“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 Cuckoo-land, 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 Magnolia Face Cream.
Among these phantasms, Death Bredon, driving his pen across reams of office foolscap, was a phantasm too, emerging from this nightmare toil to a still more fantastical existence amid people whose aspirations, rivalries and modes of thought were alien, and earnest beyond anything in his waking experience. Nor, when the Greenwich-driven clocks had jerked on to half-past five, had he any world of reality to which to return; for then the illusionary Mr. Bredon dislimned and became the still more illusionary Harlequin of a dope-addict’s dream; an advertising figure more crude and fanciful than any that postured in the columns of the Morning Star; a thing bodiless and absurd, a mouthpiece of stale clichés shouting in dull ears without a brain. From this abominable impersonation he could not now free himself, since at the sound of his name or the sight of his unmasked face, all the doors in that other dream-city-the city of dreadful night-would be closed to him.
From one haunting disquietude, Dian de Momerie’s moment of inexplicable insight had freed him. She no longer desired him. He thought she rather dreaded him; yet, at the note of the penny whistle she would come out and drive with him, hour after hour, in the great black Daimler, till night turned to daybreak. He sometimes wondered whether she believed in his existence at all; she treated him as though he were some hateful but fascinating figure in a hashish-vision. His fear now was that her unbalanced fancy might topple her over the edge of suicide. She asked him once what he was and what he wanted, and he told her stark truth, so far as it went.
“I am here because Victor Dean died. When the world knows how he died, I shall go back to the place from which I came.”