What Not. A Prophetic Comedy

by Rose Macaulay

  Meanwhile the government laid pledges in as many of the hands held out to them as they could. Pledges, in spite of a certain boomerang quality possessed by them, are occasionally useful things. They have various aspects; when you give them, they mean a little anger averted, a little content generated, a little time gained. When you receive them, they mean, normally, that others will (you hope) be compelled to do something disagreeable before you are. When others receive them, they mean that there is unfair favouritism. When (or if) you fulfil them, they mean that you are badly hampered thereby in the competent handling of your job. When you break them, they mean trouble. And when you merely hear about them from the outside they mean a moral lesson—that promises should be kept if made, but certainly never, never made.

  It is very certain, anyhow, that the Ministry of Brains made at this time too many. No Ministry could have kept so many. There was, for instance, the Pledge to the Married Women, that the unmarried women should be called up for their Mind Training Course before they were. There was the Pledge to the Mining Engineers, that unskilled labour should take the Course before skilled. There was the Pledge to the Parents of Five, that, however high the baby taxes were raised, the parents of six would always have to pay more on each baby. There was the Pledge to the Deficient, that they would not have to take the Mind Training Course at all. This last pledge was responsible for much agitation in Parliament. Distressing cases of imbeciles harried and bullied by the local Brains Boards were produced and enquired into. (Question, "Is it not the case that the Ministry of Brains has become absolutely soulless in this matter of harrying the Imbecile?" Answer, "I have received no information to that effect." Question, "Are enquiries being made into the case of the deficient girl at Perivale Halt who was rejected three times as unfit for the Course and finally examined again and passed, and developed acute imbecility and mumps half-way through the Course?" Answer, "Enquiries are being made." And so on, and so on, and so on.)

  But, in the eyes of the general public, the chief testimony to the soullessness of the Ministry was its crushing and ignoring of the claims of the human heart. What could one say of a Ministry who deliberately and coldly stood between lover and lover, and dug gulfs between parent and unborn child, so that the child was either never born at all, or abandoned, derelict, when born, to the tender mercies of the state, or retained and paid for so heavily by fine or imprisonment that the parents might well be tempted to wonder whether after all the unfortunate infant was worth it?

  "Him to be taxed!" an indignant parent would sometimes exclaim, admiring her year-old infant's obvious talents. "Why he's as bright as anything. Just look at him.... And little Albert next door, what his parents got a big bonus for, so as you could hear them for a week all down the street drinking it away, he can't walk yet, nor hardly look up when spoke to. Deficient, I calls him. It isn't fair dealing, no matter what anyone says."

  "All the same," said Nicholas Chester to his colleagues, "there appears to me to be a considerably higher percentage of intelligent looking infants of under three years of age than there were formerly. Intelligent looking, that is to say, for infants. Infants, of course, are not intelligent creatures. Their mental level is low. But I observe a distinct improvement."

  A distinct improvement was, in fact, discernible.

  But, among the Great Unimproved, and among those who did not want improvement, discontent grew and spread; the slow, aggrieved discontent of the stupid, to whom personal freedom is as the breath of life, to whom the welfare of the race is as an idle, intangible dream, not worth the consideration of practical men and women.

  * * *

  CHAPTER XI

  THE STORMING OF THE HOTEL

  1

  In December Dora did a foolish thing. It is needless to say that she did other foolish things in other months; it is to be feared that she had been born before the Brains Acts; her mental category must be well below C3. But this particular folly is selected for mention because it had a disastrous effect on the already precarious destiny of the Ministry of Brains. Putting out a firm and practised hand, she laid it heavily and simultaneously upon four journals who were taking a rebellious attitude towards the Brains Act—the Nation, Stop It, the Herald, and the Patriot. Thus she angered at one blow considerable sections of the Thoughtful, the Advanced, the Workers (commonly but erroneously known as the proletariat) and the Vulgar.

  "Confound the fools," as Chester bitterly remarked; but the deed was then done.

  "How long," Vernon Prideaux asked, "will it take governments to learn that revolutionary propaganda disseminated all over the country don't do as much harm as this sort of action?"

  Chester was of opinion that, give the Ministry of Brains its chance, let it work for, say, fifty years, and even governments might at the end of that time have become intelligent enough to acquire such elementary pieces of knowledge. If only the Ministry were given its chance, if it could weather the present unrest, let the country get used to it.... Custom: that was the great thing. People settled down under things at last. All sorts of dreadful things. Education, vaccination, taxation, sanitation, representation.... It was only a question of getting used to them.

  2

  Though the authorities were prepared for trouble, they did not foresee the events of Boxing-day, that strange day in the history of the Ministry.

  The Ministry were so busy that many of the staff took no holiday beyond Christmas Day itself. Bank Holidays are, as everyone who has tried knows, an excellent time for working in one's office, because there are no interruptions from the outside world, no telephoning, no visitors, no registry continually sending up incoming correspondence. The clamorous, persistent public fade away from sound and sight, and ministries are left undistracted, to deal with them for their good in the academic seclusion of the office. If there was in this world an eternal Bank Holiday (some, but with how little reason, say that this awaits us in heaven) ministries would thrive better; governing would then become like pure mathematics, an abstract science unmarred by the continual fret and jar of contact with human demands, which drag them so roughly, so continually, down to earth.

  On Boxing Day the Minister himself worked all day, and about a quarter of the higher staff were in their places. But by seven o'clock only the Minister remained, talking to Prideaux in his room.

  The procession, at first in the form of four clouds each no bigger than a man's hand, trailed from out the north, south, east and west, and coalesced in Trafalgar Square. From there it marched down Whitehall to Westminster, and along the Embankment. It seemed harmless enough; a holiday crowd of men and women with banners, like the people who used to want Votes, or Church Disestablishment, or Peace, or Cheap Food. The chief difference to be observed between this and those old processions was that a large number in this procession seemed to fall naturally and easily into step, and marched in time, like soldiers. This was a characteristic now of most processions; that soldier's trick, once learnt, is not forgotten. It might have set an onlooker speculating on the advantages and the dangers of a nation of soldiers, that necessary sequence to an army of citizens.

  The procession drew up outside the Ministry of Brains, and resolved itself into a meeting. It was addressed in a short and stirring speech from the Ministry steps by the president of the Stop It League, a fiery young man with a megaphone, who concluded his remarks with "Isn't it up to all who love freedom, all who hate tyranny, to lose no time, but to wreck the place where these things are done? That's what we're here to do to-night—to smash up this hotel and show the government what the men and women of England mean! Come on, boys!"

  Too late the watching policemen knew that this procession and this meeting meant business, and should be broken up.

  The Minister and Prideaux listened, from an open window, to the speaking outside. "Rendle," said Prideaux. "Scandalous mismanagement. What have the police been about? It's too late now to do much.... Do they know we are here, by the way? Probably not."

  "They
shall," replied Chester, and stepped out on to the balcony.

  There was a hush, then a tremendous shout.

  "It's the Minister! By God, it's Nicky Chester, the man who's made all the trouble!"

  A voice rose above the rest.

  "Quiet! Silence! Let him speak. Let's hear what he's got to say for himself."

  Silence came, abruptly; the queer, awful, terrifying silence of a waiting crowd.

  Into it Chester's voice cut, sharp and incisive.

  "You fools. Get out of this and go home. Don't you know that you're heading for serious trouble—that you'll find yourselves in prison for this? Get out before it's too late. That's all I have to say."

  "That's all he's got to say," the crowd took it up like a refrain. "That's all he's got to say, after all the trouble he's made!"

  A suave, agreeable voice rose above the rest.

  "That is not quite all he's got to say. There's something else. He's got to answer two plain questions. Number one: Are you certificated for marriage, Mr. Chester, or have you got mental deficiency in your family?"

  There was an instant's pause. Then the Minister, looking down from the balcony at the upturned faces, white in the cold moonlight, said, clearly, "I am not certificated for marriage, owing to the cause you mention."

  "Thank you," said the voice. "Have you all noted that, boys? The Minister of Brains is not certificated for marriage. He has deficiency in his family. Now, Mr. Chester, question number two, please. Am I correct in stating that you—got—married—last—August?"

  "You are quite correct, Mr. Jenkins."

  Chester heard beside him Prideaux's mutter—"Good God!" and then, below him, broke the roar of the crowd.

  "Come on, boys!" someone shouted. "Come on and wreck the blooming show, and nab the blooming showman before he slips off!"

  Men flung themselves up the steps and through the big doors, and surged up the stairs.

  "This," remarked Prideaux, "is going to be some mess. I'll go and get Rendle to see sense, if I can. He's leading them up the stairs, probably."

  "I fancy that won't be necessary," said Chester. "Rendle and his friends are coming in here, apparently."

  The door was burst open, and men rushed in. Chester and Prideaux faced them, standing before the door.

  "You fools," Chester said again. "What good do you think you're going to do yourselves by this?"

  "Here he is, boys! Here's Nicky Chester, the married man!"

  Chester and Prideaux were surrounded and pinioned.

  "Don't hurt him," someone exhorted. "We'll hang him out over the balcony and ask the boys down there what to do with him."

  They dragged him on to the balcony and swung him over the rail, dangling him by a leg and an arm. One of them shouted, "Here's the Minister, boys! Here's Nicky, the Minister of Brains!"

  The crowd looked up and saw him, swinging in mid air, and a great shout went up.

  "Yes," went on the speaker from the balcony, "Here's Nicky Chester, the man who dares to dictate to the people of Britain who they may marry and what kids they may have, and then goes and gets married himself, breaking his own laws, and hushes it up so that he thought it would never come out." ("I always knew it would come out," the Minister muttered, inarticulately protesting against this estimate of his intelligence.) "But it has come out," the speaker continued. "And now what are we to do with him, with this man who won't submit to the laws he forces on other people? This man who dares to tell other people to bear what he won't bear himself? What shall we do with him? Drop him down into the street?"

  For a moment it seemed that the Minister's fate, like himself, hung suspended.

  They swung him gently to and fro, as if to get an impetus....

  Then someone shouted, "We'll let him off this time, as he's just married. Let him go home to his wife, and not meddle with government any more!"

  The crowd rocked with laughter; and in that laughter, rough, good-humoured, scornful, the Ministry of Brains seemed to dissolve.

  They drew Chester in through the window again. Someone said, "Now we'll set the blooming hotel on fire. No time to waste, boys."

  Chester and Prideaux were dragged firmly but not unkindly down the stairs and out through the door. Their appearance outside the building, each pinioned by two stalwart ex-guardsmen, was hailed by a shout, partly of anger, but three parts laughter. To Chester it was the laughter, good-humoured, stupid, scornful, of the British public at ideas, and particularly at ideas which had failed. But in it, sharp and stinging, was another, more contemptuous laughter, levelled at a man who had failed to live up to his own ridiculous ideas, the laughter of the none too honest world, which yet respected honesty, at the hypocrisy and double-dealing of others.

  "They're quite right to laugh," thought Chester. "It is funny: damned funny."

  And at that, standing pinioned on the steps of his discredited Ministry, looking down on the crowd of the injured, contemptuous British public, who were out to wreck the things he cared for, he began to laugh himself.

  His laughter was naturally unheard, but they saw his face, which should have been downcast and ashamed, twist into his familiar, sad, cynical smile, which all who had heard him on platforms knew.

  "Laughing, are you," someone shouted thickly. "Laughing at the people you've tricked! You've ruined me and my missus—taken every penny we had, just because we had twins—and you—you stand there and laugh! You—you bloody married imbecile!"

  Lurching up the steps, he flung himself upon Chester and wrenched him from the relaxed hold of his captors. Struggling together, the Minister and his assailant stumbled down the steps, and then fell headlong among the public.

  3

  When the mounted police finally succeeded in dispersing the crowd, the Ministry of Brains was in flames, like Sodom and Gomorrah, those wicked cities. Unlike Sodom and Gomorrah, the conflagration was at last quenched by a fire engine. But far into the night the red wreckage blazed, testimony to the wrath of a great people, to the failure of a great idea, to the downfall of him who, whatever the weakness he shared in common with the public who downed him, was yet a great man.

  * * *

  CHAPTER XII

  DEBRIS

  1

  Chester lay with a broken head and three smashed ribs in his flat in Mount Street. He was nursed by his elder sister Maggie, a kind, silent, plain person with her brother's queer smile and more than his cynical patience. With her patience took the form of an infinite tolerance; the tolerance of one who looks upon all human things and sees that they are not much good, nor likely to be. (Chester had not his fair share of this patience: hence his hopes and his faiths, and hence his downfall.) She was kind to Kitty, whose acquaintance she now made. (The majority of the Ministry of Brains staff were having a short holiday, during the transference to other premises.)

  Maggie said to Kitty, "I'm not surprised. It was a lot to live up to. And it's not in our family, living up to that. Perhaps not in any family. I'm sorry for Nicky, because he'll mind."

  She did not reproach Kitty; she took her for granted. Such incidents as Kitty were liable to happen, even in the best regulated lives. When Kitty reproached herself, saying, "I've spoilt his life," she merely replied tranquilly, "Nicky lets no one but himself spoil his life. When he's determined to do a thing, he'll do it." Nor did she commit herself to any indication as to whether she thought that what Nicky had gained would be likely to compensate for what he had lost.

  For about what he had lost there seemed no doubt in anyone's mind. He had lost his reputation, his office, and, for the time being, his public life. The Ministry of Brains might continue, would in fact, weakly continue, without power and without much hope, till it trailed into ignominious death; even the wrecked Hotel would continue, when repaired; but it was not possible that Chester should continue.

  The first thing he did, in fact, when he could do anything at all intelligent, was to dictate a letter to the Ministerial Council tendering his resignation from o
ffice. There are, of course, diverse styles adopted by the writers of such letters. In the old days people used to write (according to the peculiar circumstances of their case)—

  "Dear Prime Minister,

  "Though you have long and often tried to dissuade me from this course ... etc., etc.... I think you will hardly be surprised ... deep regret in severing the always harmonious connection between us ..." and so forth.

  Or else quite otherwise—

  "Dear Prime Minister,

  "You will hardly be surprised, I imagine, after the strange occurrence of yesterday, when I had the interest of reading in a daily paper the first intimation that you desired a change at the Ministry I have the honour to adorn...."

  Neither of these styles was used by Chester, who wrote briefly, without committing himself to any opinion as to the probable surprise or otherwise of the Ministerial Council—

  "Dear Sirs,

  "I am resigning my office as Minister of Brains, owing to facts of which you will have doubtless heard, and which make it obviously undesirable for me to continue in the post."

  Having done this, he lay inert through quiet, snow-bound days and nights, and no one knew whether or not he was going to recover.

  2

  After a time he asked after Prideaux, and they told him Prideaux had not been hurt, only rumpled.

  "He calls to ask after you pretty often," said Kitty. "Would you like to see him sometime? When the doctor says you can?"

  "I don't care," Chester said. "Yes, I may as well."

  So Prideaux came one afternoon (warned not to be political or exciting) and it was a queer meeting between him and Chester. Chester remembered the last shocked words he had had from Prideaux—"Good God!" and wondered, without interest, what Prideaux felt about it all now.