So she had carefully “nursed” Mr. Miller, had used her charms when the use of charms would serve a turn and had been businesslike and off when the charm of her sex would have been out of place, had dined and supped with Mr. Miller, had left Mr. Miller alone for a week, had one day dropped a hint that Doubledays’ manager was a friend of her people (expressing quite a liking for Doubledays’ manager personally), and so on and so forth, until Mr. Miller thought her not only one of the brightest young women that had ever happened, but one with whom it was a pleasure to be seen in the well-dressed assemblies his British heart loved. And, of course, here Dorothy’s connexions helped too. Lady Tasker crossed over at the Ritz one evening and sat talking with Dorothy for a full ten minutes, with Mr. Miller standing all the time and bowing whenever he got a chance; and his bow when Lady Tasker left was the bow of Sir Walter with the cloak. Thereafter he kept glancing across in the direction of Lady Tasker’s party as if he wondered whether it would be permissible to take wine with Lady Tasker across the width of the room; and he spoke to Dorothy as follows:—
“Now that’s the reel thing; I say this is an Experience, Miss Lennard. The way you introdooced me: ‘Mr. Miller—,’ no more than thaaat, but with a manner, so to say: ‘Mr. Miller—,’ and then went on conversing about intimate things just as if you’d been at home or in her ladyship’s private suite of rooms at this ho-tel ... that’s the Note! Now if we could secure Lady Tasker for our Inauguration—not to be on voo, but just to be there—that would be worth dallars, guineas, I mean, both to us and to her ladyship.... And is she Mr. Stan’s aunt, if I may use the word, too? Well, now! I have to thank you for a real experience, Miss Lennard. ‘Mr. Miller’—just like that—I might have been anybody way up! Some of our Misters make some of our Sirs look poor, if I may use the expression—cheap skates—‘bum’s’ the word they use in America—nooveau. I’m vurry glad to have had the pleasure of Lady Tasker’s acquaintance. Now indicate to me who the rest of the party are——”
And when, a week later, Mr. Miller, bowing to Lady Tasker at the theatre, received a bow in return, he certainly felt, if he was not actually, many “dallars” better off. Perhaps actually he was, too. Perhaps his Idea had received confirmation and support, so that he was enabled to go forward with fresh energy and enthusiasm. We must get our inspiration from somewhere, and these things are very difficult to explain.
It may be supposed that this and a few similar things did Dorothy no harm at all; and of course she lied grossly, at any rate by implication, when she introduced the name of Doubledays’. Not that Doubledays’, too, were not straining every nerve. They and everybody else knew of the coming Inauguration that was already as completely planned as—say, “Hamlet” without the Prince. Perhaps Dorothy did actually say something to them; perhaps she gave Mr. Miller an account that she thought quite good enough for Mr. Miller; not all of us can take our truth nascent and unsullied from the Fountainhead of all Truth. Mr. Miller at any rate thought she might possibly be dickering with Doubledays’, and that was the practical matter. An introduction to Lady Tasker at the Ritz was no good to him if Doubledays’ also was going to be introduced to Lady Tasker at the Ritz, and these and other things were Dorothy’s to give or to withhold.... You see how it was. You see how time-serving and unprincipled and altogether immoral it was. Amory would not have touched it with the end of a long pole. Had Stan written the “Life and Work of Miss Dorothy Lennard” he would probably have written the most deplorable record of our whole deplorable age.
Apart from these things, however, there was the intrinsic beauty of the idea itself. That went straight to the heart of every woman, and of nearly every man also. And it touched every single being of the future, too. To Mr. Wellcome it peculiarly belonged, and Jellies and the Eugenist might have shaken hands upon it. Actuarially its basis was as sound as it could be. Dorothy went carefully into this. The cost for the whole week would be nothing to Hallowells’, and its return would be incalculable. Without it, those shining palatial premises would be as a setting that begged, prayed, implored for its jewel. If Mr. Miller didn’t take it, Doubledays’—might. You don’t bargain for these things; you show them, and name your price. If you are robbed, it is your own fault before the fact; only the people are robbed who deserve to be robbed. Dorothy didn’t guarantee a gem of such water every spring; nevertheless she intended to ask for fifteen hundred pounds a year for a number of years on the strength of it—this time (for contracts have their dull uses) to be clinched by a formal contract. She was not a fashion artist now; she had barely passed her Sealskin; she was a Publicity Adviser, and what she did not know about wheedling and scheming and other gross misuses of her sex was not worth knowing. And she did not care one rap for Emancipation and the Cause. She thought the Cause a very useful thing, merely because it collected all the cranks together, so that you might know where to find them if you happened to want them and how to avoid them when you did not; and, applying her publicity training to the extraordinary success “Barrage” was by this time having, she had no difficulty whatever in seeing to what that success was really due. Given the occasion and the organization, anybody else’s picture would have done quite as well as Amory’s. Amory was merely lucky to have hit on the idea at the right moment, and foolish if she thought the idea and the moment were likely ever to jump so happily together again. And if Amory didn’t know this, the odds were that Mr. Dix did.
This idea of Dorothy’s, then (not to beat any longer about the bush), was that of the famous Wedding Week that has now passed into history. “Shopping Weeks” had been tried before, but they had struck Dorothy as “some of our Sirs” had struck Mr. Miller by comparison with the unadorned simplicity of some Misters—as “poor,” “nooveau,” and (to use the American expression) “bum.” And yet they had paid. If those, then, had paid, such an idea as Dorothy’s was likely to pay at least as well. It seemed to her that all that these highly-paid Captains of Commerce lacked was inventiveness. They could be trusted with the details, but they had no largeness of conception. They niggled where they should have drawn with a free hand: Dorothy knew that she had ideas enough to keep a dozen of them going.
Hallowell & Smith’s, then, were going to provide, for a week, and up to the capacity of their largest hall, free weddings. Subject to certain conditions, that varied from the purchase of a veil to the opening of a monthly account—and even these were imposed only to stem the rush that was confidently anticipated—Hallowells’ would supply carriages, the breakfast, flowers, cake, music, wine, silver-paper boxes, awnings, liveries, crimson carpets, souvenirs and what not, entirely without charge, deduction, obligation, or any catch about it whatever. Between the pronouncing of the Benediction at the Church and your stepping on to the footboard of the train that was to take you away, you simply put yourself into Hallowells’ hands. Indeed, it was not Hallowells’ fault that they were not able to do even more for you. Certainly it was not Mr. Miller’s fault. For Mr. Miller simply could not see why, if in Scotland a wedding might be celebrated in an ordinary drawing-room, in England it might not take place in an up-to-date Store. He took advice, both legal and ecclesiastical; he approached both the Church and the Registry Office; and the only result was that he found something more inaccessible even than he had found the Royal Standard to be. Hallowells’, dedicated though it was (subject to the Shops’ Hours Acts) to that practical form of Faith which the Apostle James offered to show by his works, still remained, in the hidebound sense that is the only one accepted of dogma, an unconsecrated building. Mr. Miller felt this as an injustice. It seemed to him that the Church could not after all be very sure of its own position. If, as it preached, it was the duty of the strong to help the weak, surely it was equally the duty of an Establishment that had dignity enough and to spare to bestow a little of that dignity where there was need of it. Not to do so was a stultification of reel enterprise, and a refusal to give live and go-ahead brains (his brains and Dorothy’s) their proper reward. He would have met the Church more than half-way; would have dressed his marshal-celebrant in any way they had wished; cloth-of-gold if they liked; no expense should have been spared: but the authorities of the Chapel Royal and St. George’s, Hanover Square, stuck to their cobwebby old monopoly, and in a business sense Mr. Miller was forced to the conclusion that the Church was “bum.”
But while the Sacrament itself lay beyond his power, its appurtenances provided an opportunity more glorious than Publicity had dreamed of yet. Never was a Publicity-secret more jealously guarded. Day and night a picket kept the door of the room in the Clerkenwell factory where the gigantic papier-maché Old Shoe was being made; and the white-and-silver hymeneal torches, both the large ones for the trophies and the small ones for table-decoration and the holding of flowers, were allotted to separate firms. All “roughs” given out to printers were red-labelled, like poison-bottles, “Destroy at Once”; and the deliveries of Menus, Souvenirs, Wedding-cake Boxes and so on were sealed with private seals. The theatrical costumiers who supplied the wings and wreaths for the Cupids were given for secrecy’s sake, an address in Scotland from which the consignments were brought back by private van by road; and for long enough the Executive of the Wedding Week was divided about the building of an organ in the place. Mr. Miller rather wanted an organ: it would be, he thought, rather a scorching come-back on the Church; but his stunt-advisers persuaded him otherwise, and a string-band carried the day. And before it was absolutely too late for Doubledays’ or any other firm to have queered the whole thing and to have got ahead of Hallowell’s, Dorothy got her contract. The office of Consultant to Hallowell’s for five years was signed, sealed and delivered unto her. Thereafter she might stick to the job or allow it to lapse, as she pleased; in the meantime, not counting contingent benefits that were sure to come, it would start her and Stan very comfortably together.
And so, with London at its fairest and fullest, and the flower-barrows in the Circuses ablaze with tulips and narcissi and gladioli and escholtzsias, and Bond Street blocked with cars and taxis, and the Park on Sunday mornings for all the world as if rivers of confetti and black patches flowed slowly back and forth, all was made in readiness at Hallowell’s. And so well had the secret been kept that it was only when Miss Umpleby happened one day to go into the room where the Bell was being unpacked that anybody in the place (outside the Executive) had the faintest notion of what was going on. But the Bell gave it away to Miss Umpleby. Mr. Miller had got the idea of the Bell from that foreign land, America. It was twelve feet high and composed entirely of artificial flowers; and while it had originally been intended that each bridal pair should hew its way out of it with a silver axe, bringing the souvenirs for its particular party out with it, that idea had been abandoned as impracticable, and the Bell opened with two flaps like a roc’s egg at a pantomime instead. Miss Umpleby was an intelligent young woman; she had read of the device before in the newspapers; and she flew to Dorothy.