“Too smart. Smartness took the full count the fall before last; we’re pushing these funny stunts underground where they belong. And that other idee—too noisy. Shouting don’t go any more to-day. N. G.—— Now you’re an Englishman, and cann’t be expected to see these things in their reel perspective; but you’ve assets right here in this country without these vodeville acts. It ain’t my business to put you wise, but I’ll tell you this: neither noise nor smartness is good enough for Hallowell and Smiths’. Look out o’ that window. You see that edifice. That edifice isn’t going up to be run like the one next door to it. It’s a noo edifice, and it’s going to be run on noo methods. You think your methods are noo. You think again. You think quite a lot. Then when it’s hit you good and hard, ring me up and I’ll make another date with you. You got the right look, and there might be business done between you and I yet. The door closes itself. If you hear a hiss that ain’t me, but the piston. I hope you found the elevator-man courteous in his manner. You did? That’s one of the things there’s going to be at Hallowells’—etiquette. But unobtroosive. Not sticking out a foot on each side. You didn’t observe it sticking out, did you? So. Good morning.”
Mr. Miller had looked up in an etymological dictionary the meaning of the word “gospel,” and had found that it meant “good tidings”; and that, he said, was exactly what advertisement meant too. He had looked up other words also—Valour, Hero, Dignity, Gentleman—and he was for restoring their dimmed lustre. And since he saw things in their true perspective, he saw also the only way in which that could be done. To cut the cackle and come (like Mr. Wellcome) to the horses, he proposed to do it by a putting of the founts of honour to purposes of irrigation. Commerce had vulgarized itself; dignity must therefore be restored to it from where dignity was to be had in quantities sufficient if necessary to throw at the birds—from above. One day Mr. Miller, passing a more than usually ingenious advertisement in a shop window, had stated his point of view in twenty words. “Look at that!” he had exclaimed to his companion. “Now I say the man who invented that was a live wire. He connects. You feel the man. But what does the British public know about him? If he’d rescued a comrade under fire he’d have got your V.C. for it, and everybody’d have known all there was to him; but you stop a hundred people on this sidewalk and ask ’em his name, and if a single one of ’em can tell you then the drinks are on me!”
It is true that Mr. Miller did not say that he wanted the Cross bestowed (as it were) For Value instead of For Valour, but that was the direction in which his thoughts strayed. Before his perspective had become quite so clear he had tried to get permission for the Royal Standard to float over Hallowells’ new premises (the Union Jack having become common trade property, and so of no more value to one emporium than to another); and though he had failed, it was still better to have failed in such an attempt than to have succeeded in the funny stunts that had been pushed underground the fall before last. It remained an ideal for commerce to lift up its eyes to.
In the business sense, though in none other, Mr. Miller had paid a good deal of court to Dorothy Lennard—or perhaps less at first to Dorothy than to Lady Tasker’s niece. Nominally Dorothy was still “third hand” in the fashion studio; but Miss Benson had been wise enough to leave her free to do pretty much as she liked (without that freedom the studio would never have got Hallowells’ catalogue, nor have become what to all intents and purposes it now was—one of Hallowells’ departments), and Dorothy’s intimacy with Mr. Miller had ripened quickly after the famous buying of Glenister’s picture, “Sir Walter and the Cloak,” at the Academy more than a year before. Dorothy had gone round the Exhibition with Mr. Miller, and had seen him stop long before the picture and presently return to it.
“Now that’s what I call a picture, Miss Lennard,” he had said at last. “A reel thoughtful bit of art. I don’t care whether you call it pre-Raphaelite or whatever you call it—you as a lady-artist can put it all over me there—but speaking as a plain man of business I say that picture just appeals to me. It calls me. I feel it. It’s got meaning. There’s your Raleigh, look. And there’s your Queen Bess. And I ask you to observe the chivalrous spirit of it. That’s the reel old-world English courtesy. That’s the thing that hasn’t got to be let die. Hallowells’ has got to pitch its key up to that. It’s got to be as if there was a puddle in front of the Grand Entrance every day, and every lady-shopper was a Queen, and Hallowells’ was”—Mr. Miller had made a low, sweeping gesture with both his arms—“spreading its Cloak. That’s the deportment I want for our Hosts. Where do they keep the Sales Department here?”
And, that an object-lesson should be ever before his Departmental Hosts’ eyes, Mr. Miller had bought the picture.
How Hallowells’ had contrived, during the past two years, with an army of painters and gilders, carpenters and shopfitters, plasterers and electricians and inspectors and engineers swarming all over the place, that business should be “carried on as usual during rebuilding” was nothing short of a modern miracle; but so it had been. And the gradual rising of the visible edifice had been accompanied, course by course and tier by tier, by bright palatial uprearings in Mr. Miller’s busy brain. If the weather should hold for another month, all was expected to be ready for the Grand Inauguration in the spring; and even if the weather did not hold, the impression had somehow got about that the weather must be a mightier power even than had been supposed to be able to postpone an event of such magnitude.... But all this is ancient history now. London knows its Hallowells’ and the wonders that the man who held its Portfolio of Publicity (for surely he was entitled to a seat in the Cabinet of the World’s Commerce) called forth. It has accepted the Hallowell touch. It knows that its shopwalkers rank as Marshals and its head-salesmen as Hosts. It knows that the employé who would win his spurs at Hallowells’ must fast and keep his vigil before the picture of Sir Walter and the Cloak. The funny stunt has taken the full count. Mr. Miller has corrected the perspective of things.... Therefore pass we on to how Dorothy Lennard had now and then a voice in certain of the tertiary wonders of the organization and how into the vast complexity she had contrived to drag the name of Mr. Hamilton Dix.
Mr. Dix had come into the concern over the pictorial advertising. Of Dorothy as an ex-student of the McGrath Mr. Miller had presently come to think almost as much as he did of Dorothy the niece of Lady Tasker; and he had taken her word about Mr. Dix. “Couldn’t your posters and things be made somehow a bit more—important?” Dorothy had suggested one day. “Tell me how,” Mr. Miller had instantly replied—“tell us how; you’ve grasped the idee! You don’t suppose we could enlist the patronage of our president of the Royal Academy, do you?” (Mr. Miller had lately begun to speak of “our” Royal Standard and “our” House of Peers.) Thereupon Dorothy had given a light, rapid sketch of Sir Edward Pointer, not so much disdaining as debarred by his official position from superintending Hallowells’ pictorial advertising; and she had suggested Mr. Hamilton Dix instead. “Is he a live wire?” Mr. Miller had demanded. “No push about him, I mean, no noise, not always forcing himself forward, but the reel solid dignity? If he ain’t excloosive and hard to get, he’s no good to us! He ain’t a ‘Sir,’ is he?”
“No.”
“Nor an ‘Honourable,’ with a ‘u’ in it?”