Gallions Reach

a petulant 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 opinions 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.

Doris Oliver was looking at Helen with her black eyebrows 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 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 coaxed 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 interview 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 cherishing 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 wandered. 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 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 quick for a Teutonic goddess. She was wasted on a chap whose game was bales and casks and all that. Such a fellow could do nothing with a bosom which was meant for privileged joy. Beside her, Doris was a peevish child. All the same it would not be pleasant to annoy Helen. 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 book of new 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 psychoanalysis and negro mythology?”

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

“Well, I couldn’t get them out of footnotes and 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 surprising little book, though it smelt like the dissection of bad innards.”

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 lighthearted young man. “Sit down and let Suvretta refresh you. Look at the Princess Olga. And there’s a table full of Russian dancers over there. Hors d’oeuvres all over the room.”

Jimmy blinked obediently towards the princess, but saw no distinguishing back in that direction. The Russian 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 talking calmly to Doris. The biologist was relating a story happily to a girl Colet did not 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