Read Ebook: What Not: A Prophetic Comedy by Macaulay Rose

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 640 lines and 54253 words, and 13 pages

at all near, a street aero. That, probably, is the object. In the old days it was the motor bus that was thus made a thing of terror by the princes of the nether world. Now, even as then, their efforts met with success, and the tubes were filled with a panic-stricken mob.

Kitty Grammont, something of the elegant rake, something of the gamin, something of the adventuress, something of the scholar, with innocent amber-brown eyes gazing ingenuously from under long black lashes, a slightly cynical mouth, a small, smooth, rounded, child's face, a travelled manner, and an excellent brain, was adequately, as people go, equipped for the business of living. She had seen some life, in a past which, if chequered, had not lacked its gaiety, meant to see much more, in a future which she did not foresee clearly but which she intended should be worthy of her, and was seeing enough to go on with in a present which, though at moments it blackly bored her , was on the whole decidedly entertaining.

Ivy Delmer, looking at her across the compartment, with some surprise because she was so nearly punctual this morning, this not being one of her habits, admired her greatly, thinking how clever she was, how clearly, how unhesitatingly, how incisively her sentences came out when she was dictating, cutting their way, in that cool, light, dragging voice of hers, through her subject, however intricate, as a sharp blade cuts ice; quite different from some people's dictation, which trails to and fro, emending, cancelling, hesitating, indistinct, with no edge to it, so that one's shorthand has constantly to be altered, making a mess on the page, and bits of it read aloud to see how it goes now, which was a nuisance, because one can't rely always on being able to read off even one's own shorthand quite fluently straight away like that. Further--and this was nearer Ivy's heart--Miss Grammont wore, as a rule, charming shoes. She also smoked extraordinarily nice cigarettes, and often had delicious chocolates, and was generous with both.

All this made it a grief to Ivy Delmer that Miss Grammont's brother and his family, who lived in her father's parish, and with whom Miss Grammont often stayed, were not Approved Of. Into the reasons for this it will be more appropriate to enter later in this narrative.

Oxford Circus. The hub of the world, where seething mobs fought on the platform like wild beasts. Piccadilly Circus. Lucky people, thought Ivy Delmer, who got out there, all among gaiety and theatres. Trafalgar Square. There naval officers got out, to visit the Admiralty, or the Nelson Column. Charing Cross. There people had got out during the Great War, to go and help the War Office or the Ministry of Munitions to run the business. So much help, so much energy, so many hotels.... And now there were more than ever, because so much needed doing, and hotels are the means heaven has given us to do it with.

At Charing Cross Ivy Delmer and Kitty Grammont got out, for, without specifying the hotel where the Ministry of Brains carried on its labours, it may be mentioned without indiscretion that it was within a walk of Charing Cross.

Miss Grammont and Miss Delmer walked there, Miss Delmer well ahead and hurrying, because to her it seemed late, Miss Grammont behind and sauntering because to her it seemed superfluously early. The Ministry daily day began at 9.30, and it was only 9.40 now.

The summer morning was glittering on the river like laughter. A foolish thing it seemed, to be going into an hotel on a summer morning, to be sitting down at a government desk laden with government files, taking a government pen and writing pamphlets, or answers to letters which, if left long enough, would surely answer themselves, as is the way of letters, and all to improve the Brains of the Nation. Bother the Brains of the Nation, thought Miss Grammont, only she used a stronger word, as was the custom in what Mrs. Delmer called her unfortunate family. Black doubt sometimes smote her as to not so much the efficacy of the work of her Department as its desirability if ever it should be perfectly accomplished. Did brains matter so greatly after all? Were the clever happier than the fools? Miss Grammont, whose university career had been a brilliant intellectual adventure, felt competent to speak for both these types of humanity. She knew herself to be happier when playing the fool than when exerting her highly efficient brain; the lunatic-asylum touch gave her more joy than the studious, and she wore learning like a cap and bells. But stupidity was, of course, a bore. It must, of course, be mitigated, if possible. And anyhow the object of the Ministry of Brains was not to make people happy , nor to make them good , but to further social progress and avert another Great War.

Miss Grammont yawned, because the day was yet so young, and followed Miss Delmer up the steps of the hotel.

The Ministry of Brains, a vast organisation, had many sections. There was the Propaganda Section, which produced pamphlets and organised lectures and cinema shows ; there was the Men's Education Section, the Women's, and the Children's; the Section which dealt with brain-tests, examinations, certificates, and tribunals, and the Section which was concerned with the direction of the intellects of the Great Unborn. Ivy Delmer was attached to this section, and Mr. Delmer, when he heard about it, was not altogether sure it was quite nice for her.

"She surely shouldn't know they have any," he had said to his wife, who was weeding, and replied absently, "Any what, dear? Who?"

"Intellects," the vicar said. "The Unborn. Besides, they haven't." He was frowning, and jerking out dandelions from the lawn with a spud.

The vicar admitted that, even for their precious and very young Ivy, there was no great harm in this.

The Section in question was, as Mrs. Delmer had stated, concerned with the encouragement and discouragement of alliances in proportion as they seemed favourable or otherwise to the propagation of intelligence in the next generation. There were numerous and complicated regulations on the subject, which could not, of course, be enforced; the Ministry's methods were those of stimulation, reward and punishment, rather than of coercion. There were bonuses on the births of the babies of parents conforming to the regulations, and penal taxes on unregulated infants, taxes increasing in proportion to the flagrancy of the parents' disobedience, so that the offspring of parents of very low mental calibre brought with them financial ruin. Everyone held a Ministry of Brains form, showing his or her mental category, officially ascertained and registered. If you were classified A, your brains were certified to be of the highest order, and you were recommended to take a B2 or B3 partner . To ally yourself with another A or a B1 was regarded as wasteful, there not being nearly enough of these to go round, and your babies would receive much smaller bonuses. If you were classed C1, C2, or C3, your babies would receive no encouragement, unless you had diluted their folly with an A partner; if you chose to unite with another C they were heavily fined, and if you were below C3 they were fined still more heavily, by whomsoever diluted, and for the third and subsequent infants born under such conditions you would be imprisoned. Families among the lower grades and among the uncertificated were thus drastically discouraged. You were uncertificated for matrimonial purposes not only if you were very stupid, but if, though yourself of brilliant mental powers, you had actual deficiency in your near family. If you were in this case, your form was marked "A ."

And so on: the details of the regulations, their intricacies and tangled knots, the endless and complicated special arrangements which were made with various groups and classes of persons, may be easily imagined, or found in the many volumes of the Ministry of Brains Instructions.

Anyhow, to room number 13, which was among the many rooms where this vast and intricate subject was dealt with, Ivy Delmer was summoned this Monday morning to take down a letter for Vernon Prideaux.

Vernon Prideaux was a fair, slim, neat, eye-glassed young man; his appearance and manners were approved by Ivy Delmer's standards and his capabilities by the heads of his department. His intellectual category was A; he had an impatient temper, a ready tongue, considerable power over papers , resource in emergency, competence in handling situations and persons, decided personal charm, was the son of one of our more notorious politicians, and had spent most of the war in having malaria on the Struma front, with one interesting break when he was recalled to England by his former department to assist in the drawing up of a new Bill, dealing with a topic on which he was an expert. He was, after all this, only thirty now, so had every reason for believing, as he did, that he would accomplish something in this world before he left it. He had been sucked into the activities of the new Ministry like so many other able young men and women, and was finding it both entertaining and not devoid of scope for his talents.

Ivy Delmer admired him a good deal. She sat at his side with her notebook and pencil, her soft, wide mouth a little parted, waiting for him to begin. He was turning over papers impatiently. He was in a rather bad temper, because of his new secretary, of whom he only demanded a little common sense and did not get it, and he would have to get rid of her, always a tiresome process. He couldn't trust her with anything, however simple; she always made a hash of it, and filled up the gaps, which were profound, in her recollection of his instructions with her own ideas, which were not. He had on Saturday given her some forms to fill up, stock forms which were always sent in reply to a particular kind of letter from the public. The form was supposed merely to say, "In reply to your letter with reference to your position as regards the tax on your prospective infant, I am to inform you that your case is one for the decision of the Local Tribunals set up under the Mental Progress Act, to whom your application should have been made." Miss Pomfrey, who was young and full of zeal for the cause , had added on her own account to one such letter, "It was the stupidity of people like you who caused the Great War," and put it this morning with the other forms on Prideaux's table for signing. Prideaux had enquired, fighting against what he knew to be a disproportionate anger with her, didn't she really know better by now than to think that letters like that would be sent? Miss Pomfrey had sighed. She did not know better than that by now. She knew hardly anything. She was not intelligent, even as B3's went. In fact, her category was probably a mistake. Her babies, if ever she had any, would be of a mental calibre that did not bear contemplation. They would probably cause another Great War.

So Prideaux, who had also other worries, was out of temper.

"Sorry, Miss Delmer.... Ah, here we are." He fidgeted about with a file, then began to dictate a letter, in his quick, light, staccato voice. Ivy, clenching the tip of her pink tongue between her teeth, raced after him.

"Sir,

"In reply to your letter of 26th May with reference to the taxation on babies born to your employees and their consequent demand for increased wages, I am instructed by the Minister of Brains to inform you that this point is receiving his careful attention, in connection with the general economic question involved by the terms of Ministry of Brains Instruction 743, paragraph 3...."

Prideaux paused, and frowned nervously at his secretary, who was conducting a fruitless conversation over his telephone, an occupation at which she did not shine.

"What is it, Miss Pomfrey?" Prideaux broke in, making her start.

"It's the Minister's secretary," she explained, without covering the receiver. "He says will you go to the Minister. There's a deputation--of bishops, I think he said. About the new Instruction about Clergymen's Babies.... But I said you were busy dictating...."

Prideaux had jumped to his feet, frowning, and was at the door.

"You'd better make a note that I'm never busy dictating or doing anything else when the Minister sends for me," he shot at her as he left the room.

"And now he's cross," Miss Pomfrey murmured sadly.

"I daresay he's only angry at being interrupted," said Ivy Delmer, who had been at the same secretarial college as Miss Pomfrey and thought that her days in the Ministry of Brains were numbered.

Ivy found a moment in which to hope that everyone in the Ministry was being very careful and painstaking about this business, before she reverted to wondering whether or not she liked the colour which Miss Pomfrey had dyed her jersey.

Having decided that she didn't, and also that she had better go away and wait for Mr. Prideaux to send for her again, she departed.

Vernon Prideaux, having given his assistance to the Minister in the matter of the third clause of the new Clergymen's Babies Instruction, left the Minister and the deputation together and returned to his room via the Propaganda Branch, which he visited in order to ask Miss Grammont to dine with him that evening. He and Kitty Grammont had known one another for some years. They had begun at Cambridge, where Prideaux had been two years the senior, and had kept up an intermittent friendship ever since, which had, since their association in the Ministry, grown into intimacy.

Prideaux found Kitty writing a pamphlet. She was rather good at this form of literature, having a concise and clear-cut style and an instinct for stopping on the right word. Some pamphleteers have not this art: they add a sentence or two more, and undo their effect. The pamphlet on which Miss Grammont was at this moment engaged was intended for the perusal of the working woman, and bore the conversational title, "The Nation takes an interest in Your Affairs: will You not take an interest in the Affairs of the Nation?" Which, as Miss Grammont observed, took rather a long time to say, but may have been worth it.

"Dine with you? I'll be charmed. Where and when?"

"My rooms, eight o'clock. I've got my parents and the Minister coming."

"Oh, the Minister."

"Do you mind?"

"No, I'm proud to meet him. I've never yet met him over food, so to speak, only officially. I admire our Chester more every day he lives, don't you? Nature made him and then broke the die."

Another improper subject, naturally, was Liberty. That needs no explanation; it has always been improper in well-regulated countries, like Eugenics, or the Poor, and has received no encouragement from authority. Notwithstanding this, so many improper works upon it, in every conceivable form, have always been produced, that the censors had to engage a special clerk, who had just obtained a first class in English Literature at Oxford, and who therefore had books and pamphlets of all dates fresh in her memory, to check their researches and inform them when their energies were superfluous. Not that all the books of former centuries on this topic were to be encouraged, for, after all, one period is in some respects singularly like another, and the same reflections strangely germane to both. Naturally, therefore, when the literary clerk, seeing advertised a new and cheap edition of Robert Hall's "Sentiments proper to the present crisis," and, remembering the trend of this work, sent for it , and read such remarks as "Freedom, driven from every spot on the continent, has sought an asylum in a country which she always chose for her favourite abode, but she is pursued even here and threatened with destruction.... It is for you to decide whether this freedom shall yet survive, or be clothed with a funeral pall and be wrapped in eternal gloom"--very properly she reported the matter to headquarters, and the cheap edition was called in.

It will therefore be readily understood that even government departments had to go warily in this matter.

The Minister of Brains held pamphlet propaganda to be of the greatest importance. A week ago the workers in the propaganda section had been sent for and interviewed by the Minister in person. This personal contact had, for the time being, oddly weighted Miss Grammont's too irresponsible levity, kindled her rather cynical coolness, given her something almost like zeal. That was one thing about the Minister--he set other people on fire. Another was that his manners were bad but unexpected, and a third that he looked like a cross between M. Kerensky, a member of the Geddes family, and Mr. Nelson Keys.

Thus Miss Grammont, thoughtfully smoking a Cyprus cigarette, summed up the Minister of Brains.

LITTLE CHANTREYS

Ivy Delmer went home to Little Chantreys on the following Saturday afternoon, after a matin?e and tea in town, in the same train, though not the same carriage as Kitty Grammont and Vernon Prideaux, who were presumably spending the week-end at the End House. Ivy travelled home every evening of the week. Miss Grammont had a flat in town, but spent the week-ends when she was not otherwise engaged, with her brother in Little Chantreys, which was embarrassing to Ivy.

As Ivy got out of the train she saw Miss Grammont's brother and the lady who could scarcely be called her sister-in-law, on the platform, accompanied by a queer-looking man of about forty, with ears rather like a faun's. Anyone, thought Ivy, could have guessed which house in Little Chantreys he was staying at. The week-end people who came to the End House differed widely one from another in body and soul; some looked clever, or handsome, others did not, some were over-dressed, some under, some, like Miss Grammont and her brothers, just right; there were musical people, sporting people, literary or artistic people, stagy people , uncommon people, and common people; but they all, thought Ivy Delmer, had two looks in common--they looked as if they wouldn't get on very well with her father and mother, and they looked as if they didn't read the Bible.

This second look was differentiated according to the wearer of it. Some of them looked as if he didn't read it because it had become so inextricably bound up with vulgar superstition and an impossible religion that he despised it. Some, like Miss Grammont and her brother Anthony, looked as if they didn't read it because they already knew enough of it to be funny about it when they wanted to; others, like Miss Pansy Ponsonby, looked as if she had really once given it a try, but had found it dry and put off further perusal until such time as she lay dying and might want to do something about her future state. And Miss Grammont's brother Cyril looked as if it was a Protestant book, and rather vulgar. Some, again, looked innocent, as if they had never heard of it, others guilty, as if they never wanted to again.

Ivy Delmer walked home to the Vicarage, hoping rather that the End House wouldn't come to church to-morrow. It was taken, from time to time, with an unaccountable fit of doing this. It made Ivy uncomfortable. Whether or not it came to pray, she could not help having an uneasy suspicion that it stayed to mock.

It was, indeed, not an unpleasing group. Dominating it was Miss Ponsonby herself, very tall, very beautiful, very supple , with long and lovely violet eyes and the best kind of Icilma skin, adorned tastefully but quite unnecessarily with pink paint, white powder, scarlet lip salve, and black lash-darkener. All this was from force of habit: Miss Ponsonby was quite adequately pink, white, scarlet and black in her own person. But, as Kitty observed, having been given by heaven such an absurd thing as a human face, what could one do but make it yet more absurd by these superimposed gaieties? You cannot take a face as a serious thing; it is one of nature's jests, and it is most suitably dealt with as the clown and the pierrot deal with theirs. This was Kitty's point of view; Pansy had none, only habits.

Pansy was guiding and controlling a motor-pram, in which lay the Cheeper, aged four months . The Cheeper's father, Anthony Grammont, was a fair, pale, good-looking, rather tired young man of seven and twenty, with a slightly plaintive voice; he looked as if he shared, only with more languor, Miss Ponsonby's placid and engaging enjoyment of the world; he had been in one of the hottest corners of France through the European War, and had emerged from it a bored and unambitious colonel, deaf of one ear, adorned with a Military Cross, and determined to repay himself for his expenditure of so much time, energy and health by enjoying the fifty or sixty years which, he piously hoped, remained to him, to the full. Which he was now doing. His professional life was passed on the Stock Exchange.

Mr. Leslie Amherst, the man like a faun, who was staying with him, was an old friend of the Grammont family. He wrote, and was on the staff of a weekly journal. He was engaged just now on a series of articles on the Forces of Darkness in Darkest Europe. So far he had produced 1. The Legislature, 2. Capitalism, 3. Industrialism, 4. Nationalism, 5. Militarism, 6. The Press, and this week he was writing 7. Organised Religion. Though Amherst talked like a cynic, and had his affectations, he was an earnest thinker, and sometimes tired his host, who was not, and who had been left by his years of difficult continental sojourn with a supreme distaste for any further probing into the problems of Darkest Europe. Amherst had the advantage, in this matter, of having been a Conscientious Objector to Military Service, so the war had not tired him, and he retained for home use the freshness and vigour of attack which had, in the case of many of his fellow-countrymen, been all used up abroad.

The End House party was completed by Kitty Grammont, with her round, long-lashed eyes and her air of the ingenuous rake, and Vernon Prideaux, brisk and neat and clever. So there they all were; and very nice, too.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet