She told Prideaux that she was considering this offer. Prideaux said, "That thing! Its very name condemns it. It's on the wrong tack. You shouldn't be out to stop things; they've got to go on.... If it's journalism you want, why don't you apply for a job on Intelligence?" Intelligence, or the Weekly Bulletin of the Brains Ministry (to give it its sub-title, humorously chosen by one who visualised either the public or the Ministry as a sick man) was a weekly journal issued by the Ministry, and its aim was, besides reporting the Ministry's work, decisions and pronouncements for each week, to correlate all its local activities and keep them in touch with headquarters, and to collect reports from over the country as to the state of the public mind. It was for official circulation only. "Why not?" repeated Prideaux, struck by this idea. "It would be quite enough of a change: you would probably be one of the travelling reporters and send bright little anecdotes from the countryside; I know they want some more reporters. Why don't you apply? I'll speak to M.B.B. about you if you like." (M.B.B. was the department which edited the Bulletin.)
"Would it be interesting?" Kitty wondered.
Prideaux thought it would. "Besides," he added, "you'd remain attached to the Ministry that way, and could return to headquarters later on if you wanted to.... And meanwhile you'd see all the fun.... We're in for a fairly lively time, and it would be a pity to miss it. We're bound to slip up over the A.S.E. before the month's over. And probably over the exemption of Imbeciles and the Abandoned Babies, too. And the journalists; that's going to be a bad snag. Oh, it'll be interesting all right. If it wasn't for Chester's remarkable gift of getting on people's right side, it would be a poor look-out. But Chester'd pull most things through. If they'd put him at the head of the Recruiting job during the war, I believe he'd have pulled even the Review of Exceptions through without a row.... Well now, what about trying for this job?"
"All right," Kitty agreed. "If you think there's any chance of my getting it. I don't mind much what I do, so long as I have a change from this hotel."
On Prideaux's recommendation she did get the job, and was transferred from her branch to M.B.B. as a travelling reporter for Intelligence. She renounced Stop It with some regret; there was a whimsical element about Stop It which appealed to her, and which must almost necessarily be lacking in an official journal; but the career of travelling reporter seemed to have possibilities. Besides the more weighty reports from the countryside, a page of Intelligence was devoted each week to anecdotes related in the engagingly sudden and irrelevant manner of our cheaper daily Press; as, "A woman appealed before the Cuckfield Tribunal for exemption from the Mind Training Course on the grounds that she had made an uncertificated marriage and had since had twins, and must, therefore, be of a mental level which unfitted her to derive benefit from the Course." "Three babies have been found abandoned in a ditch between Amersham and Chesham Bois." "The Essex Farmers' Association have produced a strain of hens which lay an egg each day all the year round. The farmers ascribe this to the improvement in their methods caused by the Mind Training Course." "In reply to a tinplate worker who applied for Occupational Exemption from the Mental Progress Act, the Chairman of the Margam Tribunal said ..." (one of the witty things which chairmen do say, and which need not here be reported). It was, apparently, the business of the reporters to collect (or invent) and communicate these trivial anecdotes, as well as more momentous news, as of unrest at Nottingham, the state of intelligence or otherwise among Suffolk agriculturists, and so forth.
Kitty rather hoped to be sent to Ireland, which was, as often, in an interesting and dubious state. Ireland was excluded from the Brains Acts, as from other Acts. But she was being carefully watched, with a view to including her when it seemed that it might be safe to do so. Meanwhile those of her population who were considered by the English government to be in no need of it were profiting by the Mind Training Course, while the mass of the peasantry were instructed by their priests to shun such unholy heretic learning as they would the devil. But on the whole it seemed possible that the strange paths pointed out by the Brains Ministry might eventually lead to the solution of the Irish Question. (What the Irish Question at that moment was, I will not here attempt to explain: it must be sufficient to remark that there will always be one.)
5
But Kitty was not sent to Ireland. She was sent about England; first to Cambridge. Cambridge was not averse to having its mind improved; there is a sweet reasonableness about Cambridge. It knows how important brains are. Also it had an affection for Chester, who had been at Trinity. So reports from Cambridge as regards the Brains Acts were on the whole favourable, in spite of some unrest (for different reasons) at Kings, Downing, and Trinity Hall, and slight ferment of revolt down at Barnwell. There was, indeed, a flourishing branch of the S.I.L. (Stop It League) in the University, but its attention was not directed at the moment particularly to stopping the work of the Ministry of Brains.
It was, of course, a queer and quite new Cambridge which Kitty investigated. She had known the pre-war Cambridge; there had intervened the war Cambridge, that desolated and desolating thing, and now there had sprung up, on the other side of that dividing gulf, a Cambridge new and without precedent; a Cambridge half full of young war veterans, with the knowledge of red horizons, battle, murder, and sudden death, in their careless, watchful, experienced eyes; when they lounged about the streets or hurried to lectures, they dropped, against their will, into step; they were brown, and hard, and tired, and found it hard to concentrate on books; they had forgotten their school knowledge, and could not get through Littlegoes, and preferred their beds to sleeping in the open, that joy of pampered youth which has known neither battle-fields or Embankment seats.
The other half were the boys straight from school; and between these two divisions rolled the Great European War, across which they could with difficulty make themselves understood each by the other.