Watching her while he spoke, he had to hold down a smile which threatened to show. She needed somebody in trouble and she was relying on him.
She left open the door for him while he went down the winding staircase, that he might have light to see his way. When he was at the bottom, he looked up, to see her head across the handrail, silhouetted above him and still oddly recognizable and suggestive of her. Her voice came down to him, echoing in the well of the stairway.
"Good night," it said. "You won't, you won't forget?"
He was smiling as he went forth through the long hollow of the arch to the dim street; the huddled dvornik with his swiveling eyes saw him, his face lifted to the light of the numbered house-lamp, still with the shape of a smile inhabiting his lips. The night wind, bitter from the water, met him as he went, driving through the meagerness of his clothes, and still he smiled, cherished his mood like a treasure. And below his mirth, cordial as a testimony of friendship, there endured the memory of the barren and lifeless room, waiting for its fulfillment.
In the lodging which he discovered for himself, he lay that night upon his crackling mattress, hands under his head, smoking a final cigarette and staring up at the map of stains upon the ceiling. It had been a day tapestried with sensations; there was much for the thoughtful mind of a connoisseur of life to dwell upon; but, as he lay, in that hour of his leisure, the memory that persisted in him was of the inner door in the dull room where he had drunk tea and talked with the girl, and all the suggestion and enticement of it. He wished that for a moment he could have looked beyond it and viewed just once the delicate and fragrant privacy which it screened. The outer room had a purpose as plain as a kitchen; the girl in it had shown him of herself only that purpose; the rest of her was shut from him.
He pitched the end of his cigarette from him, turning his head to watch it roll to safety in the middle of the bare floor.
"I'll go after a job in the morning," he said half aloud to the emptiness of the mean chamber, and turned to sleep upon the resolution.
It was nearing noon of the next day when, following the trail of that redeeming job, he went towards the Mathieson yards. While he was yet afar off he could see between the roofs the cathedral-like scaffolding clustering around the shape of a ship in the building; the rapid-fire of the hammers and riveting guns at work upon her, plates was loud above the noises of the street. But he went slowly; he had already been some hours upon his quest, and there was a touch of worry and uncertainty in his face. It seemed that the world he had known so well had changed its heart. The gatekeeper at the wharves where he formerly had driven a winch had refused to admit him, and at the Russian foundry he had been curtly ordered away. Policemen had hailed him familiarly and publicly, and twice passing istvostchiks had swerved their little clattering vehicles to the curb to jeer down into his face as they rumbled by. The smudged impress of a rubber-stamp upon his passport and three lines of sprawling Russian handwriting recording his conviction and punishment had marked him with the local equivalent of the brand of Cain; henceforward he was set apart from other men. He pondered it as he went in an indignant bewilderment; it was strange that others should find him so different when he knew himself to be the same as ever.
The Scottish foreman-shipwright in the yard office looked up from his standing-desk, lifting, to the light of the open door a red monkey-face comically fringed with coppery whiskers, and stared at him ferociously with little stone-blue eyes. He listened in fierce stillness while Waters put forward his request to be taken on.
"It's you, is it?" he said then. "I know ye. When did they let ye out?"