That was the only occasion that I slept in the white girl Pauline’s home.
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Imaginary Millionaires—Pearls and Diamonds—The Fate of the Sacrilegious—Waylao’s Song—The Great Forest Festival—Grimes and I fall—So does the Idol—A Free Fight—Waylao’s Discovery
GRIMES and I returned once more to the grog shanty, penniless. We had been away on a short cruise with a South Sea crank. This particular crank—the South Seas abound with them—was after pearls. He swore that he knew for a positive fact that pearls lay in heaps at the bottom of the shore lagoons, and we believed him.
Our fortunes were made. We almost went balmy with delight as we nudged each other in the ribs and speculated with our riches in the wildest way, and, it may be guessed, we were feeling pretty down in the mouth at the failure of our hopes.
In imagination Grimes had pensioned off several old uncles, and had commemorated the goodness of his grandmother by placing a marble monument over her grave in Kensal Green. I, too, had been pretty generous, and made the eyes shine of old folks at home, also of friends who really did not deserve such good luck, for they had done little for me when I had arrived back in the old country from the great Australian gold-fields, arrayed in a ragged, brass-bound midshipman’s suit. Well, there we sat, worse off than any of them, for not only had our friends afar lost the gifts of generosity, but we had spent our savings, the hard-earned savings from our last voyage before the mast to San Francisco via Honolulu.
I had persuaded Grimes to come with me on that pearling trip. It was all my fault. “Grimes,” I said, “I feel awfully sorry that I persuaded you to believe in old beery-whiskers” (as we called him), “but I’ll make it all right as soon as I get a good job on one of the boats. I’ll pay you back all _you’ve_ lost. You _did_ say he was a lunatic. I wish I’d believed you.”
“That’s all roight, mate,” said Grimes. He pressed my hand. Mrs Ranjo looked a bit fierce and then ticked off the next drink that Grimes ordered for himself. We were both penniless.
It did seem a shame, for Grimes had suffered much through my sanguine temperament. Nine months before we had shipped on a schooner for the Malay Archipelago, calling in at Guadalcanar, Solomon Isles.