Wayee, who had so often entertained those rough men by dancing and singing, at first quietly shook her head. She gazed at the men with steady eyes. Her picturesquely robed figure, her pretty olive-hued face and earnest stare, that was imaged in the mirror beside her, reminded one of the white girl who had just peeped in like an apparition and then vanished. Indeed, meeting Waylao by night in the dusk for the first time, one might easily have mistaken her for a pure-blooded white girl. She was one of that type of half-wild beauty, a beauty that seems to belong to the mystery of night and moonlight. All the passionate beauty of the Marquesan race and the finer poetic charm of the white race seemed to breathe from the depths of her dark, unfathomable blue eyes. The curves of the mouth revealed a faint touch of sensualism, so faint that it seemed as though even the Great Artist had hesitated at that stroke of the brush—and then left it there.
Sometimes her eyes revealed a far-away gleam, like some ineffable flush of a dawn that would not break—a half-frightened, startled look, as though in the struggle of some dual personality a dim consciousness blushed and trembled, as though the dark strain and the white strain struggled in rivalry and the pagan won.
“Come on, Wayee,” shouted the shellbacks, determined to make the girl dance to them. She still hesitated. “Don’t be bashful, child,” said Uncle Sam in his finest parental voice. It was then that the new robe of self-consciousness fell from the girl. The old child-like look laughed in the eyes. In a moment the men had risen en masse and commenced to shift the old beef barrels up against the shanty’s wooden walls, making a cleared space for the prospective performance. Looking up into the faces of those big, rough men, Waylao was tempted by the pleased looks and flattering glances of their strong, manly eyes. As one in a dream she stood looking about her, for a moment mystified. Then softly laying down her little wicker-work basket, she tightened the coloured sash bow at her hip. A hush came over the rowdy scene and general clamour of the shanty. A dude in the next bar, craning his neck over the partition, stared through his eyeglass—Waylao had lifted her delicate blue robe and commenced to dance.
The regular drinks, getting mixed up with the between drinks, had made those old shellbacks violently eloquent.
“Go it, kiddie! Kaohau! Mitia!” yelled their hoarse voices, as they wiped their bearded mouths with their hands. Their eyes bulged with pleasure. What had happened, they wondered. Her eyes were aglow like stars. She commenced to sway rhythmically to Uncle Sam’s impromptu on the mouth-organ. O! O! bound for Rio Grande trembled to the strain of Waylao’s tripping feet, as the silent hills re-echoed the wild chorus.
Attracted by those phantom-like echoes, pretty little dusky gnomes crept out of the forest, and there, in semi-nude chastity, with half-frightened eyes they peeped round the rim of the grog shanty door. Then off they bolted, for lo! they suddenly saw their own demon-like faces and curious, fierce eyes revealed in the large cracked mirror of that low-roofed room. They were native children, truants from the village huts close by.
Suddenly the hoarse bellowings of the beachcombers ceased. The big, inflated cheeks of those old yellowing shellbacks suddenly subsided, and looking like squashed balloons resolved back into wrinkles. Even Uncle Sam ceased his unmelodious impetuosissimo on the mouth-organ, as he looked at the fairy-like figure that danced before him. The superstition, the magic of some old world, some spell of the wild poetry of paganism seemed to exist and dance before them. Waylao’s lips were chanting a weird native melody. The atmosphere of that grog shanty was transmuted into the dim light of another age. Those graceful limbs and musically moving arms, the poise of the goddess-shaped head of that dancing figure, seemed to be some materialised expression of poetry in motion. Her face was set and serious, her eyes strangely earnest looking, yes, far beyond her brief years. She seemed to be staring at something down the ages.
The open-mouthed shellbacks sat on their tubs and stared. Ranjo stood like a statue in bronze, holding a towel as he gazed on the scene. His low bar-room had become imparadised. Instinctively, in the polished utterance of his saloon-bar etiquette, he breathed forth: “Ho! Hi say! ’Er heyes shine like a hangel’s!”
Waylao heard nothing. The low-beamed shanty roof and its log walls, with the men enthroned on tiers of tubs around her, had crumbled, like the fabric of a dream. A magical forest, with wild hills heaved up slowly and grandly around her, a world that was brightened by the vaulted arch of stars and a dim, far, phantom moonlit sea. Her lips were chanting a melody that seemed to bewail some long-forgotten memory of love-lit eyes, eyes that gazed beneath the unremembered moons of some long-ago existence.
The awakening passion of womanhood had stirred some barbarian strain in the girl. It awoke like some fluttering, imprisoned swallow that heard the call of the impassioned South. It beat its trembling wings in the blood-red heart of two races—the dual personality, the daughter of the full-blooded Lydia and the blue-eyed sailorman, Benbow.