Pearl #1

I met her in India, when, during an eccentric course of travel, I visited the land

of palanquins and hookahs. She was a slender, pale, spiritual-looking girl. Her

figure swayed to and fro when she walked, like some delicate plant brushed by a

very gentle wind. Her face betokened a rare susceptibility of nervous

organization. Large, dark-gray eyes, spanned by slender arches of black

eyebrows; irregular and mobile features; a mouth large and singularly

expressive, and conveying vague hints of a sensual nature whenever she smiled.

The paleness of her skin could hardly be called paleness; it was rather a beautiful

transparency of texture, through the whiteness of which one beheld the

underglow of life, as one sees the fires of a lamp hazily revealed through the

white ground-glass shade that envelops it. Her motions were full of a strange and

subtile grace. It positively sent a thrill of an indefinable nature through me to

watch her moving across a room. It was perhaps a pleasurable sensation at

beholding her perform so ordinary an act in so unusual a manner. Every

wanderer in the fields has been struck with delight on beholding a tuft of thistle-

down floating calmly through the still atmosphere of a summer day. She

possessed in the most perfect degree this aerial serenity of motion. With all the

attributes of body, she seemed to move as if disembodied. It was a singular and

paradoxical combination of the real and ideal, and therein I think lay the charm.

Then her voice. It was like no voice that I ever heard before. It was low and

sweet; but how many hundreds of voices have I heard that were as low and just

as sweet! The charm lay in something else. Each word was uttered with a sort of

dovelike “coo,”—pray do not laugh at the image, for I am striving to express

what after all is perhaps inexpressible. However, I mean to say that the harsh

gutturals and hissing dentals of our English tongue were enveloped by her in a

species of vocal plumage, so that they flew from her lips, not like pebbles or

snakes, as they do from mine and yours, but like humming-birds, soft and round,

and imbued with a strange fascination of sound.

We fell in love, married, and Minnie agreed to share my travel for a year, after

which we were to repair to my native place in Maine, and settle down into a

calm, loving country life.

It was during this year that our little daughter Pearl was born. The way in which she came to be named Pearl was this.

We were cruising in the Bay of Condatchy, on the west coast of Ceylon, in a

small vessel which I had hired for a month’s trip, to go where I listed. I had

always a singular desire to make myself acquainted with the details of the pearl

fishery, and I thought this would be a good opportunity; so with my wife and

servants and little nameless children—she was only three months old—on whom,

however, we showered daily a thousand unwritable love-titles, I set sail for the

grounds of a celebrated pearl fishery.

It was a great although an idle pleasure to sit in one of the small coasting-boats

in that cloudless and serene climate, floating on an unruffled sea, and watch the

tawny natives, *****, with the exception of a small strip of cotton cloth wound

around their loins, plunge into the marvellously clear waters, and after having

shot down far beyond sight, as if they had been led instead of flesh and blood,

suddenly break above the surface after what seemed like an age of immersion,

holding in their hands a basket filled with long, uncouthly shaped bivalves, any

of

which might contain a treasure great as that which Cleopatra wasted in her

goblet. The oysters were flung into the boat, a brief breathing-spell was taken,

and then once more the dark-skinned diver darted down like some agile fish, to

recommence his search. For the pearl oyster is by no means to be found in the

prodigal profusion in which his less aristocratic brethren, the mill-ponds and

blue-points and chinkopins, exist. He is rare and exclusive, and does not bestow

himself liberally. He, like all high-born castes, is not prolific.

Sometimes a fearful moment of excitement would overtake us. While two or

three of the pearl-divers were under water, the calm, glassy surface of the sea

would be cleft by what seemed the thin blade of a sharp knife, cutting through

the water with a slow, even, deadly motion. This we knew to be the dorsal fin of

the man-eating shark. Nothing can give an idea of the horrible symbolism of that

back fin. To a person utterly unacquainted with the habits of the monster, the

silent, stealthy, resistless way in which that membranous blade divided the water

would inevitably suggest a cruelty swift, unappeasable, relentless. This may

seem exaggerated to any one who has not seen the spectacle I speak of. Every

A seafaring man will admit its truth. When this ominous apparition became visible,

all on board the fishing-boats were instantly in a state of excitement. The water

was beaten with oars until it foamed. The natives shouted aloud with the most

unearthly yells; missiles of all kinds were flung at this Seeva of the ocean, and A relentless attack was kept up on him until the poor fellows groping below showed their mahogany faces above the surface. We were so fortunate as not to

have been the spectators of any tragedy, but we knew from hearsay that it often

happened that the shark—a fish, by the way, possessed a rare intelligence

quietly bided his time until the moment the diver broke water, when there would

be a lightning-like rush, a flash of the white belly as the brute turned on his side

to snap, a faint cry of agony from the victim, and then the mahogany face would

sink convulsed, never to rise again, while a great crimson clot of blood would

hang suspended in the calm ocean, the red memorial of a sudden and awful

fatality.

One breathless day we were floating in our little boat at the pearl fishery,

watching the diving. “We” means my wife, myself, and our little daughter, who

was nestled in the arms of her “ayah,” or colored nurse. It was one of those

tropical mornings the glory of which is indescribable. The sea was so transparent

that the boat in which we lay, shielded from the sun by awnings, seemed to hang

suspended in air. The tufts of pink and white coral that studded the bed of the

ocean beneath was as distinct as if they were growing at our feet. We seemed to

be gazing upon a beautiful parterre of variegated candytuft. The shores, fringed

with palms and patches of a gigantic species of cactus, which was then in bloom,

were as still and serene as if they had been painted on glass. Indeed, the whole

landscape looked like a beautiful scene beheld through a glorified stereoscope

eminently real as far as detail went, but fixed and motionless as death. Nothing

broke the silence save the occasional plunge of the divers into the water, or the

noise of the large oysters falling into the bottom of the boats. In the distance, on

a small, narrow point of land, a strange crowd of human beings was visible.

Oriental pearl merchants, Fakirs selling amulets, Brahmins in their dirty white

robes, all attracted to the spot by the prospect of gain (as fish collect round a

handful of bait flung into a pond), bargaining, cheating, and strangely mingling

religion and lucre. My wife and I lay back on the cushions that lined the after

part of our little skiff, languidly gazing on the sea and the sky by turns. Suddenly

our attention was aroused by a great shout, which was followed by a volley of

shrill cries from the pearl-fishing boats. On turning in that direction, the greatest

excitement was visible among the different crews. Hands were pointed, white

teeth glittered in the sun, and every dusky form was gesticulating violently. Then

two or three blacks seized some long poles and commenced beating the water

violently. Others flung gourds and calabashes and odd pieces of wood and

stones in the direction of a particular spot that lay between the nearest fishing

boat and ourselves. The only thing visible in this spot was a black, sharp blade, thin as the blade of a pen-knife, that appeared, slowly and evenly cutting through

the still water. No surgical instrument ever glided through human flesh with a

more silent, cruel calm. It needed not the cry of “Shark! shark!” to tell us what it

was. In a moment we had a vivid picture of that unseen monster, with his small,

watchful eyes, and his huge mouth with its double row of fangs, presented to our

mental vision. There were three divers under water at this moment, while

directly above them hung suspended this remorseless incarnation of death. My

wife clasped my hand convulsively, and became deathly pale. I stretched out the

other hand instinctively, and grasped a revolver which lay beside me. I was in

the act of cocking it when a shriek of unutterable agony from the ayah burst on

our ears. I turned my head quick as a flash of lightning, and beheld her, with

empty arms, hanging over the gunwale of the boat, while down in the calm sea I

saw a tiny little face, swathed in white, sinking—sinking—sinking!

What are words to paint such a crisis? What pen, however vigorous, could

depict the pallid, convulsed face of my wife, my own agonized countenance, the

awful despair that settled on the dark face of the ayah, as we three beheld the

love of our lives serenely receding from us forever in that impassable,

transparent ocean? My pistol fell from my grasp. I, who rejoiced in a vigor of

manhood such as few attain, was struck dumb and helpless. My brain whirled in

its dome. Every outward object vanished from my sight, and all I saw was a vast,

translucent sea and one sweet face, rosy as a sea-shell, shining in its depths

shining with a vague smile that seemed to bid me a mute farewell as it floated

away to death! I was roused from a trance of anguish by the flitting of a dark

form through the clear water, cleaving its way swiftly toward that darling little

shape, that grew dimmer and dimmer every second as it settled in the sea. We all

saw it, and the same thought struck us all That terrible, deadly back fin was the

key of our sudden terror. The shark! A simultaneous shriek burst from our lips.

I tried to jump overboard, but was withheld by someone. Little use had I done

so, I could not swim a stroke. The dark shape glided on like a flash of light. It

reached our treasure. In an instant all we loved on earth was blotted from our

sight! My heart stood still. My breath ceased; life trembled on my hips. The next

moment a dusky head shot out of the water close to our boat—a dusky head

whose parted lips gasped for breath, but whose eyes shone with the brightness of

a superhuman joy. The second after, two tawny hands held a dripping white

mass above water, and the dark head shouted to the boatmen. Another second,

and the brave pearl-diver had clambered in and laid my little daughter at her

mother’s feet. This was the shark! This is the man-eater! This hero in sun - burned hide, who, with his quick, aquatic sight, had seen our dear one sinking through

the sea, and had brought her up to us again, pale and dripping, but still alive!

What tears and what laughter fell on us three by turns as we named our gem

rescued from the ocean “Little Pearl”.

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