yellow skins and black, him of gentle western birth and him of the head-hunting, gee-stringed clan.
Of
my old friend Henry, however, I must speak. It was he who during the
early days of my novitiate in Paris brought me nearer to the
understanding of pearls and revealed to me new aspects of pearl wisdom.
Henry
was younger than I by about twelve months, and I was not quite
twenty-one. He shared my enthusiasm, my desire to know, to probe, to
learn. But greater far than mine was his intuitive faculty, his flair
which stamped him as an expert while yet in his teens. "Je suis la perle meme," he
used to vaunt, and it was no idle boast. It was pride of knowledge and
utter disdain for the elderly blockheads in the trade, "earthy of the
earth," as he dubbed them.
I
had hoped you would see this record, Henry, of our young days in Paris
when the world seemed to be as young as we and there was a whole earth
waiting to be conquered. But no, you could not wait, and this very week
your son writes to say that you have gone home. . . .
I
am not ashamed to say that Henry, David to my Jonathan, always knew
more than I of matters pertaining to deep-sea fruit and some other
things. But in worldly knowledge he was often no wiser than an infant
in arms.
There
was that night when he and I went looking for pleasure in Montmartre
for the first time. I suppose we found it. At any rate, at two o'clock
in the morning we trundled home, sober but weary. He had other company
besides myself, a whole harem of precious beauties tucked away between
his shirt and his skin, and a sudden fear seized him that the pearls
entrusted to him were in danger. He implored me to share his couch for
the night.
Such
a couch and such a room! A plank in a prison cell could not have proved
harder, nor could there have been in Paris that night a ceiling closer
to a sleeper's nose than Henry's garret roof to mine, for my nose is
larger than the usual and more outstanding. Henry secured the frail
door with its keyless crazy lock by pushing his tin trunk against it.
