What Not Part 15

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 sh.o.r.e, 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 sh.o.r.eward 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 antic.i.p.ating abolition, of criminals awaiting sentence, of newspapers desperately staving off extinction, of the crews of foundered ships struggling to keep afloat, of government departments antic.i.p.ating their own untimely end, are mysteries veiled from the outside world, sacred ground which may not be trodden by the mult.i.tude.

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 cla.s.ses 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, h.o.a.rded, 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.

Ministries have a bitter time; their hand is against every man and every man's hand against them. For their good men return them evil and for their evil no good. And--let it not be forgotten--they are really, with all their faults, more intelligent, and fuller of good intentions, than the vast majority of their critics. The critics cry aloud "Get rid of them," without always asking themselves who would do the job any better, always providing it has to be done. In the case of the Ministry of Brains, the majority of the public saw no reason why the job should be done at all, which complicated matters. It was like the Directorate of Recruiting during the war, or the Censor's office, or the Ministry of Food; not merely its method but its function was unwelcome. As most men did not want to be recruited by law, or to have their reading or their diet regulated by law, so they did not want to be made intelligent by law. All these things might be, and doubtless were, for the ultimate good of the nation, but all were inconvenient at the moment, and when ultimate good (especially not necessarily one's own good) and immediate convenience come to blows, it is not usually ultimate good which wins.

So the Ministry of Brains, even more than other ministries, was fighting against odds. Feverish activity prevailed, in all departments. From morning till night telephones telephoned, clerks wrote, typists typed against time, deputations deputed, committees committeed, officials conferred with each other, messengers ran to and fro with urgent minutes and notes by hand. Instructions and circular letters poured forth, telegrams were despatched in hot haste to the local Ministries and to the Brains Representatives on the local tribunals, the staff arrived early and stayed late, and often came on Sundays as well, and grew thin and dyspeptic and nervy and irritable.

2

Even Ivy Delmer grew pale and depressed, not so much from official strain as from private worries. These she confided one day to Kitty, who had got transferred back to headquarters, through a little quiet wire-pulling (it is no use being married to a Minister if little things like that cannot easily be arranged), and was now working in her old branch. They were travelling together one Monday morning up from Little Chantreys.

"Now I ask you, Miss Grammont, what would _you_ do? I'm B3 and he's C1 (I'm certain they've cla.s.sified him wrong, because he's not a bit stupid really, not the way some men are, you know, he's jolly clever at some things--ideas, and that), but of course it's against the regulations for us to marry each other. And yet we care for each other, and we both of us feel we always shall. And we neither of us want a bit to marry an A person, besides, I don't suppose an A would ever think of us in _that_ way, you know what I mean, Miss Grammont, don't laugh, and to give each other up would mean spoiling both our lives.... Yet I suppose everyone would think it awfully wrong if we got regularly engaged, and me working at the Ministry too. I suppose I ought to leave it really, feeling the way I do.... The fact is, I've come to feel very differently about the Ministry, now I've thought it more over, and--you'll be horrified, I know--but I'm not at all sure I approve of it."

"Good gracious no," Kitty said. "I never approve of any Ministries. That isn't what one feels for them. Sympathy; pity; some affection, even; but approval--no."

"Well, you see what I mean, it's all very well in theory, but I do honestly know so many people whose lives have been upset and spoilt by it--and it does seem hard. Heaps of people in Little Chantreys alone; of course we come across them rather a lot, because they tell father and mother about it.... And all the poor little deserted babies.... Oh I suppose it's all right.... But I'm feeling a bit off it just now.... Now I ask you, feeling as I do about it, and meaning to do what I'm going to do (at least we hope we're going to do it sometime), ought I to go on at the Ministry? Is it honest? Would _you_, Miss Grammont?"

Kitty blushed faintly, to her own credit and a little to Ivy's surprise.

She did not a.s.sociate blushing with Miss Grammont, and anyhow there seemed no occasion for it just now.

"Well, yes, I think I would. I don't see that you're called on to give it up--unless, of course, you hate it, and want to.... After all, one would very seldom stick to any work at all if one felt obliged to approve entirely of it. No, I don't think there's much in that."

"You truly don't? Well, I expect I'll carry on for a bit, then. I'd rather, in one way, of course, especially as we shall need all the money we can get if we ever do marry. Not that I'm saving; I spend every penny I get, I'm afraid. But of course it takes me off father's hands....

Don't _you_ feel, Miss Grammont, that all this interference with people's private lives is a mistake? It's come home to me awfully strongly lately. Only when I read the Minister's speeches I change my mind again; he puts it so rippingly, and makes me feel perhaps I'm being simply a selfish little beast. I don't care what anybody says about him, I think he's wonderful."

"I suppose he is," said Kitty.

"My word, he jolly well _would_ despise me if he knew, wouldn't he?"

"Well...." said Kitty. And perhaps it was well that at that moment they reached Marylebone.

That conversation was typical, even as Ivy Delmer's standpoint was itself typical, of a large body of what, for lack of a better name, we must call thought, all over the country. Laws were all very well in theory, or when they only disarranged the lives of others, but when they touched and disorganised one's own life--hands off. Was the only difference between such as Ivy Delmer and such as Nicholas Chester that Ivy deceived herself ("It's not that I care a bit for myself, but it's the principle of the thing") and that Chester fell with open eyes? Which was perhaps as much as to say that Ivy was cla.s.sified B3 and Chester A.

All over the country people were saying, according to their different temperaments, one or another of these things. "Of course I don't care for myself, but I think the system is wrong," or (the other way round) "It may be all right in theory, but I'm jolly well not going to stand being inconvenienced by it," or "I'm not going to stand it _and_ it's all wrong." Of course there were also those more public-spirited persons who said, "It's a splendid system and I'm going to fall in with it," or "Though it's a rotten system I suppose we must put up with it." But these were the minority.

3

Up till November the campaign against the Brains Ministry was quite impersonal, merely resentment against a system. It was led, in the Press, by the Labour papers, which objected to compulsion, by the _Nation_, which objected to what it, rightly or wrongly, called by that much-abused name, Prussianism, by the _New Witness_, which objected to interference with the happy stupidity of merry Gentiles (making them disagreeably clever like Jews), and by _Stop It_, which objected to everything. It was supported by the more normal organs of opinion of the kind which used before and during the war to be called conservative and liberal. And, of course, through thick and thin, by the _Hidden Hand_.