After their departure I played the fiddle once more, as that wonderful collection of the drifting brigade sat listening. Serious faces, funny faces, bearded, expressionless faces, sensitive, cynical, philosophical, humorous, tawny and pasty faces, all holding rum mugs, and looking like big wax figures clad in ragged duck-suits, dirty red shirts and belted pants, wide-brimmed hats or cheesecutters, sitting there on tiers of tubs, while Ranjo swished his towel and served out drink. Over their heads were suspended multitudes of empty gin bottles, hanging on invisible wires. Each bottle held a tallow candle that dimly flickered as the faintest breeze blew through the chinks of the wooden walls and open doorway. And as I fiddled on with delight, it seemed as if that bar was some ghostly room stuck up in the clouds, and that in some magical way those fierce, disappointed, unshaved pioneers of life had stolen a constellation of stars of the third and fourth magnitude, which shone, just over their sinful heads, in a phantom-roofed sky of ethereal deep blue drifts—tobacco smoke.
Against the partition Ranjo had fixed a huge cracked ship’s mirror, which had once adorned the saloon of a man-of-war, and which now revealed in a kind of cinematograph show all that happened within, and all who might enter.
The fiddle, the banjo and the mouth-organ were in full swing. Grimes had come into the shanty and was sitting beside me, and the French sailors from the man-of-war in the bay had just sung the Marseillaise for the last time and gone aboard. Suddenly the scene changed, silence fell over the shanty. I swear that I had only drunk a little cognac, so as to be sociable with Grimes, when something like an apparition stood before me, framed in the shanty’s doorway! It was a white girl.
A deep gleam shone in her blue, star-like eyes; her lips were apart as though she were about to speak; she seemed like some figure of romance, a strip of pale blue ribbon fluttering at her warm, white throat.
The wild harmony of oaths and double-bass voices of good cheer ceased. Each beachcomber, each shellback, stayed his wild reminiscences. The new-comers, who were sympathetically treating the old-comers, fairly gasped as they turned to see the cause of the sudden silence. That tableau of astonishment and admiration on the grim, set faces of those bearded sailors made one think of some mysterious contortion of the Lord’s Last Supper; and they—a crew of sunburnt disciples looking at the materialised divinity of their dreams.
The swashbuckler who spoke all day long about his pal Robert Louis Stevenson, and swore that he was the main character of that author’s latest book on the South Seas, dropped his glass smash on the floor and muttered: “What a bewt!”
As for me, I felt the first thrill of romance since I went to sea, arrived in a far country with a black eye and took up my residence in a wharf dust-bin.
The girl looked unreal, like some beautiful creation that had just stepped hurriedly out of the distant sky-line beyond the shanty’s door. Her crown of rebellious hair seemed still afire with some magical glow of the dead sunset. Nor was I quite mad, for as the escaping tobacco smoke of that low-roofed den enshrouded her in bluish drifts, as the winds blew up the shore, she did look ghost-like, and her delicately outlined form seemed robed in some diaphanous material cut out of the vanished glory, the golden mist of the western skies. Hibiscus blossoms, scarlet and white, were wantonly entangled in her mass of loosened tresses that fluttered to the zephyrs, as though magical fingers caressed her and would call her back to the portals beyond the setting suns. Ah, Pauline, you were indeed beautiful. When I was young!
Her clear, interrogating eyes seemed to say: “Is dad here?”
I saw her lips tremble. She wavered like a spirit as I watched her image, and mine staring in the mirror beside her.