It was all he didn't say to her in the moment's pause that followed which was revealing; all that seemed to be forced back behind his guarded lips. What he did say, presently, was "No, more's the pity. It'll come, no doubt."
And, talking of industrial conscription, they walked back.
What stayed with Kitty was the odd, startled, doubtful look he had given her in that moment's pause; almost as if he were afraid of something.
6
Kitty took at this time to sleeping badly; even worse, that is to say, than usual. In common with many others, she always did so when she was particularly interested in anyone. She read late, then lay and stared into the dark, her thoughts turning and twisting in her brain, till, for the sake of peace, she turned on the light again and read something; something cold, soothing, remote from life as now lived, like Aristophanes, Racine, or Bernard Shaw. Attaining by these means to a more detached philosophy, she would drift at last from the lit stage where life chattered and gesticulated, and creep behind the wings, and so find sleep, so little before it was time to wake that she began the day with a jaded feeling of having been up all night.
On one such morning she came down to find a letter from Neil Desmond in its thin foreign envelope addressed in his flat, delicate hand. He wrote from a Pacific island where he was starting a newspaper for the benefit of the political prisoners confined there; it was to be called "Freedom" (in the British Isles no paper of this name would be allowed, but perhaps the Pacific Island censorship was less strict) and he wanted Kitty to come and be sub-editor....
Kitty, instead of lunching out that day, took sandwiches to the office and spent the luncheon-hour breaking off her engagement again. The reason why Neil never got these letters was the very reason which impelled her to write them—the lack of force about him which made his enterprises so ephemeral, and kept him ever moving round the spinning world to try some new thing.
Force. How important it was. First Brains, to perceive and know what things we ought to do, then Power, faithfully to fulfil the same. In another twenty or thirty years, perhaps the whole British nation would be full of both these qualities, so full that the things in question really would get done. And then what? Kitty's mind boggled at the answer to this. It might be strangely upsetting....
She stamped her letter and lit a cigarette. The room, empty but for her, had that curious, flat, dream-like look of arrested activity which belongs to offices in the lunch hour. If you watch an office through that empty hour of suspension you may decipher its silent, patient, cynical comment (slowly growing into distinctness like invisible ink) on the work of the morning which has been, and of the afternoon which is to be. Kitty watched it, amused, then yawned and read Stop It, the newest weekly paper. It was a clever paper, for it had succeeded so far (four numbers) in not getting suppressed, and also in not committing itself precisely to any direct statement as to what it wanted stopped. It was produced by the Stop It Club, and the government lived in hopes of discovering one day, by well-timed police raids on the Club premises, sufficient lawless matter to justify it in suppressing both the Club and the paper. For Dora had recently been trying to retrieve her character in the eyes of those who blackened it, and was endeavouring to act in a just and temperate manner, and only to suppress those whose guilt was proven. Last Sunday, for instance, a Stop It procession had been allowed to parade through the city with banners emblazoned with the ambiguous words. There were, of course, so many things that, it was quite obvious, should be stopped; the command might have been addressed to those of the public who were grumbling, or to the government who were giving them things to grumble at; to writers who were producing books, journalists producing papers, parliaments producing laws, providence producing the weather, or the agents of any other regrettable activity at the moment in progress. Indeed, the answer to the enquiry "Stop what?" might so very plausibly be "Stop it all," that it was a profitless question.
It was just after two that the telephone on Prideaux's table rang. (Kitty was working in Prideaux's room now.) "Hullo," said a voice in answer to hers, "Mr. Prideaux there? Or anyone else in his room I can speak to? The Minister speaking."