The Second Class Passenger | Page 2

for
him, and heard his mission smilingly.
"A brass-a image," he repeated. "Sir, you wait-a in the bar, an' I tell-a
the boy go look."
"You must be quick, then," said Dawson, "'cause I'm in a hurry to get
back."
"Yais," smiled the Greek. "Bimeby he rain-a bad."
"Rain?" queried Dawson incredulously. The air was like balm.
"You see," the Greek nodded. "This-a way, sir. I go look-a quick."
Dawson waited in the bar, where a dark, sallow bar-man stared him out
of countenance for twenty minutes. At the end of that time the image
was forthcoming. The ugly thing had burst the paper in which it was
wrapped, and its grinning bullet-head projected handily. The paper was
wisped about its middle like a petticoat. Dawson took it thankfully
from the Greek, and made suitable remuneration in small silver.
"Bimeby rain," repeated the Greek, as he opened a door for him again.
"Well, I'm not made of sugar," replied Dawson, and set off.
It was night now, for in Mozambique evening is but a brief hiatus

between darkness and day. It lasts only while the sun is dipping; once
the upper limb is under the horizon it is night, full and absolute. As
Dawson retraced his steps the sky over him was velvet- black, barely
punctured by faint stars, and a breeze rustled faintly from the sea. He
had not gone two hundred yards when a large, warm drop of rain
splashed on his back. Another pattered on his hat, and it was raining,
leisurely, ominously.
Dawson pulled up and took thought. At the end of the main street he
would have to turn to the left to the sea-front, and then to the left again
to reach the landing-stage. If, now, there were any nearer turning to the
left--if any of the dark alleys that opened continually beside him were
passable--he might get aboard the steamer to his dinner in the
second-class saloon with a less emphatic drenching than if he went
round by the way he had come. Mozambique, he reflected, could not
have only one street--it was too big for that. From the steamer, as it
came to anchor, he had seen acre upon acre of flat roofs, and one of the
gloomy alleys 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