What Not: A Prophetic Comedy

by Rose Macaulay

3

Kitty had lately been returned from the Propaganda Branch to her own, the Exemption Branch. Being late, she slipped into her place unostentatiously. Her in-tray contained a mass of files, as yet undealt with. She began to look through these, with a view to relegating the less attractive to the bottom of the tray, where they could wait until she had nothing better to do than to attend to them. To-day there were a great many letters from the public beginning "Dear Sir, Mr. Wilkinson said in parliament on Tuesday that families should not be reduced to destitution through the baby-taxes...." That was so like Mr. Wilkinson (parliamentary secretary to the Brains Ministry). Whenever he thoughtlessly dropped these obiter dicta, so sweeping, so far removed from truth, which was almost whenever he spoke, there was trouble. The guileless public hung on his words, waiting to pick them up and send them in letters to the Ministry. These letters went to the bottom of the tray. They usually only needed a stock reply, telling the applicants to attend their local tribunal. After several of these in succession, Kitty opened a file which had been minuted down from another branch, M.B. 4. Attached to it were two sheets of minutes which had passed between various individuals regarding the case in question; the last minute was addressed to M.B. 3, and said "Passed to you for information and necessary action." It was a melancholy tale from an aggrieved citizen concerning his infant, who was liable to a heavy tax, and who had been drowned by his aunt while being washed, before he was two hours old, and the authorities still demanded the payment of the tax. Kitty, who found the helplessness of M.B. 4 annoying, wrote a curt minute, "Neither information nor action seems to us necessary," then had to erase it because it looked rude, and wrote instead, more mildly, "Seen, thank you. This man appears to be covered by M.B.I. 187, in which case his taxation is surely quite in order and no action is possible. We see no reason why we should deal with the case rather than you."

It is difficult always to be quite polite in minutes, cheap satire costing so little and relieving the feelings, but it can and should be done; nothing so shows true breeding in a Civil Servant.

Kitty next replied to a letter from the Admiralty, about sailors' babies (the family arrangements of sailors are, of course, complicated, owing to their having a wife in every port). The Admiralty said that My Lords Commissioners had read the Minister of Brains' (i.e. Kitty's) last letter to them on this subject with much surprise. The Admiralty's faculty of surprise was infinitely fresh; it seemed new, like mercy, each returning day. The Minister of Brains evoked it almost every time he, through the pens of his clerks, wrote to them. My Lords viewed with grave apprehension the line taken by the Minister on this important subject, and They trusted it would be reconsidered. (My Lords always wrote of themselves with a capital They, as if they were deities.) Kitty drafted a reply to this letter and put it aside to consult Prideaux about. She carried on a chronic quarrel with My Lords, doubtless to the satisfaction of both sides.

Soothed and stimulated by this encounter, she was the better prepared in temper when she opened a file in which voluminous correspondence concerning two men named Stephen Williams had been jacketed together by a guileless registry, to whom such details as that one Stephen Williams appeared to be a dentist's assistant and the other a young man in the diplomatic service were as contemptible obstacles, to be taken in an easy stride. The correspondence in this file was sufficiently at cross purposes to be more amusing than most correspondence. When she had perused it, Kitty, sad that she must tear asunder this happily linked pair, sent it down to the registry with a regretful note that "These two cases, having no connection, should be registered separately," and fell to speculating, as she often did, on the registry, which, amid the trials that beset them and the sorrows they endured, and the manifold confusions and temptations of their dim life, were so strangely often right. They worked underground, the registry people, like gnomes in a cave, opening letters and registering them and filing them and sending them upstairs, astonishingly often in the file which belonged to them. But, mainly, looking for papers and not finding them, and writing "No trace," "Cannot be traced," on slips, as if the papers were wild animals which had got loose and had to be hunted down. A queer life, questing, burrowing, unsatisfied, underground.... No wonder they made some mistakes.

Kitty opened one now—a bitter complaint, which should have gone to M.B. 5, from one who considered himself placed in a wrong category. "When I tell you, sir," it ran, "that at the Leamington High School I carried off two prizes (geography and recitation) and was twice fourth in my form, and after leaving have given great satisfaction (I am told) as a solicitor's clerk, so that there has been some talk of raising my salary, you will perhaps be surprised to hear that the Local Intelligence Board placed me in class C1. I applied to the County Board, and (owing, as I have reason to know, to local feeling and jealousy) I was placed by them in C2. Sir, I ask you for a special examination by the Central Intelligence Board. I should be well up in Class B. There are some walking about in this town who are classed B1 and 2, who are the occasion of much local feeling, as it surprises all who know them that they should be classed so high. To my knowledge some of these persons cannot do a sum right in their heads, and it is thought very strange that they should have so imposed on the Intelligence Officers, though the reasons for this are not really far to seek, and should be enquired into...."

A gay and engaging young man with a wooden leg (he had lost his own in 1914, and had during the rest of the war worked at the War Office, and carried the happy Q.M.G. touch) wandered in from M.B. 5 while Kitty was reading this, and she handed it over to him. He glanced at it.

"We shall perhaps be surprised, shall we.... How likely.... The public overestimate our faculty for surprise. They have yet to learn that the only thing which would surprise the Ministry of Brains would be finding someone correctly classified.... I shall tell him I'm A2 myself, though I never got a prize in my life for geography or recitation, and I can't do sums in my head for nuts. I ought to be somewhere about B3; I surprise all who know me.... What I came in to say was, do any of you in here want a sure tip for the Oaks? Because I've got one. Silly Blighter; yes, you thought he was an absolute outsider, didn't you, so did everyone else; but he's not. You take the tip, it's a straight one, first hand. No, don't mention it, I always like to do M.B. 3 a good turn, though I wouldn't do it for everyone.... Well, I'm off, I'm beastly busy.... Heard the latest Chester, by the way? Someone tried the Wheeldon stunt on him—sent him a poisoned thorn by special messenger in a packet "To be opened by the Minister Himself." Jervis-Browne opened it, of course, and nearly pricked him self. When he took it to Chester, Chester did the Sherlock Holmes touch, and said he knew the thorn, it came off a shrub in Central Africa or Kew Gardens or somewhere. I think he knew the poison, too; he wanted Jervis-Browne to suck it, to make sure, but J.-B. wasn't having any, and Chester didn't like to risk himself, naturally. His little P.S. would have done it like a shot, but they thought it would be hard luck on the poor child's people. And while they were discussin' it, Chester ran the thing into his own finger by mistake. While J.-B. was waitin' to see him swell up and turn black, and feelin' bad lest he should be told to suck it (he knows Chester doesn't really value him at his true worth, you see), Chester whipped out his penknife and gouged a great slice out of his finger as you'd cut cheese, all round the prick. He turned as white as chalk, J.-B. says, but never screamed, except to let out one curse. And when he'd done it, and had the shorthand typist in from J.-B.'s room to tie it up, he began to giggle—you know that sad, cynical giggle of his that disconcerts solemn people so much—and said he'd have the beastly weapon cleaned and take it home and frame it in glass, with the other mementoes of a people's hate.... I say, I do waste your time in here, don't I? And my own; that's to say the government's. I'm off."

"Gay child," Kitty murmured to her neighbour as he went. "He blooms in an office like an orchid in a dust-bin. And very nice too. I remember being nearly as bright at his age; though, for my sins, I was never in Q.M.G. A wonderful Branch that is."

Thereupon she threw away her cigarette, wrote five letters with extraordinary despatch and undepartmental conciseness of style, and went to have tea in the canteen.