“It's an extraordinary thing,” muttered Miss Rossiter, vexed. “I could have sworn–”
“He's not a bit like him, really, when you see him close to,” said Miss Parton, wise after the event. “I told you it wasn't him.”
“You said it was him.” Miss Rossiter glanced back over her shoulder, and was in time to see a curious little incident.
A limousine car came rolling gently along from the direction of Leicester Square and drew up close to the kerb, opposite the entrance to the Criterion Bar. The man in dress-clothes stepped up to it and addressed a few words to the occupant, flinging his cigarette away as he did so, and laying one hand on the handle of the door, as though about to enter the car. Before he could do so, two men emerged suddenly and silently from a shop-entrance. One of them spoke to the chauffeur; the other put his hand on the gentleman's elegant arm. A brief sentence or two were exchanged; then the one man got up beside the chauffeur while the second man opened the door of the car. The man in dress-clothes got in, the other man followed, and the whole party drove off. The whole thing was so quickly done that almost before Miss Parton could turn round in answer to Miss Rossiter's exclamation, it was all over.
“An arrest!” breathed Miss Rossiter, her eyes shining. “Those two were detectives. I wonder what our friend in the monocle's been doing.”
Miss Parton was thrilled.
“And we actually spoke to him and thought it was Bredon.”
“I spoke to him,” corrected Miss Rossiter. It was all very well for Miss Parton to claim the credit, but only a few minutes back she had rather pointedly dissociated herself from the indiscretion and she could not be allowed to have it both ways.
“You did, then,” agreed Miss Parton. “I'm surprised at you, Rossie, trying to get off with a smart crook. Anyhow, if Bredon doesn't turn up tomorrow, we'll know it was him after all.”
But it could hardly have been Mr. Bredon, for he was in his place the next morning just as usual. Miss Rossiter asked him if he had a double.
“Not that I know of,” said Mr. Bredon. “One of my cousins is a bit like me.”
Miss Rossiter related the incident, with slight modifications. On consideration, she thought it better not to mention that she had been mistaken for a lady of easy virtue.
“Oh, I don't think that would be my cousin,” replied Mr. Bredon. “He's a frightfully proper person. Well known at Buckingham Palace, and all that.”
“Go on,” said Miss Rossiter.
“I'm the black sheep of the family,” said Mr. Bredon. “He never even sees me in the street. It must have been some one quite different.”
“Is your cousin called Bredon, too?”
“Oh, yes,” said Mr. Bredon.
CHAPTER III
INQUISITIVE INTERVIEWS OF A NEW COPY-WRITER
Mr. Bredon had been a week with Pym's Publicity, and had learnt a number of things. He learned the average number of words that can be crammed into four inches of copy; that Mr. Armstrong's fancy could be caught by an elaborately-drawn lay-out, whereas Mr. Hankin looked on art-work as waste of a copy-writer's time; that the word “pure” was dangerous, because, if lightly used, it laid the client open to prosecution by the Government inspectors, whereas the words “highest quality,” “finest ingredients,” “packed under the best conditions” had no legal meaning, and were therefore safe; that the expression “giving work to umpteen thousand British employees in our model works at so-and-so” was not by any means the same thing as “British made throughout”; that the north of England liked its butter and margarine salted, whereas the south preferred it fresh; that the Morning Star would not accept any advertisements containing the word “cure,” though there was no objection to such expressions as “relieve” or “ameliorate,” and that, further, any commodity that professed to “cure” anything might find itself compelled to register as a patent medicine and use an expensive stamp; that the most convincing copy was always written with the tongue in the cheek, a genuine conviction of the commodity's worth producing–for some reason–poverty and flatness of style; that if, by the most far-fetched stretch of ingenuity, an indecent meaning could be read into a headline, that was the meaning that the great British Public would infallibly read into it; that the great aim and object of the studio artist was to crowd the copy out of the advertisement and that, conversely, the copy-writer was a designing villain whose ambition was to cram the space with verbiage and leave no room for the sketch; that the lay-out man, a meek ass between two burdens, spent a miserable life trying to reconcile these opposing parties; and further, that all departments alike united in hatred of the client, who persisted in spoiling good lay-outs by cluttering them up with coupons, free-gift offers, lists of local agents and realistic portraits of hideous and uninteresting cartons, to the detriment of his own interests and the annoyance of everybody concerned.
He also learned to find his way without assistance over the two floors occupied by the agency, and even up on to the roof, where the messenger boys did their daily physical jerks under the eye of the Sergeant, and whence a fine view of London might be obtained on a clear day. He became acquainted with a number of the group-managers, and was sometimes even able to remember off-hand which clients' accounts were in the control of which manager, while with most of the members of his own department he found himself established on a footing of friendly intimacy. There were the two copy-chiefs, Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Hankin, each brilliant in his own way and each with his own personal fads. Mr. Hankin, for example, would never accept a headline containing the word “magnificent”; Mr. Armstrong disliked any lay-out which involved the picture of a judge or a Jew, and was rendered so acutely wretched when the proprietors of “Whifflets” put out a new brand of smoke called “Good Judge” Mixture that he was obliged to hand the whole account over, lock, stock and barrel to Mr. Hankin. Mr. Copley, an elderly, serious-minded man, who had entered the advertising profession before the modern craze set in for public-school-and-University-trained copy-writers, was remarkable for a tendency to dyspepsia and a perfectly miraculous knack of writing appetizing copy for tinned and packeted foodstuffs. Anything that came out of a tin or a packet was poison to him, and his diet consisted of under-cooked beef-steak, fruit and whole-meal bread. The only copy he really enjoyed writing was that for Bunbury's Whole-Meal Flour, and he was perennially depressed when his careful eulogiums, packed with useful medical detail, were scrapped in favour of some light-headed foolishness of Ingleby's, on the story that Bunbury's Whole-Meal Flour took the Ache out of Baking. But on Sardines and Tinned Salmon he was unapproachable.
Ingleby specialized in snobbish copy about Twentyman's Teas (“preferred by Fashion's Favourites”), Whifflets (“in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, in the Royal Yacht Club at Cowes, you find the discriminating men who smoke Whifflets”) and Farley's Footwear (“Whether it's a big shoot or a Hunt Ball, Farley puts you on a sound footing”). He lived in Bloomsbury, was communistic in a literary way, and dressed almost exclusively in pull-overs and grey flannels. He was completely and precociously disillusioned and one of the most promising copy-writers Pym's had ever fathered. When released from Whifflets and fashionable footwear, he could be amusing on almost any subject, and had a turn for “clever” copy, wherever cleverness was not out of place.
Miss Meteyard, with a somewhat similar mental make-up, could write about practically anything except women's goods, which were more competently dealt with by Mr. Willis or Mr. Garrett, the former of whom in particular, could handle corsets and face-cream with a peculiar plaintive charm which made him more than worth his salary. The copy department on the whole worked happily together, writing each other's headlines in a helpful spirit and invading each other's rooms at all hours of the day. The only two men with whom Bredon was unable to establish genial relations were Mr. Copley, who held aloof from everybody, and Mr. Willis, who treated him with a reserve for which he was unable to account. Otherwise he found the department a curiously friendly place.
And it talked. Bredon had never in his life encountered a set of people with such active tongues and so much apparent leisure for gossip. It was a miracle that any work ever got done, though somehow it did. He was reminded of his Oxford days, when essays mysteriously wrote themselves in the intervals of club-meetings and outdoor sports, and when most of the people who took firsts boasted of never having worked more than three hours of any day. The atmosphere suited him well enough. He was a bonhomous soul, with the insatiable curiosity of a baby elephant, and nothing pleased him better than to be interrupted in his encomiums of Sopo (“makes Monday, Fun-day”) or the Whoosh Vacuum-cleaner (“one Whoosh and it's clean”) by a fellow-member of the department, fed-up with advertising and spoiling for a chat.
“Hullo!” said Miss Meteyard one morning. She had dropped in to consult Bredon about googlies–the proprietors of Tomboy Toffee having embarked upon a series of cricket advertisements which, starting respectively from “Lumme, what a Lob!” or “Yah! that's a Yorker!” led up by devious routes to the merits of Toffee–and had now reached the point when “Gosh! it's a Googly” had to be tackled. Bredon had demonstrated googlies with pencil and paper, and also in the corridor with a small round tin of Good Judge tobacco (whereby he had nearly caught Mr. Armstrong on the side of the head), and had further discussed the relative merits of “Gosh” and “Golly” in the headline; but Miss Meteyard showed no symptoms of departing. She had sat down at Bredon's table and was drawing caricatures, in which she displayed some skill, and was rummaging in the pencil-tray for an india-rubber when she remarked, as above mentioned, “Hullo!”
“What?”
“That's little Dean's scarab. It ought to have been sent back to his sister.”
“Oh, that! Yes, I knew that was there, but I didn't know whom it belonged to. It's not a bad thing. It's real onyx, though of course it's not Egyptian and it's not even very old.”
“Probably not, but Dean adored it. He thought it was a sure-fire mascot. He always had it in his waistcoat pocket or sitting in front of him while he worked. If he'd had it on him that day, he wouldn't have tumbled downstairs–at least, that's what he'd have said himself.”
Bredon poised the beetle on the palm of his hand. It was as big as a man's thumb-nail, heavy and shallowly carved, smooth except for a slight chip at one side.
“What sort of chap was Dean?”
“Well. De mortuis, and all that, but I wasn't exactly keen on him. I thought he was rather an unwholesome little beast.”
“What way?”
“For one thing, I didn't like the people he went about with.”
Bredon twitched an interrogative eyebrow.
“No,” said Miss Meteyard, “I don't mean what you mean. At least, I mean, I can't tell you about that. But he used to tag round with that de Momerie crowd. Thought it was smart, I suppose. Luckily, he missed the famous night when that Punter-Smith girl did away with herself. Pym's would never have held its head up again if one of its staff had been involved in a notorious case. Pym's is particular.”
“How old did you say this blighter was?”
“Oh, twenty-six or-seven, I should think.”
“How did he come to be here?”
“Usual thing. Needed cash, I suppose. Had to have some sort of job. You can't lead a gay life on nothing, and he wasn't anybody, you know. His father was a bank-manager, or something, deceased, so I suppose young Victor had to push out and earn his keep. He knew how to look after himself all right.”
“Then how did he get in with that lot?”
Miss Meteyard grinned at him.
“Somebody picked him up, I should think. He had a certain kind of good looks. There is a nostalgie de la banlieue as well as de la boue. And you're pulling my leg, Mr. Death Bredon, because you know that as well as I do.”
“Is that a compliment to my sagacity or a reflection on my virtue?”
“How you came here is a good deal more interesting than how Victor Dean came here. They start new copy-writers without experience at four quid a week–about enough to pay for a pair of your shoes.”
“Ah!” said Bredon, “how deceptive appearances can be! But it is evident, dear lady, that you do not do your shopping in the true West End. You belong to the section of society that pays for what it buys. I revere, but do not imitate you. Unhappily, there are certain commodities which cannot be obtained without cash. Railway fares, for example, or petrol. But I am glad you approve of my shoes. They are supplied by Rudge in the Arcade and, unlike Farley's Fashion Footwear, are actually of the kind that is to be seen in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot and wherever discriminating men congregate. They have a ladies' department, and if you will mention my name–”
“I begin to see why you chose advertising as a source of supply.” The look of doubt left Miss Meteyard's angular face, and was replaced by a faintly derisive expression. “Well, I suppose I'd better get back to Tomboy Toffee. Thanks for your dope about googlies.”
Bredon shook his head mournfully as the door closed after her. “Careless,” he muttered. “Nearly gave the game away. Oh, well, I suppose I'd better do some work and look as genuine as possible.”
He pulled towards him a guard-book pasted up with pulls of Nutrax advertising and studied its pages thoughtfully. He was not left long in peace, however, for after a couple of minutes Ingleby slouched in, a foul pipe at full blast and his hands thrust deep into his trousers-pockets.
“I say, is Brewer here?”
“Don't know him. But,” added Bredon, waving his hand negligently, “you have my permission to search. The priest's hole and the concealed staircase are at your service.”
Ingleby rooted in the bookcase in vain.
“Somebody's bagged him. Anyway, how do you spell Chrononhotonthologos?”
“Oh! I can do that. And Aldiborontophoscophornio, too. Crossword? Torquemada?”
“No, headline for Good Judges. Isn't it hot? And now I suppose we're going to have a week's dust and hammering.”
“Why?”
“The fiat has gone forth. The iron staircase is condemned.”
“Who by?”
“The Board.”
“Oh, rot! they mustn't do that.”
“What d'you mean?”
“Admission of liability, isn't it?”
“Time, too.”
“Well, I suppose it is.”
“You looked quite startled. I was beginning to think you had some sort of personal feeling in the matter.”
“Good lord, no, why should I? Just a matter of principle. Except that the staircase does seem to have had its uses in eliminating the unfit. I gather that the late Victor Dean was not universally beloved.”
“Oh, I don't know. I never saw much harm in him, except that he wasn't exactly pukka and hadn't quite imbibed the Pym spirit, as you may say. Of course the Meteyard woman loathed him.”
“Why?”
“Oh! she's a decent sort of female, but makes no allowances. My motto is, live and let live, but protect your own interests. How are you getting on with Nutrax?”
“Haven't touched it yet. I've been trying to get out a name for Twentyman's shilling tea. As far as I can make Hankin out, it has no qualities except cheapness to recommend it, and is chiefly made of odds and ends of other teas. The name must suggest solid worth and respectability.”
“Why not call it 'Domestic Blend'? Nothing could sound more reliable and obviously nothing could suggest so much dreary economy.”
“Good idea. I'll put it up to him.” Bredon yawned. “I've had too much lunch. I don't think anybody ought to have to work at half-past two in the afternoon. It's unnatural.”
“Everything's unnatural in this job. Oh, my God! Here's somebody with something on a tray! Go away! go a-way!”
“I'm sorry,” said Miss Parton, brightly, entering with six saucers filled with a grey and steaming mess. “But Mr. Hankin says, will you please taste these samples of porridge and report upon them?”
“My dear girl,
look at the time!”
“Yes, I know, it's awful, isn't it? They're numbered A, B and C, and here's the questionnaire paper, and if you'll let me have the spoons back I'll get them washed for Mr. Copley.”
“I shall be sick,” moaned Ingleby. “Who's this? Peabody's?”
“Yes–they're putting out a tinned porridge, 'Piper Parritch.' No boiling, no stirring–only heat the tin. Look for the Piper on the label.”
“Look here,” said Ingleby, “run away and try it on Mr. McAllister.”
“I did, but his report isn't printable. There's sugar and salt and a jug of milk.”
“What we suffer in the service of the public!” Ingleby attacked the mess with a disgusted sniff and a languid spoon. Bredon solemnly rolled the portions upon his tongue, and detained Miss Parton.
“Here, taken this down while it's fresh in my mind. Vintage A: Fine, full-bodied, sweet nutty flavour, fully matured; a grand masculine porridge. Vintage B: extra-sec, refined, delicate character, requiring only–”
Miss Parton emitted a delighted giggle, and Ingleby, who hated gigglers, fled.
“Tell me, timeless houri,” demanded Mr. Bredon, “what was wrong with my lamented predecessor? Why did Miss Meteyard hate him and why does Ingleby praise him with faint damns?”
This was no problem to Miss Parton.
“Why, because he didn't play fair. He was always snooping round other people's rooms, picking up their ideas and showing them up as his own. And if anybody gave him a headline and Mr. Armstrong or Mr. Hankin liked it, he never said whose it was.”
This explanation seemed to interest Bredon. He trotted down the passage and thrust his head round Garrett's door. Garrett was stolidly making out his porridge report, and looked up with a grunt.
“I hope I'm not interrupting you at one of those moments of ecstasy,” bleated Bredon, “but I just wanted to ask you something. I mean to say, it's just a question of etiquette, don't you know, and what's done, so to speak. I mean, look here! You see, Hankie-pankie told me to get out a list of names for a shilling tea and I got out some awful rotten ones, and then Ingleby came in and I said, 'What would you call this tea?' just like that, and he said, 'Call it Domestic Blend,' and I said, 'What-ho! that absolutely whangs the nail over the crumpet.' Because it struck me, really, as being the caterpillar's boots.”
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