“Don’t fink much of this ’ere plyce!” mumbled Adams.
“All right in its way; good for insect collectors,” replied Clensy.
“Mulatters and niggers ain’t civilised like we are,” was Adams’s sententious remark, as he removed a cork and sniffed the shellback’s sal volatile—his rum-flask!
“Not they!” said Clensy, shaking his head with superb acquiescence. With all the drawbacks of Haytian ways, Clensy admitted that the city had its picturesque, poetic side. The half-caste girls and negresses with heads adorned with wonderful chignons, the dusky, bright-eyed youths and the musical patois they babbled, greeted Clensy’s ears and eyes in a pleasing way. Far away he saw the palm-clad mountain slopes disappearing into rugged, dreamy blue distances, and on the other side of the city stretched the dim wide plains of Gonaives. “What mahogany trees!” exclaimed Clensy, as they stood before several giant, sombre trees, the last members of the great forests that had once surrounded Port-au-Prince.
“Damn yer trees!” said Adams, who was more interested in watching several Haytian maids and negresses perform a peculiar dance, the bamboula, the steps of which gave a bold exhibition of the dancer’s physical charms. Adams, being very religious and modest by nature, said, “‘Ow can they do sich fings before civilised men like hus! It’s terryble!”
“Don’t break down; all our health is wanted to meet the trials of adversity before us,” said Clensy in a soothing voice, as Adams hung his blushing face and the maids still danced on. Then the sailorman lifted his shocked countenance and, as his solitary eye gave a merry blue twinkle, he murmured, “Let’s git out of it and go back to our lodgings.”
The fact is that it was getting late, and the stars were already shining over the plains of Gonaives. In half an hour Clensy and Adams had arrived back at their cheap lodging-house that was situated by the Sing-Song Café, in La Selle Street.
“By God’s grace I’ll sleep to-night,” said Clensy, as he took his tin of Keating’s flea powder forth and began to well pepper his bunk bed. Then he opened his baize bag (he had pawned his portmanteau), and, taking out his special bit of ship’s sheeting, he pitched the lodging-house sheet out of the window and remade the bed. “You’re too aristocratic, too ’tickler ter travel. You orter stopped ’ome with yer pa and ma,” said Adams, as he picked up a wriggling fat green lizard from his bed and tossed it out of the window.
“Maybe I am too particular,” replied Clensy, as he glanced through the window at the stars, and wondered how long the mingy oil-lamp, that swung from the ceiling, would last before the oil was exhausted. Then his heart gave a thump and nearly stopped! Adams dropped his pipe in his astonishment. They both thought the roof had fallen on top of them.
But it wasn’t as bad as that. A huge settee-pillow had been thrown, had struck Clensy on top of the head, and smashed into Adams’s back. A tremendous peal of laughter shook the room. “Flea powder! By the gods of my fathers, flea powder!” yelled a voice. They turned their heads, and there, in a bunk right opposite their own, they saw two large blue eyes staring at them from beneath a giant of a brow. They saw a great body slowly uplift from the bunk. Then the figure’s wide-open mouth gave vent to a vibrant peal of renewed laughter. The man who had so boisterously introduced himself to Clensy and Adams was a new arrival in Hayti, had only the day before left a steamer in the bay at Port-au-Prince.