136 THE PEARL TRADER
the handlers of pearls. It would indeed be strange if the constant communion with the queen of gems had no refining influence!
If
you are interested to discover which of them are dealers and which
brokers, you have only to peer into their faces. The haggard and pale,
the worried-looking ones, those are the dealers. The sleekly-complacent
and jesting ones are the brokers. Must I explain? The dealer has to
take and give credit. Any error of judgment when appraising goods is
upon his own head, and his is the entire risk. But the broker is merely
the go-between. Heads or tails, he wins. He obtains a brokerage from
both buyer and seller, 1 per cent; from either side, and the merchants
have to pay him whether they register a gain or a loss.
You
may wonder why, since the dealers know of each other's existence, they
do not trade directly and thus save the brokerage. They would certainly
do so if they could, because brokerage is a stiff tax, and no merchant
is keen on curtailing his own profit or increasing his charges. But
they cannot dispense with the broker. They have to tolerate him as the
shark tolerates the pilot fish. (I trust the comparison will not be
carried to extreme lengths.)
The
broker touts for business. He knows, or ought to know, the requirements
of nearly everybody with whom he comes in contact. He is a kind of
marriage broker. He is expected to praise the bride-to-be (the vendor's
goods) and to extol the merits of the future bridegroom (the solvency
of the buyer). He is a pimp of sorts, too, if you like. Yet it is to be
acknowledged that he often acts the impartial judge and holds the
scales fairly even, and that more often than not he is worthy of his
hire.
No,
they are not all Jews, these Paris pearl-merchants and brokers. Many
are Armenians, Syrians, Arabs, Parsees, Hindus, with a sprinkling of
Neapolitans and Catalans and an odd Frenchman or two.
The appearance of many of them is not prepossessing, I grant you, and perhaps we would not be inclined to trust
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