“Morning, sir!” A junior clerk went off with the letters for the post. As soon as the lad was round the bend of the stairs he began to whistle cheerfully. The lucky young devil. He had not been there twenty years. Well, the work was all right. It was good fun, plotting round difficulties and making them flourish into profit.
But that was only a game for children. He was good at the game, but his zest merely filled up empty time. This really was nothing to do with him. All very well, though, talking like that. What was his work? Where was it? Perhaps a man never found his place in the world. No blessed angel ever was on hand to conduct a fellow to his pew on earth. There was no way of learning whether you were in the right place. Well, if Perriams was the wrong pitch for him, and not his game, he’d shown most of them how to play it.
Yet what a game it was. Perriam was an artful old dog. You couldn’t help admiring him, in weak moments. He could not help succeeding, that watchful and predatory monster. Saw his advantage and took it before the next chap knew there was anything to be got. He deserved to succeed. Success? “Always keep your light so shining, a little in front of the next.” There it was. But what a light! Only good enough for cardsharpers and ravenous stomachs. Kipling’s light was a resin flare. Rollicking smoke and splashes of flame. Very picturesque, but no illumination at all. Suited that place fine. A pity, though, that commerce could not flourish except on the morality of the “Mary Gloster.” Commerce would suit a fellow, he could do something with it, if it wasn’t gutted of everything soft and warm. The romance of commerce! Romance, but with bowels of iron piping. One day they’d make workmen of aluminium and clockwork. Wind ’em up and set ’em going every Monday. Light to handle. Reliable. Go the week without watching.
He closed the door of Perriams. It was almost a sacramental act. Wouldn’t be there again for nearly two days. That romance of commerce. The snap of the lock was like the amen to a benediction. Jimmy breathed as if free air was his at last. The very stairs looked different from Monday’s apprehension of laboured stone ascent. Now they seemed to be leading out to life. Something must be wrong with the other days of the week when Saturday seemed so different. What was it? Very likely none but the Perriams of the world really feel this cold-blooded lust for things of which most men know the names, but no meanings. There must be another sort of life beyond, if a fellow were only bold enough to smash the cage which had got him. No matter. His cage might be smashed for him anyway. Perriam wouldn’t think twice about it, if he were in the mood. Then what? O, to hell with Perriam.
In a porch of the court below was Saturday’s accustomed elderly harpist sitting on a campstool, Silenus himself playing a love song, the old rascal, listening close to his crooning strings while his bowed face seemed bursting with wine. What was it Wells said of that sort of carbuncular red moon of a face? Botryoidal! A jolly good word. Jimmy gave the harpist a shilling. A lovely orbicular face. Booze and the harp had done it. Perhaps as good as rectitude and invoices. That harp was foreign to the avenue. A pity it could not move those stones, as once a harp moved some rocks. No harp would ever shift those stones. Nothing would ever shift them. Nothing but a flaming comet from God.
Round the corner in Lime Street Jimmy stopped to peer into a warehouse door. The Hudson’s Bay Company. That was a very queer smell. It was like the whiff of something old, something lost and mouldering in the Arctic. He thought of Ballantyne. It was a reminder of the past. Once, through Ballantyne’s heartiness, he wanted to go out to Rupert’s Land and trade with Indians from a fort of logs. His boyish application might have saved him from Billiter Avenue. But no answer. Nothing doing. Fate and duty to a father whose influence intrigued a lucky berth for him had marked him for Perriams before ever he knew the name of that house. His fortune had been planted while he wasn’t looking. He tucked his stick under his arm and strolled towards Leadenhall Street. Across the street he saw facing him a row of pictures decorating the P. & O. office; regal steamers amid seas and skies as good as the invitation to glory. He knew them all, those ships, by name. There was no reality about them. They were only gaudy inducements unable to induce.
Past East India Avenue, with a side glance, and a regret that he had gone to the city too late to see the old home of John Company. Names, then, meant something, after all. The implication of a word could haunt a man like a ghost.
He was a fool! Well, Lamb felt the same about South Sea House. Yet Lamb stuck to Leadenhall Street till he was pensioned. “The barren mahogany!” Barren then? How did such a man hold out for so long? The sentimentalists had given Lamb the wrong name, the Gentle Elia. That
