Читать книгу What Not - Macaulay Rose - Страница 10

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, and has received no encouragement from authority. Notwithstanding this, so many improper works upon it, in every conceivable form, have always been produced, that the censors had to engage a special clerk, who had just obtained a first class in English Literature at Oxford, and who therefore had books and pamphlets of all dates fresh in her memory, to check their researches and inform them when their energies were superfluous. Not that all the books of former centuries on this topic were to be encouraged, for, after all, one period is in some respects singularly like another, and the same reflections strangely germane to both. Naturally, therefore, when the literary clerk, seeing advertised a new and cheap edition of Robert Hall's "Sentiments proper to the present crisis," and, remembering the trend of this work, sent for it (having sold her own copy at Blackwell's when she went down), and read such remarks as "Freedom, driven from every spot on the continent, has sought an asylum in a country which she always chose for her favourite abode, but she is pursued even here and threatened with destruction.... It is for you to decide whether this freedom shall yet survive, or be clothed with a funeral pall and be wrapped in eternal gloom"—very properly she reported the matter to headquarters, and the cheap edition was called in.

Equally naturally there perished (without the help of the literary clerk, who was not asked to judge of twentieth century literature) various collections of Free Verse, for which the Poetry Bookshop was successfully raided, a tract of the sort which is dropped about trains, published by the Evangelical Tract Society and called "Throw off your Chains!", "Citizens of a Free City," which was found at Mowbray's, and bore on its title page the statement "Jerusalem ... is free" (a manifest and seditious untruth, as we, of course, held Jerusalem, in trust for the Jews), and many others of like tendency, such as works on Free Food, Free Drink, Free Housing, Free Love, Free Thought, and Labour, in Chains. Even fiction was suspect. A novel entitled The Dangers of Dora, by the well-known author of The Perils of Pauline and The Exploits of Elaine, was suppressed, in spite of what should have been the reassuring fact that Dora, like Pauline and Elaine before her, triumphantly worsted all her foes in the end, and emerged smiling and safe on the last page. Publishers were known to demand the alteration of a title if the name Dora occurred in it, such wholesome respect did the Censor's methods inspire.

It will therefore be readily understood that even government departments had to go warily in this matter.

The Minister of Brains held pamphlet propaganda to be of the greatest importance. A week ago the workers in the propaganda section had been sent for and interviewed by the Minister in person. This personal contact had, for the time being, oddly weighted Miss Grammont's too irresponsible levity, kindled her rather cynical coolness, given her something almost like zeal. That was one thing about the Minister—he set other people on fire. Another was that his manners were bad but unexpected, and a third that he looked like a cross between M. Kerensky, a member of the Geddes family, and Mr. Nelson Keys.

Thus Miss Grammont, thoughtfully smoking a Cyprus cigarette, summed up the Minister of Brains.