Gallions Reach (2 page)

Mr. Perriam was standing at his table. He did not look up as his assistant entered. He continued to regard, in disfavour, some papers on his table, upon which one hand was outspread. He was a tall, middle-aged man, bowed forward as if by the great weight of his affairs on his broad shoulders, and he bore a disconcerting likeness to the portrait in the waiting-room, except that he was bald, and his florid and massive face was clean-shaven. Colet waited, an insurgent antipathy to the arrogance of that grim face mingling with his apprehension as to what it was going to announce. This confusion of feelings constricted his throat. He feared he might not be able to answer the brute, if he had an answer to make. Perriam paid his men well. Colet's chair was an enviable seat.

“I've told you before, Colet, I've told you before, that I cannot allow our men at the warehouse to argue with us about the hours they will work. That's our affair. Why have you passed this question on to me? Why haven't you settled it?”

Mr. Perriam did not look up. He waited, with his expression of disfavour downcast to the offending papers.

Colet fingered the point of his neat little brown beard. Mr. Perriam's logic was certainly right. But was that all? Jimmy had been induced to grow that beard through the firm suggestion of the rigid mouth and aggressive chin of
the portrait of the master of the opium clipper, a portrait he had admired as a boy in that office, though of late years his admiration had been maintained only by the strength of habit and the traditions of the office. His own red lips were really dissimilar, and not in the tradition. His friendly hazel eyes were now troubled. He did not answer at once. He only moved his feet. He could not think of words which would help him.

“Well?” demanded Mr. Perriam. The principal fumbled a glance at his assistant's face, and then dodged his eyes away to the wall beyond, for Mr. Perriam never looked at a fellow-creature for more than a second. Mr. Perriam remained still, though Colet noticed that his watch-guard was trembling, as though through the suppressed energy of a powerful engine. It kept the mind active and resourceful, working for this man, but Colet used to insist to himself that this was good for the mind. Kept it ready and taut.

“I'm waiting, Colet.”

“Isn't it outside my province, Mr. Perriam? Their hours are fixed by their union. You know that. Isn't it for you to say whether or not you'll sack the lot?”

“Don't put it on to me. What are you here for? You seem unable to face your job, young man. I was afraid I'd noticed it. I don't like it. You haven't tackled those fellows. Are you afraid of them?”

“I'm on good terms with them.…”

“Your good terms! I'm not interested in them; my work must be done my way. This house can't waste time disputing with a gang of warehousemen. When I put you over that department it was to serve Perriams, not our labourers.”

“Their union.…”

“Now you need recognise no unity except that with us. That is what pays you and me.” Mr. Perriam struck the papers before him with his palm. “I care less for this document than for the way you have handled it. That is serious,
in my opinion. You know, Colet, you are being tried? Very well. Here is failure, in a better post. You would be foolish to fail there too soon, don't you think?” Mr. Perriam thrust the papers across to Colet. They cracked like a shot. “Let. your good terms be with me. I shall be back on Monday night. See me then. That will do.”

Colet retreated to his own room. As he crossed the corridor the clerks in the office eyed him furtively. They wanted a clue to any change that was imminent. Changes there were frequent and unexpected. It was a change for Colet to be in that room of his own. But Jimmy was merely twisting the point of his beard as he crossed the corridor. He was thirty-five; he had worked there for twenty years, and his reward had come but recently with this handsome advance. He sat at his desk, looking absently at Kuan-yin. She stood upon some papers, a benign and demure little image, the Chinese madonna, in porcelain the colour of ivory. Jimmy had bought her at a junk shop on the day he was promoted. He thought he would like her to preside over his work. She appeared to be looking down on his paper when he was writing. Her comeliness was admonitory. Her colour and form, there so exotic and lenitive, would qualify his impulse to act the full part of Perriam. She was different. She would keep him reminded of what was beyond.

But though he was looking at her now he did not know it. What could he do with those men? Useless to argue with them. Then sack the lot? But be damned to that. They were good fellows. They were reasonable. They knew their work. The work would not suffer. Stupid to get rid of what was good over a matter of cranky principle. But either he was to go, or they. There was no sense in it. These sacred business rules were as idiotic as taboos. Nothing to do with reason. Money was worse than ever Moloch could have been. Into the fiery belly to-day with any decent feeling! Pop in even common sense, if it won't kowtow to money! People always
went crazy before whatever they worshipped. Perriam was just the same as a priest of Baal.

Still, there Baal was. No escape. Serve the god, or be offered up. Only gradually did Kuan-yin, a luminous symbol of benignity amid alien things, show through the heated whirl of his thoughts. If he left that place, what else was there to do? His father had told him he was made, when he went there. Made into what? The idol kept her eyes lowered to his writing-pad. Everybody in that neighbourhood the other day said how lucky he was. He had stood the boys champagne at “The Ship” when he got that chair. Yet he had never felt it was really his chair, even with half a bottle of wine inside him. How was that? Perriam was right. Some kind of secret reservation, only dimly felt by himself, warned him that he was not in his element. Never had been in his element; always had felt that he was only partly on the spot, even as a boy in the city. Not all there, perhaps. But there was something rum about commerce, as if it asked for only half of a man, and that the worst and cleverest half. Yet it was enjoyable. That disorder before him of enigmatical samples of tropical produce was as good as a scatter of choice books. It had smells you could snuff and snuff again.

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.”

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.