The university man shifted his eyeglass, flushed and quoted a verse in Greek as the naked leg of some dusky dancer outside poked through the shanty door, giving those pious old shellbacks a fearful shock, as one can imagine. It was only a leg, terra-cotta colour, rounded with full, perfect symmetry, five polished nails shining like pearls on the wagging toes, and it caused a deal of critical comment. From the saloon bar came guttural and musical voices of customers who had seen better days, and still had some cash in hand. “Yesh, old man—hic, hic—you’re right, it’s sheer bosth. A man’s a man even if he did bolt with a woman—and the brass.” Here came much confidential whispering. Polished oaths were intermingled with the faint echoes of the operatic strain, _Ah che la Morte_, then silence again as someone fell to the floor!
Like a death groan the song moaned and faded—it was the voice of Pauline’s father, who had tried to sing some half-forgotten song of other days. Could one have peeped out of that shanty door into the moonlight, he would have been seen once more on his regular night route, staggering beneath the palms homeward, the eternal white jacket fluttering afar as the ever watching, sinister, white-faced man kept by his side, swaying and tottering like some awful-looking, sardonic mimic as they returned to that lonely home in the hills.
“Toime, gentlemen, please!” It was the only call of _closing_ time in Tai-o-hae, and came from the umpires outside as two burly, sunburnt men of the sea _closed_ together. The struggle soon ceased. A faint hurrah announced the victor, as crash! his opponent fell to the sward. It was nothing much, just a little forcible argument between two passionate men on some point that neither remembered when the winner had been proclaimed, and once again they drank—fearless comrades at the shanty bar!
Those rough men had a strange fascination for me. I do not hint that they were samples of the highest order, but I emphatically assert that that shanty was a good old honest slop-shop of life. Therein one could go and pick up a good bargain in the way of man—bad as well as good. It was as though Fate had made a glorious fizzling stew, a stock-pot of bubbling, singing life, always at boiling-point. Flavoured with the finest “familiar juice,” a connoisseur could sniff at the shanty door the odoriferous steaming poetry, the delicious fragrance from the boiled-down wild-bird-like songs. It was the steaming of romantic brains, the intoxicating odours of forgotten moonlit nights—a woman’s kisses years away, old memories, dead certs and dead dreams. For those old birds would sometimes come to the surface, flutter their wings and sing unearthly songs, strains of haunting beauty, only for a moment as they opened their grog-blossomed beaks, flapped their despairing, broken wings and then sank once again into the depths of the boiling groggy soup!