The Sorcerer's Stone

by Beatrice Grimshaw

“Now or never!” I thought. And, as the blade went home, I leaped back, and stiffened myself for the shock of the great valves slamming down on the handle.

It did not come.

I tried to draw the ax out and could not. The tridacna, in its dying agony, had gripped its muscles round the blade. But the closing-muscle was severed: the valves could not shut. Or at least I thought so. I drew my diver’s knife and took the risk of putting my hand inside the shells, slashing away at the huge mass of meat inside. By degrees the mechanical grip on the ax-blade lessened and I pulled it out.

Now it was possible to empty the clam, and I began tearing the meat away in lumps as big as butchers’ joints, and flinging it down on the coral. The whiteness of the inner shell, pure as polished marble, began to shine through. I had thrown away the greater part of the contents when I came at last on what I sought.

There it was, the little brown parcel, lying loose beside the greedy hand that had clutched at it and at death together. It seemed to me, as I took the Sorcerer’s Stone and put it in the bag round my neck, as if a wave of cold passed through me that had nothing to do with the benumbing water in which I stood. The evil thing!—the thing that had caused death before, that would assuredly cause it again. There, at the bottom of the sea, it would have been safe: the trail of blood that marks the path of every great diamond would have been washed away in the safe, the secret waves, to begin never more again. And I was taking it back.

I declare I stood with the stone in my hand and thought—I do not know what I thought: something mad, if madness it be to think as other men do not. Whether I should have gone beyond thinking or not I can not say. I did not get the chance. For, just as I had taken the diamond out of my bag, something happened that made me drop it back again in frantic haste and tug at my signal-cord as hard as I could. Not hurriedly, but quietly, softly, and almost gracefully, a large, long, deep-blue form came gliding through the water, and, with a sweep of its scythe-shaped tail, made straight for me.

I believe now that it was going simply for the remains of the tridacna and was not troubling about me at all: I could not have smelt so attractive, cased up in metal and rubber, as did the raw scattered flesh. But nobody waits to try conclusions with a shark in its own element. I went up through the water as fast as the captain of the Dawn could drag me, alarmed, as he was, at my long stay, and I felt that shark at my toes every inch of the seventy feet.

Nothing touched me, however. The hull of the Dawn appeared above my head—a welcome sight, indeed; the ladder flashed before my eyes, and then two pairs of hands were pulling me over the bulwarks and screwing away at the glasses on my helmet. I am not of the fainting kind, but I will admit I had to sit down while they were doing it, and was not very clear as to my whereabouts for a moment or two after.

Then, when they had got the helmet off, and my lungs were full of the good, fresh air—the glorious air of free heaven itself—I saw that the Marquis was kneeling on the deck beside me to get his head on a level with mine, and gazing so anxiously into my face that I could not help bursting out into laughter.

“Grace to God, you are well!” said the Marquis, his face lighting up like sunshine after rain. “You signaled ‘all right’ when we pulled, but, my friend, we was near bringing you up at force! Did we not see that the two divers of the Gertrude had come up sick?”