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Pieces of Eight, a novel by Richard Le Gallienne |
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Book 2 - Chapter 2 |
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_ BOOK II CHAPTER II In Which I Learn Something.
In this way, I made the acquaintance of several old salts, both white and black, one or two of whom time and their neighbours had invested with a legendary savour of the old "wrecking days," which, if rumour speaks true, are not entirely vanished from the remoter corners of the islands. But either their romantic haloes were entirely due to imaginative gossip, or they themselves were too shrewd to be drawn, for I got nothing out of them to my purpose. They seemed to be more interested in talking religion than the sea, and as navigators of Biblical deep seas little visited except by professional theologians they were remarkable. Generally speaking, indeed, piety would seem to have taken the place of piracy among the sea-going population of Nassau; a fact in which, no doubt, right-thinking folk will rejoice, but which I, I am ashamed to say, found disappointing. Those who would master the art of talking to the Nassau negro should first brush up on their Bibles; for a pious salutation might almost be said to be Nassau etiquette for opening a conversation. Of course, this applies mainly to negroes or those "conchs" in whom negro blood predominates. The average white man in Nassau must not be considered as implicated in this statement, for he seems to take his religion much as the average white man takes it in any other part of the world. One afternoon, in the course of these rather fruitless if interesting investigations among the picturesque shipyards of Bay Street, I had wandered farther along that historic water front than is customary with sight-seeing pedestrians; had left behind the white palm-shaded houses, the bazaars of the sellers of tortoise-shell, the negro grog-shops and cabins, and had come to where the road begins to be left alone with the sea, except for a few country houses here and there among the surrounding scrub--when my eye was caught by a little store that seemed to have strayed away from the others--a small timber erection painted in blue and white with a sort of sea-wildness and loneliness about it, and with large naive lettering across its lintel announcing itself as an "Emporium" (I think that was the word) "of Marine Curiosities." A bladder-shaped fish, set thick with spines like a hedgehog, swung in the breeze over the doorway, and the windows on each side of the doorway displayed, without any attempt at arrangement, all sorts of motley treasures of the sea: purple sea-fans; coral in every fairy shape, white as sea-foam; conches patterned like some tessellated pavement of old Rome; monster star-fish, sharks' teeth, pink pearls, and shells of every imaginable convolution and iridescence, and many a weird and lovely thing which I had not the knowledge to name; objects, indeed, familiar enough in Nassau, but here amassed and presented with this attractive difference--that they had not been absurdly polished out of recognition, or tortured into horrible "artistic" shapes of brooch, or earring, or paper-knife, or ash-tray, but had been left with all their simple sea-magic upon them--as they might have been heaped up by the sea itself in some moonlit grotto, paved with white sand. I pushed open the door. There was no one there. The little store was evidently left to take care of itself. Inside, it was like an old curiosity shop of the sea, every available inch of space, rough tables and walls, littered and hung with the queer and lovely bric-a-brac of the sea. Presently a tiny girl came in as it seemed from nowhere, and said she would fetch her father. In a moment or two he came, a tall weathered Englishman of the sailor type, brown and lean, with lonely blue eyes. "You don't seem afraid of thieves," I remarked. "It ain't a jewelry store," he said, with the curious soft sing-song intonation of the Nassau "conch." "That's just what I was thinking it was," I said. "I know what you mean," he replied, his lonely face lighting up as faces do at unexpected understanding in a stranger. "Of course, there are some that feel that way, but they're few and far between." "Not enough to make a fortune out of?" "O! I do pretty well," he said; "I mustn't complain. Money's not everything, you see, in a business like this. There's going after the things, you know. One's got to count that in too." I looked at him in some surprise. I had met something even rarer than the things he traded in. I had met a merchant of dreams, to whom the mere handling of his merchandise seemed sufficient profit: "There's going after the things, you know. One's got to count that in too." Naturally we were neck-deep in talk in a moment. I wanted to hear all he cared to tell me about "going after the things"--such "things"!--and he was nothing loth, as he took up one strange or beautiful object after another, his face aglow, and he quite evidently without a thought of doing business, and told me all about them--how and where he got them, and so forth. "But," he said presently, encouraged by my unfeigned interest, "I should like to show you a few rarer things I have in the house, and which I wouldn't sell, or even show to every one. If you'd honour me by taking a cup of tea, we might look them over." So we left the little store, with its door unlocked as I had found it, and a few steps brought us to a little house I had not before noticed, with a neat garden in front of it, all the garden beds symmetrically bordered with conch-shells. Shells were evidently the simple-hearted fellow's mania, his revelation of the beauty of the world. Here in a neat parlour, also much decorated with shells, tea was served to us by the little girl I had first seen and an elder sister, who, I gathered, made all the lonely dreamer's family. Then, shyly pressing on me a cigar, he turned to show me the promised treasures. He also told me more of his manner of finding them, and of the long trips which he had to take in seeking them, to out-of-the-way cays and in dangerous waters. All this I really believe the reader would find as attractive as I did; still, as I am under an implied contract to tell him a story, I am not going to palm off on him merely descriptive or informative matter, except in so far as such matter is necessary, and I have only introduced him to my dreamer in "marine curiosities" for a very pertinent reason, which will immediately appear. He was showing me the last and rarest of his specimens. He had kept, he said, the best to the last. To me, as a layman, it was not nearly so attractive as other things he had shown me--little more to my eye than a rather commonplace though pretty shell; but he explained--and he gave me its learned name, which I confess has escaped me, owing, doubtless, to what he was next to say--that it was found, or had so far been found, only in one spot in the islands, a lovely, seldom-visited cay several miles to the north-east of Andros Island. "What is it called?" I asked, for it was part of our plan for Charlie to do a little duck-shooting on Andros, before we tackled the business of Tobias and the treasure. "It's called ---- Cay nowadays," he answered, "but it used to be called Short Shrift Island." "Short Shrift Island!" I cried, in spite of myself, immediately annoyed at my lack of presence of mind. "Certainly," he rejoined, looking a little surprised, but evidently without suspicion. He was too simple, and too taken up with his shell. "It is such an odd name," I said, trying to recover myself. "Yes! those old pirate chaps certainly did think up some of the rummiest names." "One of the pirate haunts, was it?" I queried with assumed indifference. "Supposed to be. But one hears that of every other cay in the Bahamas. I take no stock in such yarns. My shells are all the treasure I expect to find." "What did you call that shell?" I asked. He told me the name again, but again I forgot it immediately. Of course I had asked it only for the sake of learning more precisely about Short Shrift Island. He told me innocently enough just where it lay. "Are you going after it?" he laughed. "After what?" I enquired in alarm. "The ----"; (again he mentioned the name of the shell.) "O! well," I replied, "I am going on a duck-shooting trip to Andros before long, and I thought I might drop around to your cay and pick a few of them up for you." "It would be mighty kind of you, but they're not easy to find. I'll tell you just exactly--" He went off, dear fellow, into the minutest description of the habitats of ----, while all the time I was eager to rush off to Charlie Webster and John Saunders, and shout into their ears--as, later, I did, at the first possible moment, that evening: "I've found our missing cay! What's the matter with your old maps, John? Short Shrift Island is ----; (I mentioned the name of a cay, which, as in the case of "Dead Men's Shoes," I am unable to divulge.) "Maybe!" said Charlie, "maybe! We can try it. But," he added, "did you find out anything about Tobias?" _ |
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