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Roy Glashan's Library
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The Cavalier, November 1909, with "The Blush of Venus"
James Francis Dwyer
JAMES FRANCIS DWYER (1874-1952) was an Australian writer. Born in Camden Park, New South Wales, Dwyer worked as a postal assistant until he was convicted in a scheme to make fraudulent postal orders and sentenced to seven years imprisonment in 1899. In prison, Dwyer began writing, and with the help of another inmate and a prison guard, had his work published in The Bulletin. After completing his sentence, he relocated to London and then New York, where he established a successful career as a writer of short stories and novels. Dwyer later moved to France, where he wrote his autobiography, Leg-Irons on Wings, in 1949. Dwyer wrote over 1,000 short stories during his career, and was the first Australian-born person to become a millionaire from writing. —Wikipedia
ROM Bencoolen to Wake Rock, and from Point Danger to the Marquesas, you can gather a thousand stories concerning the biggest pearls found in the Pacific. The stories are all as different as the pearls round which they are spun. That's just natural. Men who nuzzle after "blacklip" and "blue-edge" are not experts, and drink-shops from Padang to Port Kennedy add many grains to the gems by stirring the imaginations of the tinders.
That's why many of the biggest haven't made a stir in Hatton Garden or Maiden Lane. Up around the Arafura you'll hear of the Peri of Papua, the Opal Moon, the White Ghost, the San Christoval, and nine hundred and ninety-six others; but I think there were only three men who knew of the Blush of Venus.
Once the tropics have held your heart a prisoner in a net of rose pink and lilac and wondrous purple, they call you wherever you stray. Those white beaches that look like lace petticoats fringing the green dresses of the islands, swing before your eyes in the night, and you just gasp. Then you hear the water gurgling over the sand that, looks like diamond-dust, and you get a dream squint of a mother prahu with a mongrel clutch of sampans slithering across a trepang-scented ocean that's all ruby-colored and champagne-tinted, and when you wake in the morning everything looks like ten cents.
It was through a dream of that kind that I came to be one of the three who saw the Blush of Venus. Jack Desmond met me one morning after I had been dreaming of fluttering down the Sulu Sea in a sky-blue schooner with turquoise sails, and three weeks afterward I was watching Desmond's crew scrape blacklip off the bottom of Torres Straits near Thursday Island.
Desmond was Irish-American, and he had thrown more gloves in the face of destiny than any man his age. He just lacked imagination; and when a strong man without imagination goes knocking round the fringe of the earth, where policemen are an unknown quantity and writs stop ten parallels away, he's not a good risk for a life-insurance company. But Desmond had luck.
We had a mixed crew--Javanese, Japs, Orang Laut, and Klings; but the best man on the lugger was a half-caste Chinaman from Dutch Borneo named Chola. He did the work of two on the boat, and when we dried out at Lul Rock he was worth three of the others.
It was Chola who found the Blush. When and where he found it, I don't, know; but one morning Desmond sprang upon him, bounced him onto the boards, and rolled him over and over. The others just looked on wondering, and I grabbed a pump-stave to keep any one from interfering.
The half-caste tried to get a jiu-jitsu grip on Desmond, but his mind was so busy with the problem that he forgot to shift his head out of the way of a short-arm jolt. When he was recovering consciousness, Jack was in the cabin, showing me the Blush of Venus, named it then and there.
I'VE seen a few pearls, but the Blush wasn't the kind that a ten-grain speck could push out of your memory. It looked like a transparent film filled with claret, and the color just came and went in it as if it were alive.
"How did you know he had it?" I gasped.
Desmond laughed.
"There were six signs," he said; "and when he sprang away from me when I touched his loin cloth, it made the seventh. Seven is a lucky number, so I grabbed him. Some fools tell you that the Chow and the Jap never show emotion. Huh! But isn't it a beauty?"
I nodded.
Desmond put the pearl in his mouth and sucked it; then he put it on a red silk handkerchief, and laid down near it on the bunk, half crying and half laughing over the find. He made me smile; but I was listening all the time to the noises up on deck, where some of the crew were reviving Chola with buckets of salt Water.
"What'll you do with him?" I asked, referring to the half-caste.
Desmond thought I meant the pearl. The gem had all genders to him at that moment.
"Do with him?" he said, sucking the Blush softly. "Why, I'm going to give him to a girl living at Woollahra, near Sydney. I said I'd bring her back the biggest pearl ever scooped out of the Pacific, and, by Luk-e-ling, the sea-god of the Yaps, I've got it!"
"And Chola?" I asked, not bothering to tell him that it was the yellow-skinned gentleman I meant in the first instance.
Desmond looked up, brushed the hair out of his eyes, and laughed then as he remembered the little rumpus.
"Oh," he said, "the little yellow devil! Let him go on with his work, of course."
Then he started to tell me about the girl to whom he had promised the pearl. He said she had auburn hair; but I had tested Desmond's eye for color when the sun would be slipping down toward Timor of an evening, so I formed my own opinion. He said she was plump, too, and I nearly smiled. Any person under two hundred pounds weight was in the first stages of consumption, in his opinion. Then he said her name was Birdie, and I had to go outside the cabin, because my face was aching to wrinkle itself up.
My imagination got to painting a plump Birdie with red hair, walking round with that big pearl on her breast; so I went up on deck, and after a time Desmond followed.
The half-caste was over the side when we came up the ladder; but when we got to the surface, there was nothing on his face to tell of the trouble. Desmond didn't look to see. His eyes were looking down toward Bass Straits, two thousand miles away. I'll bet he was wishing that he could set out and walk over that blood-tinted water so that Miss Birdie Williams would get the pearl in a hurry. He was a cool customer, was Desmond.
For two weeks everything ran on quietly. Desmond sat on the deck all day and dreamed of the Blush and the girl that was going to get it; but he could pull himself out of Iris dreams mighty sudden if any one tried to take him unawares.
Then, one afternoon, Chola took a fit after coming up out of the water; and when we were eating our supper, the Jap cook came along and reported him dead. Desmond just nodded his head and went on eating.
"That was sudden," I said, after the Jap had walked away.
"Very," said Desmond, and he smiled into his plate of curry. "Guess he died of grief over that pearl," he added as he finished eating. Then he stood up and walked into his cabin.
I went up on deck and smoked till near midnight, but when I went down the ladder Desmond was waiting for me. He was standing in the dark, near the door of his cabin, and when I came along he caught me by the arm and pulled me inside.
"Been waiting two hours for you," he snapped.
"What's wrong?" I asked, trying to breathe quietly and making as much row as a croupy hippo.
"Chola isn't dead," said Desmond; "he's shamming! Some trick is in the wind, and we've got to keep our lamps trimmed, or we'll go over the side without any canvas wrapping or prayer service."
"How d'ye know he's alive?" I asked.
"Seen him," growled Desmond. "He's in the little cubby at the back of the cook's galley, and when I went in there the air was warm from his breath. I didn't touch him, because that would have sprung the plot, and I wanted to think."
He picked up his belt, took the pearl out of the cotton-wool in which it was packed, and laid it down on the table.
"Chola is coming after that," he said, "and I want to be prepared. See, the Queensland law will not permit the burial of a diver at sea, so I've got to take him to Port Kennedy. I don't see how Chola is going to gain anything by his faking; but a Chinaman is a shrewd guy. However, I'm going to slip into port to-morrow for reasons of my own, so that gives him to-night and to-morrow to get after the Blush."
"How many d'ye think are in the know?" I asked as Desmond hacked at the heel of his rubber boot.
"P'raps only the man that's feeding him; p'raps the whole bunch," he growled. "Look here! I'm putting this beauty into the heel of my boot, and if anything happens to me I want you to deliver it to Miss Birdie Williams, 711 Queen Street, Woollahra."
"Getting nervous?" I laughed.
Desmond looked at me, and I backed away. Somehow, Desmond's eyes would push you away when you tried to stare him down.
"I promised Miss Williams I'd get the pearl," he said. "It was my property before Chola stole it; and, now I've got it, I'm not going to let that yellow hound get it without a fight."
After he had fixed up the heel so that the cut couldn't be seen, he put out the light and got into his bunk, and I stumbled into mine. It looked like trouble, with Chola pretending; but I was that tired I fell asleep.
I WOKE about three o'clock, feeling a bit surprised at finding myself still alive. I put out my foot hastily and kicked Desmond in the jaw, and that started trouble. He was crouched up inside the door, waiting for Chola to come along, and he cursed me for five minutes for my clumsiness.
"Something'll happen to-day," he growled. "Did you forget the name I gave you?"
"Miss Birdie Williams," I murmured.
"And the address?"
"711 King Street, Woollahra," said I.
"Queen Street, you blockhead!" yelled Desmond, and he made me chant that address a dozen times before breakfast. In the spells he told me about Miss Birdie's beauty, and I was tired when the coffee came along.
The early part of the day went by quietly, and late in the afternoon Desmond let on that he was swinging into port with the body of Chola. I guessed that the half-caste had really slipped his cable, but Desmond thought otherwise.
"I know when a man is dead," he snarled; "but whether Chola is dead or alive, he is not putting me out any."
Just as we got under way, a fat Malay tripped over a windlass and went overboard, and Desmond and I forgot all about Chola for one short moment. We rushed the bows, because the Malay appeared to be stunned, and Desmond yelled out an order to the steersman.
Just then there was another yell that you could hear over at Cape York, and when I turned my head I saw the defunct Chola step up from the fo'cas'le-ladder onto the deck. That was the only squint I got of him. The whole of that crew, having seen the apparition that produced the yell, were looking for the nearest track to the water; and, as, we were in the way, Desmond and I got thumped with a black-and-yellow avalanche of arms and legs and bodies, and we went along with it.
When I came to the surface, the lugger was ripping down the straits, with Chola making faces at me from the wheel.
I cursed the Blush of Venus pretty heartily after I coughed up a gallon of warm salt water, and then I looked around. The black heads of the crew were bobbing near me, but there was no Desmond. I shouted and yelled, but nothing came of it. I began to think that Jack had got a whack on the head when going over, and had gone to the bottom. The crew seemed to think the same. Half a mile to leeward was a coal hulk with a Dutchman named Wagner aboard, and as night was slipping down from New Guinea like a black cloud, we steered for her as fast as we could paddle.
I was all in when the Dutchman pulled me aboard his dingey. He told me afterward that I kept on saying "Miss Birdie Williams, 711 Queen Street, Woollahra," when he was yanking me up. He had made a note of the address with a bit of chalk, thinking it was a friend who was to be told of my death if I failed to come round; but he rubbed it out pretty quick when I told him it concerned Desmond. Dutchy had no love for Desmond.
There was one other missing beside Jack, and that was a boy from Surabaya; but one of the divers said that he had seen him aboard after the dead Chola had taken charge, so it looked as if he were in league with the half-caste.
The fat Malay had been helped by a Jap in the swim across, and Wagner's hulk looked crowded. But the Dutchman was very hospitable. When I told him that Desmond had gone to the bottom, he walked to the side and spat savagely into the night.
"Not heem," he gurgled. "He is de debil! He will turn up. Gone to de bottom? Yah! I not pelief heem dead till I see heem tipped over de side mit sixty pounds of chain tied to his toes."
But I reckoned it was all up with Jack. We burned lights, and I sat up all night thinking of the Blush of Venus in the heel of the rubber boot and the girl at Woollahra that wouldn't wear the gem after all. When the sun came up over a clear ocean, I staggered below and turned in.
It was the Dutchman who woke me up. He poked me viciously in the ribs, and when I got my breath I called him names in every dialect of the archipelago.
"Come up on deck," he growled. "Did I not tarn well tell you so?"
I went up in a hurry when I saw the disgust on his face. When I got my head out of the hatch I saw the lugger coming toward us with Desmond at the wheel, and Chola and the boy reefing sails.
"He vos de debil," said Dutchy when he got a chance between my cheers. "Some day he will die, but it will be from old age."
When I climbed aboard, Desmond explained things quietly.
"Chola didn't intend to stampede the mob," he said, laughing. "Well, that is what he says. He told me that he was in a trance, and he only found it out a few minutes before we got ourselves in such a good position for a bath. Me? Oh, I had luck. I caught the dingey-rope in falling over, and I kept my head under water till Chola had finished making faces at you and had wandered below to ransack my cabin. Then I climbed on deck, and put him into another little trance with the help of a boat-hook, so that he wouldn't forget the habit."
He handed the wheel to a Jap, and I followed him down to the cabin.
"Say," he growled, turning round on me. "What d'ye think that yellow devil was doing when I whacked him?"
I shook my head.
"He was overhauling the rubber boot that carried the pearl! That makes you stare, doesn't it? I took it off an hour before; but how did he know that I stuck it in there? What? I'm not frightened of Chola, but I am frightened of losing that pearl. I promised Miss Williams that I'd bring it to her, and she's going to get it."
He glared at me as if he was waiting for a contradiction, but I kept on nodding. It was good policy to nod when Desmond was laying down his own opinions.
"Look here!" he went on. "I'm not going to make a fuss about this business. The law moves slower than a sick turtle once you're north of Townsville, and I want to slip away. I'm going to turn the lugger over to Tom Hesketh when I get into port, and then I'm going to buck a steamer down to Sydney. The Blush is too valuable to keep in one's rags after this matter."
"I'm with you," I said.
The mile swim to the coal hulk had started my imagination into wondering what I'd have done if Chola had performed his resurrection stunt when no craft was within swimming distance.
THAT afternoon we pushed through the crowd of luggers and prahus into Port Kennedy: and we didn't go round babbling of our intentions. We fixed everything up with Hesketh, and then, at the last minute, we crept aboard a sandalwood steamer bound for Brisbane. It was raining like the mischief when we were feeling our way out; but when we woke next morning, we had cleared the Albany Pass, and were slithering down the coast at a fourteen-knot gait.
Desmond sat up in his berth, gave the Blush a suck, and then held it up to a sunbeam that came through the porthole. He wanted my opinion as to how Miss Birdie would wear it, and he had me pretty tired before the bugle blew for breakfast.
"Say! Won't she trim 'em when she slings it on her windpipe and sasshays round the Botanical Gardens and Lady Macquhrie's Chair on Sunday afternoons?" he said. "Why, she could get into Government House on the strength of that pearl."
Then he started wondering as to how it would suit her auburn hair, and he kept it up all the day while we were slipping down by the Great Barrier.
Next morning we got a little surprise. Desmond had been wearing his rubber boots on the evening before, but when he got up in the morning the boots were gone. He cursed a heap.
"Why, Chola must be aboard!" he yelled. "The yellow devil thought I would leave the pearl always in the heel!"
The locks on those coasting steamers are the kind that open when the ship gives a good roll, but we were puzzled as to how he got on our track. Desmond went to the skipper after breakfast, and they started a hunt for stowaways; but the boat had a crew hatched in the tropics, and they didn't look too close after one of their own breed.
The captain suggested the purser's safe if Desmond had any valuables, but Jack reckoned he'd hold the Blush till he presented it to Birdie; and he swore if he couldn't hold it, that Chola was welcome to it. I didn't mind the half-caste getting the pearl, but I didn't want a knife stuck into my ribs in a mistake; so I slept rather light till we reached Moreton Bay.
Desmond had planned for a few busy hours in Brisbane. We hired a hansom and galloped out to Fortitude Valley at a breakneck pace; then we got out, dodged through side streets and back lanes, jumped cars, doubled on our tracks about seventeen times; then picked up another hansom and galloped back into town.
"We'll go aboard separately this time," said Desmond. "Don't go on till the last minute, and then watch the gangway. There are two boats going at six o'clock--the Coonanbarra and the City of Melbourne. Take the first, and I'll see you on board."
The Blush had my nerves upset. I waited in the back parlor of a public-, house opposite the wharf, and when the last bell went I rushed across and climbed up the plank as they were pulling it in. Desmond was hauled up over the side, and when he got his breath he reckoned we had given Chola the slip.
"He's a wise one if he's on our tracks now," he said, feeling his knee where he had skinned it climbing aboard. "The City of Melbourne pulled out from her wharf at the same moment as we left; besides, he had no idea we were going farther south."
I hoped that we had lost him, but I was a little anxious. Desmond took no chances. He slept little while we were going down the coast, and the more he kept awake the more I heard about Birdie. He wasn't engaged to her at all. He had just met her at a friend's house, and had promised to send her the biggest pearl he could find. That was Desmond's way.
"And I try to keep my word," he would say, sucking the Blush till its heart used to grow red as if it warmed beneath his breath. "This is surely the biggest pearl that has ever been located."
When we picked up South Head Light, on the third morning, I gave a sigh of relief. We would be at Circular Quay in four hours, I thought, and my nerves would have a rest.
Desmond was giving me Birdie at the rate of thirty knots an hour as we swung in through the Heads; and when a fellow pointed out a school of sharks, I walked over to the rail to dodge Jack's tongue.
"Nice customers," he said, as he followed me over and stood looking at the fins cutting through the red water like so many plowshares. "I wouldn't like to play a game of hide-and-seek with that brigade."
The plowing squadron got on my nerves, and I turned to go below to pack my valise, when a figure passed me with a bound, stopped for a moment by Desmond's side, and then sprang over the side with Jack's leather belt gripped in a lean, yellow hand!
It was Chola! He had cut Desmond's belt with the point of a knife, and before we had recovered from our astonishment, he was breasting the waters of Port Jackson.
I didn't know where the Blush of Venus was secreted on the particular morning, but I formed a good idea the moment the half-caste hit the water. Desmond let out a yell of fury, and then, without stopping a moment to consider the danger, he sprang onto the rail and dived after the thief!
I don't want to see anything like that again. Of course, Chola hadn't seen that batch of gray nurses that were swimming near us, but Desmond had. I said he had no imagination. Some one signaled the bridge, and we lowered a boat in record time, while a storm of life-buoys were thrown into the water. But those two were not looking for lifebuoys. Chola was making for Middle Head, about half a mile away, where he had a good chance, of getting into the bush, and Desmond was after him full speed.
IT made my blood run cold to see those four fins plowing round directly in the track that Chola was taking. We screamed and yelled out warnings, but I knew Desmond. He wouldn't turn for a thousand sharks. And that four kept circling round and round as if they were sentinels waiting for the half-caste to come into the territory they were guarding!
Chola put on a spurt, and then he eased down; and, raising himself for a moment out of the water, he looked to see how far he was from the shore. Then he saw the patrol! He gave a scream, and, swinging round, started to swim back toward Desmond, while the fellows in the boat drove it toward the two.
But Desmond kept straight ahead. He had started out after Chola, and there was nothing swimming in that harbor that would turn him back. The two came closer together, and then we saw the black fins disappear as Desmond stretched out his arm and gripped the terrified half-caste.
I don't want another sight of that little whirl of hell-foam that came round the two of them at that moment. I saw that once before, when a bull-nose grabbed a kanaka at Wollongong breakwater.
Chola threw up his arms and sank, while Desmond turned and swam to the boat that was now only a few yards away. No wonder Dutchy Wagner said he had the devil's luck.
Desmond was clutching the belt when we hauled him on deck. After he got his breath, he turned to me and laughed.
"I beat him, after all," he said; then he put his fingers in the pouch where the pearl was packed in cotton-wool.
He fumbled for a moment, then he looked round helplessly and rolled over on the deck in a swoon. The pouch was empty! Chola had taken out the pearl while swimming, and now the Blush of Venus is lying somewhere inside Sydney Heads, under the big guns of the fort.
I didn't see Desmond for a week after we reached Sydney; then I met him.
"That little mishap was not so bad as it looked, after all." he said. "Miss Williams married a Riverina wool king while I was up north, and now she is on her way to London, where she can buy all the gems she wants. He's a millionaire."
I thought it cool of Desmond. "What are you going to do now?" I asked.
"I'm going up to this new goldfield at Wyalong," he said.
He went, too; and four weeks afterward I read that Mr. Jack Desmond had struck a marvelously rich reef, and was then negotiating with a company that offered him one hundred thousand pounds for the claim. The Dutchman was right about his luck.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
Go to Home Page
This work is out of copyright in countries with a copyright
period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
Original content added by RGL (e.g., introductions, notes,
RGL covers) is proprietary and protected by copyright.