The Shame Dance

== THE SHAME DANCE ==
=== by Wilbur Daniel Steele ===
From The Best Stories of Wilbur Daniel Steele 1946 
Well, then, here is a story of New York. A tale of the
night heart of the city, where the vein of Forty-second touches the artery of
Broadway; where, amid the constellations of chewing-gum ads and tooth pastes
and memory methods, rise the incandescent facades of "dancing
academies" with their "sixty instructresses," their beat of brass
and strings, their whisper of feet, their clink of dimes. . . . Let a man not
work away his strength and his youth. Let him breathe a new melody; let him
draw out of imagination a novel step, a more fantastic tilt of the pelvis, a
wilder gesticulation of the deltoid. Let him put out his hand to the Touch of
Gold. . . . 
It is a tale of this New York. That it didn't chance
to happen in New York is beside the point. Where? It wouldn't help you much if
I told you. Taai. That island. Take an imaginary ramrod into Times Square, push
it straight down through the center of the earth; where it comes out on the
other side will not be very many thousand miles wide of that earth speck in the
South Seas. Some thousands, yes; but out here a few thousand miles and a month
or so by schooner make less difference than they do where the trains run under
the ground. . . . 
"Glauber's Academy" . . . "Einstein's
Restaurant" . . . "Herald Square" . . . 
I can't tell you how bizarrely those half-fabulous
names fell from Signet's lips in the turquoise and gold of the afternoon. It
was like the babble of some monstrous and harmless mythology. And all the
while, as he kicked his bare heels on the deckhouse and harassed me with his
somnolent greed for "talk," one could see him wondering, wondering,
in the back of his mind. So he would have been wonder- ing through all the
hours of weeks, months— it had come to the dignity of years, on the beach, in
the bush— wondering more than ever under the red iron roof of the Dutchman:
"What in hell am I doing- here? What in hell?" 
A guttersnipe, pure and simple. That's to say impure
and un- pleasantly complex. It was extraordinary how it stuck. Even with
nothing on but a pair of cotton pants, swimming out to me among the flashing
bodies of the islanders, men, women, girls, youths, who clung to the anchor
cable and showed their white teeth for pilot biscuit, condensed milk, and gin—
especially gin— even there you could see Signet, in imagination, dodging
through the traffic on Seventh Avenue to pick the Telegraph Racing Chart out of
the rubbish can under the Elevated. . . . 
I hadn't an idea who the fellow was. He burst upon me
unheralded. I sail out of west-coast ports, but once I had been in New York.
That was enough for him. He was "pals" in ten minutes; in fifteen,
from his eminence on the deckhouse, with a biscuit in one hand and a tumbler of
much-diluted Hollands in the other, he gazed down at his erstwhile beach
fellows with almost the disdainful wonder of a tourist from a white ship's
rail. . . . 
"Gi' me an article you can retail at a nickel—
any little thing every- body needs— or gi' me a song with a catchy chorus—
something you can turn out on them ten-cent records. . . . That makes me. Don't
want any Wall Street stuff. That's for Rockefeller and the boobs. But just one
time le' me catch on with one little old hunch that'll go in vaudeville or the
pi'tures— get Smith and Jones diggin' for the old nickel. . . . That makes me.
Then the line can move up one. That's the thing about New York. . . . Say, man,
len' me a cigarette. . . . But that's the thing about Broadway. When you make,
you make big. I know a guy turned out a powder puff looked like a lor'nette— a
quarter of a dollar. You know how the Janes'll fall for a thing like
that." 
It was completely preposterous, almost uncomfortable.
It made a man look around him. On the schooner's port side spread the empty
blue of the South Pacific; the tenuous snowdrift of the reef, far out, and the
horizon. On the starboard hand, beyond the little space of the anchorage,
curved the beach, a pink-white scimitar laid flat. Then the scattering of
thatched and stilted huts, the red, corrugated- iron store, residence and
godowns of the Dutch trader, the endless Indian file of coco palms, the abrupt
green wall of the mountain. ... A twelve-year-old girl, naked as Eve and, I've
no doubt, thrice as handsome, stood watching us from the mid-decks in a
perfection of immobility, an empty milk tin propped between her brown palms
resting on her breast. Twenty fathoms off, a shark fin, blue as lapis in the
shadow, cut the water soundlessly. The hush of ten thousand miles was disturbed
by nothing but that grotesque, microscopic babbling: 
"Say you play in bad luck. Well, you can't play
in bad luck f revet. Not if you're wise. One time I get five good wheezes. Good
ones! Sure-fire! One of 'em was the old one about the mother-'n-law and the
doctor, only it had a perfectly novel turn to it. Did I make? I did not. Why?
Well, a good friend o' mine lifts them five wheezes, writes a vaudeville turn
around 'em, and makes big. Big! What does that learn me? Learns me to go bear
on friendship. So next time I get an idea . . ." 
The girl had put the milk tin down between her toes on
deck and turned her head. 
"Digger!" I called to the mate. "Clear
the vessel! Shove them all overboard! Here comes the Dutchman!" 
Before the advance of the trader's canoe, painted
vermilion like his establishment and flying over the water under the paddle
strokes of his six men, Signet took himself hastily overboard with the rest.
There was no question of protest or false pride. Over he went. Rising and
treading water under the taffrail, and seeing the trader still some fathoms
off, he shook the wet from the rag of a beard with which long want of a razor
had blurred his peaked chin and gathered up the ends of the conversation: 
"No, Dole, you can't play in bad luck frever. One
sure-fire hunch, that's all. That makes me. When I get back to Broadway . .
." 
A paddle blade narrowly missed his head. He dived. 
The Dutchman told me more about him that evening. I
dined at the trader's house. He was a big-bodied, tow-haired man who spoke
English with the accent of an east-coast Scot, drank like a Swede, and viewed
life through the eyes of a Spaniard— that is, he could be diabolical without
getting red in the face. 
"No, my dear sir, that Signet shall not 'get back
to Broadway/ Too many have I seen. He is too tired. Quite too tired." 
"But how in the world did he ever come here,
Mynheer?" 
"That is simple. This Signet got drunk in
Papeete. He was on his way to Australia with a pugilist. How should he be in a
pugilist's company, this crab? Because he plays a good game of pinochle— to
keep the pugilist's mind bright. At any event, the steamship stops at Tahiti.
This Signet gets drunk. 'Soused!' And the steamship is gone without him. No
more pinochle for the pugilist, what? . . . From then, my dear sir, it is what
it shall always be; one island throws him to another island. Here he shall stay
for a while " 
"Till you decide to 'throw' him to another
island, eh, Mynheer?" 
"No, but I am alone. Sometimes to amuse myself I
will invite him to dine with me. I put on him a suit of the evening clothes
which belong to my nephew who is dead. But I will not allow him the razor,
since his absurd beard is amusing to me. Afterward, however, I take away the
evening clothes and I will kick him out. But he is talking continuously." 
"I believe you, Mynheer." 
"But at last I will say: 'My dear sir, suppose
that you should have the most brilliant idea; that "hunch" of yours.
"Sure-fire." What advantage will it do you here in the island of
Taai? You are not here on Broadway. You are too many thousand miles. You cannot
come there. You are too tired. It takes money. Now, my dear sir, I am putting a
trench about the godowns. If you wish, I will let you work for me.' " 
"What does he say to that, Mynheer?" 
"He says, 'Do you take me for an Italian?' 
"Then I will say: 'No; you see you are too tired.
Also you are too soft. You are a criminal. That's natural to you. But you think
of police. You have a wish, say. Well, my dear sir, but would you kill a man—
three— ten men— to have that wish? No, you are too tired, and you must have the
police. But here there are no police. I am the police. Why do you not kill me?
Ha-ha-ha! Then you could take my property. Then you would "make big,"
as you say. My dear sir, that is a "hunch"! That is
"sure-fire"! Ha-ha-ha!' . . . Then I will kick him out in his coolie
pants." 
After coffee the trader said: "One gallon of the
Hollands which you sent me ashore has disappeared. The kitchen boys are
'careless.' 
Also I wink one eye when a schooner arrives. Of course
they will dance tonight, however. You would care to go up, my dear sir? " 
Of course we went. There's no other amusement in an
islet like Taai but the interminable native dance. The Dutchman led the way up
a narrow, bushy ravine, guiding me by sound rather than by sight. 
"Up this same very path," I heard him
saying, "has gone one uncle of mine. They pulled him to the advance with
one rope around his arms. Then they cut him up and ate him. But that was many
years ago, my dear sir. Now I am the law. Maybe there shall come, now and then,
a Dutch gunboat to have a look-in. I raise up that flag. The captain shall dine
with me. All is good. But, my dear sir, I am the law." 
The "music" began to be heard, a measured
monotone of drums, a breath of voices in a recitative chant, slightly
impassioned by that vanished gallon. The same old thing, indeed; one of the
more than fifty-seven varieties of the hula. Then that had died away. 
The light from the "place" grew among the
higher leaves. And the trader, becoming visible, halted. I saw him standing,
listening. 
"No, my dear sir, but that is a new thing." 
He started forward. He stopped again. I heard it now.
Out of the familiar, hollow tautophony of drumbeats there began to emerge a
thread of actual melody— an untraditional rise and fall of notes— a tentative
attack, as it were, on the chromatic scale of the West. No he-goat's skin
stretched on bamboo would do that. 
We pushed on, curious. We came out into the
"place." The scene under the candlenut torches was as familiar to us
as the Ohio River of Uncle Tom to the small-town schoolboy; the meager rows of
three-quarters-naked Kanakas, yellow with saffron and blue with tattooer's ink;
the old women in the background of sultry lights and enormous shadows
compounding endless balls of popoi for the feast; the local and desceptered
chieftain squatting on his hams and guard- ing the vanished gallon between his
knees; this was all as it should have been. This was the convention. . . . But
what was really hap- pening on that sylvan, torchlit stage that night was
something as new as anything can be under the sun, because it was something
that had not happened in ten thousand years. . . . 
We who are worn with novelty can never reconquer for
ourselves the thrill of an unmitigated wonder. We have sold the birthright. 
But imagine the toppling of a hundred centuries! You
could have seen it in the eyes of those watchers, in their rapt, rapacious
atten- tion, in the conflict that went on within them visibly; traitorous
applause pent and pitted against all the instinctive protest of an es-
tablished art. . . . 
"Yes, but this isn't dancing!" 
Yet their bodies, one here, one there, would begin to
sway. . . . 
Three Kanaka men, strangers to the island, sat
cross-legged on the turf. One had taken over a drum from a local musician. The
other two had instruments fashioned of dried gourds with fingering pieces of
bamboo and strings of gut— barbaric cousins to the mandolin. So, on this one
night in history, the music of another tribe had come to Taai. It just escaped
being an authentic "tune." How it escaped was indefinable. The
sophisticated ear would almost have it, and abruptly it had got away in some
provoking lapse, some sudden and bizarre disintegration of tone. And the
drumbeat, bringing it back, ran like a fever pulse in a man's blood. 
In the center of the sward, her back to the musicians,
a solitary female danced; a Kanaka woman, clothed in a single shift of the
sheerest crimson cotton, tied at one shoulder and falling to mid- thigh. Not
from Taai did this woman come; one saw that; nor from any near island or group.
Her beauty was extraordinary, like that of the Marquesans, with that peculiar
straightness of all lines, at once Grecian, austere, and incalculably
voluptuous. . . . 
The dance, as I saw it for the first time that night,
I will not speak of. I have traded to many islands in many groups— even the Low
Archipelago— but the island where that dance was indigenous I am sure I've
never touched. Compared with any of the hulas, set and fixed in each locality
as the rites of Rome, it was sophisticated; it gave an illusion of continuous
invention and spontaneity; it was flesh swept by a wind and shattered; it
ravished the eyes. 
I don't know how long I watched; how long all the
immortal flame in me lent itself to the histrionic purposes of that woman. But
I shall never forget it. Never! Never! 
I looked away. I saw two faces. One of them hung over
my shoul- der. It was the trader's. It was the face of a man who has lived a
very long while wielding power of life and death over unsatisfying satisfactions.
A man awakened! The toppling of a hundred centuries, indeed! 
The other was Signet's. Scarred by leaf shadows,
thrust like a swimmer's from the meager sea of heads and naked shoulders, it
held as still as a death mask minute by minute, except that, in the penum- bra
cast by the veil of goat tuft on his chin, the Adam's apple was convulsed at
intervals, as if he were swallowing, as if he were drink- ing! 
The night grew. The torches were consumed, the
"place" de- serted. Somewhere the amazing voyagers had taken
themselves to rest. A half-moon mutilated the island— long stripes of palms,
shadow-scars of defiles, mottles of bushes. It was like a sleeping animal, a
tiger of deep blue and blue-white. 
We sat on the veranda at the Residence, the trader and
I. By and by, soft-footed, Signet was there, occupying the lowermost step. 
The Dutchman talked. Like the able administrator he
was, he had already the data to be procured. Into his ears had poured the whis-
pered trickles of a score of informants. 
"You are right, my dear sir. Marquesan. You have
been there?" 
"No." 
"She is called, in Polynesian, 'Queen Daughter.'
My people, who know nothing as a rule, of course— but they tell me the woman is
in actuality the daughter of a queen. But what is a Kanaka queen? After all,
Signet, my dear sir, down there, what is one queen, out here?" 
The trader was obviously in a good humor. He had not
been ex- cited for years. The man was alive. I've said he was like a Spaniard
in that he could be diabolical without getting red in the face. Dia- bolically
devious and strategic! Before he resumed he blew three mouthfuls of cigar smoke
out into the moonlight, where they burst from the shadow under the roof like
mute cannon shots, round and silvery. Beneath them, from the step, Signet's
eyes were fixed upon the trader's face, dry, rapt, glazed with some imperious
pre- occupation. 
"But they tell me this woman has danced in a
great many islands. She will go from here to another island to dance. The three
men are her husbands. But she is no wife. A maid, that woman! They have the
hardihood to tell me that. Ha-ha-ha! But, then, she is daughter to a queen.
With those 'husbands' she crosses a hundred leagues of sea in her sailing
canoe. That royal canoe! To dance at another is- land. . . ." 
As the Dutchman talked, blowing his smoke bursts into
the moon- light, the vision of that Marquesan woman came again before me. I
perceived her, under the heavy procession of his words, a figure of astounding
romance, an adventuress incomparable, a Polynesian bacchante. No, I saw her as
the missionary of a strange thing, cross- ing oceans, daring thirst and gale
and teeth of sharks, harrying deeper and deeper into the outseas of mystery
that small, devoted polyan- drous company of husbands, at once her paddlers,
cooks, flunkies, watchdogs, music makers. "Queen Daughter!" Royal and
self- anointed priestess of that unheard-of dance, the tribal dance, no doubt,
of some tiny principality rearing a cone in the empty huge- ness of the sea.
... I couldn't get away from my time and race. I found myself wondering
"what she got out of it"— in some jungle- bowered, torchlit
"high place," to feel again the toppling of ten thousand years? Was
it something to feel the voluptuous and abom- inable beauty of that rhythm
going out of her flesh, beat by beat, and entering into the flesh of those
astounded and half -hostile watch- ers? Perhaps. . . . 
"They tell me that she has also danced at
Papeete— before the white men of the steamships," the Dutchman was
informing us. 
At that, from the step, from the moon-blue huddle of
the cast- away, there came a sound. With a singular clarity of divination I
built up the thought, the doubt, the bitter perturbation in the fel- low's
mind. The woman had danced then at Papeete, the crossroads, the little Paris of
mid-seas. And before the white men from steamers —the white men that go back! 
Moved by projects deeper and more devious than ours,
the Dutch- man made haste to cover up what seemed to have been an overshot.
Frankly he turned his attention to the outcast. 
"By the God, then, my dear Signet, have you
considered?" 
He knew well enough that Signet had
"considered." He could see as well as I that Signet was a changed
man. But he must "pile it on." 
"There, my dear sir, you have it. That 'hunch'!
That 'sure-fire'! Do you think I do not know that New York of yours? Such a
dance as that! You must believe me. If you were but a man of energy, now . .
." With the utmost deliberation he launched upon a tirade of abuse.
"But no, you are not a man of energy, not a man to take things in your
hands. The obstacles are too big. Those three hus- bands! You might even take
that woman, that lovely, royal dancing woman— you, my dear sir, a common street
snipe. What would a woman like that, with that novel, impassioned, barbaric,
foreign dance, be worth to a man on your Broadway? Eh? But obstacles!
Obstacles! You have her not on Broadway. It is too many thousands of miles, and
you have no money. But see, if you were a man to grasp things, a man to 'hit
the nail in the head,' to 'boost,' to 'go big'— then would not a man like me,
who turns everything to gold— would he not say to you quickly enough, 'See
here, my dear sir, but let me put so much money into the undertaking
myself?" 
Under the explosions of cigar smoke, Signet continued
to hold the trader with his eyes; seemed to consume him with the fixed, dry
fire of his gaze. Not fathoming, as with a singular intuition I had fath- omed,
the profound purposes of the Dutchman, Signet saw only the implied promise in
his words. . . . The trader broke out once more with a sardonic and calculated
spleen: 
"But no! Obstacles! A sniveling little animal
sees only obstacles. The obstacle not to be mounted over— those three husbands.
There they lie tonight on Nakokai's platform— this beautiful, incredible 'Queen
Daughter'— this gold goddess of the 'Shame Dance'— and about her those three
husbands. Ah, my dear sir, but their big, lithe muscles! That is too much! To
imagine them leaping up at the alarm in the moonlight, the overpowering and
faithful husbands. No, he cannot put out his hand to take the gift. Pah! He is
a criminal in nature, but he is afraid of the police, even here. He is not a
man for the big life in these islands. He will never do anything. Those faith-
ful, strong watchdogs of husbands! Those strong destructive mus- cles! Dear,
good God, that is too much to think of . . . . Look, my dear sir!" 
He was speaking to me, as if Signet were less than the
very pebbles at the step. He got up, striking the floor heavily with his boots,
and I followed him into the house, where he took a lighted candle from a stand.
Buried in our shadows, silent-footed, Signet pursued us as the trader had meant
him to do. I persist in saying that I perceived the thing as a whole. From the
first I had divined the maneuver of the Dutchman. 
"Look!" he repeated, flinging open a door
and thrusting in the candle to cast its light over ranks and ranges of metal.
It was the gun room of the Residence. Here dwelt the law. Shotguns, repeating
rifles, old-style revolvers, new, blue automatics. An arsenal! 
"Big brown muscles!" he cried, with a
ponderous disdain. "What are they? What is the strongest brown man? Puff!
To a man of purpose and indomitable will like me! Obstacles? Three husbands?
Puff-puff-puff! Like that! . . . But all that will never be of use to him. That
Signet! No, he is a street snipe who will steal a pocket- book and call it a
crime. He is afraid to grasp. . . . But it is close in here, is it not?" 
It was too bald. He stepped across the floor,
unlatched and threw open the blind of the window, letting the candlelight
stream forth upon a mass of bougainvillea vine without. 
"I keep this door locked; you can imagine
that," he laughed, re- turning and shutting us out of the gun room. He
twisted the key; put it in his pocket. And there, at the back, that window
blind stood open. 
He stared at Signet, as if the beachcomber were just
discovered. 
"You are hopeless, my dear sir." 
"Let us have a drink," he shifted. 
For Signet he poured out a tumblerful of raw gin. The
fellow took it like a man in a daze— the daze of a slowly and fiercely so-
lidifying resolution. It shivered in his hand. A habit of greed sucked his
lips. Into his mouth he took a gulp of the spirits. He held it there. His eyes
searched our faces with a kind of malignant defiance. Of a sudden he spat the
stuff out, right on the floor. He said nothing. It was as if he said: "By
God, if you think I need that! No! You don't know me!" 
He stalked out of the door. When we followed as far as
the ve- randa we saw him making off into the striped light to the left. . . . 
"Why did you call it the 'Shame Dance,'
Mynheer?" We were seated again. 
"Of course, my dear sir, it is not that, but it
has a sound so when the Kanakas speak it. The woman spoke the name. If it is a
Polynesian word I have not heard it before. 'Shemdance.' Like that." 
"A good name, though. By jingo, a darn good name!
Eh, Myn- heer?" 
But the trader's head was turned in an attitude of
listening. Tri- umphant listening— at the keyhole of the striped, moonlit
night. I heard it, too— a faint disturbance of the bougainvillea foliage around
two sides of the house, near the window standing open to the gun room. 
Of course the amazing thing was that the man fooled
us. In the Dutchman's heart, I believe, there was nothing but astonishment at
his own success. Signet, on the face of it, was the typical big talker and
little doer; a flaw in character which one tends to think imperish- able. He
fitted so precisely into a certain pigeonhole of humankind. . . . What we had
not counted on was the fierceness of the stimulus —like the taste of blood to a
carnivore, or, to the true knight, a glimpse of the veritable Grail. 
All the following day I spent on board overseeing the
hundred minor patchings and calkings a South Sea trader will want in port. When
I went ashore that evening, after sundown, I found the Dutch- man sitting in
the same chair on the veranda, blowing smoke out into the afterglow. There was
the illusion of perfect continuity with the past. Yesterday, today, tomorrow.
Life flowed like a sleeping river, it would seem. 
But this was the status of affairs. The three brown
music makers, sons-in-law to an island queen, lay on a platform somewhere
within the edge of the bush heavier by ounces with .32-caliber slugs, await-
ing burial. And Signet, guttersnipe, beachcomber, and midnight as- sassin, was
lodged in the "calaboose," built stoutly in a corner of the biggest
and reddest of the Dutchman's godowns. As for the royal dancing woman, I was
presently, in the trader's phrase, to "have a look at her." 
At his solicitation I followed around the house, past
the gun-room window (locked fast enough now, you may be sure), and up steeply
through a hedged, immaculate garden which witnessed to the or- dered quality of
the owner's mind. At the upper end, under a wall of volcanic tufa, we came to a
summerhouse done in the native style, stilts below, palm thatch above, and
walled on three sides only with hanging screens of bamboo. Striking through
this screen from the west, the rose and green of the afterglow showed the woman
as in a semiluminous cavern, seated cross-legged in the center of the platform,
her hands drooped between her knees, and her large, dark eyes fixed upon the
sea beyond the roof of the Residence below. 
Was it the perfect immobility of defiance and disdain?
Not once did her transfixed gaze take us in. Was it the quiescence of defeat
and despair— that level brooding over the ocean which had been to her, first
and last, a cradle and a roadway for her far, adventurous pilgrimages? She sat
there before our peering eyes, the sudden widow, the daughter of potentates
brought low, the goddess of an exuberant and passionate vitality struck with
quietude; mute, as- tounded by catastrophe, yet unbowed. The beauty of that
golden- skinned woman abashed me. 
It did not abash the Dutchman. His was another and
more indom- itable fiber. It is fine to succeed, beyond expectation, detail by
detail of strategy. His hands were clean. He remained the perfect adminis-
trator. Had there been no other way, he would not have flinched at any
necessary lengths of wholesale or retail butchery. Still, it was nice to think
that his hands were spotless. For instance, if that gun- boat, with its
purple-whiskered Amsterdammer of a captain, should just now happen in. 
His face glowed in the dusk. His eyes shone with frank
calcula- tions. Fists on hips, head thrust out, one saw him casting up the sum
of his treasure-trove. . . . But he was an epicure. He could wait. It was even
delightful to wait. When I turned away he came down with me, his hands still on
his hips and his eyes on the gently emerging stars. 
The man was extraordinary. Sitting on the veranda,
bombarding the direction of the foreshore with that huge, deliberate fusillade
of cigar smoke, he talked of home, of his boyhood on the dike at Vol- endam,
and of his mother, who, bless her! was still alive to send him cheeses at
Christmas time. 
It was midnight and the moon was rising when I got
away and moved down toward the beach where the dinghy waited. The horizontal
ray struck through the grating of the "calaboose" at the cor- ner of
the godown I was skirting. I saw the prisoner. The upright shadow of an iron
bar cut his face in two, separating the high, soiled cheeks, each with an eye. 
"You mustn't leave him get at her! " 
I tell you it was not the same man that had come
swimming and sniveling out to the schooner less than forty hours before. Here
was a fierce one, a zealot, a flame, the very thin blade of a fine sword. 
"Listen, Dole, if you leave that devil get at her
" 
His eyes burned through me. He failed completely to
accept the fact that he was done. His mind, ignoring the present, ran months
ahead. With a flair of understanding, thinking of those three trav- esties of
husbands and the wife who was no wife, I perceived what he meant. 
I left him. He was a wild man, but the quality of his
wildness showed itself in the fact that he squandered none of it in shaking the
bars, shouting, or flinging about. His voice to the last, trailing me around
the next corner, held to the same key, almost subdued. 
"By God, if that bastard gets at her, I'll— I'll
— " 
"You'll what?" I mused. You see, even now I
couldn't get rid of him as the drifter, the gutter Hamlet, the congenital
howler against fate. "You'll what?" I repeated under my breath, and I
had to laugh. 
I got the vessel under way as soon as I came aboard.
The Dutch- man's shipment of copra was arranged for— a week, two, three weeks
(as the wind allowed)— and I was to return from the lower islands, where my
present cargo was assigned, and take it on. 
As we stood offshore under the waxing moonlight, as I
watched the island, gathering itself in from either extremity, grow small and
smaller on the measureless glass of the sea, the whole episode seemed to swell
up in my mind, explode, and vanish. It was too preposterous. Thirty-eight hours
chosen at random out of ten thousand empty Polynesian years— that in that wink
of eternity five human lives should have gone to pot simultaneously— a man wasn't
to be taken in by that sort of thing. 
Through twelve days it remained at that. Discharging
cargo in the furnace of Coco Inlet, if my thoughts went back to Taai, it was
al- most with the deprecating amusement a man will feel who has been had by a
hoax. If those minstrel husbands were murdered and buried; if that Broadway imp
sweated under the red-hot roof of the godown; if that incomparable,
golden-skinned heiress of cannibal emperors sat staring seaward from the gilded
cage of the Dutchman, awaiting (or no longer awaiting) the whim of the epicure—
if indeed any one of them all had ever so much as set foot upon that
microscopic strand lost under the blue equator— then it was simply because
someone had made it up in his head to while me away an empty hour. I give you
my word, when at noon of the thirteenth day the mountain of Taai stood up once
more beyond the bows, I was weary of the fantasy. I should have been amazed,
really, to find a fellow named Signet housed in the Dutchman's private jail. 
As a matter of fact, Signet was not in the jail. 
When I went ashore in midafternoon, wondering a little
why no naked biscuit beggars or gin swallowers had swum out to bother me that
day, I found the trader of Taai sitting on his veranda, blowing puffs of smoke
from those fine Manila Club perfectos out into the sunshine. Beside him leaned
a shiny, twelve-gauge pump gun which he jostled with an elbow as he bade me by
word and gesture to make myself at home. 
I'm quite certain I looked the fool. My eyes must have
stuck out. Half a dozen times I started to speak. With some vacant, fatuous
syllable I tried to break the ice. Strange as it sounds, I was never so
embarrassed in my life. 
For the trader of Taai, the blatantly obvious
proprietor of the is- land's industry and overlord of its destinies— sitting
there before me now with a pump gun touching his elbow— was this fellow Signet.
Till now I don't know precisely what had happened;
that is to say, none of the details of the act, horrid or heroic as they may
have been. All I seemed to have was a memory of the Dutchman's voice: "Why
do you not kill me? Ha-ha-ha! Then you could take my property." And again
an echo of his disdainful laughter at that fool, "Ha-ha-ha!" as, on
some midnight, he had kicked his dinner guest and his "coolie cotton
pants" out into the rain. . . . Why not, in- deed? But who now was the
"fool"? 
Signet, in the course of the afternoon, brought forth
gravely a bill of sale, making over in an orderly fashion to B. R. Signet,
U.S.A., the real and personal property of the trading station at Taai, and
"signed," in the identical, upright, Fourteenth Street grammar-school
script, by "the Dutchman.". . . I understood Signet. Signet under-
stood me. The thing was not even an attempt at forgery. It was something solely
formal— as much as to say: "This is understood to be the basis of our
mutual dealings. You will see I am owner of this place." 
As for the Dutchman: 
"Oh, the Dutchman? Well, he decided to go away.
Go home." 
Before the incalculable sang-froid of this railbird,
movie usher, alley dodger, and hanger-on at dancing academies, I could not so
much as summon up the cheek to ask what he had done with the body. You'll say I
ought to have acted; that I ought at least to have got up and left him. That
shows two things— first, that you've never been a trader in the islands;
second, that you cannot at all compre- hend how— well, how stunning he was.
Sitting there, a single fort- night removed from cotton pants and the beach,
crime-stained, im- perturbable, magnificent! Spawn of the White Lights! Emperor
of an island! How's that? 
"It's a rich island," he impressed upon me
with an intention I was yet to plumb. "Dole," he exclaimed,
"it's a gold mine!" 
"Is— is she here?" I ventured to demand at
last. 
"Is she? Say! Come and have a look." 
I was between laughing and wincing at the identical
"have a look." 
Going up the garden, Signet let we know that the woman
was in love with him. I might believe it or not. She would do anything for him.
"Anything!" he exclaimed, standing squarely
still in the path. And in his eyes I was somehow relieved to find a trace of
wonder. 
Obstacles! All his life had been a turning back from
small, insur- mountable obstacles. Of a sudden he beheld really vast obstacles
tumbling down, verily at a touch. Here was just one more of them. By a lucky
chance this "Queen Daughter" did not know by whose hand she had been
made thrice a widow, it was the simplest thing to suppose it the trader, the
same big, blond, European man who had presently removed her "for
safety" to the summerhouse behind the Residence. . . . And from the
trader, by a gesture of melodramatic violence, the other and slighter man had
set her free. . . . Perhaps even that would not have intrigued her essentially
barbaric interest as much as it did had it not been for his amazing attitude
of, well, let's say, "refrainment." His almost absurdly fastidious
concern for what the West would call "the sanctity of her person."
You can imagine— to a Marquesan woman! That! She was not ugly. 
As her gaze, from the platform, dwelt upon the shrewd,
blade- sharp features of the man beside me, the elementary problem in her eyes
seemed to redouble the peculiar, golden, Aryan beauty of her face. Let me tell
you I am human. Perhaps Signet was human, too. Standing there, encompassed by
the light of that royal and lovely woman's eyes, there was surely about him a
glow— and a glow not altogether, it seemed to me, of "Smith's nickel and
Jones's dime." I could have laughed. I could have kicked him. The
impostor! Even yet I had failed to measure the man. 
Back on the veranda again, dinner eaten and dusk come
down, Signet brought out an old guitar from among the Dutchman's effects (it
had belonged probably to that defunct nephew of the dress clothes), and as he
talked he picked at the thing with idle fingers. Not altogether idle, though, I
began to think. Something began to emerge by and by from the random fingerings—
a rhythm, a tonal theme. . . . Then I had it, and there seemed to stand before
me again the swarded "high place," with torches flaring over upturned
faces and mounting walls of green. Almost I sensed again the beat in my blood,
the eye-ravishing vision of that gold-brown flame of mo- tion, that voluptuous
priestess. 
"Oh yes. That!" I murmured. "It's got
something— something— that tune. . . . But how can you remember it?" 
"She helps me out. I'm trying to put it in
shape." 
Indeed, when I left that night, and before my oarsmen
had got me a cable's length from the beach, I heard the strumming resumed, very
faintly, up in the dark behind the Residence; still tentatively, with, now and
then through the flawless hush of the night, the guiding note of a woman's
voice. (A woman profoundly mystified.) 
A rehearsal? For what? For that almost mythical
Broadway half around the bulge of the world? Had the fool, then, not got beyond
that? Yet? 
Here he was, lord of the daughter of a queen,
proprietor of a "gold mine." For Signet was not to be hoodwinked
about the com- mercial value of Taai. All afternoon and evening, as through the
two days following, while my promised cargo was getting ferried out under the
shining authority of the pump gun, he scarcely let a min- ute go by without
some word or figure to impress upon me the extent of his
"possessions." To what end? 
Well, it all came out in a burst on the third evening,
my last there. He even followed me to the beach; actually, regardless of the
Dutch- man's nephew's boots and trouser legs, he pursued me out into the
shallows. 
"A gold mine! Don't be a damned boob, Dole. You
can see for yourself, a big proposition for a guy like you, with a ship and
every- thing — " 
Upon me he would heap all those priceless
"possessions." Me! And in exchange he would ask only cabin passage
for two from Taai beach to the Golden Gate. Only deck passage! Only anything! 
"Set us down there, me and her, that's all. I'll
give you a bill of sale. Why, from where you look at it, it's a find! It's a
lead-pipe cinch! It's taking candy away from a baby, man!" 
"Why don't you keep it, then?" 
The soul of his city showed through. I saw him again
as I had seen him swimming out in his cotton pants, with that low-comedy
whisker and that consuming little greedy nickel hope of paradise. Even the
gestures. 
"No, but can't you see, Dole? I got a bigger
thing up my sleeve. God'l'-mighty, d'you think I'm a farmer? You could go big
here; / don't go at all. I ain't that kind. But put me down in New York with
that woman there and that there dance— and that tune Say! You 
don't understand. You can't imagine. Money? Say! And
not only money. Say! I could take that up to Glauber's Academy, and I could say
to Glauber, 'Glauber,' I could say . . ." 
I had to leave him standing there, up to his knees in
the inky water, heaping me frankly with curses. I shall not repeat the curses.
At the end of them he bawled after me: 
"But I'll get there! You watch me all the same, all
the same, you damn . . ." 
The reason I didn't up-anchor and get out that night
was that when I came aboard I discovered not far from my berth the un-
obtrusive loom of that Dutch gunboat, arrived for a "look-in" at
last. 
The only thing for me to do was to sit tight. If, when
the state of the island's affairs had been discovered, there should be want of
ex- planation or corroboration, it would be altogether best for me to give it.
I wasn't yet through trading in those waters, you understand. 
But Signet was no fool. He, too, must have seen the
discreet shade of the visitor. When the morning dawned, neither he nor the
royal dancer from the Marquesas was to be found. Sometime in that night, from
the windward beach, ill-manned and desperate, the royal sailing canoe must have
set forth tumultuously upon its pilgrimage again. 
I sat in a place in Honolulu. Soft drinks were served,
and some- where beyond a tidy screen of palm fronds a band of strings was
playing. Even with soft drinks, the old instinct of wanderers and lone men to
herd together had put four of us down at the same table. Two remain vague— a f
attish, holiday-making banker and a consump- tive from Barre, Vermont. For
reasons to appear, I recall the third more in detail. 
He let me know somewhere in the give-and-take talk
that he was a railway-telegraph operator, and that, given his first long
vacation, an old impulse come down from the days of the Hawaiian hula
phonograph records had brought him to the isle of delight. He was disappointed
in it. One could see in his candid eyes that he felt him- self done out of an
illusion, an illusion of continuous dancing by girls in rope skirts on moonlit
beaches. It was an intolerable waste of money. Here, come so far and so expensively
to the romantic goal, he was disturbed to find his imagination fleeing back to
the incredible adventure of a Rock Island station, an iron-red dot on the bald,
high plain of eastern Colorado— to the blind sun flare of the desert— to the
immensity of loneliness— to the thundering nightly crisis of the
"Eleven-ten," sweeping monstrous and one-eyed out of the cavern of
the West, grating, halting, glittering, gossiping, yawn- ing, drinking with a
rush and gurgle from the red tank— and on again with an abrupt and always
startling clangor into the remote night of the East. . . . 
He shifted impatiently in his chair and made a dreary
face at the screening fronds. 
"For the love o' Mike! Even the rags they play
here are old." 
The consumptive was telling the banker about the new
co-opera- tive scheme in Barre, Vermont. 
"For the love o' Mike!" my friend repeated.
"That ain't a band; it's a historical s'ciety. Dead and buried! Next
they'll strike up that latest novelty rage, 'In the Shade of the Old Apple
Tree'! . . . Now will you listen to that. Robbin' the cemetery!" 
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. Arid without consciously
grasping what the air was, I had suffered an abrupt voyage through space. I saw
a torchlit sward, ringed with blue and saffron faces and high forest walls; I
saw the half -nude, golden loveliness of a Poly- nesian 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 weari- ness, 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 feet 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
ges- ture in my memory. . . . "That?" he queried. "Eh?" 
"Shimmie," I echoed, and, my mind skipping
back: "Shemdance! Shame Dance! ... I see!" 
"Why?" he demanded, intrigued by my
preoccupation. 
"Nothing. It just reminded me of something."
Then he lifted a hand and smote himself on the thigh.
"Me, too! By jinks! Say, I'd almost forgot that." 
He hitched his chair upon me; held me down with a
forefinger. 
"Listen. That was funny. It was one night— last
fall. It was just after Number Seventeen had pulled out, westbound, about
one-forty in the morning. There wasn't anything else till six-one. Them are
always the hardest hours. A fellow's got to stay awake, see, and nothin' to
keep him— unless maybe a coyote howlin' a mile off, or maybe a bum knockin'
around among the boxcars on the sidin', or, if it's cold, the stove to tend.
That's all. Unless you put a record on the old phonograph and hit 'er up a few
minutes now and then. Dead? Say, boy! 
"Well, this night it was a bum. I'm sittin' there
in the coop, countin' my fingers and listenin' to Limon calling off car numbers
to Denver— just like that I'm sittin'— when I hear somethin' out in the waitin'
room. Not very loud. . . . Well, I go out there, and there's the bum. Come
right into the waitin' room. 
"Bum! If he wasn't the father and mother and
brother and sister of the original bum, I'll eat my hat. Almost a Jew-lookin'
guy, and he'd saw hard service. But he's got a kind o' crazy glitter in his
eye. 
" 'Well,' says I, just like that, 'Well, what do
you want?' 
"He don't whine; he don't handle the pan. He's
got that look in his eye. 
" 'My woman is out in them boxcars,' says he.
'I'm goin' to bring her in here where it's warm.' That's what he says. Not l
can I bring her in?' but ''goin' 1 to bring her in'! From a hobo! 
"Can you imagine? It makes me think. It comes to
me the guy is really off his trolley. To keep him calm I says, 'Well ' 
"He goes out. 'I'm shed o' him, I says to
myself. Not a bit. About three minutes and here he comes trottin' back, sure
enough, bringin' a woman with him. Now, mister— what's y'r-name— prepare to
laugh. That there woman— listen— make up your face— she's a nigger! 
"He says she ain't a nigger. 
" 'Mexican?' says I. 
" 'No,' says he. 
"I give her another look, but I can't make much
out of her, except she's some kind of a nigger, anyhow. She's sittin' on the
bench far away from the light, and she's dressed in a secondhand horse blanket,
a feed sack, and a bran'-new pair of ar'tics. And she don't say a word. 
" 'Well,' says I, 'if she ain't some kind of
nigger, I'll eat my ' 
"But there he is, all of a sudden, squarin' off
in front o' me, his mug stuck up and his eyes like a couple o' headlights.
Imagine! The guy ain't got enough meat on his bones for a rest'rant chicken.
Hon- est to God, he looked like he'd been through a mile o' sausage mill. But
crazy as a bedbug. And there's somethin' about a crazy man 
" 'Hold y'r gab!' says he. To me! That gets my
goat. 
" 'Just for that,' says I, 'you can get out o'
this station. And don' forget to take your woman along with you. Get out!' 
" 'Get out hellP says he. He sticks his mug right
in my face. 
" 'That woman you speak so light of,' says he,
'is a queen. A Canuck queen,' says he. 
"I had to laugh. 'Since when was there queens in
Canada?' says I. 'And since when has the Canuck queens been usin' stove polish
for talcum powder?' 
"The guy grabs me by the coat. Listen. He was
strong as a wire. He was deceivin'. A wire with ten thousand volts into it. 
"'Look at me!' says he, breathin' hard between
his teeth. 'And take care!' says he. 'I'm a man no man can monkey with. I'm a
man that'll go through. I'm stained with crime. I've waded through seas o'
blood. Nothin' in heaven or earth or hell can stop me. A month from now rubes
like you'll be glad to crawl at my feet— an' wipe their dirty mugs on the hem
o' that there woman's skirt. . . . Now listen,' says he. 'Get the hell into
that there box o' yourn over there and be quiet.' 
"Crazy as a loon. I hope to die! the guy was
dangerous. I see that. It come to me it's best to humor him, and I go into the
coop again. I sit there countin' my fingers and listenin' to Denver tellin'
back them car numbers to Limon again. By and by I'm jumpy as a cat. 
I get up and stick a record in the old machine. . . .
That's what brings the whole thing back to mind. That record is this 'Paragon
Park.' 
"First thing I know I'm out in the waitin' room
again. And what you think I see? I give you a hundred guesses. . . ." 
"I'll take one," I said to him. "What
you saw was the finest ex- hibition of the 'Shimmie' you ever clapped an eye
upon. Am I right?" 
The young fellow's mouth hung open. He stared at me. 
"Half undressed! Honest! That nigger woman! Horse
blanket, feed sack, ar'tics— where was they? Shimmie? Say! Can you imagine, in
that there prairie depot at three in the mornin', and a wind howlin' under the
floor? Say! Well, I can't tell you, but talk about Shimmie! Say, she's like a
dead one come to life." 
"Yes," I agreed, "yes. . . . But what
about the man?" 
"Well, that man, now. The record's comin' to the
end and I go back in to start it over. And here's this hobo, come in behind me.
" 'What's that?' says he, pointin' to the record
I got in my hand. 
"Then he grabs it and looks it over. He keeps
turnin' it round and round and round, starin' at it. 
" 'I hope you'll know it again,' says I, with a
laugh. 
"My laugh seems to set him off into a shiver.
Then down he throws that record o' mine onto the floor and stamps on it; busts
it into a million pieces under his boots. I've been tellin' you he's crazy. 
" 'Here there!' I yell at him. 
"He looks at me. Looks right through me, it
seems, and beyond, with them there red-rimmed eyes. 
" 'Seas o' blood,' says he. That's all. 'Seas o'
blood!' 
"Then he turns around, walks out into the waitin'
room, and sits down in a heap in the farthest corner. Never another peep. There
he sits till daylight, and the nigger woman, with the horse blanket on again,
she sits there beside him, holdin' his hand. 
" 'What's up with him?' I ask her. 
"She says somethin' in Mexican— or some language,
anyway. But I see she don't know any more'n me. . . . It's just like this. The
current's gone out o' the wire. . . . Last I ever see of 'em, she's leadin' him
off in the sunrise toward the boxcars— leadin' him by the hand. . . . Now did
you ever hear a funnier experience than that to happen to a man?" 
"No," I said, "I never did." 
"You had to pity him," he added. 
"Yes," I agreed. . . . And I could think of
her leading him by the hand. 
I saw Signet again. It was on my first and last voyage
to the Marquesas. Under the shadow of a mountain, on a stone platform facing
the sea, sat Signet, quite nude save for a loincloth, and with an unequivocal
black beard falling down on his breast. There was a calmness about him. 
"How did you come here?" I asked, at length.
"She wanted it," he said. 
"She's a wonderful woman," he said to me,
"a wonderful woman. She would do anything for me, Dole. Anything! We've
got a kid." 
I made shift to get in a question I had carried long
in mind. "Somebody beat you out at Papeete, then, after all?" 
He turned upon me a faintly quizzical look. 
"I mean, somebody saw her— some tourist— that
time she danced at Papeete— remember?— and got away with it?" 
The thing seemed already so remote that he had to grope
back. Then he laughed. 
"Lord, no. Look here, Dole. It was her herself
seen the thing at Papeete. On board a tourist boat. I found out about it since
I learned her language good. Her and some others went aboard to dance the hula—
same as always, you know. Then some of them, the tourists, understand— well,
they have to spring the latest thing from Broad- way. And then this woman of
mine— well, you can imagine. Like a woman with a new hat. Got to run right off
and show it to the whole damn length and breadth of the South Seas. That's all.
. . . And once upon a time I thought I was bright. . . ." 
Out of the half house at the rear of the platform came
the daughter of a queen, bearing under one arm a prince of this island valley,
and in the other hand a bowl of coconut wine for the visitor. And for her lord.
For you will see that at last, despite the malignant thrusts and obstacles of
destiny, this guttersnipe of Gotham had come to a certain estate. 
When I left, he accompanied me slowly to the beach. 
"You ought to like it here," I said.
"After all, the city could never have given you so much." 
"No," he said. Wide-eyed, he took in the
azure immensity of the sea. "No. Here a guy has got time to think, think,
without any hurry or worry. ... I been thinking, Dole, a lot. I ain't going to
say nothing about it, but Dole, I believe I got an idea coming along. No
flivver this time. A real, sure-fire hunch. Something that'll go big in the
city. Big!" 
And so I left him there in the shadow of the mountain,
staring at the impassable sea. . . .
Category:Steele
Category:Published