What Not. A Prophetic Comedy

by Rose Macaulay

  They would climb often to the top of one or other of this row of hills that guarded the bay, and from its top, resting by some old pulley well or little shrine, they would look down over hills and sea bathed in evening light, and see to the east the white gleam of Genoa shimmering like a pearl, like a ghost, between transparent sea and sky, to the west the point of Savona jutting dark against a flood of fire.

  There was one hill they often climbed, a steep little pine-grown mountain crested by a little old chapel, with a well by its side. The chapel was dedicated to the Madonna della Mare, and was hung about inside with votive offerings of little ships, presented to the Madonna by grateful sailors whom she had delivered from the perils of the sea. Outside the chapel a shrine stood, painted pink, and from it the mother and child smiled kindly down on the withered flowers that nearly always lay on the ledge before them.

  By the shrine and the well Chester and Kitty would sit, while the low light died slowly from the hills, till its lower slopes lay in evening shadow, and only they on the summit remained, as if en-chanted, in a circle of fairy gold.

  One evening while they sat there a half-witted contadino slouched out of the chapel and begged from them. Chester refused sharply, and turned his face away. The imbecile hung about, mouthed a confused prayer, bowing and crossing, before the shrine, got no help from that quarter either, and at last shambled disconsolately down the hillside, crooning an unintelligible song to himself.

  Kitty, looking at Chester, saw with surprise that his face was rigid with disgust; he looked as if he were trying not to shudder.

  "How you hate them, Nicky," she said curiously.

  He said "I do," grimly, and spoke of something else.

  But a little later he said abruptly, "I've never told you much about my people, Kitty, have I, or what are called my early years?"

  "You wouldn't, of course," she replied, "any more than I should. We're neither of us much interested in the past; you live in the future, and I live in the present moment.... But I should be interested to hear, all the same."

  "That imbecile reminded me," Chester said grimly. "I had a twin sister like that, and a brother not very far removed from it. You know that, of course; but you'll never know, no one can ever know who's not experienced it, what it was like.... At first, when I began to do more than just accept it as part of things as they were, it only made me angry that such things should be possible, and frightfully sorry for Joan and Gerald, who had to go about like that, so little use to themselves or anyone else, and so tiresome to me and Maggie (she's my eldest sister; I'd like you to meet her one day). I remember even consulting Maggie as to whether it wouldn't be a good thing to take them out into a wood and lose them, like the babes in the wood. I honestly thought it would be for their own good; I knew I should have preferred it if I had been them. But Maggie didn't agree; she took a more patient line about it than I did; she always does. Then, as I grew older, I became angry with my parents, who had no right, of course, to have had any children at all; they were first cousins, and deficiency was in the family.... It was that that first set me thinking about the whole subject. I remember I asked my father once, when I was about seventeen, how he had reconciled it with his conscience (he was a dean at that time) to do such a thing. I must have been an irritating young prig, of course; in fact, I remember that I was. He very properly indicated to me that I was stepping out of my sphere in questioning him on such a point, and also that whatever is must be sent by Providence, and therefore right. I didn't drop it at once; I remember I argued that it hadn't "been" and therefore had not necessarily been right, until he and my mother made it so; but he closed the conversation; quite time too, I suppose. It was difficult to argue with my father in those days; it's easier now, though not really easy. I think the reduction of the worldly condition of bishops has been good for him; it has put him in what I suppose is called a state of grace. I don't believe he'd do it now, if he lived his life again. However, he did do it, and the result was two deficient children and one who grew up loathing stupidity in the way some few people (conceivably) loathe vice, when they've been brought into close contact with its effects. It became an obsession with me; I seemed to see it everywhere, spoiling everything, blocking every path, tying everyone's hands. The Boer war happened while I was at school.... Good Lord.... Then I went to Cambridge, and it was there that I really began to think the thing seriously out. What has always bothered me about it is that human beings are so astoundingly clever; miraculously clever, if you come to think of it, and compare us with the other animals, so like us in lots of ways. The things we've done; the animal state we've grown out of; the things we've discovered and created—it makes one's head reel. And if we can be clever like that, why not be a little cleverer still? Why be so abysmally stupid about many things? The waste of it.... The world might get anywhere if we really developed our powers to their full extent. But we always slip up somewhere: nothing quite comes off as it should. Think of all these thousands of years of house-managing, and the really clever arrangements which have been made in connection with it—and then visit a set of cottages and see the mess; a woman trying to cook food and clean the house and look after children and wash clothes, all by hand, and with the most inadequate contrivances for any of it. Why haven't we thought of some way out of that beastly, clumsy squalor and muddle yet? And why do houses built and fitted like some of those still exist? If we're clever enough to have invented and built houses at all, why not go one better and do it properly? It's the same with everything. Medical science, for instance. The advances it's made fill one with amaze and admiration; but why is there still disease? And why isn't there a cure for every disease? And why do doctors fail so hopelessly to diagnose anything a little outside their ordinary beat? There it is; we've been clever about it in a way, but nothing like clever enough, or as clever as we've got to be before we've done. The same with statesmanship and government; only there we've very seldom been clever at all; that's still to come. And our educational system ... oh Lord.... The mischief is that people in general don't want other people to become too clever; it wouldn't suit their turn. So the popular instinct for mucking along, for taking things as you find them (and leaving them there), the popular taste for superficial twaddle in literature and politics and science and art and religion is pandered to on its own level....

  "But I didn't mean to go off on to all this; I merely meant to tell you what first started me thinking of these things."

  "Go on," said Kitty. "I like it. It makes me feel at home, as if I was sitting under you at a meeting.... What I infer is that if your parents hadn't been first cousins and had deficiency in their family, there would have been no Ministry of Brains. I expect your father was right, and whatever is is best.... Of course the interesting question is, what would happen if ever we were much cleverer than we are now? What would happen, that is, besides houses being better managed and disease better treated and locomotion improved and books better written or not written at all, and all that? What would happen to nations and societies and governments, if people in general became much more intelligent? I can't imagine. But I think there'd be a jolly old row.... Perhaps we shall know before long."

  "No," said Chester. "We shan't know that. There may be a jolly old row; I daresay there will; but it won't be because people have got too clever; it will be because they haven't got clever enough. It'll be the short-sighted stupidity of people revolting against their ultimate good."

  "As it might be you and me."

  "Precisely. As it might be you and me.... What we're doing is horribly typical, Kitty. Don't let's ever blind ourselves to its nature. We'll do it, because we think it's worth it; but we'll do it with our eyes open. Thank heaven we're both clear-headed and hard-headed enough to know what we're doing and not to muddle ourselves with cant about it.... That's one of the things that I suppose, I love you for, my dear—your clear-headedness. You never muddle or cant or sentimentalise. You're hard-headed and clear-eyed."

  "I
n fact, cynical," said Kitty.

  "Yes. Rather cynical. Unnecessarily cynical, I think. You could do with some more faith."

  "Perhaps I shall catch some from you. You've got lots, haven't you? As the husband is the wife is; I am mated to, etc.... And you're a lot cleverer than I am, so you're most likely right.... We're awfully different, Nicky, my love, aren't we?"

  "No doubt we are. Who isn't?"

  For a while they lay silent in the warm sweetness of the hill-top, while the golden light slipped from them, leaving behind it the pure green stillness of the evening; and they looked at one another and speculated on the strange differences of human beings each from each, and the mystery of personality, that tiny point on to which all the age-long accumulated forces of heredity press, so that you would suppose that the world itself could not contain them, and yet they are contained in one small, ordinary soul, which does not break under the weight.

  So they looked at one another, speculating, until speculation faded into seeing, and instead of personalities they became to one another persons, and Chester saw Kitty red-lipped and golden-eyed and black-lashed and tanned a smooth nut-brown by sun and sea, and Kitty saw Chester long and lean and sallow, with black brows bent over deep, keen, dreaming eyes, and lips carrying their queer suggestion of tragedy and comedy.

  "Isn't it fun," said Kitty, "that you are you and I am I? I think it must be (don't you?) the greatest fun that ever was since the world began. That's what I think ... and everywhere millions of people are thinking exactly the same. We're part of the common herd, Nicky—the very, very commonest herd of all herds. I think I like it rather—being so common, I mean. It's amusing. Don't you?"

  "Yes," he said, and smiled at her. "I think I do."

  Still they lay there, side by side, in the extraordinary hushed sweetness of the evening. Kitty's cheek was pressed against short warm grass. Close to her ear a cicale chirped, monotonously bright; far off, from every hill, the frogs began their evening singing.

  Kitty, as she sometimes did, seemed to slip suddenly outside the circle of the present, of her own life and the life around her; far off she saw it, a queer little excited corner of the universe, where people played together and were happy, where the funny world spun round and round and laughed and cried and ran and slept and loved and hated, and everything mattered intensely, and yet, as seen from outside the circle, did not matter at all.... She felt like a soul unborn, or a soul long dead, watching the world's antics with a dispassionate, compassionate interest....

  The touch of Chester's hand on her cheek brought her back abruptly into the circle again.

  "Belovedest," he said, "let's come down the hill. The light is going."

  4

  One day they had a shock; they met someone they knew. They met him in the sea; at least he was in a boat and they were in the sea. They were swimming a mile from shore, in a pearl-smooth, golden sea, in the eye of the rising sun. Half a mile out from them a yacht lay, as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean. From the yacht a boat shot out, rowed by a man. It shot between the swimmers and the rising sun. Chester and Kitty were lying on their backs, churning up the sun's path of gold with their feet, and Kitty was singing a little song that Greek goat-herds sing on the hills above Corinth in the mornings.

  Leaning over the side and resting on his oars, the man in the boat shouted, "Hullo, Chester!"

  An electric shock stabbed Kitty through at the voice, which was Vernon Prideaux's. Losing her nerve, her head, and her sense of the suitable, she splashed round on to her chest, kicked herself forward, and dived like a porpoise, travelling as swiftly as she could from Chester, Prideaux, and the situation. When she came up it was with a splutter, because she had laughed. Glancing backwards over her shoulder, she saw Chester swimming towards the boat. What would he say? Would he speak of her, or wrap her in discreet silence? And had Prideaux recognised her or not?

  "Lunatic," said Kitty. "Of course he did. I have taken the worst way, in my excitement."

  Promptly she retraced her path, this time on the water's surface, and hailed Prideaux as she came.

  "Hullo, Vernon. The top of the morning to you. I thought I'd show you I could dive.... What brings you here? Oh the yacht, of course...." She paused, wondering what was to be their line, then struck one out on her own account. "Isn't it odd; Mr. Chester and I are both staying near here."

  Prideaux's keen, well-bred, perfectly courteous face looked for one moment as if it certainly was a little odd; then he swallowed his surprise.

  "Are you? It's a splendid coast, isn't it? Cogoleto in there, I suppose? We're not stopping at all, unfortunately; we're going straight on to Genoa.... I'm coming in."

  He dived neatly from the bows, with precision and power, as he wrote minutes, managed deputations, ignored odd situations, and did everything else. One was never afraid with Prideaux; one could rely on him not to bungle.

  They bathed together and conversed, till Kitty said she must go in, and swam shoreward in the detached manner of one whose people are expecting her to breakfast. Soon afterwards she saw that Prideaux was pulling back to the yacht, and Chester swimming westward, as if he were staying at Varazze.

  "Tact," thought Kitty. "This, I suppose, is how people behave while conducting a vulgar intrigue. Ours is a vulgar marriage; there doesn't seem much difference.... I rather wish we could have told Vernon all about it; he's safe enough, and I should like to have heard his comments and seen his face. How awful he would think us.... I don't know anyone who would disapprove more.... Well, I suppose it's more interesting than a marriage which doesn't have to be kept dark, but it's much less peaceful."

  They met at the inn, at breakfast.

  "Did you have to swim right across the bay, darling?" Kitty enquired. "I'm so sorry. By the way, I noticed that Vernon never asked either of us where we were staying, nor invited us to come and visit the yacht. Do you suppose he believed a word we said?"

  Chester lifted his eyebrows. "His mental category is A, I believe," he replied.

  "Well," said Kitty, "anyhow he can't know we're married, even if he does think we've arranged to meet here. And Vernon's very discreet; he won't babble."

  Chester ate a roll and a half in silence. Then he remarked, without emotion, "Kitty, this thing is going to come out. We may as well make up our minds to it. We shall go on meeting people, and they won't all be discreet. It will come out, as certainly as flowers in spring, or the Clyde engineers next week."

  They faced one another in silence for a moment across the coffee and rolls. Then, because there seemed nothing else which could meet the situation, they both began to laugh helplessly.

  Three days later they returned to England, by different routes.

  * * *

  CHAPTER X

  A MINISTRY AT BAY

  1

  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.