Money was the thing.
She did not care for money in itself, and none of the things it could bring really interested her, except pretty clothes.
But money was importance, money was power; money was the freedom to do exactly what you wanted, and make other people do it too. She did not think it out in words, like a European. Pictures passed before her mind, more vivid by far than the glittering water and flashing sea-gull wings in front of her bodily eyes. She saw captains of great ships, giving orders like kings, and obeyed by the promptest and smartest of slaves. She saw owners of big stores entertaining half the island on their verandahs, paid court to by wandering beach-combers, going out to ships in beautiful boats manned by their own uniformed crews, who bent their backs double at a word. She saw "Tusitala," of Samoa, the great English story-teller, living in his splendid house outside Apia, surrounded by a humble clan of native followers wearing wonderful lava-lavas of a foreign stuff they called "tatani" (tartan)—Tusitala, who was as great a chief as Mataafa himself, and had spoken to her, Vaiti, as one worthy of all honour.... Her pictures were almost all of the islands, for the islands were in her blood; but something, too, she saw of Auckland—the merchant M'Coy, old and so ugly, and of the commonest birth, yet reverenced like the greatest of chiefs, because he had money....
The afternoon rays grew blinding hot on the water as the sun sank down. The sea-gulls dipped and screamed. Steamers glided away from the wharves with long hooting cries that somehow seemed to embody all the melancholy of the homeless sea. Steam cranes chattered ceaselessly above the yawning holds of discharging ships. Behind, the tramcars hummed in the street, and people hurried up and down.
And at last the western sky began to burn with sultry red, and Vaiti went home.
Something had taken root in her mind that afternoon that struck down and shot up, in the days to come, and led her into ways and places wilder even than the adventure of the pearl lagoon. As children string berries on a straw, so upon the stem that grew from that seed were strung the strange events that followed, one by one.
CHAPTER III
THE FLOWER BEHIND THE EAR
As Vaiti, Cassandra-wise, had prophesied about the pearl lagoon, so indeed it fell out.
It takes money to exploit even the smallest discovery of this kind, and the canny M'Coy made the most of the fact. Delgadas Reef was too risky a neighbourhood to be worked by any vessel unprovided with an auxiliary engine, so a cranky little schooner of some forty tons, owning a tiny oil engine that sometimes worked and sometimes did not—more commonly the latter—was chartered; also a couple of boats for diving work, and two sets of diving dresses; and a cheap crew was picked up somewhere, and some poor provisions laid in. Everything was done on the most economical scale possible—yet the Scotchman grumbled and lamented, and declared he would never see his money back. The shares had been fixed at a wickedly low figure for Saxon and there were, furthermore, clauses in the agreement concerning expenses which made that unlucky derelict swear fiercely when he read them after he was sober. It was too late to complain then, however, for he had signed everything he was asked, under the influence of the good whisky to which M'Coy—liberal for once—had freely treated him. Nor did he get any sympathy from Vaiti. She merely laughed when he complained, and told him frankly that he would have done better to stay in his cabin and drink there, if he liked, leaving her to finish what she had begun.