course.
“I’ll wager a five-franc piece the little Nuhiva beats us in.”
“Sure,” Captain Warfield agreed. “She’s overpowered. We’re like a liner
alongside of her, and we’ve only got forty horsepower. She’s got ten horse,
and she’s a little skimming dish. She could skate across the froth of hell,
but just the same she can’t buck this current. It’s running ten knots right
now.”
And at the rate of ten knots, buffeted and jerkily rolled, the Malahini went
out to sea with the tide.
“She’ll slacken in half an hour—then we’ll make headway,” Captain
Warfield said, with an irritation explained by his next words. “He has no
right to call it Parlay. It’s down on the admiralty charts, and the French
charts, too, as Hikihoho. Bougainville discovered it and named it from the
natives.”
“What’s the name matter?” the supercargo demanded, taking advantage of
speech to pause with arms shoved into the sleeves of the undershirt.
“There it is, right under our nose, and old Parlay is there with the pearls.”
“Who see them pearl?” Hermann queried, looking from one to another.
“It’s well known,” was the supercargo’s reply. He turned to the steersman:
“Tai-Hotauri, what about old Parlay’s pearls?”
The Kanaka, pleased and self-conscious, took and gave a spoke.
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“My brother dive for Parlay three, four month, and he make much talk
about pearl. Hikihoho very good place for pearl.”
“And the pearl-buyers have never got him to part with a pearl,” the captain
broke in.
“And they say he had a hatful for Armande when he sailed for Tahiti,” the
supercargo carried on the tale. “That’s fifteen years ago, and he’s been
adding to it ever since—stored the shell as well. Everybody’s seen that—
hundreds of tons of it. They say the lagoon’s fished clean now. Maybe
that’s why he’s announced the auction.”
“If he really sells, this will be the biggest year’s output of pearls in the
Paumotus,” Grief said.
“I say, now, look here!” Mulhall burst forth, harried by the humid heat as
much as the rest of them. “What’s it all about? Who’s the old beachcomber
anyway? What are all these pearls? Why so secretious about it?”
“Hikihoho belongs to old Parlay,” the supercargo answered. “He’s got a
fortune in pearls, saved up for years and years, and he sent the word out
weeks ago that he’d auction them off to the buyers to-morrow. See those
schooners’ masts sticking up inside the lagoon?”
“Eight, so I see,” said Hermann.
“What are they doing in a dinky atoll like this?” the supercargo went on.
“There isn’t a schooner-load of copra a year in the place. They’ve come for
the auction. That’s why we’re here. That’s why the little Nuhiva’s bumping
along astern there, though what she can buy is beyond me. Narii
Herring—he’s an English Jew half- caste—owns and runs her, and his
only assets are his nerve, his debts, and his whiskey bills. He’s a genius in
such things. He owes so much that there isn’t a merchant in Papeete who
isn’t interested in his welfare. They go out of their way to throw work in
his way. They’ve got to, and a dandy stunt it is for Narii. Now I owe
nobody. What’s the result? If I fell down in a fit on the beach they’d let me
lie there and die. They wouldn’t lose anything. But Narii Herring?—what
wouldn’t they do if he fell in a fit? Their best wouldn’t be too good for
him. They’ve got too much money tied up in him to let him lie. They’d
take him into their homes and hand- nurse him like a brother. Let me tell
you, honesty in paying bills ain’t what it’s cracked up to be.”
“What’s this Narii chap got to do with it?” was the Englishman’s short-
tempered demand. And, turning to Grief, he said, “What’s all this pearl
nonsense? Begin at the beginning.”
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“You’ll have to help me out,” Grief warned the others, as he began. “Old
Parlay is a character. From what I’ve seen of him I believe he’s partly and
mildly insane. Anyway, here’s the story: Parlay’s a full-blooded
Frenchman. He told me once that he came from Paris. His accent is the
true Parisian. He arrived down here in the old days. Went to trading and
all the rest. That’s how he got in on Hikihoho. Came in trading when
trading was the real thing. About a hundred miserable Paumotans lived on
the island. He married the queen—native fashion. When she died,
everything was his. Measles came through, and there weren’t more than a
dozen survivors. He fed them, and worked them, and was king. Now
before the queen died she gave birth to a girl. That’s Armande. When she
was three he sent her to the convent at Papeete. When she was seven or
eight he sent her to France. You begin to glimpse the situation. The best
and most aristocratic convent in France was none too good for the only
daughter of a Paumotan island king and capitalist, and you know the old
country French draw no colour line. She was educated like a princess, and
she accepted herself in much the same way. Also, she thought she was all-
white, and never dreamed of a bar sinister.
“Now comes the tragedy. The old man had always been cranky and
erratic, and he’d played the despot on Hikihoho so long that he’d got the
idea in his head that there was nothing wrong with the king—or the
princess either. When Armande was eighteen he sent for her. He had slews
and slathers of money, as Yankee Bill would say. He’d built the big house
on Hikihoho, and a whacking fine bungalow in Papeete. She was to arrive
on the mail boat from New Zealand, and he sailed in his schooner to meet
her at Papeete. And he might have carried the situation off, despite the
hens and bull-beasts of Papeete, if it hadn’t been for the hurricane. That
was the year, wasn’t it, when Manu-Huhi was swept and eleven hundred
drowned?”
The others nodded, and Captain Warfield said: “I was in the Magpie that
blow, and we went ashore, all hands and the cook, Magpie and all, a
quarter of a mile into the cocoanuts at the head of Taiohae Bay—and it a
supposedly hurricane-proof harbour.”
“Well,” Grief continued, “old Parlay got caught in the same blow, and
arrived in Papeete with his hatful of pearls three weeks too late. He’d had
to jack up his schooner and build half a mile of ways before he could get
her back into the sea.
“And in the meantime there was Armande at Papeete. Nobody called on
her. She did, French fashion, make the initial calls on the Governor and
the port doctor. They saw her, but neither of their hen-wives was at home
to her nor returned the call. She was out of caste, without caste, though she
had never dreamed it, and that was the gentle way they broke the
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131
information to her. There was a gay young lieutenant on the French
cruiser. He lost his heart to her, but not his head. You can imagine the
shock to this young woman, refined, beautiful, raised like an aristocrat,
pampered with the best of old France that money could buy. And you can
guess the end.” He shrugged his shoulders. “There was a Japanese servant
in the bungalow. He saw it. Said she did it with the proper spirit of the
Samurai. Took a stiletto—no thrust, no drive, no wild rush for
annihilation—took the stiletto, placed the point carefully against her heart,
and with both hands, slowly and steadily, pressed home.
“Old Parlay arrived after that with his pearls. There was one single one of
them, they say, worth sixty thousand francs. Peter Gee saw it, and has told
me he offered that much for it. The old man went clean off for a while.
They had him strait-jacketed in the Colonial Club two days&#!51;”
“His wife’s uncle, an old Paumotan, cut him out of the jacket and turned
him loose,” the supercargo corroborated.
“And then old Parlay proceeded to eat things up,” Grief went on. “Pumped
three bullets into the scalawag of a lieutenant—”
“Who lay in sick bay for three months,” Captain Warfield contributed.
“Flung a glass of wine in the Governor’s face; fought a duel with the port
doctor; beat up his native servants; wrecked the hospital; broke two ribs
and the collarbone of a man nurse, and escaped; and went down to his
schooner, a gun in each hand, daring the chief of police and all the
gendarmes to arrest him, and sailed for Hikihoho. And they say he’s never
left the island since.”
The supercargo nodded. “That was fifteen years ago, and he’s never
budged.”
“And added to his pearls,” said the captain. “He’s a blithering old lunatic.