What Not Part 18

They swung him gently to and fro, as if to get an impetus....

Then someone shouted, "We'll let him off this time, as he's just married. Let him go home to his wife, and not meddle with government any more!"

The crowd rocked with laughter; and in that laughter, rough, good-humoured, scornful, the Ministry of Brains seemed to dissolve.

They drew Chester in through the window again. Someone said, "Now we'll set the blooming hotel on fire. No time to waste, boys."

Chester and Prideaux were dragged firmly but not unkindly down the stairs and out through the door. Their appearance outside the building, each pinioned by two stalwart ex-guardsmen, was hailed by a shout, partly of anger, but three parts laughter. To Chester it was the laughter, good-humoured, stupid, scornful, of the British public at ideas, and particularly at ideas which had failed. But in it, sharp and stinging, was another, more contemptuous laughter, levelled at a man who had failed to live up to his own ridiculous ideas, the laughter of the none too honest world, which yet respected honesty, at the hypocrisy and double-dealing of others.

"They're quite right to laugh," thought Chester. "It is funny: d.a.m.ned funny."

And at that, standing pinioned on the steps of his discredited Ministry, looking down on the crowd of the injured, contemptuous British public, who were out to wreck the things he cared for, he began to laugh himself.

His laughter was naturally unheard, but they saw his face, which should have been downcast and ashamed, twist into his familiar, sad, cynical smile, which all who had heard him on platforms knew.

"Laughing, are you," someone shouted thickly. "Laughing at the people you've tricked! You've ruined me and my missus--taken every penny we had, just because we had twins--and you--you stand there and laugh!

You--you b.l.o.o.d.y married imbecile!"

Lurching up the steps, he flung himself upon Chester and wrenched him from the relaxed hold of his captors. Struggling together, the Minister and his a.s.sailant stumbled down the steps, and then fell headlong among the public.

3

When the mounted police finally succeeded in dispersing the crowd, the Ministry of Brains was in flames, like Sodom and Gomorrah, those wicked cities. Unlike Sodom and Gomorrah, the conflagration was at last quenched by a fire engine. But far into the night the red wreckage blazed, testimony to the wrath of a great people, to the failure of a great idea, to the downfall of him who, whatever the weakness he shared in common with the public who downed him, was yet a great man.

CHAPTER XII

DEBRIS

1

Chester lay with a broken head and three smashed ribs in his flat in Mount Street. He was nursed by his elder sister Maggie, a kind, silent, plain person with her brother's queer smile and more than his cynical patience. With her patience took the form of an infinite tolerance; the tolerance of one who looks upon all human things and sees that they are not much good, nor likely to be. (Chester had not his fair share of this patience: hence his hopes and his faiths, and hence his downfall.) She was kind to Kitty, whose acquaintance she now made. (The majority of the Ministry of Brains staff were having a short holiday, during the transference to other premises.)

Maggie said to Kitty, "I'm not surprised. It was a lot to live up to.

And it's not in our family, living up to that. Perhaps not in any family. I'm sorry for Nicky, because he'll mind."

She did not reproach Kitty; she took her for granted. Such incidents as Kitty were liable to happen, even in the best regulated lives. When Kitty reproached herself, saying, "I've spoilt his life," she merely replied tranquilly, "Nicky lets no one but himself spoil his life. When he's determined to do a thing, he'll do it." Nor did she commit herself to any indication as to whether she thought that what Nicky had gained would be likely to compensate for what he had lost.

For about what he had lost there seemed no doubt in anyone's mind. He had lost his reputation, his office, and, for the time being, his public life. The Ministry of Brains might continue, would in fact, weakly continue, without power and without much hope, till it trailed into ignominious death; even the wrecked Hotel would continue, when repaired; but it was not possible that Chester should continue.

The first thing he did, in fact, when he could do anything at all intelligent, was to dictate a letter to the Ministerial Council tendering his resignation from office. There are, of course, diverse styles adopted by the writers of such letters. In the old days people used to write (according to the peculiar circ.u.mstances of their case)--

"Dear Prime Minister,

"Though you have long and often tried to dissuade me from this course ... etc., etc.... I think you will hardly be surprised ... deep regret in severing the always harmonious connection between us ..." and so forth.

Or else quite otherwise--

"Dear Prime Minister,

"You will hardly be surprised, I imagine, after the strange occurrence of yesterday, when I had the interest of reading in a daily paper the first intimation that you desired a change at the Ministry I have the honour to adorn...."

Neither of these styles was used by Chester, who wrote briefly, without committing himself to any opinion as to the probable surprise or otherwise of the Ministerial Council--

"Dear Sirs,

"I am resigning my office as Minister of Brains, owing to facts of which you will have doubtless heard, and which make it obviously undesirable for me to continue in the post."

Having done this, he lay inert through quiet, snow-bound days and nights, and no one knew whether or not he was going to recover.

2

After a time he asked after Prideaux, and they told him Prideaux had not been hurt, only rumpled.

"He calls to ask after you pretty often," said Kitty. "Would you like to see him sometime? When the doctor says you can?"

"I don't care," Chester said. "Yes, I may as well."

So Prideaux came one afternoon (warned not to be political or exciting) and it was a queer meeting between him and Chester. Chester remembered the last shocked words he had had from Prideaux--"Good G.o.d!" and wondered, without interest, what Prideaux felt about it all now.

But it was not Prideaux's way to show much of what he felt.

They talked mainly of that night's happenings. Chester had already had full reports of these; of the fire, of the fight between the police and the crowd, in which several lives had been lost, of the arrest of the ringleaders and their trials. To Chester's own part in the proceedings they did not refer, till, after a pause, Chester suddenly said, "I have been wondering, but I can't make up my mind about it. How much difference to the business did the discovery about me make? Would they have gone to those lengths without it?"

Prideaux was silent. He believed that Chester that night on the balcony, had his hands been clean, could have held the mob.

Chester interpreted the silence.

"I suppose they wouldn't," he said impa.s.sively. "However, I fancy it only precipitated the catastrophe. The Ministry was down and under, in any case. People were determined not to stand laws that inconvenienced them--as I was. I was merely an example, not a cause, of that disease...."

That was the nearest he ever got with Prideaux to discussion of his own action.

"Anyhow," said Prideaux sadly, "the Ministry is down and under now.

Imagine Frankie Lyle, poor little beggar, trying to carry on, after all this!" (This gentleman had been nominated as Chester's successor.)

Chester smiled faintly. "Poor little Frankie.... I hear Monk wouldn't touch it, by the way. I don't blame him.... Lyle won't hold them for a week; he'll back out on every point."

There was regret in his tired, toneless voice, and bitterness, because the points on which Lyle would back out were all points which he had made. He could have held them for a week, and more; he might even--there would have been a fighting chance of it--have pulled the Ministry through altogether, had things been otherwise. But things were not otherwise, and this was not his show any more. He looked at Prideaux half resentfully as Prideaux rose to leave him. Prideaux had not wrecked his own career....

To Kitty, the first time he had met her after the events of Boxing Night, Prideaux had shown more of his mind. He had come to ask after Chester, and had found Kitty there. He had looked at her sharply and coolly, as if she had made a stupid mistake over her work in the office.

"So you didn't guess, all this time," she had said to him, coolly too, because she resented his look.