THE BEAUTIFUL MAN OF PINGALAP
HE stood five feet nothing in his naked feet, a muscular, sandy little fellow, with a shock of red hair, a pair of watery blue eyes, and a tawny, sun-burned beard, the colour of fried carrots. I could not see myself that he was beautiful, and might have lived a year with him and never found it out; though he assured me, with a giggle of something like embarrassment, that he was no less a person than the Beautiful Man of Pingalap. Such at least was his name amongst the natives, who had admired him so persistently, and talked of him so much, that even the whites had come to call him by that familiar appellation.
“You see,” he said, in that whining accent which no combination of letters can adequately render, “it tykes a man of a ruddy complexion to please them there Kanakas; and if he gains their respeck and ’as a w’y with him sort of jolly and careless-like, there’s nothing on their blooming island he carn’t have for the arsking.”
I gathered, however, as I talked with him in the shadow of the old boat-house in which we lived together at Ruk like a pair of tramps, that he, Henery Hinton, had not presumed to ask for much in those isles from which he had so recently emerged. Indeed, except for a camphor-wood chest, a nondescript valise of decayed leather, a monkey, a parrot, and a young native lady named Bo, my friend owned no more in the world than the window-curtain pyjamas in which he stood.
“It ain’t much, is it,” he said, with a sigh, “to show for eight long years on the Line? Sixty dollars and w’at you see before you! Though the monkey may be worth a trifle, and a w’aler captain once offered me a mee-lodian for the bird.”
“And the girl?” I asked.
“Who’d tyke her?” he replied, with a drop of his lip. “Did you ever see an uglier piece in all your life?”