The Secret of Success depicted lurid episodes in the careers of two young men; the contrast was not, as in other drama, between virtue and vice, but between Intelligence and the Reverse. Everywhere Intelligence triumphed, and the Reverse was shamed and defeated. Intelligence found the hidden treasure, covered itself with glory, emerged triumphant from yawning chasms, flaming buildings, and the most suspicious situations, rose from obscure beginnings to titles, honours and position, and finally won the love of a pure and wealthy girl, who jilted the brainless youth of her own social rank to whom she had previously engaged herself but who had, in every encounter of wits with his intelligent rival, proved himself of no account, and who was finally revealed in a convict's cell, landed there by his conspicuous lack of his rival's skill in disengaging himself from compromising situations. Intelligence, with his bride on his arm, visited him in his cell, and gazed on him with a pitying shake of the head, observing, "But for the Government Mind Training Course, I might be in your shoes to-day." Finally, their two faces were thrown on the screen, immense and remarkable, the one wearing over his ethereal eyes the bar of Michael Angelo, the other with a foolish, vacant eye and a rabbit mouth that was ever agape.
This drama was sandwiched between The Habits of the Kola Bear, and How his Mother-in-law Came to Stay, and after it Chester and Kitty went out and walked along the Embankment.
It was one of those brilliant, moonlit, raidless nights which still seemed so strange, so almost flat, in their eventlessness. Instinctively they strained their ears for guns; but they heard nothing but the rushing of traffic in earth and sky.
5
"The State," said Chester, "is a great debaucher. It debauches literature, art, the press, the stage, and the Church; but I don't think even its worst enemies can say it has debauched the cinema stage.... What a people we are; good Lord, what a people!"
"As long as we leave Revue alone, I don't much mind what else we do," Kitty said. "Revue is England's hope, I believe. Because it's the only art in which all the forms of expression come in—talking, music, singing, dancing, gesture—standing on your head if nothing else will express you at the moment.... I believe Revue is going to be tremendous. Look how its stupidities and vulgarities have been dropping away from it lately, this last year has made a new thing of it altogether; it's beginning to try to show the whole of life as lived.... Oh, we must leave Revue alone.... I sometimes think it's so much the coming thing that I can't be happy till I've chucked my job and gone into it, as one of a chorus. I should feel I was truly serving my country then; it would be a real thing, instead of this fantastic lunacy I'm involved in now...."
At times Kitty forgot she was talking to the Minister who had created the fantastic lunacy.
"You can't leave the Ministry," said the Minister curtly. "You can't be spared."
Kitty was annoyed with him for suddenly being serious and literal and even cross, and was just going to tell him she should jolly well leave the Ministry whenever she liked, when some quality in his abrupt gravity caught the words from her lips.
"We haven't got industrial conscription to that extent yet," she merely said, weakly.