How many millions David Grief was worth no man in the Solomons knew, for
his holdings and ventures were everywhere in the great South Pacific.
From Samoa to New Guinea and even to the north of the Line his
plantations were scattered. He possessed pearling concessions in the
Paumotus. Though his name did not appear, he was in truth the German
company that traded in the French Marquesas. His trading stations were
in strings in all the groups, and his vessels that operated them were
many. He owned atolls so remote and tiny that his smallest schooners and
ketches visited the solitary agents but once a year.
In Sydney, on Castlereagh Street, his offices occupied three floors.
But he was rarely in those offices. He preferred always to be on the go
amongst the islands, nosing out new investments, inspecting and shaking
up old ones, and rubbing shoulders with fun and adventure in a thousand
strange guises. He bought the wreck of the great steamship _Gavonne_
for a song, and in salving it achieved the impossible and cleaned up a
quarter of a million. In the Louisiades he planted the first commercial
rubber, and in Bora-Bora he ripped out the South Sea cotton and put the
jolly islanders at the work of planting cacao. It was he who took the
deserted island of Lallu-Ka, colonized it with Polynesians from the
Ontong-Java Atoll, and planted four thousand acres to cocoanuts. And it
was he who reconciled the warring chief-stocks of Tahiti and swung the
great deal of the phosphate island of Hikihu.
His own vessels recruited his contract labour. They brought Santa
Cruz boys to the New Hebrides, New Hebrides boys to the Banks, and the
head-hunting cannibals of Malaita to the plantations of New Georgia.
From Tonga to the Gilberts and on to the far Louisiades his recruiters
combed the islands for labour. His keels plowed all ocean stretches. He
owned three steamers on regular island runs, though he rarely elected to
travel in them, preferring the wilder and more primitive way of wind and
sail.
At least forty years of age, he looked no more than thirty. Yet
beachcombers remembered his advent among the islands a score of years
before, at which time the yellow mustache was already budding silkily on
his lip. Unlike other white men in the tropics, he was there because he
liked it. His protective skin pigmentation was excellent. He had
been born to the sun. One he was in ten thousand in the matter of
sun-resistance. The invisible and high-velocity light waves failed to
bore into him. Other white men were pervious. The sun drove through
their skins, ripping and smashing tissues and nerves, till they became
sick in mind and body, tossed most of the Decalogue overboard, descended
to beastliness, drank themselves into quick graves, or survived so
savagely that war vessels were sometimes sent to curb their license.
But David Grief was a true son of the sun, and he flourished in all its
ways. He merely became browner with the passing of the years, though
in the brown was the hint of golden tint that glows in the skin of the
Polynesian. Yet his blue eyes retained their blue, his mustache its
yellow, and the lines of his face were those which had persisted through
the centuries in his English race. English he was in blood, yet those
that thought they knew contended he was at least American born. Unlike
them, he had not come out to the South Seas seeking hearth and saddle of
his own. In fact, he had brought hearth and saddle with him. His advent
had been in the Paumotus. He arrived on board a tiny schooner yacht,
master and owner, a youth questing romance and adventure along the
sun-washed path of the tropics. He also arrived in a hurricane, the
giant waves of which deposited him and yacht and all in the thick of a
cocoanut grove three hundred yards beyond the surf. Six months later he
was rescued by a pearling cutter. But the sun had got into his blood.
At Tahiti, instead of taking a steamer home, he bought a schooner,
outfitted her with trade-goods and divers, and went for a cruise through
the Dangerous Archipelago.
As the golden tint burned into his face it poured molten out of the ends
of his fingers. His was the golden touch, but he played the game, not
for the gold, but for the game's sake. It was a man's game, the rough
contacts and fierce give and take of the adventurers of his own blood
and of half the bloods of Europe and the rest of the world, and it was a
good game; but over and beyond was his love of all the other things
that go to make up a South Seas rover's life--the smell of the reef;
the infinite exquisiteness of the shoals of living coral in the
mirror-surfaced lagoons; the crashing sunrises of raw colours spread
with lawless cunning; the palm-tufted islets set in turquoise deeps;
the tonic wine of the trade-winds; the heave and send of the orderly,
crested seas; the moving deck beneath his feet, the straining canvas
overhead; the flower-garlanded, golden-glowing men and maids of
Polynesia, half-children and half-gods; and even the howling savages of
Melanesia, head-hunters and man-eaters, half-devil and all beast.
And so, favoured child of the sun, out of munificence of energy and
sheer joy of living, he, the man of many millions, forbore on his far
way to play the game with Harrison J. Griffiths for a paltry sum. It was
his whim, his desire, his expression of self and of the sun-warmth that
poured through him. It was fun, a joke, a problem, a bit of play on
which life was lightly hazarded for the joy of the playing.