CHAPTER XIII THE HOUSE

It would be impossible to bring home to your mind, unless you had experienced it, the vast change which the presence of the Southern Cross made in the picture of the lagoon. Not on the retinal picture, but on the mental.

Her presence altered everything. The place became a harbor. Those spars fretting the sky, that hull making green water beneath its copper brought civilization up hand over fist from a thousand leagues down under.

Loneliness had vanished, the crying of the gulls lost its melancholy, and the sound of the surf on the reef, when one noticed it, no longer spoke of desolation.

And, just as the schooner altered the lagoon, so did the presence of her crew and the labor men alter the life on the island.

In a moment life had become all hurry and work.

Isbel reappeared regularly to help in the preparation of their food; she would be on hand when wanted for any light job, but she never sat by them now when they talked; she avoided saying a word unless absolutely obliged to, and when she spoke she no longer looked Floyd in the eyes.

"She is frightened to death of us and she loathes us," he thought. "Me just as much as him. I don't wonder, either."

[Pg 115]Schumer said nothing on the matter; perhaps he was too busy to notice the change in the girl. He certainly had his work cut out for him. On the first day he had to deal with the labor men, showing them their job. They knew nothing of pearls or the shell business, but they were like otters in the water, and they picked up the small technicalities of the labor at once.

Sru especially seemed to take to the work as though born to it, and Schumer left them under his foremanship and returned to the schooner, where he had work for the crew.

He wanted a house. He had already picked out the site for it in a little clearing of the grove well protected by the trees from possible storms. The wood was ready to his hand in the wreckage of the Tonga, which the lagoon currents had driven into the shoal water of the southern beach right opposite to the camping place.

Of course he could have cut down trees for his building material, but every tree in the grove by the camping place was a valuable asset as a shelter against the weather. To have used any of the timber from the other groves of the island would have meant not only the labor of felling and trimming trees, but of floating them off and towing across the water.

He made Mountain Joe foreman of the new industry, explaining to him carefully and minutely the whole business. All planking had to be collected, made into small rafts, and towed across the lagoon. The whaleboat was used for the purpose, and Schumer accompanied it himself on the first trip to show exactly what he wanted.

It took two days' hard work before sufficient planking had been got together, and then began the business[Pg 116] of securing and towing across the heavy timbers to be used for posts and beams. The whole of this business from the start of the time when the wood was lying on the sand near the tent took over a week, during which time the fishery work was progressing, though in a leisurely manner.

"There we have thirty chaps at work," said Schumer on the night when the last of the timber was salved, "and you'd have imagined that they would have done fifteen times as much work as you and I per day. They haven't done more than three times as much. They play about in the water; they are a bone-lazy lot—well, it doesn't matter. If we had half a dozen dependable overseers to superintend the business when it comes to searching for the pearls it would be different, but there is only you and me. So it's no earthly use getting huge quantities of shell of which we can't oversee the working properly. Funny thing it is, but a business has to slow down unless it is perfect in all parts. Here we have the getters of the raw stuff, and I could speed them up four times their present rate and we'd skin the lagoon four times as quick if I had even three more men like you and me to supervise the getting of the real stuff—which is pearls. Yet if I had those three men they would want a partnership and so we'd lose in profits. It's as broad as it's long."

They were sitting by the fire, and Schumer as he talked was putting finishing touches to a drawing he was making on a leaf of his pocketbook.

It was the plan for the house.

He had made the sketch more as an exercise for his restless fingers than anything else.

[Pg 117]Nothing could be more simple or rudimentary in the way of a house plan. The drawing provided for two rooms only, a big room and a little room. The main door opened on to the big room.

"It won't be much of a house," said the architect, as he showed the drawing, "but still it will be a house, and a house is a most important thing for us. Shelter! I'd just as soon shelter in the tent; sooner, but it's not a question of shelter so much as prestige. It's like wearing a clean shirt. You see, if we live the same as our men they'll get to think of us as the same, whereas if we live in a house and keep them under canvas, or in any old huts they are able to make, they think of us accordingly. The house gets on their mind. It is the symbol of authority and power. It becomes the government building. There's a whole lot in that—more than you would think. Then, besides, we want a secure place for the pearls. It won't do to keep them under canvas or in a hole in the ground. I'm going to build as strong as I can and make the door to match. We will have loopholes to fire through, in case of eventualities, though I don't think they'll be needed.

"The man who has to depend on defending his position by resisting attack in his own house is a pretty bad administrator.

"Still one never knows what may happen, and it is as well to be prepared."