CHAPTER I.
A SOUTH SEA PARASITE.
From where Yakoff was standing in the blaze of the sun the beach ran away like a white road—miles and miles and miles away, to be lost in the blue and haze of distance. To the left of the beach lay the calm waters of the lagoon, to the right the rough coral beaten by the outer sea.
Nowhere in the world except in the low islands could you find a beach like that—just a ring of coral—sand and rock inclosing a lake so big that in the great storms from the southwest it could build six-foot waves.
If Yakoff had started to follow the road before him, leaving the houses of the native village at whose entrance he stood, he would have passed the long line of coconut trees immediately to the west, the extraordinary little gardens where vegetables were grown, the fowl pens belonging to old Lipi, the net-maker, and the deep-cut water tanks made to receive the rains.
He would have passed canoe shelters and dozens of beached canoes, some old and broken and waiting to be destroyed or mended, some new and ready to take the sea, for here was the navy yard of Araffura and the docking place of the pearling fleet.
He would have passed the second coconut grove and then, leaving men and trees behind him, he would have gone on with the sea to the right, with the lagoon to the left through a world where there was nothing but sun blaze and blueness, the fume and thunder of the breakers and the crying of the gulls.
He would have gone on and on through the same changeless, singing, blinding vacancy, the gulls crying to him to get away and the waves calling to him, “There is nothing here,” and noon would have turned to afternoon and afternoon to night, and under Canopus and the Cross he would have gone on and on to the break of day and his journey far from finished. For from the break, the reef of Araffura Lagoon is forty miles round.
But Yakoff was fat and the most unlikely person in the world to start on a journey without an object. Fat and fifty years of age and with a face that did not inspire confidence even when half hidden by his sun helmet.
Yet it was a face with a smile that rarely came off, even when the mind of Yakoff was moving in the direction of wrath or revolving in the orbits of cunning.
A man to deal with cautiously in business, or, better, not at all. Born at Archangel, educated by an uncle in a large way of trade, Yakoff Abrahamovitch, always known as Yakoff, went to the East as his uncle's correspondent in Shanghai. Here he did a deal for himself that damaged his uncle, and the result was separation. He prospered for a while in Shanghai and then somehow he had to leave. This was the beginning of a long career which carried him in zigzags from Borneo to New York and New York to Samarkand, and during which he had met and dealt with many men and picked up an American accent.
During the last few years he had taken to the Pacific, and among other things had made a specialty of pearls.
He was one of the buyers who come from all quarters of the world when the Paumotan pearling season begins.
The Paumotas belong to the French, and French law gives the right of pearling to the natives and to no one else. You must have been born at Araffura if you want to fish there and take the pearls—you may be a pure Kanaka if there is such a thing left to-day, or a half-caste or quarter-caste or a pure white; it doesn't matter; right of birth alone gives you the right to take shell and pearls.
But French law does not stop white men like Yakoff or Chinese like Ah Sin from coming to the pearling ground and robbing the fishers—that is to say, trading with them.
Yakoff, who had landed a month ago, before the opening of the season, had brought ashore boxes and boxes of “trade,” that is to say, goods to swap for pearls or shell—and such trade! it would have made an old Pacific trader's eyes open could he have seen the contents of Yakoff's boxes. Cigarettes, and the very best cigarettes at that, striped silk pajamas, socks and what not, white flannels, tennis shoes, shirts, photographic apparatus, silver-plated safety razors, eau de Cologne.
And the contents of the old Pacific schooners' trade room in the old days, what were they? Tin looking-glasses, bolts of gaudily printed cotton, dud Barlow knives and clay tobacco pipes, not to mention twist.
All the same, in a compartment of one of Yakoff's boxes there were some articles akin to these—mouth organs, a five-dollar phonograph, chewing gum and so forth, for Yakoff had learned from experience that the native mind refuses sometimes the most expensive lure and jumps to the cheapest, though it is never the cheapest for the native.
In this way, for a concertina with asthma but silvered and varnished to shine with the best, he had got a four-hundred-pound golden pearl from Tipu, the son of Lipi. Tipu had refused a twenty-dollar kodak, also a suit of flannels with a dollar watch thrown in, but the concertina got him.
Yakoff, standing now by the last of the native houses that lined the beach, saw Tipu going toward a beached canoe that lay near by. He pushed off and then, coming along also to take to his canoe, Yakoff saw Fernand Diaz.