The pearl that came home

by H. de Vere Stacpoole

Illustration: "An hour before sunset. Fleming came on the great find."

 

THE PEARL THAT
CAME HOME

By H. DE VERE STACPOOLE

ILLUSTRATED BY STEVEN SPURRIER

FOREWORD.

"For tragedy in her serious or comic guise
Search the history of gems."

THE other day in London the Southern Star, one of the largest and certainly the most beautiful of the world's diamonds, was put up for auction and "failed to realise any price." I forget what the bidding went to, nor does the amount matter beyond the statement that it was absurdly small.

The stone was too big. Too big to be worn in an ordinary way. Big diamonds are out of fashion, and this everlasting crystal holding in it the beauty and soul of sunrise was turned down.

This is not a treatise on jewellery else, leaving the Southern Star aside, I would quote many instances of lovely gems neglected, left in obscurity by Taste and only picked up at the dictates of fashion, or vice versa. The black pearl that was worth little till the Empress Eugenie made it sought after, the drop pearl that was worth much till women gave up wearing drop earrings, the opal that went out of favour less on account of superstition than of fad; a list long as the list of poets, painters, writers and sculptors, the intrinsic beauty of whose work was worth nothing till revealed by the eyes of some critic-seer.

This is the story of a pearl that came home, came at last to be appreciated for its beauty alone by a mind that knew nothing of its worth in the market-place.

I.

The Sulu Archipelago lying to the north of Borneo contains over 150 small islands, and the come from here. There is something in the water of the tropic seas that lends colour to the coral and special beauty to the pearl, and of all the seas, the sea of Sulu is most highly charged with this dynamic something that finds expression in beauty.

It was in 1882, when the old Sultan of Sulu was fighting the Spaniards, the same Sultan who sold his rights in the great bird's nest caves to the North Borneo Company, that Fleming, who had got hold of an old prahu and the service of a Sulu man whose name sounded like Nakardike, was fishing for pearls—illicitly. He had come in through the southern Sibutu passage and worked up as far as Cagayan Sulu, and it was amidst the tiny inlets north of here and in view of the palms of Cagayan that he was doing his fishing.

Now if you will look at the charts or at any large map, you will see that Sulu waters are almost as much enclosed as Tidal Basin. Five hundred miles by five hundred miles, they are hedged from the South China Sea by Palawan, from the Celebes Sea by Sibuguey and all the islands to Tawi-Tawi, from the Pacific by the Philippines—a vast blue basin, where the shark shared kingdom with an emperor who impaled men for pearling without a permit. Facts that did not in the east disturb Fleming in his fishing.

War prahus might break the horizon at any moment, or a boatful of Spaniards come along, men worse than the men of Sulu—it did not matter, it was all in the day's work. No law ran in these seas to save a lawless man from extreme punishment; it did not matter, only in the lawless seas could Fleming do his job—which was plunder in all its forms, from opium smuggling to barratry. Broken in his last deal with the customs, he had come down to the Celebes, and with the profit of a lucky gamble at Mendao bought the fishing prahu and provisions for three men for four months—also the services of Nakardike and a Malay boy, Achmat.

A week ago, here, within sight of Cagayan, they had struck oyster ground and coach-whip fucus in six-fathom water, taking in six days three hundred pair of shells and ten pearls, six almost worthless, the others, at the prices ruling in those days, varying in value from five to twenty pounds apiece.

This evening, an hour before sunset, Fleming came on the great find.

Opening the last oyster of the take, a thing nearly as big as a soup-plate, he saw a bulge on the flesh near the hinge of the shell; dividing the muscle, he squeezed gently and, like a great white bubble, out came a pearl. It was enormous; weighing maybe a hundred grains and absolutely round, luminous and perfect.

Holding it in the palm of his wet and dirty hand, Fleming looked at it. Behind him Nakardike, naked as the new moon and dripping from his last dive, stood gazing down at it; Achmat, squatting on the deck near by, gazed too, and at the kriss which Nakardike had picked up from the deck where lay his loin-cloth and betel-box.

A passing gull cried out at them, the only sound breaking the silence of that sea stretching in 'the sunset towards the palms of Cagayan and the Sibutu passage.

Here was all Fleming wanted. He was up in pearls.

He had gained his knowledge from Chi Loo, the opium middleman who dealt in pearls as well as opium and who dwelt in Hankow. It was Chi Loo who had given him the tip about Sulu waters. This thing would be worth maybe five thousand pounds in the open market, and as Fleming looked at it, after the first realisation of its value, he did not see it, or only as the nucleus of a crowded picture wherein figured Chi Loo, to whom he would offer it for sale, and the bars of Hankow and Formosa where he would cut a dash.

Nakardike, looking down, saw the Sultan of Sulu, who impaled men for illicit pearling. Saw also a house on stilts near the Itang River where he could live in comfort with a brown wife and unlimited credit at the Traders; saw, also, that the moment had come.

Unknown to Fleming stood the terrible fact that this expedition, though paid for by him, was entirely Nakardike's.

Nakardike was not the person to risk the anger of the Sultan for a few dollars, a month's wages. He had come with a cut-and-dried plan to be put in operation directly the pearl takings were worth the trouble of seizing and not a moment later, seeing the danger of lingering in these prohibited waters. The moment had come, and the blow of the kriss that nearly severed Fleming's head left nothing to be desired in the way of vigour and directness.

Nakardike seized the pearl, pouched it, and helped Achmat to throw the body overboard.

II.

Now the Spaniards at that time had several gunboats lying by their fortified settlement, Jalo, and the smallest of these, the Seville, a hundred-ton tin pot with a beam engine and a swivel gun steering eight knots and captained by the gay young spark, Lieutenant Alvarez, was cruising one fine morning between Laparan Island and Cape Sandakan when the look-out sighted a prahu.

Alvarez was down below playing the guitar and smoking. He came on deck. The fools on the prahu had altered their course, which was as good as saying "chase me," and the Seville asked nothing better; she was proud of her speed and she was aching to fire her gun. She did. She fired it, in fact, twice after the prahu had hauled her wind and surrendered.

Nakardike and Achmat received the boarders with outstretched hands spread wide open and palms up. They were innocent men, fishers who had lost their gear, natives of Timbu Mata who had no grudge against the Spanish or leanings towards the Sultan or his troops.

Illustration: "The brig was the Itang, Captain Schmerder, Dutch-owned and making to Batavia from Calcutta with a cargo of cotton goods. The prahu came right alongside of her and Alvarez and his ruffians boarded her."

"Just so," said Alvarez, who could talk the Sulu lingo, "and that?"—he pointed with his toe at a bajak lying in the port scuppers.

A bajak is an oyster-rake made in the likeness of a hay-rake and of very heavy wood; it has a heavy stone lashed to its underpart to make it run true; it is a thing quite distinctive, there is nothing else like it born of the sea, and Nakardike, like a fool, had never thought of heaving it overboard. Men do stupid things like that, especially men of the type of Nakardike and his assistant Achmat, for Providence has ordained that Murder shall always have for its shadow Stupidity, and stupidity, what is it but sister to the callousness that permits men to commit murder?

There was also an oyster-shell forgotten; there was also a stain on the deck that much scraping had not removed. A stain on the deck was nothing, it might be shark blood or what not—but why the scraping?

Now Alvarez, though only a lieutenant in the Spanish Navy on duty at Jalo, was a man of parts. He could reason, using facts as counters of thoughts, and that is the most difficult thing in the world; also he was thorough.

III.

What followed now was most curious.

Nakardike, put through the third degree and the Spanish torture of the tarred rope, handed up the pearls, all save the great one, and had Alvarez been another man he would have departed with the loot satisfied with a good morning's work; but he was Alvarez, and taking Nakardike below into the dog-hole of a cabin, he felt his head like a phrenologist—finding not only the bump of acquisitiveness but a lump which was the pearl tied up in a bit of fish-skin and bound amidst the hair so that Alvarez had to cut it loose with his pocket-knife.

He had guessed instinctively that Nakardike was holding some of the pearls back, and he had glimpsed the little lump beneath the hair, but he never expected anything like this.

Here was—fortune. Guitars, bull-fights, a house in Seville, or, better, Paris—Paris! Paris! That was the place of all places. In five beats of a pendulum, such is the power of mind, he had mapped and coloured his future. He put the pearl in his pocket; no one had seen it. It was a secret between himself and the man of Sulu. The secret had to be sealed.

He brought Nakardike on deck.

Now this bloodhound of a man had not only scented hidden loot, but also he was convinced in his mind that a white man had been boss of the prahu and had been murdered for the sake of the pearl.

Two things told him of this, the stain on the deck and an old shoe lying in a corner of the dog-hole below.

Did he accuse Nakardike? Not a bit. He ordered his men to unshackle the halyard of the big sail and put the rope round Achmat's neck.

He knew that if murder had been committed both men were in the business; there was no accusation. If murder had been committed Achmat would think that Nakardike had confessed down below, putting the blame on him (Achmat), and would try to escape by a counter-accusation. It was beautifully reasoned and swiftly done, and the result justified the reasoning.

Achmat confessed everything, accusing Nakardike, who confessed everything, accusing Achmat.

Alvarez hanged them both and made a target of the prahu at five hundred yards, sinking her at the sixth shot.

Then he went back to Jalo, reported a naval engagement in which he multiplied the prahu by six; handed over the small pearls, said nothing about the great one and settled down to brood and make plans for the future. His cleverness had brought him to an impasse. Up to this he had been careless and happy; now, with fortune in his waistcoat pocket, he was discontented.

All the fun in the world was waiting for him and he was tied to Jalo; he was on war service and could not resign his position, he could not disclose his treasure, he could not sell the thing in the East. He had long casual talks with Ah Wong, a Chinese trader who supplied Jalo with provisions, and Ah Wong, who knew everything about everything saleable, gave it as his opinion that for the sale of jewels London and Paris were the only markets. Unless indeed one could get hold of one of the native princes of India.

But all this talk was no use to Alvarez. He was tied to Jalo and the Sea of Sulu. There was no escape for another five years at least, and he could not wait.

One day he was ordered to take the Seville on a scouting expedition to the Borneo coast near Maraop.

He ran her through the Sibutu passage and piled her on a charted reef near the entrance to Darvel Bay.

The boat he escaped in ran to Tarakan. Here he and his men turned pirates—they were pirates anyway—licensed up to this, unlicensed now.

This piracy business was not his intention. His intention was to get to Europe with the pearl and the small amount of money he had taken with him from Jalo; but he was more or less in the hands of his men, these ruffians seizing a big prahu and, killing the owners, were like djinns he had evoked, and he had to go with them and be parcel of their doings—and indeed he was a bit of a djinn himself.

Powerfully armed for those days and waters—they had taken rifles and ammunition before leaving the Seville—they were a match for anything they were likely to meet. But the business was frankly rotten. The small vessels they met in with could only supply them with provisions or tobacco. Once they got a bag of dollars and once some tins of Canton opium. There was nothing in it but the gamble and the satisfaction of the plunder instinct, and all the time Alvarez, though steadily degrading, kept tight to his pearl and his dreams of the West.

He was the only one of the lot who knew anything of navigation, and past Laut he began to edge them west into the Java Sea.

They had kicked off their clothes with their civilisation; naked and brown, wearing loin-cloths and with long hair, more terrible than the men of Sulu, they were an affront to the spirit of tho White Man, and Alvarez was not the least terrible; the pearl that had led him to all this he had secreted in his long hair following the hint given him by Nakardike, and the money he had brought with him from Jalo he had hidden beneath a plank below against the time when he might be able to use it.

One day off Banka they sighted a small brig coming east, and the brig, sighting the prahu, altered her course; they chased, reckoning on the small size of the prey and its timidity,

When the two vessels were within a mile of one another the wind failed and fell to a dead calm, and the prahu, putting out her sweeps, crawled like a venomous brown beetle across the glassy swell towards its victim.

The brig was the Itang, Captain Schmerder, Dutch-owned and making to Batavia from Calcutta with a cargo of cotton goods. The prahu came right alongside of her and Alvarez and his ruffians boarded her. They had killed the Captain and half the crew and driven the remainder below, closing the hatch on them, when——

Illustration: "Once the door of the safe was flung open and a madly laughing woman seized the documents and flung them about on the floor, and then with one of them struck a bearded man on the face, who, in a rage, struck at her and missed."

IV.

Round the shoulder of far-off Gasper Island came the Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft, the new Dutch gunboat on the Batavia station, firing up for all she was worth and with her crew rushing to stations.

It is funny to think that all these vigorous happenings had been, so to speak, lying perdu in a quiet old oyster of the Sulu Sea to be fished up and set free by Nakardike and Alvarez; yet so it was, and with the pearl which was the core of them in his hair and fighting to the bitter end, he was killed with all his men on May 16, 1882, in the last battle with pirates that took place in the Java seas.

V.

Now what happened to the pearl?

Who discovered it in his hair and managed to secrete it and bring it to Amsterdam and sell it for eight hundred pounds—a wretched price—to Christiaan Huygens, the jeweller of the Heeren Graght? I am not going to say. To be honest, I don't know.

It is enough that Huygens sold it for twice the amount to Knepeller of the Rue de la Paix in Paris, who sold it to Prince Muroff, who gave it at a luncheon at the Café de Paris to Margaret Steil, who, wishing to emulate Cleopatra, called for a glass of vinegar to dissolve it in. Learning its value from the Prince, she put it in her pocket instead.

It was in a little red morocco case and undrilled as yet, and she took it home and forgot it. That seems to you impossible, which proves that you do not know the mentality of such a woman as Margaret Steil. Stolen by Rosalie, her maid, it passed into the possession of M. Bourgeois at a price which permitted Rosalie to set up a bonnet shop, and if you had passed that shop with a friend and said to him, "Look, that business came out of an oyster that lived in the sea of Sulu," he would not have believed you, nor would he have believed the same statement made concerning the new café which M. Bourgeois opened that same year in the Rue St. Honore.

VI.

In those times, just as all good defunct Americans go to Paris, all good jewels went at last to Russia—or nearly all.

It was a question of price.

Before it came to Russia the pearl had been badly drilled in Paris, a thousandth part of an inch out of the true, so it wouldn't hang properly if strung on a necklace, it had to be worn by itself on a thin chain. When Princess Anakoff opened the little box on her birthday she cried, "Oh, what a size!" Then when she heard of the drilling and that it could not be made the foundation of a new necklace she pouted, made a scene, and the Prince, who was a Minister of State, flew into "one of his tempers," tried to throw the thing out of the window, broke a vase and went off to attend to his official duties in a condition of mind that left its small but ineradicable mark on the future history of Russia.

The pearl was locked away with other discarded jewels. It had been the innocent cause of a lot of dark work; it had killed Fleming, and Alvarez and his men, incited the spirit of thievery in the hearts of more than a few, and now it was out of harm's way or out of men's way, which amounts to the same thing. Out of the way and securely locked up in a safe in the company of some musty old documents, the title deeds of houses in Paris and Vienna, and some miniatures of the early Anakoffs done by Poushkin.

Also there were a watch by Lepine, a few jade ornaments, and a huge turquoise that had come across the Urals in a Tartar's cap in the time of Attila.

Wonderful stories that turquoise could have told had it possessed memory and a tongue. Possessing neither it was dumb—as was the pearl.

Years passed.

Once the door of the safe was flung open and a madly-laughing woman seized the documents and flung them about on the floor, and then with one of them struck a bearded man on the face, who, in a rage, struck at her and missed, whilst another man, pale and thin and dressed in black and seemingly moved by sudden fury, drew an ivory-handled revolver from his breast pocket and shot the bearded man so that he fell face down on the floor, flinging up his arms as he fell.

Then the documents were shot back into the safe and the smoking revolver with them, and the door was shut and the pearl and its companions found themselves in darkness and silence again after this momentary glimpse of the strange world that surrounded them.

For a long time nothing happened—how long, who knows?—years, during which the documents were evidently uncalled for, like the jewels, and then, one night, the doors of the safe flew open to the beating of drums and cries and shrieks and flare of torches from the street on which the room opened, and a white-haired woman was gathering everything in a pillow-slip, documents, pearl, jade ornaments and all.

VII.

Next thing, after many weeks, a blaze of light and the pearl was in the hand of Ben Oued, the jeweller of Constantinople.

Then in a few weeks it was in London in the office of Romanes, the dealer, and a thick-nosed elderly man with a flower in his coat was saying:

"I should like to buy something for my wife, something of character. Diamonds? No, she has all she wants—ah, let us look at that pearl—badly pierced, worth very little!"

"Pearls are jumping every day, Mr. Gunderman," said Romanes, filling a glass with water and putting the pearl in the water, where it instantly and almost completely vanished from sight, thus proving its worth. Then he weighed it in a little scales, then he put it back on its chain.

"How much?" asked Gunderman.

 

Two hours later the new purchaser came back to the Universal Hotel where he was staying. Mrs. Gunderman was having afternoon tea at a little table in the dance-room. She was stout and florid, and when he gave her his present and she opened the box and saw the great pearl on its little chain she thought from its size that it was false, also it was on a twopenny-halfpenny-looking little chain.

"It's platinum," said he, referring to the chain, then he told her the price he had paid and she lost her temper. She had set her mind lately on emeralds. She had said nothing on the matter to him, but subconsciously and half-consciously she had been turning towards emeralds, and now this thing which did not appeal to her at all—and at such a price!

He told her that pearls were increasing in value, that they were jumping every day.

But the activity of pearls did not interest her. She said not a word about emeralds, but she frankly told him he had been "done." She had to say something nasty, and unconsciously she said the thing that would hurt the most, reflecting as it did on his business capacity.

The accusation of doing a man (within the limits of the law) would have been something of a compliment, but to accuse him of being done—well!

Flying into a temper he left her and sought solace in the American bar.

Then, when they came down to dinner at half-past seven, he found she was wearing the pearl as a sort of make-up to him. He had recovered his temper, and as he sat opposite to her during the meal his eyes travelled about the room.

"You don't know how well that pearl looks, Sarah," said he. "It's a new idea wearing one strung like that. Look at all those women and their pearl necklaces and not one genuine, I bet; you see, they make them now so good you can't tell the difference. But that thing tells itself for genuine at once, because no one would wear an imitation alone like that."

"I suppose so," said she, without disclosing the fact that she had quite made up her mind to get him to sell the thing and purchase the emeralds she now acutely longed for.

"I must get it insured to-morrow," he went on. "It will go in with the rest of your things at Lloyd's." He took a gold cigarette-case from his pocket and gave her a cigarette, then he lit up and a little later they stepped into their limousine and were driven a hundred yards away to the Empress Theatre.

Here they forgot everything for a couple of hours, returning to the Universal and their suite, where Gunderman was just in the act of pouring himself out a whisky and soda when his eyes became fixed on his wife.

"Where's the pearl?" he asked.

It was gone.

The platinum chain was there, but the pearl was gone.

Everything was there, even the little platinum wire that had pierced the thing. The wire had broken, that was all.

Like demented creatures they ran about the room searching the carpet, under the chairs, everywhere. He examined her dress, shaking out the folds ... nothing!

Bidding her stay where she was, lest by some chance it might be stuck somewhere in her clothes, he came out in the corridor hunting along to the lift, rang up the lift, searched its floor and came down in it; burst out of it like a bomb-shell, calling to the attendants to help in the search.

"A pearl, a big round pearl. I gave a large sum for it to-day. It's gone. One hundred pounds to whoever finds it!"

But it was not to be found.

Out in the Court of the Universal you might have seen men who seemed hunting for mushrooms by lamplight—a quest that would have been just as fruitful. It was gone. And it was not insured.

VIII.

Patrick Sweeny, aged thirteen and a bit, yet not looking it, being stunted by environment and heredity, was coming to the end of a perfect day.

He had played truant from school, earned sixpence by taking a message for a shady-looking man to a shady public-house, which message had caused two other shady-looking gentlemen to arise and go forth in a hurry only to fall into the arms of the police; fished for sharks with a bent pin—till chivied away by the police from the landing-stage near Cleopatra's Needle; seen a corpse being brought ashore at Westminster Bridge; received, after an hour's vigil outside a tobacco shop close to Charing Cross, two cigarette cards, one telling the history of the Gloire de Dijon rose and the other the history of the Discobolus, both illustrated; stuffed himself with gum-drops and two saveloys and seen a dog run over.

That was all mixed and good and brought him to lighting-up time and the news of the day exhibited by a newspaper sky-sign. Here he learned that Trojan had won at Kempton Park and that Mussolini had sent a message to the League of Nations and that Lloyd George was suffering from a chill at Churt.

Divided between Fleet Street and the West, he chose the latter, and was rewarded by a taxi-cab accident at Piccadilly Circus.

Theatre turning-out time found him now in the Strand, and coming along by the Empress Theatre, the eyes that took in everything in heaven and earth and on the pavement saw a big white bead which was promptly pouched, also a cigarette end that lay a little farther on, which he stuck in his mouth and lit with a mouldy old match found after much searching.

Then came the thought of Home, and Cassidy's Rents.

IX.

Cassidy's Rents were not closed for the night, in fact, when he arrived, Billy Melhan, a person of his own age, was just arriving home from the Opera—at least from in front of the opera-house in Covent Garden, where he had had no luck, and Pat's mother had only just gone to bed in the room which his father, his mother, himself and little Noreen called their home.

The door was on the latch—they are all honest people there anyhow, there's nothing to steal—and the elders in bed were asleep, and snoring like two people chloroformed and taking the anæsthetic badly. But Noreen, eleven years old, in the rag-bed on the floor near the window, was not asleep.

A wee white face showed in the moonlight. She was half sitting up on her elbow. She had been waiting for Pat. He generally brought her something, and as he took off his old boots before getting into bed beside her, fully dressed as he was, the whisper came in the moonlight, "What 'a' ye got me?" followed by the answer, "Cards—and them"—he put the dirty paper bag holding three last gum-drops in her hand. Then he remembered the bead and handed it to her.

It made her forget the gum-drops.

It looked beautiful in the moonlight; it was like a little vague lamp, and it held the sick child, for she was very sick, so that she forgot to ask for the cards, and he forgot them too, for he was in bed beside her now snuggling down under the old quilt, and almost at once he was sleeping a sleep that many a rich man would have bought at a pound a minute.

Not only did the bead look like nothing else, but it felt like nothing else, so smooth and friendly and warm. She noticed the little hole in it and guessed it was meant to put on a string; but she did not want it on a string, she only wanted to hold this lovely bead and look at it and turn it about and feel it.

Then the fear came to her that Pat would want it back. Pat was that sort, though good-hearted enough; he had taken back several things he had given her.

She fell asleep with it in her hand, and it was there when she awoke in the morning, her father gone to work, her mother scolding Pat, who was pulling on his boots, and the sun shining through the dirty window.

It looked even more beautiful when she had a peep at it in the daylight when her mother's back was turned, and days later when Mrs. Sweeny asked her, "What are you hidin' under the pillow, Noreen?" the answer came, "Nothin', mummy; it's only an old bead Pat give me, but don't tell him or he'll be wantin' it back." And I doubt if Mrs. Sweeny would have taken it from her had she thought it of value, for Noreen was "going out," and when some days later she was gone, far, let us hope, from Cassidy's Rents, her grubby little hand was holding something tight—her last plaything, which nobody tried to take from her—and rightly, had they only known, for she was the only person who had loved the thing for its beauty and for itself.

Yet all the same, true to the history of gems, it was tragic—this wealth in the hand of one who had died from tabes mesenterica—which is one of the many Latin names doctors give to Poverty.

Copyright, 1927, by H. de Vere Stacpoole, in the United States of America.