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WHAT NOT
A PROPHETIC COMEDY
BY ROSE MACAULAY
AUTHOR OF "NON-COMBATANTS," "THE MAKING OF A BIGOT," ETC.
LONDON
CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD.
1918
TO
CIVIL SERVANTS
I HAVE KNOWN
* * * * *
"Wisdom is very unpleasant to the unlearned: he that is without
understanding will not remain with her. She will lie upon him
as a mighty stone of trial; and he will cast her from him ere
it be long. For wisdom is according to her name, and she is not
manifest unto many....
"Desire not a multitude of unprofitable children...."
Jesus, Son of Sirach,
_c._ B.C. 150.
* * * * *
"It's domestickness of spirit, selvishnesse, which is the great
let to Armies, Religions, and Kingdomes good."
W. GREENHILL, 1643.
* * * * *
"It has come to a fine thing if people cannot live in their
homes without being interfered with by the police.... You are
upsetting the country altogether with your Food Orders and What
Not."
DEFENDANT IN A FOOD-HOARDING CASE,
_January, 1918._
NOTE.
As this book was written during the war, and intended prophetically, its
delay until some months after the armistice calls for a word of
explanation.
The book was ready for publication in November, 1918, when it was
discovered that a slight alteration in the text was essential, to
safeguard it against one of the laws of the realm. As the edition was
already bound, this alteration has naturally taken a considerable time.
However, as the date of the happenings described in "What Not" is
unspecified, it may still be regarded as a prophecy, not yet disproved.
R. M.
_March, 1919_
APOLOGY
One cannot write for evermore of life in war-time, even if, as at times
seems possible, the war outlasts the youngest of us. Nor can one easily
write of life as it was before this thing came upon us, for that is a
queer, half-remembered thing, to make one cry. This is a tale of life
after the war, in which alone there is hope. So it is, no doubt,
inaccurate, too sanguine in part, too pessimistic in part, too foolish
and too far removed from life as it will be lived even for a novel. It
is a shot in the dark, a bow drawn at a venture. But it is the best one
can do in the unfortunate circumstances, which make against all kinds of
truth, even that inferior kind which is called accuracy. Truth, indeed,
seems to be one of the things, along with lives, wealth, joy, leisure,
liberty, and forest trees, which has to be sacrificed on the altar of
this all-taking war, this bitter, unsparing god, which may perhaps
before the end strip us of everything we possess except the integrity of
our so fortunately situated island, our indomitable persistence in the
teeth of odds, and the unstemmed eloquence of our leaders, all of which
we shall surely retain.
This book is, anyhow, so far as it is anything beyond an attempt to
amuse the writer, rather of the nature of suggestion than of prophecy,
and many will think it a poor suggestion at that. The suggestion is of a
possible remedy for what appears to have always been the chief human
ailment, and what will, probably, after these present troubles, be even
more pronounced than before. For wars do not conduce to intelligence.
They put a sudden end to many of the best intellects, the keenest,
finest minds, which would have built up the shattered ruins of the world
in due time. And many of the minds that are left are battered and
stupefied; the avenues of thought are closed, and people are too tired,
too old, or too dulled by violence, to build up anything at all. And
besides these dulled and damaged minds, there are the great mass of the
minds which neither catastrophe nor emotion nor violence nor age nor any
other creature can blunt, because they have never been acute, have never
had an edge, can cut no ice nor hew any new roads.
So, unless something drastic is done about it, it seems like a poor
look-out.
This book contains the suggestion of a means of cure for this world-old
ill, and is offered, free, to a probably inattentive and unresponsive
Government, a close and interested study of whom has led the writer to
believe that the erection of yet another Department might not be wholly
uncongenial.
It will be observed that the general state of the world and of society
in this so near and yet so unknown future has been but lightly touched
upon. It is unexplored territory, too difficult for the present writer,
and must be left to the forecastings of the better informed.
A word as to the title of this work, which may seem vague, or even
foolish. Its source I have given. Food Orders we all know; What Not was
not defined by the user of the phrase, except by the remark that it
upset the country. The businesses described in this tale fulfil that
definition; and, if they be not What Not, I do not know what is.
_April, 1918._
CONTENTS
I. THE MINISTRY
II. LITTLE CHANTREYS
III. BRAINS SUNDAY
IV. OUR WEEK
V. THE EXPLANATION CAMPAIGN
VI. THE SIMPLE HUMAN EMOTIONS
VII. THE BREAKING POINT
VIII. ON FIXED HEARTS AND CHANGING SCENES
IX. _THE COMMON HERD_
X. A MINISTRY AT BAY
XI. THE STORMING OF THE HOTEL
XII. DEBRIS
WHAT NOT
CHAPTER I
THE MINISTRY
1
After the Great War (but I do not say how long after), when the tumult
and the shouting had died, and those who were left of the captains and
the kings had gone either home or to those obscure abodes selected for
them by their more successful fellows (to allay anxiety, I hasten to
mention that three one-time Emperors were among those thus relegated to
distance and obscurity), and humanity, released from its long torment,
peered nervously into a future darkly divined (nervously, and yet
curiously, like a man long sick who has just begun to get about again
and cannot yet make anything coherent of the strange, disquieting,
terrifying, yet enchanting jumble which breaks upon his restored
consciousness)--while these things happened, the trains still ran
through the Bakerloo tube, carrying people to their day's work.
Compartments in tube trains are full of variety and life--more so than
in trains above ground, being more congested, and having straps, also no
class snobbery. Swaying on adjacent straps were a fluffy typist, reading
"The Love He Could Not Buy," in the _Daily Mirror_, a spruce young civil
servant on his way to the Foreign Office, reading _The Times_, a
clergyman reading the _Challenge_, who looked as if he was interested in
the Life and Liberty movement, another clergyman reading the _Guardian_,
who looked as if he wasn't, an elderly gentleman reading the _Morning
Post_, who looked patriotic but soured, as if he had volunteered for
National Service during the Great War and had found it disappointing, a
young man reading the _Post-War_, the alert new daily, and a citizen
with a law-abiding face very properly perusing the _Hidden Hand_. The
_Hidden Hand_ was the Government daily paper. Such a paper had for long
been needed; it is difficult to understand why it was not started long
ago. All other papers are so unreliable, so tiresome; a government must
have one paper on which it can depend for unfailing support. So here was
the _Hidden Hand_, and its readers had no excuse for ignorance of what
the government desired them to think about its own actions.
The carriage was full of men and women going to their places of
business. There were tired young men, lame young men, pale and scarred
young men, brown and fit young men, bored and _blase_ young men, jolly
and amused young men, and nearly all, however brown or fit or pale or
languid or jolly or bored, bore a peculiar and unmistakable impress
stamped, faintly or deeply, on their faces, their eyes, their carriage,
the set of their shoulders.
There were, among the business men and girls, women going shopping,
impassive, without newspapers, gazing at the clothes of others, taking
in their cost, their cut, their colour. This is an engrossing
occupation. Those who practise it sit quite still, without a stir, a
twinkle, a yawn, or a paper, and merely look, all over, up and down,
from shoes to hat.... They are a strange and wonderful race of beings,
these gazing women; one cannot see into their minds, or beyond their
roving eyes. They bear less than any other section of the community the
stamp of public events. The representatives of the type in the Bakerloo
this morning did not carry any apparent impress of the Great War. It
would take something more than a great war, something more even than a
food crisis, to leave its mark on these sphinx-like and immobile
countenances. Kingdoms may rise and fall, nations may reel in the
death-grapple, but they sit gazing still, and their minds, amid the
rocking chaos, may be imagined to be framing some such thoughts as
these: "Those are nice shoes. I wonder if they're the ones Swan and
Edgar have at 30s. She's trimmed her hat herself, and not well. That
skirt is last year's shape. That's a smart coat. Dear me, what
stockings; you'd think anyone would be ashamed."
These women had not the air of reckless anticipation, of being alert for
any happening, however queer, that, in differing degrees, marked the
majority of people in these days. For that, in many, seemed the
prevailing note; a series of events so surprising as to kill surprise,
of disasters so appalling as to numb horror, had come and gone, leaving
behind them this reckless touch, and with it a kind of greed, a
determination to snatch whatever might be from life before it tumbled
again into chaos. They had not been devoid of lessons in what moralists
call Making the Best of It, those staggering years when everything had
fallen and fallen, successively and simultaneously, civilisation, and
governments, and hopes, and crowns, and nations, and soldiers, and rain,
and tears, and bombs, and buildings, only not prices, or newspapers.
For, if everything had so fallen once, it might even now be riding for a
fall again (in spite of the League of Nations and other devices for
propping up the unsteady framework of a lasting peace). The thing was to
get what one could first. The thing, in the opinion of one traveller in
that train, was to wear cap and bells, to dance through life to a barrel
organ, to defeat a foolish universe with its own weapons.
And always there was that sense in the background of a possible great
disaster, of dancing on the world's thin crust that had broken once and
let one through, and might break again. Its very thinness, its very
fragility added a desperate gaiety to the dance.
2
Ivy Delmer (who was not the traveller alluded to above, and did not
consciously think or feel any of these things) stood holding to a strap,
with the novel which she was going to change in the lunch hour in one
hand. Ivy Delmer, a shorthand typist at the Ministry of Brains, was
young, ingenuous, soft-faced, naive, and the daughter of a
Buckinghamshire vicar. The two things she loved best in the world were
marzipan and the drama. Her wide grey eyes travelled, with innocent
interest, along the faces in the compartment; she was seeing if she
liked them or not. Immaturely and unconsciously sexual, she looked with
more hope of satisfaction at male faces than at female. Not but that she
was susceptible to strong admirations for her own sex; she had a "pash"
for Miss Doris Keane and Miss Teddie Gerrard, and, in private life, a
great esteem for Miss Grammont, at the Ministry, whose letters she
sometimes took down in shorthand. But everyone knows there is a greater
number of interesting faces in trains belonging to another sex than to
one's own, and it is no use pretending.
Having subjected the faces within her range to her half-unconscious
judgment, and passed them with varying degrees of credit, Miss Delmer,
for lack of anything better to do, read the advertisements and
exhortations over the windows. With satisfaction she noted that she had
seen all the advertised plays. She absorbed such temporal maxims and
eternal truths as "Let Mr. Mustard mix your bath," "God is not mocked,"
and the terrifying utterances of the Safety-if-Possible Council, "Is it
safe? That is the question. No. That is the answer." "If you hope to
achieve safety in a street aero (1) Do not alight before the aero does.
(2) Do not attempt to jump up into an aero in motion." Then a picture:
"A will be killed because he is standing immediately beneath a
descending aero bus. B will be killed because he and others like him
have shaken the nerve of the aviator." A series of warnings which left
one certain that, wherever one might achieve safety, it would not be in,
or anywhere at all near, a street aero. That, probably, is the object.
In the old days it was the motor bus that was thus made a thing of
terror by the princes of the nether world. Now, even as then, their
efforts met with success, and the tubes were filled with a
panic-stricken mob.
Ivy Delmer, taking an empty seat, saw Miss Grammont at the other side of
the carriage. Miss Grammont had the _New Statesman_ and the _Tatler_ and
was reading one of them. She was partial to both, which was
characteristic of her attitude towards life. She was one of those who
see no reason why an intelligent interest in the affairs of the world
should be incompatible with a taste for Eve. She enjoyed both classical
concerts and new revues. She might be called a learned worldling. Ivy
Delmer was rather shy of her, because of her manner, which could be
supercilious, because of her reputed cleverness, and because of her
position at the Ministry, which was a long way above Ivy's. On the other
hand, her clothes made one feel at home; they showed skill and interest;
she had not that air of the dowd which some people who have been to
college have, and which is so estranging to normal people.
Kitty Grammont, something of the elegant rake, something of the gamin,
something of the adventuress, something of the scholar, with innocent
amber-brown eyes gazing ingenuously from under long black lashes, a
slightly cynical mouth, a small, smooth, rounded, child's face, a
travelled manner, and an excellent brain, was adequately, as people go,
equipped for the business of living. She had seen some life, in a past
which, if chequered, had not lacked its gaiety, meant to see much more,
in a future which she did not foresee clearly but which she intended
should be worthy of her, and was seeing enough to go on with in a
present which, though at moments it blackly bored her (she was very
susceptible to boredom), was on the whole decidedly entertaining.
Ivy Delmer, looking at her across the compartment, with some surprise
because she was so nearly punctual this morning, this not being one of
her habits, admired her greatly, thinking how clever she was, how
clearly, how unhesitatingly, how incisively her sentences came out when
she was dictating, cutting their way, in that cool, light, dragging
voice of hers, through her subject, however intricate, as a sharp blade
cuts ice; quite different from some people's dictation, which trails to
and fro, emending, cancelling, hesitating, indistinct, with no edge to
it, so that one's shorthand has constantly to be altered, making a mess
on the page, and bits of it read aloud to see how it goes now, which was
a nuisance, because one can't rely always on being able to read off even
one's own shorthand quite fluently straight away like that. Further--and
this was nearer Ivy's heart--Miss Grammont wore, as a rule, charming
shoes. She also smoked extraordinarily nice cigarettes, and often had
delicious chocolates, and was generous with both.
All this made it a grief to Ivy Delmer that Miss Grammont's brother and
his family, who lived in her father's parish, and with whom Miss
Grammont often stayed, were not Approved Of. Into the reasons for this
it will be more appropriate to enter later in this narrative.
3
Oxford Circus. The hub of the world, where seething mobs fought on the
platform like wild beasts. Piccadilly Circus. Lucky people, thought Ivy
Delmer, who got out there, all among gaiety and theatres. Trafalgar
Square. There naval officers got out, to visit the Admiralty, or the
Nelson Column. Charing Cross. There people had got out during the Great
War, to go and help the War Office or the Ministry of Munitions to run
the business. So much help, so much energy, so many hotels.... And now
there were more than ever, because so much needed doing, and hotels are
the means heaven has given us to do it with.
At Charing Cross Ivy Delmer and Kitty Grammont got out, for, without
specifying the hotel where the Ministry of Brains carried on its
labours, it may be mentioned without indiscretion that it was within a
walk of Charing Cross.
Miss Grammont and Miss Delmer walked there, Miss Delmer well ahead and
hurrying, because to her it seemed late, Miss Grammont behind and
sauntering because to her it seemed superfluously early. The Ministry
daily day began at 9.30, and it was only 9.40 now.
The summer morning was glittering on the river like laughter. A foolish
thing it seemed, to be going into an hotel on a summer morning, to be
sitting down at a government desk laden with government files, taking a
government pen (which was never a relief, only a not-exactly) and
writing pamphlets, or answers to letters which, if left long enough,
would surely answer themselves, as is the way of letters, and all to
improve the Brains of the Nation. Bother the Brains of the Nation,
thought Miss Grammont, only she used a stronger word, as was the custom
in what Mrs. Delmer called her unfortunate family. Black doubt sometimes
smote her as to not so much the efficacy of the work of her Department
as its desirability if ever it should be perfectly accomplished. Did
brains matter so greatly after all? Were the clever happier than the
fools? Miss Grammont, whose university career had been a brilliant
intellectual adventure, felt competent to speak for both these types of
humanity. She knew herself to be happier when playing the fool than when
exerting her highly efficient brain; the lunatic-asylum touch gave her
more joy than the studious, and she wore learning like a cap and bells.
But stupidity was, of course, a bore. It must, of course, be mitigated,
if possible. And anyhow the object of the Ministry of Brains was not to
make people happy (that could be left to the Directorate of
Entertainments), nor to make them good (that was up to the Church, now,
to the great benefit of both, divorced from the State), but to further
social progress and avert another Great War.
Miss Grammont yawned, because the day was yet so young, and followed
Miss Delmer up the steps of the hotel.
4
The Ministry of Brains, a vast organisation, had many sections. There
was the Propaganda Section, which produced pamphlets and organised
lectures and cinema shows (Miss Grammont had been lent temporarily to
this section by her own branch); there was the Men's Education Section,
the Women's, and the Children's; the Section which dealt with
brain-tests, examinations, certificates, and tribunals, and the Section
which was concerned with the direction of the intellects of the Great
Unborn. Ivy Delmer was attached to this section, and Mr. Delmer, when he
heard about it, was not altogether sure it was quite nice for her.
"She surely shouldn't know they have any," he had said to his wife, who
was weeding, and replied absently, "Any what, dear? Who?"
"Intellects," the vicar said. "The Unborn. Besides, they haven't." He
was frowning, and jerking out dandelions from the lawn with a spud.
"Oh, that's not it, dear," Mrs. Delmer reassured him vaguely. "Not the
_just_ unborn, you know. The--the ever so long unborn. All this
arrangement of who ought to marry who. Quite silly, of course, but no
harm for Ivy in that way. After all, there's no reason why she shouldn't
know that children often inherit their brains from their parents."
The vicar admitted that, even for their precious and very young Ivy,
there was no great harm in this.
The Section in question was, as Mrs. Delmer had stated, concerned with
the encouragement and discouragement of alliances in proportion as they
seemed favourable or otherwise to the propagation of intelligence in the
next generation. There were numerous and complicated regulations on the
subject, which could not, of course, be enforced; the Ministry's methods
were those of stimulation, reward and punishment, rather than of
coercion. There were bonuses on the births of the babies of parents
conforming to the regulations, and penal taxes on unregulated infants,
taxes increasing in proportion to the flagrancy of the parents'
disobedience, so that the offspring of parents of very low mental
calibre brought with them financial ruin. Everyone held a Ministry of
Brains form, showing his or her mental category, officially ascertained
and registered. If you were classified A, your brains were certified to
be of the highest order, and you were recommended to take a B2 or B3
partner (these were the quite intelligent). To ally yourself with
another A or a B1 was regarded as wasteful, there not being nearly
enough of these to go round, and your babies would receive much smaller
bonuses. If you were classed C1, C2, or C3, your babies would receive no
encouragement, unless you had diluted their folly with an A partner; if
you chose to unite with another C they were heavily fined, and if you
were below C3 (i.e. uncertificated) they were fined still more heavily,
by whomsoever diluted, and for the third and subsequent infants born
under such conditions you would be imprisoned. (Only the Ministry had
not been working long enough for anyone to have yet met with this fate.
The children of unions perpetrated before the Mental Progress Act were
at present exempt.) Families among the lower grades and among the
uncertificated were thus drastically discouraged. You were
uncertificated for matrimonial purposes not only if you were very
stupid, but if, though yourself of brilliant mental powers, you had
actual deficiency in your near family. If you were in this case, your
form was marked "A (Deficiency)."
And so on: the details of the regulations, their intricacies and tangled
knots, the endless and complicated special arrangements which were made
with various groups and classes of persons, may be easily imagined, or
(rather less easily, because the index is poor) found in the many
volumes of the Ministry of Brains Instructions.
Anyhow, to room number 13, which was among the many rooms where this
vast and intricate subject was dealt with, Ivy Delmer was summoned this
Monday morning to take down a letter for Vernon Prideaux.
5
Vernon Prideaux was a fair, slim, neat, eye-glassed young man; his
appearance and manners were approved by Ivy Delmer's standards and his
capabilities by the heads of his department. His intellectual category
was A; he had an impatient temper, a ready tongue, considerable power
over papers (an important gift, not possessed by all civil servants),
resource in emergency, competence in handling situations and persons,
decided personal charm, was the son of one of our more notorious
politicians, and had spent most of the war in having malaria on the
Struma front, with one interesting break when he was recalled to England
by his former department to assist in the drawing up of a new Bill,
dealing with a topic on which he was an expert. He was, after all this,
only thirty now, so had every reason for believing, as he did, that he
would accomplish something in this world before he left it. He had been
sucked into the activities of the new Ministry like so many other able
young men and women, and was finding it both entertaining and not devoid
of scope for his talents.
Ivy Delmer admired him a good deal. She sat at his side with her
notebook and pencil, her soft, wide mouth a little parted, waiting for
him to begin. He was turning over papers impatiently. He was in a rather
bad temper, because of his new secretary, of whom he only demanded a
little common sense and did not get it, and he would have to get rid of
her, always a tiresome process. He couldn't trust her with anything,
however simple; she always made a hash of it, and filled up the gaps,
which were profound, in her recollection of his instructions with her
own ideas, which were not. He had on Saturday given her some forms to
fill up, stock forms which were always sent in reply to a particular
kind of letter from the public. The form was supposed merely to say, "In
reply to your letter with reference to your position as regards the tax
[or bonus] on your prospective [or potential, or existing] infant, I am
to inform you that your case is one for the decision of the Local
Tribunals set up under the Mental Progress Act, to whom your application
should have been made." Miss Pomfrey, who was young and full of zeal for
the cause (she very reasonably wished that the Mental Progress Act had
been in existence before _her_ parents had married), had added on her
own account to one such letter, "It was the stupidity of people like you
who caused the Great War," and put it this morning with the other forms
on Prideaux's table for signing. Prideaux had enquired, fighting against
what he knew to be a disproportionate anger with her, didn't she really
know better by now than to think that letters like that would be sent?
Miss Pomfrey had sighed. She did not know better than that by now. She
knew hardly anything. She was not intelligent, even as B3's went. In
fact, her category was probably a mistake. Her babies, if ever she had
any, would be of a mental calibre that did not bear contemplation. They
would probably cause another Great War.
So Prideaux, who had also other worries, was out of temper.
"Sorry, Miss Delmer.... Ah, here we are." He fidgeted about with a file,
then began to dictate a letter, in his quick, light, staccato voice.
Ivy, clenching the tip of her pink tongue between her teeth, raced after
him.
"Sir,
"In reply to your letter of 26th May with reference to the
taxation on babies born to your employees and their consequent
demand for increased wages, I am instructed by the Minister of
Brains to inform you that this point is receiving his careful
attention, in connection with the general economic question
involved by the terms of Ministry of Brains Instruction 743,
paragraph 3...."
Prideaux paused, and frowned nervously at his secretary, who was
conducting a fruitless conversation over his telephone, an occupation at
which she did not shine.
"Hullo ... yes ... I can't quite hear ... who are you, please?... Oh ...
yes, he's here.... But rather busy, you know.... Dictating.... Yes,
_dictating_.... _Who_ did you say wanted him, please?... Oh, I see...."
"What is it, Miss Pomfrey?" Prideaux broke in, making her start.
"It's the Minister's secretary," she explained, without covering the
receiver. "He says will you go to the Minister. There's a deputation--of
bishops, I think he said. About the new Instruction about Clergymen's
Babies.... But I said you were busy dictating...."
Prideaux had jumped to his feet, frowning, and was at the door.
"You'd better make a note that I'm never busy dictating or doing
anything else when the Minister sends for me," he shot at her as he left
the room.
"And now he's cross," Miss Pomfrey murmured sadly.
"I daresay he's only angry at being interrupted," said Ivy Delmer, who
had been at the same secretarial college as Miss Pomfrey and thought
that her days in the Ministry of Brains were numbered.
"I _do_ make him cross," Miss Pomfrey observed, accepting the fact with
resignation, as one of the sad, inevitable fatalities of life, and
returned to her indexing. She had been set to make an index of those
Ministry of Brains Instructions which had come out that month. She had
only got to the 11th of the month. The draught fluttered the pages
about. Ivy Delmer watched the Instructions waving to and fro in the
breeze--number 801, Agriculturists, 798, Conscientious Obstructionists,
897, Residents in Ireland, 674, Parents of more than three children....
How many there were, thought Ivy, as she watched. How clever the people
who dealt with such things needed to be. She thought of her father's
village, and the people in it, the agriculturists, the parents of more
than three children, all the little human community of lives who were
intimately affected by one or other of these instructions, and the
fluttering pages emerged from the dry realm to which such as Ivy
relegate printed matter and ideas, and took vivid human life. It
mattered, all this complicated fabric of regulations and rules and
agreements and arrangements; it touched the living universe that she
knew--the courting boys and girls on stiles in Buckinghamshire lanes,
Emmeline, the Vicarage housemaid, who had married Sid Dean last month,
Mr. and Mrs. White at the farm, all the great stupid pathetic aggrieved
public, neatly filed letters from whom covered every table in the
Ministry, awaiting reply, their very hand-writing and spelling
calculated to touch any heart but a civil servant's....
Ivy found a moment in which to hope that everyone in the Ministry was
being very careful and painstaking about this business, before she
reverted to wondering whether or not she liked the colour which Miss
Pomfrey had dyed her jersey.
Having decided that she didn't, and also that she had better go away and
wait for Mr. Prideaux to send for her again, she departed.
6
Vernon Prideaux, having given his assistance to the Minister in the
matter of the third clause of the new Clergymen's Babies Instruction,
left the Minister and the deputation together and returned to his room
via the Propaganda Branch, which he visited in order to ask Miss
Grammont to dine with him that evening. He and Kitty Grammont had known
one another for some years. They had begun at Cambridge, where Prideaux
had been two years the senior, and had kept up an intermittent
friendship ever since, which had, since their association in the
Ministry, grown into intimacy.
Prideaux found Kitty writing a pamphlet. She was rather good at this
form of literature, having a concise and clear-cut style and an instinct
for stopping on the right word. Some pamphleteers have not this art:
they add a sentence or two more, and undo their effect. The pamphlet on
which Miss Grammont was at this moment engaged was intended for the
perusal of the working woman, and bore the conversational title, "The
Nation takes an interest in Your Affairs: will You not take an interest
in the Affairs of the Nation?" Which, as Miss Grammont observed, took
rather a long time to say, but may have been worth it.
"Dine with you? I'll be charmed. Where and when?"
"My rooms, eight o'clock. I've got my parents and the Minister coming."
"Oh, the Minister."
"Do you mind?"
"No, I'm proud to meet him. I've never yet met him over food, so to
speak, only officially. I admire our Chester more every day he lives,
don't you? Nature made him and then broke the die."
"Wonderful man," Prideaux agreed. "Extraordinary being.... A happy touch
with bishops, too. Picked that up in the home, no doubt; his father's
one. _Liking's_ another thing, of course.... By the way, do you know
what his category is? However, this is gossip. I must get back and
discover what's the latest perpetration of my new secretary. See you
to-night, then."
He left the room. Kitty Grammont observed with satisfaction, for she was
critical of such things, how well his clothes fitted him, wondered what
he had nearly told her about the Minister's category, finished her
pamphlet, and sent it out for typing. She had an idea that this pamphlet
might not get passed by the censor, and wanted to find out. For the
censor was cautious about pamphlets, wisely opining that you cannot be
too careful. Pamphlets may, and usually do, deal with dangerous or
indecent topics, such as the Future. If sufficiently dangerous and
indecent, they become Leaflets, and are suppressed on sight. There were
dangerous and explosive words, like Peace, War, and Freedom which the
censor dealt with drastically. The danger of the word Peace dated, of
course, from the days when Peace had not yet arrived and discussion of
it was therefore improper, like the discussion of an unborn infant. By
the time it did arrive, its relegation to the region of Things we do not
Mention had become a habit, not lightly to be laid aside, so that a
Ministry of Brains pamphlet entitled "The Peace of Fools" had been
strangled before birth, the censor being very naturally unable to
believe that it did not refer in some mysterious way to the negotiations
which had ended hostilities, whereas as a matter of fact it was all
about the foolish content of stupid people who went on submitting to
diseases which a little intelligent thought would have prevented. There
had also perished, owing to the same caution on the censor's part, and,
it must be presumed, to the same guilty conscience on the part of the
Government, a booklet published by Messrs. Mowbray in a purple paper
cover with a gold cross on it, called "The Peace which passeth
understanding," not to mention a new edition of Burke's "Regicide
Peace," and one or two other works of which the censor, whose reading
was obliged to be mainly twentieth century, mistook the date. And, if
treatises concerning Peace were suspected from force of habit, works on
War were discouraged also, on the sound British principle that the
stress of a great Peace is not the time to talk of War; we must first
deal with Peace, and _then_ we may think about War; but One Thing At
Once, and do not let us cry War, War, when there is no war. But there
may be one day, argued the pamphleteers, and might it not be well to
prepare our minds for it? To which the answer very properly was, No;
Britons do not look ahead. They Come Through, instead. And anyhow it was
treachery to those who were spending their energies on this righteous
peace to discuss a premature war, which could neither be just nor
lasting.
Another improper subject, naturally, was Liberty. That needs no
explanation; it has always been improper in well-regulated countries,
like Eugenics, or the Poor, and has received no encouragement from
authority. Notwithstanding this, so many improper works upon it, in
every conceivable form, have always been produced, that the censors had
to engage a special clerk, who had just obtained a first class in
English Literature at Oxford, and who therefore had books and pamphlets
of all dates fresh in her memory, to check their researches and inform
them when their energies were superfluous. Not that all the books of
former centuries on this topic were to be encouraged, for, after all,
one period is in some respects singularly like another, and the same
reflections strangely germane to both. Naturally, therefore, when the
literary clerk, seeing advertised a new and cheap edition of Robert
Hall's "Sentiments proper to the present crisis," and, remembering the
trend of this work, sent for it (having sold her own copy at Blackwell's
when she went down), and read such remarks as "Freedom, driven from
every spot on the continent, has sought an asylum in a country which she
always chose for her favourite abode, but she is pursued even here and
threatened with destruction.... It is for you to decide whether this
freedom shall yet survive, or be clothed with a funeral pall and be
wrapped in eternal gloom"--very properly she reported the matter to
headquarters, and the cheap edition was called in.
Equally naturally there perished (without the help of the literary
clerk, who was not asked to judge of twentieth century literature)
various collections of Free Verse, for which the Poetry Bookshop was
successfully raided, a tract of the sort which is dropped about trains,
published by the Evangelical Tract Society and called "Throw off your
Chains!", "Citizens of a Free City," which was found at Mowbray's, and
bore on its title page the statement "Jerusalem ... is free" (a manifest
and seditious untruth, as we, of course, held Jerusalem, in trust for
the Jews), and many others of like tendency, such as works on Free Food,
Free Drink, Free Housing, Free Love, Free Thought, and Labour, in
Chains. Even fiction was suspect. A novel entitled _The Dangers of
Dora_, by the well-known author of _The Perils of Pauline_ and _The
Exploits of Elaine_, was suppressed, in spite of what should have been
the reassuring fact that Dora, like Pauline and Elaine before her,
triumphantly worsted all her foes in the end, and emerged smiling and
safe on the last page. Publishers were known to demand the alteration of
a title if the name Dora occurred in it, such wholesome respect did the
Censor's methods inspire.
It will therefore be readily understood that even government departments
had to go warily in this matter.
The Minister of Brains held pamphlet propaganda to be of the greatest
importance. A week ago the workers in the propaganda section had been
sent for and interviewed by the Minister in person. This personal
contact had, for the time being, oddly weighted Miss Grammont's too
irresponsible levity, kindled her rather cynical coolness, given her
something almost like zeal. That was one thing about the Minister--he
set other people on fire. Another was that his manners were bad but
unexpected, and a third that he looked like a cross between M. Kerensky,
a member of the Geddes family, and Mr. Nelson Keys.
Thus Miss Grammont, thoughtfully smoking a Cyprus cigarette, summed up
the Minister of Brains.