Bureaucracy -- Fiction; England -- Fiction; Satire; Science fiction
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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