They got into the boat, and Floyd sculled her back, Schumer sitting in the stern and conning them clear of the floating wreckage near the camping place. It grieved Schumer's heart to see all that stuff waste and ungetable. He was one of the men who can make use of anything almost to further or maintain his set purpose.
CHAPTER X
THE SCHOONER
They started for the fishing ground next morning immediately after breakfast, and set to work at once. They had bad luck for the first hour, and then, as if popped into their hands by the hand of luck, came a beauty, a perfect white pearl, twice the size of a marrow-fat pea, maybe even a little bigger, worth five thousand dollars if a penny—so Schumer said.
They sat down to congratulate themselves and feel their luck. You cannot feel your luck standing. Schumer lit a pipe and Floyd followed his example. They put a bit of seaweed on a shell and the pearl on the seaweed, and with it in front of them began to speculate and talk. They felt now that time was theirs, and Schumer knew, though Floyd was still to learn, that the flower of success blooms only on the youngest shoots, that the joy of striking it rich lives only in perfection during the first early days of the stroke, that the fever of life and the enchantment of triumph both die down and fade, that the fully grasped is nothing to the half grasped.
To be given a pearl lagoon by luck and to work it as a hog works a wood for truffles would be to act like a hog.
The stuff was all there; this and the success of the first day's work was ample confirmation of the riches lying under that green water, and Schumer expatiated on the matter.
"You wouldn't believe it," said he, "but the value of a single pearl grows in proportion as you can match it with others exactly like it. It takes eighty or a hundred pearls to make a woman's necklace. Eighty or a hundred pearls like that one would each be worth two or three times what each pearl is worth alone. Even twenty pearls exactly alike would be worth much more than if they were different, for they would form the basis for a collection. You would never dream of the work that goes on in the world matching these things. There are men at it all the time in Paris and London and Amsterdam. A perfect necklace of pearls once formed is always held together; it becomes an individual, so to speak, and is known to the trade by a name. The women belonging to the royal families of Europe hold a number of these collections, but there are lots of private ones, and every great collection is known and tabulated. So you see it won't pay us to peddle our stuff out little by little—we must hold all the pearls we get and match them."
"Look here," said Floyd, "one thing we have never settled—our shares in this business. There's Isbel, too; she has done her bit."