V

At Brixton on Monday evening, Mr. Perriam was trying to leave his house. It was his address, or his house; he never called it his home. He had but just come from Manchester, and the fact that the train had been late gave him the impression that he was an overtasked man to whom even time was an enemy. But he could do it all. He was a strong man. He could continue till he had steeled the indecision into which his affairs had softened in his absence. But it was imperative that he should go to Billiter Avenue at once. He was incensed by the impediments placed by the stupid in the straight course of a just man single-minded in his devotion to good order and common sense. His menservants, with an air of solicitude, and in swift obedience to his peremptory exactions, were silently cursing him, and doing things awry. Mr. Perriam had been in a hurry when he arrived, he was in desperation to leave, and was moving about the hall with an abrupt and heavy celerity which could have been mistaken for craziness, or at best black temper, except that he was so evidently controlling with dignity his righteous impatience over the follies of inferior creatures.

His wife was not there. She had withdrawn unnoticed to a secluded upper room at the first wave of disturbance sent before Mr. Perriam’s car as it entered the outer gates of his residence, as it passed in fact between the two giant pineapples in stone which guarded their Brixton privet hedge. Mrs. Perriam was represented in the hall by the silently protesting surrogation of some Chinese silk tapestry, and a few comforting rugs and prints. They did not accord with the magnificent Indian furniture of Mr. Perriam’s importation, but they did give something on which the eye could rest. But Mr. Perriam’s eye did not rest upon them. He was unaware that his wife was in any way represented. The reproach he felt because she was not there to assuage for an anxious man the torment of the foolishness about him gave his countenance a shadow of proud resignation. His thoughts concentrated on his grave decision, that he must ignore his dinner, and go instantly to his office to examine his letters. He knew his fear was both natural and scrupulous, that ignorance and folly, while he was away, had deflected the orderly directions of his authority.

Jimmy was wondering when his chief would come. The offices of Perriams were deserted. It was past six o’clock. The only light was in his room. Jimmy had to wait. The church clock in St. Mary Axe chimed a quarter-past, half past; and its echo in the empty office where the shadows were deepening was like the memory of things gone in a place where the stir of men would be seen no more. Colet’s surviving light might have been a meaningless obstinacy in the face of advancing night. The desks in the big room were cleared of their books, and the bare mahogany surfaces gleamed in cold patches in the dusk. One of the cats of the building strolled across the linoleum. Jimmy stood up and nervously stretched himself. He saw that cat. Ah! another creature was alive there. He called to it. But the cat only twitched her tail and went on. She was nothing to him; she was only a familiar, native to the desert.

But why should he wait? There was really nothing to wait for. He did not want to see Perriam. And perhaps the boss was not coming after all. It was impossible to do any work. If Perriam came there was no report he could make which could be called good. He could give nothing to the place; and it had nothing for him except a cat which considered he was a stranger to the time and the occasion. By going now he could save London from one little eddying turmoil, make one quarrel the less in its vast meaningless jangle. That was worth thinking over. It was impossible to know by how much the air was kept sweet through saving it from but one quarrel.

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. Anyone 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 neckcloth, 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 someone 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.