“I knew there’d be flies in the ’intment somewhere,” said Harman, “but this is a bluebottle. We haven’t tobacco enough to work this lagoon a month, and what’s to happen then?”
“No use bothering a month ahead,” replied Davis. “If worst comes to the worst, we’ll just have to do the diving ourselves. Get into your harness and down with you, to see how it works.”
Harman did, and an appalling rush of bubbles followed his descent, the suit was faulty. Tropical weather does not improve diving suits, and Harman was just got up in time.
“Never again,” said he when his window was unscrewed, and he had done cursing Clayton, Clayton’s belongings, his family, his relatives and his ancestors.
“Stick her on the beach; darn divin’ suits, let’s take to the water natural.”
They did, following the practice of the Kanakas, and at the end of the week, when the shells were rotted out, six days’ takings showed three large pearls perfect in every point and worth maybe fifteen hundred dollars, five small pearls varying in value from ten to forty dollars according to Davis’ calculations, several baroques of small and uncertain value and a spoonful of seeds.
“Call it two thousand dollars,” said Davis, when they had put the takings away in some cotton-wool, left by Clayton, and a small soap-box. “Call it two thousand and we’ve had twenty Kanakas diving for a week at two sticks a day, that makes two hundred and eighty sticks at two cents a stick.”
“Well, it’s cheap enough,” said Harman. “Wonder what the unions would say to us and them chaps that’s always spoutin’ about the wages of the workin’ classes—not that I’m against fair wages. I reckon if that guy Clayton had left us enough tobacco, I wouldn’t mind raisin’ the wage bill to eight dollars a week, but we haven’t got it—haven’t got enough to last a month as it’s runnin’ now.”
He spoke the truth. Less than a month left them cleared out, and the Kanakas struck to a man and ceased to dive, spending their time fishing, lazing in the sun and smoking—but their chief amusement was watching the white men at work.
There is no penitentiary equal to a pearl lagoon, once it seizes you, and no galley slaves under the whip ever worked harder than Harman and Bud Davis, stripped to the skin, brown as cobnuts with sun and water, long-haired, dishevelled, diving like otters, and bringing up not more than a hundred pair of shells a day.