The pearly beach. Ing from Aden, sailing toward India

ing from Aden, sailing toward India. And it was a long, long time before we came to Carrappas beach, or whatever it was. And day after day the sky was the same blistering blue, till sunset flamed in our faces, gazing back over the stern, and there came every evening behind us the same outburst of stars, and all the way the half-wit sang the same song; only the sea altered. And at last we got there, as Bill had promised we would, a tiny bay with a white beach shining, shut off by rocks from the rest of the coast, and from the inner land by a cliff, a low cliff steep behind it. The little bay was no more than fifty yards long. We cast anchor then, and I swam ashore with Bill and the Portugee, and the third hand sat on the deck singing his song. All that the drunken man had said was more than true. I hardly like to call him drunken, when I think what he did for me, all out of pure kindness. But you know what I mean; he had had a few drinks and they had made him quick to notice things and quick to feel for other people, and perfectly truth­ful; you know the old proverb⁹. Probably, too, the drinks had brightened his memory, even to tiny details like latitude and longitude. I shall never forget the peculiar crunch as we walked. The pearls were mostly the size of good large peas, and seemed to go down to about six or eight inches on to a hard gray sand; but to that depth of six or eight inches along that fifty yards, and from the sea to the cliff, the beach was entirely composed of them. From sea to cliff was about fifteen yards, so that if you multiply that by fifty yards for the length, and by half a foot for the depth, you will see how much that was of solid pearls. I haven't done the sum myself. They didn't go out under the sea. It was nothing but dead oyster shells there. A funny little current scooped around that bay. We could see it doing it still, though the shells were all empty now; but once it must have idly gathered those pearls, and idly flung them on to the little beach, and roamed away into the Indian Ocean beyond the gaze of man. Well, of course there was nothing to do but to fill our pockets, and we set about doing that¹⁰, and it was a very curious thing — you may hardly believe me — but it was all I could do to get Bill to fill one pocket. Of course we had to swim back to the ship, which makes a reasonable explanation, but it wasn't Bill's reason at all. It was simply a fear he had of growing too rich. 'What's it worth? ' he kept saying, of his one pocketful; 'Over two hundred thousand, ' I said at a guess. 'Can't see the difference between two hundred thousand and four hundred thousand, ' Bill would say.

" 'There's a lot of difference, ' I'd tell him.

" 'Yes, when I've spent the two hundred thousand, ' Bill would go on.

THE PEARLY BEACH

'" Well, there you are, ¹¹' I'd say.

" 'And when will that be? ' Bill would answer.

" I saw his point.

" And another thing he was very keen on, Bill seemed to have read of men who had come by big fortunes; won lotteries and one thing and another; and according to Bill they went all to pieces quickly, ¹² and Bill was frightened. It was all I could do to get him to fill the other pocket. The Portugee was quietly filling his, but with an uneasy ear taking in all Bill's warnings. You know there was something a bit frightening about all that wealth. There was enough of it to have financed a war, or to have ruined a good-sized country in almost any other way. I didn't stay more than a few minutes after my pockets were full, to sit on the beach and let the pearls run through my fingers. Then we swam back to the ship. I said to Bill, 'What about one more load of pearls? ' For it seemed a pity not to. And Bill said only, 'Up anchor.' And the Portugee said, T expect that's best.' And the half-wit stopped his song and got up the anchor, and we turned homeward toward Aden.

" In little more than a fortnight we came to that cindery harbor, safe with our pearls. And there we sold a few in a quiet way, without waking suspicion, and paid the half-wit a thousand pounds for his wages, and went on to Port Said¹³. The three of us tookcabins on a large ship bound for London in order to sell our pearls, and late one evening we came into Port Said and were to sail on next morning. By the time we'd paid off the half-wit and paid for our cabins we hadn't much ready money left, but Bill said he knew how to get some. Bill had gone pretty slow on drinks¹⁴ since he got the pearls, but gambling was a thing he would never give up. 'We can afford it now, ' he used to say, which is of course what you never can do. So we went ashore at Port Said, and took our pearls with us, as we'd none of us trust all that out of our sight. And we came to a house Bill knew. Now, wasn't it a curious thing that Bill, who wouldn't trouble to put another two hundred thousand pounds in his pocket, was keen as mustard to make a hundred pounds or so in a Port Said gambling den? And it wasn't that he'd altered his mind about his pocketfuls of pearls being enough: he was never going back to that bay. Again and again I suggested it, but there was some sort of terror about that little white beach of pearls that seemed to have got hold of him.

" I wasn't keen on the gambling myself, but it seemed only friendly to keep an eye on the other two. So I slipped a revolver into my pocket and came with them. And I was probably drawn too by that feeling one used to

THE PEARLY BEACH

have that, if the name of Port Said shouid turn up in a conversation, one has seen alt that there is to see there. One liked to be able to say, if any particular den was mentioned, 'Oh yes, I dropped fifty pounds there.'

" I dropped more than that.

" Anyway we came to the house; and Bill and I and the Portugee went in; and soon we were playing and winning. The stakes aren't high downstairs, and you usually win there. In fact that downstairs room reminded me of a trail of grain over grass leading up to a trap. Upstairs the stakes were much higher, and upstairs we asked to go. A Greek ran the show downstairs, the sort of Greek you might meet at night in the shadier parts of Port Said and very often did. The man upstairs was a Greek too, but not the kind that you would count on meeting¹⁵; he seemed worse than I'd been warned against. As we walked in he looked at us, each in turn, and it was when he looked at you that his eyes seemed to light up, and the blood seemed to pale in his face, and the man's power and energy went to those eyes.

'" High stakes, ' he said.

" I nodded my head, and Bill and the Portugee began to babble some­thing.

" 'Got the stuff¹⁶? snapped the Greek.

" The man's style irritated me. I suppose I lost my temper. Certainly Bill and the Portugee looked pretty angry at the way he was speaking to us. 1 never answered a word to him. I merely slipped a hand into my pocket and brought out a handful of pearls, all gleaming in the ugly light of the room. And the Greek looked at them with his lips slowly widening, for a long while before he spoke. And then he said, 'Pearls, ' in quite a funny small voice. And I was just going to say Yes. It was like a page in a book, like a page with a picture of a man in a dingy room with pearls in his hand, just going to speak; you turn the page and come on something quite different, nothing to do with pearls, no room, and nobody speaking. Just silence and open air. And then the voice of a man coming up out of depths of silence, saying the same thing over again, but with words that didn't as yet bring any meaning. A long time passed like that. Then the words again and this time they seemed to mean something, if only one steadied oneself and tried to think.

'" He fainted in the street! ' a man was saying.

" 1 was in a street right enough: I could see that as soon as I looked up-And a man I had never seen before was saying that to a policeman. Fainted indeed¹⁷! There I was with a lump on my forehead the size of two eggs, not to mention a taste in my mouth that I always get after chloroform."