LITMIR.BIZ

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beside him must surely debouch upon the sea-front. He elected to try one, anyhow, and accordingly turned aside into the next.

      With ten paces he entered such a darkness as he had never known. The alley was barely ten feet wide: it lay like a crevasse between high, windowless walls of houses. The warm, leisurely rain dropped perpendicularly upon him from an invisible sky, and presently, hugging the wall, he butted against a corner, and found, or guessed, that his way was no longer straight. Underfoot there was mud and garbage that once gulfed him to the knee, and nowhere in all those terrible, silent walls on each side of him was there a light or a door, nor any sight of life near at hand. He might have been in a catacomb, companioned by the dead.

      The stillness and the loneliness scared and disturbed him. He turned on a sudden impulse to make his way back to the lights of the street.

      But this was to reckon without the map of Mozambique—which does not exist. Ten minutes sufficed to overwhelm him in an intricacy of blind ways. He groped by a wall to a turning, fared cautiously to pass it, found a blank wall opposite him, and was lost. His sense of direction left him, and he had no longer any idea of where the street lay and where the sea. He floundered in gross darkness, inept and persistent. It took some time, many turnings, and a tumble in the mud to convince him that he was lost. And then the rain came down in earnest.

      It roared, it pelted, it stamped on him. It was not rain, as he knew it: it was a cascade, a vehement and malignant assault by all the wetness in heaven. It whipped, it stung, it thrashed; he was drenched in a moment as though by a trick. He could see nothing, but groped blind and frightened under it, feeling along the wall with one hand, still carrying the bronze image by the head with the other. Once he dropped it, and would have left it, but with an impulse like an effort of self-respect, he searched for it, groping elbow-deep in the slush and water, found it, and stumbled on. Another corner presented itself; he came round it, and almost at once a light showed itself.

      It was a slit of brightness below a door, and without a question the drenched and bewildered Dawson lifted the image and hammered on the door with it. A hum of voices within abated as he knocked, and there was silence. He hammered again, and he heard bolts being withdrawn inside. The door opened slowly, and a man looked out.

      "I've lost my way," flustered Dawson pitifully. "I'm wet through, and

       I don't know where I am." Even as he spoke the rain was cutting

       through his clothes like blades. "Please let me in;" he concluded.

       "Please let me in."

      The man was backed by the light, and Dawson could see nothing of him save that he was tall and stoutly made. But he laughed, and opened the door a foot farther to let him pass in.

      "Come in," he bade him. His voice was foreign and high. "Come in. All may come in to-night."

      Dawson entered, leading a trail of water over a floor of bare boards. His face was running wet, and he was newly dazzled with the light. But when he had wiped his eyes, he drew a deep breath of relief and looked about him. The room was unfurnished save for a littered table and some chairs, and a gaudy picture of the Virgin that hung on the wall. On each side of it was a sconce, in which a slovenly candle guttered. A woman was perched on a corner of the table, a heavy shawl over her head. Under it the dark face, propped in the fork of her hand, glowed sullenly, and her bare, white arm was like a menacing thing. Dawson bowed to her with an instinct of politeness. In a chair near her a grossly fat man was huddled, scowling heavily under thick, fair brows, while the other man, he who had opened the door, stood smiling.

      The woman laughed softly as Dawson ducked to her, scanning him with an amusement that he felt as ignominy. But she pointed to the image dangling in his hand.

      "What is that?" she asked.

      Dawson laid it on the floor carefully. "It's a curio," he explained.

       "I was fetching it for a lady. An idol, you know."

      The fat man burst into a hoarse laugh, and the other man spoke to

       Dawson.

      "An' you?" he queried. "What you doing 'ere, so late an' so wet?"

      "I was trying to take a short cut to the landing-stage," Dawson replied. "Like a silly fool, I thought I could find my way through here. But I got lost somehow."

      The fat man laughed again.

      "You come off the German steamer?" suggested the woman.

      Dawson nodded. "I came ashore with some friends," he answered, "from the second-class. But I left them to go back and fetch this idol, and here I am."

      The tall man who had opened the door turned to the woman.

      "So we must wait a leetle longer for your frien's," he said.

      She tossed her head sharply.

      "Friends!" she exclaimed. "Mother of God! Would you walk about with your knives for ever? When every day other men are taken, can you ask to go free? Am I the wife of the Intendente?"

      "No, nod the vife!" barked the stout man violently. "But if you gan't tell us noding better than to stop for der police to dake us, vot's der good of you?"

      The woman shrugged her shoulders, and the shawl slipped, and showed them bare and white above her bodice.

      "I have done all that one could do," she answered sullenly, with defiant eyes. "Seven months you have done as you would, untouched. That was through me. Now, fools, you must take your turn—one month, three months, six months—who knows?—in prison. One carries a knife—one goes to prison! What would you have?"

      "Gif der yong man a chair, Tonio," said the fat man, and his companion reached Dawson a seat. He sat on it in the middle of the floor, while they wrangled around him. He gathered that the two men anticipated a visit from the police very shortly, and that they blamed it on the woman, who might have averted it. Both the men accused her of their misfortune, and she faced them dauntlessly. She tried to bring them, it seemed, to accept it as inevitable, as a thing properly attendant on them; to show that she, after all, could not change the conditions of existence.

      "You stabbed the Greek," she argued once, turning sharply on the tall man.

      "Well," he began, and she flourished her hand as an ergo.

      "Life is not spending money," she even philosophized. "One pays for living, my friend, with work, with pain, with jail. Here you have to pay. I have paid for you, seven months nearly, with smiles and love. But the price is risen. It is your turn now."

      Dawson gazed at her fascinated. She spoke and gesticulated with a captivating spirit. Life brimmed in her. As she spoke, her motions were arguments in themselves. She put a case and demolished it with a smile; presented the alternative, left a final word unspoken, and the thing was irresistible. Dawson, perched lonely on his chair, experienced a desire to enter the conversation.

      The men were beyond conviction. "Why didn't you"—do this or that? the tall man kept asking, and his fat comrade exploded, "Yea, vy?" They seemed to demand of her that she should accept blame without question; and to her answers, clear and ready, the fat man retorted with a gross oath.

      "Excuse me, sir," began Dawson, shocked. He was aching to be on the woman's side.

      "Vott" demanded the fat man.

      "That's hardly the way to speak to a lady," said Dawson gravely.

      The tall man burst into a clear laugh, and the fat man glared at Dawson. He flinched somewhat, but caught the woman's eye and found comfort and reinforcement there. She, too, was smiling, but gratefully, and she gave him a courteous little nod of thanks.

      "I don't like to hear such language used to a lady," he said, speaking manfully enough, and giving the fat man eyes as steady as his own. "No gentleman would do it, I'm sure."

      "Vot der hell you got to do mit it?" demanded the other ferociously, while his companion laughed.

      The woman held up a hand. "Do not quarrel," she said. "There

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