LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

dirty fore-deck once more under his feet.

      He designedly kept out of all danger zones, to make security doubly sure. A thick-voiced man with a black muffler about his throat had trailed after him to demand if he had no old clothes to dispose of. But he did not so much as stop to answer. A stranger in a Stetson hat, still later, caught companionably at his arm and implored him to drink with him. But he freed himself sharply and kept on his way. A figure ​or two blocked his path ominously, but he skirted them, as a careful pilot skirts his channel-buoys. He did not care to run risks. He felt that he was still in the land of the enemy. He kept to the open, blindly and doggedly. He knew but one goal, and that goal lay beyond the Laminian's odorous gangplank. He fought his devious way towards it, like a spawning sock-eye fighting its way to a river source.

      He hurried along the fog-wrapt cañons, still haunted by the impression of some unknown figure dogging his steps. He felt, as night and the fog deepened together, that the city was nothing more than a many-channeled river-bed, and that he waded along its bottom, breathing a new element, too thick for air, too etherealised for water. He saw streets that were new to him, streets where the misted globes of electric lights became an undulating double row of white tulips. Then he stumbled into Broadway. But it was a Broadway with the soft pedal on. Its roar of sound was so muffled he scarcely knew it. Then he came to a square where the scattered lamp-globes looked like bubbles of gold caught in tree-branches. Under these tree-branches he saw loungers on benches, mysterious and motionless figures, like broken rows of statuary, sleeping men in the final and casual attitudes of death. Above these figures he could see wet ​maple-leaves, hanging as still and lifeless as though they had been stencilled from sheets of green copper. His eyes fell on floating street-signs, blurs of coloured electrics cut off from the in visible walls which backed them. He caught glimpses of the softened bulbs of automatic signs, like moving gold-fish seen through frosted glass. Then he saw more lights, serried lights, subdued into balloons of misty pearl. They threaded the façade of some gigantic hotel, like jewel-strings about the throat of a barbaric woman. But he could not remember the place. And again he floundered on towards the water-front, disquieted with vague and foolish thoughts, as much oppressed by the orderly streets as though he were escaping from some sea-worn harbour slum of vice and outlawry. He still wanted his cabin, as a long-harried chipmunk wants its tree-hole.

      He was well out of it, he told himself reassuringly, though he still kept wondering why the woman had stopped him. He remembered details of her dress, the sense of assurance and well-being in her mere figure poise, the open way in which her eyes had met his. He began to wonder why he had lacked the audacity to respond to that clear challenge of fate. He demanded of himself why he had run away from the very thing he had been seeking.

      ​He knew, as the growl of the ferry-whistles grew louder, that he was nearing the river. He felt as ungainly as a tortoise scuffling back to its water-edge of escape, but his confidence began to return to him as he found himself nearer and nearer his brink of delivery. He could perceive the ridiculous figure he had cut. He could even realise that he had defeated his own ends. He was conscious of a growing overtone of discontent, a peevish resentment against his own white-livered irresolution. And he would go aboard, and the next day be out at sea, with the mystery of it all still unanswered.

      He strode on through the fog. It was not until he came to a narrow street-crossing between two blank-windowed warehouses that he saw his way obstructed. But he noticed, as he came to a sudden stop, that his path was barred by a cab with an open door. It blocked the crossing, very much as a Neapolitan corricolo manœuvres for a fare by cutting across a pedestrian's path.

      The youth drew up and peered in through that door, with a slightly quickened pulse, wondering why the impassive figure on the box should be thus blocking his way.

      Then he saw that the cab was not empty.

      Leaning quietly forward from the seat was ​an intent and waiting figure—a woman's figure. It was the woman from whom he had so ignominiously fled.

      He felt, this time, no horripilating tingle of shock. His fund of wonder seemed to be exhausted. He stood staring at her, almost abstractedly, with the mild and resigned bewilderment of a man who has seen lightning strike twice in the same spot.

      "Quick!" said the woman, with an almost imperious movement of her gloved hand.

      "What?" asked Lingg, inadequately, irrelevantly.

      "I wanted to warn you," the woman whispered, as she moved back on the cab seat, obviously to make room for him. "I must warn you—but not here."

      "Of what?" asked Lingg. He saw that she was quite alone in the cab.

      "Come!" she commanded, ignoring his question.

      He stepped into the hooded gloom like a coerced schoolboy. He was not afraid, he assured himself. It was merely that he was unwilling to be made the blind tool of forces he could not comprehend.

      "Of what?" he repeated, noticing that the cab moved forward the moment the door had slammed shut.

      ​"Not to sail on the Laminian," said the woman at his side. He could detect a subtle perfume about her presence, a flowery and effeminising perfume which made him think of New England village gardens. An older man would have thought of boudoirs.

      "Why not?" he asked. The woman could see that he was not as impressed as he might be.

      "It will not be safe."

      "It never is, on those third-class boats."

      He insisted on being literal or nothing.

      "But there are dangers ahead of you dangers you don't and can't understand."

      "I don't see how I can help that," said the youth of little imagination. "When the Company puts me on a ship or gives me a station anywheres, I've got to stick to it."

      "Then you don't believe me?"

      "It's not a matter of believing. It's more a matter of not understanding you."

      A change seemed to creep over her, a lightening and relaxing change, such as would come to the New England garden he had thought of when it passed from shadow to sunlight.

      "Would you like to understand me?" she asked, turning her eyes full on his somewhat abashed young face. He blushed and tingled under the directness of her gaze.

      ​"How could I?" he succeeded in stammering out.

      "Won't you stay and try?" she murmured, pregnantly.

      The prospect did not exactly appal him. It merely puzzled him now as something beyond the reach of his delimited imagination. The curl hadn't been taken out of Romance, after all, he told himself. He could see the brooding spirit of her, incarnate before his very eyes, coifed and gowned like a goddess. But the very radiance of the vision made him doubly afraid of her.

      "I'm afraid I'll have to get back," was his hesitating rejoinder.

      "Back where?"

      "To my ship," he faltered.

      "But you mustn't!" she murmured, with a solicitous hand on his still tingling arm.

      "I've got to get back," he persisted, reaching and fumbling for the door.

      "But not yet—not here," she begged him.

      "I must," he declared, trying to stand on his feet under the cramping cab-hood, and tugging at the door-handle.

      "Only listen to me for a moment," the woman was saying, almost pleadingly.

      He allowed her to draw him gently back into ​the seat beside her. But disquiet had again taken possession of him.

      "Am I so terrible?" she asked, with her hand still on his arm. Her voice was low and quiet; her half-smiling lips were parted a little, giving a touch of languid abandon to her otherwise intent and earnest face. And here was the very thing he had been so restlessly in search of; but now that it was before him, within his grasp, he was wordlessly afraid of it.

      "N—no, you're not terrible," he jerkily reassured her, as

Скачать книгу