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.
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, gettingau faitwith 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, mediæval 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 hadnot, as some falsely said, made a fortune during the war by cornering margarine.
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 oflaissez-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.
"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.
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.Shallwe, 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?
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 £1000 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. TheQueen, theGentlewoman, theSketch, 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 theCambridge 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."
TheEvening Newshad cartoons every day of the Combing Out of the Stupid, whom it was pleased to call Algies and Dollies. TheNew 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. TheHerald, however, rejoiced in large type in the Open Door to Labour; theChurch Timesreported 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 theHidden Handdown toHome 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."
"Amen to that," Miss Kitty Grammont remarked, stopping for a moment after buyingTruthat 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," saidThe Times(anticipating theHidden 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."
ThusThe Times, and thus, in a less dignified choice of language, many lesser organs. To which theHeralddarkly 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.
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 theseobiter 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.
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.... Theblood.... I don'tlikehim, 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...."
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, notThe Times, of course he wouldn't read it, but theIrish-American Banneror 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....
It will be generally admitted that Acts are not good at explaining themselves, and call for words to explain them; many words, so many that it is at times wondered whether the Acts are worth it. It occurred about this time to the Ministry of Brains that more words were called for to explain both the Mental Progress Act recently passed and the Mind Training Act which was still a Bill. For neither of these Acts seemed to have yet explained itself, or been explained, to the public, in such a manner as to give general satisfaction. And yet explanations had to be given with care. Acts, like lawyers' deeds, do not care to be understood through and through. The kind of explaining they really need, as Kitty Grammont observed, is the kind called explaining away. For this task she considered herself peculiarly fitted by training, owing to having had in her own private career several acts which had demanded it. It was perhaps for this reason that she was among those chosen by the authorities for the Explanation Campaign. The Explanation Campaign was to be fought in the rural villages of England, by bands of speakers chosen for their gift of the ready word, and it would be a tough fight. The things to be explained were the two Acts above mentioned.
"And none of mine," Kitty remarked to Prideaux, "ever needed so much explanation as these will.... Let me see, no one ever even tried to explain any of the Military Service Acts, did they? At least only in the press. The perpetrators never dared to face the public man to man, on village greens."
"It ought to have been done more," Prideaux said. "The Review of Exceptions, for instance. If questions and complaints could have been got out of the public in the open, and answered on village greens, as you say, instead of by official letters which only made things worse, a lot of trouble might have been avoided. Chester is great on these heart-to-heart talks.... By the way, he's going to interview all the Explanation people individually before they start, to make sure they're going about it in the right spirit."
"That's so like Chester; he'll go to any trouble," Kitty said. "I'm getting to think he's a really great man."
Chester really did interview them all. To Kitty, whom already he knew personally, he talked freely.
"You must let the people in," he said, walking about the room, his hands in his pockets. "Don't keep them at official arm's length. Let them feelpartof it all.... Make them catch fire with the idea of it.... It's sheer stark truth—intelligenceisthe thing that counts—if only everyone would see it. Make them see stupidity for the limp, hopeless, helpless, animal thing it is—an idiot drivelling on a green"—Kitty could have fancied that he shuddered a little—"make them hate it—want the other thing; want it so much that they'll even sacrifice a little of their personal comfort and desires to get it for themselves and their children. They must want it more than money, more than comfort, more than love, more than freedom.... You'll have to get hold of different people in different ways, of course; some have imaginations and some haven't; those who haven't must be appealed to through their common sense, if any, or, failing any, their feeling for their children, or, even, at the lowest, their fear of consequences.... Tell some of them there'll be another war if they're so stupid; tell others they'll never get on in the world; anything you think will touch the spot. But first, always, try to collar their imaginations.... You've done some public speaking, haven't you?"
Kitty owned it, and he nodded.
"That's all right, then; you'll know how to keep your finger on the audience's pulse.... You'll make them laugh, too...."
Kitty was uncertain, as she left the presence, whether this last was an instruction or a prophecy.
The other members of Kitty's party (the Campaign was to be conducted in parties of two or three people each) did not belong to the Ministry; they were hired for it for this purpose. They were a lady doctor, prominent on public platforms and decorated for signal services to her country during the Great War, and a free-lance clergyman known for his pulpit eloquence and the caustic wit with which he lashed the social system. He had resigned his incumbency long ago in order to devote himself the more freely to propaganda work for the causes he had at heart, wrote for a labour paper, and went round the country speaking. The Minister of Brains (who had been at Cambridge with him, and read his articles in the labour paper, in which he frequently stated that muddle-headedness was the curse of the world) had, with his usual eye for men, secured him to assist in setting forth the merits of the Brains Acts.
They began in Buckinghamshire, which was one of the counties assigned to them. At Gerrards Cross and Beaconsfield it was chilly, and they held their meetings respectively in the National School and in the bright green Parish Hall which is the one blot on a most picturesque city. But at Little Chantreys it was fine, and they met at six o'clock in the broad open space outside the church. They had a good audience. The meeting had been well advertised, and it seemed that the village was as anxious to hear the Brains Acts explained as the Ministry was to explain them. Or possibly the village, for its own part, had something it wished to explain. Anyhow they came, rich and poor, high and low, men, women, children, and infants in arms (these had, for the most part, every appearance of deserving heavy taxation; however, the physiognomy of infants is sometimes misleading). Anthony Grammont and Pansy were there, with the Cheeper, now proud in his baptismal name of Montmorency. The vicar and his wife were there too, though Mr. Delmer did not approve much of the Reverend Stephen Dixon, rightly thinking him a disturbing priest. It was all very well to advocate Life and Liberty in moderation (though Mr. Delmer did not himself belong to the society for promoting these things in the Church), but the vicar did not believe that any church could stand, without bursting, the amount of new wine which Stephen Dixon wished to pour into it. "He is very much in earnest," was all the approval that he could, in his charity, give to this priest. So he waited a little uneasily for Dixon's remarks on the Brains Acts, feeling that it might become his ungracious duty to take public exception to some of them.
The scene had its picturesqueness in the evening sunshine—the open space in which the narrow village streets met, backed by the little grey church, and with a patch of green where women and children sat; and in front of these people standing, leisurely, placid, gossiping, the women innocently curious to hear what the speakers from London had to say about this foolish business there was such an upset about just now; some of the men more aggressive, determined to stand no nonsense, with a we'll-know-the-reason-why expression on their faces. This expression was peculiarly marked on the countenance of the local squire, Captain Ambrose. He did not like all this interfering, socialist what-not, which was both upsetting the domestic arrangements of his tenants and trying to put into their heads more learning than was suitable for them to have. For his part he thought every man had a right to be a fool if he chose, yes, and to marry another fool, and to bring up a family of fools too. Damn it all, fools or not, hadn't they shed their blood for their country, and where would the country have been without them, though now the country talked so glibly of not allowing them to reproduce themselves until they were more intelligent. Captain Ambrose, a fragile-looking man, burnt by Syrian suns and crippled by British machine-guns at instruction classes (a regrettable mistake which of course would not have occurred had the operator been more intelligent), stood in the forefront of the audience with intention to heckle. Near him stood the Delmers and Miss Ponsonby and Anthony Grammont. Pansy was talking, in her friendly, cheerful way, to Mrs. Delmer about the Cheeper's food arrangements, which were unusual in one so young.
In the middle of the square were Dr. Cross, graceful, capable-looking and grey-haired; Stephen Dixon, lean and peculiar (so the village thought); Kitty Grammont, pale after the day's heat, and playing with her dangling pince-nez; a tub; and two perambulators, each containing an infant; Mrs. Rose's and Mrs. Dean's, as the village knew. The lady doctor had been round in the afternoon looking at all the babies and asking questions, and had finally picked these two and asked if they might be lent for the meeting. But what use was going to be made of the poor mites, no one knew.
Dr. Cross was on the tub. She was talking about the already existing Act, the Mental Progress Act of last year.
"Take some talking about, too, to make us swallow it whole," muttered Captain Ambrose.
Dr. Cross was a gracious and eloquent speaker; the village rather liked her. She talked of babies, as one who knew; no doubt she did know, having, as she mentioned, had two herself. She grew pathetic in pleading for the rights of the children to their chance in life. Some of the mothers wiped their eyes and hugged their infants closer to them; they should have it, then, so they should. How, said the doctor, were children to win any of life's prizes without brains? (Jane Delmer looked self-conscious; she had won a prize for drawing this term; she wondered if the speaker had heard this.) Even health—how could health be won and kept without intelligent following of the laws nature has laid down for us ("I never did none o' that, and look at me, seventy-five next month and still fit and able," old William Weston was heard to remark), and how was that to be done without intelligence? Several parents looked dubious; they were not sure that they wanted any of that in their households; it somehow had a vague sound of draughts.... After sketching in outline the probable careers of the intelligent and the unintelligent infant, between which so wide a gulf was fixed, the doctor discoursed on heredity, that force so inadequately reckoned with, which moulds the generations. Appealing to Biblical lore, she enquired if figs were likely to produce thorns, or thistles grapes. This started William Weston, who had been a gardener, on strange accidents he had met with in the vegetable world; Dr. Cross, a gardener too, listened with interest, but observed that these were freaks and must not, of course, be taken as the normal; then, to close that subject, she stepped down from the tub, took the infants Rose and Dean out of their perambulators, and held them up, one on each arm, to the public gaze. Here, you have, she said, a certificated child, whose parents received a bonus for it, and an uncertificated child, whose parents were taxed. Observe the difference in the two—look at the bright, noticing air of the infant Rose ("Of course; she's a-jogglin' of it up and down on her arm," said a small girl who knew the infant Rose). Observe its fine, intelligent little head (Mrs. Rose preened, gratified). A child who is going to make a good thing of its life. Now compare it with the lethargy of the other baby, who lies sucking an india-rubber sucker (a foolish and unclean habit in itself) and taking no notice of the world about it.
"Why, the poor mite," this infant's parent exclaimed, pushing her way to the front, "she's been ailing the last two days; it's her pore little tummy, that's all. And, if you please, ma'am, I'll take her home now. Holdin' her up to scorn before the village that way—an' you call yourself a mother!"
"Indeed, I meant nothing against the poor child," Dr. Cross explained, realising that she had, indeed, been singularly tactless. "She is merely a type, to illustrate my meaning.... And, of course, it's more than possible that if you give her a thoroughly good mental training she may become as intelligent as anyone, in spite of having been so heavily handicapped by her parents' unregulated marriage. That's where the Government Mind Training Course will come in. She'll be developed beyond all belief...."
"She won't," said the outraged parent, arranging her infant in her perambulator, "be developed or anythin' else. She's comin' home to bed. And I'd like to know what you mean, ma'am, by unregulated marriage. Our marriage was all right; it was 'ighly approved, and we got money by this baby. It's my opinion you've mixed the two children up, and are taking mine for Mrs. Rose's there, that got taxed, pore mite, owing to Mr. and Mrs. Rose both being in C class."
"That's right," someone else cried. "It's the other one that was taxed and ought to be stupid; you've got 'em mixed, ma'am. Better luck next time."
Dr. Cross collapsed in some confusion, amid good-humoured laughter, and the infant Rose was also hastily restored to its flattered mother, who, being only C3, did not quite grasp what had occurred except that her baby had been held up for admiration and Mrs. Dean's for obloquy, which was quite right and proper.
"One of nature's accidents," apologised Dr. Cross. "They will happen sometimes, of course. So will stupid mistakes.... Better luck next time, as you say." She murmured to Stephen Dixon, "Change the subject at once," so he got upon the tub and began to talk about Democracy, how it should control the state, but couldn't, of course, until it was better educated.
"But all these marriage laws," said a painter who was walking out with the vicarage housemaid and foresaw financial ruin if they got married, "they won't help, as I can see, to giveuscontrol of the state."
Dixon told him he must look to the future, to his children, in fact. The painter threw a forward glance at his children, not yet born; it left him cold. Anyhow, if he married Nellie they'd probably die young, from starvation.
But, in the main, Dixon's discourse on democracy was popular. Dixon was a popular speaker with working-men; he had the right touch. But squires did not like him. Captain Ambrose disliked him very much. It was just democracy, and all this socialism, that was spoiling the country.
Mr. Delmer ventured to say that he thought the private and domestic lives of the public ought not to be tampered with.
"Why not?" enquired Stephen Dixon, and Mr. Delmer had not, at the moment, an answer ready. "When everything else is being tampered with," added Dixon. "And surely the more we tamper (if you put it like that) in the interests of progress, the further removed we are from savages."
Mr. Delmer looked puzzled for a moment, then committed himself, without sufficient preliminary thought, to a doubtful statement, "Human love ought to be free," which raised a cheer.
"Free love," Dixon returned promptly, "has never, surely, been advocated by the best thinkers of Church or State," and while Mr. Delmer blushed, partly at his own carelessness, partly at the delicacy of the subject, and partly because Pansy Ponsonby was standing at his elbow, Dixon added, "Love, like anything else, wants regulating, organising, turning to the best uses. Otherwise, we become, surely, no better than the other animals...."
"Isn't he just terribly fierce," observed Pansy in her smiling contralto, to the world at large.
Mr. Delmer said uncomfortably, "You mistake me, sir. I was not advocating lawless love. I am merely maintaining that love—if we must use the word—should not be shackled by laws relating to things which are of less importance than itself, such as the cultivation of the intelligence."
"Isit of less importance?" Dixon challenged him.
"The greatest of these three," began the vicar, inaptly, because he was flustered.
"Quite so," said Dixon; "but St. Paul, I think, doesn't include intelligence in his three. St. Paul, I believe, was able enough himself to know how much ability matters in the progress of religion. And, if we are to quote St. Paul, he, of course, was no advocate of matrimony, but I think, when carried out at all, he would have approved of its being carried out on the best possible principles, not from mere casual impulse and desire.... Freedom," continued Dixon, with the dreamy and kindled eye which always denoted with him that he was on a pet topic, "whatisfreedom? I beg—I do beg," he added hastily, "that no one will tell me it is mastery of ourselves. I have heard that before. It is no such thing. Mastery of ourselves is a fine thing; freedom is, or would be if anyone ever had such a thing, an absurdity, a monstrosity. It would mean that there would be nothing, either external or internal, to prevent us doing precisely what we like. No laws of nature, of morality, of the State, of the Church, of Society...."
Dr. Cross caught Kitty's eye behind him.
"He's off," she murmured. "We must stop him."
Kitty coughed twice, with meaning. It was a signal agreed upon between the three when the others thought that the speaker was on the wrong tack. Dixon recalled himself from Freedom with a jerk, and began to talk about the coming Mind Training Act. He discoursed upon its general advantages to the citizen, and concluded by saying that Miss Grammont, a member of the Ministry of Brains, would now explain to them the Act in detail, and answer any questions they might wish to put. This Miss Grammont proceeded to do. And this was the critical moment of the meeting, for the audience, who desired no Act at all, had to be persuaded that the Act would be a good Act. Kitty outlined it, thinking how much weaker both Acts and words sound on village greens than in offices, which is certainly a most noteworthy fact, and one to be remembered by all politicians and makers of laws. Perhaps it is the unappreciative and unstimulating atmosphere of stolid distaste which is so often, unfortunately, to be met with in villages.... Villages are so stupid; they will not take the larger view, nor see why things annoying to them personally are necessary for the public welfare. Kitty wished she were instead addressing a northern manufacturing town, which would have been much fiercer but which would have understood more about it.
She dealt with emphasis on the brighter sides of the Act, i.e. the clauses dealing with the pecuniary compensation people would receive for the loss of time and money which might be involved in undergoing the Training Course, and those relating to exemptions. When she got to the Tribunals, a murmur of disapproval sounded.
"They tribunals—we're sick to death of them," someone said. "Look at the people there are walking about the countryside exempted from the Marriage Acts, when better men and women has to obey them. The tribunals were bad enough during the war, everyone knows, but nothing to what they are now. We don't want any more of those."
This was an awkward subject, as Captain Ambrose was a reluctant chairman of the Local Mental Progress Tribunal. He fidgeted and prodded the ground with his stick, while Kitty said, "I quite agree with you. We don't. But if there are to be exemptions from the Act, local tribunals are necessary. You can't have individual cases decided by the central authorities who know nothing of the circumstances. Tribunals must be appointed who can be relied on to grant exemptions fairly, on the grounds specified in the Act."
She proceeded to enumerate these grounds. One of them was such poverty of mental calibre that the possessor was judged quite incapable of benefiting by the course. A look of hope dawned on several faces; this might, it was felt, be a way out. The applicant, Kitty explained, would be granted exemption if suffering from imbecility, extreme feeble-mindedness, any form of genuine mania, acute, intermittent, chronic, delusional, depressive, obsessional, lethargic....
Dixon coughed twice, thinking the subject depressing and too technical for the audience, and Kitty proceeded to outline the various forms of exemption which might be held, a more cheerful topic. She concluded, remembering the Minister's instructions, by drawing an inspiring picture of the changed aspect life would bear after the mind had been thus improved; how it would become a series of open doors, of chances taken, instead of a dull closed house. Everything would be so amusing, so possible, such fun. And they would get on; they would grow rich; there would be perpetual peace and progress instead of another great war, which was, alas, all too possible if the world remained as stupid as it had been up to the present....
Here Kitty's eye lighted unintentionally on her brother Anthony's face, with the twist of a cynical grin on it, and she collapsed from the heights of eloquence. It never did for the Grammonts to encounter each other's eyes when they were being exalted; the memories and experiences shared by brothers and sisters rose cynically, like rude gamins, to mock and bring them down.
Kitty said, "If anyone would like to ask any questions...." and got off the tub.
Someone enquired, after the moment of blankness which usually follows this invitation, what they would be taught, exactly.
Kitty said there would be many different courses, adapted to differing requirements. But, in the main, everyone would be taught to use to the best advantage such intelligence as they might have, in that state of life to which it might please God to call them.
"And how," pursued the enquirer, a solid young blacksmith, "will the teachers know what that may be?"
Kitty explained that they wouldn't, exactly, of course, but the minds which took the course would be so sharpened and improved as to tackle any work better than before. But there would also be forms to be filled in, stating approximately what was each individual's line in life.
After another pause a harassed-looking woman at the back said plaintively, "I'm sure it's all very nice, miss, but it does seem as if such things might be left to the men. They've more time, as it were. You see, miss, when you've done out the house and got the children's meals and put them to bed and cleaned up and all, not to mention washing-day, and ironing—well, you've not much time left to improve the mind, have you?"
It was Dr. Cross who pointed out that, the mind once improved, these household duties would take, at most, half the time they now did. "I know that, ma'am," the tired lady returned. "I've known girls who set out to improve their minds, readin' and that, and their house duties didn't take them any time at all, and nice it was for their families. What I say is, mind improvement should be left to the men, who've time for such things; women are mostly too busy, and if they aren't they should be."
Several men said "Hear, hear" to this. Rural England, as Dr. Cross sometimes remarked, was still regrettably eastern, or German, in its feminist views, even now that, since the war, so many more thousands of women were perforce independent wage-earners, and even now that they had the same political rights as men. Stephen flung forth a few explosive views on invidious sex distinctions, another pet topic of his, and remarked that, in the Christian religion, at least, there was neither male nor female. A shade of scepticism on the faces of several women might be taken to hint at a doubt whether the Christian religion, in this or in most other respects, was life as it was lived, and at a certainty that it was time for them to go home and get the supper. They began to drift away, with their children round them, gossiping to each other of more interesting things than Mind Training. For, after all, if it was to be it was, and where was the use of talking?