“Proof they come true? What proof do we want?” said a 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 have it. Better than London, or any other proof. If I had my time over again. …”
The speaker was tall but misty, yet Jim could see he was an old man. His voice was like the sound of water. He was staring over their heads, at the darkness, at London.
“Staying away or coming back makes no difference. There are other worlds.”
Nobody answered him. The tall stranger continued to stare ahead, and was silent. Then another voice asked, “Where are we now?”
The old man remained standing. He did not seem to hear the question. The only answer to it was the murmuring of the tide. The standing figure seemed to have forgotten them. The boy looked up at the tall old man, who continued to gaze over the heads of the others. Was he looking to 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 something 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.
II
There is a region of grey limestone and glass, horizontally stratified into floors, intersected by narrow ravines called avenues, and honeycombed by shipping and commercial offices, which lies between Fenchurch and Leadenhall Streets. Billiter Avenue is one of its intersecting clefts. This secluded corner of the city must be traversed on foot, because its narrow paths are marked out only for its cliff climbers; but nobody ever goes into it except they 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 privileged. 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 sunlight, or a snail on the thorn, might seem to be above its dry and papery fame. Still, its virtue is there, powerful, though abstract and incredible. The attraction of the hidden treasure of this region, if as baffling to strangers as the beauty of the innumerable brass nameplates 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 inscriptions to be the marks of anxious men who 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 ciphers, is thronged with a legion as intent and single-minded as that of 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 Perriams, 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 famous, in its own place. There it is as familiar a word as Colombo, Rangoon, Penang, Borneo, or China. Perriam is synonymous with produce. It is rubber, copra, nutmegs, tea, gums, pepper, sugar, rattans, tortoiseshell 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 a Perriam who had been master and part-owner of an opium clipper. There is no need to say any
