What Not Part 11

"Liar. There were twelve here this morning and now there are only ten.

I've told you before I won't stand having my things pinched. If you're too slack to earn enough to keep yourself in handkerchiefs, you must do without, that's all."

"I suppose you'd rather I'd used my sleeve at the Whites' tennis this morning, wouldn't you?"

"_I_ shouldn't care if you had.... Tennis in the morning's a pretty rotten idea anyhow, if you ask me. You're the biggest slacker I ever came across. If I was Daddy I wouldn't keep you eating your head off, even if you aren't clever. You're going on like a girl before the war.

Your Training Course doesn't seem to have done you the slightest good, either. It's people like you who'll rot up the whole plan."

"It's rot anyhow," Betty returned, without interest, turning her hat about critically. "You should just hear the way they're all going on about it in the village. Stuff and nonsense, I call it. And as long as people like me and the village--normal, ordinary people--think it's stuff and nonsense, ... well, it _will_ be stuff and nonsense, that's all."

"People like you," Ivy retorted witheringly, as she changed her skirt for her country breeches.

But, after all, that retort didn't dispose of Betty, or the people like Betty ... or the whole vicarage family ... or most of Little Chantreys.... Those people, after all, were going to take more disposing of than that.... They were, quite possibly, going to take more disposing of than anyone yet knew.

"Silly a.s.s," said Ivy, but with a touch of doubt.

She thought her new green breeches were rather nice, anyhow, and that seemed to matter more.

3

Kitty found her brother Cyril at the End House. Cyril was in a poor way.

His publis.h.i.+ng business was on the edge of bankruptcy.

"So much for your abominable Brains Ministry," he complained. "The ma.s.s of safe, mediocre stuff on which publishers count for a living while they adventure with the risks is being gradually withdrawn. It simply doesn't come in. Its producers are becoming--many of them--just too intelligent. I'm not imagining this; I know of several cases in which it has happened; of people who have developed just enough distaste for their own work to dry them up altogether. What's worse, there isn't the same sale for such stuff as there was. When the process has gone much further (if ever it does)--so far that a lot of really good stuff is turned out, and read by large numbers of people, business will be all right again. Till then, publishers are in a poor way.... Verse is dropping off, too, like autumn leaves. That's all to the good.... I daresay in another year or two (unless you're wrecked first, which seems probable, by the way) there'll only be about a hundred people left in the country writing anything at all.... Newspapers, of course, go on much the same; that's because you're afraid of them and exempt their staff. Insignificant verse and meaningless novels may die a natural death (though I think it improbable), but _Myosotis_ and the _Patriot_ and the _Daily Idiot_ will go on for ever. You're all such cowards at Whitehall. You dare to ruin unoffending publishers, to browbeat the poor and simple, and to extract gold from the innocent babe unborn, but you daren't risk the favour of the press."

"No," Kitty agreed. "We certainly daren't.... Not that we've got it, you know, quite the contrary; but we strive for it. I was reading the _Herald_ and _Stop It_ in the train, till I was cold with fear. _Stop It_ veils its meaning delicately, as usual; but it means business....

However, I thought we should have been downed six months ago, yet here we are still. It's like skating on rotten ice so fast that it never breaks. It's fun; it's exciting. And I believe if we go on skating fast, it won't break at all. You see, the government are getting cleverer and cleverer themselves, which will help them to do it skilfully. Chester says his head really does feel clearer after taking the Course; he says so in private life, I mean, not only when he's soft-soaping the public."

"He'll need," said Anthony, "a jolly clear head before he's through with this job. With every door-step in our towns and villages piled with exposed babies ... it's worse than China. Much worse, because I believe in China they don't get put on door-steps, but left harmlessly out of the way in open fields and no one meddles with them. It's becoming a public nuisance."

"There is a new branch at the Ministry," said Kitty, "which is concerned exclusively with Uncertificated Babies, how to deal with them."

"An' how _do_ they deal with them, the poor little ducks?" enquired Pansy, who had just come in from the garden looking more than usually gay and lovely and fantastic in a pink sunbonnet and the kind of dress affected by milkmaids in a chorus.

Kitty looked at her thoughtfully.

"I should hardly like to tell you. You mightn't like it. Besides, it's a private department, like the secret room in jam factories where they make the pips. No, Pansy love, I can't possibly tell you.... But they _do_ deal with them, quite effectively."

Pansy tossed her Cheeper up and down to a gentle music-hall ditty.

"Who'll buy babies-- Babies better dead?

Here's every mental category, From C3 down to Z...."

It was a taking song as she crooned it on the stage, nursing an infant on each arm, and with a baby-chorus crying behind her.

4

After breakfast on Sunday morning Kitty remarked that she was going by train to Beaconsfield, where she had arranged to meet Chester for a walk through Burnham Beeches. She as a rule made no secret of her walks with Chester, only occasionally, when self-consciousness took her. After all, why should she? One went walks with all sorts of people, with any man or woman who liked walking and talking and whom one liked as a companion; it implied nothing. Kitty at times, with all it meant in this instance burning and alive in her consciousness, had to pause to tell herself how little it did imply to others, how she might mention it freely and casually, without fear. Yet might she? The intimacy of the Minister of a Department with one of his clerks _was_, no doubt, out of the ordinary, not quite like other intimacies; perhaps it did seem odd, and imply things. Perhaps Kitty might have thought so herself, in another case.

She announced her plan this morning with an extra note of casualness in her voice.

Pansy said, "Oh, you two. You'll be goin' baby-huntin' in the ditches, I should think, instead of pickin' primroses. I should say you jolly well ought, and you'd better take the Cheeper's pram with you."

Anthony said, "Exactly what I always try _not_ to do, going out on Sundays with the people from my shop. It spoils the Sabbath rest, the Pisgah's mountain touch. You'd much better come out with Cyril and Pansy and me."

"I," said Cyril, in his detached manner, "shall be going to Ma.s.s."

5

They walked up through the depraved mushroom growth round Beaconsfield station to the old town that city set on a hill, lying wide and s.p.a.cious, with its four Ends stretched out like a cross. Old Beaconsfield is an enchanted city; as it was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so it is to-day, an ancient country town, full of brick walls and old houses, and courtyards and coaching inns, and dignity and romance and great elms. But they left it behind them, and took the lane that runs to Hedgerley, with the cold April wind in their faces.

They came, four miles on, to the forest of great beeches, where broad glades and gra.s.sy rides run in and out through thickets of wild undergrowth and bracken, and ancient twisted boles and slim smooth grey-green stems are set close together under a rustling singing roof of brilliant green, the young, new-born, radiant green of beeches in April.

In every hollow and dip of the forest's mossy floor, primroses glimmered in pale pools.

They sat down by one of these pools to have their lunch.

After lunch they lay on there and smoked. Chester lay on his back, his hands clasped behind his head, staring up at the green roof. Kitty, her round chin cupped in her two hands, lay and watched his lean, sallow, clever face, foreshortened, with the shadows of the leaves moving on it and his eyes screwed against the sun.

"Kitty," said Chester presently, "I want to talk to you."

"M--m." Kitty, having finished her cigarette, was chewing gra.s.s.

He sat up and looked at her, and as he looked his face grew more sallow and his smile died. He stabbed into the soft, damp earth with his stick, and frowned.

"It's this, my dear. I can't go on any longer with this--this farce. We must end it. I've been meaning to tell you so for some time, but I thought I'd give it a fair trial, just to satisfy us both. Well, we've given it a trial, and it won't work. It isn't good enough. We've got to be more to each other--or less. This--this beastly half-way house was all right for a bit; but we've got on too far now for it.... I should like to know what _you_ think about it."

Kitty pulled a primrose to pieces, petal by petal, before she answered.

"One thing I think," she said slowly, "is that I'm different from you.

Or is it that women are different from men? Never mind; it doesn't really matter which. But I fancy it's women and men. Anyhow there it is.

And the difference is that for me a half-way house would always be better than nothing, while for you it would be worse. Men seem to value being married so much more than women do--and friends.h.i.+p, going about together, having each other to talk to and play with, and all that, seems to matter to them so little. Love seems to take different forms with men and women, and to want different ways of expression.... So it's not much use trying to understand one another about it.... That's the chief thing I think, Nicky."

He moved impatiently.

"In fact, you're contented with the present state of things."

"Oh, no. Not a bit. I want much more. But--if it's all we can have...."

"It isn't," he said. "We can get married."

She shook her head, with decision.

"No. No. No."

"Quite quietly," he pleaded. "No one would know but ourselves and the registrar and a witness whom we'd murder after the ceremony. Why shouldn't we? What are the reasons why not? There are only two; you ought to marry a certificated person and have an intelligent family; and I oughtn't to have a family at all. Well, you say you don't mean to marry anyone else; so you may as well marry me. So much for the first reason. And of course we wouldn't have a family; so much for the second.

Well, then?"