What Not Part 3

"_From a famous Theologian._ Before I undertook the Course I was a Bishop of a disestablished Church. Now my brain is clarified, my eyes are opened, and I am a leader of the Coming Faith. The Course teaches the Meaning of Life.

"_From a former Secretary of State._ Since taking the Course I have recognised the importance of keeping myself informed as to public affairs, and now never refer in my public speeches to any speech by another statesman without having previously read a summary of it.

"_From a poet._ I can now find rhymes to nearly all my lines, and have given up the old-fas.h.i.+oned habit of free rhythms to which I have been addicted since 1912. I can even find rhymes to indemnity, also a rhyme to War which is neither gore, claw, nor star.

"_From an inveterate writer of letters to newspapers._ I no longer do this.

"_From a citizen._ I was engaged to be married. Now I am not."

Then in large type again,

"All this has happened to Others! Why should it not happen to You? Save yourself, save your country, save the world! How shall wisdom be found, and where is the place of understanding? So asked the Preacher of the ancient world, and got no answer, because then there was none. But the answer is now forthcoming. Wisdom is to be found in the Government Mind Training Course--the M.T.C., as it is affectionately called by thousands of men and women who are deriving benefits from it. Enter for it to-day.

For further information apply Mind Training Section, Ministry of Brains, S.W. 1."

Above the letterpress was a picture poster, representing two youths, and called "Before and After." "Before" had the vacuity of the village idiot, "After" the triumphant cunning of the maniac. The Mind Training Course had obviously completely overset a brain formerly harmless, if deficient.

"How long," enquired Amherst, in his best Oxford manner, "do you give yourselves? I address the enquiry, as a member of the public, to you, as servants of a government which can resort to such methods as that."

"We have now remained in office for over six months," said Kitty, "and we hope to remain for at least three more.... But it's for us to ask you, as a member of the public, how long you intend to give us?

Personally I'm astonished every day that our hotel, and all the other hotels, aren't stormed and wrecked. I don't know why the Aero Bus Company, while it's on strike, doesn't sail over us and drop bombs. It shows we must be more popular than we deserve. It shows that people really _like_ being coerced and improved. They know they need it. Look at the people going about this village; look at their faces, I ask you.

They're like 'Before.' Look at the policeman at his door, half out of his clothes. He's G.o.d-like to look at; he's got a figure like the Discobolus, and the brain of a Dr. Watson. He could never track a thief.

He's looking at us; he thinks we're thieves, probably, just because we're ambiguous. That's the sort of mind he has. Look at the doctor, in his absurd little Ford. How much do you suppose he knows about curing people, or about the science of bodies? He patches them up with pills and drugs, and.... But he didn't cut us, Tony. Why not?"

"He and the vicar don't," explained Anthony. "Professional attendance.

There's the vicar, outside that cottage. See him put his hand up as we pa.s.s him."

He returned the salute with some pride, and Pansy nodded agreeably.

Amherst examined the vicar, who was small and st.u.r.dy and had a nice kind face.

Amherst shook his head when they had left him behind.

"Not nearly clever enough for the part," he p.r.o.nounced. "To organise religion a man should have the talents of the devil, or at least of the intelligent civil servant. Prideaux would do it quite well; or Chester; only Chester might be too erratic for the popular taste. No wonder Christianity is the ineffective thing it is in this country, if it's left in the hands of officials like that. That man couldn't organise anything; I bet even his school treats go wrong--too few buns or something. That's the hope for the world, that inefficiency of most religious officials; that's why the public will succeed before long in throwing off the whole business, even before they succeed in downing Parliament and the British autocracy, who are a shade more acute. From my point of view your vicar's stupidity is all to the good. If he preaches to-morrow as the Brains Ministry want him to--and he looks loyal and patriotic enough to try--he'll be preaching against his own interests. But that's what all you Brains people are doing, of course.

You don't seem to see that if you ever were to succeed in making the human race reasonably intelligent, your number would be up; you wouldn't be stood for a moment longer. You're sitting on a branch and trying to saw it off. Lucky for you your saws aren't sharper."

"Chester would go on just the same if he did see," Kitty said. "He probably does. He's an idealist, but his eye for facts is very penetrating. And he'd think it worth while to perish in so good a cause."

"The fact is," added Prideaux, "that he never would perish, even if the branch did fall; he'd climb on to another pretty quickly and rise as the People's Saviour. Our Nicky won't go under."

3

They arrived at the End House, about which there is little to say except that it lay just beyond the straggling village, was roomy, comfortable, untidy, full of dogs all named after revue stars, and was an interesting mixture of the Grammont taste in art and decoration, which was the taste of clever people several of whom were artists, and of Pansy's taste, which is most shortly indicated by mentioning that if you saw the house before you saw Pansy you were surprised, and if you had seen Pansy first you were not. The drawing-room floor was littered with large and comfortable and brightly-hued cus.h.i.+ons, obviously not mistakes but seats. This always a little flurried the vicar and his wife when they called; it was, as Mrs. Delmer observed, so very Eastern, and suggested other habits belonging to the same dubious quarter of the globe, some of which there was only too good reason to believe had been adopted. The chimney-piece was worse, being adorned by photographs of Pansy's friends--her loving Tottie, hers everlastingly, Guy, warmly Phyllis and Harry, and so forth. (There was even hers Jimmie, which, if Mrs. Delmer had known rather more of Pansy's domestic circ.u.mstances than she did, would have struck her as being in very doubtful taste.) Some of these ladies and gentlemen, fortunately, had elected to be taken head and shoulders only (and quite enough too, thought Mrs. Delmer, wondering how far below the bottom of the photograph the ladies' clothes began) and some showed the whole figure. ("I should think they did!" said Mrs.

Delmer, on her first call, nervously retreating from the chimney-piece.

It may be mentioned that Mrs. Delmer was not in the habit of witnessing revues, and was accustomed to an ampler mode of garment. These things are so much a question of habit.)

These photographs, and the excellent painting in the hall of Pansy herself in her eel dance, were among the minor reasons why Ivy Delmer was not allowed to enter the End House. There were three reasons why her parents did so; they might be stupid, but they were of an extraordinary goodness, and could not bear to leave sin alone, anyhow in their own parish, where it set such an unfortunate example, when they might, by sufficient battling, perhaps win it over to righteousness; also they had kind and soft hearts, and did not like the idea of Pansy alone all day with her infant son and the two most notoriously ill-behaved young servants in the village; and finally they were Christians, and believed that the teaching of their religion on the subject of sociability to sinners was plain. So, swallowing their embarra.s.sed distaste, they visited the End House as one might visit a hospital, but kept their children from it, because it was a hospital whose patients might be infectious.

Into this house, standing hospitably open-doored in the May evening, its owner and his friends entered. It affected them in various ways. Anthony Grammont was proud of his house and garden, his Pansy and his Cheeper.

He was young enough to be vain of being head of a household, even of an ambiguous household, and of course anyone would be proud of the dazzling and widely-known Pansy, whose name had always been one of the two in large type in advertis.e.m.e.nts of the shows in which she figured (she was as good as all that); and he was tired enough, mentally and physically, by his life of the last few years, its discomforts, its homelessness, its bondage, its painful unnaturalness, to sink with relief into Pansy's exotic cus.h.i.+ons and all they stood for.

Kitty found the house and household inordinately cheering and entertaining; the mere sight of Pansy's drawing-room could rouse her from any depression.

Vernon Prideaux shuddered a little at the row of photographs--he detested photographs on chimney-pieces--and the Eve design on the chair covers; he was not so good at the comic-opera touch as Kitty was, and had a masculine sense of propriety and good taste, and had always preferred revue stars on the stage to off it. He had also, however, a wide tolerance for the tastes of others, and was glad that Tony Grammont had found domestic happiness.

Amherst's thoughts were brief and neat, and might be summed up thus: "Forces of Darkness--number 8. The expensive, conscienceless, and unthinking female."

Pansy went upstairs to put the Cheeper to bed, and Kitty went with her to see her nephew in his bath, putting both his big toes into his mouth at once.

The only other event of importance which happened before dinner was the arrival of Cyril Grammont, a brother of Anthony's, a Cambridge friend of Prideaux's, a Roman Catholic, a writer of epigrammatic essays and light verse, and a budding publisher. He and Pansy usually quarrelled. He had spent the war partly in Macedonia, as a member of the Salonika Force, digging up fragments of sculpture from Amphipolis and the other ruined cities of those regions, tracking what he then held to be the pernicious influence of St. Paul with the help of a pocket atlas of his journeys and the obviously evil habits and dispositions of the towns which had received his attentions, and partly in Palestine, where he had taken an extreme dislike to both Jews and Turks, had become convinced that they must be so wrong about everything that mattered that Christians must be right, and was forthwith converted from atheism to Christianity. He considered that war-time is no time for Christians, they have to do so much either explaining or protesting or both, so he had waited till the war was over, and had then proceeded to investigate the various forms into which Christianity had developed (they all seemed a little strange to him at first), in order to make his choice. An impartial friend with whom he discussed the subject told him that he would find Roman Catholicism best suited to his precise, clear-cut, and Latin type of mind, provided that he succeeded in avoiding all contact with the more luscious forms of Roman devotions, which, he was warned, would disgust him as much as patchouli, or Carlo Dolci. "And anyhow," added his friend, probably erroneously, "it will outlast the other churches, for all its obscurantism, so if you want a going concern, join it."

So Cyril enquired into Roman Catholicism, found that, in its best cathedral forms, it satisfied his artistic sense, and, in its sharply-cut dogma, his feeling for precise form (his taste in art was violently against the post-bellum school, which was a riot of lazy, sloppy, and unintellectual formlessness), and so, accepting as no stranger than most of the growths of a strangely sprouting world the wonderful tree which had grown from a seed so remarkably dissimilar, he took a firm seat upon its branches, heedless of the surprised disapproval of most of his friends, who did not hold that any organised religion could be called a going concern, except in the sense that it was going to pot.

So here was Cyril, at the End House for Sunday, neat, handsome, incisive, supercilious, very sure of himself, and not in the least like the End House, with its slatternly brilliance, its yapping dogs, its absurdities, its sprawling incoherence, its cus.h.i.+ons, and its ambiguity.

In the evening Pansy danced her willow-tree dance for them. Her hair tumbled down, and she ceased to look like the Sistine Madonna and became more like a young Baccha.n.a.l. Some of her jokes were coa.r.s.e (you have to be coa.r.s.e sometimes in revue, and cannot leave the habit entirely behind you when you come off the boards) and Amherst, who was refined, was jarred. Then she quarrelled with Cyril, because he remarked, with his cheerful and businesslike air of finality, that of course if the Cheeper were not baptised he would go to h.e.l.l. Upon her violent remonstrance he merely observed that he was sorry, but facts were facts, and he couldn't get them altered to please her. He talked like this partly to annoy Pansy, because it amused him to see her cross, and partly for the pleasure of un.o.btrusively watching Amherst's expression when the word h.e.l.l was mentioned.

So, to unite the party, Kitty proposed that they should play the new card game, League of Nations, of which the point was to ama.s.s cards and go out while presenting an appearance of doing nothing at all.

Thus harmoniously and hilariously the night wore on, till at last the End House, like the other Little Chantreys houses, only much later, went to bed.

4

Little Chantreys slept under the May moon, round the market square with the Ministry of Brains poster in the middle.

The doctor slept with the sound sleep of those who do not know the width of the gulf between what they are and what they should be.

The sick, his patients, slept or woke, tossing uneasily, with windows closed to the soft night air. Every now and then they would rouse and take their medicine, with impatience, desperation, simple faith, or dull obedience, and look in vain for a bettering of their state. Those who considered themselves well, never having known what welfare really was, slept too, in stuffy, air-tight rooms, disturbed by the wailing of babies which they had not taught not to cry aloud, by the hopping of fleas which they had failed to catch or to subdue, by the dancing of mice which would never enter traps so obvious as those which they scornfully perceived in their paths, by the crowding of children about them, too close to be forgotten or ignored, by the dragging weight of incompetent, unfinished yesterday and incompetent, unbegun to-morrow.

The vicarage slept. The vicar in his sleep had a puzzled frown, as if life was too much for him, as if he was struggling with forces above his comprehension and beyond his grasp, forces that should have revolutionised Little Chantreys, but, in his hands, wouldn't. The vicar's wife slept fitfully, waking to worry about the new cook, whose pastry was impossible. She wasn't clever enough to know that cooking shouldn't be done in this inefficient, wasteful way in the home, but co-operatively, in a village kitchen, and pastry should be turned out by a pastry machine. Mrs. Delmer had heard of this idea, but didn't like it, because it was new. She wasn't strong, and would die one day, worn out with domestic worries which could have been so easily obviated....

The young Delmers slept. They always did. They mostly ought not to have been born at all; they were, except Ivy, who was moderately intelligent, below standard. They slept the sleep of the unthinking.

The vicarage girl slept. She would sleep for some time, because her alarum clock was smothered by a cus.h.i.+on; which would seem to indicate more brains on her part than were to be found in the other inmates of the vicarage.

So Little Chantreys slept, and the world slept, governments and governed, forces of darkness and forces of light, industry and idleness, the sad and the gay; pathetic, untutored children of the moment looking neither behind nor ahead.

The morning light, opening dimly, like a faintly-tinted flower, illumined the large red type of the poster in the Little Chantreys market place. "IMPROVE YOUR BRAINS!" So Brains Sunday dawned upon a world which did indeed seem to need it.

CHAPTER III

BRAINS SUNDAY

1