Read Ebook: The Pearl Fishers by Stacpoole H De Vere Henry De Vere

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Ebook has 1671 lines and 75123 words, and 34 pages

ch had just pushed up its face over the eastern reef edge, lit the pile which Floyd was now stirring with his finger, while Schumer, who had drawn himself closer on his elbow, looked on without a word. Isbel had drawn closer, too.

She had spoken very little as yet, and when she spoke it was a pleasure to listen.

To attempt the reproduction of Polynesian speech is fatal, and the authors who attempt it succeed in producing only a disgusting form of pidgin English. It is impossible to reproduce the inflections, the softness, the timbre, the soul of it. It is equally impossible to reproduce the infantile French of the West Indies.

Isbel's language was the human equivalent of the language of the soft-voiced birds; more than that, the missionary who had brought her up had guarded her from the vile "savvee" and "um" and "allee same" that foul the speech of the lower natives.

How much the missionary teaching had bent her mind to Eastern ideals or influenced her nature it would be impossible to say. There was a great deal of mystery about Isbel, centuries and centuries of the unknown and unrealized gazing from those eyes so dark and unfathomable.

"Well," said Schumer, breaking the silence at last, "that's a decent pile, and what are you going to do with it?"

"Well, it's Coxon's," said Floyd, "and now he's dead it will belong to his next of kin; he hadn't a wife and family, so he told me, but he's sure to have relations."

"Every man has who dies worth a cent," said Schumer. "Question is how are you to find them, and whether they'll thank you if you do find them, or swear that you've nailed half the boodle. You said the chap that fired the schooner was Coxon's brother-in-law; well, it 'pears to me you've suffered a good bit from his relations already, and deserve some recompense. If I were you I'd put those papers in the fire and the money in your pocket--however, that's your affair, not mine."

Floyd put papers and money back in the tin box.

"I'll put them in the tent for the present," said he; "there's lots of time to think over the matter, and little chance enough to act in it."

"Well," said Schumer, "you can do as you please when the time comes--and I wish it would come. I'm about sick of hanging here doing nothing. I'm going to turn in. I sleep in the tent, and there's room for you, too. Isbel has made a wigwam in the bush--the boat's all right; she's high above the level of the tide."

Half an hour later the great moon, swinging above the island, showed nothing but the embers of the fire, the trodden sand and the tent; the human beings whom the Fates had brought together on this lost and lonely spot had vanished, touched by sleep, just as men vanish from the world when touched by Death.

THE SECRET OF THE LAGOON

Floyd awoke shortly after sunup.

The gulls were shouting and flying against the blaze of the sunrise, fleeting like snowflakes across the blue sky beyond the reef opening, and fishing at the pierheads.

When the great lagoon was emptying or filling to the tide, the water at the pierheads went like a mill race; at slack water it lay gently flowing to the swell of the outside sea as now.

Floyd came from under the tent, glanced round him, stretched himself, and then crossed the reef to the outer beach, where the breakers were coming in--the eternal breakers of the Pacific, leisurely, monotonous, rhythmical, filling the air with their sound and spindrift, their ozone and life.

Nothing could be more extraordinary than the contrast between the inner beach and the outer beach of the island. You stood now facing a great lake, calm and colored with all the blues and greens of tropical water that varies in depth, and now, crossing the reef, you stood on the shore of a thunderous sea.

Floyd stripped himself of his clothes and went into the surf. When he had bathed and dried himself in the sun, he returned to the camp, where he found Schumer lighting the fire and Isbel preparing breakfast. They greeted him and he fell to to help.

He felt for the moment gay; the brightness, the sense of early morning, the sea breeze and the crying gulls all raised his spirits to the highest pitch.

Even Schumer, older and unenthusiastic to everything but trade, seemed more cheerful than usual.

"South of the three-hundred-mile limit there's a group of small islands, but they are not atolls. Now we're clear out of trade tracks and unknown, though you may be sure whalers have been here, for there's nowhere in the Pacific that whalers haven't pushed their noses, and whalers are useless to us. We don't want any blubber tanks showing their dirty hulls here; if they took us aboard they would drop us again at any decent port till after, maybe, a three years' cruise, and then they'd land us God knows where, crippled with work and tuppence in our pockets. No, sir, if any dirty whalers show their faces here they'll get bullets before they get us on board. Well, come on and help float the boat."

They got the boat off, and in a few minutes were out in the lagoon, Isbel forward, Floyd at the sculls, and Schumer in the stern sheets.

"There's breeze enough for the sail," said Schumer, when they were a hundred yards or so out. "Shove the mast up, and we'll take it easy. I want to have a full look at the floor of this lagoon, and take my time over it."

Floyd took in the sculls, and, helped by Isbel, who seemed to have a good knowledge of boat craft, got the mast stepped. Then they shook the sail out, and the boat scarcely heeling to the gentle breeze, they made straight across the stretch of water between them and the northernmost beach.

The floor of the lagoon was not of equal depth; near the break in the reef it was thirty-fathom water, shoaling swiftly to ten and five. The whole western half of the lagoon was three fathoms and under. At several places in this shallow zone the coral floor rose sharply and nearly reached the surface. It was necessary, indeed, to unstep the mast and take to the sculls, while Isbel, leaning over the bow, conned them.

The water was so clear that the shadow of the boat showed hard on the sand patches; looking down, the eye was held by a thousand things beautiful and strange. Color dwells like a wizard in tropical and subtropical waters; it seems inherent in those seas. Shells, fish, and coral all are gorgeous, and more than gorgeous--exquisite. Here seem to lie the remnants of a world more beautiful than any world we know--the ruins of a paradise.

Coral alone presents to us a whole world of art; its colors and its forms are infinite, and the artists of Paris or Tokyo make nothing more beautiful than the million art treasures eternally being formed in the depths and the shallows of the sea. Not only in the Pacific, but the Atlantic, not only in the Atlantic, but the Indian Ocean, from three-fathom water to a mile deep the construction of the beautiful is eternally in progress, unviewed and almost unknown.

Floyd, resting on his oars now and then, looked over into the luminous depths where flights of painted fish passed, their shadows following them over the sand patches and brain coral.

Here and there were streaks of dead and rotten coral of a seaweed brown, and here and there veritable gardens of color. Great shells moved about on the sand patches, crabs scurried hither and thither, globe-shaped jellyfish passed clear as glass, showing up for the moment by reflected light, and then vanishing like ghosts. Schumer, his battered old panama tilted back to protect his neck from the sun, seemed absorbed in the things below; he spoke scarcely a word, unless to give direction to the rower; Isbel, heedless of the sun, was equally absorbed. Always on the lookout for the shoal water, she said nothing except to give the direction "To the right," "To the left," and on the heaving of a sudden rock up through the brilliant water, "Ah, stop hard!"

The whole of this western part of the lagoon was very difficult water; unless buoyed it would be utterly unnavigable by a ship even of small tonnage.

Schumer, having explored the northernmost part of this zone, gave directions to Floyd to pull farther south.

They had scarcely entered this area when Floyd's attention became attracted to his companion. Schumer, leaning over the side and holding the thwart with his left hand, suddenly became rigid. The muscles of his neck stood out stiff, and his hand seemed trying to crush the wood of the thwart.

Then he turned with a great cry:

"Shell! Acres of shell--pearls! We've struck it!" Floyd, as excited as Schumer, drew in his sculls and looked over.

Fortune wears many cloaks, but her ugliest is formed of oysters. As far as Floyd could see, to right, to left, ahead, and astern, the floor of the lagoon was an oyster bed; all beauty of coral had vanished, and the water seemed deserted even by the colored fish that haunted the deeper parts of the lagoon.

"Row on," said Schumer; "let's see how far it stretches. It is the biggest find I ever expected to strike. I fancied there might be shell, I was on the lookout for shell, but it was only an idea of mine, and now it's here, a fortune right in our hands."

Floyd got out the sculls and the boat moved south.

Schumer was right when he had said "acres of shell." An hour's prospecting gave them the fact that the whole southern area of this the western portion of the lagoon was shell. There were three main beds with coral between, millions and millions of oysters, tons upon tons of shell, and no man could say the possibilities in the way of pearls.

When they had finished prospecting they beached the boat, and taking shelter from the sun under the shade of a little grove of artus and pura trees, set to on the provisions they had brought with them.

Right across the lagoon from where they sat they could see their camping place and the tent, the wreck, and the opening in the reef all in the blue weather, and beyond the opening in the reef a glimpse of the great Pacific and the fringe of pearl-white clouds on the horizon.

"Well," said Schumer, as they finished their meal, "the stuff is there right enough, and it only comes now to the question of lifting it. We have no labor, or none to speak of. Of course, we'll dredge and dive so as to get as much samples as we can, but we want twenty men on the work, and I don't see how we're to do it without letting others into the secret. It's this way: Some time or another a vessel is sure to happen along here and take us off; well, if it does we must keep mum. Our object will be to get to Frisco or Sydney, and there get hold of some chap with money and form a little syndicate. That'll water the profits considerable; he'll want half at least. But there you are--what's to be done?"

"Nothing," said Floyd; "we can't move without labor, and even that's no use without a ship. To rig an expedition up at Frisco or Sydney will cost a lot, and you may be sure any speculator who puts his money into the thing will want to gobble most of the profits."

"Before we'd let him into the know we'd make him sign a paper," said Schumer, "stating his acceptance of our terms, and then we'd make him keep his bond with a pistol to his head. I don't trust the law alone, but the law backed by a derringer makes a pretty good security."

As Schumer spoke, Floyd, who was watching his profile cut hard against the sky, noticed for the first time the flatness of the cheek bones and the relationship between the nose and chin.

Schumer was a very quiet man in his speech and manner, yet there was about him an assured confidence speaking of great reserves of energy; and now for the first time, as though the thought of being robbed of his treasure had revealed it, there peeped out a new man; something of the bird of prey showed in that profile, something of the desperado found echo in his voice.

"Well," said Floyd, "there's no use in making plans till we have something to go on. Let's settle on our immediate business; we'll have to get oysters up and rot them in the sun to see if there's any show of pearls, and it seems to me that we are very well placed for that. Suppose a ship comes into the lagoon; well, she can't come within a mile of this beach on account of the shoal water, and she won't be able to see our work. I propose we stick to our old camp by the wreck, and come here every day to work. We can leave Isbel on guard at the camp, and if she sights a ship she can light a fire to give us warning."

"That's sense," replied Schumer, who had become himself again. "We can rot the oysters on the weather side of the reef, and we'll set to work on the business to-morrow morning. Let's get back now to the camp. I'm going to fix up a dredge. Did I tell you I was a bit of an engineer? I've had to be a bit of everything this time or that. I once edited a paper and wrote it mostly, from the poetry column to the produce. I guess I'd have written books if my lines had been cast in quiet waters. Trade has always kept me going, and here where there's palm trees and blue water enough trade turns up in oysters."

His eyes were fixed across the lagoon on the palms near the wreck; the hawk-like look had vanished, and he murmured half to himself the verse of Scheffel:

"You speak German?" said he.

"My father was a German," replied Schumer. "I speak four languages and half a dozen Polynesian dialects. One has to. Well, shall we get back? There is nothing more to be done here for the present."

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