“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 farfetched 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 lightheaded 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 Parley’s Footwear (“Whether it’s a big shoot or a Hunt Ball, Parley puts you on a sound footing”). He lived in Bloomsbury, was communistic in a literary way, and dressed almost exclusively in pullovers and grey flannels. He was completely and precociously disillusioned and one of the most promising copywriters 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 makeup, 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.”