THE STORMING OF THE HOTEL
1
In December Dora did a foolish thing. It is needless to say that she did other foolish things in other months; it is to be feared that she had been born before the Brains Acts; her mental category must be well below C3. But this particular folly is selected for mention because it had a disastrous effect on the already precarious destiny of the Ministry of Brains. Putting out a firm and practised hand, she laid it heavily and simultaneously upon four journals who were taking a rebellious attitude towards the Brains Act—the Nation, Stop It, the Herald, and the Patriot. Thus she angered at one blow considerable sections of the Thoughtful, the Advanced, the Workers (commonly but erroneously known as the proletariat) and the Vulgar.
"Confound the fools," as Chester bitterly remarked; but the deed was then done.
"How long," Vernon Prideaux asked, "will it take governments to learn that revolutionary propaganda disseminated all over the country don't do as much harm as this sort of action?"
Chester was of opinion that, give the Ministry of Brains its chance, let it work for, say, fifty years, and even governments might at the end of that time have become intelligent enough to acquire such elementary pieces of knowledge. If only the Ministry were given its chance, if it could weather the present unrest, let the country get used to it.... Custom: that was the great thing. People settled down under things at last. All sorts of dreadful things. Education, vaccination, taxation, sanitation, representation.... It was only a question of getting used to them.
2
Though the authorities were prepared for trouble, they did not foresee the events of Boxing-day, that strange day in the history of the Ministry.
The Ministry were so busy that many of the staff took no holiday beyond Christmas Day itself. Bank Holidays are, as everyone who has tried knows, an excellent time for working in one's office, because there are no interruptions from the outside world, no telephoning, no visitors, no registry continually sending up incoming correspondence. The clamorous, persistent public fade away from sound and sight, and ministries are left undistracted, to deal with them for their good in the academic seclusion of the office. If there was in this world an eternal Bank Holiday (some, but with how little reason, say that this awaits us in heaven) ministries would thrive better; governing would then become like pure mathematics, an abstract science unmarred by the continual fret and jar of contact with human demands, which drag them so roughly, so continually, down to earth.
On Boxing Day the Minister himself worked all day, and about a quarter of the higher staff were in their places. But by seven o'clock only the Minister remained, talking to Prideaux in his room.
The procession, at first in the form of four clouds each no bigger than a man's hand, trailed from out the north, south, east and west, and coalesced in Trafalgar Square. From there it marched down Whitehall to Westminster, and along the Embankment. It seemed harmless enough; a holiday crowd of men and women with banners, like the people who used to want Votes, or Church Disestablishment, or Peace, or Cheap Food. The chief difference to be observed between this and those old processions was that a large number in this procession seemed to fall naturally and easily into step, and marched in time, like soldiers. This was a characteristic now of most processions; that soldier's trick, once learnt, is not forgotten. It might have set an onlooker speculating on the advantages and the dangers of a nation of soldiers, that necessary sequence to an army of citizens.
The procession drew up outside the Ministry of Brains, and resolved itself into a meeting. It was addressed in a short and stirring speech from the Ministry steps by the president of the Stop It League, a fiery young man with a megaphone, who concluded his remarks with "Isn't it up to all who love freedom, all who hate tyranny, to lose no time, but to wreck the place where these things are done? That's what we're here to do to-night—to smash up this hotel and show the government what the men and women of England mean! Come on, boys!"
Too late the watching policemen knew that this procession and this meeting meant business, and should be broken up.
The Minister and Prideaux listened, from an open window, to the speaking outside. "Rendle," said Prideaux. "Scandalous mismanagement. What have the police been about? It's too late now to do much.... Do they know we are here, by the way? Probably not."
"They shall," replied Chester, and stepped out on to the balcony.
There was a hush, then a tremendous shout.
"It's the Minister! By God, it's Nicky Chester, the man who's made all the trouble!"
A voice rose above the rest.
"Quiet! Silence! Let him speak. Let's hear what he's got to say for himself."
Silence came, abruptly; the queer, awful, terrifying silence of a waiting crowd.
Into it Chester's voice cut, sharp and incisive.
"You fools. Get out of this and go home. Don't you know that you're heading for serious trouble—that you'll find yourselves in prison for this? Get out before it's too late. That's all I have to say."
"That's all he's got to say," the crowd took it up like a refrain. "That's all he's got to say, after all the trouble he's made!"
A suave, agreeable voice rose above the rest.
"That is not quite all he's got to say. There's something else. He's got to answer two plain questions. Number one: Are you certificated for marriage, Mr. Chester, or have you got mental deficiency in your family?"
There was an instant's pause. Then the Minister, looking down from the balcony at the upturned faces, white in the cold moonlight, said, clearly, "I am not certificated for marriage, owing to the cause you mention."
"Thank you," said the voice. "Have you all noted that, boys? The Minister of Brains is not certificated for marriage. He has deficiency in his family. Now, Mr. Chester, question number two, please. Am I correct in stating that you—got—married—last—August?"
"You are quite correct, Mr. Jenkins."
Chester heard beside him Prideaux's mutter—"Good God!" and then, below him, broke the roar of the crowd.
"Come on, boys!" someone shouted. "Come on and wreck the blooming show, and nab the blooming showman before he slips off!"
Men flung themselves up the steps and through the big doors, and surged up the stairs.
"This," remarked Prideaux, "is going to be some mess. I'll go and get Rendle to see sense, if I can. He's leading them up the stairs, probably."
"I fancy that won't be necessary," said Chester. "Rendle and his friends are coming in here, apparently."
The door was burst open, and men rushed in. Chester and Prideaux faced them, standing before the door.
"You fools," Chester said again. "What good do you think you're going to do yourselves by this?"
"Here he is, boys! Here's Nicky Chester, the married man!"
Chester and Prideaux were surrounded and pinioned.
"Don't hurt him," someone exhorted. "We'll hang him out over the balcony and ask the boys down there what to do with him."
They dragged him on to the balcony and swung him over the rail, dangling him by a leg and an arm. One of them shouted, "Here's the Minister, boys! Here's Nicky, the Minister of Brains!"
The crowd looked up and saw him, swinging in mid air, and a great shout went up.
"Yes," went on the speaker from the balcony, "Here's Nicky Chester, the man who dares to dictate to the people of Britain who they may marry and what kids they may have, and then goes and gets married himself, breaking his own laws, and hushes it up so that he thought it would never come out." ("I always knew it would come out," the Minister muttered, inarticulately protesting against this estimate of his intelligence.) "But it has come out," the speaker continued. "And now what are we to do with him, with this man who won't submit to the laws he forces on other people? This man who dares to tell other people to bear what he won't bear himself? What shall we do with him? Drop him down into the street?"
For a moment it seemed that the Minister's fate, like himself, hung suspended.
They swung him gently to and fro, as if to get an impetus....
Then someone shouted, "We'll let him off this time, as he's just married. Let him go home to his wife, and not meddle with government any more!"
The crowd rocked with laughter; and in that laughter, rough, good-humoured, scornful, the Ministry of Brains seemed to dissolve.
They drew Chester in through the window again. Someone said, "Now we'll set the blooming hotel on fire. No time to waste, boys."
Chester and Prideaux were dragged firmly but not unkindly down the stairs and out through the door. Their appearance outside the building, each pinioned by two stalwart ex-guardsmen, was hailed by a shout, partly of anger, but three parts laughter. To Chester it was the laughter, good-humoured, stupid, scornful, of the British public at ideas, and particularly at ideas which had failed. But in it, sharp and stinging, was another, more contemptuous laughter, levelled at a man who had failed to live up to his own ridiculous ideas, the laughter of the none too honest world, which yet respected honesty, at the hypocrisy and double-dealing of others.
"They're quite right to laugh," thought Chester. "It is funny: damned funny."
And at that, standing pinioned on the steps of his discredited Ministry, looking down on the crowd of the injured, contemptuous British public, who were out to wreck the things he cared for, he began to laugh himself.
His laughter was naturally unheard, but they saw his face, which should have been downcast and ashamed, twist into his familiar, sad, cynical smile, which all who had heard him on platforms knew.
"Laughing, are you," someone shouted thickly. "Laughing at the people you've tricked! You've ruined me and my missus—taken every penny we had, just because we had twins—and you—you stand there and laugh! You—you bloody married imbecile!"
Lurching up the steps, he flung himself upon Chester and wrenched him from the relaxed hold of his captors. Struggling together, the Minister and his assailant stumbled down the steps, and then fell headlong among the public.
3
When the mounted police finally succeeded in dispersing the crowd, the Ministry of Brains was in flames, like Sodom and Gomorrah, those wicked cities. Unlike Sodom and Gomorrah, the conflagration was at last quenched by a fire engine. But far into the night the red wreckage blazed, testimony to the wrath of a great people, to the failure of a great idea, to the downfall of him who, whatever the weakness he shared in common with the public who downed him, was yet a great man.