Down the dark throat of Angel Alley a man, that night, was doing a singular thing. He was a fisherman, plainly one of the recent arrivals of the anchored fleet; he was a sturdily built fellow with a well-shaped head; he had the naturally open face and attractive bearing often to be found among drinking men; at his best he must have been a handsome, graceful fellow, lovable perhaps, and loving. At his worst, he was a cringing sot. He wore, over his faded dark-red flannel shirt, the gingham jumper favored by his class; and it seemed he had lost his hat. This man was monotonously moving to and fro, covering a given portion of Angel Alley over and again, retracing his unsteady footsteps from point to point, and repeating his course with mysterious regularity. His beat covered the space between the saloon of old Trawl (which stood about midway of the alley) and the scarlet and white transparency, whose strange and sacred heraldry blazed, held straight out, an arm of fire, across the mouth of the street. Angel Alley, as we have explained, had, at the first, inclined to call the mission Christ’s Rest, for reasons of its own; but even that half-godless reminder of a history better forgotten was growing out of date. The people’s name for Emanuel Bayard’s house of worship and of welcome was fast settling into one beautiful word—Christlove.
The fisherman in the jumper wavered to and fro between Christlove and the ancient grogshop. In the dark weather the figure of the man seemed to swing from this to that like a pendulum; at moments he seemed to have no more sense or sentience. He was hurled as if he were forced by invisible machinery; he recoiled as if wound by unseen springs; now his steps quickened into a run, as he wrenched himself away from the saloon, and faced the prayer-room; then they lagged, and he crawled like a crab to the rum-shop door. His hands were clenched together. Long before it began to rain his hatless forehead was wet.
His eyes stared straight before him. He seemed to see nothing but the two open doors between which he was vibrating. No one had happened to notice him, or, if so, his movements were taken for the vagaries of intoxication. A nerve of God knows what, in his diseased will began to throb, and he made a leap away from the saloon, and ran heavily towards the white and scarlet lights of the transparency; at the steps, he fell, and lay groveling; he could hear the singing overhead:—
“Ora pro nobis,
We lift our souls to thee.”
He tried to climb up; but something—call it his muscle, call it his will, call it his soul; it does not signify—something refused him, and he did not get beyond the second stair. Slowly, reluctantly, mysteriously, his feet seemed to be dragged back. He put out his hands, as if to push at an invisible foe; he leaned over backwards, planting his great oiled boots firmly in the ground, as if resisting unseen force; but slowly, reluctantly, mysteriously, he was pulled back. At the steps of the saloon, in a blot of darkness, on the shadowed side, he sank; he got to his hands and knees like an animal, and there he crawled. If any one had been listening, the man might have been heard to sob,—
“It’s me and the rum—God and the devil—Now we’ll see!”
He rose more feebly this time, and struggled over toward the prayer-room; he wavered, and turned before he had got there, and made weakly back. Panting heavily, he crawled up the steps of the saloon, and then lurched over, and fell down into the blot whence he had come. There he lay, crying, with the arm of his brown gingham jumper before his eyes.
“Look up, Job!” said a low voice in the shadow at his side. Job Slip lifted his sodden face, swollen, red, and stained with tears. Instinctively he stretched up his hands.