The Second Class Passenger Part 1

The Second Cla.s.s Pa.s.senger.

by Perceval Gibbon.

I

THE SECOND-CLa.s.s Pa.s.sENGER

The party from the big German mail-boat had nearly completed their inspection of Mozambique, they had walked up and down the main street, admired the palms, lunched at the costly table of Lazarus, and purchased "curios"--Indian silks, Javanese; knives, Birmingham metal-work, and what not--as mementoes of their explorations. In particular, Miss Paterson had invested in a heavy bronze image-- apparently j.a.panese--concerning which she entertained the thrilling delusion that it was an object of local wors.h.i.+p. It was a grotesque thing, ma.s.sive and bulky, weighing not much less than ten or twelve pounds. Hence it was confided to the careful porterage of Dawson, an a.s.siduous and favored courtier of Miss Paterson; and he, having lunched, was fated to leave it behind at Lazarus' Hotel.

Miss Paterson shook her fluffy curls at him. They were drawing towards dinner, and the afternoon was wearing stale.

"I did so want that idol," she said plaintively. She had the childish quality of voice, the insipidity of intonation, which is best appreciated in steamboat saloons. "Oh, Mr. Dawson, don't you think you could get it back for me?"

"I'm frightfully sorry," said the contrite Dawson. "I'll go back at once. You don't know when the s.h.i.+p goes, do you?"

Another of Miss Paterson's cavaliers a.s.sured him that he had some hours yet. "The steward told me so," he added authoritatively.

"Then I'll go at once," said Dawson, hating him.

"Mind, don't lose the boat," Miss Paterson called after him.

He went swiftly back up the wide main street in which they had spent the day. Lamps were beginning to s.h.i.+ne everywhere, and the dull peace of the place was broken by a new life. Those that dwell in darkness were going abroad now, and the small saloons were filling. Dawson noted casually that evening was evidently the lively time of Mozambique. He pa.s.sed men of a type he had missed during the day, men of all nationalities, by their faces, and every shade of color. They were lounging on the sidewalk in knots of two or three, sitting at the little tables outside the saloons, or lurking at the entrances of narrow alleys that ran aside from the main street every few paces.

All were clad in thin white suits, and some wore knives in full sight, while there was that about them that would lead even the most innocent and conventional second-cla.s.s pa.s.senger to guess at a weapon concealed somewhere. Some of them looked keenly at Dawson as he pa.s.sed along; and although he met their eyes impa.s.sively, he--even he--was conscious of an implied estimate in their glance, as though they cla.s.sified him with a look. Once he stepped aside to let a woman pa.s.s. She was large, flamboyantly southern and calm. She lounged along, a cloak over her left arm, her head thrown back, a cigarette between her wide, red lips. She, too, looked at Dawson--looked down at him with a superb lazy nonchalance, laughed a little, and walked on. The loungers on the sidewalk laughed too, but rather with her than at Dawson.

"I seem rather out of it here," he told himself patiently, and was glad to enter the wide portals of Lazarus' Hotel. A grand, swarthy Greek, magnificent in a scarlet jacket and gold braid, pulled open the door for him, and heard his mission smilingly.

"A bra.s.s-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 pa.s.sable--he might get aboard the steamer to his dinner in the second-cla.s.s 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 creva.s.se between high, windowless walls of houses. The warm, leisurely rain dropped perpendicularly upon him from an invisible sky, and presently, hugging the wall, he b.u.t.ted 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 pa.s.s 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 a.s.sault 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," fl.u.s.tered 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 pa.s.s 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 hoa.r.s.e 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 ash.o.r.e with some friends," he answered, "from the second-cla.s.s. 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 G.o.d! 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.