Gallions Reach quotes

The steamer moved up river 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.

“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. …”

“

Staying away or coming back makes no difference. There are other worlds.

”

Stupid to get rid of what was good over a matter of cranky principle. But either he was to go, or they. There was no sense in it. These sacred 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 kowtow to money! People always went crazy before whatever they worshipped. Perriam was just the same as a priest of Baal.

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.

That thought, outside the fruiterer’s, gave him the freedom to admire a favourite shop. Better than any Bond Street jeweller’s, that place.

The greengrocer trafficked 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 accorded with the dome of St. Paul’s, and a white cloud, and the poor woman whose pity was moved by misfortune.

he didn’t know Perriams, 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.

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 odd that he 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;

It proclaimed a quite impossible hour. Time, perhaps, had lost its way. Or 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.

Even the vans here had more faith than 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. Had he better take it? It was certain that paper did not belong to the day he hoped he had reached. Cowardly to step back. That boy was handing him a line of return to Billiter Avenue.

That’s the way my surgeon 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 of a coast is to keep off it. It’s a fine coast when you’re clear of it.

”

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.

”

It remained there in solid ease for some time, but it did not speak. Then it stood up, and stretched. “Aye?” it soliloquised interrogatively; 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.

“

Yesterday, or thereabouts, my boy. Just feel our revolutions.

”

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.

”

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.

That was all. Not a word about the rudder. And perhaps 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.

Hale led on to the head of the companion to the quarterdeck.

The steward pranced in with a can of hot coffee and some food. Wonderful fellow. How had he managed all that from the galley? He had saved the grub, but he was like a cat out of a ditch. Coffee was good.

Calamity could not even blow off the fragrance of coffee.

Stewards could dance through it, carrying coffee.

They sat with their heads close together, their tousled hair grizzled with dry salt. They looked aged, with grey beards.

Only the boat retained youth and eagerness.

She was as buoyant as ever. They could find nothing more to say. Collins sighed, and stood up. He looked to Sinclair’s charge, a mile away to windward. His eyes circled round, and suddenly his hand gripped hard the steersman’s shoulder.

“Not so far. Only something a bit like it. Enough to keep me going on. Can’t have the park yet, but I could buy a fawn—one or two nice little fawns.”

“Perhaps the fun is in the search, not in finding.”

“Say that again. It sounds interesting.

And please don’t dwell on the thought of perdition. It makes me uncomfortable. Think of valuable deposits, which are much better. They might come in this life. Mine is a business notion. It isn’t metaphysical.

Leave metaphysics to the senile, who take to thin joys because they can’t have babies.

What I’m looking for is something a bank manager would respect; and yet it might come to nothing but quinine and another shot at the game later. Let me press the button for your steward. Let’s have something to make us hopeful and foolish.”

Of course, the dark patch in the sky is that only because we cannot do any better with it; not near enough to it; not our place in the sky. That child was as Sinclair, and the woman as himself.

There is no such thing as humanity. There are men and women.

The day glowed and was lazy; it was a blue intensity loosened with a tincture of gold. No land was in sight.

“That? That bowl? Come and handle it. Such things are made to be touched, as well as looked at.

The touch should know as much as the eye.

”

“Sometimes,” said the Chinaman, “I have wondered whether Western culture turned into chimney smoke because of a neglected sense of touch.

You see, you must pause and weigh it, when you handle an object. You have time to change your mind.

”

“I think perhaps you know too.

But the best things have no name.

”

You turned over, and then found that that side was hotter than the other. You turned over again. Not a sound. The lizards had ceased to kiss aloud, now the light was out. But a swift slithering passed over the boards beneath the bed.

The silence was the heat. The heat was muffled.

The silence was soft and hot, but heavy. It could not be pushed away. The darkness outside the curtains was waiting. For what? He was waiting too, for sleep, but it was no good waiting for that when the unseen was waiting for something else.

“What an idea. They wouldn’t be typical in Chelsea.

Nothing good is typical. It’s a surprise.

I don’t know where my corkscrew is. Where is yours?”

“It was only last week, Colet. You are now as near as that to the old original once upon a time. You’ve marched all the way back in one day.

It only shows you what a fraud time is.

You’ll learn something, before we’ve done with you; but don’t you grin, don’t look at all superior, or the magic will pass, and so may you. Keep your face as confiding as if I were flattering your sound moral character.

It was extraordinary, but the discovery of the hoard afforded them less to talk about than had such a trivial matter as the song of an unknown bird. Yet now the song of the bird passed unremarked.

Tin did not prompt Norrie, now he had plenty of it, to a pleasing similitude of his old relish of Malay fables, which have no market value, though they can keep a campfire bright till late.

The assurance of much tin induced in Norrie even a certain correctitude. He could no longer abjure their Chinaman with his accustomed histrionic abandon. He was direct, and saved time.

Colet, reviewing it all, while Norrie was diligently drawing a map, rebuked himself. He ought to feel excited. No good. He didn’t.

What does not excite the interest cannot be made to do so by any deliberate concentration of reason.

If intelligent discontent is the beginning of progress, is it also the end of happiness?

Norrie was an old sentimentalist, easy and warm, armoured bright in guile, like most of the cynics and epicures, and was as sure to have the hump tonight as himself.

What is the good of a campfire anywhere without a pal the other side of it? Life without comradeship would be ashes.

The fire would be out. Here; better push on and take the head of the line. Set the pace. Let these fellows see who is running the show.

he had never bothered about such characteristics of the Malay jungle while Norrie was ahead, though he knew they were there. No worse now than they used to be, but he happened to be leading.

There is something in leadership, then, which the people behind never guess till the man who should be in front is not.

Through that bit. Nothing there. Just as well not to worry when you can’t see anything. Wait till you do. It might be good fun to manoeuvre this party through to the sea; an attractive substitute for the loss of the tin.

Mat was roving about, with his morning cigarette, when he reached the hut, and after a suitable interval Colet advised the Malay that he had met a tiger when going to bathe. Mat listened to the news with a show of polite interest.

These tigers! They have no manners.

Mat’s own manners, now, were perfect.

“Tuan, we should never find them.

Can smoke be caught in the hand?

”