Its only adornment was the picture, above its principal door, of what once was a negro boy.  This picture now was weathered into a faded plum-coloured suit and a pair of silver shoe-buckles—­there was nothing left of the boy himself but the whites of his eyes.  The tavern is placed where men moving in the new ways of a busy and adventurous world would not see it, for they would not be there.  Its dog Ching was asleep on the mat of the portico to the saloon bar; a Chinese animal, in colour and mane resembling a lion whose dignity has become sullenness through diminution.  He could doze there all day, and never scare away a chance customer.  None would come.  But men who had learned to find him there through continuing to trade to the opposite dock, would address him with some familiar and insulting words, and stride over him.

The tavern is near one of the wicket gates of the irregular intrusion into the city of a maze of dock basins, a gate giving those who know the district a short cut home from the ships and quays; the tavern was sited not altogether without design.  And there came Macandrew through that gate, just as I had decided I must try again soon.  His second, Hanson, was with him.  They crossed to the public-house, and we stooped over the yellow lump of Chinese apathy to talk to him, and went through the swing doors into the saloon.  The saloon was excluded from the gaze of the rest of the house by little swinging screens of frosted glass above the bar, for that was where old friends of the landlord met, who had known him all the time their house-flags had been at home in the neighbouring docks; and perhaps had even sailed with him when be himself went to sea.  A settee in red plush, salvage from the smoke-room of a liner, ran round the walls, with the very mahogany tables before it which it knew when afloat.  Some men in dingy uniforms and dungarees were at the tables.  Two men I did not know stood leaning over the bar talking confidentially across it to a woman who was only a laugh, for she was hidden.  One of the men turned from the counter to see who had come in.

“Hullo Mac,” he cried, in a voice hearty with the abandon of one who, perhaps, had been there long enough; “look here, here’s Jessie says she’s going to leave us.”

A woman’s hand, spoiled by many heavy rings, moved across the counter and shook his arm in warning.  The youngster merely closed his own hand over it.  “Isn’t it hard.  Really going to forsake us.  Won’t mix your whiskey or uncork my lemonade any more.  What are we going to do when we come home now?”

There was an impatient muttering beyond him, and he made public a soothing and exaggerated apology.  All the men in the room, even the group bent over a diagram of a marine engine they had drawn in chalk on their table, looked up in surprise, first at the youngster who had raised his voice, and then to watch the tall shadow of a woman pass quickly down the counter-screen and vanish.  Still laughing, the young man, with his uniform cap worn a little too carelessly, nodded to the company, and went out with his companion.