Soames became conscious of a new security. He
set about his duties that morning with a greater alacrity
than usual, valeting one of the living dead men—a
promising young painter whom he chanced to know by
sight—with a return to the old affable manner
which had rendered him so popular during his career
as cabin steward.
He felt that he was now part and parcel of Kan-Suh
Concessions; that Kan-Suh Concessions and he were
at one. He had yet to learn that his sense of
security was premature, and that his added knowledge
might be an added danger.
When Said brought his lunch into his room, he delivered
also a slip of paper bearing the brief message:
“Go out 6.30—return 10.”
Mr. Soames uncorked his daily bottle of Bass almost
gaily, and attacked his lunch with avidity.
THE WORLD ABOVE
The night had set in grayly, and a drizzle of fine
rain was falling. West India Dock Road presented
a prospect so uninviting that it must have damped
the spirits of anyone but a cave-dweller.
Soames, buttoned up in a raincoat kindly lent by Mr.
Gianapolis, and of a somewhat refined fit, with a
little lagoon of rainwater forming within the reef
of his hat-brim, trudged briskly along. The necessary
ingredients for the manufacture of mud are always present
(if invisible during dry weather) in the streets of
East-end London, and already Soames’ neat black
boots were liberally bedaubed with it. But what
cared Soames? He inhaled the soot-laden air rapturously;
he was glad to feel the rain beating upon his face,
and took a childish pleasure in ducking his head suddenly
and seeing the little stream of water spouting from
his hat-brim. How healthy they looked, these East-end
workers, these Italian dock-hands, these Jewish tailors,
these nondescript, greasy beings who sometimes saw
the sun. Many of them, he knew well, labored
in cellars; but he had learnt that there are cellars
and cellars. Ah! it was glorious, this gray,
murky London!
Yet, now that temporarily he was free of it, he realized
that there was that within him which responded to
the call of the catacombs; there was a fascination
in the fume-laden air of those underground passages;
there was a charm, a mysterious charm, in the cave
of the golden dragon, in that unforgettable place
which he assumed to mark the center of the labyrinth;
in the wicked, black eyes of the Eurasian. He
realized that between the abstraction of silver spoons
and deliberate, organized money-making at the expense
of society, a great chasm yawned; that there may be
romance even in felony.
Soames at last felt himself to be a traveler on the
highroad to fortune; he had become almost reconciled
to the loss of his bank balance, to the loss of his
place in the upper world. His was the constitution
of a born criminal, and, had he been capable of subtle
self-analysis, he must have known now that fear, and
fear only, hitherto had held him back, had confined
him to the ranks of the amateurs. Well, the plunge
was taken.
