DEBRIS
1
Chester lay with a broken head and three smashed ribs in his flat in
Mount Street. He was nursed by his elder sister Maggie, a kind, silent,
plain person with her brother's queer smile and more than his cynical
patience. With her patience took the form of an infinite tolerance; the
tolerance of one who looks upon all human things and sees that they are
not much good, nor likely to be. (Chester had not his fair share of this
patience: hence his hopes and his faiths, and hence his downfall.) She
was kind to Kitty, whose acquaintance she now made. (The majority of the
Ministry of Brains staff were having a short holiday, during the
transference to other premises.)
Maggie said to Kitty, "I'm not surprised. It was a lot to live up to.
And it's not in our family, living up to that. Perhaps not in any
family. I'm sorry for Nicky, because he'll mind."
She did not reproach Kitty; she took her for granted. Such incidents as
Kitty were liable to happen, even in the best regulated lives. When
Kitty reproached herself, saying, "I've spoilt his life," she merely
replied tranquilly, "Nicky lets no one but himself spoil his life. When
he's determined to do a thing, he'll do it." Nor did she commit herself
to any indication as to whether she thought that what Nicky had gained
would be likely to compensate for what he had lost.
For about what he had lost there seemed no doubt in anyone's mind. He
had lost his reputation, his office, and, for the time being, his public
life. The Ministry of Brains might continue, would in fact, weakly
continue, without power and without much hope, till it trailed into
ignominious death; even the wrecked Hotel would continue, when repaired;
but it was not possible that Chester should continue.
The first thing he did, in fact, when he could do anything at all
intelligent, was to dictate a letter to the Ministerial Council
tendering his resignation from office. There are, of course, diverse
styles adopted by the writers of such letters. In the old days people
used to write (according to the peculiar circumstances of their case)--
"Dear Prime Minister,
"Though you have long and often tried to dissuade me from this
course ... etc., etc.... I think you will hardly be surprised
... deep regret in severing the always harmonious connection
between us ..." and so forth.
Or else quite otherwise--
"Dear Prime Minister,
"You will hardly be surprised, I imagine, after the strange
occurrence of yesterday, when I had the interest of reading in
a daily paper the first intimation that you desired a change at
the Ministry I have the honour to adorn...."
Neither of these styles was used by Chester, who wrote briefly, without
committing himself to any opinion as to the probable surprise or
otherwise of the Ministerial Council--
"Dear Sirs,
"I am resigning my office as Minister of Brains, owing to facts
of which you will have doubtless heard, and which make it
obviously undesirable for me to continue in the post."
Having done this, he lay inert through quiet, snow-bound days and
nights, and no one knew whether or not he was going to recover.
2
After a time he asked after Prideaux, and they told him Prideaux had not
been hurt, only rumpled.
"He calls to ask after you pretty often," said Kitty. "Would you like to
see him sometime? When the doctor says you can?"
"I don't care," Chester said. "Yes, I may as well."
So Prideaux came one afternoon (warned not to be political or exciting)
and it was a queer meeting between him and Chester. Chester remembered
the last shocked words he had had from Prideaux--"Good God!" and
wondered, without interest, what Prideaux felt about it all now.
But it was not Prideaux's way to show much of what he felt.
They talked mainly of that night's happenings. Chester had already had
full reports of these; of the fire, of the fight between the police and
the crowd, in which several lives had been lost, of the arrest of the
ringleaders and their trials. To Chester's own part in the proceedings
they did not refer, till, after a pause, Chester suddenly said, "I have
been wondering, but I can't make up my mind about it. How much
difference to the business did the discovery about me make? Would they
have gone to those lengths without it?"
Prideaux was silent. He believed that Chester that night on the balcony,
had his hands been clean, could have held the mob.
Chester interpreted the silence.
"I suppose they wouldn't," he said impassively. "However, I fancy it
only precipitated the catastrophe. The Ministry was down and under, in
any case. People were determined not to stand laws that inconvenienced
them--as I was. I was merely an example, not a cause, of that
disease...."
That was the nearest he ever got with Prideaux to discussion of his own
action.
"Anyhow," said Prideaux sadly, "the Ministry is down and under now.
Imagine Frankie Lyle, poor little beggar, trying to carry on, after all
this!" (This gentleman had been nominated as Chester's successor.)
Chester smiled faintly. "Poor little Frankie.... I hear Monk wouldn't
touch it, by the way. I don't blame him.... Lyle won't hold them for a
week; he'll back out on every point."
There was regret in his tired, toneless voice, and bitterness, because
the points on which Lyle would back out were all points which he had
made. He could have held them for a week, and more; he might even--there
would have been a fighting chance of it--have pulled the Ministry
through altogether, had things been otherwise. But things were not
otherwise, and this was not his show any more. He looked at Prideaux
half resentfully as Prideaux rose to leave him. Prideaux had not wrecked
his own career....
To Kitty, the first time he had met her after the events of Boxing
Night, Prideaux had shown more of his mind. He had come to ask after
Chester, and had found Kitty there. He had looked at her sharply and
coolly, as if she had made a stupid mistake over her work in the office.
"So you didn't guess, all this time," she had said to him, coolly too,
because she resented his look.
"Not," he had returned, "that things had gone as far as this. I knew you
were intimate, of course. There was that time in Italy.... But--well,
honestly, I thought better of both your brains."
She gave up her momentary resentment, and slipped again into remorse.
"We thought better of them too--till we did it.... Have I spoilt his
life, Vernon? I suppose so."
He shrugged his shoulders. "You've spoilt, and he's spoilt his own,
career as Minister of Brains. There are other things, of course. Chester
can't go under; he's too good a man to lose. They'll stick on to him
somehow.... But ... well, what in heaven or earth or the other place
possessed you both to do it, Kitty?"
To which she had no answer but "We just thought we would," and he left
her in disgust.
Even in her hour of mortification and remorse, Kitty could still enjoy
getting a rise out of Prideaux.
3
Pansy, who called often with showers of hot-house flowers, which Chester
detested, was much more sympathetic. She was frankly delighted. She
could not be allowed to see Chester; Kitty was afraid that her
exuberance might send his temperature up.
"You won't mind my tellin' you now, darlin', but I've been thinkin' it
was free love all this time. I didn't mind, you know. But this is more
respectable. This family couldn't really properly afford another
scandal; it might lose its good name, then what would Cyril say? It
would come hard on the Cheeper, too. Now this is some marriage. So
_sensible_ of you both, to throw over those silly laws and do the jolly
thing and have a good time. As I said to Tony, what _is_ the good of
making laws if you can't break them yourself? Now that your Nicky's set
a good example, it really does seem as if all this foolishness was goin'
to dwine away and be forgotten.... I guess it's doin' what we like and
havin' a good time that matters, in the long run, isn't it. Not keepin'
laws or improvin' the silly old world."
"Ask me another," said Kitty. "I haven't the slightest idea, Pansy, my
love. You're usually right, so I daresay you're right about this. But
you mustn't talk like that to Nicky, or he'll have a relapse."
"And fancy," Pansy mused, "me havin' got the great Minister of Brains
for a brother-in-law! Or anyhow somethin' of the sort; as near as makes
no difference. I shall never hear the last of it from the girls and
boys.... Good-bye, old thing; I'm ever so pleased you're a happy wife
now as well as me."
4
Chester handed Kitty a letter from his mother, the wife of a struggling
bishop somewhere in the west country. It said, "Directly you are well
enough, dear, you must bring Kitty to stay with us; She won't, I am
sure, mind our simple ways.... My dear, we are so thankful you have
found happiness. We are distressed about your accident, and about your
loss of office, which I fear you will feel.... But, after all, love and
happiness are so much more important than office, are they not?..."
"Important," Kitty repeated. "Queer word. Just what love and happiness
aren't, you'd think. Comfortable--jolly--but not important.... Never you
mind, Nicky, you'll be important always: Vernon is right about that.
They'll put you somewhere where 'domestick selvishenesse' doesn't
matter: perhaps they'll make you a peer...."
Chester said he would not be at all surprised.
Kitty said, "Shall we go and see your people?" and he replied gloomily,
"I suppose we must. It will be ... rather trying."
"Will they condole with you?" she suggested, and he returned, "No.
They'll congratulate me."
A fortnight later they went down to the west. Bishop Chester lived in a
little old house in a slum behind his cathedral. Bishops' palaces were
no longer bishops' homes; they had all been turned into community
houses, clergy houses, retreat houses, alms houses, and so forth.
Celibate bishops could live in them, together with other clergy of their
diocese, but bishops with families had to find quarters elsewhere. And,
married or unmarried, their incomes were not enough to allow of any
style of living but that apostolic simplicity which the Church, directly
it was freed from the State and could arrange its own affairs, had
decided was right and suitable.
Not all bishops took kindly to the new regime; some resigned, and had to
be replaced by bishops of the new and sterner school. But, to give
bishops their due, which is too seldom done, they are for the most part
good Christian men, ready to do what they believe is for the good of the
Church. Many of their detractors were surprised at the amount of
good-will and self-sacrifice revealed in the episcopal ranks when they
were put to the test. If some failed under it--well, bishops, if no
worse than other men, are human.
Bishop Chester had not failed. He had taken to plain living and plainer
thinking (how often, alas, these two are to be found linked together!)
with resignation, as a Christian duty. If it should bring any into the
Church who had been kept outside it by his purple and fine linen, he
would feel himself more than rewarded. If it should not, that was not
his look-out. Which is to say that Bishop Chester was a good man, if not
clever.
He and his wife were very kind to Chester and Kitty. Chester said he
could not spare more than a day and night; he had to get back to town,
where he had much business on hand, including the instituting of an
action for malicious libel against Mr. Percy Jenkins and the publishers
and proprietors of the _Patriot_. Kitty was not surprised at the
shortness of the visit, for it was a humiliating visit. The bishop and
Mrs. Chester, as their son had known they would, approved of his
contravention of his own principles. They thought them, had always
thought them, monstrous and inhuman principles.
The bishop said, "My dear boy, I can't tell you how thankful I am that
you have decided at last to let humanity have its way with you.
Humanity; the simple human things; love, birth, family life. They're the
simple things, but, after all, the deep and grand things. No laws will
ever supersede them."
And Mrs. Chester looked at Kitty with the indescribable look of
mothers-in-law who hope that one day they may be grandmothers, and
whispered to her when she said good-night, "And some day, dear...."
And they saw Chester's twin sister. She was harmless; she was even doing
crochet work; and her face was the face of Chester uninformed by
thought. Mrs. Chester said, "Nicky will have told you of our poor ailing
girl...."
5
They came away next morning. They faced each other in the train, but
they read the _Times_ (half each) and did not meet each other's eyes.
They could not. They felt as thieves who still have consciences must
feel when congratulated on their crimes by other thieves, who have not.
Between them stood and jeered a Being with a vacant face and a phrase
which it repeated with cynical reiteration. "You have let humanity have
its way with you. Humanity; the simple human things.... No laws will
ever supersede them...." And the Being's face was as the face of
Chester's twin sister, the poor ailing girl.
To this they had come, then; to the first of the three simple human
things mentioned by the bishop. What now, since they had started down
the long slope of this green and easy hill, should arrest their
progress, until they arrived, brakeless and unheld, into the valley
where the other two waited, cynical, for all their simplicity, and grim?
Kitty, staring helplessly into the problematical future, saw, as if
someone had turned a page and shown it to her, a domestic
picture--herself and Chester (a peer, perhaps, why not?) facing one
another not in a train but in a simple human home, surrounded by Family
Life; two feckless, fallen persons, who had made a holocaust of theories
and principles, who had reverted to the hand-to-mouth shiftlessness and
mental sloppiness of the primitive Briton. Kitty could hear Chester, in
that future, vaguer, family, peer's voice that might then be his,
saying, "We must just trust to luck and muddle through somehow."
Even to that they might come....
In the next Great War--and who should stay its advent if such as these
failed?--their sons would fight, without talent, their daughters would
perhaps nurse, without skill. And so on, and so on, and so on....
So turned the world around. Individual desire given way to, as usual,
ruining principle and ideals by its soft pressure. What would ever get
done in such a world? Nothing, ever.
Suddenly, as if both had seen the same picture, they met one another's
eyes across the carriage, and laughed ruefully.
That, anyhow, they could always do, though sitting among the debris of
ruined careers, ruined principles, ruined Ministries, ruined ideals. It
was something; perhaps, in a sad and precarious world, it was much....
THE END
NEW FICTION
OH, MONEY! MONEY! By ELEANOR H. PORTER, Author of "Just David,"
"Pollyanna," etc.
"This tale of an elderly millionaire who goes incognito among his poor
relations to discover to which of them he shall leave his fortune is
extraordinarily soothing in these harassed times. The relations are most
humorously studied."--_Westminster Gazette._
THE ANCHOR. By M. T. H. SADLER.
"All his people are interesting and all ring true." _Pall Mall Gazette._
ANNE'S HOUSE OF DREAMS. By L. M. MONTGOMERY, Author of "Anne of Green
Gables."
"Miss Montgomery has a rare knack of making simple events and ordinary
people both charming and moving; she can make her readers both laugh and
weep."--_Westminster Gazette._
IMPOSSIBLE PEOPLE. By Mrs. GEORGE WEMYSS.
"It is set in a captivating way among village folk drawn from life,
treated with humour and sympathy, and decorated profusely with the talk
and doings of real and interesting children." _Manchester Guardian._
THE STARRY POOL and Other Tales. By STEPHEN G. TALLENTS.
"It belongs to the class of literature which gives an intimate picture
of the writer himself, who, in this particular case, endears himself to
the reader by his humour, which is never cynical, and by his zest for
the simple, which is never forced."--_Westminster Gazette._
THE WANDERERS. By MARY JOHNSTON.
"A large theme of absorbing and growing interest is treated with great
imaginative and pictorial power; and the writer's faith and enthusiasm,
as well as her knowledge and her skilful handicraft, are
manifest."--_Scotsman._
REMNANTS. By DESMOND MACCARTHY.
"It has its own clear point of view. It reveals an engaging personality,
and its contents, though dealing with subjects as diverse as Samuel
Butler, Lord George Sanger, Meredith, Dan Leno, Voltaire and Bostock's
Menagerie, are all of a piece. That is, it is a real book of
essays."--_The Bookman._
BEYOND THE RHINE. Memories of Art and Life in Germany before the War. By
MARC HENRY.
"M. Henry discourses most entertainingly on many subjects of German
social life, and his book may be cordially recommended to those
among us who seek for enlightenment on the mentality of our
enemies."--_Scotsman._
TRIVIA. By LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH.
"It is a piece of personal good luck to have read it. One goes in and
out of one's hall door with a delicious sense of possessing a secret. It
increases one's confidence in the world. If a book like this can be
written, there is, we feel, hope for the future."--_The Athenaeum._
THE LAST OF THE ROMANOFS. By CHARLES RIVET (Petrograd Correspondent of
the "Temps").
"'The Last of the Romanofs' can be recommended to one desirous of
understanding what has actually happened in Russia and what caused it to
happen."--_Globe._
ON THE EDGE OF THE WAR ZONE. By MILDRED ALDRICH, Author of "A Hilltop on
the Marne."
"They give a picture of peace in the midst of war that is both
fascinating and strange ... as an intimate sketch of one corner of the
world-war, viewed at close quarters over the garden-hedge, these little
books will have earned for themselves a place apart."--_Punch._
THE POT BOILS. A Novel. By M. STORM JAMESON.
In "The Pot Boils" the author has written a vivid and original study of
the careers and the love-story of a modern young man and woman whom we
first encounter as students at the same Northern University. Of life in
this Northern University the author gives a realistic account, and
equally realistic and entertaining is the description of the world of
social reformers, feminists, journalists, vers-libristes in London, to
which the scene is shifted later. It is a brilliant provocative book
which will appeal to all those who are interested in appraising the
worth and promise of modern movements and ideals.
THE SHIP OF DEATH. A Romance of the World-War. By EDWARD STILGEBAUER,
Author of "Love's Inferno."
In "The Ship of Death," Dr. Stilgebauer has written a romance which
depicts in all its horror the havoc wrought by war upon human
relationships and values outside the actual sphere of the battle-field.
The instrument of disaster is Captain Stirn, the captain of the
submarine which torpedoes the 'Lusitania,' styled here the 'Gigantic.'
The first part of the book depicts the company on board, when the first
premonitions of catastrophe are beginning to fill the air. Then comes
the catastrophe itself; and the last section of this book presents
Captain Stirn in the agony and delirium which seizes him after his deed
of horror. The book is impressive and absorbing both by force and
vividness of the author's style and imagination and by the vigorous
sincerity and idealism which penetrate it throughout.
THE MAKING OF AN ENGLISHMAN. By W. L. GEORGE, New Edition with a New
Preface.
_New Edition of a Famous Novel_
This book was first published in 1914, and the author has now written a
new preface, explaining how the War has modified his views, but saying
that whatever the Englishman may become, he would still be "The man of
my choice, with whom I wrangle because he is my brother, far from whom I
could not live, who quietly grins at my internationalism and makes
allowances for me because, Englishman though I be, I was not born in his
damned and dear little island."