It was getting dusk. The male part of the audience also fell away, to talk in the roads while supper was preparing. Only the vicar was left, and Captain Ambrose, and Anthony Grammont, and Pansy, who came up to talk to Kitty.
"My dear," said Pansy, "I feel absolutely flattened out by your preacher, with his talk of 'the other animals,' and organised love. Now Mr. Delmer was sweet to me—he said it ought to be free, an' I know he doesn't really think so, but only said it for my sake and Tony's. But your man's terrifyin'. I'm almost frightened to have him sleep at the End House to-night; I'm afraid he'll set fire to the sheets, he's so hot. Won't you introduce me?"
But Dixon was at this moment engaged in talking to the vicar, who, not to be daunted and brow-beaten by the notorious Stephen Dixon, was manfully expounding his position to him and Dr. Cross, while Captain Ambrose backed him up.
"They may be all night, I should judge from the look of them," said Kitty, who by now knew her clergyman and her doctor well. "Let's leave them at it and come home; Tony can bring them along when they're ready."
The End House had offered its hospitality to all the three Explainers, and they were spending the night there instead of, as usual, at the village inn. Kitty and Pansy were overtaken before they reached it by Anthony and Dr. Cross and Dixon.
Pansy said, with her sweet, ingratiating smile, "I was sayin' to Kitty, Mr. Dixon, that you made me feel quite bad with your talk about free love."
"I'm sorry," said Dixon, "but it was the vicar who talked of that, not I. I talked of organised love. I never talk of free love: I don't like it."
"I noticed you didn't," said Pansy. "That's just what I felt so bad about. Mind you, I think you're awfully right, only it takes so much livin' up to, doesn't it? with things tangled up as they are.... Sure you don't mind stayin' with us, I suppose?" She asked it innocently, rolling at him a sidelong glance from her beautiful music-hall eyes.
Dixon looked at sea. "Mind?..."
"Well, you might, mightn't you, as ours is free." Then, at his puzzled stare, "Why, Kitty, you surely told him!"
"I'm afraid I never thought of it," Kitty faltered. "She means," she explained, turning to the two guests, "that she and my brother aren't exactly married, you know. They can't be, because Pansy has a husband somewhere. They would if they could; they'd prefer it."
"We'd prefer it," Pansy echoed, a note of wistfulness in her calm voice. "Ever so much. It'smuchnicer, isn't it?—as you were sayin'. We think so too, don't we, old man?" She turned to Anthony but he had stalked ahead, embarrassed by the turn the conversation was taking. He was angry with Kitty for not having explained the situation beforehand, angry with Pansy for explaining it now, and angry with Dixon for not understanding without explanation.
"But I do hope," Pansy added to both her guests, slipping on her courteous and queenly manner, "that you will allow it to make no difference."
Dr. Cross said, "Of course not. What do you imagine?" She was a little worried by the intrusion of these irrelevant domestic details into a hitherto interesting evening. Pansy's morals were her own concern, but it was a pity that her taste should allow her to make this awkward scene.
But Dixon stopped, and, looking his hostess squarely in the face—they were exactly of a height—said, "I am sorry, but I am afraid it does make a difference. I hate being rude, and I am most grateful to you for your hospitable invitation; but I must go to the inn instead."
Pansy stared back, and a slow and lovely rose colour overspread her clear face. She was not used to being rebuffed by men.
"I'm frightfully sorry," Stephen Dixon repeated, reddening too. "But, you see, if I slept at your house it would be seeming to acquiesce in something which I believe it to be tremendously important not to acquiesce in.... Put it that I'm a prig ... anyhow, there it is.... Will you apologise for me to your brother?" he added to Kitty, who was looking on helplessly, conscious that the situation was beyond her. "And please forgive me—I know it seems unpardonable rudeness." He held out his hand to Pansy, tentatively. She took it, without malice. Pansy was not a rancorous woman.
"That's all right, Mr. Dixon. If you can't swallow our ways, you just can't, and there's an end of it. Lots of people can't, you know. Good night. I hope you'll be comfortable."
Kitty looked after him with a whistle.
"I'm fearfully sorry, Pansy love. I never thought to expatiate beforehand on Tony and you.... I introduced you as Miss Ponsonby—but I suppose he never noticed, or thought you were the Cheeper's governess or something. Who'd have thought he'd take on like that? But you never know, with the clergy; they're so unaccountable."
"I'm relieved, a bit," Pansy said. "I was frightened of him, that's a fact."
Dr. Cross said, "The queer thing about Stephen Dixon is that you never know when he'll take a thing in this way and when he won't. I've known him sit at tea in the houses of the lowest slum criminals—by the way, that is surely the scriptural line—and I've known him cut in the street people who were doing the same things in a different way—a sweating shopowner, for instance. I sometimes think it depends with him on the size and comfort of the house the criminal lives in, which is too hopelessly illogical, you'd think, for an intelligent man like him. I lose my patience with him sometimes, I confess. But anyhow he knows his own mind."
"He's gone," Pansy said to Anthony, who was waiting for them at the gate. "He thinks it's important not to acquiesce in us. So he's gone to the inn.... By the way, I nearly told him that the innkeeper is leading a double life too—ever so much worse than ours—but I thought it would be too unkind, he'd have had to sleep on the green."
"Well," Anthony said crossly, "we can get on without him. But another time, darling, I wish you'd remember that there's not the least need to explain our domestic affairs in the lane to casual acquaintances, even if they do happen to be spending the night. It's simply not done, you know! It makes a most embarrassing situation all round. I know you're not shy, but you might remember that I am."
"Sorry, old dear," said Pansy. "There's been so much explainin' this evenin' that I suppose I caught it.... You people," she added to Dr. Cross and Kitty, "have got awkwarder things to explain than I have. I'd a long sight rather have to explain free love than love by Act of Parliament."
"But on the whole," said the doctor, relieved to have got on to that subject again after the rather embarrassing interlude of private affairs, "I thought the meeting this evening not bad. What did you think, Miss Grammont?"
"I should certainly," said Kitty, "have expected it to have been worse. If I had been one of the audience, it would have been."
Some of the subsequent meetings of that campaign, in fact, were. But not all. On the whole, as Dr. Cross put it, they were not bad.
"It's a toss-up," said Dixon at the end, "how the country is going to take this business. There's a chance, a good fighting chance, that they may rise to the idea and accept it, even if they can't like it. It depends a lot on how it's going to be worked, and that depends on the people at the top. And for the people at the top, all one can say is that there's a glimmer of hope. Chester himself has got imagination; and as long as a man's got that he may pull through, even if he's head of a government department.... Of course one main thing is not to make pledges; they can't be kept; everyone knows they can't be kept, as situations change, and when they break there's a row.... Another thing—the rich have got to set the example; they must drop this having their fun and paying for it, which the poor can't afford. If that's allowed there'll be revolution. Perhaps anyhow there'll be revolution. And revolutions aren't always the useful things they ought to be; they sometimes lead to reaction. Oh, you Brains people have got to be jolly careful."
A week later the Mind Training Bill became an Act. It did, in fact, seem to be a toss-up how the public, that strange, patient, unaccountable dark horse, were going to take it. That they took it at all, and that they continued to take the Mental Progress Act, was ascribed by observant people largely to the queer, growing, and quite peculiar influence of Nicholas Chester. It was an odd influence for a minister of the government to have in this country; one would have almost have supposed him instead a power of the Press, the music-hall stage, or the cinema world. It behoved him, as Dixon said to be jolly careful.
During the period which followed the Explanation Campaign, Kitty Grammont was no longer bored by her work, no longer even merely entertained. It had acquired a new flavour; the flavour of adventure and romance which comes from a fuller understanding and a more personal identification; from, in fact, knowing more about it at first-hand.
Also, she got to know the Minister better. At the end of August they spent a week-end at the same country house. They were a party of four, besides their host's family; a number which makes for intimacy. Their hostess was a Cambridge friend of Kitty's, their host a man high up in the Foreign Office, his natural force of personality obscured pathetically by that apprehensive, defiant, defensive manner habitual and certainly excusable in these days in the higher officials of that department and of some of the other old departments; a manner that always seemed to be saying, "All right, we know we've made the devil of a mess for two centuries and more, and we know you all want to be rid of us. But we'd jolly well like to know if you think you could have worked things any better yourselves. Anyhow, we mean to stick here till we're chucked out."
How soon would it be, wondered Kitty, before the officials of the Ministry of Brains wore that same look? It must come to them; it must come to all who govern, excepting only the blind, the crass, the impervious. It must have been worn by the members of the Witan during the Danish invasions; by Strafford before 1642; by Pharaoh's councillors when Moses was threatening plagues; by M. Milivkoff before March, 1917; by Mr. Lloyd George during much of the Great War.
But it was not worn yet by Nicholas Chester.
He sat down by Kitty after dinner. They did not talk shop, but they were linked by the strong bond of shop shared and untalked. There was between them the relationship, unlike any other (for no relationship ever is particularly like any other) of those who are doing, though on very different planes, the same work, and both doing it well; the relationship, in fact, of a government official to his intelligent subordinates. (There is also the relationship of a government official to his unintelligent subordinates; this is a matter too painful to be dwelt on in these pages.)
But this evening, as they talked, it became apparent to Kitty that, behind the screen of this relationship, so departmental, so friendly, so emptied of sex, a relationship quite other and more personal and human, which had come into embryo being some weeks ago, was developing with rapidity. They found pleasure in one another this evening as human beings in the world at large, the world outside ministry walls. That was rather fun. And next morning Chester asked her to come a walk with him, and on the walk the new relationship burgeoned like flowers in spring. They did not avoid shop now that they were alone together; they talked of the Department, of the new Act, of the efforts of other countries on the same lines, of anything else they liked. They talked of Russian politics (a conversation I cannot record, the subject being too difficult for any but those who have the latest developments under their eyes, and, indeed, not always quite easy even for them). They talked of the National Theatre, of animals they had kept and cabinet ministers they had known; of poets, pictures, and potato puddings; of, in fact, the things one does talk about on walks. They told each other funny stories of prominent persons; she told him some of the funny stories about himself which circulated in the Ministry; he told her about his experiences when, in order to collect information as to the state of the intelligence of the country before the ministry was formed, he had sojourned in a Devonshire fishing village disguised as a fisherman, and in Hackney Wick disguised as a Jew, and had in both places got the better of everyone round him excepting only the other Hackney Jews, who had got the better of him. (It was in consequence of this that Jews—such Jews as had not yet been forcibly repatriated in the Holy City—were exempted from the provisions of the Mental Progress Act and the Mind Training Act. It would be a pity if Jews were to become any cleverer.)
It will be seen, therefore, that their conversation was of an ordinary description, that might take place between any two people of moderate intelligence on any walk. The things chiefly to be observed about it were that Chester, a silent person when he was not in the mood to talk, talked a good deal, as if he liked talking to-day, and that when Kitty was talking he watched her with a curious, interested, pleased look in his deep little eyes.
And that was all, before lunch; the makings, in fact, of a promising friendship.
After tea there was more. They sat in a beech wood together, and told each other stories of their childhoods. He did not, Kitty observed, mention those of his family who were less intelligent than the rest; no doubt, with his views on the importance of intellect, he found it too depressing a subject. And after dinner, when they said good-night, he held her hand but as long as all might or so very little longer, and asked if she would dine with him on Thursday. It was the look in his eyes at that moment which sent Kitty up to bed with the staggering perception of the dawning of a new and third relationship—not the official relationship, and not the friendship which had grown out of it, but something still more simple and human. He, probably, was unaware of it; the simple human emotions were of no great interest to Nicholas Chester, whose thoughts ran on other and more complex businesses. One might surmise that he might fall very deeply in love before he knew anything much about it. Kitty, on the other hand, would always know, had, in fact, always known, everything she was doing in that way, as in most others. She would track the submersion, step by step, amused, interested, concerned. This way is the best; not only do you get more out of the affair so, but you need not allow yourself, or the other party concerned, to be involved more deeply than you think advisable.
So, safe in her bedroom, standing, in fact, before the looking-glass, she faced the glimpse of a possibility that staggered her, bringing mirth to her eyes and a flutter to her throat.
"Good God!" (Kitty had at times an eighteenth-century emphasis of diction, following in the steps of the heroines of Jane Austen and Fanny Burney, who dropped oaths elegantly, like flowers.) "Good God! He begins to think of me." Then, quickly, followed the thought, to tickle her further, "Is it right? Is itconvenable?Shouldministers look like that at their lady clerks? Or does he think that, as he's uncertificated and no hopes of an outcome can be roused in me, he may look as he likes?"
She unhooked her dress, gazing at her reflection with solemn eyes, which foresaw the potentialities of a remarkable situation.
But what was, in fact, quite obvious, was that no situation could possibly be allowed to arise.
Only, if it did.... Well, it would have its humours. And, after all, should one turn one's back on life, in whatever curious guise it might offer itself? Kitty, at any rate, never yet had done this. She had once accepted the invitation of a Greek brigand at Thermopylæ to show her, and her alone, his country home in the rocky fastnesses of Velukhi, a two days' journey from civilisation; she had spent a week-end as guest-in-chief of a Dervish at Yuzgat; she had walked unattended through the Black Forest (with, for defence, a walking-stick and a hat-pin) and she had become engaged to Neil Desmond. Perhaps it was because she was resourceful and could trust her natural wits to extricate her, that she faced with temerity the sometimes awkward predicaments in which she might find herself involved through this habit of closing no door on life. The only predicament from which she had not, so far, succeeded in emerging, was her engagement; here she had been baffled by the elusive quality which defeated her efforts not by resistance but by merely slipping out of hearing.
And if this was going to turn into another situation ... well, then, she would have had one more in her life. But, after all, very likely it wasn't.
"Ministers," Kitty soliloquised, glancing mentally at the queer, clever, humorous face which had looked at her so oddly, "ministers, surely, are made of harder stuff than that. And prouder. Ministers, surely, even if they permit themselves to flirt a little with the clerks of their departments, don't let it get serious. It isn't done. You flatter yourself, my poor child. Your head has been turned because he laughed when you tried to be funny, and because, for lack of better company or thinking your pink frock would go with his complexion, he walked out with you twice, and because he held your hand and looked into your eyes. You are becoming one of those girls who think that whenever a man looks at them as if he liked the way they do their hair, he wants to kiss them at once and marry them at last...."
"What's amusing you, Kate?" her hostess enquired, coming in with her hair over her shoulders and her Cambridge accent.
"Nothing, Anne," replied Kitty, after a meditative pause, "that I can possibly ever tell you. Merely my own low thoughts. They always were low, as you'll remember."
"They certainly were," said Anne.
This chapter, as will by this time have been observed, deals with the simple human emotions, their development and growth. But it will not be necessary to enter into tedious detail concerning them. They did develop; they did grow; and to indicate this it will only be necessary to select a few outstanding scenes of different dates.
On September 2nd, which was the Thursday after the week-end above described, Kitty dined with Chester, and afterwards they went to a picture palace to see "The Secret of Success," one of their own propaganda dramas. It had been composed by the bright spirits in the Propaganda Department of the Ministry, and was filmed and produced at government expense. The cinematograph, the stage, and the Press were now used extensively as organs to express governmental points of view; after all, if you have to have such things, why not make them useful? Chester smiled sourly over it, but acquiesced. The chief of such organs were of course the new State Theatre (anticipated with such hope by earnest drama-lovers for so many years) and the various State cinemas, and theHidden Hand, the government daily paper; but even over the unofficial stage and film the shadow of the State lay black.
The Secret of Success depicted lurid episodes in the careers of two young men; the contrast was not, as in other drama, between virtue and vice, but between Intelligence and the Reverse. Everywhere Intelligence triumphed, and the Reverse was shamed and defeated. Intelligence found the hidden treasure, covered itself with glory, emerged triumphant from yawning chasms, flaming buildings, and the most suspicious situations, rose from obscure beginnings to titles, honours and position, and finally won the love of a pure and wealthy girl, who jilted the brainless youth of her own social rank to whom she had previously engaged herself but who had, in every encounter of wits with his intelligent rival, proved himself of no account, and who was finally revealed in a convict's cell, landed there by his conspicuous lack of his rival's skill in disengaging himself from compromising situations. Intelligence, with his bride on his arm, visited him in his cell, and gazed on him with a pitying shake of the head, observing, "But for the Government Mind Training Course, I might be in your shoes to-day." Finally, their two faces were thrown on the screen, immense and remarkable, the one wearing over his ethereal eyes the bar of Michael Angelo, the other with a foolish, vacant eye and a rabbit mouth that was ever agape.
This drama was sandwiched between The Habits of the Kola Bear, and How his Mother-in-law Came to Stay, and after it Chester and Kitty went out and walked along the Embankment.
It was one of those brilliant, moonlit, raidless nights which still seemed so strange, so almost flat, in their eventlessness. Instinctively they strained their ears for guns; but they heard nothing but the rushing of traffic in earth and sky.
"The State," said Chester, "is a great debaucher. It debauches literature, art, the press, the stage, and the Church; but I don't think even its worst enemies can say it has debauched the cinema stage.... What a people we are; good Lord, what a people!"
"As long as we leave Revue alone, I don't much mind what else we do," Kitty said. "Revue is England's hope, I believe. Because it's the only art in which all the forms of expression come in—talking, music, singing, dancing, gesture—standing on your head if nothing else will express you at the moment.... I believe Revue is going to be tremendous. Look how its stupidities and vulgarities have been dropping away from it lately, this last year has made a new thing of it altogether; it's beginning to try to show the whole of life as lived.... Oh, we must leave Revue alone.... I sometimes think it's so much the coming thing that I can't be happy till I've chucked my job and gone into it, as one of a chorus. I should feel I was truly serving my country then; it would be a real thing, instead of this fantastic lunacy I'm involved in now...."
At times Kitty forgot she was talking to the Minister who had created the fantastic lunacy.
"You can't leave the Ministry," said the Minister curtly. "You can't be spared."
Kitty was annoyed with him for suddenly being serious and literal and even cross, and was just going to tell him she should jolly well leave the Ministry whenever she liked, when some quality in his abrupt gravity caught the words from her lips.
"We haven't got industrial conscription to that extent yet," she merely said, weakly.
It was all he didn't say to her in the moment's pause that followed which was revealing; all that seemed to be forced back behind his guarded lips. What he did say, presently, was "No, more's the pity. It'll come, no doubt."
And, talking of industrial conscription, they walked back.
What stayed with Kitty was the odd, startled, doubtful look he had given her in that moment's pause; almost as if he were afraid of something.
Kitty took at this time to sleeping badly; even worse, that is to say, than usual. In common with many others, she always did so when she was particularly interested in anyone. She read late, then lay and stared into the dark, her thoughts turning and twisting in her brain, till, for the sake of peace, she turned on the light again and read something; something cold, soothing, remote from life as now lived, like Aristophanes, Racine, or Bernard Shaw. Attaining by these means to a more detached philosophy, she would drift at last from the lit stage where life chattered and gesticulated, and creep behind the wings, and so find sleep, so little before it was time to wake that she began the day with a jaded feeling of having been up all night.
On one such morning she came down to find a letter from Neil Desmond in its thin foreign envelope addressed in his flat, delicate hand. He wrote from a Pacific island where he was starting a newspaper for the benefit of the political prisoners confined there; it was to be called "Freedom" (in the British Isles no paper of this name would be allowed, but perhaps the Pacific Island censorship was less strict) and he wanted Kitty to come and be sub-editor....
Kitty, instead of lunching out that day, took sandwiches to the office and spent the luncheon-hour breaking off her engagement again. The reason why Neil never got these letters was the very reason which impelled her to write them—the lack of force about him which made his enterprises so ephemeral, and kept him ever moving round the spinning world to try some new thing.
Force. How important it was. First Brains, to perceive and know what things we ought to do, then Power, faithfully to fulfil the same. In another twenty or thirty years, perhaps the whole British nation would be full of both these qualities, so full that the things in question really would get done. And then what? Kitty's mind boggled at the answer to this. It might be strangely upsetting....
She stamped her letter and lit a cigarette. The room, empty but for her, had that curious, flat, dream-like look of arrested activity which belongs to offices in the lunch hour. If you watch an office through that empty hour of suspension you may decipher its silent, patient, cynical comment (slowly growing into distinctness like invisible ink) on the work of the morning which has been, and of the afternoon which is to be. Kitty watched it, amused, then yawned and readStop It, the newest weekly paper. It was a clever paper, for it had succeeded so far (four numbers) in not getting suppressed, and also in not committing itself precisely to any direct statement as to what it wanted stopped. It was produced by the Stop It Club, and the government lived in hopes of discovering one day, by well-timed police raids on the Club premises, sufficient lawless matter to justify it in suppressing both the Club and the paper. For Dora had recently been trying to retrieve her character in the eyes of those who blackened it, and was endeavouring to act in a just and temperate manner, and only to suppress those whose guilt was proven. Last Sunday, for instance, a Stop It procession had been allowed to parade through the city with banners emblazoned with the ambiguous words. There were, of course, so many things that, it was quite obvious, should be stopped; the command might have been addressed to those of the public who were grumbling, or to the government who were giving them things to grumble at; to writers who were producing books, journalists producing papers, parliaments producing laws, providence producing the weather, or the agents of any other regrettable activity at the moment in progress. Indeed, the answer to the enquiry "Stop what?" might so very plausibly be "Stop it all," that it was a profitless question.
It was just after two that the telephone on Prideaux's table rang. (Kitty was working in Prideaux's room now.) "Hullo," said a voice in answer to hers, "Mr. Prideaux there? Or anyone else in his room I can speak to? The Minister speaking."
Not his P.S. nor his P.A., but the Minister himself; an unusual, hardly seemly occurrence, due, no doubt, to lunch-time. Kitty was reminded of a story someone had told her of a pert little office flapper at one end of a telephone, chirping, "Hullo, who is it?" and the answer, slow, dignified, and crushing, from one of our greater peers—"Lord Blankson ..." (pause) "HIMSELF."
"Mr. Prideaux isn't in yet," said Kitty. "Can I give him a message?"
There was a moment's pause before the Minister's voice, somehow grown remote, said, "No, thanks, it's all right. I'll ring him up later."
He rang off abruptly. (After all, how can one ring off in any other way?) He had said, "Or anyone else in his room I can speak to," as if he would have left a message with any chance clerk; but he had not, apparently, wished to hold any parley with her, even over the telephone, which though it has an intimacy of its own (marred a little by a listening exchange) is surely a sufficiently remote form of intercourse. But it seemed that he was avoiding her, keeping her at a distance, ringing her off; his voice had sounded queer, abrupt, embarrassed, as if he was shy of her. Perhaps he had thought things over and perceived that he had been encouraging one of his clerks to step rather too far out of her position; perhaps he was afraid her head might be a little turned, that she might think he was seeking her out....
Kitty sat on the edge of Prideaux's table and swore softly. She'd jolly well show him she thought no such thing.
"These great men," she said, "are insufferable."
When they next met it was by chance, in a street aeroplane. The aero was full, and they didn't take much notice of each other till something went wrong with the machinery and they were falling street-wards, probably on the top of that unfortunate shop, Swan and Edgar's. In that dizzy moment the Minister swayed towards Kitty and said, "Relax the body and don't protrude the tongue," and then the crash came.
They only grazed Swan and Edgar's, and came down in Piccadilly, amid a crowd of men who scattered like a herd of frightened sheep. No one was much hurt (street aeros were carefully padded and springed, against these catastrophes), but Kitty chanced to strike the back of her head and to be knocked silly. It was only for a moment, and when she recovered consciousness the Minister was bending over her and whispering, "She's killed. She's killed. Oh God."
"Not at all," said Kitty, sitting up, very white. "It takes quite a lot more than that."
His strained face relaxed. "That's all right, then," he said.
"I'm dining in Hampstead in about ten minutes," said Kitty. "I must get the tube at Leicester Square."
"A taxi," said the Minister, "would be better. Here is a taxi. I shall come too, in case there is another mischance, which you will hardly be fit for alone at present." He mopped his mouth.
"You have bitten your tongue," said Kitty, "in spite of all you said about not protruding it."
"It was while I was saying it," said the Minister, "that the contact occurred. Yes. It is painful."
They got into the taxi. The Minister, with his scarlet-stained handkerchief to his lips, mumbled, "That was a very disagreeable shock. You were very pale. I feared the worst."
"The worst," said Kitty, "always passes me by. It always has. I am like that."
"I am not," he said. "I am not. I have bitten my tongue and fallen in love. Both bad things."
He spoke so indistinctly that Kitty was not sure she heard him rightly.
"And I," she said, "only feel a little sick.... No, don't be anxious; it won't develop."
The Minister looked at her as she powdered her face before the strip of mirror.
"I wouldn't put that on," he advised her. "You are looking too pale, already."
"Quite," said Kitty. "It's pink powder, you see. It will make me feel more myself."
"You need nothing," he told her gravely. "You are all right as you are. It is fortunate that it is you and not I who are going out to dinner. I couldn't talk. I can't talk now. I can't even tell you what I feel about you."
"Don't try," she counselled him, putting away her powder-puff and not looking at him.
He was leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, looking at her with his pained-humorist's face and watchful eyes.
"I expect you know I've fallen in love with you?" he mumbled. "I didn't mean to; in fact, I've tried not to, since I began to notice what was occurring. It's excessively awkward. But ... I have not been able to avoid it."
Kitty said "Oh," and swallowed a laugh. One didn't laugh when one was receiving an avowal of love, of course. She felt giddy, and seas seemed to rush past her ears.
"There are a good many things to talk about in connection with this," said the Minister. "But it is no use talking about them unless I first know what you feel about it—about me, that is. Will you tell me, if you don't mind?"
He asked it gently, considerately, almost humbly. Kitty, who did mind rather, said "Oh," again, and lay back in her corner. She still felt a little dizzy, and her head ached. It is not nice having to say what one feels; one would rather the other person did it all. But this is not fair or honourable. She remembered this and pulled herself together.
"I expect," she said, swinging her glasses by their ribbon, cool and yet nervous, "I expect I feel pretty much the same as you do about it."
After a moment's pause he said, "Thank you. Thank you very much for telling me. Then it is of use talking about it. Only not now, because I'm afraid we're just getting there. And to-morrow I am going to a conference at Leeds. I don't think I can wait till the day after. May I call for you to-night and we'll drive back together?"
"Yes," said Kitty, and got out of the taxi.
When they were in it again they comported themselves for a little while in the manner customary on these occasions, deriving the usual amount of pleasurable excitement therefrom.
Then the Minister said, "Now we must talk. All is not easy about our situation."
"Nothing is easy about it," said Kitty. "In fact, we're in the demon of a mess."
He looked at her, biting his lips.
"You know about me, then? That I'm uncertificated? But of course you do. It is, I believe, generally known. And it makes the position exactly what you say. It means ..."
"It means," said Kitty, "that we must get over this unfortunate passion."
He shook his head, with a shrug.
"One can, you know," said Kitty. "I've been in and out before—more than once. Not so badly, perhaps, but quite badly enough. You too, probably?"
"Yes. Oh, yes," he admitted gloomily. "But it wasn't like this. Neither the circumstances, nor the—the emotion."
Kitty said, "Probably not. Why should it be? Nothing ever is exactly like anything else, luckily.... By the way, when did you begin to take notice of me? Don't worry, if you can't remember."
He thought for a minute, then shook his head.
"I'm bad at these things. Didn't we meet at Prideaux's one night in the spring? I observed you then; I remember you amused me. But I don't think the impression went deep.... Then—oh, we met about a good deal one way and another—and I suppose it grew without my noticing it. And then came that week-end, and that did the trick as far as I was concerned. I knew what I was doing after that, and I tried to stop it, but, as you see, I have failed. This evening I told you, I suppose, under the influence of shock.... I am not sorry. It is worth it, whatever comes of it."
"Nothing can come of it," said Kitty. "Not the least thing at all. Except being friends. And you probably won't want that. Men don't."
"No," he said. "I don't want it at all. But I suppose I must put up with it." He began to laugh, with his suppressed, sardonic laughter, and Kitty laughed too.
"We're fairly hoist with our own petard, aren't we?" he said. "Think of the scandal we might make, if we did what we chose now.... I believe it would be thecoup de grâcefor the Brains Ministry." He stated a simple fact, without conceit.
"It's a rotten position," he continued moodily. "But there it is.... And you're A, aren't you? You'll have to marry someone, eventually. If only you were B2 or 3—only then you wouldn't be yourself. As it is, it would be criminally immoral of me to stand in your way. The right thing, I suppose, would be for us to clear out of each other's way and give each other a chance to forget.The right thing....Oh damn it all, I'm as bad as the most muddle-headed fool in the country, who doesn't carethatfor the right thing if it fights against his individual impulses and desires.... I suppose moralists would say here's my chance to bear my witness, to stand by my own principles and show the world they're real.... Theyarereal, too; that's the mischief of it. I still am sure they matter more than anything else; but just now they bore me. I suppose this is what a moral and law-abiding citizen feels when he falls in love with someone else's wife.... What are you laughing at now?"
"You," said Kitty. "This is the funniest conversation.... Of course it's a funny position—it's straight out of a comic opera. What a pity Gilbert and Sullivan didn't think of it; they'd have done it beautifully.... By the way, I don't think I shall be marrying anyone anyhow, so you needn't worry about that. I've broken off my last engagement—at least I've done my best to; it became a bore. I don't really like the idea of matrimony, you know; it would be too much of a tie and a settling down. Yes, all right, I know my duty to my country, but my duty to myself comes first.... So there's no harm, from my point of view, in our going on seeing each other and taking each other out and having as good a time as we can in the circumstances. Shall we try that way, and see if it works?"
"Oh, we'll try," he said, and took her again in his arms. "It's all we can get, so we'll take it ... my dear."
"I think it's a good deal," said Kitty. "It will be fun.... You know, I'm frightfully conceited at your liking me—I can't get used to it yet; you're so important and superior. It isn't every day that a Minister of a Department falls in love with one of his clerks. It isn't really done, you know, not by the best Ministers."
"Nor by the best clerks," he returned. "We must face the fact that we are not the best people."
"And here's my flat. Will you come in and have something? There's only my cousin here, and she's never surprised; her own life is too odd."
"I think it would be inadvisable," said the Minister discreetly. "'We don't want to coddle our reputations, but we may as well keep an eye on them.'"
On that note of compromise they parted.
It was six months later: in fact, April. It was a Saturday afternoon, and many people were going home from work, including Kitty Grammont and Ivy Delmer, who were again in the Bakerloo tube, on their way to Marylebone for Little Chantreys.
The same types of people were in the train who had been in it on the Monday morning in May which is described in the opening chapter of this work. The same types of people always are in tube trains (except on the air-raid nights of the Great War, when a new and less self-contained type was introduced). But they were the same with a difference: it was as if some tiny wind had stirred and ruffled the face of sleeping waters. In some cases the only difference was a puzzled, half-awakened, rather fretful look, where had been peace. This was to be observed in the faces of the impassive shopping women. Still they sat and gazed, but with a difference. Now and then a little shiver of something almost like a thought would flicker over the calm, observing, roving eyes, which would distend a little, and darken with a faint annoyance and fear. Then it would pass, and leave the waters as still as death again; but it had been there. And it was quite certain there were fewer of these ruminating ladies. Some had perhaps died of the Mind Training Course, of trying to use their brains. (They say that some poor unfortunates who have never known the touch of soap and water on their bodies die of their first bath on being brought into hospital: so these.) Some who had been in the ruminating category six months ago were now reading papers. Some others, who still gazed at their fellows, gazed in a different manner; they would look intently at someone for half a minute, then look away, and their lips would move, and it was apparent that they were, not saying their prayers, but trying to repeat to themselves every detail of what they had seen. For this was part of the Government Mind Training Course (observation and accuracy). And one large and cow-like lady with a shopping-bag containing circulating library books and other commodities said to her companion, in Kitty Grammont's hearing, two things that accorded strangely with her aspect.
"I couldn't get anything worth reading out of the library to-day—they hadn't got any of the ones I'd ordered. These look quite silly, I'm sure. There aren't many good books written, do you think?"
Doubtful she was, and questioning: but still, she had used the word "good" and applied it to a book, as she might have to butter, or a housemaid, or a hat, implying a possible, though still dimly discerned, difference between one book and another. And presently she said a stranger thing.
"What," she enquired, "do you think about the state of things between Bavaria and Prussia? Relations to-day seemed more strained than ever, I thought."
Her companion could not be said to rise to this; she replied merely (possibly having a little missed the drift of the unusual question) that in her view relations were very often a nuisance, and exhausting. So the subject was a little diverted; it went off, in fact, on to sisters-in-law; but still it had been raised.
Beyond these ladies sat another who looked as if she had obtained exemption from the Mind Training Course on the ground that her mind (if any) was not susceptible of training; and beyond her sat a little typist eating chocolates and reading theDaily Mirror. Last May she had been reading "The love he could not buy"; this April she was reading "How to make pastry out of nuts." Possibly by Christmas she might be reading "Which way shall I Vote and Why?"
Ivy Delmer, next her, was reading the notices along the walls. Between "Ask Mr. Punch into your home" and "Flee from the wrath to come" there was a gap, where a Safety if Possible notice had formerly offered the counsel "Do not sit down in the street in the middle of the traffic or you may get killed." A month ago this had been removed. It had, apparently, been decided by the Safety if Possible Council that the public had at last outgrown their cruder admonitions. The number of street accidents was, in fact, noticeably on the decline. It seemed as if people were learning, slowly and doubtfully, to connect cause and effect. A was learning why he would be killed, B why he would not. Ivy Delmer noticed the gap on the wall, and wondered what would take its place. Perhaps it would be another text; but texts were diminishing in frequency; one seldom saw one now. More likely it would be an exhortation to Take a Holiday in the Clouds, or Get to Watford in five minutes by Air (and damn the risk).
Ivy, as she had a year ago, looked round at the faces of her fellow-travellers—mostly men and girls going home from business. Quite a lot of young men there were in these days; enough, you'd almost think, for there to be one over for Ivy to marry some day.... Ivy sighed a little. She hoped rather that this would indeed prove to be so, but hoped without conviction. After all, few girls could expect to get married in these days. She supposed that if she married at all, she ought to take a cripple, or a blind one, and keep him. She knew that would be the patriotic course; but how much nicer it would be to be taken by a whole one and get kept! She looked at the pale, maimed young men round her, and decided that they didn't, mostly, look like keeping anyone at all, let alone her; they were too tired. The older men looked more robust; but older men are married. Some of them looked quite capable and pleased with themselves, as if they were saying, "What have I got out of it, sir? Why, £100 more per annum, more self-confidence, and a clearer head."
There was also a brilliant-looking clergyman, engaged probably in reforming the Church; but clergymen are different, one doesn't marry them. Altogether, not a hopeful collection.
The train got to Marylebone pretty quickly, because it had almost abandoned its old habit of stopping half-way between every two stations. No one had ever quite known why it had done this in the past, but, with the improvement in the brains of the employees of the electric railways, the custom had certainly gradually decreased.
Marylebone too had undergone a change: there was rather less running hither and thither, rather less noise, rather less smoke, and the clock was more nearly right. Nothing that would strike the eye of anyone who was not looking for signs, but little manifestations which made the heart, for instance, of Nicholas Chester stir within him with satisfaction when he came that way, or the way of any other station (excepting only the stations of the South Eastern line, the directors and employees of which had been exempted in large numbers from the Mind Training Act by the Railway Executive Committee, as not being likely to profit by the course).
Certainly the train to Little Chantreys ran better than of old, and with hardly any smoke. Someone had hit on a way of reducing the smoke nuisance; probably of, eventually, ending it altogether. Kitty Grammont and Ivy Delmer found themselves in the same compartment, and talked at intervals on the journey. Ivy thought, as she had thought several times during the last few months, that Kitty looked prettier than of old, and somehow more radiant, more lit up. They talked of whether you ought to wear breeches as near to town as West Ealing, and left it unsettled. They talked of where you could get the best chocolates for the least money, and of what was the best play on just now. They talked of the excess of work in the office at the present moment, caused by the new Instruction dealing with the exemption of journalists whose mental category was above B2. (This was part of the price which had to be paid by the Brains Ministry for the support of the press, which is so important.) They began to talk, at least Ivy did, of whether you can suitably go to church with a dog in your muff; and then they got to Little Chantreys.
Ivy found her parents in the garden, weeding the paths. Jane and John were playing football, and Jelly was trotting a lonely trail round the domains in a character apparently satisfactory to himself but which would have been uncertain to an audience.
"Well, dear," said the vicar, looking up at Ivy from his knees. The vicarage had not yet adopted the new plan of destroying weeds by electricity; they had tried it once, but the electricity had somehow gone astray and electrified Jelly instead of the weeds, so they had given it up. The one-armed soldier whom they employed as gardener occasionally pulled up a weed, but not often, and he was off this afternoon anyhow, somewhat to the Delmers' relief. Of course one must employ disabled soldiers, but the work gets on quicker without them.
"Have you had a hard day, darling?" enquired Mrs. Delmer, busy scrabbling with a fork between paving-stones.
"Rather," said Ivy, and sat down on the wheel-barrow. "The Department's frightfully rushed just now.... Mr. Prideaux says the public is in a state of unrest. It certainly seems to be, from the number of grumbling letters it writes us.... You're looking tired, Daddy."
"A little, dear." The vicar got up to carry away his basket of weeds to the bonfire. Mrs. Delmer said, "Daddy's had a worrying time in the parish. Two more poor little abandoned babies."
"Where were they left this time?" Ivy asked with interest.
"One at the Police Station, with a note to say the government had driven the parents to this; the other just outside our garden door, with no note at all, but I suppose it's the same old story. We've no clue to either yet; they're not from Little Chantreys, of course, but I suppose we shall trace them in time. Daddy's been making enquiries among the village people; none of them will say, if they know, but Daddy says they're all in a sad state of anger and discontent about the Baby Laws; he thinks they're working up worse every day. There's so much talk of different laws for rich and poor. Of course when people say that, what they always mean is that it's the same law for both, and ought to be different. Even that isn't true, of course, in this case, as the taxes are in proportion to the income; but it certainly does come very hard on the poor. Daddy thinks it his duty to preach about it again to-morrow, and that worries him, because he may get arrested and fined. But he feels it's right. He thinks the country is in real danger of risings and revolts if this goes on. He says the Stop It League is doing its best to stir up rebellion, and that would besucha calamity. And all these poor little babies abandoned or disowned all over the country; it goes to one's heart.... Don't talk about it, darling, it worries Daddy so.... And poor Brown issolittle use with the vegetable garden. His Mind Training Course seems really to have quite upset him; he talks and looks so strangely now. And Daddy's worried about Mr. Hawtrey" (the curate), "who's joined the Church Improvement Society and has become dreadfully restless, and keeps saying Daddy ought to join it too."
Mrs. Delmer sighed, and changed the subject, as the vicar came back, to the amount of blossom there was on the white-heart cherry.
Ivy went indoors. She went up to the room she shared with Betty. Betty was there, staining a straw hat with Jackson's nut-brown hat-polish.
Ivy said, "A nice mess you're making. I should think you might remember it's my room as well as yours," and Betty said, "Socks." From which it may be inferred that these sisters, good-humoured in the main to others, were frequently short-tempered to one another.
Ivy said next, opening a drawer, "I won't stand it. You've been pinching my handkerchiefs."
Betty replied absently, and as if from habit rather than from reflection, "Haven't been near your old drawer."
"Liar. There were twelve here this morning and now there are only ten. I've told you before I won't stand having my things pinched. If you're too slack to earn enough to keep yourself in handkerchiefs, you must do without, that's all."
"I suppose you'd rather I'd used my sleeve at the Whites' tennis this morning, wouldn't you?"
"Ishouldn't care if you had.... Tennis in the morning's a pretty rotten idea anyhow, if you ask me. You're the biggest slacker I ever came across. If I was Daddy I wouldn't keep you eating your head off, even if you aren't clever. You're going on like a girl before the war. Your Training Course doesn't seem to have done you the slightest good, either. It's people like you who'll rot up the whole plan."
"It's rot anyhow," Betty returned, without interest, turning her hat about critically. "You should just hear the way they're all going on about it in the village. Stuff and nonsense, I call it. And as long as people like me and the village—normal, ordinary people—think it's stuff and nonsense, ... well, itwillbe stuff and nonsense, that's all."
"People like you," Ivy retorted witheringly, as she changed her skirt for her country breeches.
But, after all, that retort didn't dispose of Betty, or the people like Betty ... or the whole vicarage family ... or most of Little Chantreys.... Those people, after all, were going to take more disposing of than that.... They were, quite possibly, going to take more disposing of than anyone yet knew.
"Silly ass," said Ivy, but with a touch of doubt.
She thought her new green breeches were rather nice, anyhow, and that seemed to matter more.
Kitty found her brother Cyril at the End House. Cyril was in a poor way. His publishing business was on the edge of bankruptcy.
"So much for your abominable Brains Ministry," he complained. "The mass of safe, mediocre stuff on which publishers count for a living while they adventure with the risks is being gradually withdrawn. It simply doesn't come in. Its producers are becoming—many of them—just too intelligent. I'm not imagining this; I know of several cases in which it has happened; of people who have developed just enough distaste for their own work to dry them up altogether. What's worse, there isn't the same sale for such stuff as there was. When the process has gone much further (if ever it does)—so far that a lot of really good stuff is turned out, and read by large numbers of people, business will be all right again. Till then, publishers are in a poor way.... Verse is dropping off, too, like autumn leaves. That's all to the good.... I daresay in another year or two (unless you're wrecked first, which seems probable, by the way) there'll only be about a hundred people left in the country writing anything at all.... Newspapers, of course, go on much the same; that's because you're afraid of them and exempt their staff. Insignificant verse and meaningless novels may die a natural death (though I think it improbable), butMyosotisand thePatriotand theDaily Idiotwill go on for ever. You're all such cowards at Whitehall. You dare to ruin unoffending publishers, to browbeat the poor and simple, and to extract gold from the innocent babe unborn, but you daren't risk the favour of the press."
"No," Kitty agreed. "We certainly daren't.... Not that we've got it, you know, quite the contrary; but we strive for it. I was reading theHeraldandStop Itin the train, till I was cold with fear.Stop Itveils its meaning delicately, as usual; but it means business.... However, I thought we should have been downed six months ago, yet here we are still. It's like skating on rotten ice so fast that it never breaks. It's fun; it's exciting. And I believe if we go on skating fast, it won't break at all. You see, the government are getting cleverer and cleverer themselves, which will help them to do it skilfully. Chester says his head really does feel clearer after taking the Course; he says so in private life, I mean, not only when he's soft-soaping the public."
"He'll need," said Anthony, "a jolly clear head before he's through with this job. With every door-step in our towns and villages piled with exposed babies ... it's worse than China. Much worse, because I believe in China they don't get put on door-steps, but left harmlessly out of the way in open fields and no one meddles with them. It's becoming a public nuisance."
"There is a new branch at the Ministry," said Kitty, "which is concerned exclusively with Uncertificated Babies, how to deal with them."
"An' howdothey deal with them, the poor little ducks?" enquired Pansy, who had just come in from the garden looking more than usually gay and lovely and fantastic in a pink sunbonnet and the kind of dress affected by milkmaids in a chorus.
Kitty looked at her thoughtfully.
"I should hardly like to tell you. You mightn't like it. Besides, it's a private department, like the secret room in jam factories where they make the pips. No, Pansy love, I can't possibly tell you.... But theydodeal with them, quite effectively."
Pansy tossed her Cheeper up and down to a gentle music-hall ditty.