Its windows were modest and prim in green curtains. 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