Jimmy felt his sleeve plucked. A man hurrying past with a rose bush had caught his arm with a thorn. Spring had caught him by the arm. He saw it was an April morning and the light was of good growing weather. There was a chance that the mind had 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 unexamined. God only knew to what some threads would lead reason, if it were too curious, and persisted to the ugly end of the line.
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 conjectural 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. Perriam 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 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 Leadenhall Street, shift London. It wanted some doing, though. Look at it! How long to wait?
People kept pushing him off his standing-place. He was a post 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 converging streams congested into a viscous mass—the city was slowly emptying itself over Surrey. He leaned on the parapet above 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. Civilisation 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 continually 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 had been sweetened. What was it that once was addressed 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 homogeneous 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 industry, but it never learned why the wheels went round.
That ship below was more intelligible. She was going somewhere preordained. 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 a sea of humanity? That would have no effect on its tides. A wisp of steam leisurely ascended from the ship’s funnel. She had intelligence 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, they never broke free from what held them. What enchantment was it held him to the barren mahogany?
Perhaps Lamb was right, though. 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. There might be some unknown but inexorable law of being which
