4
While Kitty was debating as to her future, toying with the relative advantages and entertainment to be derived from the careers of War Widow, Confidential Clerk, Travelling Companion, archæological explorer in Macedonia or Crete, beginner on the music-hall stage, under Pansy's auspices, all of which seemed to have their bright sides, two suggestions were made to her. One was from a cousin of hers who was sub-editor of Stop It, and offered to get her a place on the staff.
"Would it bind me to a point of view?" Kitty enquired. "I can't be bound to a point of view."
"Oh dear no," her cousin assured her. "Certainly not. Rather the contrary," and Kitty said, "All right, I'll think it over." She was rather attracted by the idea.
You cannot, of course, exactly call it being bound to a point of view to be required to hint every week that certain things want stopping, in a world whose staunchest champions must admit that this is indeed so.
Stop It was certainly eclectic, in its picking out, from all the recognised groups associated for thought and action, activities whose cessation seemed good to it. The question that rather suggested itself to its readers was, if Stop It had its way, what, if anything, would be left?
"Very little," the editor would have answered. "A clean sheet. Then we can begin again."
Stop It had dropped some of the caution with which it had begun: it was now quite often possible to deduce from its still cryptic phraseology what were some of the things it wanted stopped. Having for some time successfully dodged Dora, it was now daring her. As in all probability it would not have a long life, and appeared to be having a merry one, Kitty thought she might as well join it while she could.
To desert abruptly from the ranks of the bureaucracy to those of the mutineers seemed natural to Kitty, who had always found herself at home in a number of widely differing situations. Really this is perhaps the only way to live, if all the various and so greatly different needs of complicated human nature are to be satisfied. It is very certain that they cannot be satisfied simultaneously; the best way seems, therefore, to alternate. It is indeed strange that this is not more done, that Radicals, Tories, and Labour members, for instance, do not more frequently interchange, play general post, to satisfy on Tuesday that side of their souls and intellects which has not been given free play on Monday; that Mr. Ramsay Macdonald and Lord Curzon do not, from time to time, deliver each other's speeches, not from any freakish desire to astonish, but from the sheer necessities of their natures; that Mr. Massingham and Mr. Leo Maxse, or Mr. A. G. Gardiner and Mr. Gwynne, or Mr. J. C. Squire and Mr. J. St. Loe Strachey, or Mr. Garvin and Mr. J. A. Spender, do not from time to time arrange together to change offices and run each other's papers; or that Mr. Arthur Ransome and Mr. Stephen Graham do not, during their tours of Russia, sometimes change pens with each other when they write home. There must be in many people some undemocratic instinct of centralisation, of autocratic subversion of the horde of their lesser opinions and impulses to the most dominant and commanding one, a lack of the true democrat's desire to give a chance to them all. They say with the Psalmist, "My heart is fixed," and "I have chosen the way and I will run it to the end," and this is called, by some, finding one's true self. Perhaps it may be so; it certainly entails the loss of many other selves; and possibly the dropping of these, or rather their continual denial and gradual atrophy, simplifies life.
But Kitty, whose heart was not fixed, entered upon all the changing scenes of life with a readiness to embrace any point of view, though not indeed to be bound to it, and an even greater willingness to tell anything in earth or heaven that it ought to be stopped.