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 cardsharpers 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 campstool, 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.”

Perplexing, with that thought of a nice girl in a green coat who had gone out of April so abruptly, to worry through the eager throng of home-goers hurrying along from Ludgate Circus. They knew nothing about it. Only one of the bubbles had gone from that stream of life. Episodic, a girl who drops over a bridge when others feel jolly on a half-holiday. At the corner by the Circus he felt he would like a drink. Must have it. He left the daylight and went into a crypt, vaulted and cool, under the railway. Lamps were alight in there. It opened into other low caves with roofs arched and dim. Casks stood in rows by the walls with tiny white pails under their spigots. A famous literary man, whom Jimmy recognised because he was even more pleasing than the familiar and outrageous caricature of him, sat by himself, a black cloak falling from his shoulders, at a round table which was like a toy out of a doll’s house beside that expansive rotundity. He was nursing a comparatively minute bulb of wine on his knee with an expression of childlike faith and dreamy beatitude. Men stood about talking to each other with the rapid confidential amiability released by alcohol. Some high stools with exiguous seats were ranged along a counter. Jimmy mounted a stool next to a hulk whose taut hinder-parts bulged spherically over their pedestal. The hulk was turned the other way, consulting anxiously with another man. Jimmy got some Burgundy and a plate of sandwiches. He thought of the unknown girl in a green coat while looking at a picture on the wall illustrating high wassail, in which a nymph was emerging from a wineglass to advertise a famous brand of champagne to two men in evening dress.

“Not me,” he heard the hulk say earnestly at last to his friend. “Not me, Charley. I can’t. I can’t go back. I couldn’t apologise to Harmsworth.”

“No,” murmured his little companion meditatively. “No. He never waits for an apology, does he? But couldn’t you go back without trying to apologise? He mightn’t notice you were there.”

Jimmy was drinking when he heard that, and he made a bubbling sound in his glass, which he lowered too quickly. The barmaid glanced at him at once in cold dislike. He was a stranger there. They might think he had been eavesdropping. He left the place. Of course, those caves were for the retirement of journalists. Another world surrounded those caves. Another? No. Probably only an extension of the world he knew, complete with its Perriams and idiotic fears which meant nothing except to those whose alarms were roused by the only taboos and fetishes they knew.

Here he was. The retired front of the British Museum, frowning darkly in its retirement with its wealth of the mind, unsolicitous of attention, does not induce the stranger within its gates of iron. Beyond the austere guardians in their uniform at its outer ward an intervening desert of gravel is chiefly interesting for its doves. The doves are alive. They make love unashamed under the shadow of wisdom. You may watch them, through the iron railings, without going in. No need to cross that desert of gravel. All the urgency of life, insistent on the unknown word which first set it going, is in the iridescent neck of the gentleman who struts briskly after the coy lady: “By God, madam, but you must.” What is inside the dark portals of the building is only the sublimation of the iridescent throat of a dove in spring.

That high, massive, and grim colonnade, the last strange consequence of love, is not to be entered by humble and ignorant mortals. They are intimidated. They have the play of the doves to watch, which is easier than summoning up the courage to mount the spacious terrace of temple steps to the interior gloom. But Jimmy turned in without a thought. Man, he knew, had done something with the passionate bloom on a dove’s throat. He thought the Museum was the best thing in London except the Abbey at Evensong. He became positive when he was in the Museum. His sporadic hints concentrated into a confidence which he could not explain. Why explain, when you know? Man was aware of something better than the things to which he was daily compelled. There, about you in the Museum, the confirmation was, whichever way you looked.

Jimmy did not consult his watch. He did not know the time, as he mounted, his mind at ease, the steps to the temple which enshrined the proofs of the ardent experiments of his fellows. He was not thinking of time. He went inside, surrendered his stick, and then, irresolutely, because he was trying to think of something he could not bring to the front of his memory, went up the stairs past the stones teeming with the figures from the Indian tope of Amaravati. What had he come to that place to see? He considered this vaguely, while noticing that a wasp-waisted creature, with exaggerated breasts and hips, seemed to be moving sinuously out of the stonework. The stones moved with seductive little forms. One might suppose it was inevitable that those breasts and hips should have developed from the teachings of Buddha. Whatever man did, he found it hard to keep that from his thoughts. He gave his temples to the adoration of the baby. Quite right too. The temples began with that, and they would end with it. Things must be kept going, while we are here. But those Hindu waists were too slight. They were sensual. Adoration of the mere form of good was likely to make the generative gods shy.

He became lost among carved ivory oddments from Japan, translucent Chinese bowls of jade, lacquered boxes, and jolly dolls of the traditional Japanese puppet shows. In those things the fond human mind was at play. Its very fun was better than all the ledgers of British commerce. He wandered on, past Samian ware, and some hints of Rome in a land where the Caesars at last came down to nothing but the unresolved litter of their imperial state. It served them right. What did they expect to do with lawyers and soldiers? At the far end of a corridor was an obeisant figure, black but comely, spreading out to him its robe, edged with gold, in gracious salutation. He felt that he and that figure were alone in the place, and that it had known he was sure to come. Nobody else was there. It was plain that the figure watched him as he approached. He went straight to that exquisite idol spreading its cloak, offering a lotus bud in its right hand, in invitation to a shrine of peace lost somewhere now in the jungle of Burma. But there was no attaining to the spirit which created that figure, and the assurance of the far grove where it was at home. Too late?

Yet some other image was sternly eyeing him. He had known that all the time. He did not turn his head at once to meet its lofty regard. That required a little resolution. He had been there before, and he knew. With a sigh at last, under compulsion, he turned to the other idol, the supreme example of human handiwork in the Museum. It was the challenge of the Orient to the west, that great representative of the mind, one of Buddha’s men. London city could not answer that critical glance. If it were not condemnation, at least it reduced Leadenhall Street to a skittle-alley. That image, of a Lohan, haughty and challenging, though in complete repose, was a little awesome. He could not turn away from it. He had not the nerve. He backed slowly from it. It followed him with its unspoken and unanswerable challenge. He knew he had no adequate apology to make. But if it could only answer questions!

When out of that room, he looked at his watch. Five o’clock! There was no doubt at all that Helen Denny would not have waited an hour for him.