could see in the dusk, a little down the street, the girl standing at
her gate. The street was empty and silent. At the end of it the
lamp-lighter set his beacon.




IX. In a Coffee-Shop

With a day of rain, Dockland is set in its appropriate element. It
does not then look better than before, but it looks what it is. Not
sudden April showers are meant, sparkling and revivifying, but a
drizzle, thin and eternal, as if the rain were no more than the shadow
cast by a sky as unchanging as poverty. When real night comes, then
the street lamps dissolve ochreous hollows in the murk. It was such a
day as that; it was not night, for the street lamps were not alight.
There was no sound. The rain was as noiseless as the passage of time.
Two other wayfarers were in the street with me. One had no right
there, nor anywhere, and knew it, slinking along with his head and tail
held low, trailing a length of string through the puddles. The other,
too, seemed lost. He was idling as if one street was the same as
another, and on that day there was rain in all. He came towards me,
with his hands in his pockets and his coat collar up. He turned on me
briskly, with a sudden decision, when he drew level. Water dripped
from the peak of his cap, and his clothes were heavy and dark with it.
He spoke. "Mister, could ye give me a hand up? I've made a mess of
it." His cheerful and rather insolent assurance faltered for a moment.
He then mumbled: "I've been on the booze y'understand." But there was
still something in his tone which suggested that any good man might
have done the same thing.