He fingered one of the specifying labels. All the samples were labelled, though the marks on the tags were as mysterious as the stuff they indicated. They announced merely the names of ships, and seasons, and the cabalistic port-marks of consignors. The objects mostly were but mummied relics, odorous suggestions entirely foreign, so that they gave Jimmy’s room at Perriam’s, to a caller, an indefinable air, as though it were concerned with the subtle traffic of Oriental mysteries. But Colet himself did not know the origin of most of the samples which littered his desk, nor what form they had when alive in whichever far islands and coasts were their homes. He did not always know for what purposes they were used here. Some were in bottles, with names, like collars, about their necks. Others were in trays, in packets of blue paper, in bundles of sticks. They were but names and markets to Colet. They were good names, though: mace, turmeric, myrobalans, cinnamon, benzoin, lac, gambir, annatto. So were the names of the ships which brought over the stuff, names of eastern cities and countries, names out of the Iliad, names out of English literature. But he never saw even the ships. They, too, were but names. Nothing of all this was alive. There was not a whisper of the voyages of the ships, except a rare call from the river when he was working late, the city was quiet, and the wind was south-west and wet. That was a strange warning, the voice of a ship. He would never get used to it. When he heard it, he stopped and listened. It was like Kuan-yin. It did not belong to his world, and was disturbing as well as heartening. It would be impossible to continue amid the unrealities of the city, with its yet certain penalties for the misreading of its arbitrary symbols, without those warnings of a life and beauty beyond. The call of a ship at night, the strange smell of a sample, at times seemed to diminish Perriams to an unimportance which he half deplored; but there he was, one of its figures. It is bad to guess the relativity of one’s urgent and onerous duties. That begins a creeping paralysis.
Jimmy absently assembled his letters for the post. He glanced at the clock. Saturday, and nearly one. An office boy came in. “Mr. Perriam’s just gone, sir.”
Chapter III
Colet was the last to leave the office. He paused on that first-floor landing. Had he forgotten anything? He stood contemplating the handle of his unrefined ash stick as though divining the portent of reflections in the heart of a crystal. Ought to be ebony, that stick, with a silver knob, in that place. His stick was not in harmony with mahogany and plate glass. Neither was he. Trousers were rather rustic, too. They made him look as if he had not clearly decided whether he belonged there or not. He had accepted his fate, but his trousers were all against it. Was it possible to change such trousers? Anyhow, it was Saturday afternoon. No need to change them in freedom’s hour.
“Morning, sir! ” A junior clerk went off with the letters for the post. As soon as the lad was round the bend of the stairs he began to whistle cheerfully. The lucky young devil. He had not been there twenty years. Well, the work was all right. It was good fun, plotting round difficulties and making them flourish into profit.
But that was only a game for children. He was good at the game, but his zest merely filled up empty time. This really was nothing to do with him. All very well, though, talking like that. What was his work? Where was it? Perhaps a man never found his place in the world. No blessed angel ever was on hand to conduct a fellow to his pew on earth. There was no way of learning whether you were in the right place. Well, if Perriams was the wrong pitch for him, and not his game, he’d shown most of them how to play it.
Yet what a game it was. Perriam was an artful old dog. You couldn’t help admiring him, in weak moments. He could not help succeeding, that watchful and predatory monster. Saw his advantage and took it before the next chap knew there was anything to be got. He deserved to succeed. Success? “Always keep your light so shining, a little in front of the next.” There it was. But what a light! Only good enough for card-sharpers and ravenous stomachs. Kipling’s light was a resin flare. Rollicking smoke and splashes of flame. Very picturesque, but no illumination at all. Suited that place fine. A pity, though, that commerce could not flourish except on the morality of the Mary Gloster. Commerce would suit a fellow, he could do something with it, if it wasn’t gutted of everything soft and warm. The romance of commerce! Romance, but with bowels of iron piping. One day they’d make workmen of aluminium and clockwork. Wind ’em up and set ’em going every Monday. Light to handle. Reliable. Go the week without watching.
He closed the door of Perriams. It was almost a sacramental act. Wouldn’t be there again for nearly two days. That romance of commerce. The snap of the lock was like the amen to a benediction. Jimmy breathed as if free air was his at last. The very stairs looked different from Monday’s apprehension of laboured stone ascent. Now they seemed to be leading out to life. Something must be wrong with the other days of the week when Saturday seemed so different. What was it? Very likely none but the Perriams of the world really feel this cold-blooded lust for things of which most men know the names, but no meanings. There must be another sort of life beyond, if a fellow were only bold enough to smash the cage which had got him. No matter. His cage might be smashed for him anyway. Perriam wouldn’t think twice about it, if he were in the mood. Then what? O, to hell with Perriam.
In a porch of the court below was Saturday’s accustomed elderly harpist sitting on a camp-stool, Silenus himself playing a love song, the old rascal, listening close to his crooning strings while his bowed face seemed bursting with wine. What was it Wells said of that sort of carbuncular red moon of a face? Botryoidal! A jolly good word. Jimmy gave the harpist a shilling. A lovely orbicular face. Booze and the harp had done it. Perhaps as good as rectitude and invoices. That harp was foreign to the avenue. A pity it could not move those stones, as once a harp moved some rocks. No harp would ever shift those stones. Nothing would ever shift them. Nothing but a flaming comet from God.
Round the corner in Lime Street Jimmy stopped to peer into a warehouse door. The Hudson’s Bay Company. That was a very queer smell. It was like the whiff of something old, something lost and mouldering in the Arctic. He thought of Ballantyne. It was a reminder of the past. Once, through Ballantyne’s heartiness, he wanted to go out to Rupert’s Land and trade with Indians from a fort of logs. His boyish application might have saved him from Billiter Avenue. But no answer. Nothing doing. Fate and duty to a father whose influence intrigued a lucky berth for him had marked him for Perriams before ever he knew the name of that house. His fortune had been planted while he wasn’t looking. He tucked his stick under his arm and strolled towards Leadenhall Street. Across the street he saw facing him a row of pictures decorating the P. & O. office; regal steamers amid seas and skies as good as the invitation to glory. He knew them all, those ships, by name. There was no reality about them. They were only gaudy inducements unable to induce.
Past East India Avenue, with a side glance, and a regret that he had gone to the city too late to see the old home of John Company. Names, then, meant something, after all. The implication of a word could haunt a man like a ghost.
He was a fool! Well, Lamb felt the same about South Sea House. Yet Lamb stuck to Leadenhall Street till he was pensioned. “The barren mahogany!” Barren then? How did such a man hold out for so long? The sentimentalists had given Lamb the wrong name, the Gentle Elia. That name just suited the sentimentalists. It made Lamb one of themselves, with brains of mush and syrup! Lamb could have endured anything, if he’d thought he ought to. He’d have had a sly joke if the heavens fell. He had a heart stout enough to furnish a dozen bold explorers, but it pumped out its years on an office stool. He’d endured enough to make any man take to gin. Entitled to a drop of gin, old dear, to take the taste away.
Jimmy felt his sleeve plucked. A man hurrying past with a rose bush had caught his arm with a thorn. Spring had caught him by the arm. He saw it was an April morning and the light was of good growing weather. There was a chance that the mind had a budding season, too, as if some spring, though not in
the almanac, could penetrate to the root of the matter in its due season. Jimmy turned to look at the man. Younger than himself. No doubts bothered that eager figure. There was happiness in its spry legs. Some girl at home to make him hurry like that, with a rose bush. On Sunday morning he would put on a pipe, and plant his bush, with the earth smelling good. He was all right. He had found the centre of his world.
Ah, Helen Denny! Jimmy looked at his watch. Early yet. Not till four, outside the British Museum. He felt glad of that. She confused him. He must see her, and yet, somehow, she reminded him of Perriam. Better not think that out. Some feelings made less trouble if unexamined. God only knew to what some threads would lead reason, if it were too curious, and persisted to the ugly end of the line.
Along Gracechurch Street. Plenty of time. There was a good bookshop in that street. Jimmy stood for some minutes searching its windows for insinuations and conjectural words. To see the words on the backs of books was like smelling the samples with the eyes shut, and guessing. Words were good. In the beginning was the word. Perriam never read. Perriam picked up Past and Present one day from his desk, looked at it as if it were odd, flicked its pages, forgot it was in his hand as he talked, and put it down because he knew nothing else to do with it. Asked nothing about it. Some day another word would come along, as it did at the beginning, and the Perriams, the whole lot of them, would look like ten a penny. The little words counted—if you waited long enough. How long? The right word would shift Leadenhall Street, shift London. It wanted some doing, though. Look at it! How long to wait?
People kept pushing him off his standing-place. He was a post in the hurrying tide. Couldn’t hold fast in that Saturday pour of humanity. Better to flow with the stream. On the footpath of London Bridge the converging streams congested into a viscous mass—the city was slowly emptying itself over Surrey. He leaned on the parapet above British and Foreign Wharf and looked down to the plan of a steamer’s deck. There was a smell of oranges. There was a ship. He was, like many other fellows in London, always writing the names of ships, but he knew nothing about them, and never would, though ships kept the city alive. Astonishing, that men should be so incurious, should be satisfied with names, and never try to get hold of life, to learn the feel of it. Civilisation made eunuchs of men. Their minds grew as infertile as emasculated tomcats, and they lost all interest except in food and safe warm corners.
The torrent behind him undulated past, shuffling and husky, over the stones. Voices floated by as though bubbles had burst. He looked sideways at the continually advancing faces, but they were set and vacant. If you fixed on one it melted in the next wave. A girl’s smile appeared for a moment in the tide and sank in it. But that smile was there, somewhere, as though the sun had touched the stream. The sad and desperate current had been sweetened. What was it that once was addressed to a figure in this mass of nameless life? “Even the hairs of your head are all numbered.” Jimmy looked again.
No. You couldn’t number even the heads. Each head only existed for a second or two. This was the homogeneous spate of flesh, flowing for thousands of years, for which Christ died. But it didn’t know it. Didn’t even know now that ships and the sea were under its myriad feet, the interminable and horrific caterpillar. Didn’t seem to know anything. The hairs numbered of that tide of heads? Poor little man on a cross! Humanity poured through time like a senseless fluid. It now turned the mills of industry, but it never learned why the wheels went round.
That ship below was more intelligible. She was going somewhere preordained. She was solid and confident in repose, waiting to act a part designed. You might die for a ship. You would know what you were doing. But die for a sea of humanity? That would have no effect on its tides. A wisp of steam leisurely ascended from the ship’s funnel. She had intelligence about her. She was made to a conscious purpose. The river down which she headed was wide, bright, and unencumbered. The river went past the waiting ship to the open world with the sun on it. Freedom seemed to be down there. But men, they never broke free from what held them. What enchantment was it held him to the barren mahogany?
Perhaps Lamb was right, though. Perhaps instinct and habit knew better than the man himself what he ought to do, and held him, against his will and reason, to his place in the unseen ceremony of creation. There might be some unknown but inexorable law of being which would have obedience at all costs. Though it broke your heart, it would make you do some of its work. Well, then, all right; but Perriam was a damned funny agent to be in the mystic employ of the Creator.
He edged and dawdled back to Cannon Street against the human stream. The roads were full of huge red buses, their foreheads announcing eccentric destinations, places he had never heard of. A girl’s voice fluttered at his elbow. “He’s a dear.” He turned to see what she was like. Nobody there. A ghost, perhaps. It had melted in the crowd. Where he had heard that voice there was a bus which was going to Theydon Bois. And where was that? London was too big to know itself. It was congested with anxious people and nervous engines, and at the same time a man might just as well be on Crusoe’s island. There would be more in a parrot than in all these people. The angel Gabriel himself couldn’t make a chart of London. He would never know from whom the words came which floated up to the blue calms out of those swirling miles of uproar and confusion. But Crusoe could be in less doubt about his parrot.
It was terrifying, if you thought about it. London was like the dream in which you stood by yourself at night and saw all the stars break loose and stream down the sky. Jimmy paused by the London Stone at the thought of that boyish dream. And that was strange, too. His dream persisted, which only he himself knew, just as did that oldest stone in London, which had come from nobody knew what age and place. What irrelevant things to survive in so long and immense a show! But that dream, the stars out of law and falling down the sky, was like the spectacle of London on a Saturday afternoon. Terrifying! None of the books had ever proved whether it all mattered, or whether it did not. Whether everything was happening so because it had to, or whether it was all worse than shove-ha’penny. Cosmic shove-ha’penny?
He crossed over by Cannon Street Railway Station. From there he could see, dominant over the confusion and the noise, with a lambent cloud behind it, the triumphant dilation of St. Paul’s, holding above the capital its mysterious symbol to the sun. By Jove, though, man did that. He even divined the culminating mystery. Not much shove-ha’penny about that. Jimmy watched a sad woman, in clothes women do not wear unless they must, go by a dreary fellow standing by the kerb, pause, fumble in her handbag, and return to give the chap something, though she hardly looked at him. Was that a chance hint? But a man never knew when he was tipped a crafty wink out of the welter of the alien tumult. Jimmy warmed with a sudden confidence, anyhow, that the shabby woman was as important as Wren’s masterpiece, as anything in London. She was a vestal to the god of April. He had seen her compassion for a wreck, and she didn’t know it. There must be something inherent in this chaos which informed it. Perhaps in the beginning it got the word and had remembered it, without knowing what it meant. These people were all right. They would work out what had to be done, in spite of all the Perriams, and without knowing what they were doing.
That thought, outside the fruiterer’s, gave him the freedom to admire a favourite shop. Better than any Bond Street jeweller’s, that place. The greengrocer trafficked with the raw material of the poet. Sonnets and lyrics by the pound. You could come to any generous and hopeful decision before that shop window. It accorded with the dome of St. Paul’s, and a white cloud, and the poor woman whose pity was moved by misfortune. If the earth were not a good place, when it could do that, then what would you call it? If the good fortune of that window was just the chance luck of time and rain, like that woman’s pity, then it was good luck. It could not have been better if divinely planned. Those massed grapes were the translucent globules, purple and gold, of the juice of our own star. Enough to make the sun laugh, to see what he had done
. Jimmy lit a pipe as he surveyed the show. Those colours would put it across Helen’s artist pals at Hampstead. What an artist, to get those dyes out of mixing mud and sunlight! Helen herself couldn’t get that hint of green light in those topaz lanterns, the melons. The rank of geometrical pines was a rich joke. The oranges were the congealed drops of the glow of luxurious noons. No doubt about the earth being a baby, when you saw the skin of a peach. Plenty of time for it to grow. Only fools get impatient with a baby.
Jimmy found himself, without knowing how he got there, by Blackfriars Bridge. “Premier’s Grave Speech.” The newsboys were running along, holding placards like slovenly aprons. You felt anxious to learn what made the boys run in excitement, got a stimulating hint from a word or two, and then a draught blew the placard open to merely that full announcement. Speeches were always grave. That was the joke of a speech by a statesman; it was wind to keep the ignorant shivering. Wasted on a fine Saturday, anyhow. A little group stood near him, eagerly talking, with a policeman in the midst. The constable hurried away from it, with a lady’s silk reticule in his hand. He looked comical, the helmeted and serious man, with so incongruous a little dainty in his fist. The women in the group watched him go away with it, but they did not smile. They were all talking together.
“Couldn’t stop her. I was as near as I am to you, that I was.”
“Yes. Just dropped that bag, and over she went. Nice girl she looked.”
“In a green coat. Never said a word.”
Gallions Reach Page 2