to Greece, where Kitty vaguely believed him still to be (unless he was visiting, with seditious intent, the island in the Pacific where the world's great Have-Beens were harmoniously segregated).

  "The only thing for it," Kitty observed to the cousin with whom she lived, a willowy and lovely young lily of the field, who had had a job once but had lost it owing to peace, and was now having a long rest, "The only thing for it is to put it in the agony column of the—no, not The Times, of course he wouldn't read it, but the Irish-American Banner or something. 'K. G. to N. D. All over. Regret.'"

  "You'll have to marry him, darling. God means you to," sang her cousin, hooking herself into a flame-coloured and silver evening dress.

  "It certainly looks as if he did," Kitty admitted, and began to take her own clothes off, for she was going to see Pansy in a new revue. (Anthony would have been the last man to wish to tie Pansy down to home avocations when duty called; he was much too proud of her special talents to wish her to hide them in a napkin.)

  The revue was a good one, Pansy was her best self, lazy, sweet, facetious, and extraordinarily supple, the other performers also performed suitably, each in his manner, and Kitty afterwards had supper with a party of them. These were the occasions when office work, seen from this gayer corner of life, seemed incredibly dusty, tedious and sad....

  * * *

  CHAPTER V

  THE EXPLANATION CAMPAIGN

  1

  It will be generally admitted that Acts are not good at explaining themselves, and call for words to explain them; many words, so many that it is at times wondered whether the Acts are worth it. It occurred about this time to the Ministry of Brains that more words were called for to explain both the Mental Progress Act recently passed and the Mind Training Act which was still a Bill. For neither of these Acts seemed to have yet explained itself, or been explained, to the public, in such a manner as to give general satisfaction. And yet explanations had to be given with care. Acts, like lawyers' deeds, do not care to be understood through and through. The kind of explaining they really need, as Kitty Grammont observed, is the kind called explaining away. For this task she considered herself peculiarly fitted by training, owing to having had in her own private career several acts which had demanded it. It was perhaps for this reason that she was among those chosen by the authorities for the Explanation Campaign. The Explanation Campaign was to be fought in the rural villages of England, by bands of speakers chosen for their gift of the ready word, and it would be a tough fight. The things to be explained were the two Acts above mentioned.

  "And none of mine," Kitty remarked to Prideaux, "ever needed so much explanation as these will.... Let me see, no one ever even tried to explain any of the Military Service Acts, did they? At least only in the press. The perpetrators never dared to face the public man to man, on village greens."

  "It ought to have been done more," Prideaux said. "The Review of Exceptions, for instance. If questions and complaints could have been got out of the public in the open, and answered on village greens, as you say, instead of by official letters which only made things worse, a lot of trouble might have been avoided. Chester is great on these heart-to-heart talks.... By the way, he's going to interview all the Explanation people individually before they start, to make sure they're going about it in the right spirit."

  "That's so like Chester; he'll go to any trouble," Kitty said. "I'm getting to think he's a really great man."

  2

  Chester really did interview them all. To Kitty, whom already he knew personally, he talked freely.

  "You must let the people in," he said, walking about the room, his hands in his pockets. "Don't keep them at official arm's length. Let them feel part of it all.... Make them catch fire with the idea of it.... It's sheer stark truth—intelligence is the thing that counts—if only everyone would see it. Make them see stupidity for the limp, hopeless, helpless, animal thing it is—an idiot drivelling on a green"—Kitty could have fancied that he shuddered a little—"make them hate it—want the other thing; want it so much that they'll even sacrifice a little of their personal comfort and desires to get it for themselves and their children. They must want it more than money, more than comfort, more than love, more than freedom.... You'll have to get hold of different people in different ways, of course; some have imaginations and some haven't; those who haven't must be appealed to through their common sense, if any, or, failing any, their feeling for their children, or, even, at the lowest, their fear of consequences.... Tell some of them there'll be another war if t
hey're so stupid; tell others they'll never get on in the world; anything you think will touch the spot. But first, always, try to collar their imaginations.... You've done some public speaking, haven't you?"

  Kitty owned it, and he nodded.

  "That's all right, then; you'll know how to keep your finger on the audience's pulse.... You'll make them laugh, too...."

  Kitty was uncertain, as she left the presence, whether this last was an instruction or a prophecy.

  3

  The other members of Kitty's party (the Campaign was to be conducted in parties of two or three people each) did not belong to the Ministry; they were hired for it for this purpose. They were a lady doctor, prominent on public platforms and decorated for signal services to her country during the Great War, and a free-lance clergyman known for his pulpit eloquence and the caustic wit with which he lashed the social system. He had resigned his incumbency long ago in order to devote himself the more freely to propaganda work for the causes he had at heart, wrote for a labour paper, and went round the country speaking. The Minister of Brains (who had been at Cambridge with him, and read his articles in the labour paper, in which he frequently stated that muddle-headedness was the curse of the world) had, with his usual eye for men, secured him to assist in setting forth the merits of the Brains Acts.

  They began in Buckinghamshire, which was one of the counties assigned to them. At Gerrards Cross and Beaconsfield it was chilly, and they held their meetings respectively in the National School and in the bright green Parish Hall which is the one blot on a most picturesque city. But at Little Chantreys it was fine, and they met at six o'clock in the broad open space outside the church. They had a good audience. The meeting had been well advertised, and it seemed that the village was as anxious to hear the Brains Acts explained as the Ministry was to explain them. Or possibly the village, for its own part, had something it wished to explain. Anyhow they came, rich and poor, high and low, men, women, children, and infants in arms (these had, for the most part, every appearance of deserving heavy taxation; however, the physiognomy of infants is sometimes misleading). Anthony Grammont and Pansy were there, with the Cheeper, now proud in his baptismal name of Montmorency. The vicar and his wife were there too, though Mr. Delmer did not approve much of the Reverend Stephen Dixon, rightly thinking him a disturbing priest. It was all very well to advocate Life and Liberty in moderation (though Mr. Delmer did not himself belong to the society for promoting these things in the Church), but the vicar did not believe that any church could stand, without bursting, the amount of new wine which Stephen Dixon wished to pour into it. "He is very much in earnest," was all the approval that he could, in his charity, give to this priest. So he waited a little uneasily for Dixon's remarks on the Brains Acts, feeling that it might become his ungracious duty to take public exception to some of them.

  The scene had its picturesqueness in the evening sunshine—the open space in which the narrow village streets met, backed by the little grey church, and with a patch of green where women and children sat; and in front of these people standing, leisurely, placid, gossiping, the women innocently curious to hear what the speakers from London had to say about this foolish business there was such an upset about just now; some of the men more aggressive, determined to stand no nonsense, with a we'll-know-the-reason-why expression on their faces. This expression was peculiarly marked on the countenance of the local squire, Captain Ambrose. He did not like all this interfering, socialist what-not, which was both upsetting the domestic arrangements of his tenants and trying to put into their heads more learning than was suitable for them to have. For his part he thought every man had a right to be a fool if he chose, yes, and to marry another fool, and to bring up a family of fools too. Damn it all, fools or not, hadn't they shed their blood for their country, and where would the country have been without them, though now the country talked so glibly of not allowing them to reproduce themselves until they were more intelligent. Captain Ambrose, a fragile-looking man, burnt by Syrian suns and crippled by British machine-guns at instruction classes (a regrettable mistake which of course would not have occurred had the operator been more intelligent), stood in the forefront of the audience with intention to heckle. Near him stood the Delmers and Miss Ponsonby and Anthony Grammont. Pansy was talking, in her friendly, cheerful way, to Mrs. Delmer about the Cheeper's food arrangements, which were unusual in one so young.

  In the middle of the square were Dr. Cross, graceful, capable-looking and grey-haired; Stephen Dixon, lean and peculiar (so the village thought); Kitty Grammont, pale after the day's heat, and playing with her dangling pince-nez; a tub; and two perambulators, each containing an infant; Mrs. Rose's and Mrs. Dean's, as the village knew. The lady doctor had been round in the afternoon looking at all the babies and asking questions, and had finally picked these two and asked if they might be lent for the meeting. But what use was going to be made of the poor mites, no one knew.

  Dr. Cross was on the tub. She was talking about the already existing Act, the Mental Progress Act of last year.

  "Take some talking about, too, to make us swallow it whole," muttered Captain Ambrose.

  Dr. Cross was a gracious and eloquent speaker; the village rather liked her. She talked of babies, as one who knew; no doubt she did know, having, as she mentioned, had two herself. She grew pathetic in pleading for the rights of the children to their chance in life. Some of the mothers wiped their eyes and hugged their infants closer to them; they should have it, then, so they should. How, said the doctor, were children to win any of life's prizes without brains? (Jane Delmer looked self-conscious; she had won a prize for drawing this term; she wondered if the speaker had heard this.) Even health—how could health be won and kept without intelligent following of the laws nature has laid down for us ("I never did none o' that, and look at me, seventy-five next month and still fit and able," old William Weston was heard to remark), and how was that to be done without intelligence? Several parents looked dubious; they were not sure that they wanted any of that in their households; it somehow had a vague sound of draughts.... After sketching in outline the probable careers of the intelligent and the unintelligent infant, between which so wide a gulf was fixed, the doctor discoursed on heredity, that force so inadequately reckoned with, which moulds the generations. Appealing to Biblical lore, she enquired if figs were likely to produce thorns, or thistles grapes. This started William Weston, who had been a gardener, on strange accidents he had met with in the vegetable world; Dr. Cross, a gardener too, listened with interest, but observed that these were freaks and must not, of course, be taken as the normal; then, to close that subject, she stepped down from the tub, took the infants Rose and Dean out of their perambulators, and held them up, one on each arm, to the public gaze. Here, you have, she said, a certificated child, whose parents received a bonus for it, and an uncertificated child, whose parents were taxed. Observe the difference in the two—look at the bright, noticing air of the infant Rose ("Of course; she's a-jogglin' of it up and down on her arm," said a small girl who knew the infant Rose). Observe its fine, intelligent little head (Mrs. Rose preened, gratified). A child who is going to make a good thing of its life. Now compare it with the lethargy of the other baby, who lies sucking an india-rubber sucker (a foolish and unclean habit in itself) and taking no notice of the world about it.

  "Why, the poor mite," this infant's parent exclaimed, pushing her way to the front, "she's been ailing the last two days; it's her pore little tummy, that's all. And, if you please, ma'am, I'll take her home now. Holdin' her up to scorn before the village that way—an' you call yourself a mother!"

  "Indeed, I meant nothing against the poor child," Dr. Cross explained, realising that she had, indeed, been singularly tactless. "She is merely a type, to illustrate my meaning.... And, of course, it's more than possible that if you give her a thoroughly good mental training she may become as intelligent as anyone, in spite of having been so heavily handicapped by her parents' unregulated marriage. That'
s where the Government Mind Training Course will come in. She'll be developed beyond all belief...."

  "She won't," said the outraged parent, arranging her infant in her perambulator, "be developed or anythin' else. She's comin' home to bed. And I'd like to know what you mean, ma'am, by unregulated marriage. Our marriage was all right; it was 'ighly approved, and we got money by this baby. It's my opinion you've mixed the two children up, and are taking mine for Mrs. Rose's there, that got taxed, pore mite, owing to Mr. and Mrs. Rose both being in C class."

  "That's right," someone else cried. "It's the other one that was taxed and ought to be stupid; you've got 'em mixed, ma'am. Better luck next time."

  Dr. Cross collapsed in some confusion, amid good-humoured laughter, and the infant Rose was also hastily restored to its flattered mother, who, being only C3, did not quite grasp what had occurred except that her baby had been held up for admiration and Mrs. Dean's for obloquy, which was quite right and proper.

  "One of nature's accidents," apologised Dr. Cross. "They will happen sometimes, of course. So will stupid mistakes.... Better luck next time, as you say." She murmured to Stephen Dixon, "Change the subject at once," so he got upon the tub and began to talk about Democracy, how it should control the state, but couldn't, of course, until it was better educated.