That same afternoon, to Clensy’s extreme mortification, he found himself standing just outside the presidential palace at Port-au-Prince. “It’s best ter ply before people who ’as got money,” Adams had said, and so there they stood as Adams opened his villainous mouth and wailed out “Little Annie Rooney’s My Sweetheart” to his vile accordion accompaniment. Clensy gnashed his teeth and hid his perspiring face in his silk handkerchief of other days when the chorus came. It was then that Adams shuffled his feet and, doubling the tempo of the song, danced a hideous jig. “God our help in ages past,” murmured Clensy in an insane way, as the ebony-hued population swarmed around them, and gazed in astonishment at the one-eyed sailorman as he played on, quite unconcerned and careless of Clensy’s anguished feelings. “What! you have the infernal cheek to think I’ll go round with your coco-nut shell and collect!” said Clensy, when Adams calmly stood on one leg, stopped dancing, and intimated that Clensy might make a “whip round.” “Not I. I’d sooner get a ship! Why, it’s bad enough to hear you make that damned row,” said Clensy angrily. Consequently Adams went round himself with the shell. To Clensy’s surprise, when Adams had passed among the crowd of onlookers, and had come back, the coco-nut shell was nearly full of peculiar-looking coins that neither knew the exact value of.
The Haytians and mulattoes are a naturally unostentatious folk in their likes and dislikes, a peculiar kind of calmness pervading their most deliberate acts. One cynical-looking Haytian chief gazed critically into Adams’s collecting calabash as he once more went round, and dropped a dead putrid rat inside! The Haytian chief was evidently not feeling exactly partial towards white men, and chose that way of showing his resentment.
“For heaven’s sake, don’t get ratty!” whispered Clensy as he pulled his comrade’s coat-tail and gave a warning glance. Fortunately for them both, Adams swiftly realised that Clensy was generally right, and so he cooled down and soothed his outraged feelings by swearing at the Haytian chief in the choicest Billingsgate English. With that marvellous precision which brings envy to the hearts of foreign sailormen throughout the world, Adams squirted a stream of tobacco-juice—splash! it had sent a dark stain down the length of the chief’s yellow robe as he stalked majestically away. Then once more the Cockney sailorman began to play and sing.