Plain Murder Read online

  12

  The affairs of the Universal Advertising Agency were looking up; there was no doubt about it. Twice in one week had elegant Mr Lewis come hastening into the office, his baby eyes wide with excitement, to tell the glad news of a new account which was to be entrusted to them. The sale of Ultra-violet Soap had expanded so much, either because of or in spite of the work of the Agency, that the proprietors, like sensible men, had decided to increase their advertising appropriation, and with it, in consequence, the Agency’s commission. It was only six weeks after his last rise in salary that Mr Morris was told by Mr Campbell that he was to receive another one – his income rose now to the colossal height of six pounds ten a week; and the whole office was delighted to hear of the distribution of a fortnight’s pay among them as a Christmas bonus.

  Mr Morris was a good advertising man. He had the directness of vision which enabled him to see that the object of advertising was to sell; consequently he was trammelled by none of the ideals which might have hindered a better-educated man. To him an advertisement could only be beautiful or well worded if it was likely to promote sales; it involved a contradiction in terms to speak of a well-worded advertisement which did not do so. Split infinitives and ‘different to’s’ meant nothing to him as long as they did not detract from the appeal of the advertisement to the class of person to whom it was addressed. He was never likely in consequence to lose time in struggling towards an unattainable but delicious ideal of beauty; certainly he would never be responsible for the production of an admirable drawing or an exquisite piece of prose which left the reader quite charmed but without the least urge to buy the product advertised. Vulgarity meant nothing unpleasant to him if vulgarity achieved its end. Arguments might even be put forward, therefore, to show that Morris was an idealist in his way, although his ideals were not those of an artistic minority.

  Certainly Mr Campbell, shrewd but lacking in vigour, well appreciating the object of advertising but shrinking fastidiously from the means necessary to attain it, found that Morris saved him a great deal of trouble and earned him a great deal of money. The propositions Morris brought forward were so obviously promising that he could not fail to see their efficacy, and Morris could urge their adoption so earnestly that Mr Campbell could sigh and grant it without a feeling of personal responsibility for the new burst of inartistic vulgarity which was to be inflicted on the world. As Morris declared triumphantly, and as Mr Campbell admitted with whimsical sorrow, the people who looked for taste in drawings or correctness of English in an advertisement usually had not the money or not the faintest inclination to buy Ultra-violet Soap or Sleepwell Beds, and Morris saw no object whatever in throwing away the good seed of labour and money upon the stony ground of their poverty or indifference. He worked upon the taste and superstition of the massed majority, the housewives doing their Friday shopping and the men at Saturday football matches, and they in return spent their pennies and sixpences as he vociferously directed them.

  There was no doubt about that at all. The work the Universal Advertising Agency was doing was beginning to be talked about among the men with advertising appropriations to spend; business was coming its way rapidly.

  ‘We shall have to be increasing our staff before long at this rate,’ said Mr Campbell to Morris, à propos of nothing in particular.

  ‘Yes, I can see it coming,’ said Morris.

  Mr Campbell tapped at his desk with the end of his pencil and looked across at Morris somewhat nervously.

  ‘I could bring you a new clerk next week, if you like,’ he said.

  ‘There’s work enough for another one,’ replied Morris. He was choosing his words carefully, for he realized that Mr Campbell did not approach a proposition thus indirectly without good cause.

  ‘Quite untrained,’ said Mr Campbell. ‘I suppose you could teach the elements of lay-out and sizes of type and things like that?’

  Morris’s face fell a little; he did not want to do anything of the kind, but Mr Campbell clearly wished it, and his position was not yet strong enough by any means to counter Mr Campbell’s wishes directly.

  ‘I could do with a good lay-out man, or a copy writer—’ he began doubtfully, but Mr Campbell interrupted.

  ‘This won’t be a lay-out man,’ he said. ‘I was thinking about my daughter.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Morris.

  ‘You’ve seen her, I expect.’ Morris certainly could remember a shingled, well-dressed girl in her late teens who sometimes came to call for Mr Campbell at his office. ‘She’s nearly grown up by now. I thought a year or two in this office might do her a bit of good.’

  ‘It might,’ said Morris.

  ‘All girls ought to work for their livings for a time, I think,’ went on Mr Campbell. ‘But I can’t think of anyone who would be likely to employ my daughter if I don’t.’

  He said it in the deprecating fashion of a proud parent.

  ‘Oh, that’ll be all right, of course,’ said Morris.

  ‘I’m glad you think so. She will be working in your room just like the others, of course. I don’t want to do it unless you are sure that it won’t upset things.’

  ‘Oh, no, of course it won’t,’ said Morris, who did not feel nearly as sure about it as he tried to appear. The presence of a girl of that sort would mean a mincing attention to what one said, and to the similes one employed, and would be an infernal nuisance all round; but one does not raise unreasonable objections of that sort to an idea which is clearly near to one’s employer’s heart.

  ‘Right,’ said Mr Campbell. ‘She’ll come in next Monday, then, and start a first-hand study of what the great world is really like.’ And next Monday, as good as his word, Mr Campbell appeared at the composing-room door with his hand on his daughter’s shoulder.

  ‘Here we are then, Mr Morris,’ he said. ‘Here’s your new assistant. Keep her up to scratch, mind. There, Doris, I suppose that’s your chair and table. Mr Morris will start you off on your duties. Be a good girl.’

  An ordinarily unobservant individual might have said that he saw dozens of girls exactly like Doris Campbell every day in the street. She was just of that type, taller than the average of the preceding generation, slim and trim and shingled, well dressed, apparently self-assured, clearly a good dancer and a good tennis player, but with nothing else to distinguish her from all her fellow nineteen-year-olds in her class of society.

  No one in the composing room paid her any special attention at first; everyone there had greeted the news of her approaching arrival among them with groans and grumblings, and perhaps for as much as two days after it they would not have recognized her had they passed her in the street.

  Then she began to differentiate herself from the mass of the outer world, just as any girl will if one sees enough of her. Soon everyone in the composing room could have said for certain that she had grey eyes and black hair; if they could not have stated with precision the prevailing colour of her office jumper, they would at least take notice when she wore a different one. Young Shepherd became her attentive slave; elegant young Lewis, the outside man, found frequent occasion to explain subtle points of advertising to her at her table beside Morris’s dais. She soon recovered from the agonizing shyness and the dazed sense of uselessness which oppressed her when she first came, and was able to look the young men in the face with her steady grey eyes. Living in that atmosphere no one could possibly avoid picking up the jargon of the profession. Soon she was able to talk about fourteen-point type and six-inch double columns with the best of them. Mr Campbell, watching anxiously to see the effect of an experiment he had not been too sure about, was overjoyed. Possibly the only people who thoroughly disliked the presence of the new arrival were the typists, whose hats and stockings and shoes, trim and neat though they might be, could never compete with those of a girl who was the only daughter of a man whose large income was steadily increasing.

  Her presence had a very marked e
ffect on Mr Morris. As her instructor he had necessarily most to do with her. Whenever he could spare time from all the manifold work he had to do, he would sit at a second chair at Miss Campbell’s table and explain to her the elements of the art.

  ‘It’s easy enough, Miss Campbell. Look here, these blokes, the Elsinore Cork Company, want some new ads. got out. You get hold of the file with what we’ve said about ’em before. That’s Shepherd’s job to find it out for you. Of course, they only advertise in the technical press. No one except cold storage people and so on want to buy compressed cork. Here’s a booklet about their stuff, for instance. If you look through that you soon see what they’re proud of. It’s light, and it’s cheap, and it won’t warp, and you can stick it on to anything with any kind of glue. Right. You want to get all that into one ad. and sing a whole song about one of those points. So you start off with big type. “Save weight!” Something like that to catch the eye of the man turning over the advertisement pages. Then you’ve got to explain that: “Elsinore Compressed Cork weighs less per square foot than any other on the market.” It doesn’t matter much if it doesn’t. If someone kicks up a fuss it’s easy to find some particular case where you’re right. But you have to rub it in. Just saying that doesn’t fix it in a chap’s mind. You’ve got to have a drawing of a workman carrying great slabs of the stuff on the back of his neck, or something, and smiling all over his face at the easiness of it. Then, when you’ve made your big point, you can go on and make the others. “And it’s cheaper than other brands, too, and you can’t make it warp if you try; and as for sticking! – any quick-drying glue will stick it for you in no time.” That makes a good ad. And then the week after you make the next point the big one. “Cut your replacement costs!” and the next week, “Do your cork slabs do this or that”; and the week after, “You can’t pry it loose with a crowbar!” You don’t have to know anything special about the stuff to advertise it. All you have to remember is to say the main thing three times over – in big type, and then in a drawing, and then in little type. That’s a good ad., then, of the easy kind. Wonderful how it lasts. It’ll work over and over again in that kind of paper.’

  ‘You make it sound awfully easy,’ said Miss Campbell, gazing fascinated at Morris’s thick hands flipping over the filed advertisements and producing example after example to prove his points unhesitatingly.

  ‘Oh, don’t you run away with the idea that it’s as easy as all that,’ said Morris. ‘Any fool can make up some kind of ad. Lots of fools try. But it isn’t a fool who can make up a good ad. You’ve got to use just the right word and have the type just the right size, and you’ve got to see that the artist gets just your idea into his drawing. Clarence, over there, always wants to put his own idea in, and those damned – dashed, I mean – those dashed studios always do the same, too, if they have any ideas at all. You can’t have that at all. These artistic blokes always think they know best, and they don’t. You take that from me, Miss Campbell – they don’t. They never do. There never was an artist yet who could make up a good ad. – an ad. worth calling an ad. I don’t expect Einstein – is it Einstein or Epstein? – anyway, you know the bloke I mean – ever had an idea for an ad. that we’d give tuppence for. I’m sure of it. If he had, I don’t expect he’d stay an artist long.’

  ‘I don’t expect he would,’ said Miss Campbell, and felt very pleased with herself on account of this secretly witty remark, while Morris rubbed his chin and grinned down at her in huge satisfaction at being able to spread himself thus.

  Morris never found himself regretting for a moment Mr Campbell’s decision to bring his daughter to the office. She brought a new interest into the composing room. It was the first time he had come into contact with a girl of her class. That apparent assurance of manner even at the shyest moment, that obviously well-bred voice were things he had long envied – and sneered at to his friends who did not possess them.

  Certainly they were in remarkable contrast with his wife’s manners; even Maudie appeared now to his newly meticulous taste to be flamboyant and badly dressed. Anyway, he had found out long ago, by experiment, that Maudie was easy of approach, whereas Miss Campbell was unattainable. It was some time before Morris progressed beyond this realization. He was long satisfied with peacocking in front of her, with admiring her daintiness from afar; he found absurd pleasure in her proximity when they sat side by side studying advertising. It was only gradually that he began to form the sneaking ambition to attain the unattainable; and before he really did so affairs between him and Oldroyd had reached a crisis.

  Lamb and Howlett were new to the office; Clarence cared little about anyone there; Shepherd noticed nothing ominous in the atmosphere, because his attention was entirely filled up by Morris’s insistence on his doing all the work he could cram into his time, and by his new devotion to Miss Campbell, and by all the pleasurable excitement of the successful development of the office. Only Oldroyd was conscious of the horror of the situation. He alone knew that what the Press would have delighted to call a ‘human tiger’ was stalking about the office. Sturdily unimaginative as he was, he still found himself at times indulging in the wildest mental imagery; he would realize with a shock that he had been looking at Morris’s thick lips and telling himself that they had tasted blood. Morris could hardly smile without Oldroyd quoting to himself a half-forgotten line of Shakespeare: ‘A man may smile and smile and smile and be a villain.’ His loathing of the man increased day by day; he was filled with a shuddering fear of the fellow who could grin amicably one day and kill the next.

  He found himself at times wondering who would be Morris’s next victim, wondering who there was who stood now in his way; and often he came to the sickly conclusion that it was he, Oldroyd, from whom Morris had most to fear, and who might, therefore, be the object of Morris’s Satanic wrath. But, though he knew himself afraid, Oldroyd still had enough sturdy courage to stay where he was and endure the troubles Fate and his own weakness had brought upon him. He set his teeth and refused to admit the possibility of Morris’s gaining an ascendancy over him. But it was very bad for his work.

  One bright morning the fact was thrust upon him. The while he was racking his tired brain for ideas for a new lay-out Miss Campbell went off with her father for lunch; Shepherd was out on an errand, and then Morris sent Clarence and Lamb and Howlett out together to their lunches as well. Something in Morris’s cold, flat voice told Oldroyd that there was danger in the air; he could tell now when Morris was posing – but he could never tell whether Morris was merely planning a murder or some scheme for smartening up the staff. When the footsteps of the trio had died away outside the door Oldroyd heard Morris address him across the room.

  ‘Oldroyd,’ said Morris, ‘come here a minute.’

  There was a menace in his voice; Oldroyd knew the fellow too well by now. All the same, Oldroyd heaved himself out of his chair and shambled across to the dais. He felt he hated a world which put him under the orders of Morris.

  ‘Now look here, Oldroyd,’ began Morris judicially, ‘you know what I want to speak about.’

  ‘No, that I don’t,’ was the sullen reply.

  ‘I think you do. I sent those others out so that I wouldn’t have to tell you off in front of them. You’re not doing the least dam’ bit of good in this office.’

  ‘Oh, aren’t I?’ said Oldroyd. He was inclined to snarl a little, such was his mood of angry mutiny.

  ‘I’m warning you,’ said Morris – and anyone could have guessed that from the tone of his voice.

  ‘There isn’t a day goes by but someone has to clear up mistakes after you. You haven’t made a decent suggestion for weeks. You’re slow and you’re careless and you’re setting a bad example to the others. I can’t have it in my office, Oldroyd, I tell you that; and, what’s more, I’m not going to have it.’

  ‘You aren’t, aren’t you?’ said Oldroyd; he was not a man of repartee, but the tone of his voice implie
d most of the biting things he would have liked to say had he thought of them. He could not bring himself to knuckle under to Morris.

  Morris’s face had assumed a pained expression. It hurt his fine feelings that a junior employee should thus carry himself with a rebellious bearing towards a senior. He set an edge on his voice.

  ‘That’s enough of that,’ he said. ‘I’m warning you for your own good. If there isn’t a big improvement soon I shall have to tell Mac that you’re no use in this office. And that means that you go – quick, too. We’ll give you a character all right – don’t care who you work for as long as you don’t work for us – but you’ll go out of here.’

  He looked across his desk at Oldroyd. His expression was calm; for that matter so were his feelings. There was nothing in this business of chiding a junior to ruffle a man like him. He eyed the struggle on Oldroyd’s face quite dispassionately.

  For Oldroyd was in a state of boiling fury – fury at his own impotence as much as at the insolent overbearingness of this man whom he knew so much about, and so uselessly. His features worked with the conflict of his emotions. The yearning to say something effective, the ingrained caution resulting from years of employment which warned him to do nothing to offend his employer, his fear and his fury with himself for his fear, all these combined into a very explosive mixture in Oldroyd’s soul. The internal pressure rose until two words were forced out of Oldroyd’s mouth; he hardly knew he had said them.

  ‘King’s Evidence!’ said Oldroyd hoarsely, glaring back at Morris’s stony stare.

  Oldroyd felt a fierce joy at seeing the effect of his words. Morris’s expression lost some of its impersonal quality, and he leaned a little forward towards Oldroyd across the table.

  ‘What’s that you said?’ he demanded sharply.