tion>Rose Macaulay
What Not
A Prophetic Comedy
Published by Good Press, 2021
EAN 4057664623706
Table of Contents
ON FIXED HEARTS AND CHANGING SCENES
CHAPTER I
THE MINISTRY
1
After the Great War (but I do not say how long after), when the tumult and the shouting had died, and those who were left of the captains and the kings had gone either home or to those obscure abodes selected for them by their more successful fellows (to allay anxiety, I hasten to mention that three one-time Emperors were among those thus relegated to distance and obscurity), and humanity, released from its long torment, peered nervously into a future darkly divined (nervously, and yet curiously, like a man long sick who has just begun to get about again and cannot yet make anything coherent of the strange, disquieting, terrifying, yet enchanting jumble which breaks upon his restored consciousness)—while these things happened, the trains still ran through the Bakerloo tube, carrying people to their day's work.
Compartments in tube trains are full of variety and life—more so than in trains above ground, being more congested, and having straps, also no class snobbery. Swaying on adjacent straps were a fluffy typist, reading "The Love He Could Not Buy," in the Daily Mirror, a spruce young civil servant on his way to the Foreign Office, reading The Times, a clergyman reading the Challenge, who looked as if he was interested in the Life and Liberty movement, another clergyman reading the Guardian, who looked as if he wasn't, an elderly gentleman reading the Morning Post, who looked patriotic but soured, as if he had volunteered for National Service during the Great War and had found it disappointing, a young man reading the Post-War, the alert new daily, and a citizen with a law-abiding face very properly perusing the Hidden Hand. The Hidden Hand was the Government daily paper. Such a paper had for long been needed; it is difficult to understand why it was not started long ago. All other papers are so unreliable, so tiresome; a government must have one paper on which it can depend for unfailing support. So here was the Hidden Hand, and its readers had no excuse for ignorance of what the government desired them to think about its own actions.
The carriage was full of men and women going to their places of business. There were tired young men, lame young men, pale and scarred young men, brown and fit young men, bored and blasé young men, jolly and amused young men, and nearly all, however brown or fit or pale or languid or jolly or bored, bore a peculiar and unmistakable impress stamped, faintly or deeply, on their faces, their eyes, their carriage, the set of their shoulders.
There were, among the business men and girls, women going shopping, impassive, without newspapers, gazing at the clothes of others, taking in their cost, their cut, their colour. This is an engrossing occupation. Those who practise it sit quite still, without a stir, a twinkle, a yawn, or a paper, and merely look, all over, up and down, from shoes to hat.... They are a strange and wonderful race of beings, these gazing women; one cannot see into their minds, or beyond their roving eyes. They bear less than any other section of the community the stamp of public events. The representatives of the type in the Bakerloo this morning did not carry
