"Very well, Mr. Campbell."
Together they entered the outer office, as Guy Burnett banged the telephone receiver back on its hook.
"Hale's, sir. Two-fifty more copies of 'Piccadilly' wanted immediately for the branch libraries."
"Of 'Piccadilly'?"
Campbell groaned aloud. "Piccadilly" was the so-called Book of the Year. The volume in its dull red binding had since four months become an obsession in the office. They breathed, talked, dreamt "Piccadilly." It littered the floor, the desks, the tables, the shelves. Every 'phone call concerned "Piccadilly"; every letter. They took up a paper and read reviews of "Piccadilly." They went for a walk and the cover stared at them from library windows. The entire firm had floated to affluence on "Piccadilly." And one and all, Campbell and his partner; Guy Burnett, the clerk; Gareth Temple, the reader; and Jimmy, the Heart-breaker; one and all were deadly sick of "Piccadilly." Graham Carr was the only person who was not sick of it. Graham Carr had written it.
"Aweel, send Jimmy over to interview the binder." Campbell disappeared into his inner sanctum. Alexander, by way of reproof to enthusiasm, never arrived on the spot till noon.
The Heart-breaker was despatched on his congenial errand. Then, cheered and refreshed, returned to his task of making into parcels the rejected manuscripts. Merrily he whistled, as he jerked the string into knots; merrily he whistled as he banged the door behind him, and set off to catch the post. Jimmy, aged thirteen, had been the very first within these walls to break an unknown heart by dispatching a package with slip of paper enclosed: "Mr. Campbell has considered your MS. with much care, but regrets——" Consequently his title and his importance.
Burnett was called into the inner room to be dictated a letter which the senior partner was anxious to dispatch on the sly, before his relentless junior should appear. An exceedingly popular lady novelist, commanding the best existing sale of sentimental fiction, had offered her wares to Leslie Campbell, for the prestige of seeing his name stamped at the foot of her cover. Alexander was considering the advisability of lowering their standards to accept these overtures: "Psychology will never make us a fortune, Campbell; and we can't live for ever on the proceeds of 'Piccadilly.'" Now, sneakingly, and with immense delight, Campbell dictated his uncompromising refusal of Miss Ethel Erskine's offer. He would have nothing but the Intellectuals. The little Scotsman's admiration of his "Young Men" and their style of authorship was almost fanatical.
Gareth found them tiring. He felt always acutely conscious of being an outsider. Not that it mattered—he was only the reader; and though his judgment could be relied on as sound and scholarly, Campbell never made an intimate of him; never called him "my boy," as he did young Burnett, for instance. As for Alexander, he disapproved altogether of the reader, whom he classified as an idealist lacking in guts.
Temple was older than any of the others; older than the head of the firm, even. And sitting there at his desk, he seemed to have grown just a little dusty; to lag a few paces behind the times—while "Campbell's Young Men" rushed fully twenty years ahead of them.