“We'll make Haagedorn do it. He's got hands like a pair of hams. Who else? Oh, that chap in the printing–Beesely–he's not much good with a bat, but we can rely on him for a few straight balls.”
“What about that new fellow in the Copy Department? Bredon? He's a public school man. Is he any good?”
“Might be. He's a bit ancient, though. We've got two aged stiffs already in Hankin and Miller.”
“Aged stiff be blowed. That chap can move, I've seen him do it. I wouldn't be surprised if he could show us a bit of style.”
“Well, I'll find out. If he's any good, we'll stick him in instead of Pinchley.”
“Pinchley can swipe 'em up,” said Mr. Wedderburn.
“He never does anything but swipe. He's jam for the fielders. He gave them about ten chances last year and was caught both innings.”
Mr. Wedderburn agreed that this was so.
“But he'll be awfully hurt if he's left out,” he said.
“I'll ask about Bredon,” said Mr. Tallboy.
He sought out that gentleman, who was, for once, in his own room, singing soup-slogans to himself.
A meal begun with Blagg's Tomato
Softens every husband's heart-oh!
Hubbies hold those wives most dear
Who offer them Blagg's Turtle Clear.
Fit for an Alderman–serve it up quick–
Rum-ti-ty, tum-ti-ty, Blagg's Turtle Thick.
“Rum-ti-ty, tum-ti-ty,” said Mr. Bredon. “Hullo, Tallboy, what's the matter? Don't say Nutrax has developed any more innuendos.”
“Do you play cricket?”
“Well, I used to play for–” Mr. Bredon coughed; he had been about to say, “for Oxford,” but remembered in time that these statements could be checked. “I've played a good deal of country-house cricket in the old days. But I'm rapidly qualifying to be called a Veteran. Why?”
“I've got to scrape up an eleven for a match against Brotherhood's. We play one every year. They always beat us, of course, because they have their own playing-fields and play together regularly, but Pym likes it to be done. He thinks it fosters fellow-feeling between client and agent and all that sort of thing.”
“Oh! when does it come off?”
“Saturday fortnight.”
“I daresay I might keep my end up for a bit, if you can't get anybody better.”
“You anything of a bowler?”
“Nothing.”
“Better with the willow than the leather, eh?”
Mr. Bredon, wincing a little at this picturesqueness, admitted that, if he was anything, he was a batsman.
“Right. You wouldn't care to open the ball with Ingleby, I suppose?”
“I'd rather not. Put me down somewhere near the tail.”
Tallboy nodded.
“Just as you like.”
“Who captains this Eleven?”
“Well, I do, as a rule. At least, we always ask Hankin or Miller, just out of compliment, but they generally decline with thanks. Well, righty-ho; I'll just buzz round and see that the others are O.K.”
The selected team went up on the office notice-board at lunch-time. At ten minutes past two, the trouble began with Mr. McAllister.
“I observe,” said he, making a dour appearance in Mr. Tallboy's room, “that ye're no askin' Smayle to play for ye, and I'm thinkin' it'll be a wee bit awkward for me if I play and he does not. Workin' in his room all day and under his orders, it will make my poseetion not just so very comfortable.”
“Position in the office has nothing to do with playing cricket,” said Mr. Tallboy.
“Ay, imph'm, that's so. But I just do not care for it. So ye'll oblige me by leavin' my name oot.”
“Just as you like,” said Tallboy, annoyed. He struck Mr. McAllister's name off the list, and substituted that of Mr. Pinchley. The next defection was that of Mr. Adcock, a stolid youth from the Voucher Department. He inconsiderately fell off a step-ladder in his own home, while assisting his mother to hang a picture, and broke the small bone of his leg.
In this extremity, Mr. Tallboy found himself compelled to go and eat humble pie to Mr. Smayle, and request him to play after all. But Mr. Smayle had been hurt in his feelings by being omitted from the first list, and showed no eagerness to oblige.
Mr. Tallboy, who was, indeed, a little ashamed of himself, endeavoured to gloss the matter over by making it appear that his real object in leaving out Mr. Smayle had been to make room for Mr. Bredon, who had been to Oxford and was sure to play well. But Mr. Smayle was not deceived by this specious reasoning.
“If you had come to me in the first instance,” he complained, “and put the matter to me in a friendly way, I should say nothing about it. I like Mr. Bredon, and I appreciate that he has had advantages that I haven't had. He's a very gentlemanly fellow, and I should be happy to make way for him. But I do not care for having things done behind my back in a hole-and-corner fashion.”
If Mr. Tallboy had said at this point, “Look here, Smayle, I'm sorry; I was rather out of temper at the time over that little dust-up we had, and I apologize”–then Mr. Smayle, who was really an amiable creature enough, would have given way and done anything that was required of him. But Mr. Tallboy chose to take a lofty tone. He said:
“Come, come, Smayle. You're not Jack Hobbs, you know.”
Even this might have passed over with Mr. Smayle's ready admission that he was not England's premier batsman, had not Mr. Tallboy been unhappily inspired to say:
“Of course, I don't know about you, but I have always been accustomed to have these things settled by whoever was appointed to select the team, and to play or not, according as I was put down.”
“Oh, yes,” retorted Mr. Smayle, caught on his sensitive point, “you would say that. I am quite aware, Tallboy, that I never was at a public school, but that is no reason why I shouldn't be treated with ordinary, common courtesy. And from those who have been to real public schools, I get it, what's more. You may think a lot of Dumbleton, but it isn't what I call a public school.”
“And what do you call a public school?” inquired Mr. Tallboy.
“Eton,” retorted Mr. Smayle, repeating his lesson with fatal facility, “and Harrow, and–er–Rugby, and Winchester and places like those. Places where they send gentlemen's sons to.”
“Oh, do they?” said Mr. Tallboy. “I suppose you are sending your family to Eton, then.”
At this, Mr. Smayle's narrow face became as white as a sheet of paper.
“You cad!” he said, choking. “You unspeakable swine. Get out of here or I'll kill you.”
“What the devil's the matter with you, Smayle?” cried Mr. Tallboy, in considerable surprise.
“Get out!” said Mr. Smayle.
“Now, I'd just like a word wi' ye, Tallboy,” interposed Mr. McAllister. He laid a large, hairy hand on Mr. Tallboy's arm and propelled him gently from the room.
“What on airth possessed ye to say such a thing to him?” he asked, when they were safely in the passage. “Did ye not know that Smayle has but the one boy and him feeble-minded, the poor child?”
Mr. Tallboy was really aghast. He was stricken with shame, and, like many shame-stricken people, took refuge in an outburst of rage against the nearest person handy.
“No, I didn't know. How should I be expected to know anything about Smayle's family? Good God! I'm damned sorry and all that, but why must the fellow be such an ass? He's got a mania about public schools. Eton, indeed! I don't wonder the boy's feeble-minded if he takes after his father.”
Mr. McAllister was deeply shocked. His Scottish sense of decency was outraged.
“Ye ought to be damn well ashamed o' yersel',” he said, severely, and releasing Tallboy's arm, stepped back into the room he shared with Mr. Smayle and slammed the door.
Now, it is not very clear at the first glance what this disagreement between Mr. Tallboy and Mr. Smayle about a cricket match had to do with the original disagreement between the former and Mr. Copley. Tr
ue, one may trace a remote connection at the beginning of things, since the Tallboy-Smayle row may be said to have started with Mr. Smayle's indiscreet jest about Mr. Tallboy's fifty pounds. But this fact has no very great importance. What is really important is that as soon as Mr. McAllister made known all the circumstances of the Tallboy-Smayle affair (which he did as soon as he could find a listener), public opinion, which, in the Tallboy-Copley dispute had been largely on Mr. Tallboy's side, veered round. It was felt that since Mr. Tallboy could behave with so much unkindness to Mr. Smayle, he was probably not guiltless towards Mr. Copley. The office staff was divided like the Red Sea and rose up in walls on either hand. Only Mr. Armstrong, Mr. Ingleby, and Mr. Bredon, sardonic Gallios, held themselves apart, caring little, but fomenting the trouble for their own amusement. Even Miss Meteyard, who abominated Mr. Copley, experienced an unwonted uprush of feminine pity for him, and pronounced Mr. Tallboy's behaviour intolerable. Old Copley, she said, might be an interfering old nuisance, but he wasn't a cad. Mr. Ingleby said he really didn't think Tallboy could have meant what he said to Smayle. Miss Meteyard said: “Tell that to the marines,” and, having said so, noted that the phrase would make a good headline for something-or-other. But Mr. Ingleby said, “No, that had been done.”
Miss Parton, of course, was an anti-Copleyite whom nothing could move, and therefore smiled on Mr. Tallboy when he happened into the typists' room to borrow a stamp. But Miss Rossiter, though superficially more peppery, prided herself on possessing a well-balanced mind. After all, she insisted, Mr. Copley had probably meant well over the matter of the fifty pounds and, when you came to think of it, he had got Tallboy and all the rest of the Nutrax contingent out of a very tiresome sort of mess. She thought that Mr. Tallboy thought rather a lot of himself, and he had certainly had no business to speak as he had done to poor Mr. Smayle.
“And,” said Miss Rossiter, “I don't like his lady friends.”
“Lady friends?” said Miss Parton.
“Well, I'm not one to talk, as you know,” replied Miss Rossiter, “but when you see a married man coming out of a restaurant at past midnight with somebody who is obviously not his wife–”
“No!” exclaimed Miss Parton.
“My dear! and got up regardless ... one of those little hats with an eye-veil ... three-inch diamanté heels ... such bad taste with a semi-toilette ... fish-net stockings and all....”
“Perhaps it was his sister.”
“My dear !... And his wife's having a baby, too.... He didn't see me.... Of course, I wouldn't say a word, but I do think....”
Thus the typewriters clacked.
Mr. Hankin, though officially impartial, was a Tallboyite. Himself a precise and efficient man, he was nevertheless perennially irritated by the precision and efficiency of Mr. Copley. He suspected, what was quite true, that Mr. Copley criticized the conduct of the department and would have liked to be given a measure of authority. Mr. Copley had a way of coming to him with suggestions: “Would it not be better, Mr. Hankin, if....” “If you will excuse my making a suggestion, Mr. Hankin, could not a stricter control be kept....?” “Of course, I know I am in an entirely subordinate position here, Mr. Hankin, but I have had over thirty years' experience of advertising, and in my humble opinion....”–excellent suggestions, always, and having only the one drawback that they threatened either to annoy Mr. Armstrong, or to involve a quantity of tedious and time-wasting supervision, or to embroil the whole temperamental Copy Department and put it off its stroke. Mr. Hankin grew weary of saying: “Quite so, Mr. Copley, but Mr. Armstrong and I find it works better, on the whole, to have as few restrictions as possible.” Mr. Copley had a way of saying that he quite understood, which always left Mr. Hankin with the impression that Mr. Copley thought him weak and ineffectual, and this impression had been confirmed by the Nutrax incident. When a point had arisen about which Mr. Hankin might, and ought to, have been consulted, Mr. Copley had passed him over–conclusive proof to Mr. Hankin that all Mr. Copley's valuable suggestions about departmental management were so much window-dressing, put forward to show how brilliant Mr. Copley was, and not in the least with the desire of aiding Mr. Hankin or the department. In this, Mr. Hankin's shrewdness saw much more clearly into Mr. Copley's motives than did Mr. Copley himself. He was quite right. Consequently, he was not inclined to bother himself about Mr. Copley, and was determined to give any necessary support to Mr. Tallboy. The Smayle incident was, naturally, not reported to him; he therefore made no comment upon the Cricket Eleven except to ask, mildly, why Mr. Smayle and Mr. McAllister were excluded. Mr. Tallboy replied briefly that they were unable to play, and that was the end of the matter.
Mr. Tallboy had a further ally in Mr. Barrow, who disliked the whole Copy Department on principle, because, as he complained, they were a conceited lot who were always trying to interfere with his artists and dictate to him about his displays. He admitted that, as a general proposition, the sketch was supposed to illustrate the copy, but he maintained (and with truth) that the displays suggested by the copy-writers were often quite impracticable and that the copy-writers took unnecessary offence over the very necessary modifications which he had to make in their “roughs.” Further, he had been deeply insulted by Mr. Armstrong's remarks about himself, too faithfully reported by Mr. Ingleby, whom he detested. In fact, he was within an ace of refusing altogether to play in the same match as Mr. Ingleby.
“Oh, but, look here!” protested Mr. Tallboy, “you simply can't let me down like that! You're the best bat we've got.”
“Can't you leave Ingleby out?”
This was more than awkward, for in fact Mr. Barrow, though a good and reliable bat, was by no means so good a bat as Mr. Ingleby. Mr. Tallboy hesitated:
“I don't quite see how I can do that. He made 63 last year. But I'll tell you what. I'll put him in fourth and leave you to open with somebody else–say Pinchley. Will you start with Pinchley?”
“You can't put Pinchley in first. He's nothing but a slogger.”
“Who else is there?”
Mr. Barrow scanned the list mournfully.
“It's a weak bunch, Tallboy. Is that really the best you can do?”
“Afraid so.”
“Pity you've managed to get across Smayle and McAllister.”
“Yes–but that can't be helped now. You'll have to play, Mr. Barrow, or we'll have to scratch–one or the other!”
“I know what you'd better do. Put yourself in first with me.”
“They won't like that. They'll think it's swank.”
“Then put Garrett in.”
“Very well. You'll play, then?”
“I suppose I must.”
“That's very sporting of you, Mr. Barrow.”
Mr. Tallboy ran down, sighing, to pin the revised list on the board:
MATCH AGAINST BROTHERHOOD'S
1. Mr. Barrow
2. Mr. Garrett
3. Mr. Hankin
4. Mr. Ingleby
5. Mr. Tallboy (Captain)
6. Mr. Pinchley
7. Mr. Miller
8. Mr. Beeseley
9. Mr. Bredon
10. Mr. Haagedorn
11. Mr. Wedderburn
He stood for a moment looking at it rather hopelessly. Then he went back to his room and took up a large sheet of foolscap, with the intention of marking off the figures for a client's appropriation over the next three months. But his mind was not on the figures. Presently he pushed the sheet aside, and sat staring blankly out of the window across the grey London roofs.
“What's up, Tallboy?” inquired Mr. Wedderburn.
“Life's the devil,” said Mr. Tallboy. Then, in a sudden outburst:
“My God! how I hate this blasted place. It gets on my nerves.”
“Time you had your holiday,” said Mr. Wedderburn, placidly. “How's the wife?”
“All right,” rejoined Mr. Tallboy, “but we shan't be able to get away till September.”
“That's the worst of
being a family man,” replied Mr. Wedderburn. “And that reminds me. Have you done anything about that series for The Nursing Times about 'Nutrax for Nursing Mothers'?”
Mr. Tallboy thoughtlessly cursed the nursing mothers, dialled Mr. Hankin's room on the inter-office 'phone and in a mournful tone put in a requisition for six 4-inch doubles on that inspiring subject.
CHAPTER XI
INEXCUSABLE INVASION OF A DUCAL ENTERTAINMENT
To Lord Peter Wimsey, the few weeks of his life spent in unravelling the Problem of the Iron Staircase possessed an odd dreamlike quality, noticeable at the time and still more insistent in retrospect. The very work that engaged him–or rather, the shadowy simulacrum of himself that signed itself on every morning in the name of Death Bredon–wafted him into a sphere of dim platonic archetypes, bearing a scarcely recognizable relationship to anything in the living world. Here those strange entities, the Thrifty Housewife, the Man of Discrimination, the Keen Buyer and the Good Judge, for ever young, for ever handsome, for ever virtuous, economical and inquisitive, moved to and fro upon their complicated orbits, comparing prices and values, making tests of purity, asking indiscreet questions about each other's ailments, household expenses, bed-springs, shaving cream, diet, laundry work and boots, perpetually spending to save and saving to spend, cutting out coupons and collecting cartons, surprising husbands with margarine and wives with patent washers and vacuum cleaners, occupied from morning to night in washing, cooking, dusting, filing, saving their children from germs, their complexions from wind and weather, their teeth from decay and their stomachs from indigestion, and yet adding so many hours to the day by labour-saving appliances that they had always leisure for visiting the talkies, sprawling on the beach to picnic upon Potted Meats and Tinned Fruit, and (when adorned by So-and-so's Silks, Blank's Gloves, Dash's Footwear, Whatnot's Weatherproof Complexion Cream and Thingummy's Beautifying Shampoos), even attending Ranelagh, Cowes, the Grand Stand at Ascot, Monte Carlo and the Queen's Drawing-Rooms. Where, Bredon asked himself, did the money come from that was to be spent so variously and so lavishly? If this hell's-dance of spending and saving were to stop for a moment, what would happen? If all the advertising in the world were to shut down tomorrow, would people still go on buying more soap, eating more apples, giving their children more vitamins, roughage, milk, olive oil, scooters and laxatives, learning more languages by gramophone, hearing more virtuosos by radio, re-decorating their houses, refreshing themselves with more non-alcoholic thirst-quenchers, cooking more new, appetizing dishes, affording themselves that little extra touch which means so much? Or would the whole desperate whirligig slow down, and the exhausted public relapse upon plain grub and elbow-grease? He did not know. Like all rich men, he had never before paid any attention to advertisements. He had never realized the enormous commercial importance of the comparatively poor. Not on the wealthy, who buy only what they want when they want it, was the vast superstructure of industry founded and built up, but on those who, aching for a luxury beyond their reach and for a leisure for ever denied them, could be bullied or wheedled into spending their few hardly won shillings on whatever might give them, if only for a moment, a leisured and luxurious illusion. Phantasmagoria–a city of dreadful day, of crude shapes and colours piled Babel-like in a heaven of harsh cobalt and rocking over a void of bankruptcy–a Cloud Cuckooland, peopled by pitiful ghosts, from the Thrifty Housewife providing a Grand Family Meal for Fourpence with the aid of Dairyfields Butter Beans in Margarine, to the Typist capturing the affections of Prince Charming by a liberal use of Muggins's Magnolia Face Cream.