Part 3
“I’m with you on the pearls,” said Harman, “and I’m ready to close on two conditions, and the first is that the beds haven’t been stripped.”
“We’ll easily prove that,” said Davis. “I’ve done pearling and I know the business.”
“Second is,” continued Harman, “that havin’ hived the stuff, we’ll be able to get away with it.”
“Maybe what more you’ll be wanting is a mail boat to ’Frisco and a brass band to play us off. Isn’t Luck good enough to trust in? And look at the luck that’s brought us here. What you want flying in the face of it for?”
“Well, maybe you’re right,” said the other. “The luck’s all right if it holds; question is, will it? I don’t like that petticut flyin’ up in our face; it’s part of the deal, seems to me, since he’s droppin’ this place mainly to get to her, and I’ve never seen a deal yet that wasn’t crabbed if a woman put as much as the tip of her nose into it. I ain’t superstitious. I’m only sayin’ what I know, and all I’m saying is that it’s rum him talking of——”
“Oh, shut up,” said the other, “you’re worse than any old woman. I’m into this business whether or no, and you can stay out if you want. How’s it to be?”
Harman raised his head and sniffed the air tainted with the oysters rotting on the coral. Then he turned to the cabin hatch. “Come on,” said he, and they went below to close the bargain.
* * * * *
Clayton’s house was grass-thatched like the others and situated close to the groves on the right of the village; it had three rooms and a veranda, and mats and native-made chairs constituted the chief furniture. Beyond the house, farther on the right, was the shed where a few trade goods, mostly boxes of tobacco and rolls of print, were stored.
“That’s all there’s left of the stuff I brought with me,” said he; “it’ll carry you on, and I make you a present of it. The Kanakas aren’t used to high wages. A chap will dive all day for the fun of it and half a stick of tobacco, but you can do most of the diving yourselves and save on the business. There are the diving suits, two of them. Good as when I got them, and the pump’s in the boat there; she’s in that canoe house, it’s a Clarkson, in good order. Say, boys, you’ve no reason to sneeze over this deal. Here’s an island, a living larder, pigs and fowl and taro and fish and fruit for nix, a pearl lagoon not half worked, diving suits and pump and a bit of trade, and all for that frousty old brown boat of yours. Was you ever on your feet before?”
“Well, maybe,” said Davis, “we’ve no call to complain if the beds are all right. Let’s put out and look at them.”
They took the _Douro’s_ boat and rowed out, Clayton steering and piloting them.
The beds ran north, acres of them, and one of the Kanakas Clayton had taken with them dived now and then and brought up a pair of shells as a sample.
Big molluscs they were, weighing maybe eight hundred to the ton, of the white shell like the Tahiti oysters.
Davis, who knew something of the business, reckoned that the shell alone was worth five hundred dollars a ton, but he said nothing as the boat, impelled by the sculls, passed through the crystal water.
Every lagoon would be a pearl lagoon but for the fact that the oyster of all sea creatures is the most difficult to suit with a breeding ground. The tides must not be too swift, the floor must be exactly right.
Javal Lagoon was ideal, a bar of reef delaying the floor current and the coral showing the long coach-whip fucus loved by the pearl-seeker. Davis declared himself satisfied, and they rowed back to inspect the mounds of shell and oysters rotting on the beach which were to be thrown in as part of the goodwill of the business.
That night after supper, Clayton showed his pearls. A few of them. He had four tin cash-boxes, and he opened one and disclosed his treasures lying between layers of cotton-wool. You have seen chocolate creams in boxes—that was the sight that greeted the eyes of Harman and Davis, only the chocolate creams were pearls. Some were the size of marrowfat peas and some were the size of butter beans, very large, but not of very good shape, some were pure white, some gold and some rose.
“Don’t show us no more, or I guess we’ll be robbin’ you,” said Harman.
Next morning the pearl-man began his preparations for departure, the water-casks of the _Douro_ were filled, chickens caught and cooped, a live pig embarked and the groves raided for nuts, bananas and bread-fruit.
“It’s well he’s leavin’ us the trees,” said Harman.
The diving suits were got out and Clayton showed them how they were used, also the trick of filling the net bag with oysters in the swiftest way and without tangling the air-tube. The beds were shallow enough to be worked without diving gear, but a man in a diving dress will raise five times as many pairs of shells as a man without in a given time, Clayton explained this. He left nothing wanting in the way of explanations and advice, and next morning, having filled up with provisions and water, he put out, taking the ebb, the _Douro_ heeling to a five-knot breeze and followed past the break by a clanging escort of gulls.
Then Harman and Davis found themselves alone, all alone, masters of a treasure that would have turned the head of Tiffany, and of a hundred and fifty Kanakas, men, women, and children, a tribe captained and led by one Hoka, a frizzy-headed buck whose only dress and adornment was a gee string and the handle of a china utensil slung round his neck as a pendant.
The rotted oysters on the coral were useless, they had been worked over by Clayton. That was the first surprise, the next was the price of labour. Two sticks of tobacco a day was the price of native labour, not half a stick as reported by Clayton.
Trade tobacco just then worked out at two cents a stick, so the pay was not exorbitant; it was the smallness of the stock in hand that bothered our syndicate. But Hoka was adamant. He did not know ten words of English, but he knew enough to enforce his claims, and the syndicate had to give in.
“I knew there’d be flies in the ’intment somewhere,” said Harman, “but this is a bluebottle. We haven’t tobacco enough to work this lagoon a month, and what’s to happen then?”
“No use bothering a month ahead,” replied Davis. “If worst comes to the worst, we’ll just have to do the diving ourselves. Get into your harness and down with you, to see how it works.”
Harman did, and an appalling rush of bubbles followed his descent, the suit was faulty. Tropical weather does not improve diving suits, and Harman was just got up in time.
“Never again,” said he when his window was unscrewed, and he had done cursing Clayton, Clayton’s belongings, his family, his relatives and his ancestors.
“Stick her on the beach; darn divin’ suits, let’s take to the water natural.”
They did, following the practice of the Kanakas, and at the end of the week, when the shells were rotted out, six days’ takings showed three large pearls perfect in every point and worth maybe fifteen hundred dollars, five small pearls varying in value from ten to forty dollars according to Davis’ calculations, several baroques of small and uncertain value and a spoonful of seeds.
“Call it two thousand dollars,” said Davis, when they had put the takings away in some cotton-wool, left by Clayton, and a small soap-box. “Call it two thousand and we’ve had twenty Kanakas diving for a week at two sticks a day, that makes two hundred and eighty sticks at two cents a stick.”
“Well, it’s cheap enough,” said Harman. “Wonder what the unions would say to us and them chaps that’s always spoutin’ about the wages of the workin’ classes—not that I’m against fair wages. I reckon if that guy Clayton had left us enough tobacco, I wouldn’t mind raisin’ the wage bill to eight dollars a week, but we haven’t got it—haven’t got enough to last a month as it’s runnin’ now.”
He spoke the truth. Less than a month left them cleared out, and the Kanakas struck to a man and ceased to dive, spending their time fishing, lazing in the sun and smoking—but their chief amusement was watching the white men at work.
There is no penitentiary equal to a pearl lagoon, once it seizes you, and no galley slaves under the whip ever worked harder than Harman and Bud Davis, stripped to the skin, brown as cobnuts with sun and water, long-haired, dishevelled, diving like otters, and bringing up not more than a hundred pair of shells a day.
The boat had to be anchored over a certain spot, and as the work went on the anchorage had to be shifted; at the end of the day the oysters had to be brought ashore and laid out on the coral to rot. Then, too tired, almost, to smoke, the Pearl Syndicate would stretch itself under the stars to dream of fortune and the various ways of spending money.
The imaginative Harman had quite definite views on that business—diamonds and dollar Henry Clays, champagne and palatial bars, standing drinks to all and sundry and a high time generally, that was his idea. Davis, darker and more secretive, had higher ambitions roughly formulated in the words, “More money.” Dollars breed dollars, and great wealth was enough for him. He would spend his money on making more, sure in his mind that if he once got his foot again in ’Frisco with a pocketful of money, he would find his way out through the big end of the horn.
And so they went on till at the end of four months, taking stock of their possessions, they found themselves forty thousand dollars up, to use Davis’ words.
Taken by the hands of the Kanakas in the first month and by their own hands in the three succeeding months, they had safely hived forty-seven white and perfect pearls, two golden pearls, one defective, some red pearls not worth more than a shilling a grain, and, king of the collection, a great black pearl pear-shaped and perfect and equal to any Mexican in lustre and value. There were also some baroques of extraordinary shapes and a quantity of seeds.
Of the forty-seven white pearls, four were of very large size. Davis had no scales, but he reckoned that these four and the black were worth all the rest put together.
The general stock-taking brought an end to their luck, and for weeks after the take was a joke, to use Davis’ expression. It is always so in pearling; a man may make a small fortune out of a fishery in a few months, but the take is never consistent, and if he strikes it rich at first, it is ten to one he will have to pay for his luck.
One morning, just as the sun was freeing himself from the reef and the last of the gulls departing for their deep-sea fishing grounds, Harman, who had been to draw water from the well, suddenly dropped the bucket he was carrying, shaded his eyes and gave a shout that brought Davis from the house.
Davis looked to where the other was pointing, and there far off to the north and lit by the newly-risen sun stood a sail.
They had been praying for a ship for the last fortnight, speculating on the chances of anything picking them up before they died of hope deferred and loneliness and a diet of fish and vegetable truck, yet now, before that sail hard on the blue and evidently making towards them, they scarcely felt surprised, and were too troubled to be filled with joy; for it suddenly occurred to them that pearls were pearls—that is to say, wealth in its most liftable form.
“Say, Bud,” cried Harman, “we’ve got to hide them divin’ dresses. If these chaps ain’t on the straight and they sniff pearls, we’ll be robbed sure and shoved in the lagoon. I never thought of that before. We’re sure marks for every tough till we’ve cashed in and banked the money.”
“You aren’t far wrong,” replied Davis, still contemplating the sail. “Yes, she’s making for here, and she’s all a hundred and fifty tons. Inside two hours she’ll be off the reef and we’ve no time to waste.”
Most of the island Kanakas had gone fishing the night before to the other side of the atoll, so there were only a few old women and children about to mark the actions of the Pearl Syndicate.
First they dealt with the boat that held the pump, sinking it by the inner beach in four-fathom water at a point where the trees came down right across the sands.
Then, carrying the diving suits, they dumped them in a fish-pool off the outer beach. Having done this, they divided the pearls, making two parcels of them, and surprisingly small parcels they were considering their value.
“Now,” said Harman, when all was done, “we’re shipwrecked chaps blown ashore, we don’t know nothing about pearls, and we reckon the house and go-down were built by some trader the Kanakas has murdered. How’s that for a yarn to sling them; but what’s the name of our ship?”
“The _Mary Ann Smithers_,” replied Davis promptly, “from Tampico to ’Frisco, cargo of hides and wool, badly battered off the Horn, old man’s name Sellers, and driven out of our course by the big gale a month ago. There wasn’t any gale a month ago, but it’s a million to one they were a thousand miles off then, so how are they to know?”
“You were second officer,” said Harman.
“No, I was bo’sun; second officers are supposed to be in the know of the navigation and all such. I was just bo’sun, plain Jim Davis.”
“Well, they won’t dispute you’re plain enough,” said Harman. “But you ain’t the cut of a bo’sun, not to my mind, cable length nearer you are to the look of a Methodis’ preacher or a card sharp—no need to get riled—be a bo’sun and be darned, be anythin’ you like. I’m an A.B. hopsacker, British born and—here they are.” The fore canvas of the schooner was just showing at the break.
* * * * *
She came in laying the water behind her as though she had a hundred square miles of harbour to manœuvre in, then the wind shivered out of her canvas and almost on the splash of the anchor a boat was dropped.
Harman and Davis watched it as it came ashore, noted the stroke of the broad-backed Kanaka rowers and the sun helmet of the white man in the stern and his face under the helmet as he stepped clear of the water on to the beach.
Mandelbaum was the name of the newcomer, a dark, small man with a face expressionless as a wedge of ice. He wore glasses.
As he stepped on to the sand he looked about him in seeming astonishment, first at Harman, then at Davis, then at the house, then at the beach.
“Who the devil are you?” asked he.
“Same to yourself,” replied Harman, “we’re derelicks. Hooker bust herself on the reef in a big blow more’n a month ago. Who are you?”
“My name is Mandelbaum,” replied the other.
“Well, come up on the verandy and have a drink,” said the hospitable Harman, “and we can have a clack before goin’ aboard. You the captain of that hooker?”
“I am,” said Mandelbaum.
“Then I reckon you won’t mind givin’ us a lift. We’re not above workin’ for our grub—set down till I get some drinkin’ nuts.”
There was a long seat under the veranda, the house door was at the westward end of the house and the seat ran from the door to the eastern end. It was long enough for, maybe, ten people to sit on comfortably, and the three sat down on the seat. Harman having fetched the nuts, Mandelbaum threw his right leg over his left knee and turning comfortably and in a lazy manner towards the others, said:
“Where’s Clayton?”
“I beg your pardon,” said Harman.
Davis said nothing. His mouth fell open, and before he could shut it Mandelbaum got in again.
“Don’t go to the trouble of trying any monkey tricks, there’s half a dozen fellows with Winchesters on that schooner. Your bluff is called. Where’s Clayton, my partner? He and a year’s taking of pearls ought to be here. I bring the schooner back with more trade goods and he’s gone, and I find you two scowbarkers in his house and serving strangers with your damn drinking nuts.” A venomous tang was coming into the steady voice, and a long slick Navy revolver came out of his left-hand coat pocket into his right hand, with the nozzle resting on his right knee.
“Where’s Clayton, dead—but where, where have you planted him, and where have you cached the pearls?”
“Cached the pearls?” suddenly cried Harman, finding his voice and taking in the whole situation. Then he began to laugh. He laughed as though he were watching Charlie Chaplin or something equally funny. He was. The picture of Clayton stood before him. Clayton making off with his partner’s share of the pearls, and handing the island and the fishing rights to him and Davis in return for the ketch, the picture of Davis and himself working like galley slaves, doing four months’ hard labour for the sake of Mandelbaum, for well he knew Mandelbaum would make them stump up to the last baroque.
Then he sat with his chin on his fists, spitting on the ground, while Davis explained and Harman soliloquised sometimes quite out aloud: “No, it ain’t no use; straight’s the only word in the dictionary. No darn use at all, ain’t enough mugs—and a petticut on top of all——”
* * * * *
“Well, what’s the ‘ultermatum’?” asked Harman, a day later, as he stood by a native canoe on the beach.
“It’s either stick here and work for two dollars a day or get out for the Paumotus,” replied Davis, coming up from a last interview with Mandelbaum. “Which will we do, stick here and work for Mandelbaum for two dollars a day sure money, house, grub and everything found, or put out for the Paumotus in this blessed canoe which his royal highness says we can have in exchange for the ship’s money he’s robbed us of? Which is it to be, the society of Mandelbaum or the Paumotus, which is hell, sharks, tide races, contr’y winds and starvation, maybe?”
“The Paumotus,” said Harman without a moment’s hesitation.
III—THE WAY OF A MAID WITH A MAN
Have you ever tried to manage a South Sea canoe, a thing not much wider than a skiff, with mast and sail out of all proportion to the beam, yet made possible because of the outrigger?
The outrigger, a long skate-shaped piece of wood, is supposed to stabilize the affair; it is always fixed to port and is connected to the canoe proper in two chief ways, either by a pole fore and aft or by a central bridge of six curved lengths of wood to which the mast stays are fixed; there are subsidiary forms with three outrigger poles, with two outrigger poles and a bridge, but it was in a canoe of the pure bridge type that Bud Davis and William Harman found themselves afloat in the Pacific, making west with an unreliable compass, a dozen and a half drinking nuts, a breaker of water and food for a fortnight.
They had been shot out of a pearl lagoon by the rightful owner and robbed of two double handfuls of pearls which they had collected in his absence. Given the offer of a canoe to go to the devil in or honest work at two dollars a day with board and lodging free, they had chosen the canoe.
They could work; they had worked like beavers for months and months collecting those pearls, but they weren’t going to work for wages.
“No, sir,” said Harman, “I ain’t come down to that yet. Billy Harman’s done signin’ on to be sweated like a gun-mule and hove in the harbour when he’s old bones; the beach is good enough for him if it comes to bed-rock.”
It had certainly come to bed-rock now this glorious morning, two days out and steering into the face of the purple west, the great sun behind them just risen and leaning his chin on the sea line.
Harman was at the steering paddle, Davis forward. They had breakfasted on cold water and bananas, and Billy was explaining to Davis exactly the sort of fools they had been, not in refusing work and good grub and pay, but in having failed to scrag Mandelbaum, the pearl man.
“Oh, shut up,” said Davis, “you’re always going back on things, and you haven’t it in you to scrag a chicken, anyhow; always serving out that parson’s dope about it not paying to run crooked.”
“Nor it don’t,” said the moralist. “There ain’t enough mugs in the world, as I’ve told you more than twice. I don’t say there ain’t enough, but they’re too spread about—now if you could get them all congeriated into one place, I wouldn’t be behind you in waltzing in with a clear conscience an’ takin’ their hides—but there ain’t such a place—— ’Nother thing that queers the pitch is the way sharps let on to be mugs. Look at Clayton.”
“What about Clayton?”
“Well, look at him. In we sails to that pearl shop and there we finds him on the beach. Looked like the king of the mugs, didn’t he, with his big, round face and them blue-gooseberry eyes. ‘Here’s a sealed lagoon for you,’ says he, ‘I’m done with it; got all the pearls I want and am only wishful to get away; take it for nix, I only want your ship in exchange, and we fall to the deal and off he goes.’
“We didn’t know he’d sailed off with all his pardner’s pearls, did we? And when his pardner, Mandelbaum, turns up and collars our takin’s, and kicks us out in this durned canoe after we’d been workin’ months and months, our pitch wasn’t queered—was it? And all by a sharp got up to look like a sucker and be d——d to him. Well, I hopes he’ll fry in blazes if he ain’t drowned before he cashes them pearls. I ain’t given to cursin’, but I could curse a hole in this dished canoe when I thinks of the hand we give him by fallin’ into his trap and the trick he served us by settin’ it.”
“MIND!” yelled Davis.
Harman, in his mental upset, had neglected his steering, and the canoe paying off before the wind nearly flogged the mast out as Davis let go the sheet.
There are two sure ways of capsizing a South Sea canoe—letting the outrigger run under too deep and letting it tip into the air. They nearly upset her both ways before matters were righted, then pursuing again the path of the flying fish, the little canoe retook the wind, tepid and sea-scented and blowing out of the blue north-west.
An hour after sunrise next morning Davis, on the look-out, saw a golden point in the sky away to the south of west. It was the cloud turban of Motul. A moment later Harman saw it too.
“Lord! it’s a high island,” cried he. “I thought there was nuthin’ but low islands in these parts. Where have we been driftin’ to?”
“I don’t know,” replied Davis. “Mind your steering, it’s land, that’s all I want.”
“Oh, I ain’t grumblin’,” said Harman. He got her a point closer to the wind and steered, keeping the far-off speck on the port bow. The breeze freshened and the stays of the mast, fastened to the outrigger grating, twanged while the spray came inboard now and then in dashes from the humps of the swell, yet not a white cap was to be seen in all the vast expanse of water, the great sea running with a heave in the line of Humboldt’s current from south to north, but without a foam gout to break the ruffled blue.
At noon Motul had lost its turban of cloud, but now it stood, a great lumping island moulded out of mountains, scarred with gulleys down which burst forests and rainbow falls, for Motul was green with the recent rains and its perfume met them ten miles across the sea.
There seemed no encircling reef, just a line of reef here and there, beyond which lay topaz and aquamarine sheets of water bathing the feet of the great black cliffs of Motul.
“Ain’t a place I’d choose for a lee shore,” said Billy, “but this canoe don’t draw more than a piedish, and I reckon we can get her in most anywhere across the reefs. Question is where do them cliffs break?”
They kept a bit more to the south, and there sure enough was the big break where the cliffs seem smashed with an axe and where the deep water comes in, piercing the land so that you might anchor a battleship so close that the wild cliff-hanging convolvulus could brush its truck and fighting tops.
“We can’t make it before dark,” said Billy.
“Don’t matter,” said Davis.
It didn’t; although the moon had not risen, the stars lit Motul and the great dark harbour that pierces the land like a sword.