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
lab