"I want to marry your daughter," said Mark Spayley with faltering
eagerness. "I am only an artist with an income of two hundred a year,
and she is the daughter of an enormously wealthy man, so I suppose you
will think my offer a piece of presumption."
Duncan Dullamy, the great company inflator, showed no outward sign of
displeasure. As a matter of fact, he was secretly relieved at the
prospect of finding even a two-hundred-a-year husband for his daughter
Leonore. A crisis was rapidly rushing upon him, from which he knew he
would emerge with neither money nor credit; all his recent ventures had
fallen flat, and flattest of all had gone the wonderful new breakfast
food, Pipenta, on the advertisement of which he had sunk such huge
sums. It could scarcely be called a drug in the market; people bought
drugs, but no one bought Pipenta.
"Would you marry Leonore if she were a poor man's daughter?" asked the
man of phantom wealth.
"Yes," said Mark, wisely avoiding the error of over-protestation. And
to his astonishment Leonore's father not only gave his consent, but
suggested a fairly early date for the wedding.
"I wish I could show my gratitude in some way," said Mark with genuine
emotion. "I'm afraid it's rather like the mouse proposing to help the
lion."
"Get people to buy that beastly muck," said Dullamy, nodding savagely
at a poster of the despised Pipenta, "and you'll have done more than
any of my agents have been able to accomplish."
"It wants a better name," said Mark reflectively, "and something
distinctive in the poster line. Anyway, I'll have a shot at it."
Three weeks later the world was advised of the coming of a new
breakfast food, heralded under the resounding name of "Filboid Studge."
Spayley put forth no pictures of massive babies springing up with
fungus-like rapidity under its forcing influence, or of representatives
of the leading nations of the world scrambling with fatuous eagerness
for its possession. One huge sombre poster depicted the Damned in Hell
suffering a new torment from their inability to get at the Filboid
Studge which elegant young fiends held in transparent bowls just beyond
their reach. The scene was rendered even more gruesome by a subtle
suggestion of the features of leading men and women of the day in the
portrayal of the Lost Souls; prominent individuals of both political
parties, Society hostesses, well-known dramatic authors and novelists,
and distinguished aeroplanists were dimly recognizable in that doomed
throng; noted lights of the musical-comedy stage flickered wanly in the
shades of the Inferno, smiling still from force of habit, but with the
fearsome smiling rage of baffled effort. The poster bore no fulsome
allusions to the merits of the new breakfast food, but a single grim
statement ran in bold letters along its base: "They cannot buy it now."
Spayley had grasped the fact that people will do things from a sense of
duty which they would never attempt as a pleasure. There are thousands
of respectable middle-class men who, if you found them unexpectedly in
a Turkish bath, would explain in all sincerity that a doctor had
ordered them to take Turkish baths; if you told them in return that you
went there because you liked it, they would stare in pained wonder at
the frivolity of your motive. In the same way, whenever a massacre of
Armenians is reported from Asia Minor, every one assumes that it has
been carried out "under orders" from somewhere or another, no one seems
to think that there are people who might LIKE to kill their neighbours
now and then.
And so it was with the new breakfast food. No one would have eaten
Filboid Studge as a pleasure, but the grim austerity of its
advertisement drove housewives in shoals to the grocers' shops to
clamour for an immediate supply. In small kitchens solemn pig-tailed
daughters helped depressed mothers to perform the primitive ritual of
its preparation. On the breakfast-tables of cheerless parlours it was
partaken of in silence. Once the womenfolk discovered that it was
thoroughly unpalatable, their zeal in forcing it on their households
knew no bounds. "You haven't eaten your Filboid Studge!" would be
screamed at the appetiteless clerk as he hurried weariedly from the
breakfast-table, and his evening meal would be prefaced by a warmed-up
mess which would be explained as "your Filboid Studge that you didn't
eat this morning." Those strange fanatics who ostentatiously mortify
themselves, inwardly and outwardly, with health biscuits and health
garments, battened aggressively on the new food. Earnest, spectacled
young men devoured it on the steps of the National Liberal Club. A
bishop who did not believe in a future state preached against the
poster, and a peer's daughter died from eating too much of the
compound. A further advertisement was obtained when an infantry
regiment mutinied and shot its officers rather than eat the nauseous
mess; fortunately, Lord Birrell of Blatherstone, who was War Minister
at the moment, saved the situation by his happy epigram, that
"Discipline to be effective must be optional."
Filboid Studge had become a household word, but Dullamy wisely realized
that it was not necessarily the last word in breakfast dietary; its
supremacy would be challenged as soon as some yet more unpalatable food
should be put on the market. There might even be a reaction in favour
of something tasty and appetizing, and the Puritan austerity of the
moment might be banished from domestic cookery. At an opportune
moment, therefore, he sold out his interests in the article which had
brought him in colossal wealth at a critical juncture, and placed his
financial reputation beyond the reach of cavil. As for Leonore, who
was now an heiress on a far greater scale than ever before, he
naturally found her something a vast deal higher in the husband market
than a two-hundred-a-year poster designer. Mark Spayley, the
brainmouse who had helped the financial lion with such untoward effect,
was left to curse the day he produced the wonder-working poster.
"After all," said Clovis, meeting him shortly afterwards at his club,
"you have this doubtful consolation, that 'tis not in mortals to
countermand success."