uenos Aires, has
not been heard of since that date, and today was 'posted' as missing."

I remembered then a young man in uniform, with a rakish cap, trying to
find a key while a girl was laughing at him. As I left the house I
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.

It is not easy to be even sententious with the sinful when an open
confession robs us of our moral prerogative, so I only told him that it
seemed likely booze had something to do with it. His age could have
been forty; but it was not easy to judge, for the bridge of his nose
was a livid depression. Some accident had pushed in his face under the
eyes, giving him the battered aspect of ancient sin. His sinister
appearance would have frightened any timid lady if he had stopped her
in such a street, on such a day, with nobody about but a lost dog, and
the houses, it could be supposed, deserted, or their inmates seclu