THE ADVENT OF CULTURED PEARLS
I
BELIEVE that every
incident of our lives is closely linked with the preceding one, and
that their totality represents the strongly forged chain of our fate.
Out
of my famous visit to Tan Kim Tong on the occasion of the working of
the big blister came by devious ways my foreknowledge of the cultured
pearl. How and why matters little now, because Tan has made the final
journey to his beloved Kwantung in an ypil casket of magnificent
dimensions carefully chosen by himself, and Nakamura, my Japanese
friend, has his substantial headstone in the Japanese cemetery on Jolo
Island.
Certainly
there was feud between those two once upon a time, but for all I know
to the contrary they may now be walking arm in arm along the
pearl-paved streets of Paradise.
Nakamura
was Tan Kim Tong's debt slave and felt his shackles grievously. There
were times when, stung past bearing by the thought of the exactions of
the Chinese, he would mutter darkly to me of schemes that would one day
bring ruin to the fat potentates of the pearling industry.
Thus
I came to know little by little of his secret pearl-culture station in
a sheltered cove somewhere off Mindanao Island, and of the valuable
assistance he was receiving for it from his countrymen in Japan. But at
the time I paid little attention to him. It all sounded too fantastic,
too far-fetched, too much like a pipe-dream. Even when some time later
he laid before me evidence of his being in regular communication with
several professors of the Imperial University at Tokyo on the subject
of pearl-culture, I looked upon the whole thing as not worthy of a
practical man's consideration, but the mere figment of a professor's
dream.
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