What Not. A Prophetic Comedy

by Rose Macaulay

  And every patriotic advertiser of clothes, furs, jewellery, groceries, or other commodities, tacked on to his advertisement, "Take a ticket this week for the M.T. Course." And every patriotic letter-writer bought a Brains Stamp, and stamped his envelopes with the legend "Improve your Brains now."

  Railway bookstalls were spread with literature on the subject. The Queen, the Gentlewoman, the Sketch, and other such periodicals suited, one imagines, to the simpler type of female mind, had articles on "Why does a woman look old sooner than a man?" (the answer to this was that, though men are usually stupid, women are often stupider still, and have taken even less pains to improve their minds), "Take care of your mind and your complexion will take care of itself," "Raise yourself to category A, and you enlarge your matrimonial field," "How to train Baby's intellect," and so forth. Side by side with these journals was the current number of the Cambridge Magazine, bearing on its cover the legend "A Short Way with Fools; Pogrom of the Old Men. Everyone over forty to be shot." "We have always said," the article under these head-lines very truly began, "and we do not hesitate to say it again, that the only way to secure an intelligent government or citizenship in any nation is to dispose, firmly but not kindly, of the old and the middle-aged, and to let the young have their day. There will then be no more such hideous blunders as those with which the diplomacy of our doddering elders has wrecked the world again and again during the past centuries."

  The Evening News had cartoons every day of the Combing Out of the Stupid, whom it was pleased to call Algies and Dollies. The New Witness, on the other hand, striking a different note, said that it was the fine old Christian Gentile quality of stupidity which had made Old England what it was; the natives of Merrie England had always resented excessive acuteness, as exhibited in the Hebrew race at their expense. The Herald, however, rejoiced in large type in the Open Door to Labour; the Church Times reported Brains Sunday sermons by many divines (in most of them sounded the protest raised by the vicar of Little Chantreys against interference with domestic rights, the Church was obviously going to be troublesome in this matter) and the other journals, from the Hidden Hand down to Home Chat, supported the cause in their varying degrees and characteristic voices.

  Among them lay the Ministry of Brains pamphlets, "Brains. How to get and keep them," "The cultivation of the Mind," etc. In rows among the books and papers hung the Great Thoughts from Great Minds series—portraits of eminent persons with their most famous remarks on this subject inscribed beneath them. "It is the duty of every man, woman, and child in this country so to order their lives in this peace crisis as to make the least possible demand upon the intelligence of others. It is necessary, therefore, to have some of your own." (An eminent minister.) "I never had any assistance beyond my wits. Through them I am what I am. What that is, it is for others rather than for myself to judge." (A great journalist.) "It was lack of brains (I will not say whose, but it occurred before the first Coalition Government, mind you) which plunged Europe into the Great War. Brains—again, mark you, I do not say whose—must make and keep the Great Peace." (One of our former Prime Ministers.) "I have always wished I had some." (A Royal Personage.) "I must by all means have a Brains Ministry started in Liberia." (The Liberian Ambassador.) Then, after remarks by Shakespeare, Emerson, Carlyle, Mr. R. J. Campbell, Henry James, President Wilson, Marcus Aurelius, Solomon, Ecclesiasticus ("What is heavier than lead, and what is the name thereof but a fool?") and Miss Ella Wheeler Wilcox, the portrait gallery concluded with Mr. Nicholas Chester, the Minister of Brains, looking like an embittered humorist, and remarking, "It's a damned silly world."

  2

  "Amen to that," Miss Kitty Grammont remarked, stopping for a moment after buying Truth at the bookstall and gazing solemnly into the Minister's disillusioned eyes. "And it would be a damned dull one if it wasn't." She sauntered out of Charing Cross tube station and boarded an Embankment tram. This was the Monday morning after Brains Week had run its course.

  The fact had to be faced by the Ministry: Brains Week had proved disappointing. The public were not playing up as they should.

  "We have said all along," said The Times (anticipating the Hidden Hand, which had not yet made up its mind), "that the Government should take a strong line in this matter. They must not trust to voluntary effort; we say, and we believe that, as always, we voice the soundest opinion in the country, that it is up to the Government to take the measures which it has decided, upon mature consideration, to be for the country's good. Though we have given every possible support to the great voluntary effort recently made, truth compels us to state that the results are proving disappointing. Compulsion must follow, and the sooner the Government make up their minds to accept this fact the better advised it will be. Surely if there is one thing above all others which the Great War (so prolific in lessons) has taught us, it is that compulsion is not tyranny, nor law oppression. Let the Government, too long vacillating, act, and act quickly, and they will find a responsive and grateful nation ready to obey."

  Thus The Times, and thus, in a less dignified choice of language, many lesser organs. To which the Herald darkly rejoined, "If the Government tries this on, let it look to itself."

  "It'll have to come," said Vernon Prideaux to Kitty Grammont at lunch. They were lunching at one of those underground resorts about which, as Kitty said, you never know, some being highly respectable, while others are not. Kitty, with her long-lashed, mossy eyes and demure expression, looked and felt at home among divans for two, screens, powdered waitresses, and rose-shaded lights; she had taken Prideaux there for fun, because among such environment he looked a stranger and pilgrim, angular, fastidious, whose home was above. Kitty liked to study her friends in different lights, even rose-shaded ones, and especially one who, besides being a friend, was her departmental superior, and a coming, even come, young man of exceptional brilliance, who might one day be ruling the country.

  "If it does," said Kitty, "we shall have to go, that's all. No more compulsion is going to be stood at present. Nothing short of another war, with a military dictatorship and martial law, will save us."

  "We stood compulsory education when there was no war," Prideaux pointed out. "We've stood vaccination, taxation, every conceivable form of interference with what we are pleased to call our liberty. This is no worse; it's the logical outcome of State government of the individual. Little by little, precept upon precept, line upon line, these things grow, till we're a serf state without realising it.... After all, why not? What most people mean by freedom would be a loathsome condition; freedom to behave like animals or lunatics, to annoy each other and damage the State. What's the sense of it? Human beings aren't up to it, that's the fact."

  "I quite agree with you," said Kitty. "Only the weak point is that hardly any human beings are up to making good laws for the rest, either. We shall slip up badly over this Mind Training Act, if we ever get it through; it will be as full of snags as the Mental Progress Act. We shall have to take on a whole extra Branch to deal with the exemptions alone. Chester's clever, but he's not clever enough to make a good Act. No one is.... By the way, Vernon, you nearly told me something the other day about Chester's category. You might quite tell me now, as we're in the Raid Shelter and not in the Office."

  "Did I? It was only that I heard he was uncertificated for marriage. He's got a brother and a twin sister half-witted. I suppose he collared all the brains that were going in his family."

  "He would, of course, if he could. He's selfish."

  "Selfish," Prideaux was doubtful. "If you can call such a visionary and idealist selfish."

  "Visionaries and idealists are always selfish. Look at Napoleon, and Wilhelm II, as Mr. Delmer would say. Visions and ideals are the most selfish things there are. People go about wrapped in them, and keep themselves so warm that they forget that other people need ordinary clothes.... So the Minister is uncertificated.... Well, I'm going up to Regent Street to buy a birthday present for Pansy and cigarettes for myself."


  "I must get back," said Prideaux. "I've a Leeds Manufacturers' deputation coming to see me at 2.30 about their men's wages. Leeds workmen, apparently, don't let the Mental Progress Act weigh on them at all; they go calmly ahead with their uncertificated marriages, and then strike for higher wages in view of the taxable family they intend to produce. These fellows coming to-day have got wind of the new agreement with the cutlers and want one like it. I've got to keep them at arm's length."

  He emerged above ground, breathed more freely, and walked briskly back to the Ministry. Kitty went to Regent Street, and did not get back to the office until 3.15.

  3

  Kitty had lately been returned from the Propaganda Branch to her own, the Exemption Branch. Being late, she slipped into her place unostentatiously. Her in-tray contained a mass of files, as yet undealt with. She began to look through these, with a view to relegating the less attractive to the bottom of the tray, where they could wait until she had nothing better to do than to attend to them. To-day there were a great many letters from the public beginning "Dear Sir, Mr. Wilkinson said in parliament on Tuesday that families should not be reduced to destitution through the baby-taxes...." That was so like Mr. Wilkinson (parliamentary secretary to the Brains Ministry). Whenever he thoughtlessly dropped these obiter dicta, so sweeping, so far removed from truth, which was almost whenever he spoke, there was trouble. The guileless public hung on his words, waiting to pick them up and send them in letters to the Ministry. These letters went to the bottom of the tray. They usually only needed a stock reply, telling the applicants to attend their local tribunal. After several of these in succession, Kitty opened a file which had been minuted down from another branch, M.B. 4. Attached to it were two sheets of minutes which had passed between various individuals regarding the case in question; the last minute was addressed to M.B. 3, and said "Passed to you for information and necessary action." It was a melancholy tale from an aggrieved citizen concerning his infant, who was liable to a heavy tax, and who had been drowned by his aunt while being washed, before he was two hours old, and the authorities still demanded the payment of the tax. Kitty, who found the helplessness of M.B. 4 annoying, wrote a curt minute, "Neither information nor action seems to us necessary," then had to erase it because it looked rude, and wrote instead, more mildly, "Seen, thank you. This man appears to be covered by M.B.I. 187, in which case his taxation is surely quite in order and no action is possible. We see no reason why we should deal with the case rather than you."

  It is difficult always to be quite polite in minutes, cheap satire costing so little and relieving the feelings, but it can and should be done; nothing so shows true breeding in a Civil Servant.

  Kitty next replied to a letter from the Admiralty, about sailors' babies (the family arrangements of sailors are, of course, complicated, owing to their having a wife in every port). The Admiralty said that My Lords Commissioners had read the Minister of Brains' (i.e. Kitty's) last letter to them on this subject with much surprise. The Admiralty's faculty of surprise was infinitely fresh; it seemed new, like mercy, each returning day. The Minister of Brains evoked it almost every time he, through the pens of his clerks, wrote to them. My Lords viewed with grave apprehension the line taken by the Minister on this important subject, and They trusted it would be reconsidered. (My Lords always wrote of themselves with a capital They, as if they were deities.) Kitty drafted a reply to this letter and put it aside to consult Prideaux about. She carried on a chronic quarrel with My Lords, doubtless to the satisfaction of both sides.

  Soothed and stimulated by this encounter, she was the better prepared in temper when she opened a file in which voluminous correspondence concerning two men named Stephen Williams had been jacketed together by a guileless registry, to whom such details as that one Stephen Williams appeared to be a dentist's assistant and the other a young man in the diplomatic service were as contemptible obstacles, to be taken in an easy stride. The correspondence in this file was sufficiently at cross purposes to be more amusing than most correspondence. When she had perused it, Kitty, sad that she must tear asunder this happily linked pair, sent it down to the registry with a regretful note that "These two cases, having no connection, should be registered separately," and fell to speculating, as she often did, on the registry, which, amid the trials that beset them and the sorrows they endured, and the manifold confusions and temptations of their dim life, were so strangely often right. They worked underground, the registry people, like gnomes in a cave, opening letters and registering them and filing them and sending them upstairs, astonishingly often in the file which belonged to them. But, mainly, looking for papers and not finding them, and writing "No trace," "Cannot be traced," on slips, as if the papers were wild animals which had got loose and had to be hunted down. A queer life, questing, burrowing, unsatisfied, underground.... No wonder they made some mistakes.

  Kitty opened one now—a bitter complaint, which should have gone to M.B. 5, from one who considered himself placed in a wrong category. "When I tell you, sir," it ran, "that at the Leamington High School I carried off two prizes (geography and recitation) and was twice fourth in my form, and after leaving have given great satisfaction (I am told) as a solicitor's clerk, so that there has been some talk of raising my salary, you will perhaps be surprised to hear that the Local Intelligence Board placed me in class C1. I applied to the County Board, and (owing, as I have reason to know, to local feeling and jealousy) I was placed by them in C2. Sir, I ask you for a special examination by the Central Intelligence Board. I should be well up in Class B. There are some walking about in this town who are classed B1 and 2, who are the occasion of much local feeling, as it surprises all who know them that they should be classed so high. To my knowledge some of these persons cannot do a sum right in their heads, and it is thought very strange that they should have so imposed on the Intelligence Officers, though the reasons for this are not really far to seek, and should be enquired into...."

  A gay and engaging young man with a wooden leg (he had lost his own in 1914, and had during the rest of the war worked at the War Office, and carried the happy Q.M.G. touch) wandered in from M.B. 5 while Kitty was reading this, and she handed it over to him. He glanced at it.

  "We shall perhaps be surprised, shall we.... How likely.... The public overestimate our faculty for surprise. They have yet to learn that the only thing which would surprise the Ministry of Brains would be finding someone correctly classified.... I shall tell him I'm A2 myself, though I never got a prize in my life for geography or recitation, and I can't do sums in my head for nuts. I ought to be somewhere about B3; I surprise all who know me.... What I came in to say was, do any of you in here want a sure tip for the Oaks? Because I've got one. Silly Blighter; yes, you thought he was an absolute outsider, didn't you, so did everyone else; but he's not. You take the tip, it's a straight one, first hand. No, don't mention it, I always like to do M.B. 3 a good turn, though I wouldn't do it for everyone.... Well, I'm off, I'm beastly busy.... Heard the latest Chester, by the way? Someone tried the Wheeldon stunt on him—sent him a poisoned thorn by special messenger in a packet "To be opened by the Minister Himself." Jervis-Browne opened it, of course, and nearly pricked him self. When he took it to Chester, Chester did the Sherlock Holmes touch, and said he knew the thorn, it came off a shrub in Central Africa or Kew Gardens or somewhere. I think he knew the poison, too; he wanted Jervis-Browne to suck it, to make sure, but J.-B. wasn't having any, and Chester didn't like to risk himself, naturally. His little P.S. would have done it like a shot, but they thought it would be hard luck on the poor child's people. And while they were discussin' it, Chester ran the thing into his own finger by mistake. While J.-B. was waitin' to see him swell up and turn black, and feelin' bad lest he should be told to suck it (he knows Chester doesn't really value him at his true worth, you see), Chester whipped out his penknife and gouged a great slice out of his finger as you'd cut cheese, all round the prick. He turned as white as chalk, J.-B. says, but never sc
reamed, except to let out one curse. And when he'd done it, and had the shorthand typist in from J.-B.'s room to tie it up, he began to giggle—you know that sad, cynical giggle of his that disconcerts solemn people so much—and said he'd have the beastly weapon cleaned and take it home and frame it in glass, with the other mementoes of a people's hate.... I say, I do waste your time in here, don't I? And my own; that's to say the government's. I'm off."

  "Gay child," Kitty murmured to her neighbour as he went. "He blooms in an office like an orchid in a dust-bin. And very nice too. I remember being nearly as bright at his age; though, for my sins, I was never in Q.M.G. A wonderful Branch that is."

  Thereupon she threw away her cigarette, wrote five letters with extraordinary despatch and undepartmental conciseness of style, and went to have tea in the canteen.

  4

  The Minister was having tea too, looking even paler than usual, with his left hand in a sling. Kitty put up her eye-glasses and looked at him with increased interest. As ministers go, he was certainly of an interesting appearance; she had always thought that. She rather liked the paradoxical combination of shrewdness and idealism, sullenness and humour, in his white, black-browed, clever face. He looked patient, but patient perforce, as if he rode natural impatience on a curb. He looked as if he might know a desperate earnestness, but preferred to keep it at arm's length with a joke; his earnestness would be too grim and violent to be an easy and natural companion to him. He looked as if he might get very badly hurt, but would cut out the hurt and throw it away with the cold promptness of the surgeon. He was not yet forty, but looked more, perhaps because he enjoyed bad health. At this moment he was eating a rock bun and talking to Vernon Prideaux. One difference between them was that Prideaux looked an intelligent success, like a civil servant, or a rising barrister or M.P., and Chester looked a brilliant failure, and more like a Sinn Feiner or a Bolshevist. Only not really like either of these, because he didn't look as if he would muff things. He might go under, but his revolutions wouldn't. Kitty, who too greatly despised people who muffed things, recognised the distinction. She had a friend whose revolutions, which were many, always did go under....