BRAINS SUNDAY
1
Ivy Delmer had been right in her premonition. The End House was in
church, at matins (the form of Sunday midday worship still used in
Little Chantreys, which was old-fashioned). Ivy looked at them as they
sat in a row near the front. Mr. Anthony Grammont and Miss Ponsonby sat
next each other and conversed together in whispers. Miss Ponsonby was
attired in pink gingham, and not much of it (it was not the fashion to
have extensive clothes, or of rich materials, lest people should point
at you as a profiteer who had made money out of the war; even if you had
done this you hid it as far as was convenient, and what you did not hide
you said was interest on war loan). Miss Ponsonby, with her serene
smile, looked patient, resigned, and very sweet and good. Next her was
Miss Grammont, who looked demure in a dress of motley, and, beyond her
again, Mr. Prideaux, who looked restless and impatient, either as if he
were thinking out some departmental tangle, or as if he thought it had
been a silly idea to come to church, or both. At the end of the row were
Mr. Amherst, who was studying the church, the congregation and the
service through his glasses, collecting copy for his essay, and Mr.
Cyril Grammont, who looked like a Roman Catholic attending a Protestant
church by special dispensation. (This look cannot be defined, but is
known if seen.)
Ivy looked from the End House to her father, surpliced at the lectern,
reading the Proper Lesson appointed for Brains Sunday, Proverbs 8 and 9.
"Shall not wisdom cry, and understanding put forth her word? She
standeth in the top of high places, by the way, in the places of the
paths. She crieth at the gates, at the entry of the city, at the coming
in at the doors.... O ye simple, understand wisdom, and, ye fools, be of
an understanding heart.... Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn
out her seven pillars" (that was the Ministry hotel, thought Ivy)....
"She hath sent forth her maidens, she crieth upon the highest place of
the city" (on the walls of the Little Chantreys town hall). "Whoso is
simple, let him turn in hither.... Forsake the foolish and live, and go
in the way of understanding.... Give instruction to a wise man and he
will get wiser; teach a just man and he will increase in learning....
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of
the holy is understanding...." Which set Ivy Delmer wondering a little,
for she believed her parents to be holy, or anyhow very, very good, and
yet.... But perhaps they had, after all, the beginning of wisdom, only
not its middle, nor its end, if wisdom has any end. She looked from her
father, carefully closing the big Bible and remarking that here ended
the first lesson, to her mother, carefully closing her little Bible (for
she was of those who follow lessons in books); her mother, who was so
wonderfully good and kind and selfless, and to whom old age must come,
and who ought to be preparing for it by going in for the Government Mind
Training Course, but who said she hadn't time, she was so busy in the
house and garden and parish. And half the things she did or supervised
in the house and garden ought, said the Ministry of Brains, to be done
by machinery, or co-operation, or something. They would have been done
better so, and would have left the Delmers and their parishioners more
time. More time for what, was the further question? "Save time now spent
on the mere business of living, and spend it on better things," said the
Ministry pamphlets. Reading, Ivy supposed; thinking, talking, getting
_au fait_ with the affairs of the world. And here was Mrs. Delmer
teaching each new girl to make pastry (no new girl at the vicarage ever
seemed to have acquired the pastry art to Mrs. Delmer's satisfaction in
her pre-vicarage career)--pastry, which should have been turned out by
the yard in a pastry machine; and spudding up weeds one by one, which
should have been electrocuted, like superfluous hairs, or flung up by
dynamite, like fish in a river.... But when Mrs. Delmer heard of such
new and intelligent labour-saving devices, she was as reluctant to adopt
them as any of the poor dear stupid women in the cottages. It was a
pity, because the Church should lead the way; and really now that it had
been set free of the State it quite often did.
Ivy looked with puzzled, thoughtful eyes, which this morning, unusually,
were observing people rather than their clothes, at the rest of the
congregation, her own brothers and sisters first. The young Delmers were
several in number; there was Betty, who had just left school, and showed
no signs of "doing" anything, except her hair, the flowers, and
occasionally the lamps. For the rest, she played tennis for prizes and
hockey for Bucks, went out to tea, and when in doubt dyed her clothes or
washed the dogs. There was Charlie, at Cambridge. Charlie was of those
for whom the Great War had been allowed to take the place of the
Littlego, which was fortunate in his case, as he had managed to get
through the one but would probably in no circumstances have got through
the other. And there was Reggie, who had got through neither, but had
been killed at Cambrai in November, 1917. There were also some little
ones, Jane and John, aged twelve and eleven, who, though separated by
the length of a seat, still continued to hold communication by Morse,
and Jelly, who was named for a once famous admiral and whose age cannot
be specified. Jelly was small and stout, sat between his mother and Ivy
and stared at his father in the choir-stalls, and from time to time
lifted up his voice and laughed, as if he were at a Punch and Judy show.
On the whole an agreeable family, and well-intentioned (though Ivy and
Betty quarrelled continuously and stole each other's things), but
certainly to be numbered among the simple, who were urged to get
understanding. Would they ever get it? That was the question, for them
and for the whole congregation here present, from the smallest,
grubbiest school-child furtively sucking bulls'-eyes and wiping its
sticky hands upon its teacher's skirt, to the vicar in the pulpit,
giving out his text.
"The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God"; that was the text.
Ivy saw a little smile cross the clever and conceited face of Mr.
Amherst as it was given out. He settled himself down to listen,
expectant of entertainment. He believed that he was in luck. For Mr.
Amherst, who did not say in his heart that there was no God, because
even in his heart he scorned the affirmation of the obvious, was of
those who are sure that all members of the Christian Church are fools
(unlike Mr. Arnold Bennett, who tries and fails, he did not even try to
think of them as intellectual equals), so he avoided, where he could,
the study of clever Christians, and welcomed the evidences of weakness
of intellect that crossed his path. He believed that this was going to
be a foolish sermon, which, besides amusing them all, would help him in
his article on Organised Religion.
Ivy could not help watching the End House people. Somehow she knew how
the sermon was affecting them. She didn't think it funny, but she
suspected that they would. Her father wasn't as clever as they were;
that was why he failed to say anything that could impress them except as
either dull or comic. Brains again. How much they mattered. Clergymen
ought to have brains; it seemed very important. They ought to know how
to appeal to rich and poor, high and low, wise and simple. This
extraordinary thing called religion--(Ivy quite newly and unusually saw
it as extraordinary, seeing it for a moment with the eyes of the End
House, to all of whom, except Miss Ponsonby and, presumably, Cyril
Grammont, it was like fairy lore, like Greek mythology, mediaeval archaic
nonsense)--this extraordinary lore and the more extraordinary force
behind it, was in the hands, mainly (like everything else), of
incompetents, clerical and lay, who did not understand it themselves and
could not help others to do so. They muddled about with it, as Miss
Pomfrey muddled about with office papers.... It would not be surprising
if the force suddenly demolished them all, like lightning....
But such speculations were foreign to Ivy, and she forgot them in
examining the hat of Mrs. Peterson, the grocer's wife, which was so
noticeable in its excessive simplicity--its decoration consisted wholly
of home-grown vegetables--as to convince beholders that Mr. Peterson had
_not_, as some falsely said, made a fortune during the war by cornering
margarine.
2
Mr. Delmer was talking about the worst form of unwisdom--Atheism; a
terrible subject to him, and one he approached with diffidence but
resolution, in the face of the unusual pew-full just below him.
"It is an extraordinary thing," he was saying, "that there are those who
actually deny the existence of God. We have, surely, only to think of
the immeasurable spaces of the universe--the distance He has set between
one thing and another.... It is reported of the Emperor Napoleon that,
looking up at the stars one night, he remarked...." Ivy, who had heard
this remark of the Emperor Napoleon's before, let her attention wander
again to the hats of Mrs. Peterson and others. When she listened once
more, the vicar had left Napoleon, though he was still dealing with the
heavenly bodies.
"If an express train, performing sixty miles an hour, were to start off
from this planet--were such a thing possible to imagine, which of course
it is not--towards the moon, and continue its journey without stops
until it arrived, it would reach its destination, according to the
calculations of scientists, in exactly 1 year, 8 months, 26 days." (Ivy,
who had left school lately enough to remember the distance set by the
creator between the earth and the moon, began to work this out in her
head; she did not think that her father had got it quite right.) "And,
in the face of this, there are those who say that God does not exist. A
further thought, yet more wonderful. If the same train, travelling at
the same rapid rate, were to leave this earth again, this time for the
sun, the time it would take over this journey would be--I ask you, if
you can, to imagine it, my friends--no less than 175 years, 1 week, and
6 days...." (Ivy gave it up; it was too difficult without pencil and
paper.) "Is it possible that, knowing this, there are still those who
doubt God? Yet once more. Imagine, if you can, this train again starting
forth, this time bound for the planet Jupiter. Scientists tell us, and
we must believe it" (All right, thought Ivy, with relief, if he'd got it
out of a book), "that such a journey would take, if performed when
Jupiter was at its furthest, 1097 years, 9 months, 2 weeks, 5 days, 10
hours, and a fraction. Can it really be that, confronted with the dizzy
thought of these well-nigh incredibly lengthy journeys from one heavenly
body to another, there are yet men and women who attribute the universe
to the blind workings of what they are pleased to call the Forces of
Nature? I ask you to consider earnestly, could any force but God have
conceived and executed such great distances? And Jupiter, my friends, is
comparatively near at hand. Take instead one of those little (but only
apparently little) nameless stars twinkling in the firmament. Imagine
our train starting off into space once more...."
Ivy failed to imagine this; her attention was occupied with the End
House seat. The train's last journey had been too much for the tottering
self-control of the Grammont family and Vernon Prideaux (nothing ever
broke down Mr. Amherst's self-control, and Pansy's thoughts were
elsewhere). Prideaux's head rested on his hand, as if he were lost in
thought; Kitty and Anthony were shaking, unobtrusively but unmistakably,
and Cyril's fine, supercilious chin, set firmly, was quivering. Cyril
had, from childhood, had more self-control than the other two, and he
was further sustained by his conviction that it would be unthinkably bad
form for a Catholic to attend a Protestant service and laugh at it in
public.
They oughtn't, thought Ivy, rather indignantly, to laugh at her father's
sermon when he wasn't meaning to be funny. If he saw he would be hurt.
One shouldn't laugh in church, anyhow; even Jane and John knew that.
These people were no better than Jelly.
"This Sunday," continued the Vicar, his last star journey safely
accomplished, "is the day that has been set aside by our country for
prayer and sermons with regard to the proposed increase in the national
brain-power. This is, indeed, a sore need: but let us start on the firm
foundation of religion. What is wisdom apart from that? Nothing but
vanity and emptiness. What is the clever godless man but a fool from the
point of view of eternity? What is the godly fool but a heavenly
success?" ("He's talking sedition," whispered Kitty to Prideaux. "He'd
better have stuck to the trains.")
But, of course, the vicar continued, if one can combine virtue and
intelligence, so much the better. It has been done. There was, e.g.
Darwin. Also General Gordon, St. Paul, and Lord Roberts, who had said
with his last breath, in June, 1915, "We've got the men, we've got the
money, we've got the munitions; what we now want is a nation on its
knees." (Ivy saw Prideaux sit up very straight, as if he would have
liked to inform Mr. Delmer that this libel on a dying soldier had long
since been challenged and withdrawn.) One can, said the vicar, find many
more such examples of this happy combination of virtue and intelligence.
There was Queen Victoria, Florence Nightingale, and Lord Rhondda (who in
the dark days of famine had led the way in self-denial). Not,
unfortunately, the Emperor Napoleon, Friedrich Nietzsche, or the Kaiser
Wilhelm II. The good are not always the clever, nor the clever always
the good. Some are neither, like the late Crown Prince of Germany (who
was now sharing a small island in the Pacific with the Kaiser Wilhelm
and MM. Lenin and Trotzky, late of Petrograd, and neither stupid nor
exactly, let us hope, bad, but singularly unfortunate and misguided,
like so many Russians, whom it is not for us to judge).
But we should try to be both intelligent and good. We should take every
step in our power to improve our minds. (Prideaux began to look more
satisfied; this was what sermons to-day ought to be about.) It is our
duty to our country to be intelligent citizens, if we can, said the
vicar. Reason is what God has differentiated us from the lower animals
by. They have instinct, we reason. Truly a noble heritage. We are rather
clever already; we have discovered fire, electricity, coal, and invented
printing, steam engines, and flying. No reason why we should not improve
our minds further still, and invent (under God) more things yet. Only
one thing we must affirm; the State should be very careful how it
interferes with the domestic lives of its citizens. The State was going
rather far in that direction; it savoured unpleasantly of Socialism, a
tyranny to which Englishmen did not take kindly. An Englishman's home
had always been his castle (even castles, thought some aggrieved members
of the congregation, were subject to unpleasant supervision by the
police during food scarcity). No race was before us in its respect for
law, but also no race was more determined that their personal and
domestic relations should not be tampered with. When the State
endeavoured to set up a Directorate of Matrimony, and penalised those
who did not conform to its regulations, the State was, said the vicar,
going too far, even for a State. The old school of _laissez-faire_, long
since discredited as an economic theory, survived as regards the private
lives of citizens. It is not the State which has ordained marriage, it
is God, and God did not say "Only marry the clever; have no children but
clever ones." He said, speaking through the inspired mouth of the writer
of the book of Genesis, "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the
earth." ("And, through the inspired mouth of Solomon, 'Desire not a
multitude of unprofitable children,'" murmured Anthony Grammont, who
knew his Bible in patches, but was apt to get the authorship wrong.)
The vicar said he was now going to say a bold thing; if it brought him
within reach of the law he could not help it. He considered that we
ought all, in this matter, to be what are called Conscientious
Obstructionists; we ought to protest against this interference, and
refuse to pay the taxes levied upon those less intelligent infants sent
to us by heaven. He did not say this without much thought and prayer,
and it was, of course, a matter for everyone's own conscience, but he
felt constrained to bear his witness on this question.
This came to Ivy as a shock. She had not known that her father was going
to bear his witness this morning. She watched Prideaux's face with some
anxiety. She admired and feared Prideaux, and thought how angry he must
be. Not Miss Grammont; Miss Grammont didn't take these things quite
seriously enough to be angry. Ivy sometimes suspected that the whole
work of the Ministry of Brains, and, indeed, of every other Ministry,
was a joke to her.
It was a relief to Ivy when her father finished his sermon on a more
loyal note, by an urgent exhortation to everyone to go in for the Mind
Training Course. We must not be backward, he said, in obeying our
country in this righteous cause. He, for his part, intended to go in for
it, with his household (Mrs. Delmer looked resigned but a little
worried, as if she was mentally fitting in the Mind Training Course with
all the other things she had to do, and finding it a close fit) and he
hoped everyone in the congregation would do the same. Ivy saw Prideaux's
profile become more approving. Perhaps her father had retrieved his
reputation for patriotism after all. Anyhow at this point the And Now
brought them all to their feet, they sang a hymn (the official hymn
composed and issued by the Brains Ministry), had a collection (for the
education of imbeciles), a prayer for the enlightenment of dark minds
(which perhaps meant the same), and trooped out of church.
3
"He ought, of course," said Prideaux at lunch, "to be reported and
prosecuted for propaganda contrary to the national interest. But we
won't report him; he redeemed himself by his patriotic finish."
"He is redeemed for evermore by his express train," said Kitty.
"A most instructive morning," said Amherst.
"Protestants are wonderful people," said Cyril.
"I always said that man was a regular pet lamb," said Pansy. "And hadn't
he pluck! Fancy givin' it us about that silly old baby tax with you two
representatives of the government sitting under him an' freezin' him. I
guess I'll have the Cheeper christened first opportunity, just to please
him, what, old dear?"
Anthony, thus addressed, said, "As soon and as often as you like,
darling. Don't mind me. Only I suppose you realise that it will mean
thinking of a name for him--Sidney, or Bert, or Lloyd George or
something."
"Montmorency," said Pansy promptly. "Monty for short, of course. That'll
sound awfully well in revue."
It should be noted as one up for Mr. Delmer that his sermon, whether or
not it brought many of his parishioners to the Government Mind Training
Course, had anyhow (unless Pansy forgot again) brought one infant soul
into the Christian Church.
4
Mrs. Delmer said to Ivy, "I suppose we shall all have to go in for it,
dear, as father's told everyone we're going to. But I don't quite know
how I'm going to get the time, especially with this new boy so
untrustworthy about changing the hens' water when he feeds them and
crushing up the bones for them. Perhaps he'll be better when he's taken
the course himself. But I half suspect it's not so much stupidity as
naughtiness.... Well, well, if father wants us to we must."
Jane said, kicking stones along the road as she walked, "Shall I be top
of my form when I've taken the Course, mother? Shall I, mother? Will
John? John was lower than me last week. _Shall_ we, mother?"
Mrs. Delmer very sensibly observed that, if all the other children in
the parish took the course too, as they ought, their relative capacities
would remain unchanged. "But if both you and John took a little more
pains over your home-work, Jane," she took the opportunity to add,
whereupon Jane very naturally changed the subject.
Betty's contribution was "_Brains!_ What a silly fuss about them. Who
wants brains?"
Which was, indeed, a very pertinent question, and one which Nicholas
Chester sometimes sadly asked himself.
Who, alas, did?