What Not: A Prophetic Comedy, Page 4

  CHAPTER III

  BRAINS SUNDAY

  1

  Ivy Delmer had been right in her premonition. The End House was inchurch, at matins (the form of Sunday midday worship still used inLittle Chantreys, which was old-fashioned). Ivy looked at them as theysat in a row near the front. Mr. Anthony Grammont and Miss Ponsonby satnext each other and conversed together in whispers. Miss Ponsonby wasattired in pink gingham, and not much of it (it was not the fashion tohave extensive clothes, or of rich materials, lest people should pointat you as a profiteer who had made money out of the war; even if you haddone this you hid it as far as was convenient, and what you did not hideyou said was interest on war loan). Miss Ponsonby, with her serenesmile, looked patient, resigned, and very sweet and good. Next her wasMiss Grammont, who looked demure in a dress of motley, and, beyond heragain, Mr. Prideaux, who looked restless and impatient, either as if hewere thinking out some departmental tangle, or as if he thought it hadbeen a silly idea to come to church, or both. At the end of the row wereMr. Amherst, who was studying the church, the congregation and theservice through his glasses, collecting copy for his essay, and Mr.Cyril Grammont, who looked like a Roman Catholic attending a Protestantchurch by special dispensation. (This look cannot be defined, but isknown if seen.)

  Ivy looked from the End House to her father, surpliced at the lectern,reading the Proper Lesson appointed for Brains Sunday, Proverbs 8 and 9."Shall not wisdom cry, and understanding put forth her word? Shestandeth in the top of high places, by the way, in the places of thepaths. She crieth at the gates, at the entry of the city, at the comingin at the doors.... O ye simple, understand wisdom, and, ye fools, be ofan understanding heart.... Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewnout her seven pillars" (that was the Ministry hotel, thought Ivy)...."She hath sent forth her maidens, she crieth upon the highest place ofthe city" (on the walls of the Little Chantreys town hall). "Whoso issimple, let him turn in hither.... Forsake the foolish and live, and goin the way of understanding.... Give instruction to a wise man and hewill get wiser; teach a just man and he will increase in learning....The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge ofthe holy is understanding...." Which set Ivy Delmer wondering a little,for she believed her parents to be holy, or anyhow very, very good, andyet.... But perhaps they had, after all, the beginning of wisdom, onlynot its middle, nor its end, if wisdom has any end. She looked from herfather, carefully closing the big Bible and remarking that here endedthe first lesson, to her mother, carefully closing her little Bible (forshe was of those who follow lessons in books); her mother, who was sowonderfully good and kind and selfless, and to whom old age must come,and who ought to be preparing for it by going in for the Government MindTraining Course, but who said she hadn't time, she was so busy in thehouse and garden and parish. And half the things she did or supervisedin the house and garden ought, said the Ministry of Brains, to be doneby machinery, or co-operation, or something. They would have been donebetter so, and would have left the Delmers and their parishioners moretime. More time for what, was the further question? "Save time now spenton the mere business of living, and spend it on better things," said theMinistry pamphlets. Reading, Ivy supposed; thinking, talking, getting_au fait_ with the affairs of the world. And here was Mrs. Delmerteaching each new girl to make pastry (no new girl at the vicarage everseemed to have acquired the pastry art to Mrs. Delmer's satisfaction inher pre-vicarage career)--pastry, which should have been turned out bythe yard in a pastry machine; and spudding up weeds one by one, whichshould have been electrocuted, like superfluous hairs, or flung up bydynamite, like fish in a river.... But when Mrs. Delmer heard of suchnew and intelligent labour-saving devices, she was as reluctant to adoptthem as any of the poor dear stupid women in the cottages. It was apity, because the Church should lead the way; and really now that it hadbeen set free of the State it quite often did.

  Ivy looked with puzzled, thoughtful eyes, which this morning, unusually,were observing people rather than their clothes, at the rest of thecongregation, her own brothers and sisters first. The young Delmers wereseveral in number; there was Betty, who had just left school, and showedno signs of "doing" anything, except her hair, the flowers, andoccasionally the lamps. For the rest, she played tennis for prizes andhockey for Bucks, went out to tea, and when in doubt dyed her clothes orwashed the dogs. There was Charlie, at Cambridge. Charlie was of thosefor whom the Great War had been allowed to take the place of theLittlego, which was fortunate in his case, as he had managed to getthrough the one but would probably in no circumstances have got throughthe other. And there was Reggie, who had got through neither, but hadbeen killed at Cambrai in November, 1917. There were also some littleones, Jane and John, aged twelve and eleven, who, though separated bythe length of a seat, still continued to hold communication by Morse,and Jelly, who was named for a once famous admiral and whose age cannotbe specified. Jelly was small and stout, sat between his mother and Ivyand stared at his father in the choir-stalls, and from time to timelifted up his voice and laughed, as if he were at a Punch and Judy show.

  On the whole an agreeable family, and well-intentioned (though Ivy andBetty quarrelled continuously and stole each other's things), butcertainly to be numbered among the simple, who were urged to getunderstanding. Would they ever get it? That was the question, for themand for the whole congregation here present, from the smallest,grubbiest school-child furtively sucking bulls'-eyes and wiping itssticky hands upon its teacher's skirt, to the vicar in the pulpit,giving out his text.

  "The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God"; that was the text.Ivy saw a little smile cross the clever and conceited face of Mr.Amherst as it was given out. He settled himself down to listen,expectant of entertainment. He believed that he was in luck. For Mr.Amherst, who did not say in his heart that there was no God, becauseeven in his heart he scorned the affirmation of the obvious, was ofthose who are sure that all members of the Christian Church are fools(unlike Mr. Arnold Bennett, who tries and fails, he did not even try tothink of them as intellectual equals), so he avoided, where he could,the study of clever Christians, and welcomed the evidences of weaknessof intellect that crossed his path. He believed that this was going tobe a foolish sermon, which, besides amusing them all, would help him inhis article on Organised Religion.

  Ivy could not help watching the End House people. Somehow she knew howthe sermon was affecting them. She didn't think it funny, but shesuspected that they would. Her father wasn't as clever as they were;that was why he failed to say anything that could impress them except aseither dull or comic. Brains again. How much they mattered. Clergymenought to have brains; it seemed very important. They ought to know howto appeal to rich and poor, high and low, wise and simple. Thisextraordinary thing called religion--(Ivy quite newly and unusually sawit as extraordinary, seeing it for a moment with the eyes of the EndHouse, to all of whom, except Miss Ponsonby and, presumably, CyrilGrammont, it was like fairy lore, like Greek mythology, mediaeval archaicnonsense)--this extraordinary lore and the more extraordinary forcebehind it, was in the hands, mainly (like everything else), ofincompetents, clerical and lay, who did not understand it themselves andcould not help others to do so. They muddled about with it, as MissPomfrey muddled about with office papers.... It would not be surprisingif the force suddenly demolished them all, like lightning....

  But such speculations were foreign to Ivy, and she forgot them inexamining the hat of Mrs. Peterson, the grocer's wife, which was sonoticeable in its excessive simplicity--its decoration consisted whollyof home-grown vegetables--as to convince beholders that Mr. Peterson had_not_, as some falsely said, made a fortune during the war by corneringmargarine.

  2

  Mr. Delmer was talking about the worst form of unwisdom--Atheism; aterrible subject to him, and one he approached with diffidence butresolution, in the face of the unusual pew-full just below him.

  "It is an extraordinary thing," he was saying, "that there are those whoactually deny the existence of God
. We have, surely, only to think ofthe immeasurable spaces of the universe--the distance He has set betweenone thing and another.... It is reported of the Emperor Napoleon that,looking up at the stars one night, he remarked...." Ivy, who had heardthis remark of the Emperor Napoleon's before, let her attention wanderagain to the hats of Mrs. Peterson and others. When she listened oncemore, the vicar had left Napoleon, though he was still dealing with theheavenly bodies.

  "If an express train, performing sixty miles an hour, were to start offfrom this planet--were such a thing possible to imagine, which of courseit is not--towards the moon, and continue its journey without stopsuntil it arrived, it would reach its destination, according to thecalculations of scientists, in exactly 1 year, 8 months, 26 days." (Ivy,who had left school lately enough to remember the distance set by thecreator between the earth and the moon, began to work this out in herhead; she did not think that her father had got it quite right.) "And,in the face of this, there are those who say that God does not exist. Afurther thought, yet more wonderful. If the same train, travelling atthe same rapid rate, were to leave this earth again, this time for thesun, the time it would take over this journey would be--I ask you, ifyou can, to imagine it, my friends--no less than 175 years, 1 week, and6 days...." (Ivy gave it up; it was too difficult without pencil andpaper.) "Is it possible that, knowing this, there are still those whodoubt God? Yet once more. Imagine, if you can, this train again startingforth, this time bound for the planet Jupiter. Scientists tell us, andwe must believe it" (All right, thought Ivy, with relief, if he'd got itout of a book), "that such a journey would take, if performed whenJupiter was at its furthest, 1097 years, 9 months, 2 weeks, 5 days, 10hours, and a fraction. Can it really be that, confronted with the dizzythought of these well-nigh incredibly lengthy journeys from one heavenlybody to another, there are yet men and women who attribute the universeto the blind workings of what they are pleased to call the Forces ofNature? I ask you to consider earnestly, could any force but God haveconceived and executed such great distances? And Jupiter, my friends, iscomparatively near at hand. Take instead one of those little (but onlyapparently little) nameless stars twinkling in the firmament. Imagineour train starting off into space once more...."

  Ivy failed to imagine this; her attention was occupied with the EndHouse seat. The train's last journey had been too much for the totteringself-control of the Grammont family and Vernon Prideaux (nothing everbroke down Mr. Amherst's self-control, and Pansy's thoughts wereelsewhere). Prideaux's head rested on his hand, as if he were lost inthought; Kitty and Anthony were shaking, unobtrusively but unmistakably,and Cyril's fine, supercilious chin, set firmly, was quivering. Cyrilhad, from childhood, had more self-control than the other two, and hewas further sustained by his conviction that it would be unthinkably badform for a Catholic to attend a Protestant service and laugh at it inpublic.

  They oughtn't, thought Ivy, rather indignantly, to laugh at her father'ssermon when he wasn't meaning to be funny. If he saw he would be hurt.One shouldn't laugh in church, anyhow; even Jane and John knew that.These people were no better than Jelly.

  "This Sunday," continued the Vicar, his last star journey safelyaccomplished, "is the day that has been set aside by our country forprayer and sermons with regard to the proposed increase in the nationalbrain-power. This is, indeed, a sore need: but let us start on the firmfoundation of religion. What is wisdom apart from that? Nothing butvanity and emptiness. What is the clever godless man but a fool from thepoint of view of eternity? What is the godly fool but a heavenlysuccess?" ("He's talking sedition," whispered Kitty to Prideaux. "He'dbetter have stuck to the trains.")

  But, of course, the vicar continued, if one can combine virtue andintelligence, so much the better. It has been done. There was, e.g.Darwin. Also General Gordon, St. Paul, and Lord Roberts, who had saidwith his last breath, in June, 1915, "We've got the men, we've got themoney, we've got the munitions; what we now want is a nation on itsknees." (Ivy saw Prideaux sit up very straight, as if he would haveliked to inform Mr. Delmer that this libel on a dying soldier had longsince been challenged and withdrawn.) One can, said the vicar, find manymore such examples of this happy combination of virtue and intelligence.There was Queen Victoria, Florence Nightingale, and Lord Rhondda (who inthe dark days of famine had led the way in self-denial). Not,unfortunately, the Emperor Napoleon, Friedrich Nietzsche, or the KaiserWilhelm II. The good are not always the clever, nor the clever alwaysthe good. Some are neither, like the late Crown Prince of Germany (whowas now sharing a small island in the Pacific with the Kaiser Wilhelmand MM. Lenin and Trotzky, late of Petrograd, and neither stupid norexactly, let us hope, bad, but singularly unfortunate and misguided,like so many Russians, whom it is not for us to judge).

  But we should try to be both intelligent and good. We should take everystep in our power to improve our minds. (Prideaux began to look moresatisfied; this was what sermons to-day ought to be about.) It is ourduty to our country to be intelligent citizens, if we can, said thevicar. Reason is what God has differentiated us from the lower animalsby. They have instinct, we reason. Truly a noble heritage. We are ratherclever already; we have discovered fire, electricity, coal, and inventedprinting, steam engines, and flying. No reason why we should not improveour minds further still, and invent (under God) more things yet. Onlyone thing we must affirm; the State should be very careful how itinterferes with the domestic lives of its citizens. The State was goingrather far in that direction; it savoured unpleasantly of Socialism, atyranny to which Englishmen did not take kindly. An Englishman's homehad always been his castle (even castles, thought some aggrieved membersof the congregation, were subject to unpleasant supervision by thepolice during food scarcity). No race was before us in its respect forlaw, but also no race was more determined that their personal anddomestic relations should not be tampered with. When the Stateendeavoured to set up a Directorate of Matrimony, and penalised thosewho did not conform to its regulations, the State was, said the vicar,going too far, even for a State. The old school of _laissez-faire_, longsince discredited as an economic theory, survived as regards the privatelives of citizens. It is not the State which has ordained marriage, itis God, and God did not say "Only marry the clever; have no children butclever ones." He said, speaking through the inspired mouth of the writerof the book of Genesis, "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish theearth." ("And, through the inspired mouth of Solomon, 'Desire not amultitude of unprofitable children,'" murmured Anthony Grammont, whoknew his Bible in patches, but was apt to get the authorship wrong.)

  The vicar said he was now going to say a bold thing; if it brought himwithin reach of the law he could not help it. He considered that weought all, in this matter, to be what are called ConscientiousObstructionists; we ought to protest against this interference, andrefuse to pay the taxes levied upon those less intelligent infants sentto us by heaven. He did not say this without much thought and prayer,and it was, of course, a matter for everyone's own conscience, but hefelt constrained to bear his witness on this question.

  This came to Ivy as a shock. She had not known that her father was goingto bear his witness this morning. She watched Prideaux's face with someanxiety. She admired and feared Prideaux, and thought how angry he mustbe. Not Miss Grammont; Miss Grammont didn't take these things quiteseriously enough to be angry. Ivy sometimes suspected that the wholework of the Ministry of Brains, and, indeed, of every other Ministry,was a joke to her.

  It was a relief to Ivy when her father finished his sermon on a moreloyal note, by an urgent exhortation to everyone to go in for the MindTraining Course. We must not be backward, he said, in obeying ourcountry in this righteous cause. He, for his part, intended to go in forit, with his household (Mrs. Delmer looked resigned but a littleworried, as if she was mentally fitting in the Mind Training Course withall the other things she had to do, and finding it a close fit) and hehoped everyone in the congregation would do the same. Ivy saw Prideaux'sprofile become more approving. Perhaps her father had retrieved his
reputation for patriotism after all. Anyhow at this point the And Nowbrought them all to their feet, they sang a hymn (the official hymncomposed and issued by the Brains Ministry), had a collection (for theeducation of imbeciles), a prayer for the enlightenment of dark minds(which perhaps meant the same), and trooped out of church.

  3

  "He ought, of course," said Prideaux at lunch, "to be reported andprosecuted for propaganda contrary to the national interest. But wewon't report him; he redeemed himself by his patriotic finish."

  "He is redeemed for evermore by his express train," said Kitty.

  "A most instructive morning," said Amherst.

  "Protestants are wonderful people," said Cyril.

  "I always said that man was a regular pet lamb," said Pansy. "And hadn'the pluck! Fancy givin' it us about that silly old baby tax with you tworepresentatives of the government sitting under him an' freezin' him. Iguess I'll have the Cheeper christened first opportunity, just to pleasehim, what, old dear?"

  Anthony, thus addressed, said, "As soon and as often as you like,darling. Don't mind me. Only I suppose you realise that it will meanthinking of a name for him--Sidney, or Bert, or Lloyd George orsomething."

  "Montmorency," said Pansy promptly. "Monty for short, of course. That'llsound awfully well in revue."

  It should be noted as one up for Mr. Delmer that his sermon, whether ornot it brought many of his parishioners to the Government Mind TrainingCourse, had anyhow (unless Pansy forgot again) brought one infant soulinto the Christian Church.

  4

  Mrs. Delmer said to Ivy, "I suppose we shall all have to go in for it,dear, as father's told everyone we're going to. But I don't quite knowhow I'm going to get the time, especially with this new boy sountrustworthy about changing the hens' water when he feeds them andcrushing up the bones for them. Perhaps he'll be better when he's takenthe course himself. But I half suspect it's not so much stupidity asnaughtiness.... Well, well, if father wants us to we must."

  Jane said, kicking stones along the road as she walked, "Shall I be topof my form when I've taken the Course, mother? Shall I, mother? WillJohn? John was lower than me last week. _Shall_ we, mother?"

  Mrs. Delmer very sensibly observed that, if all the other children inthe parish took the course too, as they ought, their relative capacitieswould remain unchanged. "But if both you and John took a little morepains over your home-work, Jane," she took the opportunity to add,whereupon Jane very naturally changed the subject.

  Betty's contribution was "_Brains!_ What a silly fuss about them. Whowants brains?"

  Which was, indeed, a very pertinent question, and one which NicholasChester sometimes sadly asked himself.

  Who, alas, did?