STRANGE CRAFT.
I.
One slushy night in December Selwyn was returning from a solitary dinner at a modest Holborn restaurant, when a damp sleet began to fall, making the sickly street-lamps darker still, and defying the protection of mufflers and heavy coats. With hat pulled over his eyes and hands immersed in the pockets of his coat, he made his way through the throng, while the raucous voices of news-venders cried out the latest tidings from the front.
To escape the proximity of the crowds and the nerve-shaking noises of traffic, he turned down a wide thoroughfare, and eventually emerged on Fleet Street. Again the seething discontent of rumbling omnibuses and hurrying crowds irritated him, and crossing to Bouverie Street, where Mr. Punch looks out on England with his genial satire, he followed its quiet channel until he reached the Thames.
In contrast to the throbbing arteries of Holborn and Fleet Street, the river soothed his nerves and lent tranquillity to his mind. Following the Embankment, which was shrouded in heavy darkness, he reached the spot where Cleopatra's Needle, which once looked on the majesty of ancient Egypt, stands, a sentinel of incongruity, on the edge of London's river. Giving way to a momentary whim, Selwyn paused, and finding a spot that was sheltered from the sleet, sat down and leaned against the monument.
In the masque of night he could just make out the sketchy forms of a river-barge and two steamers anchored a few yards out. From their masts he could see the dull glow of red where a meagre lamp was hung, and he heard the hoarse voice of a man calling out to some one across the river. As if in answer, the rattle of a chain came from the deck of some unseen craft, like a lonely felon in a floating prison.
The river's mood was so in keeping with his own that Selwyn's senses experienced a numbing pleasure; the ghostly mariners of the night, the motionless ships at their moorings, the eerie hissing of the sleet upon the water, combined to form a drug that left his eyelids heavy with drowsy contentment.
How long he had remained there he could not have stated, when from the steps beneath him, leading towards the water, he heard a man's slovenly voice.
'Are you going to stay the night here?'
As apparently the remark was intended for him, Selwyn leaned forward and peered in the direction from which the voice had come. At the foot of the dripping steps he could just make out a huddled figure.