CHAPTER II
LITTLE CHANTREYS
1
Ivy Delmer went home to Little Chantreys on the following Saturdayafternoon, after a matinee and tea in town, in the same train, thoughnot the same carriage as Kitty Grammont and Vernon Prideaux, who werepresumably spending the week-end at the End House. Ivy travelled homeevery evening of the week. Miss Grammont had a flat in town, but spentthe week-ends when she was not otherwise engaged, with her brother inLittle Chantreys, which was embarrassing to Ivy.
As Ivy got out of the train she saw Miss Grammont's brother and the ladywho could scarcely be called her sister-in-law, on the platform,accompanied by a queer-looking man of about forty, with ears rather likea faun's. Anyone, thought Ivy, could have guessed which house in LittleChantreys he was staying at. The week-end people who came to the EndHouse differed widely one from another in body and soul; some lookedclever, or handsome, others did not, some were over-dressed, some under,some, like Miss Grammont and her brothers, just right; there weremusical people, sporting people, literary or artistic people, stagypeople (these last were the friends of Miss Pansy Ponsonby, who was notMiss Grammont's sister-in-law), uncommon people, and common people; butthey all, thought Ivy Delmer, had two looks in common--they looked as ifthey wouldn't get on very well with her father and mother, and theylooked as if they didn't read the Bible.
This second look was differentiated according to the wearer of it. Someof them (like this man to-day) looked as if he didn't read it because ithad become so inextricably bound up with vulgar superstition and animpossible religion that he despised it. Some, like Miss Grammont andher brother Anthony, looked as if they didn't read it because theyalready knew enough of it to be funny about it when they wanted to;others, like Miss Pansy Ponsonby, looked as if she had really once givenit a try, but had found it dry and put off further perusal until suchtime as she lay dying and might want to do something about her futurestate. And Miss Grammont's brother Cyril looked as if it was aProtestant book, and rather vulgar. Some, again, looked innocent, as ifthey had never heard of it, others guilty, as if they never wanted toagain.
Ivy Delmer walked home to the Vicarage, hoping rather that the End Housewouldn't come to church to-morrow. It was taken, from time to time, withan unaccountable fit of doing this. It made Ivy uncomfortable. Whetheror not it came to pray, she could not help having an uneasy suspicionthat it stayed to mock.
2
"Hullo, old dear," said Miss Pansy Ponsonby, in her rich and resonantdrawl, as Kitty and her companion came out of the station. "Here we allare again. _And_ the Cheeper. He's a growin' boy, our Cheeper: he putson weight. Takes after me: I put on weight when I forget my exercisesand don't keep an eye on myself. Don't I, Tony? Mr. Prideaux, isn't it?How do, Mr. Prideaux? Vurry pleased you've come. You know Mr. Amherst,don't you? You clever folks all know each other." Miss Ponsonby, who wasnot an American, had once performed in the same company as Miss LeeWhite, and had caught an inflexion or two. She looked with thesatisfaction of the hospitable hostess at the little group, and added,"So here we all are. And vurry nice too."
It was, indeed, not an unpleasing group. Dominating it was Miss Ponsonbyherself, very tall, very beautiful, very supple (only a year ago she hadbeen doing her celebrated eel-dance in "Hullo, Peace!"), with long andlovely violet eyes and the best kind of Icilma skin, adorned tastefullybut quite unnecessarily with pink paint, white powder, scarlet lipsalve, and black lash-darkener. All this was from force of habit: MissPonsonby was quite adequately pink, white, scarlet and black in her ownperson. But, as Kitty observed, having been given by heaven such anabsurd thing as a human face, what could one do but make it yet moreabsurd by these superimposed gaieties? You cannot take a face as aserious thing; it is one of nature's jests, and it is most suitablydealt with as the clown and the pierrot deal with theirs. This wasKitty's point of view; Pansy had none, only habits.
Pansy was guiding and controlling a motor-pram, in which lay theCheeper, aged four months (he had no Christian name, having so farevaded both the registrar and the font, and presumably no surname, owingto the peculiar circumstances of his parents). The Cheeper's father,Anthony Grammont, was a fair, pale, good-looking, rather tired young manof seven and twenty, with a slightly plaintive voice; he looked as if heshared, only with more languor, Miss Ponsonby's placid and engagingenjoyment of the world; he had been in one of the hottest corners ofFrance through the European War, and had emerged from it a bored andunambitious colonel, deaf of one ear, adorned with a Military Cross, anddetermined to repay himself for his expenditure of so much time, energyand health by enjoying the fifty or sixty years which, he piously hoped,remained to him, to the full. Which he was now doing. His professionallife was passed on the Stock Exchange.
Mr. Leslie Amherst, the man like a faun, who was staying with him, wasan old friend of the Grammont family. He wrote, and was on the staff ofa weekly journal. He was engaged just now on a series of articles on theForces of Darkness in Darkest Europe. So far he had produced 1. TheLegislature, 2. Capitalism, 3. Industrialism, 4. Nationalism, 5.Militarism, 6. The Press, and this week he was writing 7. OrganisedReligion. (It will no doubt shock some readers to learn that theseforces had not all, in spite of the earnest hopes entertained for solong for their overthrowal, yet been overthrown; but truth compels me tostate that they had not.) Though Amherst talked like a cynic, and hadhis affectations, he was an earnest thinker, and sometimes tired hishost, who was not, and who had been left by his years of difficultcontinental sojourn with a supreme distaste for any further probing intothe problems of Darkest Europe. Amherst had the advantage, in thismatter, of having been a Conscientious Objector to Military Service, sothe war had not tired him, and he retained for home use the freshnessand vigour of attack which had, in the case of many of hisfellow-countrymen, been all used up abroad.
The End House party was completed by Kitty Grammont, with her round,long-lashed eyes and her air of the ingenuous rake, and Vernon Prideaux,brisk and neat and clever. So there they all were; and very nice, too.
Kitty kissed her brother and Miss Ponsonby and dug the Cheeper in theribs in the manner he preferred. She was very fond of them all, andfound Miss Ponsonby immeasurably entertaining. Little had she thought,when of old she used joyfully to watch Miss Pansy Ponsonby twist andkick and curl herself about the stage and sing fascinating inanities inher lazy contralto, that they would ever be linked by no common bond. Ofcourse she had known that her brother Anthony was showering flowers,chocolates, suppers, week-ends and air-trips at Miss Ponsonby's nimblefeet (the toes of which could bend right back at the joints) but Anthonyhad been known to shower these things at the feet of others. CertainlyKitty had never expected that he would instal this delightful andexpensive being in a real house, have a real infant, and really settledown, albeit socially ostracised in Buckinghamshire because imperfectlymarried (that was the fault of Pansy's husband, Mr. Jimmie Jenks, who,though he didn't want her himself, selfishly refused to sever theconnection irrevocably).
"What's the afternoon news?" enquired Mr. Amherst, as they walked up tothe village.
"Haven't seen a paper for half an hour," replied Prideaux, who kept hisfinger on the pulse of the nation and liked his news up to date. "I'vegot two five o'clock ones with me, though. The Leeds strike is ratherworse, the Sheffield one rather better. The aero bus men are coming outon Monday. Dangerous unrest among Sussex shepherds and Cotswold cowmen."(Agricultural labour was now controlled by the State.) "Lord Backwoodshas been speaking to his constituents against the Bill fordisfranchising Conscientious Obstructionists of the Mental ProgressActs. A thoroughly seditious speech, of course. Poor old chap, hiseldest-son has just got engaged to be married, so there'll be anotherfamily of Backwoods babies who ought never to exist. It will hit themheavily financially.... And the International Police have found anotherunderground gun-factory near Munich, under a band-stand. And it'sconfirmed that old Tommy Jackson is to be Drink Controller."
"Another good butler spoilt," observed Anthon
y Grammont. "He _was_ ajolly good butler once. And he'll be a jolly bad Drink Controller."
"Dear old Tommy," murmured Miss Ponsonby absently, lifting the Cheeperout of his motor-pram with one strong white hand and balancing him onher ample shoulders. "He was vurry kind to me in the dear old days, whenI spent week-ends at Surrey Towers. He used to give me tips on CorrectConduct. I didn't take them; Correct Conduct wasn't what the peoplethere asked me for; but I was grateful to Tommy."
"If," said Anthony, "there is any member of a government department,existing, fallen, or yet to come, who has _not_ in the dear old daysbeen vurry kind to you, my dear Pansy, I should be rather glad to knowhis name."
"Why, certainly," returned Pansy, with cheerful readiness. "NickyChester, the Brains Minister who's making himself such an all-roundeternal nuisance, doesn't even realise I exist, and if he did he'd thinkI oughtn't."
"That's where you're wrong, Pansy," Kitty said. "He thinks everyoneought to exist who does anything as well as you do your things. You'reStarred A, aren't you?"
"I've gone and lost the silly old bus ticket," said Pansy indifferently,"but that's what it said, I think." Starred A meant (in the words of theofficial definition) first-class ability at a branch of work which wouldnot appear to be a valuable contribution to the general efficiency ofthe State. The Cheeper, child of a starred A mother and a B3 father(Anthony's brains had been reduced by trench-life; he had been quiteintelligent at Oxford), was subject neither to bonus nor tax.
"Anyhow," went on Pansy, grinning her wide, sweet, leisurely grin, "Ithink I see Nicky Chester sendin' me round flowers or goodies after ashow! He's seen me, you know: he was in a box the first night of 'Hullo,Peace!' He laughed at the political hits, but my turns left him cold; Iguess they weren't brainy enough." She tossed the Cheeper in the air andcaught him, strongly and easily. "Make him supple young," she observed,"an' by the time he's six he'll be a star Child Gamboller, fit forrevue. He takes after me. Already he can put both his big toes in hislittle mouth at once."
"Very unusual, surely," remarked Mr. Amherst, looking at the Cheeperthrough his pince-nez as if he were an insect under a microscope. Mr.Amherst was fellow of an Oxford college, and had the academic touch, andwas not yet entirely used to Pansy, a type outside his previous studies,and at no time would he be really used to anyone under eighteen years ofage, let alone six months. Possibly this was what his reviewers meantwhen they said that he lacked the touch of common humanity.
His attention was diverted from the Cheeper by the parish church, whichhe inspected with the same curiosity and distaste.
"Organised Religion, I presume," he commented. "If you've no objection,Anthony, I will attend morning service there to-morrow. It may provideme with some valuable subject matter for my article."
"We'll all go," said Kitty. "The End House shall set an example to thevillage. We'll take Cyril, too. He can get a dispensation. It's BrainsSunday, you know, and all patriotic clergymen will be preaching aboutit. Vernon and I are officially bound to be there."
"I don't suppose it will be amusing," said Anthony. "But we'll go if youall want to."
"Church," said Pansy, meditatively regarding the Early Perpendiculartower. "_I_ went one Sunday morning." She paused reminiscently, andadded, without chagrin, "The vicar turned me down."
"He could hardly," said Mr. Amherst civilly, "do otherwise. Yourposition is not one which is at present recognised by OrganisedReligion."
"Oh, he recognised it all right," Pansy explained. "That was just thetrouble; he didn't like it.... He's not a bad old sort. He came to callafterwards, and told me all about it. He was quite upset. So was I,wasn't I, old thing?"
"Not in the least," returned Anthony placidly.
"I'd only wanted to do the proper thing," Pansy continued herunperturbed narrative, in her singularly beautiful voice. "I was alwaysbrought up to go to church now and then. I was confirmed all right. Ilike to do the proper thing. It only seems fair to the Cheeper to bringhim up in the way he should go. I wouldn't care for him to grow up anagnogger, like all you people. But Mr. Delmer said my way of life wastoo ambiguous to square with comin' to church. Rather a sweet word,don't you think? Because it _isn't_ ambiguous really, you know; not abit, I'm afraid.... So when the Cheeper turned up, it seemed to me _he_was a bit ambiguous, too, an' that's why I haven't had him made a littleChristian yet. The vicar says he can square that up all right--he calledon purpose to tell me--but somehow we've never had the time to fix it,have we, darlin'? Tottie O'Clare promised me she'd be godmother if everI did have him done...."
"Pansy," said Anthony, "you're boring Amherst and Prideaux. They're notinterested in babies, or baptisms, or Tottie O'Clare."
Pansy smiled at them all out of her serene violet eyes. She looked likesome stately, supple Aphrodite; she might, but for the delicate soupconof powder and over-red lips, have sat for a madonna.
"Pansy," said Kitty, "it's the Sistine Madonna you're like; I've got itat last. You're the divine type. You might be from heaven. You're sorestful. We all spin and buzz about, trying to get things done, and tobe clever and fussy and efficient--and you just _are_. You happen, likespring, or music. You're not a bit like Chester, but you're ever so muchmore important. Isn't she, Vernon?"
"They're both," said Prideaux tactfully, "of enormous importance. Andcertainly, as you say, not in the least alike. Chester is neither likespring nor music, and certainly one wouldn't call him restful. And Ishould be a bit surprised to learn that heaven is where he either beganor will end his career.... But, I ask you, look at that."
They were passing the little Town Hall, that stood in the village marketplace. Its face was plastered with an immense poster, which Prideaux andKitty surveyed with proprietary pride, Amherst with cynical amusement,Anthony with bored resignation, and Pansy and the Cheeper with placidwonder at the world's folly.
"Ours is a wonderful government," Kitty commented. "And we are awonderful ministry. Think of rural England all plastered with that.... Idon't believe Chester laughs when he sees it, Vernon. I'm sure he looksat it proudly, like a solemn, earnest little boy."
"And quite right too," said Prideaux, screwing his glass into his eyethe better to read. For this was a new Ministry of Brains poster; newthis week. It read, in large type, "Improve your Brains! Go in for theGovernment Course of Mind Training! It will benefit you, it will benefityour country, it will benefit posterity. Old Age must come. But it neednot be a Doddering Old Age. Lay up Good Mental Capacities to meet it,and make it a Fruitful and Happy Time. See what the Mind Training Coursehas done for others, and let it Do the Same for You."
Then, in smaller type, "Here are a few reports from those who havebenefited by it.
"_From a famous financier._ Since I began the Course I have doubled myincome and halved those of 750 others. I hope, by the time I havecompleted the Course, to have ruined twice this number.
"_From a Cabinet Minister._ Owing to the Mind Training Course I have nowremained in office for over six weeks. I hope to remain for at leastthree more.
"_From a newspaper proprietor._ I have started eight new journals sinceI took the Course, over-turned three governments, directed fourinternational crises, and successfully represented Great Britain to thenatives of the Pacific Islands.
"_From the editor of a notorious weekly paper._ I took the Coursebecause I seemed to be losing that unrivalled touch which has made mypaper what, I may say, it is. Since taking it, more than my old forcehas returned, so that I have libelled nine prominent persons andsuccessfully defended six libel actions in the courts. The M.T. Courseteaches one to Live at one's Best.
"_From a Civil Servant._ Every time a new government department is bornI enter it, rendered competent by the Mind Training Course to fill itshighest posts. When the Department falls I leave it, undamaged.
"_From a Publisher._ My judgment has been so stimulated by the Coursethat since taking it I have published five novels so unpleasant thatcorrespondence still rages about them in the columns of the Spectator,
and which have consequently achieved ten editions. The Course teachesone why some succeed and others fail.
"_From a Journalist._ I now only use the words decimated, literally,annihilated, and proletariat, according to the meanings ascribed to themin the dictionary, do not use pacifism more than three times a day, nor'very essential' or 'rather unique' at all.
"_From a famous Theologian._ Before I undertook the Course I was aBishop of a disestablished Church. Now my brain is clarified, my eyesare opened, and I am a leader of the Coming Faith. The Course teachesthe Meaning of Life.
"_From a former Secretary of State._ Since taking the Course I haverecognised the importance of keeping myself informed as to publicaffairs, and now never refer in my public speeches to any speech byanother statesman without having previously read a summary of it.
"_From a poet._ I can now find rhymes to nearly all my lines, and havegiven up the old-fashioned habit of free rhythms to which I have beenaddicted since 1912. I can even find rhymes to indemnity, also a rhymeto War which is neither gore, claw, nor star.
"_From an inveterate writer of letters to newspapers._ I no longer dothis.
"_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? Saveyourself, save your country, save the world! How shall wisdom be found,and where is the place of understanding? So asked the Preacher of theancient world, and got no answer, because then there was none. But theanswer is now forthcoming. Wisdom is to be found in the Government MindTraining Course--the M.T.C., as it is affectionately called by thousandsof 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, andcalled "Before and After." "Before" had the vacuity of the villageidiot, "After" the triumphant cunning of the maniac. The Mind TrainingCourse had obviously completely overset a brain formerly harmless, ifdeficient.
"How long," enquired Amherst, in his best Oxford manner, "do you giveyourselves? I address the enquiry, as a member of the public, to you, asservants of a government which can resort to such methods as that."
"We have now remained in office for over six months," said Kitty, "andwe hope to remain for at least three more.... But it's for us to askyou, 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 otherhotels, aren't stormed and wrecked. I don't know why the Aero BusCompany, while it's on strike, doesn't sail over us and drop bombs. Itshows we must be more popular than we deserve. It shows that peoplereally _like_ being coerced and improved. They know they need it. Lookat 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 ofhis clothes. He's god-like to look at; he's got a figure like theDiscobolus, 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 becausewe're ambiguous. That's the sort of mind he has. Look at the doctor, inhis absurd little Ford. How much do you suppose he knows about curingpeople, or about the science of bodies? He patches them up with pillsand 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 wepass him."
He returned the salute with some pride, and Pansy nodded agreeably.Amherst examined the vicar, who was small and sturdy and had a nice kindface.
Amherst shook his head when they had left him behind.
"Not nearly clever enough for the part," he pronounced. "To organisereligion a man should have the talents of the devil, or at least of theintelligent civil servant. Prideaux would do it quite well; or Chester;only Chester might be too erratic for the popular taste. No wonderChristianity is the ineffective thing it is in this country, if it'sleft in the hands of officials like that. That man couldn't organiseanything; I bet even his school treats go wrong--too few buns orsomething. That's the hope for the world, that inefficiency of mostreligious officials; that's why the public will succeed before long inthrowing off the whole business, even before they succeed in downingParliament and the British autocracy, who are a shade more acute. Frommy point of view your vicar's stupidity is all to the good. If hepreaches to-morrow as the Brains Ministry want him to--and he looksloyal and patriotic enough to try--he'll be preaching against his owninterests. 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 thehuman race reasonably intelligent, your number would be up; you wouldn'tbe stood for a moment longer. You're sitting on a branch and trying tosaw it off. Lucky for you your saws aren't sharper."
"Chester would go on just the same if he did see," Kitty said. "Heprobably does. He's an idealist, but his eye for facts is verypenetrating. And he'd think it worth while to perish in so good acause."
"The fact is," added Prideaux, "that he never would perish, even if thebranch did fall; he'd climb on to another pretty quickly and rise as thePeople's Saviour. Our Nicky won't go under."
3
They arrived at the End House, about which there is little to say exceptthat it lay just beyond the straggling village, was roomy, comfortable,untidy, full of dogs all named after revue stars, and was an interestingmixture of the Grammont taste in art and decoration, which was the tasteof clever people several of whom were artists, and of Pansy's taste,which is most shortly indicated by mentioning that if you saw the housebefore you saw Pansy you were surprised, and if you had seen Pansy firstyou were not. The drawing-room floor was littered with large andcomfortable and brightly-hued cushions, obviously not mistakes butseats. This always a little flurried the vicar and his wife when theycalled; it was, as Mrs. Delmer observed, so very Eastern, and suggestedother habits belonging to the same dubious quarter of the globe, some ofwhich there was only too good reason to believe had been adopted. Thechimney-piece was worse, being adorned by photographs of Pansy'sfriends--her loving Tottie, hers everlastingly, Guy, warmly Phyllis andHarry, and so forth. (There was even hers Jimmie, which, if Mrs. Delmerhad known rather more of Pansy's domestic circumstances than she did,would have struck her as being in very doubtful taste.) Some of theseladies and gentlemen, fortunately, had elected to be taken head andshoulders only (and quite enough too, thought Mrs. Delmer, wondering howfar below the bottom of the photograph the ladies' clothes began) andsome 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 witnessingrevues, and was accustomed to an ampler mode of garment. These thingsare so much a question of habit.)
These photographs, and the excellent painting in the hall of Pansyherself in her eel dance, were among the minor reasons why Ivy Delmerwas not allowed to enter the End House. There were three reasons why herparents did so; they might be stupid, but they were of an extraordinarygoodness, and could not bear to leave sin alone, anyhow in their ownparish, where it set such an unfortunate example, when they might, bysufficient battling, perhaps win it over to righteousness; also they hadkind and soft hearts, and did not like the idea of Pansy alone all daywith her infant son and the two most notoriously ill-behaved youngservants in the village; and finally they were Christians, and believedthat the teaching of their religion on the subject of sociability tosinners was plain. So, swallowing their embarrassed distaste, theyvisited the End House as one might visit a hospital, but kept theirchildren from it, because it was a hospital whose patients might beinfectious.
Into this house, standing hospitably open-doored in the May evening, itsowner and his friends entered. It affected them in various ways. AnthonyGrammont 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 anambiguous household, and of course anyone woul
d be proud of the dazzlingand widely-known Pansy, whose name had always been one of the two inlarge type in advertisements of the shows in which she figured (she wasas 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'sexotic cushions and all they stood for.
Kitty found the house and household inordinately cheering andentertaining; the mere sight of Pansy's drawing-room could rouse herfrom any depression.
Vernon Prideaux shuddered a little at the row of photographs--hedetested photographs on chimney-pieces--and the Eve design on the chaircovers; he was not so good at the comic-opera touch as Kitty was, andhad a masculine sense of propriety and good taste, and had alwayspreferred revue stars on the stage to off it. He had also, however, awide tolerance for the tastes of others, and was glad that Tony Grammonthad found domestic happiness.
Amherst's thoughts were brief and neat, and might be summed up thus:"Forces of Darkness--number 8. The expensive, conscienceless, andunthinking female."
Pansy went upstairs to put the Cheeper to bed, and Kitty went with herto see her nephew in his bath, putting both his big toes into his mouthat once.
The only other event of importance which happened before dinner was thearrival of Cyril Grammont, a brother of Anthony's, a Cambridge friend ofPrideaux's, a Roman Catholic, a writer of epigrammatic essays and lightverse, and a budding publisher. He and Pansy usually quarrelled. He hadspent the war partly in Macedonia, as a member of the Salonika Force,digging up fragments of sculpture from Amphipolis and the other ruinedcities of those regions, tracking what he then held to be the perniciousinfluence of St. Paul with the help of a pocket atlas of his journeysand the obviously evil habits and dispositions of the towns which hadreceived his attentions, and partly in Palestine, where he had taken anextreme dislike to both Jews and Turks, had become convinced that theymust be so wrong about everything that mattered that Christians must beright, and was forthwith converted from atheism to Christianity. Heconsidered that war-time is no time for Christians, they have to do somuch either explaining or protesting or both, so he had waited till thewar was over, and had then proceeded to investigate the various formsinto which Christianity had developed (they all seemed a little strangeto him at first), in order to make his choice. An impartial friend withwhom he discussed the subject told him that he would find RomanCatholicism best suited to his precise, clear-cut, and Latin type ofmind, provided that he succeeded in avoiding all contact with the moreluscious forms of Roman devotions, which, he was warned, would disgusthim as much as patchouli, or Carlo Dolci. "And anyhow," added hisfriend, probably erroneously, "it will outlast the other churches, forall its obscurantism, so if you want a going concern, join it."
So Cyril enquired into Roman Catholicism, found that, in its bestcathedral forms, it satisfied his artistic sense, and, in itssharply-cut dogma, his feeling for precise form (his taste in art wasviolently against the post-bellum school, which was a riot of lazy,sloppy, and unintellectual formlessness), and so, accepting as nostranger than most of the growths of a strangely sprouting world thewonderful tree which had grown from a seed so remarkably dissimilar, hetook a firm seat upon its branches, heedless of the surpriseddisapproval of most of his friends, who did not hold that any organisedreligion could be called a going concern, except in the sense that itwas 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 likethe End House, with its slatternly brilliance, its yapping dogs, itsabsurdities, its sprawling incoherence, its cushions, and its ambiguity.
In the evening Pansy danced her willow-tree dance for them. Her hairtumbled down, and she ceased to look like the Sistine Madonna and becamemore like a young Bacchanal. Some of her jokes were coarse (you have tobe coarse sometimes in revue, and cannot leave the habit entirely behindyou when you come off the boards) and Amherst, who was refined, wasjarred. Then she quarrelled with Cyril, because he remarked, with hischeerful and businesslike air of finality, that of course if the Cheeperwere not baptised he would go to hell. Upon her violent remonstrance hemerely observed that he was sorry, but facts were facts, and he couldn'tget them altered to please her. He talked like this partly to annoyPansy, because it amused him to see her cross, and partly for thepleasure of unobtrusively watching Amherst's expression when the wordhell was mentioned.
So, to unite the party, Kitty proposed that they should play the newcard game, League of Nations, of which the point was to amass cards andgo out while presenting an appearance of doing nothing at all.
Thus harmoniously and hilariously the night wore on, till at last theEnd House, like the other Little Chantreys houses, only much later, wentto bed.
4
Little Chantreys slept under the May moon, round the market square withthe Ministry of Brains poster in the middle.
The doctor slept with the sound sleep of those who do not know the widthof the gulf between what they are and what they should be.
The sick, his patients, slept or woke, tossing uneasily, with windowsclosed to the soft night air. Every now and then they would rouse andtake their medicine, with impatience, desperation, simple faith, or dullobedience, and look in vain for a bettering of their state. Those whoconsidered themselves well, never having known what welfare really was,slept too, in stuffy, air-tight rooms, disturbed by the wailing ofbabies which they had not taught not to cry aloud, by the hopping offleas which they had failed to catch or to subdue, by the dancing ofmice which would never enter traps so obvious as those which theyscornfully perceived in their paths, by the crowding of children aboutthem, too close to be forgotten or ignored, by the dragging weight ofincompetent, unfinished yesterday and incompetent, unbegun to-morrow.
The vicarage slept. The vicar in his sleep had a puzzled frown, as iflife was too much for him, as if he was struggling with forces above hiscomprehension and beyond his grasp, forces that should haverevolutionised Little Chantreys, but, in his hands, wouldn't. Thevicar's wife slept fitfully, waking to worry about the new cook, whosepastry was impossible. She wasn't clever enough to know that cookingshouldn't be done in this inefficient, wasteful way in the home, butco-operatively, in a village kitchen, and pastry should be turned out bya pastry machine. Mrs. Delmer had heard of this idea, but didn't likeit, because it was new. She wasn't strong, and would die one day, wornout with domestic worries which could have been so easily obviated....
The young Delmers slept. They always did. They mostly ought not to havebeen 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 heralarum clock was smothered by a cushion; which would seem to indicatemore brains on her part than were to be found in the other inmates ofthe vicarage.
So Little Chantreys slept, and the world slept, governments andgoverned, forces of darkness and forces of light, industry and idleness,the sad and the gay; pathetic, untutored children of the moment lookingneither behind nor ahead.
The morning light, opening dimly, like a faintly-tinted flower,illumined the large red type of the poster in the Little Chantreysmarket place. "IMPROVE YOUR BRAINS!" So Brains Sunday dawned upon aworld which did indeed seem to need it.