Antic Hay, Aldous Huxley [whitelam books .txt] 📗

may say,” he went on with a certain solemnity, “will depend the failure or success of our enterprise. I consider it of the first importance.”

“Quite,” said Gumbril, nodding importantly and with intelligence.

“We must set to work,” said Mr. Boldero, “sci⁠—en⁠—tifically.” Gumbril nodded again.

“We have to appeal,” Mr. Boldero went on so glibly that Gumbril felt sure he must be quoting somebody else’s words, “to the great instincts and feelings of humanity.⁠ ⁠… They are the sources of action. They spend the money, if I may put it like that.”

“That’s all very well,” said Gumbril. “But how do you propose to appeal to the most important of the instincts? I refer, as you may well imagine, to sex.”

“I was just going to come to that,” said Mr. Boldero, raising his hand as though to ask for a patient hearing. “Alas! we can’t. I don’t see any way of hanging our Small-Clothes on the sexual peg.”

“Then we are undone,” said Gumbril, too dramatically.

“No, no.” Mr. Boldero was reassuring. “You make the error of the Viennese. You exaggerate the importance of sex. After all, my dear Mr. Gumbril, there is also the instinct of self-preservation; there is also,” he leaned forward, wagging his finger, “the social instinct, the instinct of the herd.”

“True.”

“Both of them as powerful as sex. What are the Professor’s famous Censors but forbidding suggestions from the herd without, made powerful and entrenched by the social instinct within?”

Gumbril had no answer; Mr. Boldero continued, smiling:

“So that we shall be all right if we stick to self-preservation and the herd. Rub in the comfort and the utility, the hygienic virtues of our Small-Clothes; that will catch their self-preservatory feelings. Aim at their dread of public opinion, at their ambition to be one better than their fellows and their terror of being different⁠—at all the ludicrous weaknesses a well-developed social instinct exposes them to. We shall get them, if we set to work scientifically.” Mr. Boldero’s birdlike eyes twinkled very brightly. “We shall get them,” he repeated, and he laughed a happy little laugh, full of such a childlike diabolism, such an innocent gay malignity that it seemed as though a little leprechaun had suddenly taken the financier’s place in Gumbril’s best armchair.

Gumbril laughed too; for this leprechaunish mirth was infectious. “We shall get them,” he echoed. “Oh, I’m sure we shall, if you set about it, Mr. Boldero.”

Mr. Boldero acknowledged the compliment with a smile that expressed no false humility. It was his due, and he knew it.

“I’ll give you some of my ideas about the advertising campaign,” he said. “Just to give you a notion. You can think them over, quietly, and make suggestions.”

“Yes, yes,” said Gumbril, nodding.

Mr. Boldero cleared his throat. “We shall begin,” he said, “by making the most simple elementary appeal to their instinct of self-preservation: we shall point out that the Patent Small-Clothes are comfortable; that to wear them is to avoid pain. A few striking slogans about comfort⁠—that’s all we want. Very simple indeed. It doesn’t take much to persuade a man that it’s pleasanter to sit on air than on wood. But while we’re on the subject of hard seats we shall have to glide off subtly at a tangent to make a flank attack on the social instincts.” And joining the tip of his forefinger to the tip of his thumb, Mr. Boldero moved his hand delicately sideways, as though he were sliding it along a smooth brass rail. “We shall have to speak about the glories and the trials of sedentary labour. We must exalt its spiritual dignity and at the same time condemn its physical discomforts. ‘The seat of honour,’ don’t you know. We could talk about that. ‘The Seats of the Mighty.’ ‘The seat that rules the office rocks the world.’ All those lines might be made something of. And then we could have little historical chats about thrones; how dignified, but how uncomfortable they’ve been. We must make the bank clerk and the civil servant feel proud of being what they are and at the same time feel ashamed that, being such splendid people, they should have to submit to the indignity of having blistered hindquarters. In modern advertising you must flatter your public⁠—not in the oily, abject, tradesmanlike style of the old advertisers, crawling before clients who were their social superiors; that’s all over now. It’s we who are the social superiors⁠—because we’ve got more money than the bank clerks and the civil servants. Our modern flattery must be manly, straightforward, sincere, the admiration of equal for equal⁠—all the more flattering as we aren’t equals.” Mr. Boldero laid a finger to his nose. “They’re dirt and we’re capitalists.⁠ ⁠…” He laughed.

Gumbril laughed too. It was the first time that he had ever thought of himself as a capitalist, and the thought was exhilarating.

“We flatter them,” went on Mr. Boldero. “We say that honest work is glorious and ennobling⁠—which it isn’t; it’s merely dull and cretinizing. And then we go on to suggest that it would be finer still, more ennobling, because less uncomfortable, if they wore Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes. You see the line?”

Gumbril saw the line.

“After that,” said Mr. Boldero, “we get on to the medical side of the matter. The medical side, Mr. Gumbril⁠—that’s most important. Nobody feels really well nowadays⁠—at any rate, nobody who lives in a big town and does the kind of loathsome work that the people we’re catering for does. Keeping this fact before our eyes, we have to make it clear that only those can expect to be healthy who wear pneumatic trousers.”

“That will be a little difficult, won’t it?” questioned Gumbril.

“Not a bit of it!” Mr. Boldero laughed with an infectious confidence. “All we have to do is to talk about the great nerve centres of the spine: the shocks they get when you sit down too hard; the wearing exhaustion to which long-protracted sitting on unpadded seats subjects them. We’ll have to talk very scientifically about the great lumbar ganglia⁠—if there are such things, which I really don’t pretend to know. We’ll even talk almost mystically about the ganglia.