Gallions Reach (6 page)

Jimmy, in abstraction, was placing Kuan-yin so that he could consider her from various angles. Then the telephone bell menaced. (Yes, yes.… Certainly… He was waiting.)

The office no longer seemed so abandoned now he had heard Perriam's voice. But he was not thinking of his chief. He was considering the Chinese image. Kuan-yin was meek and passive, however she was viewed. She accepted just what happened to her. At whatever angle she was seen her grace was distinguished only by its gentleness and composure. She was not like the cat, which flicked an insulting tail. Kuan-yin was possibly a mistake. This passive acceptance might be all right in the East, or in Jerusalem, but it was a poor substitute for assertion among western steam-engines. He had been passive all his life. He had never felt himself other than an outsider, watching the show. Somehow, the show never seemed to have much to do with him. He had taken the place in it to which chance had led him. He was sitting in that chair because his father pushed him that way. One place was as good as another. If he had followed his instinct ten minutes ago he would not have been there when Perriam was at the telephone. Which was right, the cat or Kuan-yin? There he was now, waiting for something unpleasant to happen, through a sense of duty no more admirable than the reason the cat had for crossing the floor.

And there was Helen. To her he had, without knowing why he did it, casually declined life. He had got out of its way. Actually, in its most adorable form, he had refused it. That would be hard to explain, when the sense of his distance from what was warm and living, from what was shaping the world, was like a drouth. The outer office was the picture of
what he had done; cold and empty. But it is not always easy to tell whether one is accepting or declining, whether one is going with the tendency of life, or against it.

Perriam was late. He would be glad to get this over. Then he would be free from two perplexities. He would escape into another existence which, whatever it might prove to be, would be free from the worst consequences of the past. He would be born again. That Chinese image of acceptance had her back turned to him. Should he turn his back on her? Perhaps not. These little things might mean a lot. She might represent something better than he knew. Perhaps the damned steam-engine was on the wrong line, after all.

Eh? There at last was Perriam. He was coming up the stairs in heavy deliberation, like destiny. No escape now; might kill the beggar, though. Jimmy smiled at the thought. But to fling a bomb into Moloch's fiery belly and do in the brute god would be decrepit backsliding. Not much spiritual acceptance, in that act, of the ultimate unimportance of material bellies, fiery or otherwise. Let the fiery belly burn itself out.

Mr. Perriam was filled, in fact, with resolute calm. He was not burning. He was content, for now he knew that control of his affairs was in his hands again. He and they were safe. He walked slowly to his door. Jimmy heard it close. The reflections of another light confused the darkness of the outer office.

Jimmy considered it. Should he go in? No. Better to wait until he was called. He heard his principal moving about. Then there was silence, a long silence. Then his bell rang. Jimmy was glad to hear it.

Mr. Perriam was sitting at his table, magisterial, but at his ease. His hands were spread on the arms of his chair. He did not look at his assistant. He was as if inspecting the central air, his eyes half-closed, in the sad knowledge that there could be no right answers to his searching inquisition;
as if slovenly men could never satisfy demands that were so austere and irrefragable. He was anticipating, in weariness, a coming dissatisfaction.

He asked some questions about the drift of the office; and, as no fault could be found with the answers, he made no comment. He merely took his eyes from their inspection of the invisible to look at his signet ring. He rubbed his nose. He leaned forward, with his arms on the table, and he himself began to surmise that he had wasted his time. He might have left all this till the morning. Jimmy began to feel more at his ease. The boss seemed almost human, after all. He had been exaggerating this problem.

“See, now. I'd forgotten. There's another little thing. When do the men go at our warehouse—the fellows who don't want to stay? This week or next?”

Jimmy did not reflect. “Haven't heard,” he said brightly. Let chance answer for him.

Perriam was drumming on the table with his fingers, but he stopped. It seemed a long time before he spoke again.

“When will you know?”

“Well, they haven't told me, and I haven't asked.”

The principal pushed his chair back noisily, paused, and then rose in pointed slowness. He began to pace the room, his head bowed in thought. As he walked, he snapped his fingers once or twice, and his resentment began to glow anew at the frivolity of this frustration of reason. He considered, with his back to Jimmy, a picture of a ship on the wall. Jimmy knew it, the old
Chrysolite
. Important once; now that rare lithograph. Without turning, Mr. Perriam asked, “What is your reason for saying that?”

“No reason for it. I merely report the fact.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“Nothing.”

Here was a man Mr. Perriam admired. He had not expected this. It was very good. Colet was a stouter fellow
than he had imagined. Any one who coolly ignored the aggressiveness with which Mr. Perriam disguised his own simple hesitances was sure of his secret approbation. A sly smile moved round his set mouth, but Jimmy did not see it. Still, this young man would have to be disciplined, to get him back to his place. When Mr. Perriam swung about his face was flushed and grim, and even fanatical in its assumed determination. The principal of that important house began, with sonorous sententiousness, for his task was not easy, to advise his assistant what young Colet was, when he came there, and what he had become in that fostering office. Mr. Perriam had all the command of rhetoric of a romantic man of affairs luxuriating in the waywardness of fools. He was solemn, and eloquently reasonable. He was enjoying this. He moved hither and thither with the energy of his warm periods, as if this was a meeting, and he could not help an appeal to the better feelings of a thoughtless generation, which might, nevertheless, do well, if it would but listen to him.

Colet hardly heard him, after the initial outburst. There was but a continuous and strenuous noise. He was meek and enduring. The room grew hot. This must end some day. But Perriam, he could see, was a figure of lasting power, able to continue, and the logic of his monomania was unanswerable. Jimmy merely waited patiently for silence to fall. It did not occur to him that he might laugh and walk out of the room and away. Nothing occurred to him.

But his meek submission to ill-luck, which to Mr. Perriam seemed but a show of proud and enduring reserve, caused his chief to believe that this appeal for gratitude and common sense was in vain, a further offence that made Mr. Perriam flounder in his periods. He was convinced by his own eloquence. His sense of an injustice became genuine, and too quick for his words. They were not ready for his heartfelt sincerity. He began to accuse Colet with an emphasis
which he felt was all too weak. He saw that this was because he was not near enough for his assistant to get a full impression. He approached Colet, with his voice raised. Jimmy looked at him then, in dreary apprehension of a puerile but menacing apparition.

“A man like you,” Mr. Perriam was saying, “has no right to be here. There are better men. I'll tell you what it is to take a place you can't fill. It's swindling. You are a fraud. That damned quietness and good-nature cheats the people who pay you.”

Jimmy was not listening. His principal, close to him, raised an arm in trenchant reprobation. Colet glanced at the threat with indifference, and then an uncalled surge of abhorrence turned him black. He saw Perriam's near mask as the front of all arrogant swinishness. He struck it.

Mr. Perriam behaved as though he had no bones. He dropped, face downwards, and his unexpected falling weight, which his assistant tried to catch, sent Colet floundering. He sat on the floor, legs spread out, deferentially waiting, as it seemed, for Mr. Perriam to rise first. But Mr. Perriam did not move. Colet eyed his chief in astonishment. The room was silent. Mr. Perriam remained on the carpet, with one arm awkwardly folded under him. His bald head, resting on the Axminster roses, was absurdly out of place. His boots with their spats were spread unnaturally. The assistant scrambled to his chief's aid, and turned him round. Some effort was necessary; and Jimmy was as surprised as if, succouring the figure of a man, he found it had the head of a tailor's dummy. Mr. Perriam's face was a bad parody in wax. His mouth was open, and his teeth looked dry. His tongue was large and fatuous. Mr. Perriam stared at the ceiling.

Jimmy shook him, and called to him, in the sudden anger of dismay. Mr. Perriam continued to stare at the ceiling. Jimmy loosened his chief's collar in fumbling haste, swore at the knot of the neck-cloth, tore roughly at the
starch which held the collar-stud; but Mr. Perriam did not object. His big rough chin was warm but docile. His limp submission was horrible. Jimmy saw that he was dead; and waited on his knees, hoping that some one would come in. The church clock chimed nine. Only the cat looked in at the door, in round-eyed surprise, but did not enter.

Jimmy went to his own room, grabbed his hat to hurry for assistance, yet returned irresolutely to his principal's room, because, naturally, one would expect to see Mr. Perriam in his chair. But he was still on the floor. Colet left the office, in the confused intention to escape from that object, to get help, to think it over, to call the police.

Colet was surprised to find that the night outside was in cool and spacious repose. Its indifference stopped his rush. The Avenue was empty. He could hear the traffic as usual in Leadenhall Street. It was still there. And then he could hear also the lonely sound of his footsteps quickly following him. That sound startled yet steadied him. As he approached Billiter Street a policeman strolled into view, paused, and yawned. Jimmy was looking for a policeman, but not for one who yawned. That sign of boredom confused him, for he was nearing the constable. His distress would have checked him with an impulse to confide, but his legs did not know that, and so he was carried on.

He found himself in Fenchurch Street. He was walking east, but without any reason. He had merely turned to the left. He was just walking, and somewhat too hurriedly, so he slowed down. Then he came to Aldgate Pump, which is the starting-point in London for all solitary and extravagant adventures. He stopped, though not because he recognised a starting-point. He knew that pump. He was astonished to see it there. It had not changed. It was the first impartial and certain landmark to show distinctly since he took his eyes off the Axminster carpet.

What should he do? He thought of this as he continued to walk eastwards. He did not know what he expected to find in that direction, but the vista ahead, he had seen, was more friendly with a larger crowd. The crowd, somehow, looked helpful. He wanted to get into it. One more does not seem to matter so much when the crowd is large. Nobody
looked at him. This steadied him still more. He did not want to be looked at.

Something ought to be done. Should he telephone to Mrs. Perriam? “Is that Mrs. Perriam? I have just killed your husband. I couldn't help it.” Seemed rather silly. She might be upset.

Was there anything he could do? He considered that, and continued his easterly drift. Perhaps there was nothing he could do. Now and again the image of that yawning policeman came before him, to be instantly expunged. That fellow would not understand; he didn't know Perriams, and never saw the boss with his arm up, bullying, and that look on his big flushed face. The look wasn't on his face now. Where had it gone? No good trying to produce it in evidence. The little things which really count can never be shown in evidence. They do the trick, and then they vanish.

Nobody could help Perriam now. He ought not to have died like that. Too idiotic. A man who could die so easily should have kept quiet. Bad as a swindle. He would never have believed it. Any one would think the heart was just waiting for an excuse to stop. Heavens, you couldn't stop a decent heart like that.

Had he really hit his chief? He did not remember doing it. He could not recall the feel of the contact. The violent old fool just dropped. Poor old fellow. A pity he waited till that telephone bell rang. Perriam would be alive now if he hadn't. It was odd that he couldn't remember the blow. But that wouldn't do. No good, that. Either he hit the man, or else God knocked him out. Perhaps a bit of both. All the same to the police. Easy for God to prove an alibi.

He found himself by the stalls of Aldgate. There was a distraction of hissing naphtha flares, and illuminated trams which interlaced on many tracks like short lengths of lighted streets on the move; and a confused slow tide of faces, masks that were vacant, foreign, indifferent, which expected
nothing. They seemed to be upborne on shadows. They went slowly past, bobbing on the surface of nothing, and had no names, and were going nowhere. Each face had but a brief existence by the favour of a chance light, and then was gone.

That made the matter worse. It was meaningless. The faces just glanced once, and then went out. Eyes in a never-ending stream, that came into existence with one look of indifference as they passed into a light, and then were done. He went into a tavern to get out of it. There were many eyes floating past, a ceaseless drift of stares.

His thoughts would not stop, and yet they did not help him. Perhaps the morning would help him. It would be all cut and dried by then. No escape. He could stand up to it then. But to what? What would there be? Only the usual cold and compelling logic of the old confusion, and those eyes all round looking on indifferently.

He was not sure what he wanted in a public-house. A brisk potman appeared to know what, and served him. The potman had a squint. That was a good squint. It made the chap seem polite. He sat on a bench near a tough who was thumping a table with a heavy hand to emphasise a matter which had to be whispered, though huskily, to a companion who listened with his eyes shut, while sucking a pipe. “I arst yer. What would you 'ave done?” The lean man did not open his eyes. He nodded his head solemnly.