Just below us a shore-boat was hanging to the staging at the foot of the accommodation ladder, waiting, no doubt, to take some visitors ashore. Leyden called down to them in Créole, asking if there was to be a dance that night. One of the men replied somewhat sulkily that there was not.
“A minute,” said Leyden, turning to me. He slipped below, and directly I heard what appeared to be the voice of a Haytian stevedore coming from one of the freight-ports. A boatman in the bow replied guardedly, and for a few minutes there was a conversation in low tones. Soon it ceased, and Leyden rejoined me.
“There is to be a dance,” said he, “but it is a small affair.”
“Was that you talking from below?” I asked.
“Yes. I stood back in the shadow, and the fellow thought that he was speaking with one of the black gang. They do not like to discuss the bamboula with leblancs.”
“Your imitation was extraordinary. If I had not suspected what you were up to I could have sworn that it was one of the Haytian boatmen talking. You must have lived in this country.”
“It was but three months, and that several years ago. I came here to catch snails. There was an experience—a thing odd and uneven. It is possible that you would be interested—listen!” He held up one hand.
From out of the illusive velvety depths that marked the contours of the tumbling hills came monotonously the “tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom,” now rising with the puff of the land breeze, waning slightly, yet unvarying as the swing of a pendulum. With it came the night smells of flowers drenched in dew and the mouldy reek of the tropic woods.
“Smell it!” said Leyden. He leaned both elbows on the rail and dropped the butt of his cigar into the black water, where it drowned with a spiteful little hiss. “The ‘bamboula’—the smell of the trees and the stephanotis—ach, how it seems as if it were last night! That bamboula, with its tom-tom-tom! First it is quaint, then it is a nuisance, then irritating, then fascinating, and last of all it maddens. To think that such a people should have learned the secret of repeated concussions on a single group of brain-cells——”
“You have heard it before?” I interrupted, for I knew all of this he was telling me and wanted his story.