I’m going to be one of their successors?”
“You aren’t. They’re not going to have any successors. The real work has nothing to do with all these departments. The kind of sociology we’re interested in will be done by my people—the police.”
“Then where do I come in?”
“If you’ll trust me,” said the Fairy, putting down her empty glass and producing a cheroot, “I can put you on to a bit of your real work—what you were really brought here to do—straight away.”
“What’s that?”
“Alcasan,” said Miss Hardcastle between her teeth. She had started one of her interminable dry smokes. Then, glancing at Mark with a hint of contempt, “You know who I’m talking about, don’t you?”
“You mean the radiologist—the man who was guillotined?” asked Mark, who was completely bewildered.
The Fairy nodded.
“He’s to be rehabilitated,” she said. “Gradually. I’ve got all the facts in the dossier. You begin with a quiet little article—not questioning his guilt, not at first, but just hinting that of course he was a member of their quisling government, and there was a prejudice against him. Say you don’t doubt the verdict was just, but it’s disquieting to realise that it would almost certainly have been the same even if he’d been innocent. Then you follow it up in a day or two with an article of quite a different kind. Popular account of the value of his work. You can mug up the facts—enough for that kind of article—in an afternoon. Then a letter, rather indignant, to the paper that printed the first article, and going much further. The execution was a miscarriage of justice. By that time——”
“What on earth is the point of all this?”
“I’m telling you, Studdock. Alcasan is to be rehabilitated. Made into a martyr. An irreparable loss to the human race.”
“But what for?”
“There you go again! You grumble about being given nothing to do, and as soon as I suggest a bit of real work you expect to have the whole plan of campaign told you before you do it. It doesn’t make sense. That’s not the way to get on here. The great thing is to do what you’re told. If you turn out to be any good you’ll soon understand what’s going on. But you’ve got to begin by doing the work. You don’t seem to realise what we are. We’re an army.”
“Anyway,” said Mark, “I’m not a journalist. I didn’t come here to write newspaper articles. I tried to make that clear to Feverstone at the very beginning.”
“The sooner you drop all that talk about what you came here to do, the better you’ll get on. I’m speaking for your own good, Studdock. You can write. That’s one of the things you’re wanted for.”
“Then I’ve come here under a misunderstanding,” said Mark. The sop to his literary vanity, at that period of his career, by no means compensated for the implication that his sociology was of no importance. “I’ve no notion of spending my life writing newspaper articles,” he said. “And if I had, I’d want to know a good deal more about the politics of the N.I.C.E. before I went in for that sort of thing.”
“Haven’t you been told that it’s strictly non-political?”
“I’ve been told so many things that I don’t know whether I’m on my head or my heels,” said Mark. “But I don’t see how one’s going to start a newspaper stunt (which is about what this comes to) without being political. Is it Left or Right papers that are going to print all this rot about Alcasan?”
“Both, honey, both,” said Miss Hardcastle. “Don’t you understand anything? Isn’t it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That’s how we get things done. Any opposition to the N.I.C.E. is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it’s properly done you get each side out-bidding the other in support of us—to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we’re non-political. The real power always is.”
“I don’t believe you can do that,” said Mark. “Not with the papers that are read by educated people.”
“That shows you’re still in the nursery, lovey,” said Miss Hardcastle. “Haven’t you yet realised that it’s the other way round?”
“How do you mean?”
“Why, you fool, it’s the educated readers who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem: we have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”
“As one of the class you mention,” said Mark with a smile, “I just don’t believe it.”
“Good Lord!” said the Fairy, “where are your eyes? Look at what the weeklies have got away with! Look at the Weekly Question. There’s a paper for you. When Basic English came in simply as the invention of a free-thinking Cambridge don, nothing was too good for it; as soon as it was taken up by a Tory Prime Minister it became a menace to the purity of our language. And wasn’t the Monarchy an expensive absurdity for ten years? And then, when the Duke of Windsor abdicated, didn’t the Question go all monarchist and legitimist for about a fortnight? Did they drop a single reader? Don’t you see that the educated reader can’t stop reading the highbrow weeklies whatever they do? He can’t. He’s been conditioned.”
“Well,” said Mark, “this is all very interesting, Miss Hardcastle, but it has nothing to do with me. In the first place, I don’t want to become a journalist at all: and if I did I should like to be an honest journalist.”
“Very well,” said Miss Hardcastle. “All you’ll do is to help to ruin this country, and perhaps the whole human race. Besides dishing your own career.”
The confidential tone in which she had been speaking up till now had disappeared and there was a threatening finality in her voice. The citizen and the honest man which had been awaked in Mark by the conversation, quailed a little: his other and far stronger self, the self that was anxious at all costs not to be placed among the outsiders, leaped up, fully alarmed.
“I don’t mean,” he said, “that I don’t see your point. I was only wondering . . .”
“It’s all one to me, Studdock,” said Miss Hardcastle, seating herself at last at her table. “If you don’t like the job, of course, that’s your affair. Go and settle it with the D.D. He doesn’t like people resigning, but, of course, you can. He’ll have something to say to Feverstone for bringing you here. We’d assumed you understood.”
The mention of Feverstone brought sharply before Mark as a reality the plan, which had up till now been slightly unreal, of going back to Edgestow and satisfying himself with the career of a Fellow of Bracton. On what terms would he go back? Would he still be a member of the inner circle even at Bracton? To find himself no longer in the confidence of the Progressive Element, to be thrust down among the Telfords and Jewels,
