What Not Part 14

He looked at her once more, just before the end, and his eyes said, "Wait for me."

She waited, in the front of a little group by the door through which he was to come out. He came out with his secretary, and the mayor, and others; he was talking to them. When he saw her he stopped openly, and said, so that all could hear, "How do you do, Miss Grammont. I haven't seen you for some time. You're doing this reporting work for the Bulletin now, aren't you? I want to talk to you about that. If you'll give me the address I'll come round in about half an hour and see you about it."

She gave him the address of her rooms in Little Darkgate Street, and he nodded and walked on. He had done it well; no one thought it strange, or anything but all in the way of business. Ministers have to be good at camouflage, at throwing veils over situations; it is part of their job.

Kitty went back to her lodgings, and washed again, for the seventeenth time that day, and tried if she would feel less hot and less pale and more the captain of her soul in another and even filmier blouse. But she grew hotter, and paler, and less the captain of anything at all.

At 9.30 Chester came. He too was hot and pale and captain of nothing. He had not even the comfort of a filmy blouse.

He said, "My dear--my dear," and no more for a little time. Then he said, "My dearest, this has got to stop. I can't stand it. We've got to marry."

Kitty said, "Oh well. I suppose we have." She was too hot, too limp, too tired, to suppose anything else.

"At once," said Chester. "I'll get a licence.... We must get it done at some small place in the country where they don't know who we are. I must take another name for it.... There's a place I sometimes stay at, in the Chilterns. They are rather stupid there--even now," he added, with the twist of a rueful smile. "I think it should be pretty safe. Anyhow I don't think I much care; we're going to do it."

They spoke low in the dim, breathless room, with its windows opened wide on to the breathless street.

"I have wanted you," said Chester. "I have wanted you extremely badly these last three months. I have never wanted anything so much. It has been a--a hideous time, taking it all round."

"You certainly," said Kitty, "look as if it had. So do I--don't I? It's partly heat and dirt, with both of us--the black of this town _soaks_ in--and partly tiredness, and partly, for you, the strain of your ministerial responsibilities, no doubt; but I think a little of it is our broken hearts.... Nicky, I'm too limp to argue or fight. I know it's all wrong, what we're going to do; but I'm like you--I don't think I much care. We'll get married in your stupid village, under a false name.

That counts, does it? Oh, all right. I shouldn't particularly mind if it didn't, you know. I'll do without the registry business altogether if you think it's safer. After all, what's the odds? It comes to the same thing in the end, only with less fuss. And it's no one's business but ours."

"No," Chester said. "I think that would be a mistake. Wrong. I don't approve of this omitting of the legal bond; it argues a lack of the sense of social ethics; it opens the door to a state of things which is essentially uncivilised, lacking in self-control and intelligence. I don't like it. It always strikes me as disagreeable and behind the times; a step backwards. No, we won't do that. I'd rather take the greater risk of publicity. I'm dropping one principle, but I don't want to drop more than I need."

Kitty laughed silently, and slipped her hand into his. "All right, you shan't. We'll get tied up properly at your country registry, and keep some of our principles and hang the risk.... I oughtn't to let you, you know. If it comes out it will wreck your career and perhaps wreck the Ministry and endanger the intellect of the country. We may be sowing the seeds of another World War; but--oh, I'm bored with being high-principled about it."

"It's too late to be that," said Chester. "We've got to go ahead now."

He consulted his pocket-book and said that he was free on August 10th, and that they would then get married and go to Italy for a fortnight's holiday together. They made the other arrangements that have to be made in these peculiar circ.u.mstances, and then Chester went back to his hotel.

The awful, airless, panting night through which the Chesterfield furnaces flamed, lay upon the queer, crooked black city like a menace.

Kitty, leaning out of her window and listening to Chester's retreating steps echoing up the street, ran her fingers through her damp dark hair, because her head ached, and murmured, "I don't care. I don't care.

What's the good of living if you can't have what you want?"

Which expressed an instinct common to the race, and one which would in the end bring to nothing the most strenuous efforts of social and ethical reformers.

3

They got married. Chester took, for the occasion, the name of Gilbert Lewis; it was surprising how easy this was. The witness looked attentively at him, but probably always looked like that at the people getting married. Neither he nor the registrar looked intelligent, or as if they were connecting Chester's face with anything they had seen before.

After the performance they went to Italy for a fortnight. Italy in August is fairly safe from English visitors. They stayed at Cogoleto, a tiny fishing town fifteen miles up the coast from Genoa, shut in a little bay between the olive hills and the sea. To this sheltered coast through the summer months people come from the hot towns inland and fill every lodging and inn and pitch tents on the sh.o.r.e, and pa.s.s serene, lazy, amphibious days in and out of a sea which has the inestimable advantage over English seas that it is always at hand.

The Chesters too pa.s.sed amphibious days. They would rise early, while the sea lay cool and smooth and pale and pearly in the morning light, and before the sand burnt their feet as they walked on it, and slip in off the gently shelving sh.o.r.e, and swim and swim and swim. They were both good swimmers. Chester was the stronger and faster, but Kitty could do more tricks. She could turn somersaults like an eel, and sit at the bottom of the sea playing with pebbles, with open eyes gazing up through clear green depths. When they bathed from a boat, she turned head over heels backwards from the bows, and shot under the boat and came up neatly behind the stern. Chester too could perform fairly well; their energy and skill excited the amazed admiration of the _bagnanti_, who seldom did more than splash on the sea's edge or bob up and down with swimming belts a few yards out. Chester and Kitty would swim out for a mile, then lie on their backs and float, gazing up into the sea-blue sky, before the sun had climbed high enough to burn and blind. Then they would swim back and return to the inn and put on a very few clothes and have their morning coffee, and then walk up the coast, taking lunch, to some little lonely cove in the shadow of rocks, where they would spend the heat of the day in and out of the sea. When they came out of the water they lay on the burning sands and dried themselves, and talked or read. When the heat of the day had pa.s.sed a little, and the sea lay very smooth and still in the late afternoon, with no waves at all, only a gentle, whispering swaying to and fro, they would go further afield; climbing up the steep stone-paved mule-tracks that wound up the hills behind, pa.s.sing between grey olive groves and lemon and orange gardens and vineyards of ripening vines and little rough white farmhouses, till they reached the barer, wilder hill slopes of pines and rocks, where the hot sweetness of myrtle and juniper stirred with each tiny moving of sea air.

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."

"In 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 acc.u.mulated 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 gra.s.s. 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 dispa.s.sionate, compa.s.sionate interest....