Cjallions %each

Books by

The Same Author

%

GIFTS OF FORTUNE TIDEMARKS

THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE WAITING FOR DAYLIGHT LONDON RIVER OLD JUNK

*8?

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/gallionsreachOOOOtoml

Yes, this was the edge of his world.

O' p-g< <0

3 8^4-

Gp allions *F(each

BY

H. M. TOMLINSON

Harper & Brothers P ubli shers New York and London MCMXXVII

\>R603^ .<5” 35G 2>

G ALLION S REACH

COPYRIGHT, 1 pi7. Bi1 HARPER tr BROTHERS PRINTED IN THE V.S.A.

FIRST EDITION

G-B

Dedicated to

CHARLES E. HANDS

Illustrations

Yes, this was the edge of his world .... Frontispiece

Facing Page

Only gradually did Kuan-yin, a luminous symbol of benignity amid alien things, show through the whirling haze of his thoughts . 12

She gave a hollow rumbling groan, and without a check to the silent awe of the watchers, she went down . 136

His prison opened suddenly, and skeletons of fire

were capering around him . 276

Qallions \each

L

Qallions \each

Chapter One

The steamer moved upriver at half-speed, and the sounds of life fell with the sun. The shores grew blurred. The quiet was the dusk. The ship itself was hushed, and her men about their duties appeared at a task spectrally, out of nowhere. She might have been trying to reach her destination unobserved. The tired air spilling over the steamer’s bows hardly reached the bridge. The bridge caught the last of the light, and a trace of anger that flushed the murk banked in the west, to which the ship was moving, was reflected in the face of an officer there, and gave him the distinction of a being exalted and stern. He was superior, and seemed to be brooding down over some passengers sitting in a group on the indistinct foredeck. They were murmuring in conversation, with a child asleep on a shawl beside one of the chairs.

Yellow glims appeared low in the shadows that were Kent and Essex. That day of summer had gone. Only the wan river and the sky remembered it. A figure rose from the group on the foredeck, and his voice, surprisingly uplifted, was as if he had been compelled to an important announcement. “There’s the Great Smoke. London! London !”

1

2

Qallions %each

The child sat up quickly. He stared up and ahead, as his elders were doing. He wanted to see what London meant. He saw only the solid black shape of the bows, and the faint smear of crimson beyond. He heard waters murmuring, and edged closer to the shadow of his mother. Her hand sought his bare head, and rumpled his hair. “Nearly home, Jimbo.”

The sound of the waters, the quiet that was neither day nor night, and that grave word which announced the un¬ known, brought the child to his feet. He felt as he did when he heard the old clock talking to itself at night in its case, or saw a star peeping at him through the bedroom curtains when everybody was asleep, and he was wonder¬ ing what the clock was saying. He did not know what he expected to see; but if it were there it would be better to look at it. So he stood up. But nothing was there with any shape he knew. It was the world. He did not know what it meant. The ship was going towards a darkness which reached almost to the top of the pale sky. It seemed to have blood in it. “There you are, Jim Colet,” said his father. “That’s the place for you. See it? London, my boy.” But he could see only a darkness.

He looked at his father. But his elders had forgotten him. They continued their confidential talk.

“You know, I haven’t seen this river since the year the Princess Alice was lost.”

Who was that princess? It did not look like a place for princesses. Sometimes his father did not mean what he said. He never smiled when he was joking with you. It looked as if the ship were going to where the night hides in the daytime. He did not know what they were all talk-

Qallions %each 3

ing about. “Never heard from him afterwards.” Their words came out of the shadows without being joined to¬ gether. “I remember. He was afraid of it, but he went.” It was nearly as hard to hear the talkers as to see them. Who was afraid? Where did he go?

“Yes, yes. But he was afraid of his own shadow.”

Why were they speaking so quietly?

“Well, his shadow was enough to make any man nervous.”

There was a little laugh. Jim thought they were talk¬ ing as if they did not want some one to hear them. Was it somebody on the ship?

“Called it fortune. His luck, or fate. I forget. The same old dream, but I suppose we can’t live without dreaming. He didn’t want to go, and yet he never came back. This river has seen a lot of men of that sort. It is a river of dreams.”

A woman’s voice spoke quietly. “Some of them came true, though. There’s London to prove it.”

The ship seemed to have reached the hiding-place of night. It was almost dark. The ship was going deeper into it. Was this the place where the dreams had come true? Low yellow stars moved past on either side, as though they were fixed in the darkness which had come to meet them. The night was sweeping past. The ship was trembling. It was getting cold; Jim could hardly keep from shivering.

“Proof? Proof of it?” said a deep voice. “The dream is true if you have it. There is nothing else.” The speaker stood up. “I know, I tell you. It is true if you

4 Qallions %each

have it. Better than London, or any other proof of it. If I had my time over again . . .”

The speaker was tall and dim, but Jim could see the gleam of white hair and a beard. The old man’s voice was like the sound of the water. He was staring over their heads, at the darkness, at London.

“What is the good of it all? What if he never did come back? I tell you there are other worlds.”

Nobody answered him. The tall stranger continued to stare ahead, and was silent. Then there wa3 another voice. “Where are we now?”

The old man remained standing. He did not seem to hear the question. The only answer to it was the mur¬ muring of the tide. The standing figure seemed to have forgotten them. The boy looked up at the tall old man who stood gazing over the heads of the others. Could he see another world? The tide continued its muttering. The lights went by in silence. Then the old man sighed. He spoke again, in a voice that seemed far away in some¬ thing deep. “Gallions Reach,” he said, as if he thought he had better let them know it, after all. As he spoke, out of the night, across the water, as though to show that he was right, there came a fluttering of the air, and that broke into a sombre answer, the call of an unseen ship.

f

Chapter Two

There is a region of grey limestone and glass, hori¬ zontally stratified into floors, intersected by narrow ra¬ vines called avenues, and honey-combed by shipping and commercial offices, which lies between Fenchurch and Leadenhall Streets. Billiter Avenue is one of its inter¬ secting clefts. This secluded corner of London must be traversed on foot, because its narrow paths were marked out only for its cliff climbers; but nobody ever goes into it except those who are concerned with the secrets of its caves. The wealth of the cave of Sinbad, compared with that of most of the offices in this canton of the city, would have seemed but a careless disposal of the superfluous.

Yet within the guarded recesses of the cliffs of Billiter Avenue no treasure is ever visible. It may be viewed at all only by confidential initiates, and even they cannot see it except as symbols in ledgers, bills of lading, bank drafts, warrants, indents, manifests, and in other forms designed to puzzle moths and official liquidators in their work of corruption. It has no beauty. It is not like the streets of jasper. It does not smell of myrrh. Its gates are not praise. There is no joy in it even for the privi¬ leged. A life devoted to the cherishing of this treasure gives to a devotee a countenance as grave as would golf or the obsequies of a dear friend. One rose in the sun¬ light, or a snail on the thorn, might seem to laugh at its dry and rustling fame. Still, its virtue is there, powerful, though abstract and incredible. The attraction of the

5

6 Qallions %each

hidden treasure of this region, if as baffling to strangers as the beauty of the innumerable brass name-plates at its doors, is dominant, nevertheless.

There are acres of its lower walls covered with names. They are, nearly all of them, inscribed in brass. A chance wayfarer might think he had found abundant evidence of a local craving for immortality. He might think the in¬ scriptions to be the marks of vagrom men who had desired a lasting impress of their insignificance, for to him the names would be no more important, famous, or delectable than those cut into trees or on tombstones, or scrawled in convenient recesses.

James Colet was one of the multitude which entered this region every morning at nine o’clock, and deserted it about six in the evening. Between those hours the arid and hollow limestone, where nothing grows but cyphers, is thronged with a legion as intent and single- minded as a vast formicarium. Before those hours, and at night, it is as silent as the ruins of Memphis, and as empty, except for a few vestals with brooms and pails who haunt the temporary solitude on their ministration to whatever joss presides over numerals.

An explorer, questing those acres of brass plates for a clue to a man he desired to find, could never happen on Colet at all, unless he had divined him behind a plate which announced Perriam, Limited, First Floor. That name did not seem more significant than the numerous other inscriptions on the wall within the stone-and-iron portal of the building in Billiter Avenue. Yet it is fa¬ mous, in its own place. There it is as familiar a word as Colombo, Rangoon, Penang, Borneo, or China. Perriam,

Qallions %each 7

to the initiated, means produce. That name, in markets, docks, and shipping offices, is rubber, copra, nutmegs, tea, gums, pepper, sugar, rattans, tortoise-shell, and much else which can be induced by native labour out of tropical prodigality disciplined by western accountancy. It is other things too, of course, but in a chronicle of commerce they would be as irrelevant as the sayings of Jesus of Nazareth. One should not expect comeliness to be one of the inherencies of a brass plate. Nobody desires that the balance-sheet of most moment to him should get its chief virtue from what is apostolic. So nobody could love the house of Perriam for its graces and inward beauty, nor would they question a cheque which, indubitably, bore its sign-manual.

There was once a Perriam who was master and part owner of an opium clipper. There is no need to say any more about him. He had been the master of an opium smuggler, and he was the origin of the firm. When a visitor is left in the waiting room of the modern house of Perriam, and in that room is idle and impatient suffi¬ ciently long to feel a diminution of his consequence, and the matter of his call dwindles to something which is scarcely worth discussion in circumstances so imposing, he then has time to note a portrait of the founder of that house, above a Nankin jar on the mantelpiece; a stylish head, in a rakish marine cap garnished around with an escape of abundant hair, with sombre but truculent eyes, side-whiskers, and a shaven mouth and chin which might once or more have confronted mutiny, and, without a word, caused it to shuffle backwards a little in irresolution. Those eyes would dwell from their height and from the

8 Qallions %each

past upon a visitor, with fixity and stern indictment, and thus he might feel the less opiniative when at last a mem¬ ber of the house of Perriam snatched a brief release from matters more urgent to incline a polite ear to his humble petition. Beyond the waiting room, and within the sanc¬ tuary itself, was a corridor of frosted glass and mahogany. The closed doors on either hand bore the names of the principals. One announced Mr Colet. There were others, and the last of them, just where the office broad¬ ened into a spacious array of desks and clerks, had the name of Mr Perriam upon it.

It was an interior of imperturbable calm. It was a house whose establishment and power were unquestioned. A voice was never raised there. It would have been im¬ pious to fracture its lucid stillness with a rude note. In its hush the pens could be heard adding to the treasure of numerals. The clerks were bent over their desks with devout heads. When one of them was wanted his bell rang on the ceiling overhead, a brief peremptory sum¬ mons to the principal’s room. The bell in Mr Colet’s room whirred, his door of frosted glass opened instantly, and he came out to swing across the corridor with swifter obedience than might have been expected from a shapely man with a martial beard. Colet, in fact, wondered what was the trouble now. That sudden whirr in the plaster heaven of the office was the harsh and imperious warning of absolutism. Now what the hell was the matter with Him?

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

Qallions %each 9

hand was outspread. He was a tall, middle-aged man, bowed forward as if by the great weight of 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 con¬ stricted 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 por¬ trait 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 tradi¬ tion. His friendly hazel eyes were now troubled. He did not answer at once. He only moved his feet. He could not think of the words which would help him.

“Well?” demanded Mr Perriam. The principal fum-

10 Q allions %each

bled a glance at his assistant’s face, who was regarding him with appraising directness. The chief then dodged his eyes away to the wall beyond, for Mr Perriam never did more than flick a glance at another man’s direct scrutiny. He remained still, though Colet noticed that his watch-guard was trembling, as though through the sup¬ pressed 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 these 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 in 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 Perriam’s, not our labourers.”

“Their union . .

“Now, see, 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.

Q allions %each 11

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. But Jimmy was merely twisting the point of his taut little 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 re¬ minded of what was beyond.

But though he was looking at her now he did not know it. He could do nothing with those men. Useless to argue with them. Then sack the lot? Be damned to that. They were good fellows. They were reasonable. They knew their work. The work would not suffer. Imbecile to get rid of what was good over a matter of principle. To the devil with that principle. But either

12

Qallions %each

he was to go, or they. There was no sense in it. These strict 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 today with any decent feeling! Pop in even common sense, if it won’t kow-tow 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 whirling haze 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 wine at “The Ship” when he got that chair. Yet he had never felt it was really his chair, even with half a bottle of good stuff inside him. What kind of secret reservation, only dimly felt by him¬ self, 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 sam¬ ples were labelled, though the marks on the tags were as

Only gradually did Kuan -yin, a luminous symbol of benignity amid alien things , show through the whirling haze of his thoughts.

Q allions %each 13

mysterious as the stuff they identified. 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, tumeric, myrabolans, 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 voy¬ ages of the ships, except a rare call from the river when he was working late, the city was quiet, and the wind was southwest, 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 penal¬ ties for the misreading of its arbitrary symbols, without those warnings of a life and beauty beyond. The call

14 Qallions %each

of a ship at night, the strange smell of a sample, at times seemed to diminish Perriam’s to an unimportance which he half deplored, for 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 Three

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 let¬ ters 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 was really nothing to do with him. All very well, though, talking like that. He was there because he didn’t know his job, nor where to find it. Perhaps a man hardly ever 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

15

16 Qallions %each

right place. Well, if Perriam’s was the wrong pitch for him, and not his game, he’d shown most of them there how to play it.

Yet what a game it was. Perriam was an artful hog. 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 shin¬ ing, 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 pictur¬ esque, 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, with bowels of iron-piping? One day they’d make workmen of aluminium and clock-work. Wind ’em up and set ’em going every Monday. Light to handle. Reliable. Go the week without watching.

He closed the door of Perriam’s. It was almost a sacra¬ mental act. Wouldn’t be there again for nearly two days. That was the romance of commerce. The catching 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?

Qalliom %each 17

Very likely nobody but the Perriams of the world really felt this cold-blooded lust for things of which most men knew the names, but no meanings. There must be an¬ other sort of life outside, 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 ? Oh, to hell with Perriam.

In a porch of the court below was Saturday’s accus¬ tomed 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 burst¬ ing with wine. Wells somewhere put a word to 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. Noth¬ ing but a flaming comet from God.

Round the corner, in Lime Street, Jimmy stopped to peer into a warehouse door. The Hudson’s Bay Com¬ pany. That was a very queer smell. What was it? He could see only gloom inside. 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 had wanted to go out to Rupert’s Land, and trade with In¬ dians from a fort of logs. His boyish application might have saved him from Billiter Avenue. But no answer.

18 Q allions %each

Nothing doing. Fate and duty to a father whose influ¬ ence intrigued a lucky berth for him had marked him for Perriam’s 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. & 0. office; regal steamers amid seas and skies like 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. So names, then, meant some¬ thing, 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? Strange that a little man could hold out for so long. But of course the paralyzing sentimentalists had given Lamb the wrong name — Gentle Elia. That name just suited the sentimentalists. It made Lamb one of themselves, with brains of porridge 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

Q allions %each 19

with a rose bush had caught his arm with a thorn. Spring had caught him by the arm. He saw it was an April day, and the light was of good growing weather. Did the mind have 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 un¬ examined. God only knew to what some threads would lead curiosity, if it persisted to the end of the clue.

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 con¬ jectural 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. 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

20

Qallions %each

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 Leaden- hall Street, shift London. It wanted some doing, though. Look at it!

People kept pushing him off his standing place. He was an obstacle 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 con¬ verging streams congested into a viscous mass — the city was slowly emptying itself over Surrey. He leaned on the parapet above the 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. Civilization 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 continu¬ ally 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

21

Qallions %each

had been sweetened. What was it that once was ad¬ dressed 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 homo¬ geneous 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 commerce, but it never learned why the wheels went round.

That ship below was more intelligible. She was out¬ ward bound. 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 the sea? Die for a flood of humanity? A wisp of steam leisurely ascended from the ship’s funnel. She had intel¬ ligence 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 were afraid of freedom. Some instinct, anyhow, kept him to the barren mahogany.

Maybe Lamb was right. 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. Was there some un-

22 Qallions %each

known but inexorable law of being which would have obedience at all costs? Though it broke the heart, would it get some of its work done? 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 the voice was a bus which was going to Theydon Bois. Where was that? London was too big to know itself. It was con¬ gested with anxious people and nervous engines, and at the same time he 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 Lon¬ don. He would never know from whom the words came which floated up to the blue calm 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 fall 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 sur¬ vive in so long and immense a show! But that dream,

Qallions %each 23

the stars out of law and falling down the sky, was like the spectacle of London on a Saturday afternoon. Terri¬ fying! 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 tri¬ umphant dilation of St. Paul’s, holding above the capital its mysterious symbol to the sun. By Jove! 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? How was a man to know when he was really tipped a crafty wink out of the welter of the alien tumult? Jimmy warmed with a sudden confidence that that 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 Per- riams, 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

24 Qall ions %eaclo

Bond Street jeweller’s, that place. The greengrocer traf¬ ficked 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 ac¬ corded with the dome of St. Paul’s, and a white cloud, and the poor woman whose pity was moved by misfor¬ tune. If the earth were not a good place, when it could do that, then both good and evil meant nothing. Was the good fortune of that window just the chance luck of sun and rain, like that woman’s pity? Then it was good luck. Divine planning might have done worse. Those massed grapes were the translucent globules, pur¬ ple 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 sun¬ light! Helen herself couldn’t get that hint of green light in those topaz lanterns, the melons. The arch of geo¬ metrical 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. Don’t 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

Qallions %each 25

grave. That was the joke of a grave speech, the sol¬ emnity in which the dupes shivered. Wasted on a fine Saturday, anyhow. A little group stood near him, eagerly talking, with a policeman in the midst. The constable hur¬ ried 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.”

It became difficult to move in abstraction against the eager throng of home-goers hurrying along from Ludgate Circus, with that thought of a girl in a green coat, who had gone out of April so abruptly. 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. 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 recog¬ nized because he was even more pleasing than the fa¬ miliar 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 dolls’ house beside that ex-

26 Q allions %each

pansive rotundity. He was nursing a comparatively minute bulb of wine on his knee with an expression of child-like faith and dreamy beatitude. Men stood about talking to each other with the rapid confidential amia¬ bility released by alcohol. Some high stools with exigu¬ ous 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 wine-glass to advertise a 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 an extension of the world he knew, complete

Q allions %each 27

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 Mu¬ seum, frowning darkly in its abstraction with its recon¬ dite acquirements, 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 un¬ ashamed under the shadow of wisdom. You may watch them, through the iron railings, without going in. Why cross that desert of gravel? All the urgency of life, in¬ sistent on the unknown word which first set it going, is in the swollen 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 forbidding to humble and ignorant mortals. It puts them outside so distinctly. But there is the play of the doves to watch. They doubt whether they could summon the courage to crawl up the spacious ter¬ race of temple steps to the interior gloom. But Jimmy had gone beyond that phase, and 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 confi-

28 Q allions %each

dence 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 him in the Museum, the confirmation was, whichever way he 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 successful experiments of his fellows. He was not thinking of time. He went inside, surrendered his stick, and then, irreso¬ lutely, 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 Amaravata. 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 cut of the stone¬ work. The stones moved with seductive little forms. Was it 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 ritual was likely to make the gods shy.

He became lost among carved ivory oddments from Japan, translucent Chinese bowls of jade, lacquered boxes, and jolly dolls of the traditional Javanese puppet shows. In those things the fond human mind was at play. Its

Q allions %eaclo 29

very fun was better than all the ledgers of British com¬ merce. He wandered on, past Samian ware, and some hints of Rome in a land where the Csesars at last came down to nothing but the unresolved litter of their im¬ perial 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, spread¬ ing 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 some¬ where now in the jungle of Burma. But men would never again attain the spirit which created that figure, nor find the assurance of the far grove where once it was at home. Too late; the engine had taken its place.

Yet some other figure 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 reso¬ lution. He had been there before, and he knew. With a sigh at last, under compulsion, he turned to the other image, the supreme example of human handiwork in the Museum. It was the challenge of the Orient to the West, that great earthenware representation of one of Buddha’s men. London city could not answer that critical glance. Was it condemnation? It reduced Leadenhall Street to a skittle alley. The image of a Lohan, haughty and challenging, though in complete repose, was a little awe¬ some. He could not turn away from it. He had not the

30 Qallions %each

nerve. He backed slowly from it. It followed him with its unspoken and inscrutable challenge. He knew he had no adequate apology to make. Ah, 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.

Chapter Four

No DINER at the Gridiron should flatter another diner by noticing his capriciousness. That would betray his surprise, which he ought not to feel. If he were not singular, he would not be there. For that restaurant is not only in Soho, but it is hard to discover unless one who knows it is clever enough to think you are equal to it, and so conducts you to its primrose door between a dubious tobacconist’s shop and a large window of many small panes that are screened by dark-white curtains. No outside symbol betrays the Gridiron. Its frequenters are so pleased with the secret of its choice attractions that they take their friends to it. It is sufficient that it should be known to those who deserve it. If you should enter that restaurant with the bare guess that it is a place for refreshment, and because you have noticed that one place where food is sold is much like the others in any neighbourhood, you will be stopped in a narrow passage by a sinister waiter, who will slyly question you. Should you answer him in any way you will be admitted; should you not answer him at all you will be allowed in.

If your nature is so mild that it would permit without impatience a casual policeman to scatter the contents of your bureau as rudely as would a burglar, that is nothing. It is sure to be the sport of gay caprice at the Gridiron. For it is but just to allow to the deserving some protest against dun conformity after they have suffered it vir¬ tuously all day, and caprice for an evening in a secluded

31

32 Q allions %each

chamber which we trust is Bohemian is all the revolt most of us can manage against the extravagant hallu¬ cination of the conventional. The Gridiron is the only place in London where you may get Italian dishes you do not want.

So the proud voice of the great musician Suvretta, as he conversed there with a lady noticeable because of the distance between her burst of orange-coloured hair and the upper margin of her green frock, drew no atten¬ tion. Everybody behaved as though the musician had the place and the lady to himself. Yet Suvretta knew that the best of his harsh drollery would appear presently, glossed by a journalist who then was missing nothing of it, in one of those illustrated papers which give us the soothing illusion that we are not far from where the important people move in the brightness of their wit with better manners amid their improvements on life.

Helen Denny, at the other end of the saloon, while watching the door, could not help a glance to idle occa¬ sionally towards the musician. She knew the vulgarity that face betrayed, but it was a masculine face. That arrogant mouth would never soften in surrender to a gentle appeal, except in condescension. And condescen¬ sion is savoury, especially to those who themselves im¬ pose on others with a show of pride and indifference. His sullen eyes were arbitrary and poaching. He knew she had been looking at him. The lines of his broad face were as definite as those of a mastiff’s. He was a savage, but savages had their way. Jimmy had not come. It was getting late. Would the duffer remember where they would be that night? Jimmy was a strange

Q allions %each 33

fellow. It was not easy to see whether he was as simple as a child, or was as experienced as sin, and so was not particularly interested. No, not experienced; that was unfair. She liked his quiet informality. That looked very like wisdom. You could be sure of Jimmy. But his immunity was tantalizing. Immunity was a puzzling attribute of informality.

She turned, in an impatient dismissal of Jimmy, to her companions. She was wasting her evening. It did not matter where he was. He reserved too much. He would never be touched by life. Probably he was still dutiful at the office, making quite sure the things that worried him went their proper roads. You could never tell what was in his mind. He only looked as if he knew. His usual answer to any bright word of a friend was a happy chuckle. He might say something about it to her, hours later. But if his comment was surprising then, it was too late, and was wasted. Jim was either careless of the opinion of others, or else he was unaware that people were curious and critical. It was not easy to see which it was in a man whose eyes were often fixed elsewhere and distantly when his friends were drawn together by something which had aroused them, and who, if he spoke at all then, did so as one who was good-humoured but had something else to think about. If he had anything better, what was it? She wished she knew that.

Doris Oliver was looking at Helen with her black eye¬ brows arched over her childish face in an expression of querulous languor. Her elbows were on the table, and her pale hands drooped towards each other like two lilies which had been communing on their stalks, but

34 Q allions %each

had fallen asleep. Doris was a wily elf, Helen thought. Helen wondered whether a girl ought to wear her hair like that. It was as smooth as an Indian carving in ebony, and so shaped down to her thin cheeks that it left only a white triangle of forehead, and was coiled into neat bosses over her ears. Could there be a prim wanton? Doris looked like it, fastidious but hungry. A pallid little Quakeress with florid lips.

“I saw Jimmy this afternoon.”

“Yes? What had he to say? Haven’t seen him for a week.”

“Oh, he didn’t see me. Jimmy never sees anyone.” Doris picked at her necklace of limpid crystals and swayed it with a tired hand. “I’d been to hear the ‘Twelfth Mass’ at Saffron Hill. He was in Ludgate Circus, looking as if he’d just come away from an inter¬ view with his Maker, and was dissatisfied. Then a bus intervened. He vanished. Translated in a fiery motor perhaps. All gone.”

A plump young man sitting next to Doris, whose happy grin, which never left him, suggested that he was cherish¬ ing a ridiculous world because it was so amusing, leaned forward eagerly, as though he were going to add a jocund comment, but he saw that Helen’s attention had wan¬ dered. He checked himself, with his mouth a little open. His good teeth, and his fair hair which stood upright as if in constant astonishment, made it right for him to smile with his mouth a little open in cheerful interest. He thought, as he appreciated Helen, that Jim Colet must be a cool customer. Helen distinguished their table. She was the picture of the place. That is, if you

Qallions %each 35

liked ’em heroic. Too classical for him. She might be warm, but not cosy. A little haughty, except with those she acknowledged. He did not think she had accepted him. It was hard to learn that from a woman whose profile was like — it would have been like Brynhild’s, only she was too alert for a Teutonic goddess. She was wasted on a chap whose game was bales and casks and all that. What could such a fellow do with a bosom that was meant for privileged joy? Beside her, Doris was a peevish child. All the same, it would not be pleas¬ ant to annoy her. Those little lines were not at the corners of her mouth for nothing. Things had fallen a bit flat this evening. He must talk.

“I say, Doris,” he said, “I’ve been reading that new book of poems you lent me. Many thanks. But what’s it about?”

Doris was swaying her beads. “I wondered whether you’d ask that when I lent it, but I might have known you would. You ought to get some change from biology.”

His grin broadened. “All I can say is, my dear, give me the old songs, though I can’t sing them, if they’re the new. What does poetry want with footnotes about psycho-analysis and negro mythology?”

“Suppose,” some one asked him, “that you don’t know anything about them?”

“Well, I couldn’t learn them out of footnotes and get the poetry all in one stride, could I? But, Doris, they were very clever and insulting poems, I think. Sing a song of mockery. Is that the latest? But it was a sur¬ prising little book, though it smelt like the dissection of bad innards.”

3 6 Qallions %each

There was a quiet chuckle above him.

“Hullo, Jim! We’ve been waiting for you. Come on. Only as far as the soup, and no hope of progress much before midnight.”

“This place is only known to the elect,” said Doris.

“And so the waiters have no time,” continued the light¬ hearted young man. “Sit down and let Suvretta refresh you. Look at the Princess Olga. And there’s a table¬ ful of Russian dancers over there. Hors-d’ceuvres all over the room.”

Jimmy blinked obediently towards the princess, but saw no distinguishing back in that direction. The Rus¬ sian dancers, entertained by a newspaper proprietor, were very engaging. The long room, with its vistas deepening into a sort of maroon haze, was warm and chromatic, and sparkling with eager noises at the level of the table lights. Everybody seemed to be enjoying it. He looked at Helen with some concern, but she was talk¬ ing calmly to Doris. The biologist was relating a story happily to a girl Colet did nor know. Plenty of cheerful common sense about that scientist. A healthy boy. A waiter came, performed some legerdemain at the table swiftly but noiselessly, bent over him in confidential and unexpected solicitation, and left him. He could hear only fragments of the conversation.

“Got no time for him. When I open that man’s books, only a little lymph comes out,” said the biologist.

Helen was gazing absently into her wine, rotating her glass reflectively on the table, as if admiring the gleams of its ruby light. It sent a flush upwards to drift about her throat.

Cj allions %each 37

“What would you expect, Walcott? Blood these days ?”

“Don’t be silly. But I’d like to know why you literary critics are so keen over those morbid symptoms. Why not cut up dogfish with me?”

The critic looked sadly but tolerantly at the biologist, and smiled. Walcott was so young that he was lively. The kindly critic did not appear to think it was necessary to answer. He guarded the secret of literature with a pleasant but superior smile.

“Well, give me something I can enjoy. I’ve always thought literature was above my laboratory, but from the modern books Doris presses on me fbr my good. I’ve been thinking it must be the same thing as the lab, only worse.”

“If you are able to find books you can enjoy, why not enjoy them? There’s something for all of us,” the critic murmured.

“I know. But consider the young learner. Isn’t the best meant for enjoyment, these days?”

“Obviously it depends on what you can enjoy.” The critic’s gentle but deprecating smile showed that he was not to be idly provoked. “Why not keep, for a time, to Lamb and Dickens and — and the approved enter¬ tainments ?”

Jimmy turned quickly to the speaker. The man seemed to mean it. Perhaps he would regard death with a gentle sneer. He did not appear to be expecting applause for an original remark.

The amusement of the biologist, however, was now a little embarrassed, as though he had become conspicuous

38 Qallions %each

with a childish enthusiasm. His forehead was pink. Doris watched him with a trace of weariness in her eyes.

“I should like to know what you think is important in literature — if, of course, I may be told.”

“Important?” The critic was slow and deliberate. “I never said that literature has anything of importance to say. If you were to ask me, I should say that I don’t think it has. Its importance, we should honestly admit, is but in its manner, which is a matter of taste. One need not insist on one’s own taste.”

The critic was patient, and spoke as if this belief, like all else, afforded him no pleasure. If the truth was in¬ sisted on, well, there it was.

“Sorry. I’ll give thanks for my dogfish then. I found a new parasite in the liver of one yesterday. Might be the same as the best in literature.”

“You stick to your protozoa, my lad,” said Doris.

“Yes, I must. It seems as if anything more than unicellular is probably fake.”

“No, not fake,” wisdom assured him. “There again you are imputing idealism where it cannot be found. Why name it?”

Colet moved as if to ask the critic a question. But relaxed again. He refrained. The conversation con¬ tinued, facile and inconsequential as an air-balloon to the touches of children. Were these people serious? Per¬ haps such evenings were only the desperation of empty existences. But he looked again at the critic to confirm a sense of loss. He felt as if something of value had been withdrawn, by an authority who was able to declare, if pressed, that literature has nothing of more importance

Q allions %each 39

to say than a dado. Choose your dado to taste. Yet he had always read that critic’s contributions to the more serious reviews with respect.

Walcott, who had evoked this disillusion, saw Colet’s interest. The critic was now, in ironic humour, elabor¬ ating his views to Helen and Doris, tapping the edge of the table with a forefinger. The young ladies were as attentive as though he were a priest.

“Look at his tie-pin,” whispered the biologist.

Colet looked. It was an opal, but it was an opaque blue. There was no light in it.

“Even his opal looks like the eye of a dead fish. Now he’s giving the girls the outlook of Bloomsbury.”

“What’s that like?”

“The prospect of a dead fish. Nothing really matters. That’s all. But you ought to show good taste, though, and that is fairly easy if you consider other people’s pref¬ erences are funny.”

A girl danced languidly down the room between the tables as if she were expected to do it and were getting it over. She avoided the eyes of the diners, but only a few of the men looked at her as she approached, and the elder women glanced after her critically when she had passed their tables. Colet watched her go by, and felt still more humiliated. Helen saw his detachment, and his dislike as the dancer swam past. The critic had not amused her. Things, she understood, were certainly good if you thought they were, and if you thought they were poor they could be entertaining, sometimes. She was glad Jimmy was different. He was not an intellect¬ ual. You could hold on to him — more like a coarse man.

40 Q allions %each

She had mocked his beard, but after all it was the only- one in the room. Just under the reddish cheek bones it was golden, but it was grizzled already by the sides of the mouth, and under the lower lip. She had not noticed that before. When he turned his head to young Walcott • — they seemed very friendly .this evening — a muscle stretched like a strong cable from his ear to his throat. He looked solid, and as if he would last. There he was. The evening could be a success after all.

But when Colet chanced to see her face Helen had turned it, in the idleness of contentment, to the Russians. She was an admirer of that critic, he thought. Used to recommend his stuff to him. She was part of this place. He was an outsider. Better be off. Most of these people were a little queer, like the pictures painted on the walls. Over their table was a puzzle of heteroge¬ neous yellow and crimson geometry, in which he could make out a one-eyed woman who would have been nude but for the chance intervention of some greenish rhombs. There were no vitals to the room. It was heartless. Night was outside, and you could wander there alone, and would not have to listen to anything clever. He rose, and squeezed the shoulder of the biologist. “I’ll be off. I’ll leave you to it.”

Outside, the look of the stars above the parapets of the houses opposite, and even the smell, on a still night, of London’s pavements that had been heated all day by the sun, were better. Nothing ingenious about that, even if it had no meaning. No false contact. He stood by the kerb, free again, deciding which way he should turn.

41

Qallions %each

“I’m coming too, Jimmy. I could see you were bored. So was I. Come along.” Helen laid her hand on his arm.

“You were?” He hesitated.

“Of course. Did you think you were going to escape like this?” She laughed quietly, in confidence. She could rely on Jimmy.

He, though, was suspicious that the friendly night was being taken from him as soon as he had found it. He was reluctant to share the street with anyone. It sur¬ prised him that she had left her friends. Why was that? He could trust himself, when alone. There was safety in the night, but he knew he could not be sure of himself, if she were close to him. Then he was largely in abey¬ ance. It was as if most other human creatures were inimical. They were so remarkably not the same that they were uncanny. He felt strongly drawn to that tall, supple woman beside him, and resented her for that reason. There was no privacy with a woman. The soul got mauled about.

Besides, she had not left that dinner table because its talk was glib and sparkling. She liked that. She’d brought that atmosphere with her. She admired those people in there. They were clever. Made him feel a slow fool. But what if they were clever? Perhaps that only meant they could justify their hollow insides. They could make their dry and dusty cavities seem more like nature than having guts. Lord! They could make a heart feel ashamed, compared with an interior that had a thick settlement of knowledge on its hard ledges. If

42 Qallions %each

that was Bloomsbury, give him Billiter Avenue. You knew there where you were.

“It’s better out here, Jimmy.”

He found it hard to believe she meant that. She meant it at the moment; that was all. But what an autocrat she was in that cloak. He wanted to believe her. If he could do that he would surrender. Here was luck, for a woman like this to show she wanted him. Helen was as clever as they were made. Then why did she want him? Even the pictures she painted were malicious, as if her insight were diabolical. Sometimes her designs and figures were as though she was contemptuous of the world and wanted to expose it. He would sooner look at the traffic now, and have no reason to talk. He would not accept her; she did not belong to him. It didn’t do to look at that full throat of hers, and then at her eyes. Common sense went then. Time it did?

Time it did. As they walked, and she stepped in unison with him no matter how in irritation he broke his stride, for she was nearly as tall as himself, he felt her intended touch now and then, and was stirred. She pointed to something comic in the upturned faces of a crowd that was watching a sky-sign — a baby’s feeding bottle that constantly emptied and refilled to the joy re¬ peated as intermittent jerky lights in the face of a gigantic cherub, and Jimmy stopped and laughed aloud. The crowd might have been watching the heavens unroll as a scroll.

They got into a taxi-cab. Helen could see his profile, salient and thoughtful, in an occasional light, and his nearness was evident. He suggested faintly — what was

Q allions %each 43

it? — tonka beans. That was Perriam’s warehouse. Or his tobacco. She remembered it. She broke into gaiety over what they had heard at dinner. He heard, in sur¬ prise, his own dubiety expressed in positive wit. Was that what she was thinking while listening to the critic with such apparent respect? Poor man of letters! Perhaps women were like chameleons, and could swiftly assume the colour which circumstances required. But he liked it. It was pleasant to feel a woman so close who could be as comically shrewd as that over people who had mocked his verities.

Helen knew he was coming over to her. “How’s the ogre? How’s old Perriam?” she asked. “You haven’t said a thing yet. Talk to me.”

He outlined the latest manifestation in the city. He put his hand on hers. “So, you see, if I’m to go on, they’re to get out.”

She took possession of his fist. “Don’t let those people trouble you. That’s what you always do.”

He did not answer.

“You are ridiculous. You want to treat a crude earth as if it were porcelain. You waste feeling on what will never know it. No doubt about it, men are the sentimen¬ talists. Haven’t you learned yet that the art of com¬ merce is the art of doing without more feeling than you need for luck?”

His fist was clenched on her knee. She opened his hand and laid it limply flat.

“If it were daylight, I’d read your fortune. You’re too easy with those men. No daylight wanted to read that. If they hurt you, get rid of them.”

44 Qallions %each

The cab bumped. His hat fell to the floor. He with¬ drew his hand to pick it up, and then folded his arms.

“Those men knew well enough, of course, that either they would win, or else you would. They asked for it. Why should they win?”

He could not answer that. Such an argument came from a different order of assumptions. That was the way Perriam looked at it.

They went up to her rooms. There she was, cool, clever, and luxurious, with her books and pictures about her, the best that London could do for men. And here he was, like a grey long-eared one, out of sympathy. She welcomed him with a restrained little gesture, and for a second met his eyes in candour and intimacy. They might have been alone in the city. He was sure her eyes could look the Lohan serenely in the face, though he were in the flesh. That would give the Lohan some¬ thing to do.

He did not sit down. He stood with an elbow on the mantelpiece, and examined a Tanagra figurine. It was not unlike Helen in miniature.

“There you are, Jim. Where’s your pipe?” She lifted an arm, which would have delighted him in Grecian marble, and pressed his shoulder. He noticed the tur¬ quoise on her white hand. He sank into the chair. She sat on the arm of it, and he did not hear what she was saying, for her voice was as far as something just remem¬ bered. The bold curves of the thigh beside him, instead of satisfying him, as would that of a statue, so disturbed him that its proximity gave him anxiety. It was dan¬ gerous; and she had said “get rid of them.” He could

Q allions %each 45

not forget that. He was not going to blaspheme life. There was no fellowship here. He stood up and met her glance. She was patiently watching him in en¬ chanting perplexity.

“Why, aren’t you going to stay?” She looked down, and paused. “You’ve only just come,” she said very quietly. He did not answer, and she said more. He vaguely wondered whether he rightly understood her. The courage of this woman! He dared not look at her. His own sensations were baffling, but somehow he re¬ mained rigidly outside himself, so that his body could not act, as though he were afraid, not of her, but of com¬ ing too close to himself. There was something more important. She took a step back, and her arm, which had been raised towards him, fell to her side, as though she had forgotten it was raised. He went away.

Chapter Five

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 soft¬ ened in his absence. But it was imperative that he should go to Billiter Avenue at once. He was incensed by the obstructions placed by the muddle-headed in the straight course of a just man single-minded in his devo¬ tion 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 Brix-

46

Qallions %each 47

ton privet hedge. Mrs Perriam was represented in the hall by the silently protesting surrogation of some Chi¬ nese silk tapestry and a few comforting rugs and prints. They did not accord with the magnificent Indian fur¬ niture of Mr Perriam’s importation, but they did give something on which the eye could rest. But Mr Per¬ riam’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 foolishness about him gave his countenance a reminiscence of proud resignation. His thoughts con¬ centrated on his grave decision that he must ignore his dinner, and go instantly to his office to examine his let¬ ters. He knew his fear was both natural and scrupulous, that folly, while he had been away, had misdirected the just order of his authority.

Jimmy was wondering when his chief would come. The offices of Perriam’s were deserted. It was past six o’clock. The only light was in his room. Jimmy had to wait. The church clock of 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 nerv¬ ously stretched himself. He saw that cat. Ah! another creature was alive there; he called to it. But the cat

48 Q allions %each

only twitched her tail and went on. She was nothing to him; she was only a familiar, native to the wilderness.

Why should he wait? There was really nothing to wait for. He did not want to see Perriam. And per¬ haps the boss was not coming, after all. It was impos¬ sible to do any work. If the boss 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 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 playing Kuan-yin so that he could consider her from various angles. Then the telephone bell menaced. (Yes, yes. 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,

Q allions %each 49

the show never seemed to have much to do with him. He had taken any place in it in which Chance had left him. He was sitting in that chair because his father pushed him that way. One place was as good as an¬ other. 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 know¬ ing why he did it, casually declined life. He had got out of its way. Actually, in its most adorable form he had refused it. Why was that, 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

5 0 Qallions %each

up the stairs in heavy deliberation, like destiny. No escape now; might kill the beggar, though. Jimmy chuckled at the thought. Fling a bomb into Moloch's fiery belly and do in the brute god? That 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 the controls of his affairs were 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 till 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 dissatis¬ faction.

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

Q allions %each 5 1

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 fel¬ lows 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 about, 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

52 Q allions %each

the aggressiveness with which Mr Perriam disguised his own simple hesitances was sure of his secret approba¬ tion. 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. Then he would be more valuable still. 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 ingratitude 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 an empty and thoughtless genera¬ tion, 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, in infestivity, 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 submission to ill-luck, which to Mr Perriam was but a show of proud and enduring reserve, caused

Qallions %each 5 3

his chief to believe that this appeal for gratitude and common sense was in vain. This further offense made Mr Perriam flounder in his periods. 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 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 eloquent reprobation. Colet glanced at the intimidation with indifference, and then an un¬ called surge of abhorrence turned him black. He saw Perriam’s near mask as the front of all arrogant swinish¬ ness. 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 Jimmy floundering. Jimmy sat on the floor, legs spread out, deferentially waiting, as it seemed, for Mr Perriam to rise first. But Mr Perriam did not move. Jimmy 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 Ax-

54 Q allions %each

minster roses, was absurdly out of place. His boots with their spats were spread unnaturally. Jimmy scram¬ bled to his chief’s assistance, 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 sur¬ prise, but did not enter.

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

Chapter Six

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 walk¬ ing 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 Aid- gate 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 cer¬ tain landmark to show distinctly since he took his eyes off the Axminster carpet.

What should he do? He thought of this as he con¬ tinued to walk eastwards. He did not know what he expected to find in that direction, but the vista ahead,

55

5 6 Qallions %each

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. There might be nothing he could do because he had now gone to the limit. He wondered over 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 under¬ stand; he didn’t know Perriam, 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. Anyone 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 queer that he

Q allions %each 57

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, callous, which expected nothing. They seemed to be upborne on shad¬ ows. 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. Too many eyes floating past, a ceaseless drift of stares.

His thoughts could 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 welter, and those eyes all round looking on indifferently.

What did he want in a public house? A brisk potman appeared to know that, 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

5 8 Qallions %each

a matter which had to be whispered, though huskily, to a companion who listened with his eyes shut, while suck¬ ing a pipe: “I arst yer. What would you ’ave done?” The lean man did not open his eyes. He nodded his head solemnly.

The talker glanced furtively at Jimmy beside him, who was gazing in evident abstraction at a glass globe in its haze of tobacco smoke. The man had no collar, and he eased his thick moist neck from a constricting shirt band with a finger, and grimaced in impatient dis¬ comfort. “I’d ’ad enough of the bitch. Too much of it. But that stopped her jaw. An’ there you are, Bill. I shan’t turn up in the mornin’.”

The other fellow removed his pipe. “Police know?” he said.

Jimmy moved instantly at that word to look at them. The tough felt his movement, and swung sharply upon him with his great hands clenched on the greasy knees of his trousers. He contemplated Jimmy with lowering insolence in silence, head thrust forward, for some seconds.

“ ’Ere, you — you with the whiskers. You listening to us? Know anything? By cripes! you shift your ear, or it’ll get thick.”

Jimmy felt a change of thought. It went over him with a glow of pleasure. He smiled kindly at the tough. Good, good; that fellow was a weight.

“Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“Alarmed!” The big fellow inclined his head to his friend. “’Ear ’im, Bill? Arsts me if I’m alarmed.” His face came round with decision. “Don’t you wait ’ere

Qallions %each 5 9

any longer than you must, whiskers. This pub is un¬ healthy. Understand what I mean? You got anything else to do, go and do it.”

The distraction grew still more pleasing, though Jimmy thought it might be better to go. Yet not too soon. He maintained his friendly smile, and took a drink. “Plenty of other things to do, when I feel like it. Don’t let me keep you from your interesting con¬ versation with your pal.”

The man steadily took stock of Jimmy, hesitated, and turned away, to mumble to his companion. Jimmy presently rose, wished him good night, and left the tavern. He paused, when in the shades beyond, to watch the door. The two men came out, surveyed the traffic care¬ fully, and walked towards him. This would never do. He kept close to the wall, and continued. He took a dark and handy byway, and lost himself in it. Those two fellows did not appear to enter it. No use having more trouble. He had an unlucky fist.

Where was he? But it did not matter where he was. Any circumstances would do now, for he had lost the old set. Lost them? Not so easily lost as that. Any¬ how, he might as well walk off his feelings till morning, when he would have to own up.

Queer place, this. There was a wall beside him which was Cyclopean. A straight section of primordial night, like the beginning of the way down to Erebus. The just and predestined path for him. He should follow it to whatever was at the bottom of it. He did not know that it was, anciently, but the beginning of Ratcliffe Highway. The night was brooding and overcast. He

60 Q allions %each

could only guess that he was still going east. There were no stars. Why go east? Well, when the stars have fallen out of the sky, of course they are not there. No use then to try scientific navigation by exact bearings.

When he came to a street lamp he could see the wall was only dingy brickwork. But it looked like the pal¬ pable residue of old chaos, something which had never seen daylight. It ranged upwards beyond the glim in the street. No end to it, above. The glass of the lamp was broken, and the little flame, shaken by a draught, caused irresolution in the revealed area of the wall, which con¬ tracted and expanded, as though immemorial night were resilient, but too vast for a little light to move except as a local jest.

He continued along by the wall, which was so vague that sometimes his hand knocked it. Then he remem¬ bered he had a body. Damn! He was still there. He was not a disembodied spirit yet walking in a chaste nightshirt down to Hades. But there was no need of a nightshirt for him, to get the appropriate feeling. If only Apollyon were somewhere about. It would be a pleasure to meet him. Give a fellow something to do. The trouble with Belial is that you can get no nearer to him than when in abstraction you bark your knuckles. Pretty lonely, that kind of conflict, in the valley of the shadow. The worst thing in hell is that nobody else is there, no devil, no fire that has the merit of being everlasting, no pal, no light, no way out, and the way in behind you gone like yesterday morning.

Were they houses, opposite? They might be houses. They were more like that than anything else. Some

Qallions %each 61

were the complement of the wall beside him, and the roofs of others came down almost to his level. The irregular penumbra opposite was sprinkled with lighted squares. The squares showed, surprisingly, that there might be others beside himself in this abiding place of night; he could see into their lighted caves. At times the shadow of a colossal and distorted head would appear on a window-blind, a protean shape which confused a newcomer with its grotesque mockery or order and shape¬ liness, reduced itself to a sudden knob, and faded off. The others here had that scope. They could take any shape they liked, and diminish to nothing suddenly while you watched. Occasionally there were wanderers like himself on the other side of the way, figures with no character, in no hurry. They only moved. Perhaps they were shapes which had come off the blinds for a change.

At times he heard voices, but they belonged to nobody. Nobody was there to speak. Once there was a single eldritch shriek. Jimmy stopped. It came from a nar¬ row opening in the dark on the other side, to which depth was given by a distant bracket lamp on a wall. He could see nothing but the lamp up there. Its light flattened and turned blue in a gust, and then flared again, as though it had got over that trouble. Maybe the lamp had shrieked in its loneliness. A figure, which reminded Jimmy of a man, leaned against a post at the bottom of the turning. It did not stir. It did not move to look at the lamp which had screamed. Perhaps it was used to the cries of loneliness in the dark.

Jimmy felt it was time to make out what the shapes

62 Qallions %each

were that haunted this region. He crossed over to see. But the figure did not look at him. Its head was on its breast, studying the road, perhaps trying to see daylight on a path that was far below the reach of daylight. There came along three other forms which appeared to be two women and a man, and they shambled together past him, singing with drawling and doleful remorse. The yowling whine of the women was almost human in its discordance with the subjugating dark to which it was addressed.

Jimmy, nearing another lamp, was thoughtfully re¬ garding a truncated monument which stood under it. What did that commemorate? The top of it moved, and turned a human face to him. It was a policeman. “Good night,” said the policeman, as Jimmy got within that brief circle of knowledge.

“Good evening,” said Jimmy, and stopped.

“Having a midnight prowl, sir?” asked the policeman. “Yes,” said Jimmy. “This is a strange parish.”

“Oh, I dunno. Not to us. We’re used to it. Not so bad as it’s painted.”

“I thought it looked like a place where everything was hidden away.”

“Not it. Don’t you believe it. No good for hiding in. Too many looking on. No good to come here, after a little upset, like, thinking that you can get lost. Though some people do say so. I read a book the other day . . . funny things get into books. All about this place. But not like it is when you know it, same as I do.”

Jimmy turned over the keys in his pocket. There

Q allions %each 63

wasn’t much to talk about, if you didn’t want to say anything.

“I heard an unpleasant scream just now, at the turning above.”

“Yers;' they’re always nasty to hear. But there’s nothing in it. Take no notice, that’s the thing to do. No screams, guv’nor, take it from me, when some one’s light is being put out. They take good care of that. As a rule. Only amateurs let ’em scream.” The con¬ stable was amused. “If they began with a loud noise our job would be as easy as kiss your hand. Go straight to it, couldn’t we? But they don’t oblige us, so we have to find ’em afterwards.”

The officer seemed glad of some one to talk to. He eased his helmet.

“Take it from me, sir.” He jerked his left thumb over his shoulder. “Why, only last week a young feller up there, he tried it on. Came from another part of London. People always think they’re safe when they dunno where they are, like. Reckoned, I suppose, that anything could happen here and nobody would notice it. God bless me, the fact that he was here gave him away. What was he doing here? Of course, everybody asked that. Wouldn’t come here for pleasure, as you might say.” The constable chuckled again. “And there you are.”

“Where does this road lead to?”

“Same sort of thing all the way along. Comes out by Stepney station. Go on far enough and you’ll have to walk back, this time o’ night. Far to go?”

“I think I’ll be getting along, then.”

64 Qallions %each

“Well, speaking for myself, I’d sooner be indoors. But of course, if it’s the first time you’ve done it, it’s an experience. I hope you’ll enjoy it, sir.”

Jimmy hesitated, but then went his way. He strolled away from the light, but without knowing whether he was continuing in the same direction. He was not think¬ ing of that. He took a side alley without knowing it, and continued to take whichever opening in the obscurity was the next one. No good trying to believe morning would ever come to that precinct. But he wanted the morning, he wanted the daylight.

This place looked like the forgotten lumber yard of creation. Shapes that could not be published had been abandoned there. They held together because they had never been disturbed. The echoes of his footsteps might shake them down, so he made less noise. This was the very bottom of the night, and he had sunk to it by his own weight. One byway left him in a narrow passage, under a gas jet, where he had to choose between right and left. He could see what used to be there. It used to be warehouses. He looked above, as if in appeal, for a suggestion of sky. There might have been one, but the ancient walls were close, and leaned towards each other, as if the weight of night with its density would bury that foundered corner. Jimmy felt that he was sunk abysmally from all communion with his fel¬ lows. The gas jet made hardly any hollow in the gloom. It but selected for illumination a worn iron post, a scat¬ ter of chaff on cobblestones, horse droppings, and a few barrel-hoops. Then, almost melted into the dusk beyond the chaff on the cobbles, he saw a dog watching him.

Q allions %each 65

He saw its yellow eyes. It was a dog? Here, old fellow! When he moved that way it became only an ugly little noise, and was not there. An unseen hoop sprang from under his tread and bit him on the hand But he did not cry out. Almost immediately, he saw it was only a hoop.

As though it had only opened in the darkness since he came, he noticed before him a cleft in the wall. It could have been an opening there. It was a lighter patch. While he wondered whether it was an outlet a green planet moved across it, midway, from side to side. The bright planet appeared suddenly, and stared at him for a few seconds, and then was eclipsed. As though that green light had caused it, he felt a cool draught blow steadily from across the way. What was there? Then a red star appeared midway, in the midst of a travelling cluster of white stars. Lord! a ship?

He listened rigidly. He could hear the plunging of a propeller. He made a guess. A red light? Then she was going east. She was bound outwards. He crossed over and walked down that slit in the dark till he felt only outer space was before him. There were remote points of light in a void. He stopped, and fumbled with his hand. Yes, this was the edge of his world.

He sat down on it. In a little while he could hear water talking quietly somewhere below him. It might have been near or far. It was invisible. Perhaps that was the tide running by the Southern Cross. That was a long sheer cold drop.

66 Q allions %each

“Ahoy!” It was a clear but minute call from straight out before him. “Aho-o-y!”

“I’m here,” said Jimmy to himself. “I’m coming.”

That caller would take some finding. It meant a long journey. He sat looking at that idea till his plight, the monody of the waters, the far points of light, and a thin drizzle which began, all blurred into an infinite stillness within which his waking mind became like one of the stars sunk deeply in the void. He was hardly there.

Had he been asleep? It had been raining. He was wet. When he stood on the edge, he heard, as if from across the river, a clock strike three. Three tiny ones. Not much longer to wait now. Better get moving. Nobody about yet.

The same old walls in a city that was dead. Funny name that, over a shop. Couldn’t be right. Perhaps he was getting light-headed. Wu Fu Li. Better not see people about when they had such names. This ashy solitude was interminable, and morning never came to it.

He rambled up to the centre of a bridge, which seemed to rise above the shadows, and saw beyond him the inky grotesques of chimneys and house ridges against a low pallor. He leaned over the parapet. So there it began, that day for him. Below the bridge was a stream, sound¬ less and raven, which became outlined in the bottom of night even as he watched. Its banks were of mud. They were livid like the water, but they did not move. The water uncoiled slowly, and so it could be seen. A careened barge was below, a lump melting into the sludge. It would take old Charon some time to shift

Qallions %each 67

that. But this was his river, all right. The old boy was probably waiting asleep under that gasometer.

A group of men passed him, going the same way. But they were brisk. 1 heir noisy footsteps meant pur¬ pose and direction. Something was ahead of them, and they were going to it. That was more like life. Where they could go, so could he. lie followed them, more like life. People were about, glum but purposeful. This was an early world, where railway lines were mixed with the streets, factories with the homes, and an unborn ship stood immense in her skeleton womb above the tenements. The day was broad, when, surmounting grey fields and sheds with low roofs of iron, the scarlet funnel of a liner stood up like a noble beacon. Beyond her was a blue funnel with yellow bands. The vista of low buildings was overtopped by a long diminishing array of cranes and jibs, masts, and the vivid colours of smoke-stacks, one beyond the other. A broad new world this, but with some smells he knew. Where did this road end? Some lascars in blue muslin and red turbans were crouched under a railway station. A clock was suspended over the deserted platform. It proclaimed a quite impossible hour. 1 hey had lost the time here. But perhaps there was no time here. He might have got beyond the range of the schedules. He looked up at the clock, and saw a sparrow’s nest in its works. Time was stopped here to let the birds nest. At the other end of the platform was a name-board above the palings, its letters big and positive enough to announce that locality to a great distance. Gallions.

Chapter Seven

y^FTER a little respite of sleep in the hotel at the dock- head, Jimmy went down through a dull corridor to the coffee room. He was surprised, when he opened its door, by the attack of an interior light which was theat¬ rical in its early brilliance. Four or five men at a table near the window looked as if they were beginning the day. Breakfast then? He got an impression of a room which was set, in a surprisingly good imitation of morn¬ ing, for an act in a play. The dour figures of the men at coffee and newspapers were very like life. One of them looked up at him over his spectacles in critical fixity, as if he had interrupted a private rehearsal. In his embarrassment Jimmy shut the door at once, with¬ out going in. Thought it was time for tea. Perhaps his watch had stopped.

“Who was that?” asked the spectacled man of his neighbour.

“Don’t know. Didn’t see him.”

“Thought it might be the man who got the Altair. He was supposed to join her yesterday.”

Another man lowered his cup. “The Altair is my ship,” he said.

“So that’s that. Pleased to meet you, sir. She’s anchored astern of mine, the Harlow His paper went aside. “Nothing in that,” he grumbled. “I always go to it as if it could no more be missed than the chronometer,

68

Q all ions %each 69

but somehow I can never get the time by it. Anything in your radical rag, Doctor? And don’t keep those rolls.

The elderly doctor smiled sideways. “Why, yes, Cap¬ tain Bennett, plenty in it. You are unjust. \ou must have missed a whole page of bargains in Oxford Street. And I see our owner’s horse is fancied for the Derby. You didn’t see that? It struck me as strange that racing stables should be run on ships that never will

pay.”

“Get away. If that horse is like the Harlow, he’ll want some stoking to raise the knots out of him. But I know what you mean. I don’t like your talk. You re too fond of showing notions by the arse-end. Too much ethnology, or what you call it.”

Jimmy went out of the hotel. The look of that room had lessened his specific gravity. Quite a hopeful hint in the air, that day, of Rip van Winkle. Perhaps he had not, like Rip, secured a very long advantage on the dear old home; he could not have left it so securely far behind. For his beard was about the same. It was not venerable. How much of the calendar had he dodged? Through a slip in the celestial cogs he might have been wangled into another year. What year was this? It was a buoyant thought, it ascended as a morning grace, and at least he could continue to enjoy it till he reached a newsboy and the truth. There was enough about him to justify a brief sustenation of the idea. Evidently, Gallions was outside the world which used to have him. Its railway-station clock was timed to a sparrow s nest. If time is one of man’s devices, like fish knives and drains, then alter the clock when its current hour is

70 Q allions %each

unsympathetic. Choose you own time, if the local dura¬ tion feels untimely. To the devil with Greenwich, if it is out of your date. Settle on your own meridian, and stick to it. He paused to take in a noisy group of lascars.

The station was busy with a life that was foreign to him. This was a boundary, in which diversities melted — Hindus, white men, Chinese, negroes — as if Gallions served as a common denominator of men; turbans, woolly knobs, silk hats, and caps. No wonder the clock was abandoned to nesting-time. A rough and dusty en¬ closure at the back of a shed was cumbered with vans that were loaded with packages port-marked for coasts that were only names in London. Even the vans here had more faith that the far thought had a reality. What you had to do was to follow it up. Only custom and timidity prevent us from stepping over the last row of the cabbage plot.

A newsboy offered him a paper. Better not take it. It was almost certain that paper did not belong to the day he hoped he had reached. Don’t step back. That boy was only handing him a line of return to Billiter Avenue. But there was no help for it. The boy was destiny right enough, though destiny ought to wipe its nose. He took the paper. Opened it.

Nothing was in it. Not a name he knew, not a name which concerned him. No big type for such as he. Useless for the unenterprising to kill anybody. He looked at the date. He had lost a day. This was tomorrow morn¬ ing. He would have to keep to his own time. The night before last was with the Kings of Memphis. He

Qallions %each 71

dropped the paper, returned to the hotel, and went into the coffee room with a spurious confidence which was almost complete that he knew where he was, and when. Jimmy took a seat beside the master of the Altair.

At that moment, on the other side of the captain, the diffident doctor was contemplating the skipper furtively, for the doctor wished to speak to him, and this bearded stranger who was just sitting down had changed the atmosphere a trifle, and he had not yet spoken to the captain. The Altair was to make an interesting voyage. The doctor sighed. It was years since he himself coasted in the China Sea. Out there were the coasts for youth. Probably he would never sit again in the verandah of that place he knew in Singapore, and watch the various and unaccountable East go by, at sunset. Never smell tropical overgrowth again. He would like another chance to visit the ruins of Angkor. The Altair* s captain was staring absently across the table to the window light, which was broad from the river. That light gave him away. The elderly and experienced doctor wondered, for a moment, when he looked at his neighbour, what the merchant service was coming to, when a man like that could have command of a ship. A negative figure; thin hair, an insignificant mouth and nose; even his moustache was trifling. A lot of interest Bangkok, or the ruins of a forgotten civilization, would be to him. No character. The doctor had long ago decided that England was decadent, for an unassailable reason; he had found it impossible to get an appointment ashore better than the quackery of humouring the willing vie-

72 Q allions %each

tims of bad habits and unoccupied minds, and as a ship’s surgeon he was sent on uninteresting routes. i “You know Bangkok, Cambodia, those places, sir?” he asked.

The skipper started nervously. “Eh? No, well, I haven’t been that way since I was a junior.”

“An interesting coast.”

“Yes? You know it? Any coast has to be that, though, when one is there.”

Captain Bennett laughed rudely. “Interesting! That’s it. That’s the way the doctor talks. You ought to sail with him.” He shook a rebuking fork at the doctor in pride. “I tell you he’s even interested in the cockroaches. Keeps ’em in bottles. He’d measure the head of any bumboatman who came alongside. The interest in a coast is to keep off it. It’s a fine coast when you’re clear of it.”

“It’s only a point of view, Captain.”

“Point of view! Five fathoms, and a draught of twenty-six feet. There’s a point of view. You always talk as if a ship were a peep show or Noah’s Ark. You ought to know by now it’s more like a pawnshop owned by a Welshman. No Cardiff man here? Every damned rivet is tallied. Doctor, you are too late. You should have signed articles with Noah.”

“Well, Captain, don’t you think Noah would be more interested in your ship than you would be in his old ark?”

Captain Bennett was entangled for a moment. He frowned at the doctor while getting this notion free. Jimmy took a look at him. A rosy but truculent old dog. This was one of his favourite pastimes, to quarrel

Qallions %eaclo 73

in play. The sly doctor enjoyed pulling his leg. Bennett grunted.

“That ark, dirtier than a cattle-ship, what with monkeys and elephants. Didn’t her old man have to beat about because the only port was under water? Weather as thick as hell. All the same, no trouble with soundings. Yes, Doctor, I guess old Noah would have been glad of a gin and bitters on the Harlow. But you knew all right what I meant. Our world isn’t new, but Noah’s was the first voyage, wasn’t it? You’d have seen every¬ thing for the first time with him.”

The doctor was offensively quiet and kind. “Do you think we ever see anything at all? There’s nothing but names in the world, Captain. Most of the names are old. They hide the things. We look at the names and see nothing.”

“Now what’s he getting at? That’s the way he goes on, quietly pushing the soup off the table to start a nice little conversation with me. Him and our engineer. If you could hear the pair of them at it, you’d think the earth was only a fog, as near as I can make out. Not enough solid rock in it to scrape the heads off wet matches.”

“Oh, come . . .”

“I say yes. All very well for a doctor to talk like that, when his job’s just guesswork, but it beats me to hear an engineer doing it.”

“Playing with words, Doctor?” suggested the Altair’s master; “taking soundings with words, and finding no bottom?”

Hullo, thought the doctor; more in this chap than I supposed. He felt more at home.

74 Qallions %each

“It can be a very dangerous game,” he said. “Find the right set of words, and you can make almost anything with them, a steam engine, God, a war, or a pleasant little suggestion to upset everybody. I was thinking of a brother of mine who is surgeon in one of the New York liners. I know her captain. No more nonsense in him than in you, Captain Bennett. My brother told me yesterday that last voyage they had a lovely upset. It’s down in the log, it’s reported to the Board of Trade, and one large and decorated form of the story — which depended no more on the facts, I need not say, than my ship’s voyage depends on me — appeared in a New York paper, and created some prejudice against the cruel captain of the liner. The skipper, just before dinner one day halfway on the outward voyage, my brother told me, got a message that somebody was overboard. The sea was calm, so they had a chance to save him. The ship was put about. There appears to have been no doubt about it. Three ladies on the saloon promenade- deck had seen the figure drop from the boat-deck into the sea. The skipper questioned the witnesses, but each most emphatically had the same yarn, a man’s figure whirling into the sea from above. Naturally, that skipper knows all ladies, or some of them, are darlings, but he has been so long in the Atlantic passenger service that he doesn’t trust their evidence as much as he does the Nautical Almanac; so he examined the boat-deck care¬ fully. Nothing there to show. The boats all had their covers intact. No stowaway had been in one of them. There was no canvas missing which in the wind might have looked like a soul whirling out into

Qallions %each 75

eternity. The dinner was postponed, the passen¬ gers assembled, all hands off duty were paraded, and the roll was called. Everybody present. All cor¬ rect. Long before the roll was completed, because about eighteen hundred people were aboard, the dinner was spoiled, but the ship was on her course again. The missing soul, what there was of it, was abandoned to the deep. No boat was put out. Next day the skipper heard there was a whisper in the ship — in the way skip¬ pers have of hearing things, Captain Bennett — that he was a wretch who thought more of his program than he did of one of God’s own creatures. Three ladies in particular knew that he was a villain who did not believe they had seen a man fall into the sea.”

“More like a ghost story than anything else,” grumbled Captain Bennett.

“It is a ghost story,” answered the doctor.

“But,” asked Jimmy, “something must have been seen by those ladies?”

The doctor admitted it. “Yes, sir, I dare say. People do see things, then give names to them.”

After they had solemnly considered the prospect of a world of intangibilities in which names and portents permuted in a dumb and dizzy flux, names and mean¬ ings differing for all who were looking on, Bennett spoke.

“Right you are. I give in to you, Doctor. I won’t argue. But thank God there’s one thing with a name that is all right — money. You can’t deny that. You just let me have that, and you can keep the rest of the words, or what you call ’em. The only voyage I hanker after more than the usual charter is the one in

76 Q allions %each

the books, one of those treasure island hurroos. I’d sign on for that like a cabin boy with his first bolster.”

“But if treasure is not the same as money . . the surgeon began.

“None of that, now. Of course it is. No good try¬ ing to pretend I don’t know the ace of trumps when there’s a name to it. Doctor, you can count money, which is treasure, and what more do you want?”

“We’ll call it a go, Captain. But I hope I’m with you when you count treasure and stow it. I’d like to see it done. A chart for hidden bullion! That’s enough to poison any desert island! I thought that was only a yarn for pirates and boys.”

The surgeon rose. Jimmy looked round at him. A short fellow with a big bald head. A grey moustache. A sad but quizzical face. The surgeon paused with his hands on the back of his chair. He appeared to find inspiration in the seat of it.

“I’ve never heard of a chart for the things I want. I don’t believe I can have it, unless I make it myself, and then the next man couldn’t read it. If he did, he’d want something else. Morning, Captain. I’ll see you at the shipping office presently. Sign on at two-thirty, don’t we?”

The master of the Altair was smiling ironically, while idly balancing his spoon on the edge of his cup. Then he, too, left the table, but without a word.

Colet soon followed. A clear decision had come to him to return to the office. There was no hurry, but he was going. Perhaps Perriam wasn’t dead. And if he were, that was an inquisition he could face. Just see what would happen. Bound to be interesting. He went

Qallions %each 77

up to his bedroom. That surgeon was a good doctor. There was no name to him, but he was a pal. How surprised he would be if he knew that his demeanour and chance words had prompted a decision in a stranger about a quite irrelevant matter. Colet was passing an open door and glanced in. The A It air’s master was there, considering, with his hands in his pockets, a large example of Kuan-yin. Jimmy was brought up. “Hullo,” he said to himself, and then would have gone on. But the man inside saw him. “That took my eye,” Colet apologised. “It’s a beauty. May I look?”

“Come in, come in. It is a good one?”

“I like it. I’ve never seen a better one. It’s a beau¬ tiful figure. But only one or two men know this stuff.”

“Are you interested in it?”

“Yes, but I don’t know anything about it. It’s different from Staffordshire ware, that’s all.”

The stranger shyly confessed that, when in London, he himself had paid furtive visits to the British Museum, he did not quite know why, to look at Chinese bowls. “There’s something about them,” he ventured.

“There is. They’re the same as some music, I suppose. There’s no reason in it, but it means something.”

They approved each other, and showed it. They had confessed a common frailty. Colet handled the figure, while they speculated over her quality and the nature of her attraction.

“We had better not look for reason in it,” said the stranger. “For instance, just now she’s a bit of a nui¬ sance. I’m leaving here, but now I can’t go to my ship till this afternoon. I’ve been called by ’phone to town.

78 Q allions %each

And there it is. I can’t lug her about. I don’t like trust¬ ing rough hands with her, but I shall have to risk it.”

Jimmy was jolted by a thoughtless impulse. He might as well finish with a useless friendly act. Was it the word to say? “Where is your ship? Could I take it along? It would be safe with me. It’s all one what time I get to the city today.”

The sailor gave Jimmy a direct glance. Then he pouted at Kuan-yin. “That’s very good of you. But it’s too much to expect of a stranger.”

“Not a stranger,” said Jimmy. “I mean, I know her. I’ve got one — I had one — rather like it. No trouble to see that good thing is safe. If it would help, of course. Is your ship far?”

“I should be grateful, sir, I must say. The steamer Altair. But could you really do it? I got the thing only three days ago, in a Limehouse pawnshop. I couldn’t resist it. Now I’m suddenly shifted to this ship, and I shan’t see Newcastle yet awhile.”

Colet protested the simplicity of the task, if he could be trusted with it. His hurry was not great.

“It’s very good of you. And I can’t make any return. Sure you’ve the time for it? My ship is at Woolwich buoys. There will be a launch at the dock-head in half an hour. That would put you aboard, if you care to go. Could you wait aboard for me? If you would tell Mr Sinclair, the chief officer, that you are a friend of mine, and that I shall be aboard pretty soon after lunch — ! My name is Hale.”

Chapter Eight

Mr SINCLAIR, the chief officer of the Alt air, was on the navigating bridge, with the boatswain and a few men, and his voice was raised above the importance of the job, which was but adjusting the weather-cloth. He moved about abruptly in dispraise. Something, the boat¬ swain thought, had stung him that morning. His foxy hair was so boisterous that it strongly resented the impo¬ sition of his cap. There was reproach in his eye, and his darting energy was but the whooping of his exasperation. He had expected to get this ship, for he had earned the post; he had brought her home. But another master was coming to take charge. If there hadn’t been a new baby this voyage, worse luck, they could have found another mate for her as well. “Bo’sun, why the hell . . . !” The boatswain indicated with a warning nod that a boat was at the gangway. Sinclair shot his head over the bridge-end, saw a man of his own age in a launch, nursing a package, and conning the ship with a bright appraising eye. Here was the old man, already looking for faults. Let him find ’em. Let the whole chromatic directorate run their indecorous noses over her. She was better than they deserved, blast them. He flung down to the head of the ship’s ladder, prepared for any complaint, and hoping he would get it. He faced the newcomer with a look as direct and doubting as that of a challenging bulldog. “Well, what fault have you found so far?” But the thought was not spoken. This stranger

79

8 0 Qallions %each

did not look like a fault-finder. Sinclair mumbled some¬ thing to a new master.

“Mr Sinclair?” Then Jimmy explained. The red- haired man, so radiantly contumacious, heard him in scep¬ tical silence. Then abruptly turned. “Come this way,” he said, over his shoulder.

Jimmy followed him along a covered alleyway, past three or four teak doors with brass handles, and another that was open. In the opening lolled a figure in a dirty singlet and dungarees, its face oddly patterned in coal- dust and sweat, eating an apple. It took an irreverently noisy bite as it watched them pass. Just beyond that door the mate seemed to save himself from falling from top to bottom of a perpendicular iron ladder with miracu¬ lous deftness, and Jimmy followed him down carefully, rung by rung; then along an iron deck; then through a door in the stern. There his guide, in the indistinction, disappeared. Jimmy heard a voice. “Here you are; in here. The captain’s room. Better wait here.”

Jimmy looked round. He placed Kuan-yin in the bunk. The mate stood for a second as if he were going to fire a question. He did not fire it, but vanished. Jimmy took a wicker chair, which whined so loudly under his invasion that he thought it better for the silence if he did not move.

Eleven o’clock. New smells here. He couldn’t wait long. Why wait at all? But he could not go at once. Not fair to disturb that carroty young man too soon. Must give him a chance to cool off. Might as well take the opportunity to think a bit. What right had he to be there? Better to help save a good piece of porcelain than

Q allions %each 81

to hurry to give the police a job of work. Perhaps the accidents of circumstances were not quite so accidental as they appeared. Perhaps they knew what they were about. Well, then they knew more than he did. If they knew so much, let them take charge, and see what would happen. It was all a muddle. A muddle to him. It was not much, after all, to be charged with Perriam’s death; but it was of great importance, now, not to become involved again in that other life. That would be worse than murder. A senseless existence. Wasn’t worth a thought. That travail in London meant nothing but fodder for cattle. Cabbages for cows. Perriam alive wasn’t so important as Kuan-yin.

All rot that! Reason could always justify fears and desires.

But what else was there to do? Couldn’t run away to sea. That was ruled out. Too ignorant of life to know how to live independently. He was part of the protoplasmic reef of London, and now he was a de¬ tached polyp. Was it possible to live alone? At the very next hint of destiny, one way or another, he would take it, though it stranded the polyp high in the sun, and he dried up. The real trouble was to catch destiny when it tipped the wink.

The room seemed to be listening to his thoughts. It was very quiet, but it had thoughts of its own. You could hear them, when your own thoughts stopped. The cabin seemed to be full of reminiscences. It knew a lot. It communicated with him through the chair; tremors, clicks of adjustment, a ventriloquial murmuring. Once he heard the mate’s voice outside. That fellow did not seem much

82 Qallions %each

better yet. And then somebody in a white jacket burst into the cabin, opened his mouth when he saw the room was occupied, and left at once, closing the door with defer¬ ential gentleness. The distant trees he could see through the port had changed their position. She was swinging to the tide.

Silly to wait there. He was an intruder. Whatever place there was for him in the world, it was not that room. He went outside. Mr Sinclair hurried past him on deck. “One moment, please.” He advised the chief officer what he had done with his charge, and that the contents of the parcel were eminently precious and delicate. Mr Sin¬ clair darted back to the alleyway without a word. “Stew¬ ard!” he bawled. The man in the white jacket was there at once. “Parcel in the captain’s room. Too good to be touched. Don’t touch it. See?”

Then he turned on Colet, and his question was in his glance. “Anything more to say? Pm busy.” Jimmy explained that he would not wait for the captain. He must go now.

“What?” ejaculated the sailor. “I thought you were a passenger or the ship’s agent. Why didn’t you speak? The launch has gone. The pilot’s aboard. I’ve just had a telegram to say Captain Hale joins us at Plymouth. You’ll have to go on to Gravesend now.” He spoke as though it would not matter to him if Jimmy went fur¬ ther still.

Jimmy made a little protest.

“There it is. I can’t stop. I’m wanted above.” Mr Sinclair strode away.

The Altair was far from the shore. There was some

Q allions %each 8 3

inexplicable activity, and directing shouts. The ship began to tremble, and gave a warning bellow. She was under way. Jimmy half-wished he was going with her; a foolish wish; he did not even know where she was going.

Chapter Nine

The Altair went down on the first of the ebb at half¬ speed. Colet had not seen those shores since he came up this very reach more years ago than he could accurately count. It does not heighten the present morning light to count years you seem to have lost. But it was twi¬ light, he knew, when he was there last. Not much use peering backwards to discern what has lapsed into an old twilight. All the people who were with him then were shades in a dusk. He could not recognise them. There was a vague woman in a pale dress beside him, whose face he could not see now, but he could feel her consoling fingers rumpling his hair. Here it all was. And an old man stood up there who somehow accorded with the dark and the sound of the warning river. He remem¬ bered how the grave murmuring stirred him, while all was still. Who was that old fellow? His dim tall figure was still there. But nobody knew his name. He could hear only Mr Sinclair’s voice. No doubt about that. We live a dual existence. The people who talk to us in the pres¬ ent are unaware that we are not altogether with them. Which voyage was he making now? If that chief officer were asked, he would give an emphatic opinion, which everybody would see was obviously right; but the truth isn’t so easy as that.

He paced the deck, and watched two landscapes un¬ fold, one in an evening without a date, and another that their pilot was watching. He felt that the actual was of

84

Qallions %each 8 5

less potency, in spite of the spring sun, than the obscure land from which the sun had gone, where the people were so merged in a fading year that nothing of them remained but a gesture of affection and an absurdly solemn premo¬ nition about something he didn’t know. It looked as if the doctor who talked at breakfast was right. There can be no chart for what is of enduring importance for us. Nobody ever talks of what is of most importance to him; other people might laugh. Infinity cannot be charted. There are only private symbols, but they affect us more than the loud fussiness of the day. Perhaps, in a time not yet, even that aggressive officer on the Altair’s bridge would appear to be shadowy and significant to him. There was Mr Sinclair’s voice again. He was address¬ ing somebody in the bows, and his voice was like a gun’s. Jimmy saw some fun in that probability. It would not be easy to make an august memory of that red-headed man.

Something was happening. Of course, here was Graves¬ end. They had anchored. The day was still early. It would be easy to get back. The fellow in the white jacket approached him. “Mr Sinclair would like to see you, sir. He’s in the chart room.”

Jimmy went up. Sinclair held out his hand with an embarrassed smile. “I don’t know your name. You’ll excuse me if I’ve seemed inattentive. I’ve been rushed. The pilot will be leaving in ten minutes. He’s talking to the chief engineer. You can push off with him.”

He was assured that all was well. “Have you got an interesting voyage in front of you?”

“I haven’t. I’d stay ashore if I could. I’ve been in

86 Q allions %each

this old thing too long. Four years and two sets of owners. It’s time for a change, but she was turned round again so quickly this voyage that I didn’t get a chance to do anything about it.”

Mr Sinclair now seemed slow and sad. He was open¬ ing and closing a pair of dividers. “Look here, I’m sorry I was so busy when you boarded us. No time for a drink, and all that. Things have gone in jumps the last day or two, and I never knew which way they’d jump. The owners, you know. The blessed owners. But perhaps you don’t know ’em. The present owners are worse than the last, and old Perriam was bad enough.”

“What!” muttered Jimmy, suddenly shocked. “Did he own her?”

“Under another name. Did you know him?”

“Yes. I worked for him. I was in his office.”

Mr Sinclair betrayed no interest. “You were?” He put down the dividers, and called to a sailor outside. “Go and see if the pilot is still with Mr Gillespie.” He pushed back a chart and perched himself on the table. “I saw in a paper that the old swine is dead. Found dead in his office. About time, too. What was the matter with him; heart? Couldn’t have been. He hadn’t got one. What was it?”

Jimmy took a steady look at his watch. “So far as I know, it was a punch on the jaw.”

Mr Sinclair looked up with amused interest. “No. It was a jolly good one, then. Who hit him for us?”

“I did.”

Mr Sinclair threw up an astonished leg and laughed. He laughed with his head thrown back, loudly and with

Q allions %each 87

complete abandon to his enjoyment. He slapped his raised leg with his hand. He was wiping his eyes when he turned to Jimmy, who was speaking to him.

“Please tell me what the paper said about it.”

“Eh? Oh, nothing much. I don’t remember. Said he was dead. That’s all. Found in his office, on the floor. Just dead. I say, what the devil are you doing here? It didn’t say anyone had hit him. I don’t believe it did.”

“Well, somebody did, and here he is, though God knows why.”

A sailor came to the door and announced that the pilot was ready to go. Mr Sinclair slid off the table, hesitated, and snapped his fingers. “All right, Wilson. Tell him . . . tell him there’s nobody for the shore.”

He turned to Jimmy. “You’d better be in no hurry. You want time for this. Might as well run round to Plymouth with us. The skipper knows you, doesn t he? Nothing in it. A little loafing is all right. Besides,” he grinned, “old Perriam. That old dear. I want to hear all about it.”

Chapter Ten

The oil-lamp of the cabin, after a short sleep, would wake, and move uneasily in its gimbals. Its smoky glim was barely enough to fill the hollow cube with light, though the room was small, so the long shadow over the head of the settee might have been a man, or a hat and empty clothes dangling from a peg; for, in sympathy with the movements of the swinging lamp, and the water in the bottle, which sloped unnaturally first this way, then that, the limp clothes came feebly to life now and then, and slithered weakly over the cabin wall. They were reconciled to the perpendicular again when they found their tether would allow them no more freedom. There was no sound, except a suggestion that the night outside was a tide pouring headlong forever between the stars; but there was a tremor in the cabin, as of a dance of all its atoms, and a profound murmuring, which might have been the humming of an asteroid asleep with the speed of its rotation in space. An open book on a table beside the bunk, responsive to the dance of the atoms, was now projected over the edge, and was on the point of toppling over. The heavy brass handle of the door sud¬ denly made frantic efforts to come off, and then the door opened, and the light flattened in a cold rush of night. The book fell. When the glim stood upright in the quiet again, Sinclair was there, looking down on Colet. Jimmy continued asleep in his bunk with the calm aban¬ don of the joys and woes of earth shown by the image of

88

Qallions %each 89

a crusader in his niche in a church. The sailor grinned, and was about to go, when the sleeper opened his eyes. The formidable figure he saw filling an unfamiliar and unescapable space, giant in its glistening oilskins, brought him up on the point of leaping out to meet the monstrous adversary of a dream.

“Eight bells,” said the sailor, “and all’s well. I just popped in to see how you were taking it.

Colet sank back in a release to ease. “Where are we now?”

“Mind your own business. Do you want this boon.? What a dirty light you’ve got, though. Won’t it do any better? But this ship wasn’t fixed for comfort; only for cargo and sailors.”

Chapter Eleven

T HE unsubstantial hills of early morning stood over the steamer. Colet was on deck, for the steward had told him they were at Plymouth. Devon, waiting for the sun to give it body, was as phantom and vague as its reflection in the still water. The chief officer found Colet eyeing the shore. “The old man is aboard, Colet. And look here. Fve told him everything. I hope you don’t mind. He seems a decent old boy. Go and see him.”

Captain Hale, in his shirt sleeves, but wearing a bowler hat, was in his cabin advising the steward how he desired his property to be stowed. When Jimmy entered the room his step had to be stretched over a mound of clothes. The captain showed no surprise at his presence. “Come in, Mr Colet. Sinclair has told me all about it.” He motioned the steward out of the cabin. “Come back in five minutes.”

They talked, but the captain never took his eyes off a stack of shirts on the floor. Jimmy got an impression that somehow there was a difficulty with the laundry. They were discussing that. Some collars were missing? Even the neat pile of clean linen before him did not ap¬ pear to interest the captain very much. Perhaps it was only old stuff which had gone astray; not much good. A grey and shy little man. The captain stooped and picked up a garment; turned it about as though in de¬ preciating examination. Both of them maintained a con¬ templative silence for so long a tenuous spell that Jimmy

90

(j allions "Breach 91

was on the nervous point of bringing the encounter to a close and going out to and Sinclair and a boat. The cap¬ tain silently considered the garment in his hands.

“It’s irregular,” he murmured at last, as if in dispraise of those pants. “A bit off the course. But I can log it, I suppose.” He changed his regard to Colet, though not to his face; about as high as his knees. Merely comparing their pants?

“We leave as soon as our engineers are ready. They’ve uncoupled something below, but they won’t be long. Well, what will you do then? Go on with us?”

“What? Yes, if I may.”

“Well. It’s your affair. I suppose it’s in order. We’ll know some day. Only thing to do is what seems best at the time. I’ll see you at dinner.”

That night at dinner hardly a general word went across the table. The captain was new to the ship, and he pre¬ sided over the soup as though he were not sure that the others would care for the stuff. “Too much onion in this, steward. Remember that.” Sinclair’s stern interest was fixed where nothing could be seen. He was merely per¬ forming a duty in eating, and he picked up his cap from a sideboard and left the saloon as though glad to get out of it. The captain and the chief engineer then conversed in undertones of some technical matters. Jimmy wished to learn to where in the world the ship was bound, but he had to do without it.

Yet, when he got away from that confinement with strangers who were talking apart and confidentially of much which he did not understand and more that he did not hear, and was alone on deck, their destination, wher-

92 Q allions %each

ever it was, did not loom of importance. It was inciden¬ tal. They were outward bound. Enough for one day. One day at a time. He leaned on the lee rail, amidships, watching a distant light. That was the last spark of the old interests. It was low down. It was a wonder that it could persist. Sometimes it did go out, but reappeared, to attach and remind them. Then a big warm presence bringing the smell of a cheroot was beside him. He did not hear it approach. He smelt it first. A dark night. It said nothing. Occasionally the cigar glowed. The chief engineer? They didn’t know each other yet. That warm and comfortable shadow also seemed to be con¬ sidering the last hint of England. It remained there in solid ease for some time, but it did not speak. Then it stood up and stretched. “Aye,” it soliloquised interroga¬ tively; and then, as though in confirmation, “aye”; and that was all. Its place was empty.

So this, conjectured Jimmy, groping over his clammy door for its handle, is romance. There’s no fuss about it. You wouldn’t know it, unless you were told what it was. Altogether casual and insignificant, as if it were as silly as life itself.

Chapter Twelve

(jILLESPIE extolled the Scots. His hardihood left nothing else to talk about. The steward brisked about with the morning dishes. Jimmy, in a way that was new to him, noticed that the odour of the coffee had the effect of a clarion, of a hymn of praise. It smelt better than it tasted. The mornings were good. And this the Bay of Biscay, too! The seas were actually chanting. A stray beam of shine from the skylight swayed leisurely to and fro across the tablecloth; the water-bottle was in its track and answered the light with flashes of ruby and emerald. A rum thing, but as soon as you approached the matter of the resounding ballads and the tall tales, it was like this. On the whole, Colet thought he preferred it as it was. Look at Gillespie, that bold seaman! Or Hale, whose downcast thoughts seemed absorbed into the empti¬ ness of his plate! Easy-going and friendly. No deeps of evil and heroism there. Hale hardly ever spoke; but his words then certainly hinted that he knew what he was talking about. Gillespie continued to admonish Sinclair about the Scots, and the chief officer was smiling de¬ risively.

“Where would you have been without them? Answer that now. Talk of your Shakespeare! Aye, he wasn’t so bad. Not so bad. But there’s Burns. There’s a man for ye. Have ye the like of him? And who did all that was worth doing, marine engines, the best ships, whisky, now?”

93

94 Q allions %each

“And macadam, Gillespie. Don’t forget that.”

Jimmy had heard all this before. It was probably as constant at ships’ mess-tables as bloaters. Gillespie’s face was big and comforting, and its bronze made his grey eyes, and his crimpled and wiry hair, oddly pale and no¬ ticeable; his back was as broad as the mahogany. Sinclair had confided to Colet that the chief engineer could smell in his sleep a minor fault in the engine-room and go to it by divination. Sinclair handsomely confessed now, pulling bread apart, that he would not so strongly object to the Scots if they could talk English.

“Man, I tell ye that Scotch is the original English, anyway.”

“Of course, when we were hairy savages, living on heather tops. Before we learned better manners. I say, Gillespie. Didn’t I ever tell you? There was a Scotch¬ man, an Aberdonian, I sailed with once. He was an engineer, on his first voyage. I had to guess twice before I knew what it was he wished to tell me, but couldn’t pro¬ nounce properly. Well, we were coaling out East, and this fellow-countryman of yours was at a hatch with the Chinese Number One. They were rowing. Pidgin-Eng- lish and your kind of English. You never heard such a shocking noise. The work was getting all balled up. Nothing to do with me, of course, but I strolled along to hear what the trouble was. The young engineer tried to tell me, but the Chink broke in. He was so jolly wild. He pointed at your countryman. ‘Look!’ he said. ‘No speakee English. No speakee Chinee. All same bloody Scotchman.’ ” Sinclair went out triumphant while Gil¬ lespie was considering a shot at him.

Qailions %each 95

The captain took no part in the discussion. “He’s a lively young man,” he remarked to the engineer. “You know, Gillespie, I’m told that I’m a Scot, or that I was.”

Thus that day drew insensibly towards noon. The next day was like it, and the day after was separated but by another night. Time was alternate day and night. Their ship was enchanted to the centre of a vast and empty world. It was the dot and focus of a radiant vacuity; and it was a handhold when about them there was nothing but the stars and the dirge of the abyss. It laboured, it beat down without ceasing glassy upheavals and spread around them fields of hissing white, but it could never escape to that dark and distant line where the wall of heaven stood about them. They were alone. The ro¬ mance of the sea had flown off, perhaps, on the wings of the clippers, and it was lost. It was not there. But the sea and the sky were unaware of any loss. They were beautiful, but were aloof from the desires and anxieties of man. The deck was orange and crimson with rust. Even iron-rust, when it was seen in the right place, ac¬ corded with a mind in which perturbation was lessening. Jimmy had a word with Sinclair about that rust. Sinclair surveyed it, and advised Colet that it would do him more good to take a chipping hammer to it. What was more, it would have to be done. The black funnel and the yellow masts leaned this way and that, and sometimes swung in a half-circle.

A coast appeared, late one afternoon. It was illusive, but it must have been land. The shape of earth there, Colet saw, had the luminous indistinction of a pale-blue flower in sunlight; and those strips of orange would be its

96 Q allions %each

beaches. The sky over the inland hills of violet was a clear height of greenish ether. The ship was lost, very likely. It had strayed to a younger and brighter planet. An opposite coast formed, with a scatter of white specks down by the sea. The captain stood with Colet on the starboard side of the bridge. “There’s Tangier,” said Hale.

Names. Bare names. They were no nearer the reality than ever. The only reality was their present ship and its men. Hale, and that spellbound seaman inside the wheel-house, were solid. They were there. But beyond them was the old vaporous abstraction. Perhaps an Odyssey could begin with every voyage of every ship. But how was a voyager to know that? What would be the alarming signal: “Here you start”? Did it all depend on the spectator himself? Perhaps there is no adventur¬ ous morning light showing things anew for those who sleep on. How is one to know whether one is awake or asleep? Captain Hale, having indicated the presence of Africa, remained in the same position, leaning on the weather dodger, with his lean brown hands clasped before him. His white shirt cuffs were linked with gold. A neat, precise, and sensible deacon. He was still regarding Tangier in apparent belief. Somebody was playing an accordion in the forecastle. “How strange,” commented the ship’s master. “I don’t think I’ve heard that tune since one night at the Queen’s Palace of Varieties. You wouldn’t know it. Poplar High Street. I was a young¬ ster then, in a barque in the South Dock. I heard Jenny Hill that night. Before your time, I think. No, you wouldn’t know her. They called her the Vital Spark.”

(j allions %each 97

Captain Hale was still considering the portentous gloom of Africa, and seemed pleased with it.

Good Lord! thought Jimmy. Here we are, and the men together on the same ship are in different seas, and only appear to be together. They see different things. What would make this world common for us all? “The Great Macdermott was on the program that night,” quietly continued Hale.

“We don’t want to fight, but by jingo if we do?”

“Yes. You’ve got him. That’s the fellow.”

“It’s a long time ago.”

“Yesterday, or thereabouts, my boy. Just feel out revolutions.”

Jimmy gave conscious attention to the incessant and energetic throbbing which was the only warning of their progress.

“She’s doing her best,” he reported.

“She is,” said Hale. “Well, that’s how time goes.” He turned to look at their wake. Jimmy turned. Their track diminished to infinity on the uneventful sea towards the declining sun.

Chapter Thirteen

A LITTLE concentration with a chipping hammer will do more to the inexperienced back than to a rusty deck. Colet, not to be beaten, ached while he chipped, and the sun burned his neck. The rust was even drier than ledgers. How long to go to one belli A flake struck his eye, and he gave it a rest; he stretched his back. The sea, after the near red deck, expanded into an astonishing sapphire. An island was in sight in the blaze of day, a desert of tawny rock. It quivered under the sun and the lucent breeze. Where had that place come from? Con¬ jured up? Sinclair, on his way aft, rebukingly active, descended an iron ladder to the deck with a rapid tattoo of his feet, but checked alongside Colet to peer at '•he island. One tiny house by the shore, a white cube, was all that showed in the desert.

“That’s where she lives,” confided Sinclair. “Circe waits for me there, but alone. No leopards. And espe¬ cially no swine. Only jars of wine.”

“Have you ever seen her?”

“On my first voyage. Yes, I think I saw her. Just a glimpse.”

“But that line of white along the shore. That’ll be the bones of sailors.”

“Served ’em right. I’m the man. One day I shall land, and then she’ll come down to the beach. No good looking today. You won’t see her. She knows I’m pass-

98

Q allions %each 99

ing the place. Not the time yet to stop. Farewell, Circe, my darling!” Sinclair kissed his hand to the mirage.

Their ship touched earth again at Port Said. That was a solid abode of men, with the assured smells of historical contamination and well-established intercourse. No doubt about Port Said. It was an area of understandable life, noisy and lusty. It was ramshackle, insistent, preda¬ tory, and raucous. Goats reclined in its gutterways. Its crowds hinted indifference or hostility. Venders of ob¬ scenities, purveyors of cosmopolitan lesions, enticed with the smirking confidence that the desires of their own species were well known to them. It swarmed with flies. Its canal was a lucky way of escape.

But by Suez, one daybreak, Colet sat up in his bunk from sleep with the instant waking certainty that some¬ thing was going to happen. The ship, too, he could feel, was waiting for it. She was still and reconciled. She was anchored? The cabin was as close and quiet as a crypt. A crypt; this might be the breathless Resurrection day. There was no sign. It had not begun yet. The book he had been reading late into the night was just discernible, open on the floor, where it had fallen from his bunk. Something in his favour. It was the Bible. The book looked up at him. It counselled him nothing from that distance below. There was not a sound. The ship was abandoned; he was left aboard, to make the best of it on his own?

Colet glanced out of the cabin port. There stood ghostly what must be the usual stanchion, and a loose rope was beside it hanging from above. The rope was as still as the iron. That appearance of waiting in resigna-

100 Q allions %each

tion was more than strange. It was a warning. The queer thing was that London seemed of less consequence to him now than that book on the floor. Reading that book had been his last act. The shadow of London moved but once in his thought as he sat up, but it had gone. Of no importance. What was important now? Through the port, beyond the stanchion, the distance deepened as he looked. Light was coming. Land formed under it.

Syria, very likely. Somewhere hereabouts Moses used to roam with his aboriginal mob and his first laws done in stone. Perhaps this was the chosen region of earth, when¬ ever it was decided to vouchsafe a new light. That silence and brooding obscurity would make a man contrite and willing to learn. Out there, something would soon begin. The eastern sky seemed to be indicating the dread judg¬ ment to come, but no sign was under it of the works of men. Or else all that was in hiding. Men and their work had guessed what was coming. They had crawled under the film of sin and night which the past had left on the earth. But the upstanding ship would be conspicuous. That stanchion was already plain. A level flush of reddish gold beyond made the earth shrink into a deeper dark, but the elevated iron of the ship from London, unable to escape, was brightly caught. Without the sound of a trumpet the eye of Heaven suddenly lifted and blazed. Bones and opinions were like glass. The earth was pros¬ trate under that unremitting stare.

Every man but Colet at the saloon breakfast was in a white uniform. Immaculate linen for a transcendent day, when the old things had passed. Were they all confident they would be approved, and had anticipated it in pure

Q allions %each 101

raiment? Captain Hale waved aside the bloater and bacon. No more grease. There was a stifling suggestion that furnace doors were somewhere open. “Not now,” he said. “This gulf is the easier for a little fasting.”

“Man, never give in to the Red Sea,” said Gillespie. “How would you care for yon engine room now?” he asked Sinclair.

The chief officer was glum. He wiped his wet face. He glared malignantly at old Gillespie. “Engine room! This is about the place where all that began, isn’t it? Civilization and engines. God seems to be savage about it now. On the bridge you’d think he was trying to burn out a mistake.”

“It’s no right. That’s no the way to talk. Sun and rock and no wind. What would ye expect?”

“I tell you he is sorry he let us start it. This place is being paid out. That’s what makes it so damned hot.”

“Och! Get away, man!”

“It’s your cursed engines and science, that’s my idea, Mr Engineer.”

The captain smiled; he was not at breakfast; he was waiting for a message from the shore. “Don’t let it worry you. We can’t alter it. It’s not Gillespie’s fault.”

“I think so, sir. If it wasn’t for engines, we shouldn’t be here.”

“An’ where would ye be? Piddling aroun’ south with a bit canvas. I tell ye. The engineers are the men. Ye couldna do withoot them.”

“I think,” said Hale, “Sinclair is not really annoyed with the engines. He must find them handy, at times.

102 Q allions %each

Perhaps he is only thinking of the uses to which we put our knowledge. Is that it, Mr Sinclair?”

The chief officer had not seen this turn to his petulance. “Well, sir. No. I don’t know. I was only hot.”

The engineer presently left, still argumentative. “Hot! I never heard the like of it.” The captain shook his head in amusement at his lieutenant. “Be careful, mister. If you must get peevish, don’t blaspheme science. Nobody will mind if you round on God. But leave the engines alone. They’re sacred.”

Sinclair looked round at the master in a little surprise. That elderly man was sitting with his eyes cast down, but he looked up friendlily at his junior. “You’ll find it so,” he said. “It’s no good getting annoyed with the way of things. We might as well argue with the seasons. They change, when the turn comes. Some day — perhaps — even engines may not be sacred.” He went Ou.ii of the saloon, but came back to put his head in the door. “We get going in about half an hour.”

They went on. The ship came to sullen life, grumbling and stuffy, breathing cinders heavily all over them from a languid bulge of smoke. She had entered another region of earth, and was committed to another existence. Europe was far off, and out of mind; they were beset by another order, and must make the best of it with the little they knew. The shores near to them on either beam showed that Sinclair was right in one thing. Those coasts were burnt out. There the earth had finished with men. There was no more darkness in the high bergs of Africa. They were masses of radiant bronze and brass. The very sea was lumpish and resentful of the intrusion of keels.

Q allions %each 103

It did not want them to pass. At sunset it was a level of heavy lava, polished and opaque, where their ship was fixed centrally in a glow between fulgent metallic shores. Sounds had gone from that world, for no men were there, no rain, and no wind.

Off the island of Socotra they found some air, and their ship began to sway. They had crossed over; they were involved now in the hazard of a new probation. The waters opened to the East, to a legend that was fabulous in ancient cities when London was sedge and mud.

“It doesn’t look as if the monsoon had broken, sir,” said Sinclair to the captain. They were on the bridge. Socotra, a serrated confusion of the horizon, was far to starboard.

“No,” said Hale. “I wish it had. We should know what to expect. The weather looks oily. I think we will have those hatch covers secured. Never know when it may break.”

But Colet was trying to puzzle out Socotra from a ravel of cloud, sea glint, and shadow. That presence was more insistent than a monsoon which was not there. “I’ve heard of Socotra often enough, and there it is. Have you ever been there, Captain?”

Sinclair frowned to starboard as if that shape had no right on the seas. Hale took Colet’s arm, and surveyed the island, with a little smile.

“No, and I’ve never met a man who has. But there it always is, somehow. If you want to know about some of the things here, you’ll get it from Sinbad.”

Chapter Fourteen

At THE saloon mess-table, the guardians of the ship were allusive about her welfare. The set of a current had been adverse; she was seven miles astern of her estimated position. The signs in the heavens induced respectful references to the habits of the Arabian Gulf. The glass was briefly indicated; Colet surmised, while taking an¬ other piece of toast, that it was not happy in its divination. The high-pressure cylinder had taken to blowing through its packing; it was wheezy. “Man, yon’s a sad waste o’ power.” And one of the deck-hands was sick. Fever, very likely.

“At Rotterdam,” Sinclair baldly hinted.

“Aye, the heat will bring it out,” confirmed Gillespie, with luscious gravity. Then he exhibited some startling instances from the store of a long familiarity with sin. He indulged in illustrative cases with composure and fond irrelevance.

“I’ll see this man,” announced Hale, hastily rising while still the boding symptoms of another exemplary case were unfulfilled. Gillespie shook his pow in apprecia¬ tive warning over sin.

Colet accompanied the captain on his way to the fore¬ castle, and he noticed, because the master paused to in¬ spect them, that the forehatches were laced over with cordage. The master disappeared within the dark aper¬ ture of the forecastle. Colet mounted the ladder to its deck. That was a noble outlook at the beginning of the

104

Q allions %each 105

day. It was dry and red-crusted, weather-stained, iso¬ lated as a vantage exposed to an immensity of light. It was solitude. It might have been as old as the sea itself, by the look of it. It was hoar with salt.

And the ship’s head was alive. It was massive but buoyant. It seemed to inflate and to mount quickly and easily with enormous intakes of air; then, sighing through its hawse-pipes, it declined into the friendly rollers. If you looked overside and down, the cutwater of the ship was deep and plain in the blue transparency, coming along with unvarying confidence like the brown nose of an exploring monster. When the ship’s head plunged over a slope, an acre of blinding foam spread around and swept astern, melting and sibilant.

Companies of flying-fish were surprised by that iron nose, and got up. They skittered obliquely over the bright polish of the inclines, and plumped abruptly into smooth slopes which opposed them. A family of four dolphins were there that morning. They were set in the clear glass just before the cutwater. They did not fly from it. Their bodies but revolved leisurely before it. The crescent valves in their heads could be seen sleepily opening and closing when they touched the surface, with the luxury of life in the cool fathoms. One after another idly they rolled belly up; they were merely revolving without progress, yet the fast-pursuing iron nose never reached them. It was always just behind the family, which wove a lazy and gliding dance before the ship. Artfully leading them on, these familiars of the deep?

It was a fair world into which they were being led. It reposed in an eternal radiant tranquillity. The Indian

106 Q allions "Breach

Ocean was as inviting as its name. There were clouds ahead, but they were fast to the sky line; they were as remote as the ghostly mountains and steeps of a land no man would ever reach. This world of the tropics was but an apparition of splendour. It was there, by the chance of good fortune. It was seen only by the desiring mind. It was like the import of great musi,c, for which there is no word. If you stood looking at it long enough, the bright dream would draw you out of your body.

The ship’s head fell sideways into a deeper hollow, and Colet returned without warning to an iron deck. He was swung round on his handhold. The rail he struck was hard. Steady! Solid fountains burst loudly through the hawse-pipes. There was impetuosity in the lift of the ship’s head. She got out of the smother in a hurry. By the look of it, more was coming. The rollers had seemed to be growing heavier. It was getting wet up there. Colet retreated. When he was mounting the ladder amidships a sharp lurch of the ship left him dangling by his hands. The boyish third officer on the deck above respectfully watched him while his feet sought the ladder again.

“A beam sea setting in, Mr Colet. Makes her roll.”

It was making her roll. But it was very agreeable. It shook off the weight of the heat. These were the first seas worth the lively name since the voyage began. It was like the real thing to see the decks getting wet; to be caught at a corner by a dollop of rollicking brine. Hullo, Sinclair! Colet mentioned this novelty as they met by the engine-room entrance. He spoke of it lightly, wiping some spray from his eyes. Sinclair showed amusement, but his gaze was elsewhere. They had to steady them-

Q allions %each 107

selves, in their pause, by gripping the ironwork. The movements of the ship, to Colet’s surprise, were exhilarat¬ ing. They shifted him from an old centre of thought. The rhythm of the ship’s compensations was the measure of easy and solid courage.

“I don’t know,” mused Colet, “but once, just once, I think I’d like to see all this when it was not play.”

“Play?” exclaimed the sailor. “Play? If anybody else had said that, I’d tell him not to be a fool.”

Colet made a dramatic appeal to the listening and jealous gods to forget his childish indiscretion. Only his ignorance. The issue of a fathead. It was born of his trust in his company. He reposed in the faith that the Altair was a sound old dear.

Sinclair grinned. “Perhaps you didn’t catch what the old man was mumbling at breakfast?” He poked his companion in the ribs. “You’re coming along, my son. A bit too confident, that’s all. When you’re a sailor, you’ll cross yourself if you hear some one talk as you did.”

“I’m sure of it. What was it the captain said at breakfast?”

“Oh, nothing. He’s a cautious old boy, I think. Wanted me to believe he doesn’t like the look of it. But I can t smell anything in the wind. Seems all right. I don’t see anything in this.”

It was all right, though the draught which was upset by the rocking of the ship was languid, and the breath of an oven.

Night fell; the day was abolished abruptly. There were brief up-glarings of a desperate sun taken by an in-

108

Qallions %each

surrection of darkness. He was put down. The authority of day was overturned. The ship alone of all the world below held with startled emphasis the memory of a bright¬ ness extinguished. For a few moments there was the pale wraith of a deck, vertiginous in its slant, with its fixtures bleak and exposed; and then the only lights were the stars concentrated low in a patch of the southern sky. In the south, the stars were the lights of a city without a name where there could be no land. They could see the frenzied glittering of its lamps. For the show of that city behaved only as would an hallucination in a region that was enthralled by the powers of darkness. Now its level was below them, and now it soared towards the meridian.

Chapter Fifteen

“Come now, will you?” said the captain.

Colet was glad of a change from that erratic dinner table, and gestured his readiness. He was to be purser for the evening. He followed the master out of the saloon. As he reached its door the opening uprose, as though to frustrate his intent. He gripped the door-post. Whoa! He waited. The chance came. The deck sloped the other way, and, almost under control, Colet shot through. The far side of the alleyway saved him, though harshly.

“She’s lively,” said the master. “Here we are.” He steadied Colet into his room.

“I thought monsoons were friendly winds,” Colet joked.

“There is no wind,” he was told. “Not yet. Just a bit of a swell. Sit there. That way you won’t feel it so much. There you are, if you would check the manifest for me with the stowage plan.” He stood over Colet, and explained the documents. “I was not about when she was loaded, and we have a number of ports. You can help me here. It’ll keep you from noticing her capers.”

It was not easy to ignore her capers. They raised a number of doubts which jolted one’s consideration from the job, yet could not be answered. Get on with the job then. Didn’t know enough to answer them. He knew about as much as an ant in its hill under a blunder¬ ing cow; and the astral cow blundering about now had enormous splay hooves. There was a boom, and an answering panic of crocks in the pantry. His considera-

109

110 Q allions %each

tion of his job was shifted, and he glanced at Hale, to see whether this was portentous. The attention of the cap¬ tain, however, rapt as at prayer, was devoted to his desk. Hale but cleared his throat, and turned over a sheet as though it were a token of a rosary.

They worked without a word for a time, and then Colet put a question to the master.

“Eh?” said Hale, turning leisurely. “No, that is prob¬ ably a slip. Make a mark there.”

The master remained, for a spell, thoughtful in that apposition to his amateur purser.

“It’s an idea of mine that there’s an intention to sell her out East, when we are cleared,” he soliloquized. “Chinese owners, I expect. But don’t discuss that out¬ side. It’s only a guess since I took her over. I go by this and that.”

“Surely the owners would have told you?” Colet be¬ came bright. He was relieved to hear some cool and intelligent human sounds. It was enjoyable to encourage them.

Hale smiled wanly. “A ship’s master is not so impor¬ tant as he used to be. Like the rest of the servants, he’s on a length of string, and doesn’t always know who is pulling it, nor why. But it’s no good complaining of the way the world goes.”

His thin hand went over his thin hair. Colet felt stir within him the warmth of a liking for that frail figure. It was insignificant, till its eye met yours. Then you guessed a hidden but constant glim. That man looked as though he had made his humble acceptance, but could not be de¬ ceived by the bluff of chance. He met Colet’s eye then,

Qallions %each 111

and might have guessed that something had quickened in his junior.

“We are apt to make too much of our importance, Colet, when we don’t like things, or they don’t like us. But, you know, the best we can do is to keep our own doorstep clean. We can always manage that.”

As if to try his faith, his own ship then treated him with indignity. She went over, and Hale, nearer her side, sank low, and was huddled into his chair. Colet over¬ looked the master from a higher position. Hale wrestled patiently with the arm of his seat to escape from his ungraceful posture.

“That was a big one. They racket things so.”

The cabin itself was quiet. At times it complained a little, but in undertones. It seemed apart, an illuminated hollow where understandable and well-ordered objects were an assurance of continuity, while all without was dark confusion, besieging it, yet unable to do more than move it, never to disorder it. Its lamp burned steadily. Perhaps it was the master who gave it that air of sanity and composure while anarchy was at its walls. Hale, slight and elderly, with his deliberation which was not unlike weariness, was an augury of grey wisdom and the symbol of conscious control amid the welter of huge and heedless powers. Boom and crash, but the old man took no notice. The portrait of a stout matron, her arm round a little girl, regarded them sedately from a bulkhead. No other ornament was in the cabin, except the faded photograph of a sailing ship over the bunk. Colet’s ribs were squeezed, first against one arm of his chair, then the other. That was another distraction; trying to keep

112 Q allions %each

still. The deck rose under them, and Colet dizzily won¬ dered how high it intended to go; the grind of the pro¬ peller then grew loud in its monody, and even frantic. The cabin trembled. His seat sank under him, and his attention went another way, for the suggestion of empty gulf was sickening, and the propeller moaned in the very deeps. She heaved and tilted. The purser grabbed his escaping papers.

Something avalanched outside, and then continued a noisy career. What was that? Colet again looked at the captain for a sign. There was none. The master sat at his desk, turned from it a little now, scrutinizing a document through his uplifted spectacles. His attention was wholly given to that.

Nothing in it. Don’t be a fool. Look after your own doorstep. But a more violent lift, a louder explosion of a breaking sea, would set him calculating, as it began, the probable extent of a movement. How far would this one go? Worse than the last? Sometimes it was. Yet Hale released sheet after sheet, sometimes turning to his desk to make a note; he lit his pipe, and nothing could have been so reassuring as the leisure of its blue smoke. All was well. Colet resumed his clerkship, and half for¬ got beleaguerment by the unseen in an interval of com¬ parative ease. The seas were lessening?

Certainly. That was only a minor jar; but when Colet would have made the cheerful comment aloud, he saw the captain had lowered his papers and was listening atten¬ tively, as though waiting for another cryptic message from the night, gazing at the foot of the door of his cabin over the top of his glasses. Colet watched him for an interpre-

Q allions %each 113

tation. Hale only relaxed and sighed; and then, seeing that the purser was expectant, he spoke.

“Colet, it occurs to me that somewhere about now makes for me forty years of this. Yes. You see that barque there? She was my first, forty years agone this month. This job, when I’m through, will be my last. I was of half a mind not to take it. I’ve had my share, I think. But that child,” Hale indicated the portrait, “she’s in for her degree now. I thought I ought to make this trip. A little extra for her.”

While he was communing a whispering began on the deck above. It increased to a heavy drumming.

“I thought so,” Hale remarked, his ear cocked. “Rain. But no wind, and this swell. A cyclone in the northeast somewhere.” He added the conclusion indifferently.

There was a knock at the cabin door. A man out of the dark stood there, a barefooted seaman in his dripping oilskins.

“Mr Sinclair, sir. He wants you on the bridge.”

“Anything wrong, Wilson?”

“I don’t know, sir. The steering gear, I think, sir.”

“I’m coming.”

Hale assembled his papers deftly, stowed them, and opened a cupboard. He hauled out oilskins and seaboots. He was buttoning the stiff stuff across his throat, his head thrown back.

“Wait here, Colet,” he said. “I thought I heard an unusual thump just now.”

The captain, Colet imagined, was diminished by that armour for the weather. His face, framed by the sou’¬ wester, looked womanish, as though he were in the wrong

114 Qallions %each

clothes. Hale glanced at the barometer, gave it a closer inspection on whatever it was it told him, and stumped out.

Colet waited. He continued his work, pausing now and then to listen for evidence. There were fewer noises. The ship itself appeared to be making no sound. The waters were nearer, or louder. Anyone would think . . . Had the engines stopped? He opened the door and put his head out. The steward was hurriedly balancing his way along the corridor.

“Anything the matter, steward?”

“Mr Colet, the rudder’s gone.”

Chapter Sixteen

The steward departed, chary of words, as though he were on his way to get another rudder. He had no time to talk.

The violent rolling of the ship did not relent. That seemed senseless, when she was crippled. She ought to be let off, now she could not steer. Impossible to think, with that rolling.

Colet, to his great annoyance, found that his knees were shaking. He had not told them to. He did not want them to shake. He damned those quivering members of his body, and would have stiffened them, but that he was flung against a bulkhead, and so brought down some of the master’s pipes from a rack. Something to do, any¬ way. He could recover tobacco pipes while others found a rudder. Better men had to look after the ship for those who attended to pipe-racks, while waiting.

They also serve who only look after the tobacco pipes. If there was no wind when he first went into that room, something was howling now all right. It was no good waiting for the captain. Hale was not likely to return till . . . well, he wasn’t likely to return. The best thing to do would be to go and find the men at the centre of things, because that cabin had precious little interest now. It was useless to wait there, at that time of night, when for all he knew they soon might be taking to the boats.

He heard a heavy concussion. The cabin shook. The papers on which he had been working fell to the floor.

115

116 (j allions %each

The boats! Colet watched the papers sprawling and scattering. They had lost their meaning. They were just as well where they were. But there would be no boats for the sea which could make that sound. The cabin re¬ versed, and as it did so a tongue of water shot over the carpet straight for the papers. Colet dived for them and snatched them out of its way. Save the stationery!

He straightened them on the desk. With measured deliberation he sought carefully for the sheet on which he had been working. They were all in a mess, these sheets, but so was everything else. At least, the ship’s papers could be put in order. No more water seemed to be coming in. That was only a splash. Not founder¬ ing yet. He settled the papers into their sequence, and began again on them at the mark. The captain had said Wait.

It was the only thing to do, but that lad Casabianca deserved a better poem. It would be easy to wait on a deck diminishing in dissolution if one but knew the reason for it. But this was only an idiot joke, dutifully complet¬ ing a ship’s papers when the mysterious reason was trying to turn the ship over. Now the infernal water was under the desk. Reason! No more reason in it than in the hot gas which congealed to a mud ball, on which grew the truth, and crosses and nails for those who dared to men¬ tion it. What a joke; and nobody to get a laugh out of it!

Let her roll. He could not stop it. Time for a pipe. Not his affair. Funny, that a man should curse the stars in their courses, when he was beset. Same thing as a rat biting his trap, maybe. Lucky to have a job to do, if only a job of checking packages of pots and pans, when

Q allions %each 117

heaven itself was cracking. “We are but little children meek.” The tune of this hymn, for some uninvited cause, was running through his head. The movements of the ship kept it going. “Not born in any high estate.” Couldn’t very well call this estate puffed up. “What can we do for Jesus’ sake?” Well, Jesus, I was checking this ship’s manifest when I went down. Sorry it’s wet.

What was the time? To his surprise, the clock said it was another morning again. The skipper’s cabin was in a sorry state. Somebody was attempting the door, but the slant of the ship held it fast. The door rattled, and then Hale entered. He showed no surprise at finding the purser still busy. He took a towel and wiped his face. “I should drop that now,” he remarked.

Colet told him he had just finished it. Hale looked at the clock, and thanked him. The purser modestly waited for the master to give a word on the business without, but Hale merely balanced himself patiently to the movements of his room, and sought for something in a drawer.

“By the way, Colet, you could turn in here. It would save you the run to your own place.”

But Colet felt a sudden dislike of the suggestion of that isolation.

“Oh, thank you. But I’ll make for my own cubby-hole. It’ll do me good, to run for it.”

That was all. Not a word about the rudder. And per¬ haps it would be better not to ask questions. Perhaps rudders were indelicate. By Hale’s manner, too, it might be only a rather wet night. It would be nobler to assume the night was merely wet.

118 Q allions %each

Hale led on to the head of the companion to the quar¬ ter-deck.

“Can’t open the lower door,” he explained. The master stood there, with his hand on the upper door, as though listening for some one who would let them out. “Now,” he muttered, opened it on the instant, and they were both in the night.

The night engulfed them with a roar as though it saw them instantly. Colet was separated from Hale. There was no ship. There was but a pealing and a shouting. The darkness was full of driving water. It was hard to breathe. Hale had gone. Colet forgot which was the head and which the stern. A burst of spray raked past. Then he felt a grip on his arm, and a warm mouth sought his ear. Hale was saying something, but his words were torn away.

“What?”

The skipper’s voice was at once superior to the chaos:

“We can do it.”

Wanted a bit of doing. Like trying to walk a plank you couldn’t see which was only there sometimes. It was a wonder it ever came back. My God! she was like a balloon, trying to sail out of it. But the water was up there too. Here was the ladder down to the deck. He had got on to its rungs when the warm mouth came near his ear again:

“Wait. Hold tight.”

The thing under their feet heaved, but checked, as if this was too much for it. The night exploded over them and fell in broken thunder. Couldn’t go through that.

“Go on,” ordered invisible Hale. They reached the

Q allions %each 119

deck, and ran. Ran in short lengths. You can’t keep running on a slope which changes direction abruptly in the dark. Together they got to the foot of the ladder to the bridge-deck, and Hale pushed Colet at it, the signal to mount quickly; but when he gripped the iron thing it came at him as though loose. He was pulling the ladder out of the ship. Nothing to stand on. Then the ship fell head first into nothing; the purser’s face was dragged after the retreating ladder and struck it. Colet could hear the sea in behind him and clambered up; yet hesi¬ tated.

“Captain?”

The old man was in that below. No good shouting. The purser got down to the deck again, and groped, with the flood at his knees. He found Hale on his hands and knees, rising, and clutched him.

“Go on, go on,” Hale shouted.

The captain came into Colet’s cabin with him, and stayed there for a moment. He was smiling.

“You would never have believed that, would you, Colet?”

Colet, a little breathless, held to the edge of his bunk. He hinted that the violence seemed a bit unreasonable.

“No. There’s sufficient cause. I’ve seen it before. We must wait for daylight.”

When the master had gone, Colet considered his bunk. No. The settee tonight. No use turning in, when things were happening all the time. But it needed very delib¬ erate control to sit there, waiting for light to come, when the world was falling to pieces. Especially when, the longer you waited, the louder grew the mania of the wind,

120 Q allions %each

and the more surprisingly delirious mounted the buoy¬ ancy of the ship. Could she stand it? She seemed terri¬ fied. Colet remembered a rabbit he had once seen leap¬ ing and convulsive in a wire noose. She was desperate, but she was done.

Colet surrendered limply to the anarchy. Once he rose, and vomited. Well . . . the day was about due. The wind did all the moaning that was necessary. That moan outside would do for all creation. No need to add to it. It was the antiphon of doom. And it didn’t seem to mat¬ ter now. Nothing more to do. A sea battered on his door, but Colet did not look up. Might as well rest while waiting.

Chapter Seventeen

The port light was a grey round, and the lamp was paled. When Colet noticed that, he wondered how it had come about. He peered out from the port. He could see nothing but wan panic, and a long loose end of rope resting straight on the wind as rigid as an iron bar. This was called day. The deck looked as though no man had been on it for years; but Sinclair came into view, leaning and pulling up against the drive of morning. Coming to him? Colet got at the door to be ready for him. It felt as if it weighed tons. It fought.

“Fuh, Colet,” he breathed. “You’re not overside, eh?”

He tore his sou’wester off. His hot hair was extin¬ guished and flattened.

“What a night!”

Sinclair’s appearance was almost that of a stranger. His face was bleached and seamed, his eyes were raw. They blinked sorely as he grinned. He plumped on to the couch and leaned back.

“She has had a time. Two boats look as if elephants had sat in them. The old man was right, after all.”

The grin remained on his face. He had forgotten to take it off. He was grinning at the window.

“Look at that rope. Hell! Look at it.”

“Is Hale all right?”

“Eh? Yes, he’s still up there.”

Sinclair was regarding now in childish wonder a wound

121

122 (jallions %each

on his hand. “How did that come?” He dismissed his hand.

“The old man? Yes. Well, this ship’s got a skipper. Colet, the old man’s right, if anyone wants to know.”

“How is it now?”

“Don’t ask. She’s taking it easier, though. Sitting in it like a duck. Shouldn’t have thought it possible, but the old man was sure she would. Been rolling her bridge ends under, too. Glad to see daylight.”

Sinclair shut his eyes.

“I say, I think I’ll take my ten minutes here. Handy, here.”

He sought Colet again, with a grin.

“Nice job for this child presently, when it moderates. Coming with us? The rudder’s broken at the couplings. You know that? Must get her under control. There’s a boat to be got out. Wires from the steering chains to the rudder. That sort of thing. Fix it up. You’d better make for the bridge-house now, the old man says. Tell him where I am, won’t you?”

The chief officer’s head fell sideways; this time he was certainly asleep.

The purser adventured for the bridge-house. If you checked yourself from point to point, hand over hand, you were not hurled along. The wind was solid. The purser did not look at the seas, but some heights caught his eye as they fled past. They were aged. It was better not to look at them. Hale turned his head as Colet entered. He grimaced at him humorously. Was the old man en¬ joying it? A seaman was still at the useless wheel, as if apart, and in a trance, looking to futurity through the

Qallions "Breach 123

glass, and waiting. His jaws moved slightly, now and then, but that was all. Nobody else was there.

“Did you sleep, Colet? No sleep till morn, eh? Well,

I think it moderates a bit. We shall be busy, soon. I want you with me in case. The lads are taking a rest now.”

The master resumed his vigil. His head was turned to the world beyond. But that world had contracted. One could not see far, but the intimidated eye could see all that it wanted. The sky had closed down on them, and they were circumscribed by a sunless incertitude. In that grey vacancy shadows appeared which were too high to be of water, but those ghosts darkened and emerged as seas which saw the ship at once and came at her in towering velocity. As they shaped, each of them threatened that it was the one which would finish her, but the Altair heaved into the sky out of it in time. Yet another was always coming when one had gone. The desolate head of the ship, condemned to dreary unrest, streamed with gauzes of water. Its stanchions and rails were awry and tortured. A length of the bulwarks of