"In reply to your letter of 26th May with reference to the taxation on babies born to your employees and their consequent demand for increased wages, I am instructed by the Minister of Brains to inform you that this point is receiving his careful attention, in connection with the general economic question involved by the terms of Ministry of Brains Instruction 743, paragraph 3...."
Prideaux paused, and frowned nervously at his secretary, who was conducting a fruitless conversation over his telephone, an occupation at which she did not shine.
"Hullo ... yes ... I can't quite hear ... who are you, please?... Oh ... yes, he's here.... But rather busy, you know.... Dictating.... Yes, dictating.... Who did you say wanted him, please?... Oh, I see...."
"What is it, Miss Pomfrey?" Prideaux broke in, making her start.
"It's the Minister's secretary," she explained, without covering the receiver. "He says will you go to the Minister. There's a deputation—of bishops, I think he said. About the new Instruction about Clergymen's Babies.... But I said you were busy dictating...."
Prideaux had jumped to his feet, frowning, and was at the door.
"You'd better make a note that I'm never busy dictating or doing anything else when the Minister sends for me," he shot at her as he left the room.
"And now he's cross," Miss Pomfrey murmured sadly.
"I daresay he's only angry at being interrupted," said Ivy Delmer, who had been at the same secretarial college as Miss Pomfrey and thought that her days in the Ministry of Brains were numbered.
"I do make him cross," Miss Pomfrey observed, accepting the fact with resignation, as one of the sad, inevitable fatalities of life, and returned to her indexing. She had been set to make an index of those Ministry of Brains Instructions which had come out that month. She had only got to the 11th of the month. The draught fluttered the pages about. Ivy Delmer watched the Instructions waving to and fro in the breeze—number 801, Agriculturists, 798, Conscientious Obstructionists, 897, Residents in Ireland, 674, Parents of more than three children.... How many there were, thought Ivy, as she watched. How clever the people who dealt with such things needed to be. She thought of her father's village, and the people in it, the agriculturists, the parents of more than three children, all the little human community of lives who were intimately affected by one or other of these instructions, and the fluttering pages emerged from the dry realm to which such as Ivy relegate printed matter and ideas, and took vivid human life. It mattered, all this complicated fabric of regulations and rules and agreements and arrangements; it touched the living universe that she knew—the courting boys and girls on stiles in Buckinghamshire lanes, Emmeline, the Vicarage housemaid, who had married Sid Dean last month, Mr. and Mrs. White at the farm, all the great stupid pathetic aggrieved public, neatly filed letters from whom covered every table in the Ministry, awaiting reply, their very hand-writing and spelling calculated to touch any heart but a civil servant's....
Ivy found a moment in which to hope that everyone in the Ministry was being very careful and painstaking about this business, before she reverted to wondering whether or not she liked the colour which Miss Pomfrey had dyed her jersey.
Having decided that she didn't, and also that she had better go away and wait for Mr. Prideaux to send for her again, she departed.
6
Vernon Prideaux, having given his assistance to the Minister in the matter of the third clause of the new Clergymen's Babies Instruction, left the Minister and the deputation together and returned to his room via the Propaganda Branch, which he visited in order to ask Miss Grammont to dine with him that evening. He and Kitty Grammont had known one another for some years. They had begun at Cambridge, where Prideaux had been two years the senior, and had kept up an intermittent friendship ever since, which had, since their association in the Ministry, grown into intimacy.
Prideaux found Kitty writing a pamphlet. She was rather good at this form of literature, having a concise and clear-cut style and an instinct for stopping on the right word. Some pamphleteers have not this art: they add a sentence or two more, and undo their effect. The pamphlet on which Miss Grammont was at this moment engaged was intended for the perusal of the working woman, and bore the conversational title, "The Nation takes an interest in Your Affairs: will You not take an interest in the Affairs of the Nation?" Which, as Miss Grammont observed, took rather a long time to say, but may have been worth it.
"Dine with you? I'll be charmed. Where and when?"
"My rooms, eight o'clock. I've got my parents and the Minister coming."
"Oh, the Minister."
"Do you mind?"
"No, I'm proud to meet him. I've never yet met him over food, so to speak, only officially. I admire our Chester more every day he lives, don't you? Nature made him and then broke the die."
"Wonderful man," Prideaux agreed. "Extraordinary being.... A happy touch with bishops, too. Picked that up in the home, no doubt; his father's one. Liking's another thing, of course.... By the way, do you know what his category is? However, this is gossip. I must get back and discover what's the latest perpetration of my new secretary. See you to-night, then."
He left the room. Kitty Grammont observed with satisfaction, for she was critical of such things, how well his clothes fitted him, wondered what he had nearly told her about the Minister's category, finished her pamphlet, and sent it out for typing. She had an idea that this pamphlet might not get passed by the censor, and wanted to find out. For the censor was cautious about pamphlets, wisely opining that you cannot be too careful. Pamphlets may, and usually do, deal with dangerous or indecent topics, such as the Future. If sufficiently dangerous and indecent, they become Leaflets, and are suppressed on sight. There were dangerous and explosive words, like Peace, War, and Freedom which the censor dealt with drastically. The danger of the word Peace dated, of course, from the days when Peace had not yet arrived and discussion of it was therefore improper, like the discussion of an unborn infant. By the time it did arrive, its relegation to the region of Things we do not Mention had become a habit, not lightly to be laid aside, so that a Ministry of Brains pamphlet entitled "The Peace of Fools" had been strangled before birth, the censor being very naturally unable to believe that it did not refer in some mysterious way to the negotiations which had ended hostilities, whereas as a matter of fact it was all about the foolish content of stupid people who went on submitting to diseases which a little intelligent thought would have prevented. There had also perished, owing to the same caution on the censor's part, and, it must be presumed, to the same guilty conscience on the part of the Government, a booklet published by Messrs. Mowbray in a purple paper cover with a gold cross on it, called "The Peace which passeth understanding," not to mention a new edition of Burke's "Regicide Peace," and one or two other works of which the censor, whose reading was obliged to be mainly twentieth century, mistook the date. And, if treatises concerning Peace were suspected from force of habit, works on War were discouraged also, on the sound British principle that the stress of a great Peace is not the time to talk of War; we must first deal with Peace, and then we may think about War; but One Thing At Once, and do not let us cry War, War, when there is no war. But there may be one day, argued the pamphleteers, and might it not be well to prepare our minds for it? To which the answer very properly was, No; Britons do not look ahead. They Come Through, instead. And anyhow it was treachery to those who were spending their energies on this righteous peace to discuss a premature war, which could neither be just nor lasting.
Another improper subject, naturally, was Liberty. That needs no explanation; it has always been improper in well-regulated countries, like Eugenics, or the Poor,
