As he walked along he thought of these things; thought of them carefully and concisely in English. His narrow eyes became a trifle more narrow, and a smile that held something of triumph in it came and played about his flat, mobile mouth.
It had been raining hard. The wet streets stretched in dark, reflecting coils under the corner lamps. Overhead a black sky lowered threateningly; pressing down upon the crouching, gray masses of the close-built houses in sullen menace. Now and again a swift moving train flung itself in thundering derision across the elevated tracks; a long brightly lit line streaking through the encircling gloom.
He could feel the mysterious throb of life all about him. The unfathomed lure of the night, of the few people that at so late an hour crept past him, looming for a second in sudden distinctness at his side, then fading phantom-like into the deep engulfing shadows of the dim street.
He was at a complete loss how to express to himself the feeling of dread; a subtle feeling that somehow refused to be translated into the carefully acquired English of which he was so proud.
For a moment he doubted himself. Doubted that, were he so thoroughly American, he could feel the Oriental's subconscious recognition of the purposeful, sinister intent in the huddled mass of darkened shop windows with their rain-dripping signs; in the shining reptile scales of the asphalt underfoot; in the pulsing intensity of the hot, torpid July atmosphere.
A street lamp flickered its uncertain light sluggishly over the carefully groomed figure and across the placid breath of the yellow face.
He paused a second as he saw a form come lurching unsteadily out of the gloom ahead of him. It came nearer and he could see that what had at first appeared to be a dark, undefinable mass, pushed here and there by unseen hands, was in reality a man swaying drunkenly out of the shadows.
He watched the man curiously, with a little of that contemptuous feeling an Oriental always holds for any expression of excess. As the man stood before him in the darkness, as he stumbled and seemed about to fall, he put out his hand and caught him by the elbow.
"Thank 'e;" the drunken eyes blinked blearily up into his stolid impassive face. "It's fine to be saved on a stormy night like this. It is--"