LITTLE CHANTREYS
1
Ivy Delmer went home to Little Chantreys on the following Saturday
afternoon, after a matinee and tea in town, in the same train, though
not the same carriage as Kitty Grammont and Vernon Prideaux, who were
presumably spending the week-end at the End House. Ivy travelled home
every evening of the week. Miss Grammont had a flat in town, but spent
the week-ends when she was not otherwise engaged, with her brother in
Little Chantreys, which was embarrassing to Ivy.
As Ivy got out of the train she saw Miss Grammont's brother and the lady
who could scarcely be called her sister-in-law, on the platform,
accompanied by a queer-looking man of about forty, with ears rather like
a faun's. Anyone, thought Ivy, could have guessed which house in Little
Chantreys he was staying at. The week-end people who came to the End
House differed widely one from another in body and soul; some looked
clever, or handsome, others did not, some were over-dressed, some under,
some, like Miss Grammont and her brothers, just right; there were
musical people, sporting people, literary or artistic people, stagy
people (these last were the friends of Miss Pansy Ponsonby, who was not
Miss Grammont's sister-in-law), uncommon people, and common people; but
they all, thought Ivy Delmer, had two looks in common--they looked as if
they wouldn't get on very well with her father and mother, and they
looked as if they didn't read the Bible.
This second look was differentiated according to the wearer of it. Some
of them (like this man to-day) looked as if he didn't read it because it
had become so inextricably bound up with vulgar superstition and an
impossible religion that he despised it. Some, like Miss Grammont and
her brother Anthony, looked as if they didn't read it because they
already knew enough of it to be funny about it when they wanted to;
others, like Miss Pansy Ponsonby, looked as if she had really once given
it a try, but had found it dry and put off further perusal until such
time as she lay dying and might want to do something about her future
state. And Miss Grammont's brother Cyril looked as if it was a
Protestant book, and rather vulgar. Some, again, looked innocent, as if
they had never heard of it, others guilty, as if they never wanted to
again.
Ivy Delmer walked home to the Vicarage, hoping rather that the End House
wouldn't come to church to-morrow. It was taken, from time to time, with
an unaccountable fit of doing this. It made Ivy uncomfortable. Whether
or not it came to pray, she could not help having an uneasy suspicion
that it stayed to mock.
2
"Hullo, old dear," said Miss Pansy Ponsonby, in her rich and resonant
drawl, as Kitty and her companion came out of the station. "Here we all
are again. _And_ the Cheeper. He's a growin' boy, our Cheeper: he puts
on weight. Takes after me: I put on weight when I forget my exercises
and don't keep an eye on myself. Don't I, Tony? Mr. Prideaux, isn't it?
How do, Mr. Prideaux? Vurry pleased you've come. You know Mr. Amherst,
don't you? You clever folks all know each other." Miss Ponsonby, who was
not an American, had once performed in the same company as Miss Lee
White, and had caught an inflexion or two. She looked with the
satisfaction of the hospitable hostess at the little group, and added,
"So here we all are. And vurry nice too."
It was, indeed, not an unpleasing group. Dominating it was Miss Ponsonby
herself, very tall, very beautiful, very supple (only a year ago she had
been doing her celebrated eel-dance in "Hullo, Peace!"), with long and
lovely violet eyes and the best kind of Icilma skin, adorned tastefully
but quite unnecessarily with pink paint, white powder, scarlet lip
salve, and black lash-darkener. All this was from force of habit: Miss
Ponsonby was quite adequately pink, white, scarlet and black in her own
person. But, as Kitty observed, having been given by heaven such an
absurd thing as a human face, what could one do but make it yet more
absurd by these superimposed gaieties? You cannot take a face as a
serious thing; it is one of nature's jests, and it is most suitably
dealt with as the clown and the pierrot deal with theirs. This was
Kitty's point of view; Pansy had none, only habits.
Pansy was guiding and controlling a motor-pram, in which lay the
Cheeper, aged four months (he had no Christian name, having so far
evaded both the registrar and the font, and presumably no surname, owing
to the peculiar circumstances of his parents). The Cheeper's father,
Anthony Grammont, was a fair, pale, good-looking, rather tired young man
of seven and twenty, with a slightly plaintive voice; he looked as if he
shared, only with more languor, Miss Ponsonby's placid and engaging
enjoyment of the world; he had been in one of the hottest corners of
France through the European War, and had emerged from it a bored and
unambitious colonel, deaf of one ear, adorned with a Military Cross, and
determined to repay himself for his expenditure of so much time, energy
and health by enjoying the fifty or sixty years which, he piously hoped,
remained to him, to the full. Which he was now doing. His professional
life was passed on the Stock Exchange.
Mr. Leslie Amherst, the man like a faun, who was staying with him, was
an old friend of the Grammont family. He wrote, and was on the staff of
a weekly journal. He was engaged just now on a series of articles on the
Forces of Darkness in Darkest Europe. So far he had produced 1. The
Legislature, 2. Capitalism, 3. Industrialism, 4. Nationalism, 5.
Militarism, 6. The Press, and this week he was writing 7. Organised
Religion. (It will no doubt shock some readers to learn that these
forces had not all, in spite of the earnest hopes entertained for so
long for their overthrowal, yet been overthrown; but truth compels me to
state that they had not.) Though Amherst talked like a cynic, and had
his affectations, he was an earnest thinker, and sometimes tired his
host, who was not, and who had been left by his years of difficult
continental sojourn with a supreme distaste for any further probing into
the problems of Darkest Europe. Amherst had the advantage, in this
matter, of having been a Conscientious Objector to Military Service, so
the war had not tired him, and he retained for home use the freshness
and vigour of attack which had, in the case of many of his
fellow-countrymen, been all used up abroad.
The End House party was completed by Kitty Grammont, with her round,
long-lashed eyes and her air of the ingenuous rake, and Vernon Prideaux,
brisk and neat and clever. So there they all were; and very nice, too.
Kitty kissed her brother and Miss Ponsonby and dug the Cheeper in the
ribs in the manner he preferred. She was very fond of them all, and
found Miss Ponsonby immeasurably entertaining. Little had she thought,
when of old she used joyfully to watch Miss Pansy Ponsonby twist and
kick and curl herself about the stage and sing fascinating inanities in
her lazy contralto, that they would ever be linked by no common bond. Of
course she had known that her brother Anthony was showering flowers,
chocolates, suppers, week-ends and air-trips at Miss Ponsonby's nimble
feet (the toes of which could bend right back at the joints) but Anthony
had been known to shower these things at the feet of others. Certainly
Kitty had never expected that he would instal this delightful and
expensive being in a real house, have a real infant, and really settle
down, albeit socially ostracised in Buckinghamshire because imperfectly
married (that was the fault of Pansy's husband, Mr. Jimmie Jenks, who,
though he didn't want her himself, selfishly refused to sever the
connection irrevocably).
"What's the afternoon news?" enquired Mr. Amherst, as they walked up to
the village.
"Haven't seen a paper for half an hour," replied Prideaux, who kept his
finger on the pulse of the nation and liked his news up to date. "I've
got two five o'clock ones with me, though. The Leeds strike is rather
worse, the Sheffield one rather better. The aero bus men are coming out
on Monday. Dangerous unrest among Sussex shepherds and Cotswold cowmen."
(Agricultural labour was now controlled by the State.) "Lord Backwoods
has been speaking to his constituents against the Bill for
disfranchising Conscientious Obstructionists of the Mental Progress
Acts. A thoroughly seditious speech, of course. Poor old chap, his
eldest-son has just got engaged to be married, so there'll be another
family of Backwoods babies who ought never to exist. It will hit them
heavily financially.... And the International Police have found another
underground gun-factory near Munich, under a band-stand. And it's
confirmed that old Tommy Jackson is to be Drink Controller."
"Another good butler spoilt," observed Anthony Grammont. "He _was_ a
jolly good butler once. And he'll be a jolly bad Drink Controller."
"Dear old Tommy," murmured Miss Ponsonby absently, lifting the Cheeper
out of his motor-pram with one strong white hand and balancing him on
her ample shoulders. "He was vurry kind to me in the dear old days, when
I spent week-ends at Surrey Towers. He used to give me tips on Correct
Conduct. I didn't take them; Correct Conduct wasn't what the people
there asked me for; but I was grateful to Tommy."
"If," said Anthony, "there is any member of a government department,
existing, fallen, or yet to come, who has _not_ in the dear old days
been vurry kind to you, my dear Pansy, I should be rather glad to know
his name."
"Why, certainly," returned Pansy, with cheerful readiness. "Nicky
Chester, the Brains Minister who's making himself such an all-round
eternal nuisance, doesn't even realise I exist, and if he did he'd think
I oughtn't."
"That's where you're wrong, Pansy," Kitty said. "He thinks everyone
ought to exist who does anything as well as you do your things. You're
Starred A, aren't you?"
"I've gone and lost the silly old bus ticket," said Pansy indifferently,
"but that's what it said, I think." Starred A meant (in the words of the
official definition) first-class ability at a branch of work which would
not appear to be a valuable contribution to the general efficiency of
the State. The Cheeper, child of a starred A mother and a B3 father
(Anthony's brains had been reduced by trench-life; he had been quite
intelligent at Oxford), was subject neither to bonus nor tax.
"Anyhow," went on Pansy, grinning her wide, sweet, leisurely grin, "I
think I see Nicky Chester sendin' me round flowers or goodies after a
show! He's seen me, you know: he was in a box the first night of 'Hullo,
Peace!' He laughed at the political hits, but my turns left him cold; I
guess they weren't brainy enough." She tossed the Cheeper in the air and
caught him, strongly and easily. "Make him supple young," she observed,
"an' by the time he's six he'll be a star Child Gamboller, fit for
revue. He takes after me. Already he can put both his big toes in his
little mouth at once."
"Very unusual, surely," remarked Mr. Amherst, looking at the Cheeper
through his pince-nez as if he were an insect under a microscope. Mr.
Amherst was fellow of an Oxford college, and had the academic touch, and
was not yet entirely used to Pansy, a type outside his previous studies,
and at no time would he be really used to anyone under eighteen years of
age, let alone six months. Possibly this was what his reviewers meant
when they said that he lacked the touch of common humanity.
His attention was diverted from the Cheeper by the parish church, which
he inspected with the same curiosity and distaste.
"Organised Religion, I presume," he commented. "If you've no objection,
Anthony, I will attend morning service there to-morrow. It may provide
me with some valuable subject matter for my article."
"We'll all go," said Kitty. "The End House shall set an example to the
village. We'll take Cyril, too. He can get a dispensation. It's Brains
Sunday, you know, and all patriotic clergymen will be preaching about
it. Vernon and I are officially bound to be there."
"I don't suppose it will be amusing," said Anthony. "But we'll go if you
all want to."
"Church," said Pansy, meditatively regarding the Early Perpendicular
tower. "_I_ went one Sunday morning." She paused reminiscently, and
added, without chagrin, "The vicar turned me down."
"He could hardly," said Mr. Amherst civilly, "do otherwise. Your
position is not one which is at present recognised by Organised
Religion."
"Oh, he recognised it all right," Pansy explained. "That was just the
trouble; he didn't like it.... He's not a bad old sort. He came to call
afterwards, and told me all about it. He was quite upset. So was I,
wasn't I, old thing?"
"Not in the least," returned Anthony placidly.
"I'd only wanted to do the proper thing," Pansy continued her
unperturbed narrative, in her singularly beautiful voice. "I was always
brought up to go to church now and then. I was confirmed all right. I
like to do the proper thing. It only seems fair to the Cheeper to bring
him up in the way he should go. I wouldn't care for him to grow up an
agnogger, like all you people. But Mr. Delmer said my way of life was
too ambiguous to square with comin' to church. Rather a sweet word,
don't you think? Because it _isn't_ ambiguous really, you know; not a
bit, I'm afraid.... So when the Cheeper turned up, it seemed to me _he_
was a bit ambiguous, too, an' that's why I haven't had him made a little
Christian yet. The vicar says he can square that up all right--he called
on purpose to tell me--but somehow we've never had the time to fix it,
have we, darlin'? Tottie O'Clare promised me she'd be godmother if ever
I did have him done...."
"Pansy," said Anthony, "you're boring Amherst and Prideaux. They're not
interested in babies, or baptisms, or Tottie O'Clare."
Pansy smiled at them all out of her serene violet eyes. She looked like
some stately, supple Aphrodite; she might, but for the delicate soupcon
of powder and over-red lips, have sat for a madonna.
"Pansy," said Kitty, "it's the Sistine Madonna you're like; I've got it
at last. You're the divine type. You might be from heaven. You're so
restful. We all spin and buzz about, trying to get things done, and to
be clever and fussy and efficient--and you just _are_. You happen, like
spring, or music. You're not a bit like Chester, but you're ever so much
more important. Isn't she, Vernon?"
"They're both," said Prideaux tactfully, "of enormous importance. And
certainly, as you say, not in the least alike. Chester is neither like
spring nor music, and certainly one wouldn't call him restful. And I
should be a bit surprised to learn that heaven is where he either began
or will end his career.... But, I ask you, look at that."
They were passing the little Town Hall, that stood in the village market
place. Its face was plastered with an immense poster, which Prideaux and
Kitty surveyed with proprietary pride, Amherst with cynical amusement,
Anthony with bored resignation, and Pansy and the Cheeper with placid
wonder at the world's folly.
"Ours is a wonderful government," Kitty commented. "And we are a
wonderful ministry. Think of rural England all plastered with that.... I
don't believe Chester laughs when he sees it, Vernon. I'm sure he looks
at it proudly, like a solemn, earnest little boy."
"And quite right too," said Prideaux, screwing his glass into his eye
the better to read. For this was a new Ministry of Brains poster; new
this week. It read, in large type, "Improve your Brains! Go in for the
Government Course of Mind Training! It will benefit you, it will benefit
your country, it will benefit posterity. Old Age must come. But it need
not be a Doddering Old Age. Lay up Good Mental Capacities to meet it,
and make it a Fruitful and Happy Time. See what the Mind Training Course
has done for others, and let it Do the Same for You."
Then, in smaller type, "Here are a few reports from those who have
benefited by it.
"_From a famous financier._ Since I began the Course I have doubled my
income and halved those of 750 others. I hope, by the time I have
completed the Course, to have ruined twice this number.
"_From a Cabinet Minister._ Owing to the Mind Training Course I have now
remained in office for over six weeks. I hope to remain for at least
three more.
"_From a newspaper proprietor._ I have started eight new journals since
I took the Course, over-turned three governments, directed four
international crises, and successfully represented Great Britain to the
natives of the Pacific Islands.
"_From the editor of a notorious weekly paper._ I took the Course
because I seemed to be losing that unrivalled touch which has made my
paper what, I may say, it is. Since taking it, more than my old force
has returned, so that I have libelled nine prominent persons and
successfully defended six libel actions in the courts. The M.T. Course
teaches one to Live at one's Best.
"_From a Civil Servant._ Every time a new government department is born
I enter it, rendered competent by the Mind Training Course to fill its
highest posts. When the Department falls I leave it, undamaged.
"_From a Publisher._ My judgment has been so stimulated by the Course
that since taking it I have published five novels so unpleasant that
correspondence still rages about them in the columns of the Spectator,
and which have consequently achieved ten editions. The Course teaches
one why some succeed and others fail.
"_From a Journalist._ I now only use the words decimated, literally,
annihilated, and proletariat, according to the meanings ascribed to them
in the dictionary, do not use pacifism more than three times a day, nor
'very essential' or 'rather unique' at all.
"_From a famous Theologian._ Before I undertook the Course I was a
Bishop of a disestablished Church. Now my brain is clarified, my eyes
are opened, and I am a leader of the Coming Faith. The Course teaches
the Meaning of Life.
"_From a former Secretary of State._ Since taking the Course I have
recognised the importance of keeping myself informed as to public
affairs, and now never refer in my public speeches to any speech by
another statesman without having previously read a summary of it.
"_From a poet._ I can now find rhymes to nearly all my lines, and have
given up the old-fashioned habit of free rhythms to which I have been
addicted since 1912. I can even find rhymes to indemnity, also a rhyme
to War which is neither gore, claw, nor star.
"_From an inveterate writer of letters to newspapers._ I no longer do
this.
"_From a citizen._ I was engaged to be married. Now I am not."
Then in large type again,
"All this has happened to Others! Why should it not happen to You? Save
yourself, save your country, save the world! How shall wisdom be found,
and where is the place of understanding? So asked the Preacher of the
ancient world, and got no answer, because then there was none. But the
answer is now forthcoming. Wisdom is to be found in the Government Mind
Training Course--the M.T.C., as it is affectionately called by thousands
of men and women who are deriving benefits from it. Enter for it to-day.
For further information apply Mind Training Section, Ministry of Brains,
S.W. 1."
Above the letterpress was a picture poster, representing two youths, and
called "Before and After." "Before" had the vacuity of the village
idiot, "After" the triumphant cunning of the maniac. The Mind Training
Course had obviously completely overset a brain formerly harmless, if
deficient.
"How long," enquired Amherst, in his best Oxford manner, "do you give
yourselves? I address the enquiry, as a member of the public, to you, as
servants of a government which can resort to such methods as that."
"We have now remained in office for over six months," said Kitty, "and
we hope to remain for at least three more.... But it's for us to ask
you, as a member of the public, how long you intend to give us?
Personally I'm astonished every day that our hotel, and all the other
hotels, aren't stormed and wrecked. I don't know why the Aero Bus
Company, while it's on strike, doesn't sail over us and drop bombs. It
shows we must be more popular than we deserve. It shows that people
really _like_ being coerced and improved. They know they need it. Look
at the people going about this village; look at their faces, I ask you.
They're like 'Before.' Look at the policeman at his door, half out of
his clothes. He's god-like to look at; he's got a figure like the
Discobolus, and the brain of a Dr. Watson. He could never track a thief.
He's looking at us; he thinks we're thieves, probably, just because
we're ambiguous. That's the sort of mind he has. Look at the doctor, in
his absurd little Ford. How much do you suppose he knows about curing
people, or about the science of bodies? He patches them up with pills
and drugs, and.... But he didn't cut us, Tony. Why not?"
"He and the vicar don't," explained Anthony. "Professional attendance.
There's the vicar, outside that cottage. See him put his hand up as we
pass him."
He returned the salute with some pride, and Pansy nodded agreeably.
Amherst examined the vicar, who was small and sturdy and had a nice kind
face.
Amherst shook his head when they had left him behind.
"Not nearly clever enough for the part," he pronounced. "To organise
religion a man should have the talents of the devil, or at least of the
intelligent civil servant. Prideaux would do it quite well; or Chester;
only Chester might be too erratic for the popular taste. No wonder
Christianity is the ineffective thing it is in this country, if it's
left in the hands of officials like that. That man couldn't organise
anything; I bet even his school treats go wrong--too few buns or
something. That's the hope for the world, that inefficiency of most
religious officials; that's why the public will succeed before long in
throwing off the whole business, even before they succeed in downing
Parliament and the British autocracy, who are a shade more acute. From
my point of view your vicar's stupidity is all to the good. If he
preaches to-morrow as the Brains Ministry want him to--and he looks
loyal and patriotic enough to try--he'll be preaching against his own
interests. But that's what all you Brains people are doing, of course.
You don't seem to see that if you ever were to succeed in making the
human race reasonably intelligent, your number would be up; you wouldn't
be stood for a moment longer. You're sitting on a branch and trying to
saw it off. Lucky for you your saws aren't sharper."
"Chester would go on just the same if he did see," Kitty said. "He
probably does. He's an idealist, but his eye for facts is very
penetrating. And he'd think it worth while to perish in so good a
cause."
"The fact is," added Prideaux, "that he never would perish, even if the
branch did fall; he'd climb on to another pretty quickly and rise as the
People's Saviour. Our Nicky won't go under."
3
They arrived at the End House, about which there is little to say except
that it lay just beyond the straggling village, was roomy, comfortable,
untidy, full of dogs all named after revue stars, and was an interesting
mixture of the Grammont taste in art and decoration, which was the taste
of clever people several of whom were artists, and of Pansy's taste,
which is most shortly indicated by mentioning that if you saw the house
before you saw Pansy you were surprised, and if you had seen Pansy first
you were not. The drawing-room floor was littered with large and
comfortable and brightly-hued cushions, obviously not mistakes but
seats. This always a little flurried the vicar and his wife when they
called; it was, as Mrs. Delmer observed, so very Eastern, and suggested
other habits belonging to the same dubious quarter of the globe, some of
which there was only too good reason to believe had been adopted. The
chimney-piece was worse, being adorned by photographs of Pansy's
friends--her loving Tottie, hers everlastingly, Guy, warmly Phyllis and
Harry, and so forth. (There was even hers Jimmie, which, if Mrs. Delmer
had known rather more of Pansy's domestic circumstances than she did,
would have struck her as being in very doubtful taste.) Some of these
ladies and gentlemen, fortunately, had elected to be taken head and
shoulders only (and quite enough too, thought Mrs. Delmer, wondering how
far below the bottom of the photograph the ladies' clothes began) and
some showed the whole figure. ("I should think they did!" said Mrs.
Delmer, on her first call, nervously retreating from the chimney-piece.
It may be mentioned that Mrs. Delmer was not in the habit of witnessing
revues, and was accustomed to an ampler mode of garment. These things
are so much a question of habit.)
These photographs, and the excellent painting in the hall of Pansy
herself in her eel dance, were among the minor reasons why Ivy Delmer
was not allowed to enter the End House. There were three reasons why her
parents did so; they might be stupid, but they were of an extraordinary
goodness, and could not bear to leave sin alone, anyhow in their own
parish, where it set such an unfortunate example, when they might, by
sufficient battling, perhaps win it over to righteousness; also they had
kind and soft hearts, and did not like the idea of Pansy alone all day
with her infant son and the two most notoriously ill-behaved young
servants in the village; and finally they were Christians, and believed
that the teaching of their religion on the subject of sociability to
sinners was plain. So, swallowing their embarrassed distaste, they
visited the End House as one might visit a hospital, but kept their
children from it, because it was a hospital whose patients might be
infectious.
Into this house, standing hospitably open-doored in the May evening, its
owner and his friends entered. It affected them in various ways. Anthony
Grammont was proud of his house and garden, his Pansy and his Cheeper.
He was young enough to be vain of being head of a household, even of an
ambiguous household, and of course anyone would be proud of the dazzling
and widely-known Pansy, whose name had always been one of the two in
large type in advertisements of the shows in which she figured (she was
as good as all that); and he was tired enough, mentally and physically,
by his life of the last few years, its discomforts, its homelessness,
its bondage, its painful unnaturalness, to sink with relief into Pansy's
exotic cushions and all they stood for.
Kitty found the house and household inordinately cheering and
entertaining; the mere sight of Pansy's drawing-room could rouse her
from any depression.
Vernon Prideaux shuddered a little at the row of photographs--he
detested photographs on chimney-pieces--and the Eve design on the chair
covers; he was not so good at the comic-opera touch as Kitty was, and
had a masculine sense of propriety and good taste, and had always
preferred revue stars on the stage to off it. He had also, however, a
wide tolerance for the tastes of others, and was glad that Tony Grammont
had found domestic happiness.
Amherst's thoughts were brief and neat, and might be summed up thus:
"Forces of Darkness--number 8. The expensive, conscienceless, and
unthinking female."
Pansy went upstairs to put the Cheeper to bed, and Kitty went with her
to see her nephew in his bath, putting both his big toes into his mouth
at once.
The only other event of importance which happened before dinner was the
arrival of Cyril Grammont, a brother of Anthony's, a Cambridge friend of
Prideaux's, a Roman Catholic, a writer of epigrammatic essays and light
verse, and a budding publisher. He and Pansy usually quarrelled. He had
spent the war partly in Macedonia, as a member of the Salonika Force,
digging up fragments of sculpture from Amphipolis and the other ruined
cities of those regions, tracking what he then held to be the pernicious
influence of St. Paul with the help of a pocket atlas of his journeys
and the obviously evil habits and dispositions of the towns which had
received his attentions, and partly in Palestine, where he had taken an
extreme dislike to both Jews and Turks, had become convinced that they
must be so wrong about everything that mattered that Christians must be
right, and was forthwith converted from atheism to Christianity. He
considered that war-time is no time for Christians, they have to do so
much either explaining or protesting or both, so he had waited till the
war was over, and had then proceeded to investigate the various forms
into which Christianity had developed (they all seemed a little strange
to him at first), in order to make his choice. An impartial friend with
whom he discussed the subject told him that he would find Roman
Catholicism best suited to his precise, clear-cut, and Latin type of
mind, provided that he succeeded in avoiding all contact with the more
luscious forms of Roman devotions, which, he was warned, would disgust
him as much as patchouli, or Carlo Dolci. "And anyhow," added his
friend, probably erroneously, "it will outlast the other churches, for
all its obscurantism, so if you want a going concern, join it."
So Cyril enquired into Roman Catholicism, found that, in its best
cathedral forms, it satisfied his artistic sense, and, in its
sharply-cut dogma, his feeling for precise form (his taste in art was
violently against the post-bellum school, which was a riot of lazy,
sloppy, and unintellectual formlessness), and so, accepting as no
stranger than most of the growths of a strangely sprouting world the
wonderful tree which had grown from a seed so remarkably dissimilar, he
took a firm seat upon its branches, heedless of the surprised
disapproval of most of his friends, who did not hold that any organised
religion could be called a going concern, except in the sense that it
was going to pot.
So here was Cyril, at the End House for Sunday, neat, handsome,
incisive, supercilious, very sure of himself, and not in the least like
the End House, with its slatternly brilliance, its yapping dogs, its
absurdities, its sprawling incoherence, its cushions, and its ambiguity.
In the evening Pansy danced her willow-tree dance for them. Her hair
tumbled down, and she ceased to look like the Sistine Madonna and became
more like a young Bacchanal. Some of her jokes were coarse (you have to
be coarse sometimes in revue, and cannot leave the habit entirely behind
you when you come off the boards) and Amherst, who was refined, was
jarred. Then she quarrelled with Cyril, because he remarked, with his
cheerful and businesslike air of finality, that of course if the Cheeper
were not baptised he would go to hell. Upon her violent remonstrance he
merely observed that he was sorry, but facts were facts, and he couldn't
get them altered to please her. He talked like this partly to annoy
Pansy, because it amused him to see her cross, and partly for the
pleasure of unobtrusively watching Amherst's expression when the word
hell was mentioned.
So, to unite the party, Kitty proposed that they should play the new
card game, League of Nations, of which the point was to amass cards and
go out while presenting an appearance of doing nothing at all.
Thus harmoniously and hilariously the night wore on, till at last the
End House, like the other Little Chantreys houses, only much later, went
to bed.
4
Little Chantreys slept under the May moon, round the market square with
the Ministry of Brains poster in the middle.
The doctor slept with the sound sleep of those who do not know the width
of the gulf between what they are and what they should be.
The sick, his patients, slept or woke, tossing uneasily, with windows
closed to the soft night air. Every now and then they would rouse and
take their medicine, with impatience, desperation, simple faith, or dull
obedience, and look in vain for a bettering of their state. Those who
considered themselves well, never having known what welfare really was,
slept too, in stuffy, air-tight rooms, disturbed by the wailing of
babies which they had not taught not to cry aloud, by the hopping of
fleas which they had failed to catch or to subdue, by the dancing of
mice which would never enter traps so obvious as those which they
scornfully perceived in their paths, by the crowding of children about
them, too close to be forgotten or ignored, by the dragging weight of
incompetent, unfinished yesterday and incompetent, unbegun to-morrow.
The vicarage slept. The vicar in his sleep had a puzzled frown, as if
life was too much for him, as if he was struggling with forces above his
comprehension and beyond his grasp, forces that should have
revolutionised Little Chantreys, but, in his hands, wouldn't. The
vicar's wife slept fitfully, waking to worry about the new cook, whose
pastry was impossible. She wasn't clever enough to know that cooking
shouldn't be done in this inefficient, wasteful way in the home, but
co-operatively, in a village kitchen, and pastry should be turned out by
a pastry machine. Mrs. Delmer had heard of this idea, but didn't like
it, because it was new. She wasn't strong, and would die one day, worn
out with domestic worries which could have been so easily obviated....
The young Delmers slept. They always did. They mostly ought not to have
been born at all; they were, except Ivy, who was moderately intelligent,
below standard. They slept the sleep of the unthinking.
The vicarage girl slept. She would sleep for some time, because her
alarum clock was smothered by a cushion; which would seem to indicate
more brains on her part than were to be found in the other inmates of
the vicarage.
So Little Chantreys slept, and the world slept, governments and
governed, forces of darkness and forces of light, industry and idleness,
the sad and the gay; pathetic, untutored children of the moment looking
neither behind nor ahead.
The morning light, opening dimly, like a faintly-tinted flower,
illumined the large red type of the poster in the Little Chantreys
market place. "IMPROVE YOUR BRAINS!" So Brains Sunday dawned upon a
world which did indeed seem to need it.