"It's a toss-up," said Dixon at the end, "how the country is going to take this business. There's a chance, a good fighting chance, that they may rise to the idea and accept it, even if they can't like it. It depends a lot on how it's going to be worked, and that depends on the people at the top. And for the people at the top, all one can say is that there's a glimmer of hope. Chester himself has got imagination; and as long as a man's got that he may pull through, even if he's head of a government department.... Of course one main thing is not to make pledges; they can't be kept; everyone knows they can't be kept, as situations change, and when they break there's a row.... Another thing—the rich have got to set the example; they must drop this having their fun and paying for it, which the poor can't afford. If that's allowed there'll be revolution. Perhaps anyhow there'll be revolution. And revolutions aren't always the useful things they ought to be; they sometimes lead to reaction. Oh, you Brains people have got to be jolly careful."
A week later the Mind Training Bill became an Act. It did, in fact, seem to be a toss-up how the public, that strange, patient, unaccountable dark horse, were going to take it. That they took it at all, and that they continued to take the Mental Progress Act, was ascribed by observant people largely to the queer, growing, and quite peculiar influence of Nicholas Chester. It was an odd influence for a minister of the government to have in this country; one would have almost have supposed him instead a power of the Press, the music-hall stage, or the cinema world. It behoved him, as Dixon said to be jolly careful.
CHAPTER VI
THE SIMPLE HUMAN EMOTIONS
1
During the period which followed the Explanation Campaign, Kitty Grammont was no longer bored by her work, no longer even merely entertained. It had acquired a new flavour; the flavour of adventure and romance which comes from a fuller understanding and a more personal identification; from, in fact, knowing more about it at first-hand.
Also, she got to know the Minister better. At the end of August they spent a week-end at the same country house. They were a party of four, besides their host's family; a number which makes for intimacy. Their hostess was a Cambridge friend of Kitty's, their host a man high up in the Foreign Office, his natural force of personality obscured pathetically by that apprehensive, defiant, defensive manner habitual and certainly excusable in these days in the higher officials of that department and of some of the other old departments; a manner that always seemed to be saying, "All right, we know we've made the devil of a mess for two centuries and more, and we know you all want to be rid of us. But we'd jolly well like to know if you think you could have worked things any better yourselves. Anyhow, we mean to stick here till we're chucked out."
How soon would it be, wondered Kitty, before the officials of the Ministry of Brains wore that same look? It must come to them; it must come to all who govern, excepting only the blind, the crass, the impervious. It must have been worn by the members of the Witan during the Danish invasions; by Strafford before 1642; by Pharaoh's councillors when Moses was threatening plagues; by M. Milivkoff before March, 1917; by Mr. Lloyd George during much of the Great War.
But it was not worn yet by Nicholas Chester.