LITMIR.BIZ

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fear, even in the open sunlight, where its serrated skyline reminded him of a waiting trap-jaw. He was hopelessly at sea in the silence which surrounded him, overawed by the quietness which the turn of a street-corner might convert into some perilous ambuscade. Heilig, the engineer, had been right. He'd been a fool to come ashore.

      He recalled, a little enviously, the figure of the engineer, the morose and lank and slatternly figure in ragged carpet-slippers, leaning against the ship's rail and smoking the long-stemmed German pipe with its blue china bowl. He remembered the engineer's impassive stare and his almost placid grunt of protest as he wheeled ​slowly round towards the solid land that he always seemed to hate.

      "Where yuh off to, son?" he asked, as Lingg dropped to the splintered stringpiece of the wharf. The Laminian was chafing and fretting against that stringpiece just as his own soul had been chafing and fretting against the desolation of her empty decks.

      "Ashore," Lingg answered, resolutely enough, yet against all the voices of better judgment.

      "Wimmin?" demanded the laconic figure against the rail.

      "No!" exploded the impatient youth.

      "Then what yuh after?" persisted his gloomy interlocutor.

      "What am I after?" echoed the other, having no answer ready.

      "What d'yuh want with all that?" demanded the engineer, with a contemptuous pipe-wave that embraced the entire island of Manhattan.

      "I guess I want to mind my own business," was the reproving answer. It was followed by a contemplative eye-blink or two from the man in the carpet-slippers. But the disgust did not go out of his face.

      "No good comes o' knowin hell-holes like this," he at last averred, with a slow and sagacious side-wag of his head. He spat into the ​slip water; it was a rite of his infinite contempt.

      "I'm not going beyond Broadway," the half-repentant Lingg stopped to explain, marvelling at that strange and lonely seaman's fixed distrust of solid land. He did not think it worth while to enlarge on how sick he was of the ship stink and the quietness, of the fumes of rotting fruit, of the heavy musk-smell of harbour water, and the febrile rattle and clatter of donkey engines.

      "Yuh'll find bad enough b'tween here and Broadway," avowed the placid misanthrope at the ship's rail, contemplating his pipe-smoke as though it were incense rising before the epitomised wisdom of all the ages.

      But Lingg was not altogether looking for the bad. He had been remembering how one of the junior officers of the Pretoria, when in port, spent his two riotous days riding up and down in the Fifth Avenue 'buses, the delirious 'buses, which he described as "bee-hives of swarming beauty," where he was ignored and elbowed and walked over by "the finest women who ever wore feathers," to his hungering heart's content. And Lingg, too, was hungering for some glimpse of life beyond that of a dirty fore-deck; for a sight of faces less satyr-like than that of a brandy-steeped sea captain. He ​wanted to see light and colour and movement. The unpurged emotional tracts of youth ached for some undiscerned adventure. But above all he was swayed by a wordless, yet none the less compelling hunger to behold the faces of women and girls. Some subliminal sex-hunger, after so many empty days at sea, made him long for that vague upper world which seemed embodied in this very word, Girls. He wanted to see them, good or bad, with painted faces or pure. It scarcely mattered, so long as he could look at them. They would all be goddesses to him, Olympian beings who breathed some diviner air, trailing clouds of mystery after their most casual footsteps. He did not ask to walk or speak with them. Their lowliest skirt-swish would seem only too like the ruffle of angel wings. He merely wanted to brush against them, indeterminately, in the city's crowded places, to watch their coming and going, to hear their occasional voices, to let his eyes dwell on their faces as a seaman looks at passing land-lights. For Lingg was still young, clean-living and clean-thoughted beyond the ways of the sailor. Heilig's assistant on the Laminian had more than once spoken of him as "Mealy-mouth."

      And then, amazingly enough, came the girl herself, without sign or warning.

      ​Where she fluttered or fell from he scarcely knew. It was somewhere in one of the quieter side-streets, and they were standing face to face, almost, when he looked up and saw her. Had he seen a mermaid over the ship's rail it could not have startled him more. There was no evading the situation; there was no chance of being mistaken. It was Adventure, in answer to his prayer. It was Romance, as he had asked. And he had never so much as clapped eyes on her before. Nor was her face a painted face. There was no betraying cupid-bow streak of carmine on the softly smiling lips. There was no barbaric black gum on the undrooping eye lashes, no tell-tale blue paint on the eyelids. There were no disquieting blandishments, no sidelong and predatory glances, no ensnaring simulation of tender levity. His startled eyes could detect no granite savagery under the velvet of her unconcern. She seemed merely Woman incarnate to him, the sort of woman he had sometimes dreamt about on tropic nights when the Southern Cross swung low to the sky line.

      "You are Gustav Lingg," she said quietly, and as plain as day, while his wide eyes still studied every tint and shadow and line of her untroubled face. On that face he seemed to ​see nothing but a gentle yet determined abstraction.

      "Y—yes," he stammered, vacuously, as though her statement had been a question. A faint tingle of something that was neither fear nor delight went needling up and down his back bone.

      "I want to talk to you," the woman said, quite gravely. "I must talk to you—alone."

      He knew that she had turned and joined him as he moved wonderingly forward, with his staring eyes still on her. Then the futility, the hopelessness, the impossibility of it all suddenly came home to him. He was conscious of a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. Courage sank away from him, confidence sucked out of him, like water out of an unplugged bath-bowl.

      If she had only stood before him less alluring, less Olympian in her loveliness, he might have been less bewildered. If she had been the Other Kind, openly and unequivocally, he might have grown less afraid of her.

      But he felt and knew it was a mistake, a foolish and colossal mistake. A vague and slowly mounting fear took the place of his earlier astonishment. The city itself had already intimidated him. He remembered the engineer's opprobrious summing-up of its perils. There was something amiss, terribly amiss.

      ​He raised his hat from his head awkwardly, muttering he scarcely knew what, as he heard her voice again. He backed away from her as she essayed to draw nearer, and stumbled, almost drunkenly, while she stood regarding him in open wonder. Then he turned and fled from her, fled from her, abashed and tingling, fled from her blindly, like a field-mouse from a coiled blacksnake.

      He did not stop until he had rounded a street-corner. He felt, as he did so, that he was demeaning his manhood before some possible high adventure. He vaguely suspected that one of life's vast occasions had slipped away from him unrecognised. But he was still afraid, foolishly afraid. He was glad to dip deeper and deeper into the city, as though it were a cleansing bath that might wash away his lubberly awkwardness. He was glad when the fog crept into the streets and helped to obliterate him and his shame. He was glad to wander unknown and unrecognised about the grey-draped solitude that engulfed him.

      He knew that the woman had not followed him. But all that afternoon he wandered and tarried and walked about with the feeling that he was not alone. He kept looking over his shoulder from time to time, pondering some wordless yet persistent sense of disquiet. He ​felt as though he were being shadowed. He could not shake off the impression that some vague figure or two was guardedly dogging his footsteps.

      This sense of being shadowed grew stronger as night came on. It made him doubly anxious to get back to his ship, to know the security of his bald, little, white-painted cabin. It caused him to reiterate to himself the engineer's morose dictum that the city was not to be trusted. He had hungered for the Unexpected; he had been restless for his emprising hour or two on land. But this, he muttered to himself, was the kind of night that took all the curl out of Romance. He was not worthy of the venture. He was better suited to the quietness of a ship s cabin. He disliked the thought of the two pacing shadows that seemed to be following him through the fog. He

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