Miss Pilgrim's Progress

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Title:     Miss Pilgrim's Progress
Author: Perceval Gibbon [More Titles by Gibbon]

The double windows of the big office overlooked the quays of Nikolaieff and the desk was beside them; so that the vice-consul had only to turn his head to see from his chair the wide river and its traffic, with the great grain-steamers, like foster-children thronging at the breast of Russia, waiting their turn for the elevators, and the gantries of the shipyards standing like an iron filigree against the pallor of the sky. The room was a large one, low-ceilinged, and lighted only upon the side of the street; so that a visitor, entering from the staircase, looked as from the bottom of a well of shadow across the tables where the month-old American newspapers were set forth to the silhouette of the vice-consul at his roll-top desk against his background of white daylight.

Mr. Tim Waters, American citizen in difficulties, leaned upon the top of the desk and pored absorbedly across the head of his country's representative at the scene beyond the window. A tow-boat with a flotilla of lighters was at work in midstream; there was a flash of white foam at her forefoot, and her red-and-black funnel trailed a level scarf of smoke across the distance. It was a sketch done vigorously in strong color, and he broke off the halting narrative of his troubles to watch if with profound unconscious interest.

Selby, the vice-consul, shifted impatiently in his chair. He was a small, dyspeptic, short-sighted man, and he was endeavoring under difficulties to give the impression that he had no time to spare.

"Well," he snapped; "go on. You were walking peaceably along the street, you said. What comes next?"

Tim Waters turned mild eyes upon him, withdrawing them from the tow-boat with patient reluctance.

"There was one o' them dvorniks" (doorkeepers), he resumed in a voice of silky softness. "He was settin' outside his gate on one o' them stools they have. And he was talkin' to one o' them istvostchiks." (cabmen).

His thin, sun-browned face, furrowed with whimsical lines, with its faint-blue eyes that wandered from his hearer to the allurement of the window and back again, overhung the desk as he spoke, drawling in those curiously soft tones of his an unconvincing narrative of sore provocation and the subsequent fight. He was a man in the later twenties, lean and slack-limbed; the workman's blouse of coarse linen, belted about him, and the long Russian boots which he wore, gave him, by contrast with the humor and sophistication of his face and the controlled ease of his attitude as he lounged, something of the effect of a man in fancy dress. Actually he belonged to the class familiar to missionaries and consuls of world-tramps, those songless troubadours for whom no continent is large enough and no ocean too wide. With his slightly parted lips of wonder and interest, a pair of useful fists and a passport granted by the American Minister in Spain, he had worked his way up the Mediterranean to the Levant, drifted thence by way of the Black Sea to Nikolaieff, and remained there ever since. Riveter in the shipyards, winch driver on the wharves, odd-man generally along the waterside, he and his troubles had come to Selby's notice before.

The vice-consul sniffed and stared unsympathetically as the recital wandered unhurried to its end. For him, the picaroon who leaned upon his desk was scarcely more than a tramp; Selby had respectability for a religion; and his beaky, irritable face, behind the glasses that straddled across his nose, answered Tim Waters's mild conciliatory gaze with stiff hostility. The dvornik and the istvostchik, it seemed, had laughed loudly and significantly as Waters went by, and he had turned to inquire into the joke.

"Because, y'see, Mr. Selby, them Russians just don't laugh in a general way, except they're wantin' to start something. An' I heard 'em say 'Amerikanetz' just as plain as I can see you settin' there. So, a' course, I knowed it was me they was pickin' on." The fight had followed; Tim Waters, while he told of it, raised the hand in which he held his cap and looked thoughtfully at a row of swollen and abraded knuckles; and lastly, the police had intervened.

"It was that big sergeant with the medals," said the victim. "Come at me with his sword, he did. Seems like it ain't safe to be an American citizen in this town, Mr. Selby."

"Does it?" Selby sat back sharply in his chair, his ragged moustache bristling, his glasses malevolently askew on his nose. "You're a mighty fine example of an American citizen, aren't you? Say, Waters, you don't think you can put that over again, do you?"

"Eh?" Tim Waters opened his pale blue eyes in the mildest surprise. "Why, Mr. Selby?" he began, fumbling in his pocket. The vice-consul interrupted him with a snarl.

"Now you don't want to pull that everlasting passport of yours on me again," he cried. "Every crook and hobo that's chased off a steamer into this town has got papers as good as yours, red seal an' all. You seem to think that bein' an American citizen's a kind of license to play hell and then come here to be squared. Well, I'm going to prove to you that it's not."

Waters was watching him as he spoke with something of that still interest which he had given to the scene beyond the window. Now he smiled faintly.

"But say, Mr. Selby," he protested gently. "It it ain't the sergeant I'm worried about. I'll get him all right. But there's what they call a protocol fer breakin' up that istvostchik, an' you bein' our consul here."

Selby rose, jerking his chair back on its castors. "Cut that out," he shrilled. "Your consul, eh? Your kind hasn't got any consul, not if you had forty passports see? You get out o' this office right now; and if they hand you six months with that protocol."

He was a ridiculous little man when he was angry; the shape of him as he stood, pointing peremptorily across the room to the door, rose grotesque and pitiable against the window. The wanderer, still leaning on the desk, looked over at him with lips parted as though he found a profit of interest even in his anger.

"And you can tell your friends, if you got any," fulminated the vice-consul, "that this place isn't."

He broke off short in mid-word; the rigid and imperative arm with which he still pointed to the door lost its stiffening; he made a snatch at his sliding glasses, saved them, and stood scaring. Waters turned his head to look likewise.

"This is the American Consulate?" inquired a voice from the doorway.

For the moment neither answered, and the newcomer came down between the tables towards the light of the window.

Of the two men, it was assuredly Waters, who had followed the lust of the eye across the continents, who was best able to flavor and relish that entry and approach. For him, stilly intent and watchful, it was as though a voice, the voice which had spoken from the shadowy doorway, had incarnated itself and become visible, putting on a form to match its own quality, at once definite and delicate. The newcomer moved down the room with a subdued rustling of skirts, resolving at last into a neat and appealing feminine presence that smiled confidently and yet conciliatorily and offered a hand towards Selby.

"It is the American Consulate, isn't it?" she asked again.

Selby, ruffled like an agitated hen, woke to spasmodic movement, and took the hand.

"Why, yes," he answered, pushing towards her the chair he had not offered to Waters and erupting forthwith into uneasy volubility. "This is it. Sit down, madam; sit right down and tell me what I can do for you."

The girl, still smiling, took the seat he gave her; across the desk-top, Waters, unmoving, his battered hand grasping his peaked Russian cap, gazed upon her absorbedly.

"Just got in, have you?" inquired Selby fussily.

"Yes," she answered. "I got in this morning by the boat from Odessa. You see, I've come up from Bucharest, and as I don't know very much about Russia, I thought."

Selby, seated again in his chair of office, his fingers judicially joined, nodded approvingly. "You just naturally came along to your consul," he finished for her. "Quite right, Miss, er."

"Pilgrim," supplied the girl.

"Miss Pilgrim?" he hesitated. She nodded. "Well, Miss Pilgrim, if there's any information I can give you, or assistance, or, or advice, I'll be very happy to do what I can. You're, er, traveling alone?"

"Yes," she replied, with her little confirming nod.

He had forgotten for the while the mere existence of Waters, brooding wordlessly over them, and Waters after his manner, had forgotten everything in the world. The girl between them, sitting unconscious and tranquil under their converging gaze, had snared their faculties. She was perhaps twenty-four, and both Selby and Waters, when afterwards they used to speak of her, always insisted on this, not pretty. She was fair in a commonplace way, middle-sized and inconspicuous, the fashion of young woman who goes to compose the background of life. She raised to the light of the window a face of creamy pallor, with large serious grey eyes, and lips of a gentle and serene composure; but it was not these that redeemed her from being merely negligible and made her the focus of the two men's eyes. It was rather a quality implicit in the whole of her as she sat, feminine and fragile by contrast with even the meager masculinity of Selby, with a suggestion about her, an emanation, of steadfastness and courage as piteous and endearing as the bravery of a lost child. In Selby, staled and callous long since to all those infirmities of the wits or the purse which are carried to a consul as to a physician, there awoke at sight of her all that was genial and protective in his sore and shriveled soul; in Waters, who shall say what visions and interpretations?

She looked from one to the other of them with her trustful eyes. On Waters they seemed to dwell for a moment as though in question.

"Yes," she repeated; "I came alone; there wasn't anybody to come with me." Her voice, mild and pleasant, corresponded to the rest of her. "I've been working down in Rumania for nearly a year, in the Balkan Bank, and before that I was in Constantinople. But I've always wanted to see Russia; I'd heard and read so much about it; so" with a little explanatory shrug of her shoulders "I came."

Waters's still eyes widened momentarily; he, at any rate, understood. He knew, contentedly and well, that need to see, the unease of the spirit that moves one on, that makes of the road a home and of every destination a bivouac. His chin settled upon his crossed arms as he continued to take stock of this compatriot of the highways.

"Oh!" Selby was enlightened and a little disconcerted. This was not turning out as he had expected. He had diagnosed a tourist, and now discovered that he had been entertaining a job-seeker unawares. But the girl's charm and appeal held good; she was looking at him trustfully and expectantly, and he surrendered. He set his glasses straight with a fumbling hand and resumed his countenance of friendly and helpful interest.

"Then, you propose to, er, seek employment here in Nikolaieff," he inquired.

"Yes," she answered serenely. "Typist and stenographer, or secretary or translator in French and German and Rumanian" she was numbering off the occupations on her fingers as she listed them "or even governess, if there isn't anything else. But it seems to me, with the English steamers coming here all the time and the shipbuilding works, there ought to be some office I could get into."

Selby pursed his lips doubtfully.

"You don't know of anything?", she asked. "That's what I came in to see you about if you happened to know of anything? Because our consuls hear of pretty nearly everything that's going on, don't they?"

It wasn't flattery; her good faith was manifest in her face and voice; and Selby suppled under it like a stroked cat.

"I wouldn't say that, Miss Pilgrim," he demurred coyly. He paused. Her mention of shipping offices disturbed him. He had much business with shipping offices; and he was picturing to himself, involuntarily and with distaste, that gentle courage bruising itself upon the rough husks of managers and their like, peddling itself from one noisy Russian office to another, wearing thin its panoply of innocence upon evil speech and vile intention. There were the dregs of manhood in him, for all his narrowness and feebleness, and the prospect offended him like an indecency.

"No, there's only one job I know of in Nikolaieff that you could take," he said abruptly. "And that's right here in this office."

He had said it upon a rare impulse of generosity; all men are subject to such impulses; and he halted upon the word for his reward. She rendered it handsomely.

"Oh!" she cried, her grey eyes shining and all her pale and gentle face alive with sudden enthusiasm. "Here in the Consulate?" She spoke the word as a devotee might speak of a temple. "That, oh, that's glorious!"

It was utterly satisfactory; Selby swelled and bridled.

"Er, secretary and stenographer," he said largely. "I had a young man here a while since, but I let him go. He couldn't seem to be respectful. And, er, as to terms, Miss Pilgrim."

"Yes?" murmured Miss Pilgrim, as respectfully as he could wish.

But the vice-consul did not continue. In his moment of splendor, it may be that he became aware that only a part of his audience was applauding, and his eyes had fallen on Waters. Till that moment he had actually forgotten him; he seized now on an occasion to be still more impressive.

"Hey, you Waters!" he cried commandingly. "What you waitin' there for? Didn't you hear me tell you to clear out of this? Go on, now; an' don't let me see you in this office again!"

She failed to come up to his expectations this time; she looked puzzled and distressed and seemed to shrink. Waters, removing his eyes from her face, stood deliberately upright. His vagueness and dreaminess gathered themselves into gravity. His lips moved as though on the brink of an answer, but he said nothing.

"Go on!" yapped Selby again.

"I'm goin'," replied Waters, turning from him.

He sent the girl a look that was a claim upon her. "Pleased to meet ye," he said clearly. "Me name's Waters; I'm an American too."

Selby bounced in his chair behind him, squeaking and spluttering; the girl, surprised and uncertain, stammered something. But her face, for all her embarrassment, acknowledged his claim. He took his reply from it, nodded slowly in satisfied comprehension and walked past her towards the door. His worn blouse glimmered white in the shadows of the entry; and he was gone.

Behind him, the office was suddenly uncomfortable and cheerless. Selby was no longer sure of himself and the figure he had cut; the girl looked at him with eyes in which he read a doubt.

"You don't want to take any notice of that fellow," he blustered. "He'd no right to speak to you. He's just a tough in trouble with the police and wanting me to fix it for him. He won't come here again in a hurry."

"But" she hesitated. "Isn't he an American?" she ventured.

"Huh!" snorted Selby. "Americans like him are three for a nickel round here."

"Oh!" she murmured, and sat looking at him while he plunged into the question of "terms." His glasses wobbled on his nose; his hands moved jerkily as he talked, fidgeting with loose papers on his desk; but his weak eyes did not return her gaze.

Nikolaieff, which yet has a quality of its own, has this in common with other abiding places of men that life there shapes itself as a posture or a progress in the measure that one gives to it or receives from it. Tim Waters, who fed upon life like a leech, returned to it after a six weeks' enforced absence (the protocol had valued a damaged istvostchik at that price) with a show of pallor under the bronze on his skin and a Rip van Winkle feeling of having slumbered through far-reaching changes. During his absence the lingering southern autumn had sloped towards winter; the trees along the sad boulevard were already leafless; the river had changed from luminous blue to the blank hue of steel. The men in the streets went fortified with sheepskins or furs; Waters, still in his linen blouse, with hands sunk deep in his pockets and shoulders hunched against the acid of the air, passed among them as conspicuous as a naked man, marking as he moved the stares he drew across high, raised collars.

He was making his way across the city to his old haunts by the waterside; he crossed the Gogol Street through its brisk, disorderly traffic of trams and droschkies and gained the farther sidewalk hard by where a rank of little cabs stood along the gutter. A large sedate officer, moving like a traction-engine, jostled him back into the gutter; he swore silently, and heard a shout go up behind him, a blatant roar of jeers and laughter. Startled, he turned; the istvostchiks, the padded, long-skirted drivers of the little waiting cabs, were gathered together in the roadway; their bearded and brutal faces, discolored with the cold, were agape and hideous with their laughter; and in the forefront of them, pointing with a great hand gloved to the likeness of a paw, stood and roared hoarsely the particular istvostchik on whose account he had suffered the protocol and the prison. The discord of their mirth rilled the street; the big men, padded out under their clothes to a grotesque obesity, their long coats hanging to their heels giving them the aspect of figures out of a Noah's Ark, drew all eyes. The beginnings of a crowd gathered to watch and listen.

"The Amerikanetz," the foremost istvostchik was roaring. "Look at him! Look at his clothes! Just out of prison Look at him!"

Everybody looked; the word "Amerikanetz" fled from lip to lip like a witticism. Waters, stunned by the suddenness of it all, daunted and overwhelmed, turned to move away, to get out of sound and hearing. Forthwith a fresh howl went up. He caught at his self-possession and turned back.

The moment had epic possibilities; the istvostchiks were not fewer than eight in number and the crowd was with them. Waters's face was dark and calm and his movements had the deliberate quiet of purpose. Another instant and Nikolaieff would have been gladdened and scandalized by something much more spectacular than a pogrom. The leading istvostchik, still pointing and bellowing, was inviting disaster; when from behind him, ploughing through the onlookers', came the overdue policeman, traffic baton in hand.

"Circulate, circulate!" he cried to the loiterers, waving at them with his stick. "It is not permitted to congregate. Circulate, gentlemen!"

He advanced into the clear space of roadway behind the rearmost cab, between Waters and his tormentors. His darting official eye fell on the former, standing in his conspicuous blouse, his thin face tense and dire.

"And this?" he demanded. "What is this?"

A chorus of explanations from the istvostchiks answered him. "Amerikanetz," they told him, "just out of prison!" They thronged round him, bubbling over with the story, while he stood, trim and armed, his hard, neat face arrogant under the sideways-tilted peak of his cap, hearing them augustly. Then he smiled.

"Tak!" he said briefly. "So!" He turned on Waters, coming round on him with a movement like a slow swoop. Never was anything so galling as the air he had of contemptuous and amused comprehension.

"You march!" he ordered. "Get off this street!" He pointed with his white-painted baton to the nearest turning. "Don't say anything, now," he warned. "March!"

Waters hesitated. The istvostchiks, still hopeful of sport, pressed nearer. To disobey and resist meant being cut down and stamped to death under their heavy boots. Across the policeman's pointing arm, Waters saw the face of his enemy, expectant, avid, bestial with hideous and cruel mirth. He regarded it for a moment thoughtfully. Then, with a shrug, he turned and moved in the direction he had been ordered to go.

Again, behind him, there was that jeering outcry, as the policeman, smiling indulgently and watching his departure, seemed to preside over the chorus.

He came at length, going slowly, to the water side. It was dark by then; the sheds of the wharves shut out the river and made a barrier against the sweep of the wind. From over their roofs came the glare of the high arc-lamps at the wharf-edge and the masts and the rigging of ships lifted into view. The stridency of day was over in the shabby street; its high houses, standing like cliffs, showed tier upon tier of windows, dimly lighted or dark, while from under the feet of the buildings, from cellar-saloons to traktirs below the street-level, there spouted up the ruddiness of lamplight and the jangle of voices. There was a smell in the sharp air of ships and streets blended, the aromatic freshness of tar, the sourness of crowds and uncleanliness.

Waters, halting upon the cobbles, sniffed with recognition and unstiffened his mind as he gazed along the dreary street. He was here, on his own ground; somewhere in the recesses of those gaunt houses he would sleep that night, and next day he would wedge himself back into his place in that uneasy waterside community and all would be as before. He shivered under the lee of the sheds as he stood, looking, scarcely thinking, merely realizing the scene in its evening disguise.

Down the street towards him, walking with strong and measured steps that resounded upon the cobbles, vague under the shadow of the sheds, came a man. Waters glanced casually in his direction as he came near, aware of him merely as in shape that inhabited the darkness, a dim thing that fitted in with the hour and the furtive street. Then the man was close to him and visible.

"By gosh!" exclaimed Waters aloud.

It was, of all possible people, "the sergeant with the medals." He stared at him helplessly.

"Nu!" cried the sergeant heartily. He possessed all that patronizing geniality which policemen can show to evil-doers, as to colleagues in another department of the same industry. "You are back again yes? And how did you find it up there?"

Waters swallowed and hesitated. The sergeant was a vast man, blond as a straw and bearded like an Assyrian bull, the right shape of man to wear official buttons. His short sword hung snugly along his leg in its black, brass-tipped scabbard; his medals, for war-service in the army, for exemplary conduct, for being alive and in the police at the time of the Tsar's coronation and so forth, made a bright bar on the swell of his chest. A worthy and responsible figure; yet the sum of him was to Waters an offence and a challenge.

He found his tongue. "About the same as you left it, I guess," he answered unpleasantly.

The big man laughed, standing largely a-straddle with the thumbs of his gloved hands hooked into his sword-belt. He was rosy as a pippin and cheery as a host.

"It has done you good," he declared. "For one thing, I can see that you speak Russian better now oh, much better! It is a fine school. By and by, we will send you up for six months, and after that nobody will know you for an Amerikanetz. Ah, you will thank me some day!"

Waters heard him stonily and nodded with meaning.

"You bet I will," he replied. "And when I'm through with you, you'll know just how grateful I am." The need for words with a taste to them mastered him. He broke into his own tongue. "You'll get yours, you big slob!"

"Eh?" The sergeant cocked an ear alertly, "Beek slab? What is that in Russian?"

"It's your middle name," retorted Waters cryptically and made to move on.

"Do svidania!" called the sergeant mockingly, raising his voice to a shout. "Till we meet again! Because I shall be watching you, Votters; I shall be."

"Here!" Waters wheeled on him, hands withdrawn from his pockets and cleared for action.

"You start bellerin' at me in the street that way an' I'll just about."

There was no cohort of hostile istvostchiks here, and anger ached in him like a cancer. He stepped up to the sergeant with a couple of long, cat-footed strides and the out-thrust jaw of war. But the sergeant, instead of bristling and giving battle, held up one large, leather-clad hand with the motion of hushing him.

"St!" he clicked warningly. "Not now! Be orderly, Votters. See your lady-consul!"

"What?" Waters halted, taken by surprise, and turned his head. The sergeant, rigid and formal upon the instant, was saluting. Upon the high sidewalk, a dozen paces away, a girl was passing; she acknowledged the sergeant's salute with a small bow. Her eyes seemed to fall on Waters and she stopped.

"Why, it's" she began, and hesitated as though at a loss for his name. She stood, inspecting the grouping of the pair in the road, the massive sergeant and his slighter, more vivid companion. "Is there is there anything the matter?"

Waters turned his back upon the sergeant and moved slowly towards her, peering at her where she waited in the growing darkness.

"Not with me," he answered.

"Oh!" It was, of course, Miss Pilgrim, the girl whom he had watched across the top of the vice consul's desk. She stood above him now at the edge of the high sidewalk, whence the deep cobbled revetment of the gutter sloped like a fortification. Gazing at her with all his eyes, he identified again, like dear and long-remembered landmarks, the poise of her head, the fragile slope of her shoulders, the softly lustrous pallor of her face. Even her attitude, perched over him there and leaning a little towards him, was a thing individual and characteristic.

"I wondered," she said. "I thought, perhaps."

"We are just talking" Waters reassured her. "Him and me's old friends."

He endeavored to be convincing; but it happened that she had seen as she approached the motion with which he had turned on the sergeant a moment before, and she still waited.

"Perhaps," she suggested then in her pleasant voice, "if you could spare the time, you'd walk along a little way with me?"

He smiled. It was protection she was offering him, the shield of her company, dropping it from above like a gentle gift, like a flower let fall from a balcony. She saw the white gleam of his smile in his shadowed face and made a small, quick movement as though she shrank. Waters made haste to accept.

"With you, Miss Pilgrim? Why, sure I will," he replied warmly, and strode across the gutter to her side.

To the sergeant, watching dumbly this pairing and departure, he said nothing; he did not even turn to enjoy his face.

It was strange to pass along that familiar street with her, to glance down at her and see her forward bent face in profile against the dark doorways leading to interiors whose secrets he knew. The drinking dens were noisy at their feet; the tall houses were dark and sinister above them. He heard her breath as she walked at his elbow in the vicious chill of the evening and out upon the water, visible between the sheds as a low green and a high white light sliding, slowly across the night, an outgoing steamer wailed like a hoarse banshee. Once upon a time he had seen the Black Hundred come roaring and staggering along that street under the eyes of the ships, and had backed into one of the doorways past which they now walked to fight for his life. The memory of it came curiously to him now, as the girl at his side led him on, hurrying to bring him to safety.

They turned a corner ere she spoke to him again, and advanced along a street which showed a vista of receding darkness, beaded by the dull house-lamps set over the courtyard gates. Not till then did she slacken the hurry of her gait. She lifted her face towards him.

"But there was something, wasn't there?" she asked. "Between you and that policeman, I mean. You weren't really just chatting?"

Waters shrugged the policeman into the void.

"It's nothin' that you'd need to worry about, Miss Pilgrim," he answered. "He don't amount to anything."

She was still looking at him. She had on a big muffling coat and her face lifted out of the high collar of it.

"But" she paused. "I was watching, you for a minute; I saw you go back to talk to him," she said. "That's why I stopped. You see, that day in the office, I was ever so sorry."

"Oh, that!" Waters was vaguely embarrassed; he was not used to sympathy so openly expressed. "You mean Selby an' all that? That didn't hurt me."

But she would not be denied. "It hurt me," she answered. "To see you go out like that, so quietly, after asking for help and nobody to say a word for you! I've been hoping ever since that I'd see you so that I'd be able to tell you. Of course," she added, in the tone of one who makes reasonable allowances, "of course, Mr. Selby's in a difficult position; he has to consider the authorities. Naturally, being our consul, he'd like to do his best for all Americans; but he has to be careful. You can understand that, can't you?"

"Why, sure!" agreed Waters warmly. "It's mighty good of you to feel like that about me, Miss Pilgrim; and I ain't blamin' Selby any. He was born like that, I guess sort o' poor white trash and his folks didn't find it out in time to smother him. But I wish I was consul here for a time and he'd come to me to have me fix somethin' for him. I'd cert'nly like to have him know how it feels."

"Ah, but I know," she said earnestly. "I can guess like having no home or friends or even a country of your own to belong to. Like finding out suddenly that Uncle Sam wasn't your uncle after all! Tell me, was it what they did to you, I mean was it very bad?"

He smiled a little wryly, looking down into her serious face.

"Well, it wasn't very good," he answered. "It wasn't meant to be. It ain't often these people get a white man to practice on, an' they sure made the most o' the chance. But it didn't kill me; and, anyway, there ain't any reason why it should trouble you, Miss Pilgrim."

He had a feeling that he preferred her to be immune from the knowledge and understanding of such things, to be and remain a mere eyeful of delicate and stimulating feminine effect. But upon his words she half halted, turning to him; she drew a hand from her muff and her fingers touched his sleeve.

"No reason?" she repeated. "Ah, but there is! There is a reason. I haven't got any official position or anything to lose at all. I don't have to consider anybody. So next time if there is a next time I want you to come straight away to me."

He stared at her, not understanding her sudden excitement. "To you, Miss Pilgrim? You mean come round to Selby's again?"

"No, no!" She shook her head impatiently. "You know it's no use to go there. But I live close by here; I'm taking you there now; and I want you to come to me. Then I'll see the Chief of Police for you; I know him quite well."

"So do I," said Waters. "He's a crook. But say, Miss Pilgrim, I don't just see."

She interrupted him. "I'll explain what I mean and then you'll see that it's all right. But now I want you to come home and have a glass of tea and see where I live. It's Number Thirteen only two houses more. You will come, won't you?"

"I'll be glad to," answered he.

The house to which she brought him had a cavernous courtyard arch like a tunnel, outside whose gates the swaddled dvornik huddled upon the sheltered side of the arch. Of all his body, only his eyes moved as they approached, pivoting under his great hood to scan them and follow them through the gate. Within, the small court was a pit of gloom roofed by the windy sky; a glass-paneled door let them in to a winding stone stair with an iron handrail that was greasy to the touch. It was upon the second floor that Miss Pilgrim halted and put a key into a door.

There was a hall within, a narrow passage cumbered with big furniture, wardrobes and the like, which had obviously overflowed from the rooms. At the far end of it, a door was ajar, letting out a slit of bright light and a smell of cabbage. Miss Pilgrim opened a nearer door, reached for the switch and turned to summon Waters where he waited in the entry, browsing with those eager eyes of his upon this new pasture.

"Here's where you'll come when you want me," she said.

He entered the room, walked as far as the middle of it and looked about him. To his sensitive apprehension, whetted to fineness in the years of his wandering and gazing, it was as though a chill and dead air filled the place, a suggestion as of funerals. Opposite the door, two tall windows, like sepulchral portals, framed oblongs of the outer darkness; and the white-tiled stove in the corner was like a mausoleum. The cheap parquet of the floor had a clammy gleam; a tiny icon, roosting high in a corner, showed a tawdry shine of gilding; the whole room, square and lofty, with its sparse furniture grouped stiffly about its emptiness, was gaunt and forbidding. Of a personality that should be at home within it and leave the impress of its life upon the place, there was not a sign; it was the corpse of a room. Waters turned from his scrutiny of it towards Miss Pilgrim, standing yet by the door and clear to see at last in the light. She smiled at him with her pale, quiet face, and he marked how, when she ceased to smile, her mouth drooped and her face returned to shadow. "That's Selby," he told himself hotly. "Selby done that to her!"

There was another door in the corner, near the white stove. It stood a few inches open, revealing nothing. But as he glanced towards it, it seemed to him that he detected in the lifeless air a nuance of fragrance, something elusive as a shade that emanated from the farther room, and had in its very slightness and delicacy a suggestion of femininity. He knew that it must be her bedroom that lay beyond the door, and he found himself wondering what that was like.

Presently he was seated by the little sham mahogany table, upon which the big brass samovar steamed and whispered, listening to her and watching her. She gave him his glass of the pale-yellow Russian tea that neither cheers nor inebriates, but merely distends and irrigates, and sat over against him, sipping at her glass and returning his gaze with her steady eyes.

"I've only had this room a little time," she remarked. "I've had just a bedroom before. But I had to have somewhere for people to come the people who can't go to Mr. Selby, I mean. You know what they call me at the Police Bureau? Mr. Selby's the vice-consul and I'm the vice-vice. So this," her gaze traveled round the barren room with gentle complacency "this is my Vice-vice Consulate."

"Oh!" Waters looked up at her over the rim of his glass with a changed interest. "The vice-vice? That's a pretty good name. Then you've been doin' this for fellers already?"

He marked a faintness of pink that dawned for a moment in her face at the question. She smiled involuntarily and a little ruefully.

"Well," she hesitated; "I've tried, but I'm afraid I haven't actually done anything for anybody. I haven't had a real chance yet. But, anyhow, there's this room all ready and there's me; and any American who can't go to Mr. Selby for help can come here."

He nodded.

"It was really from you I got the idea," she went on; "when you went out of the Consulate like that and there was nowhere you could go. And later on, there was a sailor from one of the ships, and afterwards a man who said he was a Mormon missionary; and Mr. Selby wouldn't couldn't see his way to do anything for them. The sailor was brought in by two policemen, though he was only a boy! He couldn't speak a word of Russian, of course, and it made me so sorry to think of him all alone with those people, having things done to him and not understanding anything. So, after hours, I went round to see the Chief of Police."

Waters moved a little on his chair. Her face had a mild glow of enthusiasm which touched it with sober beauty. He shook his head.

"He's no good," he said. "You hadn't oughter gone to him by yourself."

"But," Miss Pilgrim protested, "lots of people have said that, and it's all wrong. It was he that nicknamed me the 'vice-vice,' and now all the police in the streets salute me when they see me. Even that first time, before I knew him or anything, he was just as nice as he could be. He was in his office, writing at a table under a lamp, and he just looked up at me, hard and well, taking stock of me, you know, while I told him who I was and what I'd come for. And then he gave me a chair and sat and listened to everything I'd got to say, leaning on his elbow and watching me close. I suppose a Chief of Police gets used to watching people like that."

"I, I wouldn't wonder," answered Waters vaguely. He was seeing, in a swift vision, that interview, with the black-browed man in uniform under the lamp, listening and staring.

"I told him how I felt about it," Miss Pilgrim continued, "and how, since there wasn't anybody else to speak for the boy, I'd come along to see if I could do anything. And when I'd finished he let me go on till I hadn't another word to say that I could think of! he just bowed and said he'd have been delighted to oblige me, but the sailor's captain had been in and paid his fine and taken him away three hours before. Then he sent for glasses of tea and we sat and had a talk, and I got him to say I could always come again when I wanted to. But, you see, if it hadn't been for the captain."

"Sure," agreed Waters. "They'd have turned the kid loose for you. And the Mormon? Seems to me I seen that Mormon, unless there's a couple of them strayin' around. How did you fix it for him?"

Again, at the query, that ghost of pink showed on her cheeks.

"Oh, he--he wasn't very nice," she answered. "He was a big stout man, with a curly black beard like fur growing close to his face all round and shiny round knobs of cheek bulging out of it. I never did get to hear just what the trouble was with him, because when he was telling Mr. Selby, he looked round at me first and then bent over the desk and whispered. Whatever it was, it made Mr. Selby very angry; he simply bounced out of his chair and shouted the man right out of the room. And the man, I couldn't help being sorry for him, just went walking backwards, fending Mr. Selby off with his hands, with his mouth open and his eyes staring, looking as helpless and aghast as could be. And when he got to the door, he burst out crying like a little child."

Waters smacked his knee. "That's him," he cried. "That's the feller! He was up the river same time as me, an' gettin' plenty to cry for, too. But what in what made you try to do anything for one o' them?"

"He said he was an American citizen," answered Miss Pilgrim; "and Mr. Selby wouldn't help him; so he was qualified. What made it difficult in his case was that somehow I never found out what he'd done; and the Chief of Police was queer about him too. I remember once that he told me that if he were to let the man go, he'd be afraid to sleep at nights, for fear he'd hear children's voices weeping in the dark. I couldn't get anything else out of him. And the next time I went, they'd found out that the Mormon wasn't an American at all; he'd just been in the States for a couple of years and then come back to Russia. So there wasn't any more I could do."

Waters put his empty glass upon the square iron tray by the samovar. He reached under his chair for his cap.

"That's so," he agreed. "You couldn't do nothin' for that feller. Maybe you'll land with the next one."

He smiled at her across the little table. He understood now why the gaunt room reflected nothing of her. It was a city of refuge she had built and the refugees had failed to come; it was a makeshift temple of her patriotism and her pity. He caught her small answering smile, noting with what a docility of response her lips shaped themselves to it. No doubt she had smiled just as obediently at the "Mormon."

"It's a great idea, too," he went on. "Maybe Selby's all right as far as he goes, but he certainly don't go very far. This here" he gathered the room into his gesture "starts off where he stops. It's great!"

It was good to see her brighten under the brief praise.

"Then you see now what I meant when I told you to come here to me?" she asked. "Because I'll do everything I can, and the Chief of Police will always listen to me. And you will come, won't you, if you should happen ever to need help or or anything?"

"Why, you bet I will," he promised heartily. "I reckon I got a right to. You're my vice-vice and we don't want to waste a room like this."

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?"

"Yesterday," answered Waters wearily. "Say, boss, it was only for beatin' up an istvostchik, and I got to have a job."

The fiery monkey-face, pursed in sourest disapproval, did not relax a line. "Yesterday an' now ye come here! Well, we're no' wantin' hands just now, d'ye see? An' if we was, we'd no' want you. So now ye know!"

The angry mask of a face continued to lower at him unwaveringly; it was almost bitter and righteous enough to be funny. Waters surveyed it for a space of moments with a faint interest in its mere grotesqueness; it did not change nor shift under his scrutiny, but continued to glare inhumanly like a baleful lamp. He humped a thin shoulder in resignation and turned away. When he was halfway to the gate, he heard behind him the foreman ordering the gatekeeper not to admit him in future.

Passing again along the cobbled street, he halted suddenly and gazed about him like a man seeking. Everything was as it had been before, from the folk moving in it to the pale sky over it. The little shops, showing idealized pictures of their wares on painted boards beside their doors for the benefit of a public that could not read; the cluster of small gold domes on a church at the corner; the great bearded laboring men in their filthy sheepskins; the Jews, sleek and furtive; the cabman who doffed his hat and crossed himself as he drove by a shrine there was not a house nor a man that he could not identify and classify. He had come back to them from the pain and labor of his imprisonment confident of what he should find; and it was as if a home had become hostile and unwelcoming.

"Guess I'll have to be movin' outta this town," he told himself. "Seems as if I'd stopped here long enough!"

He had time to confirm this judgment in the days that followed. The approach of winter was bringing its inevitable slackness to all work carried on in the open air, and the big works could afford to be scrupulous about the characters of the men they engaged; and the little tradesmen feared the ban of the police. His slender store of money came to an end, and but for occasional jobs of wood-splitting as the supplies of winter fuel came in, it would have been difficult merely to live. As it was, he dragged his belt tighter about the waist of the old linen blouse and showed to the daylight a face whose whimsicality and vagueness were darkened with a touch of the saturnine. He showed it likewise to Miss Pilgrim when one day she passed him at the noon hour, hurrying past the corner on which he stood, wrapped to the eyes in her greatcoat.

She recognized him suddenly and stopped.

"Good morning," she said. "It's, it's a cold day, isn't it?"

Waters had his back to the wall for shelter, and though he stood thus out of the wind, the air drenched him with its chill like water. He smiled slowly with stiff lips at the brisk outdoor pink in her cheeks.

"This ain't cold," he answered. "You won't call this cold when you've been through a winter here."

"No," she agreed. "I suppose I won't." She shifted diffidently, looking at him with her frank eyes. "Are you getting along all right," she asked.

He smiled again; in her meaning there was only one kind of "all right" and "all wrong." "Why, yes," he replied. "I'm all right, Miss Pilgrim; an' if I wasn't, I'd know where to come."

She nodded eagerly. "Yes; I don't want you to forget. I I'll always be glad to do everything I can."

"Sure; I know that," he replied. "An' you? You makin' out all right too, Miss Pilgrim? That Vice-vice-Consulate o' yours keepin' you pretty busy?"

The brisk pink flooded across her face in a quick flush, and her mouth drooped. But her eyes, as always, were steady against his.

"There hasn't been anybody yet," she answered, with a look that deprecated his smile.

He hastened to be sympathetic. "Too bad!" he said. "With a room like that all ready an' waitin' too. But maybe it's only that things is kind o' slack just now; somebody'll be cuttin' loose pretty soon and you'll get your turn all right."

She made to move on, but paused again to answer.

"The room will always be there if you if anybody wants it," she said. "Even if nobody ever comes, it shall always be ready, at least. That's all I can do."

She bade him farewell, with the little nod she had, and passed on, muffling her chin down into her great cloth collar. Waters looked after her with a frown of consideration. He was forgetting for the moment that he was cold, that he had fed inadequately upon gruel of barley, that he was all but penniless in an expensive and hostile world. There was astir in his being, as he watched the slight overcoated figure of the girl, that same protective instinct which had galvanized even Selby into generosity; it never fails to make one feel man enough to cope with any array of ills. There crossed and tangled in his mind a moving web of schemes for aiding and consoling her.

Each of them had for a character vagueness of method and utter completeness of result, but none amounted to a programme. Waters, for all his brisk record, was not a man of action; he was rather a mechanism jolted abruptly into action by the impulses of a detached and ardent mind. It was chance, the ironic chance whose marionettes are men and women, and not any design of his, which turned his feet that evening towards the room that was always to be waiting and ready.

He was returning towards his lodging after an afternoon of looking for work, tired, wearing a humor in tune with the early dark and the empty monotony of the streets by which he went. The few folk who were abroad in them went by like shy ghosts; the high fronts of the houses were like barricades between him and all the comfort and security in the world. There was mud in the roads and his boots were no longer weather-proof. Life tasted stale and sour.

An empty droschky, going the same way as himself, came bumping along the gutter behind him, the driver singing hoarse and broken snatches of song. He moved from the edge of the pavement to be clear of mud-splashes as it passed him, and heard, without further concern, the vehicle draw up level with him and the whistle and slap of the whip as the istvostchik light-heartedly tortured his feeble horse.

"Her eyes are cornflowers," proclaimed the istvostchik melodiously; "her lips are-" He was abreast of Waters as he broke off. Five feet of uneven and slimy sidewalk separated them. Waters looked up; a house-lamp was above, dull and steady as a foggy star; and it showed him, upon the box of the droschky, his enemy, the mainspring of all his troubles. He halted short.

The istvostchik had recognized him likewise. He was something short of drunk, but his liquor was lively in him, and he wrenched his poor specter of a horse to a standstill. Upon his seat, padded hugely in his gown, he had a sort of throned look, a travesty of majesty; his whip was held like a scepter.

They stared at one another for a space of three or four breaths. Waters was frankly aghast; this, upon the top of his other troubles, was overwhelming. The istvostchik ruptured the moment with a brassy yell.

"Wow!" he howled. "My Amerikanetz, the Foreigner, the jail-bird! Look at him, brothers!" He waved his whip as though the darkness were thronged with auditors. "Look at the jail-bird!"

From the gate below the dull lamp a dvornik poked his head forth. Waters had a sense that every door and window in the street was similarly fertile in heads.

"Stop that!" he called to the istvostchik. "That's enough, now."

The man upon the little cab rolled on his seat in a strident ecstasy of eloquence, brandishing arm and whip abroad above the back of the drooping horse.

"He tried to fight me, and first I beat him terribly oh, terribly! and then I made a protocol and sent him to prison. See him?" he bellowed. "See the jail-bird? See the dog?"

Waters swore helplessly. A month before, upon a quarter of such provocation, he would have flashed into fight; but cold, hunger and friendlessness had damped the tinder in him. He made to go on and get away from it all; he started quickly.

"Come back, jail-bird!" howled the istvostchik.

"I haven't done with you, my golubchik, my little prison-rat. Come back here to me when I bid you. What, you won't? Get on, you!"

The last was to the horse, accompanied by a rending slash with the whip. The wretched animal jerked forward, and Waters backed to the wall as his enemy clattered down upon him again.

"That'll do you," he warned as the cabman dragged his horse to a standstill once more. "I'm not lookin' for trouble. You be on your way!"

The immense ragged-edged voice of the istvostchik descended upon him, drowning his protest.

"He runs away from me, this Amerikanetz! He runs away, because when I find him I beat him I beat him whenever I find him. See now, brothers, I am beating him!"

And out of the tangle of his gesticulations, the whip-lash swooped across the sidewalk and cut Waters heavily across the neck.

In the mere surprise of it and the instance of the pain, Waters made a noise like a yelp, a little spurt of involuntary sound. And then the tinder lighted.

"Beating him!" intoned the istvostchik, mighty in his moment. "Beat."

It was the last coherent syllable which he uttered in the affair. With a rush Waters cleared the sidewalk and was upon him, had him by the pulp of clothes which enveloped him and tore him across the wheel to the ground. They went down together across the curb, legs in the gutter among the wheels, a convulsive bundle of battle that tore apart and whirled together again as the American, with all the long-compressed springs of his being suddenly released and vibrant, poured his resentment and soul-soreness into his fists and found balm for them in the mere spite of hitting somebody.

It was a short fight. The istvostchik, even under his padding, was a biggish man and vicious with liquor; he grappled at his antagonist earnestly enough, to drag him down and bite and worry and kick in the manner of his kind. But the breast of the worn linen blouse ripped in his clutch and a pair of man-stopping punches on the mouth and the eye drove him backwards towards the wall. It was then he began to squeal.

There were spectators by now, dvorniks who came running and passers-by upon the other side who appeared from nowhere as though suddenly materialized. There was a sparse circle of them about the fight when it ceased, with the istvostchik down and flattened in the angle of the wall and the pavement, making small timid noises like a complaining kitten. Waters, with the mist of battle clearing, from his eyes, saw them all about him, dark, well-wrapped figures, watching him silently or whispering together. He sensed their profound disapproval of him and his proceedings.

"That'll keep you quiet for a while," he spoke down to the wreck of the istvostchik.

Only moans answered him; he grunted and turned to go. From the nearest group of spectators a single figure detached itself and moved towards him, blocking his path. It revealed itself at close quarters as a stout, middle-aged man, prosperously fur-coated, with a spike of dark beard the inevitable public-spirited citizen of the provinces.

"You must explain this disturbance," he said to Waters importantly. "You must wait here and explain yes, and show your papers. You cannot walk away like this!"

His companions pressed nearer interestedly. Waters could not know the figure he cut, with his torn blouse which even in the gloom showed stains of the mud and blood of the combat.

"Get out of my way!" was all his answer.

"Your papers," persisted the stout man. "I," he puffed his chest, "I am in the Administration; I require to see your papers. Produce them!"

The pale oblong of his fat face wagged at Waters peremptorily; he quite obviously felt himself a spokesman for order and decency and the divinely ordained institution of "papers."

"I said get out o' my way," said Waters clearly. He put the flat of his hand against the stout man's fur-coated chest, shoved, and sent him staggering back on his heels among his supporters. Without looking towards him again, he passed through them and continued his way. He heard the chorus of their indignation break out behind him.

It followed him, a cackle of outraged respectability, with here and there an epithet distinguishable like a plum in a pudding. "Ruffian," they called him, "assassin," "robber," and so forth, the innocuous amateur abuse of men who have learned their bad language from their newspapers. It was not till he had gone a hundred yards, and the noise of their lamentation had a little died down, that there emerged out of the blur of it a voice that was quite clear.

"Hi, you there!" It rang with the note of practiced authority. "Halt, d'you hear? Halt!"

The tones were enough, without the fashion of the words, to tell him that a policeman had arrived on the scene. He looked back and saw that the group of citizens was flowing along the sidewalk towards him, a black moving blot. He could not distinguish the policeman, but he knew that the others must be escorting him, coming with him to see the finish.

There was a corner some thirty or forty yards farther on. Waters jammed his cap tighter on his head, picked up his heels and sprinted for it.

"Halt, there!" shouted the policeman. "Halt-I'll shoot!"

Waters was at the corner when the shot sounded, detonating, like a cannon in the channel of the street. Where the bullet went he did not guess; he was round the corner, running in the middle of the street for the next turning, with eyes alert for any entrance in which he might find a refuge. But the firing had had its intended effect of bringing every dvornik to his gate, and there was nothing for it but to run on. He heard the chase round the corner behind him and the policeman's 'repeated shout; the skin of his back crawled in momentary expectation of another shot that might not go wild; and then, with the next corner yet twenty yards away, came the idea.

The mere felicity of it tickled him like a jest in the midst of all his stress; he spent hoarded breath in a gasp of laughter.

Around the corner that lay just ahead of him, for which he was racing, was the street in which Miss Pilgrim lived, with her outer room that was always ready and waiting. Without design or purpose he had run towards it; an inscrutable fate, whimsical as his own humor, had herded him thither. Well, he would go there! The matter was slight, after all; she would explain the whole matter to her Chief of Police, how the istvostchik had been the assailant and so forth; he would be released, and her self-appointed function of "vice-vice" would shine forth justified and vindicated. It all fell out as dexterously as a conjuring trick.

"Halt!" yelled the policeman. "I know you, halt!"

But he did not shoot again; those southern policemen lack the fiber that will loose bullet after bullet along a dark street; and Waters had yet a good lead as he rounded the next corner and came into cover. The house he sought was near by; as he cleared the angle, he dropped into a swift walk that the new row of dvorniks might not mark him at once for a fugitive, and strode along sharply under the wall where it was darkest. He passed Number Seventeen without a sign from its dvornik, and in the gate of Number Fifteen two dvorniks were gossiping and did not turn their heads as he passed. The arch of Number Thirteen, the house he sought, was close at hand when the pursuit came stamping round the corner behind him; he heard their cries as he slipped in through the half-open gate of the arch. The chance that had brought him hither was true to him yet, for there was no dvornik on watch; the man had chosen that moment of all others to step over to gossip with his neighbor of Number Fifteen.

He paused in the blackness of the courtyard to listen whether the pursuit would pass by, and heard it arrive outside the gate, jangling with voices. It had gathered up the dvornik on its way. Waters, with a hand upon the door that opened to the staircase, heard the brisk voice of the policeman questioning him in curt spurts of speech, and the dvornik's answers. "Of course, he might have gone in. There is an Amerikanka here, from the Consulate, and he might have gone to her." Then the policeman, cutting the knot: "We'll soon see about that!" He waited no longer, but entered and darted up the stair; he must at all costs not be caught before he got to Miss Pilgrim.

It was the thought of her and the expectation of her welcome to the barren room that made him smile as he climbed. Muddy, penniless and hunted, he knew himself for one that brought gifts; he was going to make her rich with the sense of power and benevolence. He was half-way up the second flight, at the head of which she lived, when he heard the policeman and his following of citizens enter below him and the stamp of their firm ascending feet on the lower steps. He took the remaining stairs three at a time. Upon the landing, the door of the flat stood ajar.

Gently, with precautions not to be heard below, he pushed it open, uncovering the remembered view of the furniture-cluttered passage, with the doors of rooms opening from it and the kitchen door at the end. The kitchen door was closed now; there was no sound anywhere within the place. Nearest to him, on the left of the passage, the door of the room in which he had drunk tea was open and dark.

He tapped nervously with his nails upon the door, hearing from below the approaching footsteps of the hunters.

"Miss Pilgrim," he called in a loud whisper along the passage. "Miss Pilgrim!"

The bell-push was a button somewhere in the woodwork and he could not find it. He tapped and whispered again. The others were at the foot of the second flight now; in a couple of seconds the turn of the staircase would let them see him, and he would be captured and dragged away from her very threshold. He had a last agony of hesitation, an impulse swiftly tasted and rejected, to try a rush down the stairs and a fight to get through and away; and then he stepped into the flat and eased the door to behind him. Its patent lock latched itself with a small click unheard by the party whose feet clattered on the stone steps.

There was a clock somewhere in the dwelling that ticked pompously and monotonously, and no other sound. Standing inside the door, in that hush of the house, he was oppressed by a sense of shameful trespass; he glanced with trepidation towards the kitchen, dreading to see someone come forth and shriek at the sight of him. Supposing Miss Pilgrim were out! Then from the landing came a smart insistent knock upon the door, and within the flat a bell woke and shrilled vociferously. He turned; the room that was always to be ready was at his side, and he fled on tiptoe into its darkness.

He got himself clear of the door, moving with extended hands across its creaking parquet till he touched the cold smoothness of the tiled stove, and freezing to immobility as he heard the kitchen door open. Quick footsteps advanced along the passage; to him, checking, his breath in the dark, listening with every nerve taut, it was as though he saw her, the serene poise of her body as she walked, the pathetic confidence of her high-held head, so distinctive and personal was even the noise of her tread on the boards. Presently, when she had sent the policeman away, he would see her and make her the gift of his request and watch her face as she received it from him.

The latch clicked back under her hand, and she was standing in the entry, confronting the policeman and his backing of citizens.

"Yes?" he heard her say, with a note of surprise at the sight of them. "Yes? What is it?"

The policeman's voice, with the official rasp in it, answered, spitting facts as brief as curses. "Man evading arrest aggravated assault believed to be a certain American apparently escaped this direction." It was like a telegram talking. Then, from his escort, a corroborating gabble.

He could imagine her look of rather puzzled eagerness. "An American?" she exclaimed. Then, as she realized it and its possibilities possibly also the fact that already when an American was sought for it was to her door that they came "oh!"

"Require you to produce him," injected the policeman, "if here! He is here yes?"

"No," she answered; "nobody has come here yet."

There seemed to be a check at that; the effect of her, standing in the doorway, made insistence difficult. The loud clock ticked on, and, at the background of the whole affair, the citizens on the landing maintained a subdued and unremarked murmur among themselves.

"He came this way," observed the policeman tenaciously. "He was seen to pass the next house." And a voice chimed in, melancholy, plaintive, evidently the voice of the dvornik who had been discovered absent from his post: "Yes, I saw him."

"Well," Miss Pilgrim seemed a little at a loss. "He's not here." She paused. "I have two rooms here," she added; "this" she must be pointing to the dark open door beside her "and my bedroom. You can look in this room, if that is what you want."

Waters heard the answering yap of the policeman and the shuffle of feet. He turned in panic; there was no time to reason with events. A step, and his groping hands were against that inner door, which yielded to their touch. Even in the chaos of his wits, he was aware of that subtle odor he had perceived before, that elusive fragrance which seemed a very emanation of chaste girlhood and virgin delicacy. He was inside, leaving the door an inch ajar, as the switch clicked in the outer room and a narrow jet of light stabbed through the opening.

"You see, there is nobody," Miss Pilgrim was saying.

The citizens, faithful to the trial, had crowded in. The policeman grunted doubtfully.

Waters, easing his breath noiselessly, let his eyes wander. The streak of light lay across the floor and up over the counterpane of a narrow wooden bed, then climbed the wall across the face of a picture to the ceiling. Beyond its illumination, there were dim shapes of a dressing-table and a wash-hand-stand, and there were dresses hanging on the wall beside him behind a sheet draped from a shelf. A window, high and double-paned, gave on the courtyard. Through it he could see the lights shining in curtained windows opposite.

"That?" It was Miss Pilgrim answering some question. "That is my bedroom. No; you must not go in there!"

There was a hush and a citizen said "Ah!" loudly and knowingly. Waters, listening intently, frowned.

"I must look," said the policeman curtly.

"But" her voice came from near the door, as though she were standing before it, barring the way to them, "you certainly shall not look. It is my bedroom, and even if your man had come here" she broke off abruptly. "You see he is not here," she added.

"I must look," repeated the policeman in exactly the same tone as before. "It is necessary."

"No," she said. "You must take my word. If you do not, I shall complain tomorrow morning to the consul and to the Chief of Police and you shall be punished."

"H'm!" The policeman was in doubt; she had spoken with a plain effect of meaning what she said, and a policeman's head upon a charger is a small sacrifice for a courteous Chief to offer to a lady friend. He tried to be reasonable with her.

"It was because he was seen to come this way," he argued. "He passed the next house and the dvornik this man here! saw him. He had committed an assault, an aggravated assault, on an istvostchik and evaded arrest. And he came this way."

"He is not here, though," replied Miss Pilgrim steadily. "Nobody at all has been here this evening. I give you my word."

The Russian phrase she used was "chestnoe slovo," "upon my honorable word." Waters caught his breath and listened anxiously.

"I give you my honorable word that he is not here," she affirmed deliberately.

"Now what do you know about that?" exclaimed Waters helplessly.

From the rear of the room somebody piped up acutely: "Then why may the policeman not look, since nobody is there?" Murmurs of agreement supported the questioner.

Miss Pilgrim did not answer. It was to Waters as though she and the policeman stood, estimating each other, measuring strength and capacity. The policeman grunted.

"Well," he said, "since you say, upon your honorable word but I must report the matter, you understand." He paused and there followed the rustle of paper as he produced and opened his notebook.

"Your names?" he demanded.

"Certainly," agreed Miss Pilgrim, in a voice of extreme formality. But she moved to the bedroom door and drew it conclusively shut before she replied.

Waters drew deep breaths and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. From the farther room he could hear now no more than confused and inarticulate murmurings; but he was not curious about the rest. He knew just what was going on the fatuous interrogatory as to name, surname, age, birthplace, nationality, father, mother, trade, married or single, civil status, and all the rest of the rigmarole involved in every contact with the Russian police. He had seen it many times and endured it himself often enough. Just now he had another matter to think of.

"Honorable word!" he repeated. "It's a wonder she couldn't find something different to say. Now I got to fool her. I got to, I."

The window showed him the pit of the courtyard; its frame was not yet caulked with cotton-wool and sealed with brown paper for the winter. He got it open and leaned out, feeling to either side for a spout, a pipe, anything that would give him handhold to climb down by. There was nothing of the kind; but directly below him he could make out the mass of the great square stack of furnace-wood built against the wall. From the sill to the top of the stack was a drop of full twenty feet.

He measured it with his eyes as best he could in the darkness. It was a chance, a not impossible one, but ugly enough. At any rate, it was the only one, if he were to get out and leave that "honorable word" untarnished. It never occurred to him that she might take it less seriously than he.

Waters, who dreamed, who stood by and gazed when life became turbulent and vivid, did not hesitate now. There was time for nothing but action, if he was to substitute a worthy sacrifice for his spoiled gift.

Seated upon the sill, he managed to draw the inner window shut and to latch it through the ventilating pane; the outer one he had to leave swinging and trust that she might find or not demand an explanation for it. This done, he was left, with his back to the house, seated upon the sill, a ledge perhaps a foot wide, with his legs swinging above the twenty-foot drop. In order to make it with a chance for safety, he had so to change his posture that he could hang by his hands from the sill, thus reducing the sheer fall by some six feet.

The dull windows of the courtyard watched him like stagnant eyes as, leaning aside, he labored to turn and lower himself. His experience at sea and upon the gantries in the yards should have helped him; but the past days, with their chill and insufficient food, had done their work on nerve and muscle, and he was still straining to turn and get his weight on to his hands when he slipped.

In the outer room, the catechism was running, or crawling, its ritual course.

"Father's nationality?" the policeman was inquiring, with his notebook upheld to the light and! a stub of flat pencil poised for the answer. A noise from the courtyard reached him. "What's that?" he inquired.

"Sounds like wood slipping off the stack," volunteered a citizen, and the dvornik, whose business it had been to pile it, and who had trouble enough on his hands already, sighed and drooped.

"American, of course," replied Miss Pilgrim patiently.

Below in the courtyard, Waters sat up and raised a hand to where something wet and warm was running down his cheek from under his hair, and found that it hurt his wrist when he did so. He rose stiffly, cursing to himself at the pain it caused him. Above him, the windows of the room that was always to be ready and waiting were broad and bright and heads were visible against them. He felt himself carefully and discovered that he could walk.

"Huh! Me for the roads goin' south outta this," he soliloquized, as he hobbled towards the gate; "an' startin' right now!"

He paused at the entry to the arch and looked back at the windows again.

"Honorable word!" he repeated bitterly, nursing his injured wrist. "Wouldn't that jar you?"

He moved out through the gale slowly and painfully.

[The end]
Perceval Gibbon's short story: Miss Pilgrim's Progress

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