He needn't have asked me to listen. As a matter of fact I had been listening for perhaps a hundred seconds; listening, not as if with the ears, but with the deeper sensatory nerves. And without consciously grasping what the air was I had suffered an abrupt voyage through space. I saw a torch-lit sward, ringed with blue and saffron faces and high forest walls; I saw the half-nude, golden loveliness of a Polynesian woman shaken like a windy leaf. And the beat of a goat-hide drum was the beat of my blood. I felt my shoulders swaying.
I looked at the young man. His face expressed a facetious weariness, but his shoulders, too, were swaying.
"What tune is that?" I asked, in a level tone.
His contemptuous amazement was unfeigned.
"Holy Moses! man. Where you been?"
He squinted at me. After all, I might be "stringing him."
"That," he said, "is as old as Adam. It was run to death so long ago I can't remember. That? That's 'Paragon Park.' That is the old original first 'Shimmie' dance—with whiskers two foot long—"
"The original what?"
"Shimmie! Shimmie! Say, honest to God, don't you know—?" And with his shoulders he made a wriggling gesture in appeal to my wits, the crudest burlesque, it seemed, of a divinely abominable gesture in my memory.—"That?" he queried. "Eh?"
"Shimmie," I echoed, and, my mind skipping back: "Shemdance! Shame Dance!—I see!"