31st Of February Read Free Page B

out. “I suppose Rev’s told you two boys what this is all about?”
    Placidly puffing at his pipe, Reverton said: “Only hints, VV. I thought you’d like to explain.”
    “Well,” said VV, delighted. He uttered an indistinct exclamation, and darted at a bell push. A girl appeared. VV smacked his hand on the desk. “My hot milk and my tablets, Miss Jones.” The girl vanished. VV sat back in his chair and looked round at them as though they were an audience of three hundred, instead of three. “There’s one thing,” he said, “that every one of us has done this morning. Do you know what it is? Not only every one of us in this room, but every man in these offices.” His hands fluttered, his triangular gnome-like face shone with pleasure. “It’s not what you’re thinking, Jack my boy,” he said, pointing at Wyvern, whose face gave no indication that he was thinking anything. “We don’t do that every morning – not even the biggest rams among us.”
    Reverton took his pipe out of his mouth. “There are no statistics on that, VV.”
    “Statistics? We’ve got the whole history of the human race.” He rocked with laughter. “And we don’t all evacuate every morning either, unfortunately. What do we do, then?” Miss Jones returned with a glass of milk and three green tablets which she placed at his side. He waved them away impatiently. When she had gone out he repeated: “What do we do?” His voice dropped to a whisper. “I’ll tell you, gentlemen. We shave.”
    Reverton went on blowing smoke from his pipe. Wyvern continued to look out of the window. Anderson sat forward, looking, he hoped, keenly interested. In his mind he saw the calendar which said MONDAY, 4 FEBRUARY. What did it mean? VV jumped up and began to walk up and down the room among the piles of Scope, Verve, Vogue and Printers’ Ink on the floor.
    “Every morning homo sapiens crawls out of his warm bed, stretches, faces a mirror and assaults his face with cold steel for anything from five to thirty-five minutes. He cuts and scrapes and hacks away, fighting the unending battle against the growth of Nature. Every morning he gains a victory – but at what a price. Bits of sticking plaster, after-shave lotion, cooling powder – he calls them all into play; he has a row with his wife and catches the eight-fifteen feeling very much the worse for wear.” VV’s voice, which had risen to a pitch of histrionic excitement, changed suddenly to a mellifluous cooing. “Now supposing we had a means of eliminating this daily torture, supposing we could say ‘Hey Presto’ and find ourselves shaved – wouldn’t that be the greatest boon ever brought to twentieth-century man?” He stood for a moment with one band stretched before him, and then slowly lowered it. “Boys,” he said solemnly, “this is something big. Really big. This is something more than just another advertising account. It’s a national benefit.” He sat down, put one of the green pills on his tongue, and sipped the milk.
    Wyvern shifted in his chair. Anderson looked down at his legs. He had for the moment the extraordinary impression that the lower part of his body was separated from the upper half. Suppose that was really so? Suppose that the foot, the whole leg, failed to obey the instructions telegraphed from the brain. Suppose that one telegraphed such a message now, and suddenly his right foot flickered on the carpet as though moved by a tic. He watched its performance dispassionately.
    “Better get down to cases,” said Reverton. “I’ve got it all down here in outline, VV. shall I give it to them?” Drinking his milk, swallowing his tablets, glancing from one to the other of them, VV nodded. “All right then. This is a new product, absolutely unmarketed. It’s extracted from the tgojumba tree which grows in Central Africa, refined and specially processed.”
    “The what?” said Wyvern.
    “The tgojumba tree.”
    “Any relation to the miraculous yam-yam you