OUR WEEK
1
Brains Week ("Our Week," as it was called by the ladies who sold flags
for it) having opened thus auspiciously, flourished along its gallant
way like a travelling fair urging people to come and buy, like a tank
coaxing people to come in and purchase war bonds, like the War Office
before the Military Service Acts, like the Ministry of Food before
compulsory rationing. It was, in fact, the last great appeal for
voluntary recruits for the higher intelligence; if it failed then
compulsion would have to be resorted to. Many people thought that
compulsion should in any case be resorted to; what was the good of a
government if not to compel? If the Great War hadn't taught it that, it
hadn't taught it much. This was the view put forward in many prominent
journals; others, who would rather see England free than England clever,
advocated with urgency the voluntary scheme, hoping, if it might be, to
see England both.
It was a week of strenuous and gallant effort on the part of the
Government and its assistants. Every Cinema showed dramas representing
the contrasted fates of the Intelligent and the Stupid. Kiosks of
Propaganda and Information were set up in every prominent shop.
Trafalgar Square was brilliant with posters, a very flower-garden. The
Ministry of Brains' artists had given of their best. Pictorial
propaganda bloomed on every city wall, "Before and After," "The Rich Man
and the Poor Man" (the Rich Man, in a faultless fur coat, observing to
the Poor Man in patched reach-me-downs, "Yes, I was always below you at
school, wasn't I? But since then I've taken the Mind Training Course,
and now money rolls in. Sorry you're down on your luck, old man, but why
don't you do as I've done?") and a special poster for underground
railways, portraying victims of the perils of the streets--"A will be
safe because he has taken the Mind Training Course and is consequently
facing the traffic. B will not, because he has refused to improve his
mind and has therefore alighted from a motor bus in the wrong direction
and with his back to oncoming traffic; he will also be crushed by a
street aero, having by his foolish behaviour excited the aviator. B will
therefore perish miserably, AND DESERVES TO."
There were also pictures of human love, that most moving of subjects for
art. "Yes, dear, I love you. But we are both C2" (they looked it). "We
cannot marry; we must part for ever. You must marry Miss Bryte-Braynes,
who has too few teeth and squints, and I must accept Mr. Brilliantine,
who puts too much oil on his hair. For beauty is only skin-deep, but
wisdom endures for ever. We must THINK OF POSTERITY."
Nor was Commerce backward in the cause. Every daily paper contained
advertisements from our more prominent emporiums, such as "Get tickets
for the M.T. Course at Selfswank's. Every taker of a ticket will receive
a coupon for our great L1000 lottery. The drawing will be performed in a
fortnight from to-day, by the late Prime Minister's wife." (To reassure
the anxious it should be said that the late Prime Minister was not
deceased but abolished; the country was governed by a United Council,
five minds with but a single thought--if that.) "By taking our tickets
you benefit yourself, benefit posterity, benefit your country, and stand
a good chance of winning A CASH PRIZE."
And every patriotic advertiser of clothes, furs, jewellery, groceries,
or other commodities, tacked on to his advertisement, "Take a ticket
this week for the M.T. Course." And every patriotic letter-writer bought
a Brains Stamp, and stamped his envelopes with the legend "Improve your
Brains now."
Railway bookstalls were spread with literature on the subject. The
_Queen_, the _Gentlewoman_, the _Sketch_, and other such periodicals
suited, one imagines, to the simpler type of female mind, had articles
on "Why does a woman look old sooner than a man?" (the answer to this
was that, though men are usually stupid, women are often stupider still,
and have taken even less pains to improve their minds), "Take care of
your mind and your complexion will take care of itself," "Raise yourself
to category A, and you enlarge your matrimonial field," "How to train
Baby's intellect," and so forth. Side by side with these journals was
the current number of the _Cambridge Magazine_, bearing on its cover the
legend "A Short Way with Fools; Pogrom of the Old Men. Everyone over
forty to be shot." "We have always said," the article under these
head-lines very truly began, "and we do not hesitate to say it again,
that the only way to secure an intelligent government or citizenship in
any nation is to dispose, firmly but not kindly, of the old and the
middle-aged, and to let the young have their day. There will then be no
more such hideous blunders as those with which the diplomacy of our
doddering elders has wrecked the world again and again during the past
centuries."
The _Evening News_ had cartoons every day of the Combing Out of the
Stupid, whom it was pleased to call Algies and Dollies. The _New
Witness_, on the other hand, striking a different note, said that it was
the fine old Christian Gentile quality of stupidity which had made Old
England what it was; the natives of Merrie England had always resented
excessive acuteness, as exhibited in the Hebrew race at their expense.
The _Herald_, however, rejoiced in large type in the Open Door to
Labour; the _Church Times_ reported Brains Sunday sermons by many
divines (in most of them sounded the protest raised by the vicar of
Little Chantreys against interference with domestic rights, the Church
was obviously going to be troublesome in this matter) and the other
journals, from the _Hidden Hand_ down to _Home Chat_, supported the
cause in their varying degrees and characteristic voices.
Among them lay the Ministry of Brains pamphlets, "Brains. How to get and
keep them," "The cultivation of the Mind," etc. In rows among the books
and papers hung the Great Thoughts from Great Minds series--portraits of
eminent persons with their most famous remarks on this subject inscribed
beneath them. "It is the duty of every man, woman, and child in this
country so to order their lives in this peace crisis as to make the
least possible demand upon the intelligence of others. It is necessary,
therefore, to have some of your own." (An eminent minister.) "I never
had any assistance beyond my wits. Through them I am what I am. What
that is, it is for others rather than for myself to judge." (A great
journalist.) "It was lack of brains (I will not say whose, but it
occurred before the first Coalition Government, mind you) which plunged
Europe into the Great War. Brains--again, mark you, I do not say
whose--must make and keep the Great Peace." (One of our former Prime
Ministers.) "I have always wished I had some." (A Royal Personage.) "I
must by all means have a Brains Ministry started in Liberia." (The
Liberian Ambassador.) Then, after remarks by Shakespeare, Emerson,
Carlyle, Mr. R. J. Campbell, Henry James, President Wilson, Marcus
Aurelius, Solomon, Ecclesiasticus ("What is heavier than lead, and what
is the name thereof but a fool?") and Miss Ella Wheeler Wilcox, the
portrait gallery concluded with Mr. Nicholas Chester, the Minister of
Brains, looking like an embittered humorist, and remarking, "It's a
damned silly world."
2
"Amen to that," Miss Kitty Grammont remarked, stopping for a moment
after buying _Truth_ at the bookstall and gazing solemnly into the
Minister's disillusioned eyes. "And it would be a damned dull one if it
wasn't." She sauntered out of Charing Cross tube station and boarded an
Embankment tram. This was the Monday morning after Brains Week had run
its course.
The fact had to be faced by the Ministry: Brains Week had proved
disappointing. The public were not playing up as they should.
"We have said all along," said _The Times_ (anticipating the _Hidden
Hand_, which had not yet made up its mind), "that the Government should
take a strong line in this matter. They must not trust to voluntary
effort; we say, and we believe that, as always, we voice the soundest
opinion in the country, that it is up to the Government to take the
measures which it has decided, upon mature consideration, to be for the
country's good. Though we have given every possible support to the great
voluntary effort recently made, truth compels us to state that the
results are proving disappointing. Compulsion must follow, and the
sooner the Government make up their minds to accept this fact the better
advised it will be. Surely if there is one thing above all others which
the Great War (so prolific in lessons) has taught us, it is that
compulsion is not tyranny, nor law oppression. Let the Government, too
long vacillating, act, and act quickly, and they will find a responsive
and grateful nation ready to obey."
Thus _The Times_, and thus, in a less dignified choice of language, many
lesser organs. To which the _Herald_ darkly rejoined, "If the Government
tries this on, let it look to itself."
"It'll have to come," said Vernon Prideaux to Kitty Grammont at lunch.
They were lunching at one of those underground resorts about which, as
Kitty said, you never know, some being highly respectable, while others
are not. Kitty, with her long-lashed, mossy eyes and demure expression,
looked and felt at home among divans for two, screens, powdered
waitresses, and rose-shaded lights; she had taken Prideaux there for
fun, because among such environment he looked a stranger and pilgrim,
angular, fastidious, whose home was above. Kitty liked to study her
friends in different lights, even rose-shaded ones, and especially one
who, besides being a friend, was her departmental superior, and a
coming, even come, young man of exceptional brilliance, who might one
day be ruling the country.
"If it does," said Kitty, "we shall have to go, that's all. No more
compulsion is going to be stood at present. Nothing short of another
war, with a military dictatorship and martial law, will save us."
"We stood compulsory education when there was no war," Prideaux pointed
out. "We've stood vaccination, taxation, every conceivable form of
interference with what we are pleased to call our liberty. This is no
worse; it's the logical outcome of State government of the individual.
Little by little, precept upon precept, line upon line, these things
grow, till we're a serf state without realising it.... After all, why
not? What most people mean by freedom would be a loathsome condition;
freedom to behave like animals or lunatics, to annoy each other and
damage the State. What's the sense of it? Human beings aren't up to it,
that's the fact."
"I quite agree with you," said Kitty. "Only the weak point is that
hardly any human beings are up to making good laws for the rest, either.
We shall slip up badly over this Mind Training Act, if we ever get it
through; it will be as full of snags as the Mental Progress Act. We
shall have to take on a whole extra Branch to deal with the exemptions
alone. Chester's clever, but he's not clever enough to make a good Act.
No one is.... By the way, Vernon, you nearly told me something the other
day about Chester's category. You might quite tell me now, as we're in
the Raid Shelter and not in the Office."
"Did I? It was only that I heard he was uncertificated for marriage.
He's got a brother and a twin sister half-witted. I suppose he collared
all the brains that were going in his family."
"He would, of course, if he could. He's selfish."
"Selfish," Prideaux was doubtful. "If you can call such a visionary and
idealist selfish."
"Visionaries and idealists are always selfish. Look at Napoleon, and
Wilhelm II, as Mr. Delmer would say. Visions and ideals are the most
selfish things there are. People go about wrapped in them, and keep
themselves so warm that they forget that other people need ordinary
clothes.... So the Minister is uncertificated.... Well, I'm going up to
Regent Street to buy a birthday present for Pansy and cigarettes for
myself."
"I must get back," said Prideaux. "I've a Leeds Manufacturers'
deputation coming to see me at 2.30 about their men's wages. Leeds
workmen, apparently, don't let the Mental Progress Act weigh on them at
all; they go calmly ahead with their uncertificated marriages, and then
strike for higher wages in view of the taxable family they intend to
produce. These fellows coming to-day have got wind of the new agreement
with the cutlers and want one like it. I've got to keep them at arm's
length."
He emerged above ground, breathed more freely, and walked briskly back
to the Ministry. Kitty went to Regent Street, and did not get back to
the office until 3.15.
3
Kitty had lately been returned from the Propaganda Branch to her own,
the Exemption Branch. Being late, she slipped into her place
unostentatiously. Her in-tray contained a mass of files, as yet undealt
with. She began to look through these, with a view to relegating the
less attractive to the bottom of the tray, where they could wait until
she had nothing better to do than to attend to them. To-day there were a
great many letters from the public beginning "Dear Sir, Mr. Wilkinson
said in parliament on Tuesday that families should not be reduced to
destitution through the baby-taxes...." That was so like Mr. Wilkinson
(parliamentary secretary to the Brains Ministry). Whenever he
thoughtlessly dropped these _obiter dicta_, so sweeping, so far removed
from truth, which was almost whenever he spoke, there was trouble. The
guileless public hung on his words, waiting to pick them up and send
them in letters to the Ministry. These letters went to the bottom of the
tray. They usually only needed a stock reply, telling the applicants to
attend their local tribunal. After several of these in succession, Kitty
opened a file which had been minuted down from another branch, M.B. 4.
Attached to it were two sheets of minutes which had passed between
various individuals regarding the case in question; the last minute was
addressed to M.B. 3, and said "Passed to you for information and
necessary action." It was a melancholy tale from an aggrieved citizen
concerning his infant, who was liable to a heavy tax, and who had been
drowned by his aunt while being washed, before he was two hours old, and
the authorities still demanded the payment of the tax. Kitty, who found
the helplessness of M.B. 4 annoying, wrote a curt minute, "Neither
information nor action seems to us necessary," then had to erase it
because it looked rude, and wrote instead, more mildly, "Seen, thank
you. This man appears to be covered by M.B.I. 187, in which case his
taxation is surely quite in order and no action is possible. We see no
reason why we should deal with the case rather than you."
It is difficult always to be quite polite in minutes, cheap satire
costing so little and relieving the feelings, but it can and should be
done; nothing so shows true breeding in a Civil Servant.
Kitty next replied to a letter from the Admiralty, about sailors' babies
(the family arrangements of sailors are, of course, complicated, owing
to their having a wife in every port). The Admiralty said that My Lords
Commissioners had read the Minister of Brains' (i.e. Kitty's) last
letter to them on this subject with much surprise. The Admiralty's
faculty of surprise was infinitely fresh; it seemed new, like mercy,
each returning day. The Minister of Brains evoked it almost every time
he, through the pens of his clerks, wrote to them. My Lords viewed with
grave apprehension the line taken by the Minister on this important
subject, and They trusted it would be reconsidered. (My Lords always
wrote of themselves with a capital They, as if they were deities.) Kitty
drafted a reply to this letter and put it aside to consult Prideaux
about. She carried on a chronic quarrel with My Lords, doubtless to the
satisfaction of both sides.
Soothed and stimulated by this encounter, she was the better prepared in
temper when she opened a file in which voluminous correspondence
concerning two men named Stephen Williams had been jacketed together by
a guileless registry, to whom such details as that one Stephen Williams
appeared to be a dentist's assistant and the other a young man in the
diplomatic service were as contemptible obstacles, to be taken in an
easy stride. The correspondence in this file was sufficiently at cross
purposes to be more amusing than most correspondence. When she had
perused it, Kitty, sad that she must tear asunder this happily linked
pair, sent it down to the registry with a regretful note that "These two
cases, having no connection, should be registered separately," and fell
to speculating, as she often did, on the registry, which, amid the
trials that beset them and the sorrows they endured, and the manifold
confusions and temptations of their dim life, were so strangely often
right. They worked underground, the registry people, like gnomes in a
cave, opening letters and registering them and filing them and sending
them upstairs, astonishingly often in the file which belonged to them.
But, mainly, looking for papers and not finding them, and writing "No
trace," "Cannot be traced," on slips, as if the papers were wild animals
which had got loose and had to be hunted down. A queer life, questing,
burrowing, unsatisfied, underground.... No wonder they made some
mistakes.
Kitty opened one now--a bitter complaint, which should have gone to M.B.
5, from one who considered himself placed in a wrong category. "When I
tell you, sir," it ran, "that at the Leamington High School I carried
off two prizes (geography and recitation) and was twice fourth in my
form, and after leaving have given great satisfaction (I am told) as a
solicitor's clerk, so that there has been some talk of raising my
salary, you will perhaps be surprised to hear that the Local
Intelligence Board placed me in class C1. I applied to the County Board,
and (owing, as I have reason to know, to local feeling and jealousy) I
was placed by them in C2. Sir, I ask you for a special examination by
the Central Intelligence Board. I should be well up in Class B. There
are some walking about in this town who are classed B1 and 2, who are
the occasion of much local feeling, as it surprises all who know them
that they should be classed so high. To my knowledge some of these
persons cannot do a sum right in their heads, and it is thought very
strange that they should have so imposed on the Intelligence Officers,
though the reasons for this are not really far to seek, and should be
enquired into...."
A gay and engaging young man with a wooden leg (he had lost his own in
1914, and had during the rest of the war worked at the War Office, and
carried the happy Q.M.G. touch) wandered in from M.B. 5 while Kitty was
reading this, and she handed it over to him. He glanced at it.
"We shall perhaps be surprised, shall we.... How likely.... The public
overestimate our faculty for surprise. They have yet to learn that the
only thing which would surprise the Ministry of Brains would be finding
someone correctly classified.... I shall tell him I'm A2 myself, though
I never got a prize in my life for geography or recitation, and I can't
do sums in my head for nuts. I ought to be somewhere about B3; I
surprise all who know me.... What I came in to say was, do any of you in
here want a sure tip for the Oaks? Because I've got one. Silly Blighter;
yes, you thought he was an absolute outsider, didn't you, so did
everyone else; but he's not. You take the tip, it's a straight one,
first hand. No, don't mention it, I always like to do M.B. 3 a good
turn, though I wouldn't do it for everyone.... Well, I'm off, I'm
beastly busy.... Heard the latest Chester, by the way? Someone tried the
Wheeldon stunt on him--sent him a poisoned thorn by special messenger in
a packet "To be opened by the Minister Himself." Jervis-Browne opened
it, of course, and nearly pricked him self. When he took it to Chester,
Chester did the Sherlock Holmes touch, and said he knew the thorn, it
came off a shrub in Central Africa or Kew Gardens or somewhere. I think
he knew the poison, too; he wanted Jervis-Browne to suck it, to make
sure, but J.-B. wasn't having any, and Chester didn't like to risk
himself, naturally. His little P.S. would have done it like a shot, but
they thought it would be hard luck on the poor child's people. And while
they were discussin' it, Chester ran the thing into his own finger by
mistake. While J.-B. was waitin' to see him swell up and turn black, and
feelin' bad lest he should be told to suck it (he knows Chester doesn't
really value him at his true worth, you see), Chester whipped out his
penknife and gouged a great slice out of his finger as you'd cut cheese,
all round the prick. He turned as white as chalk, J.-B. says, but never
screamed, except to let out one curse. And when he'd done it, and had
the shorthand typist in from J.-B.'s room to tie it up, he began to
giggle--you know that sad, cynical giggle of his that disconcerts solemn
people so much--and said he'd have the beastly weapon cleaned and take
it home and frame it in glass, with the other mementoes of a people's
hate.... I say, I do waste your time in here, don't I? And my own;
that's to say the government's. I'm off."
"Gay child," Kitty murmured to her neighbour as he went. "He blooms in
an office like an orchid in a dust-bin. And very nice too. I remember
being nearly as bright at his age; though, for my sins, I was never in
Q.M.G. A wonderful Branch that is."
Thereupon she threw away her cigarette, wrote five letters with
extraordinary despatch and undepartmental conciseness of style, and went
to have tea in the canteen.
4
The Minister was having tea too, looking even paler than usual, with his
left hand in a sling. Kitty put up her eye-glasses and looked at him
with increased interest. As ministers go, he was certainly of an
interesting appearance; she had always thought that. She rather liked
the paradoxical combination of shrewdness and idealism, sullenness and
humour, in his white, black-browed, clever face. He looked patient, but
patient perforce, as if he rode natural impatience on a curb. He looked
as if he might know a desperate earnestness, but preferred to keep it at
arm's length with a joke; his earnestness would be too grim and violent
to be an easy and natural companion to him. He looked as if he might get
very badly hurt, but would cut out the hurt and throw it away with the
cold promptness of the surgeon. He was not yet forty, but looked more,
perhaps because he enjoyed bad health. At this moment he was eating a
rock bun and talking to Vernon Prideaux. One difference between them was
that Prideaux looked an intelligent success, like a civil servant, or a
rising barrister or M.P., and Chester looked a brilliant failure, and
more like a Sinn Feiner or a Bolshevist. Only not really like either of
these, because he didn't look as if he would muff things. He might go
under, but his revolutions wouldn't. Kitty, who too greatly despised
people who muffed things, recognised the distinction. She had a friend
whose revolutions, which were many, always did go under....
There was a queer, violent strength about the Minister.
But when he smiled it was as if someone had flashed a torch on lowering
cliffs, and lit them into extraordinary and elf-like beauty. Kitty knew
already that he could be witty; she suddenly perceived now that he could
be sweet--a bad word, but there seemed no other.
He ate another rock bun, and another. But they were small. His eyes fell
on Kitty, eating a jam sandwich. But his thoughts were elsewhere.
"Yes, it was me that had to tie it up for him," Ivy Delmer was saying to
another typist. "Luckily I've done First Aid. But I felt like
fainting.... The _blood_.... I don't _like_ him, you know; his manners
are so funny and his dictating is so difficult; but I must say I did
admire his pluck.... He never thanked me or anything--he wouldn't, of
course. Not that I minded a scrap about that...."
5
When Kitty got home to her flat that evening, she found the Boomerang on
the floor. (It was on the floor owing to the lack of a letter-box.) The
Boomerang was a letter from herself, addressed to Neil Desmond, Esq.,
and she wrote it and despatched it every few months or so, whenever, in
fact, she had, at the moment, nothing better to do. On such days as Bank
Holidays, when she spent them at the office but official work did not
press, Kitty tidied the drawers of her table and wrote to break off her
engagement. The drawers got tidied all right, but it is doubtful whether
the engagement could ever be considered to have got broken off, owing to
the letter breaking it being a boomerang. It was a boomerang because
Neil Desmond, Esq. was a person of no fixed address. He wrote long and
thrilling letters to Kitty (which, if her correspondence had been raided
by the police, would probably have subjected her to arrest--he had
himself for long been liable to almost every species of arrest, so could
hardly be further incriminated), but when she wrote to the address he
gave he was no longer ever there, and so her letters returned to her
like homing pigeons. So the position was that Neil was engaged to Kitty,
and Kitty had so far failed to disengage herself from Neil. Neil was
that friend who has been already referred to as one whose revolutions
always went under. Kitty had met him first in Greece, in April, 1914.
She had since decided that he was probably at his best in Greece. In
July he had been arming to fight Carson's rebels when the outbreak of
the European War disappointed him. The parts played by him in the
European War were many and various, and, from the British point of view,
mostly regrettable. He followed Sir Roger Casement through many
adventures, and only just escaped sharing in the last of all. He partook
in the Sinn Fein rising of Easter, 1916 (muffed, as usual, Kitty had
commented), and had then disappeared, and had mysteriously emerged again
in Petrograd a year later, to help with the Russian revolution.
Wherever, in fact, a revolution was, Neil Desmond was sure to be. He had
had, as may be imagined, a busy and satisfactory summer and autumn
there, and had many interesting, if impermanent, friends, such as
Kerensky, Protopopoff (whom, however, he did not greatly care for),
Kaledin, Lenin, Trotzky, Mr. Arthur Ransome, and General Korniloff. (It
might be thought that the politics of this last-named would not have
been regarded by Neil with a favourable eye, but he was, anyhow, making
a revolution which did not come off.) In January, 1918, Neil had got
tired of Russia (this is liable to occur) and gone off to America, where
he had for some time been doing something or other, no doubt
discreditable, with an Irish-American league. Then a revolution which
seemed to require his assistance broke out in Equador, which kept him
occupied for some weeks. After that he had gone to Greece, where Kitty
vaguely believed him still to be (unless he was visiting, with seditious
intent, the island in the Pacific where the world's great Have-Beens
were harmoniously segregated).
"The only thing for it," Kitty observed to the cousin with whom she
lived, a willowy and lovely young lily of the field, who had had a job
once but had lost it owing to peace, and was now having a long rest,
"The only thing for it is to put it in the agony column of the--no, not
_The Times_, of course he wouldn't read it, but the _Irish-American
Banner_ or something. 'K. G. to N. D. All over. Regret.'"
"You'll have to marry him, darling. God means you to," sang her cousin,
hooking herself into a flame-coloured and silver evening dress.
"It certainly looks as if he did," Kitty admitted, and began to take her
own clothes off, for she was going to see Pansy in a new revue. (Anthony
would have been the last man to wish to tie Pansy down to home
avocations when duty called; he was much too proud of her special
talents to wish her to hide them in a napkin.)
The revue was a good one, Pansy was her best self, lazy, sweet,
facetious, and extraordinarily supple, the other performers also
performed suitably, each in his manner, and Kitty afterwards had supper
with a party of them. These were the occasions when office work, seen
from this gayer corner of life, seemed incredibly dusty, tedious and
sad....