That autumn was a feverish period in the Ministry's career. Many persons have been called upon, for one cause or another, to wait in nervous anticipation hour by hour for the signal which shall herald their own destruction. Thus our ancestors at the latter end of the tenth century waited expectantly for the crack of doom; but the varying emotions with which they awaited it can only be guessed at. More vivid to the mind and memory are the expectant and waiting first days of August, 1914. On the other hand, the emotions of cabinets foreseeing their own resignation, of the House of Lords anticipating abolition, of criminals awaiting sentence, of newspapers desperately staving off extinction, of the crews of foundered ships struggling to keep afloat, of government departments anticipating their own untimely end, are mysteries veiled from the outside world, sacred ground which may not be trodden by the multitude.
The Ministry of Brains that autumn was fighting hard and gallantly for its life. It was an uphill struggle; Sisyphus pushing up the mountain the stone of human perverseness, human stupidity, human self-will, which threatened all the time to roll back and grind him to powder. Concessions were made here, pledges given there (even, here or there, occasionally fulfilled). New Instructions were issued daily, old ones amended or withdrawn, far-reaching and complicated arrangements made with various groups and classes of people, "little ministries" set up all over the country to administrate the acts regionally, soothing replies and promises dropped like leaves in autumn by the Parliamentary Secretary, to be gathered up, hoarded, and brooded over in many a humble, many a stately home. It is superfluous to recapitulate these well-worn, oft-enacted, pathetic incidents of a tottering ministry. Ministries, though each with a special stamp in hours of ease, are all much alike when pain and anguish wring their brows. With arts very similar each to other they woo a public uncertain, coy and hard to please; a public too ready to believe the worst of them, too pitiless and unimaginative towards their good intentions, too extreme to mark what is done amiss, too loth to admit success, too ready to condemn failure without measuring the strength of temptation.
Ministries have a bitter time; their hand is against every man and every man's hand against them. For their good men return them evil and for their evil no good. And—let it not be forgotten—they are really, with all their faults, more intelligent, and fuller of good intentions, than the vast majority of their critics. The critics cry aloud "Get rid of them," without always asking themselves who would do the job any better, always providing it has to be done. In the case of the Ministry of Brains, the majority of the public saw no reason why the job should be done at all, which complicated matters. It was like the Directorate of Recruiting during the war, or the Censor's office, or the Ministry of Food; not merely its method but its function was unwelcome. As most men did not want to be recruited by law, or to have their reading or their diet regulated by law, so they did not want to be made intelligent by law. All these things might be, and doubtless were, for the ultimate good of the nation, but all were inconvenient at the moment, and when ultimate good (especially not necessarily one's own good) and immediate convenience come to blows, it is not usually ultimate good which wins.
So the Ministry of Brains, even more than other ministries, was fighting against odds. Feverish activity prevailed, in all departments. From morning till night telephones telephoned, clerks wrote, typists typed against time, deputations deputed, committees committeed, officials conferred with each other, messengers ran to and fro with urgent minutes and notes by hand. Instructions and circular letters poured forth, telegrams were despatched in hot haste to the local Ministries and to the Brains Representatives on the local tribunals, the staff arrived early and stayed late, and often came on Sundays as well, and grew thin and dyspeptic and nervy and irritable.
Even Ivy Delmer grew pale and depressed, not so much from official strain as from private worries. These she confided one day to Kitty, who had got transferred back to headquarters, through a little quiet wire-pulling (it is no use being married to a Minister if little things like that cannot easily be arranged), and was now working in her old branch. They were travelling together one Monday morning up from Little Chantreys.
"Now I ask you, Miss Grammont, what wouldyoudo? I'm B3 and he's C1 (I'm certain they've classified him wrong, because he's not a bit stupid really, not the way some men are, you know, he's jolly clever at some things—ideas, and that), but of course it's against the regulations for us to marry each other. And yet we care for each other, and we both of us feel we always shall. And we neither of us want a bit to marry an A person, besides, I don't suppose an A would ever think of us inthatway, you know what I mean, Miss Grammont, don't laugh, and to give each other up would mean spoiling both our lives.... Yet I suppose everyone would think it awfully wrong if we got regularly engaged, and me working at the Ministry too. I suppose I ought to leave it really, feeling the way I do.... The fact is, I've come to feel very differently about the Ministry, now I've thought it more over, and—you'll be horrified, I know—but I'm not at all sure I approve of it."
"Good gracious no," Kitty said. "I never approve of any Ministries. That isn't what one feels for them. Sympathy; pity; some affection, even; but approval—no."
"Well, you see what I mean, it's all very well in theory, but I do honestly know so many people whose lives have been upset and spoilt by it—and it does seem hard. Heaps of people in Little Chantreys alone; of course we come across them rather a lot, because they tell father and mother about it.... And all the poor little deserted babies.... Oh I suppose it's all right.... But I'm feeling a bit off it just now.... Now I ask you, feeling as I do about it, and meaning to do what I'm going to do (at least we hope we're going to do it sometime), ought I to go on at the Ministry? Is it honest? Wouldyou, Miss Grammont?"
Kitty blushed faintly, to her own credit and a little to Ivy's surprise. She did not associate blushing with Miss Grammont, and anyhow there seemed no occasion for it just now.
"Well, yes, I think I would. I don't see that you're called on to give it up—unless, of course, you hate it, and want to.... After all, one would very seldom stick to any work at all if one felt obliged to approve entirely of it. No, I don't think there's much in that."
"You truly don't? Well, I expect I'll carry on for a bit, then. I'd rather, in one way, of course, especially as we shall need all the money we can get if we ever do marry. Not that I'm saving; I spend every penny I get, I'm afraid. But of course it takes me off father's hands.... Don'tyoufeel, Miss Grammont, that all this interference with people's private lives is a mistake? It's come home to me awfully strongly lately. Only when I read the Minister's speeches I change my mind again; he puts it so rippingly, and makes me feel perhaps I'm being simply a selfish little beast. I don't care what anybody says about him, I think he's wonderful."
"I suppose he is," said Kitty.
"My word, he jolly wellwoulddespise me if he knew, wouldn't he?"
"Well...." said Kitty. And perhaps it was well that at that moment they reached Marylebone.
That conversation was typical, even as Ivy Delmer's standpoint was itself typical, of a large body of what, for lack of a better name, we must call thought, all over the country. Laws were all very well in theory, or when they only disarranged the lives of others, but when they touched and disorganised one's own life—hands off. Was the only difference between such as Ivy Delmer and such as Nicholas Chester that Ivy deceived herself ("It's not that I care a bit for myself, but it's the principle of the thing") and that Chester fell with open eyes? Which was perhaps as much as to say that Ivy was classified B3 and Chester A.
All over the country people were saying, according to their different temperaments, one or another of these things. "Of course I don't care for myself, but I think the system is wrong," or (the other way round) "It may be all right in theory, but I'm jolly well not going to stand being inconvenienced by it," or "I'm not going to stand itandit's all wrong." Of course there were also those more public-spirited persons who said, "It's a splendid system and I'm going to fall in with it," or "Though it's a rotten system I suppose we must put up with it." But these were the minority.
Up till November the campaign against the Brains Ministry was quite impersonal, merely resentment against a system. It was led, in the Press, by the Labour papers, which objected to compulsion, by theNation, which objected to what it, rightly or wrongly, called by that much-abused name, Prussianism, by theNew Witness, which objected to interference with the happy stupidity of merry Gentiles (making them disagreeably clever like Jews), and byStop It, which objected to everything. It was supported by the more normal organs of opinion of the kind which used before and during the war to be called conservative and liberal. And, of course, through thick and thin, by theHidden Hand.
But in the course of November a new element came into the attack—the personal element. Certain sections of the Press which supported the Ministry began to show discontent with the Minister. TheTimesbegan to hint guardedly that new blood might perhaps be desirable in certain quarters. TheDaily Mail, in its rounder and directer manner, remarked in large head-lines that "Nicky is played out." Ministers have to bear these intimations about themselves as they walk about London; fleeing from old gentlemen selling theDaily Mailoutside Cox's, Chester was confronted in the Strand by theHeraldremarking very loudly "CHESTER MUST GO." And then (but this was later) by thePatriot, which was much, much worse.
ThePatriotaffair was different from the others. ThePatriotwas, in fact, a different paper. ThePatriothad the personal, homely touch; it dealt faithfully not only with the public misdemeanours of prominent persons, but with the scandals of their private lives. It found things out. It abounded in implications and references, arch and jocose in manner and not usually discreet in matter. ThePatriothad been in the law courts many times, but as it remarked, "We are not afraid of prosecution." It had each week a column of open letters addressed to persons of varying degrees of prominence, in which it told them what it thought of them. The weak point of these letters was that thePatriotwas not a paper which was read by persons of prominence; its readers were the obscure and simple, who no doubt extracted much edification from them. Its editor was a Mr. Percy Jenkins, a gentleman of considerable talents, and, it was said, sufficient personal charm to be useful to him. What he lacked in æsthetic taste he made up in energy and patriotism, and the People hailed him affectionately as the People's friend. Throughout October Mr. Jenkins suffered apparently from a desire to have a personal interview with the Minister of Brains. He addressed private letters to him, intimating this desire, which were answered by his secretary in a chilly negative strain. He telephoned, enquiring when, if at all, he could have the pleasure of seeing the Minister, and was informed that the Minister had, unfortunately, no time for pleasures just now. He called at the Ministry and sent up his card, but was told that, as he had no appointment it was regretted that he could not penetrate further into the Ministry than the waiting-room. He called in the evening at the Minister's private address, but found him engaged.
After that, however, the Minister apparently relented, for Mr. Jenkins received a letter from his secretary informing him that, if he wished to see the Minister, he might call at his house at 9.30 p.m. on the following Monday. Mr. Jenkins did so. He was shown into the Minister's study. Chester was sitting by the fire, readingTales of my Grandfather. He was never found writing letters, as one might expect a public man to be found; his secretary wrote all his official letters, and his unofficial letters were not written at all, Chester being of the opinion that if you leave the letters you receive long enough they answer themselves.
Mr. Jenkins, having been invited to sit down, did so, and said, "Very kind of you to give me this interview, sir."
Chester did not commit himself, however, to any further kindness, but said stiffly, "I have very little time. I am, as you see, occupied"—he indicatedTales of my Grandfather—"and I shall be glad if you will state your business at once, sir, and as plainly as you can."
Mr. Jenkins murmured pleasantly, "Well, we needn't be blunt, exactly.... But you are quite right, sir; Ihavebusiness. As you are no doubt aware, I edit a paper—thePatriot—it is possible that you are acquainted with it."
"On the contrary," said Chester, "such an acquaintance would be quite impossible. But I have heard of it. I know to what paper you refer. Please go on."
"Everybody," retorted Mr. Jenkins, a little nettled, "does not find close acquaintance with thePatriotat all impossible. Its circulation...."
"We need not, I think, have that, Mr. Jenkins. Will you kindly go on with your business?"
Mr. Jenkins shrugged his shoulders.
"Your time appears to be extremely limited, sir."
"All time," returned the Minister, relapsing, as was often his habit, into metaphysics, "is limited. Limits are, in fact, what constitute time. What 'extremelylimited' may mean, I cannot say. But if you mean that I desire this interview to be short, you are correct."
Mr. Jenkins hurried on.
"ThePatriot, as you may have heard, sir, deals with truth. Its aim is to disseminate correct information with regard to all matters, public and private. This, I may say, it is remarkably successful in doing. Well, Mr. Chester, as of course you are aware, the public are very much interested in yourself. There is no one at the present moment who is more to the fore, or if I may say so, more discussed. Naturally, therefore, I should be glad if I could provide some items of public interest on this subject, and I should be very grateful for any assistance you could give me.... Now, Mr. Chester, I have heard lately a very interesting piece of news about you. People are saying that you are being seen a great deal in the company of a certain lady." He paused.
"Go on," said Chester.
"It has even been said," continued Mr. Jenkins, "that you have been seen staying in the country together ... alone together, that is ... for week-ends...."
"Go on," said Chester.
Mr. Jenkins went on. "Other things are said; but I daresay they are mere rumour. Queer things get said about public men. I met someone the other day who lives in Buckinghamshire, somewhere in the Chilterns, and who has a curious and no doubt entirely erroneous idea about you.... Well, in the interests of the country, Mr. Chester (I have the welfare of the Ministry of Brains very much at heart, I may say; I am entirely with you in regarding intelligence as the Coming Force), I should like to be in a position to discredit these rumours. If you won't mind my saying so, they tell against you very seriously. You see, it is generally known that you are uncertificated for matrimony and parentage, if I may mention it. And once people get into their heads the idea that, while forcing these laws on others, you are evading them yourself ... well, you may imagine it might damage your work considerably. You and I, Mr. Chester, know what the public are.... I should be glad to have your authority to contradict these rumours, therefore."
Chester said, "Certainly. You may contradict anything you please. I shall raise no objection. Is that all?"
Mr. Jenkins hesitated. "I cannot, of course, contradict the rumours without some assurance that they are false...."
They had an interesting conversation on this topic for ten minutes more, which I do not intend to record in these pages.
So many conversations are, for various reasons, not recorded. Conversations, for instance, at Versailles, when the allied powers of the world sit together there behind impenetrable curtains, through the rifts of which only murmurs of the unbroken harmony which always prevails between allies steal through to a waiting world. Conversations between M. Trotzky and representatives of the German Government before the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Conversations between the President of the Board of Trade and the Railway Companies when the price of travel is being increased; between governments and capitalists when elections are to be fought or newspapers to be bought; between Jane Austen's heroes and heroines in the hour when their passion is declared.
For quite different reasons, all these conversations are left to the imagination, and I propose to leave to the same department of the reader's mind the interview between Mr. Percy Jenkins and the Minister of Brains. I will merely mention that the talking was, for the most part, done by Mr. Jenkins. The reasons for this were two. One was that Mr. Jenkins was a fluent talker, and the Minister capable of a taciturnity not invariably to be found in our statesmen. Both have their uses in the vicissitudes of public life. Both can be, if used effectively, singularly baffling to those who would probe the statesman's mind and purposes. But fluency is, to most (it would seem) the easier course.
Anyhow this was how thePatriotcampaign started. It began with an Open Letter.
"To the Minister of Brains."Dear Mr. Nicholas Chester,"There is a saying 'Physician, heal thyself.' There is also, in the same book (a book which, coming of clerical, even episcopal, parentage, you should be acquainted with), 'Cast out the beam which is in thine own eye, and then thou shalt see more plainly to pull out the mote which is in thy brother's eye.' We will on this occasion say no more than that we advise you to take heed to these sayings before you issue many more orders relating to matrimony and such domestic affairs. And yet a third saying, 'Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch?' you would do well to ponder in your heart."
"To the Minister of Brains.
"Dear Mr. Nicholas Chester,
"There is a saying 'Physician, heal thyself.' There is also, in the same book (a book which, coming of clerical, even episcopal, parentage, you should be acquainted with), 'Cast out the beam which is in thine own eye, and then thou shalt see more plainly to pull out the mote which is in thy brother's eye.' We will on this occasion say no more than that we advise you to take heed to these sayings before you issue many more orders relating to matrimony and such domestic affairs. And yet a third saying, 'Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch?' you would do well to ponder in your heart."
That was all, that week. But it was enough to start speculation and talk among thePatriot'sreaders. Next week and other weeks there were further innuendoes, and more talk. One week there was a picture of Chester with several unmistakable, but also unmistakably deficient, little Chesters clinging to his coat. This picture was called "Following the dear old dad. What we may expect to see in the near future."
Mr. Percy Jenkins knew his business. And, during his interview with the Minister of Brains, he had conceived an extreme dislike towards him.
"He'll feel worse before I've done with him," Chester said to Kitty. They were sitting together on Kitty's sofa, with a copy of thePatriotbetween them. Kitty was now alone in her flat, her cousin having suddenly taken it into her head to get married.
"I always said it would come out," was Kitty's reply. "And now you see."
"Of course I knew it would come out," Chester said calmly. "It was bound to. However, it hasn't yet. All this is mere talk. It's more offensive, but not really so serious, as the Labour attacks on the Ministry, and theStop Itcampaign, and the cry for a Business Government. Business Government, indeed! The last word in inept futility...."
"All the same," Kitty said, rather gravely, "you and I have got to be rather more careful, Nicky. We've been careful, I think, but not enough, it seems."
"There's no such thing," said Chester, who was tired, "as being careful enough, in this observant world, when one is doing wrong. You can be too careful (don't let's, by the way) but you can't be careful enough."
But Chester did not really see Kitty very often in these days, because he had to see and confer with so many others—the Employers' Federation, and the Doctors, and the Timber Cutters, and the Worsted Industries, and the Farmers, and the Cotton Spinners, and the Newspaper Staffs, and the Church, and the Parents, and the Ministerial Council, and the Admiralty, and the Board of Education, and the War Office, and the Ministry of Reconstruction, and the Directorate of Propaganda. And the A.S.E.
It is much to be hoped that conferences are useful; if they are not, it cannot, surely, be from lack of practice.
Prideaux also, and the other heads of sections, on their humbler scale received deputations and conferred. Whether or not it was true to say of the Ministry (and to do Ministries justice, these statements are usually not true) that it did not try to enter sympathetically into the difficulties and grievances of the public, it is anyhow certain that the difficulties and grievances entered into the Ministry, from 9.30 a.m. until 7 p.m. After 7 no more difficulties were permitted to enter, but the higher staff remained often till late into the night to grapple with those already there.
Meanwhile the government laid pledges in as many of the hands held out to them as they could. Pledges, in spite of a certain boomerang quality possessed by them, are occasionally useful things. They have various aspects; when you give them, they mean a little anger averted, a little content generated, a little time gained. When you receive them, they mean, normally, that others will (you hope) be compelled to do something disagreeable before you are. When others receive them, they mean that there is unfair favouritism. When (or if) you fulfil them, they mean that you are badly hampered thereby in the competent handling of your job. When you break them, they mean trouble. And when you merely hear about them from the outside they mean a moral lesson—that promises should be kept if made, but certainly never, never made.
It is very certain, anyhow, that the Ministry of Brains made at this time too many. No Ministry could have kept so many. There was, for instance, the Pledge to the Married Women, that the unmarried women should be called up for their Mind Training Course before they were. There was the Pledge to the Mining Engineers, that unskilled labour should take the Course before skilled. There was the Pledge to the Parents of Five, that, however high the baby taxes were raised, the parents of six would always have to pay more on each baby. There was the Pledge to the Deficient, that they would not have to take the Mind Training Course at all. This last pledge was responsible for much agitation in Parliament. Distressing cases of imbeciles harried and bullied by the local Brains Boards were produced and enquired into. (Question, "Is it not the case that the Ministry of Brains has become absolutely soulless in this matter of harrying the Imbecile?" Answer, "I have received no information to that effect." Question, "Are enquiries being made into the case of the deficient girl at Perivale Halt who was rejected three times as unfit for the Course and finally examined again and passed, and developed acute imbecility and mumps half-way through the Course?" Answer, "Enquiries are being made." And so on, and so on, and so on.)
But, in the eyes of the general public, the chief testimony to the soullessness of the Ministry was its crushing and ignoring of the claims of the human heart. What could one say of a Ministry who deliberately and coldly stood between lover and lover, and dug gulfs between parent and unborn child, so that the child was either never born at all, or abandoned, derelict, when born, to the tender mercies of the state, or retained and paid for so heavily by fine or imprisonment that the parents might well be tempted to wonder whether after all the unfortunate infant was worth it?
"Him to be taxed!" an indignant parent would sometimes exclaim, admiring her year-old infant's obvious talents. "Why he's as bright as anything. Just look at him.... And little Albert next door, what his parents got a big bonus for, so as you could hear them for a week all down the street drinking it away, he can't walk yet, nor hardly look up when spoke to. Deficient,Icalls him. It isn't fair dealing, no matter what anyone says."
"All the same," said Nicholas Chester to his colleagues, "there appears to me to be a considerably higher percentage of intelligent looking infants of under three years of age than there were formerly. Intelligent looking, that is to say,forinfants. Infants, of course, are not intelligent creatures. Their mental level is low. But I observe a distinct improvement."
A distinct improvement was, in fact, discernible.
But, among the Great Unimproved, and among those who did not want improvement, discontent grew and spread; the slow, aggrieved discontent of the stupid, to whom personal freedom is as the breath of life, to whom the welfare of the race is as an idle, intangible dream, not worth the consideration of practical men and women.
In December Dora did a foolish thing. It is needless to say that she did other foolish things in other months; it is to be feared that she had been born before the Brains Acts; her mental category must be well below C3. But this particular folly is selected for mention because it had a disastrous effect on the already precarious destiny of the Ministry of Brains. Putting out a firm and practised hand, she laid it heavily and simultaneously upon four journals who were taking a rebellious attitude towards the Brains Act—theNation,Stop It, theHerald, and thePatriot. Thus she angered at one blow considerable sections of the Thoughtful, the Advanced, the Workers (commonly but erroneously known as the proletariat) and the Vulgar.
"Confound the fools," as Chester bitterly remarked; but the deed was then done.
"How long," Vernon Prideaux asked, "will it take governments to learn that revolutionary propaganda disseminated all over the country don't do as much harm as this sort of action?"
Chester was of opinion that, give the Ministry of Brains its chance, let it work for, say, fifty years, and even governments might at the end of that time have become intelligent enough to acquire such elementary pieces of knowledge. If only the Ministryweregiven its chance, if it could weather the present unrest, let the country get used to it.... Custom: that was the great thing. People settled down under things at last. All sorts of dreadful things. Education, vaccination, taxation, sanitation, representation.... It was only a question of getting used to them.
Though the authorities were prepared for trouble, they did not foresee the events of Boxing-day, that strange day in the history of the Ministry.
The Ministry were so busy that many of the staff took no holiday beyond Christmas Day itself. Bank Holidays are, as everyone who has tried knows, an excellent time for working in one's office, because there are no interruptions from the outside world, no telephoning, no visitors, no registry continually sending up incoming correspondence. The clamorous, persistent public fade away from sound and sight, and ministries are left undistracted, to deal with them for their good in the academic seclusion of the office. If there was in this world an eternal Bank Holiday (some, but with how little reason, say that this awaits us in heaven) ministries would thrive better; governing would then become like pure mathematics, an abstract science unmarred by the continual fret and jar of contact with human demands, which drag them so roughly, so continually, down to earth.
On Boxing Day the Minister himself worked all day, and about a quarter of the higher staff were in their places. But by seven o'clock only the Minister remained, talking to Prideaux in his room.
The procession, at first in the form of four clouds each no bigger than a man's hand, trailed from out the north, south, east and west, and coalesced in Trafalgar Square. From there it marched down Whitehall to Westminster, and along the Embankment. It seemed harmless enough; a holiday crowd of men and women with banners, like the people who used to want Votes, or Church Disestablishment, or Peace, or Cheap Food. The chief difference to be observed between this and those old processions was that a large number in this procession seemed to fall naturally and easily into step, and marched in time, like soldiers. This was a characteristic now of most processions; that soldier's trick, once learnt, is not forgotten. It might have set an onlooker speculating on the advantages and the dangers of a nation of soldiers, that necessary sequence to an army of citizens.
The procession drew up outside the Ministry of Brains, and resolved itself into a meeting. It was addressed in a short and stirring speech from the Ministry steps by the president of the Stop It League, a fiery young man with a megaphone, who concluded his remarks with "Isn't it up to all who love freedom, all who hate tyranny, to lose no time, but to wreck the place where these things are done? That's what we're here to do to-night—to smash up this hotel and show the government what the men and women of England mean! Come on, boys!"
Too late the watching policemen knew that this procession and this meeting meant business, and should be broken up.
The Minister and Prideaux listened, from an open window, to the speaking outside. "Rendle," said Prideaux. "Scandalous mismanagement. What have the police been about? It's too late now to do much.... Do they know we are here, by the way? Probably not."
"They shall," replied Chester, and stepped out on to the balcony.
There was a hush, then a tremendous shout.
"It's the Minister! By God, it's Nicky Chester, the man who's made all the trouble!"
A voice rose above the rest.
"Quiet! Silence! Let him speak. Let's hear what he's got to say for himself."
Silence came, abruptly; the queer, awful, terrifying silence of a waiting crowd.
Into it Chester's voice cut, sharp and incisive.
"You fools. Get out of this and go home. Don't you know that you're heading for serious trouble—that you'll find yourselves in prison for this? Get out before it's too late. That's all I have to say."
"That's all he's got to say," the crowd took it up like a refrain. "That's all he's got to say, after all the trouble he's made!"
A suave, agreeable voice rose above the rest.
"That isnotquite all he's got to say. There's something else. He's got to answer two plain questions. Number one:Are you certificated for marriage, Mr. Chester, or have you got mental deficiency in your family?"
There was an instant's pause. Then the Minister, looking down from the balcony at the upturned faces, white in the cold moonlight, said, clearly, "I am not certificated for marriage, owing to the cause you mention."
"Thank you," said the voice. "Have you all noted that, boys? The Minister of Brains is not certificated for marriage. He has deficiency in his family. Now, Mr. Chester, question number two, please.Am I correct in stating that you—got—married—last—August?"
"You are quite correct, Mr. Jenkins."
Chester heard beside him Prideaux's mutter—"Good God!" and then, below him, broke the roar of the crowd.
"Come on, boys!" someone shouted. "Come on and wreck the blooming show, and nab the blooming showman before he slips off!"
Men flung themselves up the steps and through the big doors, and surged up the stairs.
"This," remarked Prideaux, "is going to be some mess. I'll go and get Rendle to see sense, if I can. He's leading them up the stairs, probably."
"I fancy that won't be necessary," said Chester. "Rendle and his friends are coming in here, apparently."
The door was burst open, and men rushed in. Chester and Prideaux faced them, standing before the door.
"You fools," Chester said again. "What good do you think you're going to do yourselves by this?"
"Here he is, boys! Here's Nicky Chester, the married man!"
Chester and Prideaux were surrounded and pinioned.
"Don't hurt him," someone exhorted. "We'll hang him out over the balcony and ask the boys down there what to do with him."
They dragged him on to the balcony and swung him over the rail, dangling him by a leg and an arm. One of them shouted, "Here's the Minister, boys! Here's Nicky, the Minister of Brains!"
The crowd looked up and saw him, swinging in mid air, and a great shout went up.
"Yes," went on the speaker from the balcony, "Here's Nicky Chester, the man who dares to dictate to the people of Britain who they may marry and what kids they may have, and then goes and gets married himself, breaking his own laws, and hushes it up so that he thought it would never come out." ("I always knew it would come out," the Minister muttered, inarticulately protesting against this estimate of his intelligence.) "But ithascome out," the speaker continued. "And now what are we to do with him, with this man who won't submit to the laws he forces on other people? This man who dares to tell other people to bear what he won't bear himself? What shall we do with him? Drop him down into the street?"
For a moment it seemed that the Minister's fate, like himself, hung suspended.
They swung him gently to and fro, as if to get an impetus....
Then someone shouted, "We'll let him off this time, as he's just married. Let him go home to his wife, and not meddle with government any more!"
The crowd rocked with laughter; and in that laughter, rough, good-humoured, scornful, the Ministry of Brains seemed to dissolve.
They drew Chester in through the window again. Someone said, "Now we'll set the blooming hotel on fire. No time to waste, boys."
Chester and Prideaux were dragged firmly but not unkindly down the stairs and out through the door. Their appearance outside the building, each pinioned by two stalwart ex-guardsmen, was hailed by a shout, partly of anger, but three parts laughter. To Chester it was the laughter, good-humoured, stupid, scornful, of the British public at ideas, and particularly at ideas which had failed. But in it, sharp and stinging, was another, more contemptuous laughter, levelled at a man who had failed to live up to his own ridiculous ideas, the laughter of the none too honest world, which yet respected honesty, at the hypocrisy and double-dealing of others.
"They're quite right to laugh," thought Chester. "It is funny: damned funny."
And at that, standing pinioned on the steps of his discredited Ministry, looking down on the crowd of the injured, contemptuous British public, who were out to wreck the things he cared for, he began to laugh himself.
His laughter was naturally unheard, but they saw his face, which should have been downcast and ashamed, twist into his familiar, sad, cynical smile, which all who had heard him on platforms knew.
"Laughing, are you," someone shouted thickly. "Laughing at the people you've tricked! You've ruined me and my missus—taken every penny we had, just because we had twins—and you—you stand there and laugh! You—you bloody married imbecile!"
Lurching up the steps, he flung himself upon Chester and wrenched him from the relaxed hold of his captors. Struggling together, the Minister and his assailant stumbled down the steps, and then fell headlong among the public.
When the mounted police finally succeeded in dispersing the crowd, the Ministry of Brains was in flames, like Sodom and Gomorrah, those wicked cities. Unlike Sodom and Gomorrah, the conflagration was at last quenched by a fire engine. But far into the night the red wreckage blazed, testimony to the wrath of a great people, to the failure of a great idea, to the downfall of him who, whatever the weakness he shared in common with the public who downed him, was yet a great man.
Chester lay with a broken head and three smashed ribs in his flat in Mount Street. He was nursed by his elder sister Maggie, a kind, silent, plain person with her brother's queer smile and more than his cynical patience. With her patience took the form of an infinite tolerance; the tolerance of one who looks upon all human things and sees that they are not much good, nor likely to be. (Chester had not his fair share of this patience: hence his hopes and his faiths, and hence his downfall.) She was kind to Kitty, whose acquaintance she now made. (The majority of the Ministry of Brains staff were having a short holiday, during the transference to other premises.)
Maggie said to Kitty, "I'm not surprised. It was a lot to live up to. And it's not in our family, living up to that. Perhaps not in any family. I'm sorry for Nicky, because he'll mind."
She did not reproach Kitty; she took her for granted. Such incidents as Kitty were liable to happen, even in the best regulated lives. When Kitty reproached herself, saying, "I've spoilt his life," she merely replied tranquilly, "Nicky lets no one but himself spoil his life. When he's determined to do a thing, he'll do it." Nor did she commit herself to any indication as to whether she thought that what Nicky had gained would be likely to compensate for what he had lost.
For about what he had lost there seemed no doubt in anyone's mind. He had lost his reputation, his office, and, for the time being, his public life. The Ministry of Brains might continue, would in fact, weakly continue, without power and without much hope, till it trailed into ignominious death; even the wrecked Hotel would continue, when repaired; but it was not possible that Chester should continue.
The first thing he did, in fact, when he could do anything at all intelligent, was to dictate a letter to the Ministerial Council tendering his resignation from office. There are, of course, diverse styles adopted by the writers of such letters. In the old days people used to write (according to the peculiar circumstances of their case)—
"Dear Prime Minister,"Though you have long and often tried to dissuade me from this course ... etc., etc.... I think you will hardly be surprised ... deep regret in severing the always harmonious connection between us ..." and so forth.
"Dear Prime Minister,
"Though you have long and often tried to dissuade me from this course ... etc., etc.... I think you will hardly be surprised ... deep regret in severing the always harmonious connection between us ..." and so forth.
Or else quite otherwise—
"Dear Prime Minister,"You will hardly be surprised, I imagine, after the strange occurrence of yesterday, when I had the interest of reading in a daily paper the first intimation that you desired a change at the Ministry I have the honour to adorn...."
"Dear Prime Minister,
"You will hardly be surprised, I imagine, after the strange occurrence of yesterday, when I had the interest of reading in a daily paper the first intimation that you desired a change at the Ministry I have the honour to adorn...."
Neither of these styles was used by Chester, who wrote briefly, without committing himself to any opinion as to the probable surprise or otherwise of the Ministerial Council—
"Dear Sirs,"I am resigning my office as Minister of Brains, owing to facts of which you will have doubtless heard, and which make it obviously undesirable for me to continue in the post."
"Dear Sirs,
"I am resigning my office as Minister of Brains, owing to facts of which you will have doubtless heard, and which make it obviously undesirable for me to continue in the post."
Having done this, he lay inert through quiet, snow-bound days and nights, and no one knew whether or not he was going to recover.
After a time he asked after Prideaux, and they told him Prideaux had not been hurt, only rumpled.
"He calls to ask after you pretty often," said Kitty. "Would you like to see him sometime? When the doctor says you can?"
"I don't care," Chester said. "Yes, I may as well."
So Prideaux came one afternoon (warned not to be political or exciting) and it was a queer meeting between him and Chester. Chester remembered the last shocked words he had had from Prideaux—"Good God!" and wondered, without interest, what Prideaux felt about it all now.
But it was not Prideaux's way to show much of what he felt.
They talked mainly of that night's happenings. Chester had already had full reports of these; of the fire, of the fight between the police and the crowd, in which several lives had been lost, of the arrest of the ringleaders and their trials. To Chester's own part in the proceedings they did not refer, till, after a pause, Chester suddenly said, "I have been wondering, but I can't make up my mind about it. How much difference to the business did the discovery about me make? Would they have gone to those lengths without it?"
Prideaux was silent. He believed that Chester that night on the balcony, had his hands been clean, could have held the mob.
Chester interpreted the silence.
"I suppose they wouldn't," he said impassively. "However, I fancy it only precipitated the catastrophe. The Ministry was down and under, in any case. People were determined not to stand laws that inconvenienced them—as I was. I was merely an example, not a cause, of that disease...."
That was the nearest he ever got with Prideaux to discussion of his own action.
"Anyhow," said Prideaux sadly, "the Ministry is down and under now. Imagine Frankie Lyle, poor little beggar, trying to carry on, after all this!" (This gentleman had been nominated as Chester's successor.)
Chester smiled faintly. "Poor little Frankie.... I hear Monk wouldn't touch it, by the way. I don't blame him.... Lyle won't hold them for a week; he'll back out on every point."
There was regret in his tired, toneless voice, and bitterness, because the points on which Lyle would back out were all points which he had made. He could have held them for a week, and more; he might even—there would have been a fighting chance of it—have pulled the Ministry through altogether, had things been otherwise. But things were not otherwise, and this was not his show any more. He looked at Prideaux half resentfully as Prideaux rose to leave him. Prideaux had not wrecked his own career....
To Kitty, the first time he had met her after the events of Boxing Night, Prideaux had shown more of his mind. He had come to ask after Chester, and had found Kitty there. He had looked at her sharply and coolly, as if she had made a stupid mistake over her work in the office.
"So you didn't guess, all this time," she had said to him, coolly too, because she resented his look.
"Not," he had returned, "that things had gone as far as this. I knew you were intimate, of course. There was that time in Italy.... But—well, honestly, I thought better of both your brains."
She gave up her momentary resentment, and slipped again into remorse.
"We thought better of them too—till we did it.... Have I spoilt his life, Vernon? I suppose so."
He shrugged his shoulders. "You've spoilt, and he's spoilt his own, career as Minister of Brains. There are other things, of course. Chester can't go under; he's too good a man to lose. They'll stick on to him somehow.... But ... well, what in heaven or earth or the other place possessed you both to do it, Kitty?"
To which she had no answer but "We just thought we would," and he left her in disgust.
Even in her hour of mortification and remorse, Kitty could still enjoy getting a rise out of Prideaux.
Pansy, who called often with showers of hot-house flowers, which Chester detested, was much more sympathetic. She was frankly delighted. She could not be allowed to see Chester; Kitty was afraid that her exuberance might send his temperature up.
"You won't mind my tellin' you now, darlin', but I've been thinkin' it was free love all this time. I didn't mind, you know. But this is more respectable. This family couldn't really properly afford another scandal; it might lose its good name, then what would Cyril say? It would come hard on the Cheeper, too. Now this is some marriage. Sosensibleof you both, to throw over those silly laws and do the jolly thing and have a good time. As I said to Tony, whatisthe good of making laws if you can't break them yourself? Now that your Nicky's set a good example, it really does seem as if all this foolishness was goin' to dwine away and be forgotten.... I guess it's doin' what we like and havin' a good time that matters, in the long run, isn't it. Not keepin' laws or improvin' the silly old world."
"Ask me another," said Kitty. "I haven't the slightest idea, Pansy, my love. You're usually right, so I daresay you're right about this. But you mustn't talk like that to Nicky, or he'll have a relapse."
"And fancy," Pansy mused, "me havin' got the great Minister of Brains for a brother-in-law! Or anyhow somethin' of the sort; as near as makes no difference. I shall never hear the last of it from the girls and boys.... Good-bye, old thing; I'm ever so pleased you're a happy wife now as well as me."
Chester handed Kitty a letter from his mother, the wife of a struggling bishop somewhere in the west country. It said, "Directly you are well enough, dear, you must bring Kitty to stay with us; She won't, I am sure, mind our simple ways.... My dear, we are so thankful you have found happiness. We are distressed about your accident, and about your loss of office, which I fear you will feel.... But, after all, love and happiness are so much more important than office, are they not?..."
"Important," Kitty repeated. "Queer word. Just what love and happiness aren't, you'd think. Comfortable—jolly—but not important.... Never you mind, Nicky, you'll be important always: Vernon is right about that. They'll put you somewhere where 'domestick selvishenesse' doesn't matter: perhaps they'll make you a peer...."
Chester said he would not be at all surprised.
Kitty said, "Shall we go and see your people?" and he replied gloomily, "I suppose we must. It will be ... rather trying."
"Will they condole with you?" she suggested, and he returned, "No. They'll congratulate me."
A fortnight later they went down to the west. Bishop Chester lived in a little old house in a slum behind his cathedral. Bishops' palaces were no longer bishops' homes; they had all been turned into community houses, clergy houses, retreat houses, alms houses, and so forth. Celibate bishops could live in them, together with other clergy of their diocese, but bishops with families had to find quarters elsewhere. And, married or unmarried, their incomes were not enough to allow of any style of living but that apostolic simplicity which the Church, directly it was freed from the State and could arrange its own affairs, had decided was right and suitable.
Not all bishops took kindly to the new régime; some resigned, and had to be replaced by bishops of the new and sterner school. But, to give bishops their due, which is too seldom done, they are for the most part good Christian men, ready to do what they believe is for the good of the Church. Many of their detractors were surprised at the amount of good-will and self-sacrifice revealed in the episcopal ranks when they were put to the test. If some failed under it—well, bishops, if no worse than other men, are human.
Bishop Chester had not failed. He had taken to plain living and plainer thinking (how often, alas, these two are to be found linked together!) with resignation, as a Christian duty. If it should bring any into the Church who had been kept outside it by his purple and fine linen, he would feel himself more than rewarded. If it should not, that was not his look-out. Which is to say that Bishop Chester was a good man, if not clever.
He and his wife were very kind to Chester and Kitty. Chester said he could not spare more than a day and night; he had to get back to town, where he had much business on hand, including the instituting of an action for malicious libel against Mr. Percy Jenkins and the publishers and proprietors of thePatriot. Kitty was not surprised at the shortness of the visit, for it was a humiliating visit. The bishop and Mrs. Chester, as their son had known they would, approved of his contravention of his own principles. They thought them, had always thought them, monstrous and inhuman principles.
The bishop said, "My dear boy, I can't tell you how thankful I am that you have decided at last to let humanity have its way with you. Humanity; the simple human things; love, birth, family life. They're the simple things, but, after all, the deep and grand things. No laws will ever supersede them."
And Mrs. Chester looked at Kitty with the indescribable look of mothers-in-law who hope that one day they may be grandmothers, and whispered to her when she said good-night, "And some day, dear...."
And they saw Chester's twin sister. She was harmless; she was even doing crochet work; and her face was the face of Chester uninformed by thought. Mrs. Chester said, "Nicky will have told you of our poor ailing girl...."
They came away next morning. They faced each other in the train, but they read theTimes(half each) and did not meet each other's eyes. They could not. They felt as thieves who still have consciences must feel when congratulated on their crimes by other thieves, who have not. Between them stood and jeered a Being with a vacant face and a phrase which it repeated with cynical reiteration. "You have let humanity have its way with you. Humanity; the simple human things.... No laws will ever supersede them...." And the Being's face was as the face of Chester's twin sister, the poor ailing girl.
To this they had come, then; to the first of the three simple human things mentioned by the bishop. What now, since they had started down the long slope of this green and easy hill, should arrest their progress, until they arrived, brakeless and unheld, into the valley where the other two waited, cynical, for all their simplicity, and grim?
Kitty, staring helplessly into the problematical future, saw, as if someone had turned a page and shown it to her, a domestic picture—herself and Chester (a peer, perhaps, why not?) facing one another not in a train but in a simple human home, surrounded by Family Life; two feckless, fallen persons, who had made a holocaust of theories and principles, who had reverted to the hand-to-mouth shiftlessness and mental sloppiness of the primitive Briton. Kitty could hear Chester, in that future, vaguer, family, peer's voice that might then be his, saying, "We must just trust to luck and muddle through somehow."
Even to that they might come....
In the next Great War—and who should stay its advent if such as these failed?—their sons would fight, without talent, their daughters would perhaps nurse, without skill. And so on, and so on, and so on....
So turned the world around. Individual desire given way to, as usual, ruining principle and ideals by its soft pressure. What would ever get done in such a world? Nothing, ever.
Suddenly, as if both had seen the same picture, they met one another's eyes across the carriage, and laughed ruefully.
That, anyhow, they could always do, though sitting among the debris of ruined careers, ruined principles, ruined Ministries, ruined ideals. It was something; perhaps, in a sad and precarious world, it was much....
"This tale of an elderly millionaire who goes incognito among his poor relations to discover to which of them he shall leave his fortune is extraordinarily soothing in these harassed times. The relations are most humorously studied."—Westminster Gazette.
"All his people are interesting and all ring true."Pall Mall Gazette.
"Miss Montgomery has a rare knack of making simple events and ordinary people both charming and moving; she can make her readers both laugh and weep."—Westminster Gazette.
"It is set in a captivating way among village folk drawn from life, treated with humour and sympathy, and decorated profusely with the talk and doings of real and interesting children."Manchester Guardian.
"It belongs to the class of literature which gives an intimate picture of the writer himself, who, in this particular case, endears himself to the reader by his humour, which is never cynical, and by his zest for the simple, which is never forced."—Westminster Gazette.
"A large theme of absorbing and growing interest is treated with great imaginative and pictorial power; and the writer's faith and enthusiasm, as well as her knowledge and her skilful handicraft, are manifest."—Scotsman.
"It has its own clear point of view. It reveals an engaging personality, and its contents, though dealing with subjects as diverse as Samuel Butler, Lord George Sanger, Meredith, Dan Leno, Voltaire and Bostock's Menagerie, are all of a piece. That is, it is a real book of essays."—The Bookman.
"M. Henry discourses most entertainingly on many subjects of German social life, and his book may be cordially recommended to those among us who seek for enlightenment on the mentality of our enemies."—Scotsman.
"It is a piece of personal good luck to have read it. One goes in and out of one's hall door with a delicious sense of possessing a secret. It increases one's confidence in the world. If a book like this can be written, there is, we feel, hope for the future."—The Athenæum.
"'The Last of the Romanofs' can be recommended to one desirous of understanding what has actually happened in Russia and what caused it to happen."—Globe.
"They give a picture of peace in the midst of war that is both fascinating and strange ... as an intimate sketch of one corner of the world-war, viewed at close quarters over the garden-hedge, these little books will have earned for themselves a place apart."—Punch.
In "The Pot Boils" the author has written a vivid and original study of the careers and the love-story of a modern young man and woman whom we first encounter as students at the same Northern University. Of life in this Northern University the author gives a realistic account, and equally realistic and entertaining is the description of the world of social reformers, feminists, journalists, vers-libristes in London, to which the scene is shifted later. It is a brilliant provocative book which will appeal to all those who are interested in appraising the worth and promise of modern movements and ideals.
In "The Ship of Death," Dr. Stilgebauer has written a romance which depicts in all its horror the havoc wrought by war upon human relationships and values outside the actual sphere of the battle-field. The instrument of disaster is Captain Stirn, the captain of the submarine which torpedoes the 'Lusitania,' styled here the 'Gigantic.' The first part of the book depicts the company on board, when the first premonitions of catastrophe are beginning to fill the air. Then comes the catastrophe itself; and the last section of this book presents Captain Stirn in the agony and delirium which seizes him after his deed of horror. The book is impressive and absorbing both by force and vividness of the author's style and imagination and by the vigorous sincerity and idealism which penetrate it throughout.
This book was first published in 1914, and the author has now written a new preface, explaining how the War has modified his views, but saying that whatever the Englishman may become, he would still be "The man of my choice, with whom I wrangle because he is my brother, far from whom I could not live, who quietly grins at my internationalism and makes allowances for me because, Englishman though I be, I was not born in his damned and dear little island."