The queen's necklace

UST before the war I was in Paris, and, happening to be in the Rue de la Paix, I called on my friend Leverrier. He was a jeweler in a large way of business, but to-day is temporarily serving as cook somewhere in the Argonne until such time as he can be a jeweler again.

I met him first in Biarritz seven or eight years ago, and we at once became friends, for our tastes were sympathetic, and it was often a wonder to me that a man who loved an out-of-door life and all that goes with it in the form of movement and adventures could live cooped up in the Rue de la Paix, year in, year out, with little relaxation and no change to speak of.

That day I called upon him I happened to mention this fact. We were seated in the office at the back of his shop and there in the midst of ledgers and papers and an atmosphere prosaic as the atmosphere of a bank he told me this story.

“Well,” said he, “it may seem a trifle dull, this life of mine, but I assure you there are moments in the life of a jeweler when he gets all the excitement and action he requires, especially when life stock is worth a couple of million francs, with a couple of thousand jewel thieves in Paris; men, more over, who have made a fine art of their business. I could tell you a good many stories to prove my point, but I will content myself with one, just to show you that the word business covers more things than profit and money changing. It was my first ad venture in life, all my future turned on it and in a most curious way.

“My father was a small jeweler in Marseilles. He died when I was twenty-one years of age. I was an only child, my mother had passed away some years before, and I was alone in the world. I had big ideas. I saw quite clearly that a small business is eternal labor and little profit, and that if I wished to live a full life I must strike out, take my fortune and my courage in both hands, and risk everything to gain everything.

“I collected all my available cash, some sixty thousand francs, and, still continuing in business with the aid of one assistant, I crouched waiting to spring on Fortune should she come in sight.

“She came.

“Just at that time occurred the sale of the Polignac jewels. I attended it. On the second morning of the sale and just before the luncheon hour a necklace of opals was put up, the most lovely work of art, fire opals, some of large size, and set with small brilliants; but it was less the value of the stones that attracted me than the workmanship of the whole. You may guess my surprise when the bidding started at only fifteen thousand francs and the three succeeding bids only raised it to eighteen thousand. But the fact of the matter was that opals just then were out of favor. There is nothing more curious than the fashions that come and go in precious stones, diamonds always excepted. Opals are, as you know, considered unlucky, and just then there had been a murder case or a divorce case or something of that nature in which opals had figured, so I suppose the grande dames of Paris and London were not buying; at all events, the big dealers present were absolutely unenthusiastic. Then I came in, and the sight of a young and enthusiastic bidder seemed to hearten the others, for they put the price up on me till twenty-eight thousand francs was reached. At thirty thousand francs the hammer fell and the necklace was mine.

“Now, only a week before the sale I had read in a paper—the Echo de Paris, no less—that the Queen of Spain had a passion for opals, and it was that paragraph in my head, no less than the beauty of the article at auction, that had made me keen on the purchase. I had, in fact, resolved that, if I could buy it, I would endeavor, by hook or by crook, to sell it to her majesty, not so much for the profit as for the sale, for let me tell you that the fortune of a jeweler lies often at the back door of a palace, if he can once slip in, and that the history of the Rue de la Paix is, in part, the history of the Tuileries during the Second Empire, and the histories of the courts of London, Vienna and Berlin.

“Well, I had my necklace at the cost of half my available capital, and it only remained with me now to make the sale. I wrote to the chamberlain of the Spanish court stating the facts and got no reply to my very civil letter though I waited a month. Then I cast about me for other ways to forward my scheme, but without success, and several Spaniards whom I knew, so far from encouraging me, gave me to understand that of all courts in the world the court of Spain is the most exclusive and the most difficult to manipulate.

“Well, there I was with my hands tied and my necklace round my throat, so to speak, and my thirty thousand francs lying unproductive. Many people would have given the thing up, but I am very tenacious by nature. Once I get hold of a plan I stick to it like one of those dogs you English keep for setting upon bulls and, in fact, I would not be defeated.

“It occurred to me, suddenly, to apply to our deputy, Monsieur Villenois, a black-bearded southerner, a man from Tarbes, who might have stood for the portrait of Daudet’s Numa Roumestan. I interviewed him, and he listened to my story with interest. He became enthusiastic as though it were an affair of his own.

“‘The Queen of Spain is now at Biarritz,’ said he. ‘Go there, my dear Monsieur Leverrier, with your necklace and wait. I will obtain a letter of introduction from our foreign minister and forward it to you at your hotel.’ He refused to be thanked, all but embraced me, dismissed me with the highest hopes—and forgot me. He was not a scoundrel, simply a man who could not refuse; one of those genial southern souls, all sunlight, and to whom a promise signifies nothing.

“Well, I put up at an hotel in Biarritz and I saw. her majesty often at a great distance, but I did not see the promised letter from my deputy.

“There were some pleasant people in the hotel and among them there was an old gentleman, Don Pedro Gommera, with whom I struck up a close acquaintanceship. He was, as it afterward turned out, the owner of a rubber estate on the Amazon, a man very wealthy, but of the type of the old buccaneers. It was this in him, perhaps, that pleased me; he was different from others, and in our conversations he talked of the wilderness of the Amazon, of his life there; of the rubber workers who, though paid, were practically his slaves; and in such a manner that I seemed listening to the voice of Cortez himself.

“Bold spirits attract one another, and one day, still waiting for my deputy’s letter, I told him of my intended attack on her majesty of Spain and of the necklace. It interested him and he asked to see it, as he was a connoisseur of jewels, and I unfortunately, or rather fortunately, acceded to his request.

“I kept the casket containing the thing in a tin box, and the tin box in my valise, and my valise in my bedroom. We went up to my room and there, opening the valise, I produced the necklace with which he at once fell in love. He was completely fascinated, just as a man is fascinated by a beautiful woman, and I could tell without any word of his, but just by the manner in which he held it and hung over it, the effect it had produced on his mind. But he said nothing much till that night after dinner when he approached me in the smoking room where I was smoking a cigar.

“He sat down beside me#and after talking for a while on various objects he came to the point.

“‘I have been thinking of that necklace you showed me,’ said he, ‘and if you will excuse me for talking to you on business, I should like to purchase it.’

“‘Ah, monsieur,’ I replied, ‘nothing would give me greater pleasure than to do business with you, but, unfortunately, it is not for sale, or only to one person—and her name you know.’

“‘I would point out to you, monsieur,’ said he, ‘that when I take a thing into my head money to me is no object. Name your price.’

“‘And I would point out to you, monsieur,’ I replied, ‘that when I take a thing into my head money is no object. I wish to sell this article to her majesty, not so much for the sake of the money she will pay me as for the sake of a business introduction to the court. I hope yet to be jeweler to the court of Spain; yet, leaving all that aside, there is the fact that I have set before myself an object to be attained, and I have never yet desisted once I have started on a journey toward an object.’

“‘You are an obstinate man,’ said he.

“‘No, monsieur, a tenacious one,’ I replied, ‘and as that is not a bad description of your own character, if my instinct for physiognomy is not at fault, you can sympathize with me.’

“‘You refuse to sell?’

“‘Absolutely, monsieur.

“‘Very well,’ said he, ‘let us say no more on the matter.’

“He left Biarritz next day, and the day following going to my portmanteau I found it unlocked. I opened it, and found the tin box containing my treasure gone.

“It was like a blow in the stomach.

“I had left the portmanteau locked, of course. That was what I told myself. Then doubt assailed me. Had I omitted to lock it in putting back the necklace, and had Don Gommera noticed the fact? That he was the thief was a fact of which I had an instinctive surety, based on the instinctive knowledge that nothing at all would stop this man from attempting to obtain any object upon which he had set his mind. As I knelt holding the lid of the portmanteau open and looking at the contents something drew my eye. It was an envelope, an ordinary envelope with the name of the hotel on the back, bulky but unsealed. I took out the contents and found notes on the Bank of France for the sum of forty thousand francs. Not a word, not a line, just the notes in an unsealed envelope.

“Despite my rage and mortification, I could have laughed. There was something so childlike and primitive in the whole business, so rascally and yet so ingenuous. I seemed to see before me more fully the character of the man—a man who dared all the risks of burglary, a man who did not hesitate to steal, yet a man who disdained taking a jeweler’s goods without paying for them. He would have cut my throat, perhaps, to obtain what he craved for—yet have left the payment in notes on my person.

“The thought of applying to the police occurred to me, but I dismissed it. First of all, he was no common criminal, he was an hidalgo, but not of our day, and I had that much fine feeling that the thought of dragging him and his white beard and his noble manner into the dirt of a common police court was repugnant to me. He had treated me as an equal, and I did not see myself standing before him as the figure of a prosecuting tradesman.

“Secondly, he had robbed me not of a necklace, but of an object in view. He had gained his object, I had lost, for a time, mine. No, it was a question of man to man, not of jeweler and thief.

“I packed my portmanteau and started back for Marseilles, and the day after my arrival I called upon Chardin.

“You may not have heard of Chardin. He is the inquiry agent employed by all the great business houses of Marseilles; his office is in the Rue Noailles and he has sub agencies everywhere. Give him a week and he will tell you all things about any man from the name of his dentist to the number of his shoes. In less than a week Chardin placed before me all I wanted to know, the exact address of my man and how to reach it. Also, Chardin told me that Don Pedro Gommera had departed for home by the last boat, and that if I took the next boat, which started in eight days’ time, I would arrive on his heels. So far, so good, but what an address that was! The Estate of Flores, on the left bank of the river Amazon, and a thousand miles from its mouth, enough to daunt any man as it did me for the space of a day and a half.

“For a day and a half I held off, but I was young, my will was strong, and that something which makes for adventure was in me.

“‘Will you let distance beat you?’ I asked of myself, and the answer came on the question, ‘No.’ There was also something else, I do not know what, something like the tide which leads men along to fortune, and whose ripples men sometimes hear by a finer sense than that which brings us the sound of the dinner gong. I felt that I was doing the right thing—and then, again, beyond that, I felt that if I allowed this old man’s will the victory I would start in life handicapped by the sense of defeat and the knowledge that another man’s will was stronger than mine. So I packed my traps, I left my business with my assistant, and started.

“Ma foi, that wonderful journey! it burns still in my mind like a blue jewel, first the ocean that seemed to turn to a deeper indigo each day, and then the vast river and the tropical forests that hide its banks. I took passage up it in a Royal Mail steamer, a great white boat that seemed built for deep-sea service, but none too big for the Amazon where the Mauretania herself might navigate even a thousand miles from the mouth.

“And the forests forever and forever lining the banks, and the birds flying above the forests—birds that yelped like dogs and birds of all colors from snow to flame. It seemed a strange place for a man to come in search of a lost necklace!

“The Flores plantation where I had arranged to be put off was well known to the captain and officers of the ship, also Don Pedro Gommera who seemed to be a character. They had many stories about him, of his wealth and the number of tons of rubber Flores put out each year, and so forth. Hearing I was going on a visit to him, they declared that I would be treated royally, and so I hoped, but I had my doubts. I only wanted to be treated fairly, to receive back my necklace and, if possible, the expenses of my journey.

“Once in our conversations at Biarritz the old man had said that some day I must pay him a visit on his estate. I determined in my mind to take that cue, to be absolutely courteous, and to win my necklace back with a laugh, so to say—Well, man proposes and God disposes, as you shall hear.

“At breakfast one morning the captain told me that I had better get my belongings together as in the course of an hour or so we would be off Flores, and at eleven o’clock, standing on the deck with my belongings beside me, the plantation came into view with golden fields and native houses and a great wharf like a deep sea harbor wharf alongside of which we came and tied up.

“The stoppage was made not entirely on my account, for there was some cargo to be discharged at the plantation. I watched the wharf-side crowd of colored men as I waited for the gangplank to be lowered, and as I watched, there, sure enough, came a figure through the crowd, the figure of a tall old man clad in white wearing a Panama and smoking a cigar. The crowd parted before him as he came, just as the Red Sea parted before Moses. It was Don Pedro Gommera.

“Was he surprised when, stepping from the gangway, I saluted him, bag in hand? I don’t know. I can only say he showed nothing of surprise, and when I told him I had come to pay my promised visit he seemed charmed, called porters to collect my luggage and then, having boarded the steamer for a moment to speak to the captain about the cargo consigned to him, came off again, apologizing for the delay, inquiring as to whether I had had a pleasant journey, and all with such an air of having expected me, such warmth, such courtliness, that confusion seized me as much as it could seize a jeweler with a grievance, a tradesman who had been wronged and had come over four thousand miles to have his wrongs redressed. But not for long. As he led me off toward a large, low, white house set beyond tree ferns and surrounded with a miraculous garden, where palmistes waved against the sky and butterflies like blossoms chased each other over flowers more brilliant and lovely than jewels, I became myself again, or, rather, I became that self which contact with the personality of my courtly host engendered in me, for it is perfectly true that one takes one’s color from one’s companions, and that a man of true stateliness and good form diffuses his qualities as a lamp diffuses its light or a flower its perfume.

“You may laugh to hear me talk so of Don Pedro Gommera—ah, well, if you had met him, you would know exactly what I mean, and if you had met him in his home on the banks of the Amazon you would know even better.

“The house where he led me was verandaed so that nearly every room on its two floors gave upon a veranda space, it was shadowed by vast trees and surrounded by a tropical garden—a garden where one might, lose oneself in broad daylight—a garden where one came upon marble seats set in coigns of shadow and before vistas of tree-fern alleys and views, now giving one the picture of the forest’s heart, and now of the broadly flowing Amazon.

“The house itself was furnished with the simplicity that is born of warm climates and, when I had been shown to my room by a manservant, I returned to the veranda where I had left my host. There, while we sat in rocking-chairs and talked, another servant made his appearance bearing a large silver tray on which was a bowl of crushed ice, glasses, decanters containing rum, liqueurs and lime juice, cigars and cigarettes.

“The tray, having been placed on a table beside us, we helped ourselves to its contents and the conversation turned to my voyage and far-away Europe.

“‘It is difficult,’ said Don Pedro, ‘for European people to understand the life out here, simply, monsieur, because the life out here is so different from the life of Europe. There civilization holds sway and the old laws of the different countries, Being the products of centuries of experience and practice, work of their own accord, so to speak, smoothly and meeting every requirement that may turn up. The crimes are all tabulated and the punishments. It is like the contents of a shop. If a man wishes to invest in murder, let us say, he knows the price he may be expected to pay, but here I am the Law, and on this estate justice is my caprice. For, if a man were to murder another, his punishment would lie entirely in my hands, and I might hang him or shoot him or imprison him in a dungeon or let him off, as my fancy chose.”

“‘You are, in fact, king,’ said I.

“‘I am, in fact, king—absolutely.’

“‘I am just a tradesman;’ I went on, ‘and though I may have been intended for higher things than the life of cities, fate has placed me where I am.’

“He laughed.

“‘Do not run down tradesmen,’ said he. ‘They were the first adventurers. I myself am a tradesman of a sort since I sell the rubber for which I pay my laborers. To me, men are men and the worth of a man is to me everything, his position in life nothing. I am so placed that I can look on things like that, unblinded by the false views that make up civilization.’

“Just then a voice, clear, golden, sweet as the voice of a bird, full as the voice of a woman, came to us from the trees; the rear foliage shook, parted, and disclosed the form of a girl, the most lovely, wild, entrancing vision that ever fell on the sight of mortal man.

“Lightly attired as a Greek of old days, almost barbaric, with raven hair moist as though from a bath in some lagoon of the river, and red gold bangles upon her perfect arms, she stood with hands spread out in astonishment at the sight of a stranger.

“Around her neck and resting on her snow-white bosom adding a last touch to the strangeness of the picture, lay a string of blazing opals.

“My necklace.

“You can fancy the situation.

“‘My daughter,’ said the old man quietly, and then to the vision: ‘Juanita.’

“She came toward him and they spoke together in Spanish. He introduced us with a few words as she hung beside him gazing at me with the eyes of a forest creature, eyes luminous and deep and dark, friendly—yet destructive to peace of mind.

“Then she vanished into the house.

“Then he turned to me.

“‘Monsieur,’ said he, ‘you are a connoisseur in gems, what do you think of my daughter’s necklace?’

“‘Senor,’ replied I, ‘I did not see the necklace you speak of. I saw nothing but the beauty of the Queen of Flores.’

“He bowed. As for me, I almost spoke the truth for I was in love.

“As for the necklace, it was never spoken of again during my stay at Flores. It had reached the destination I had designed for it. It was worn by a queen. It is still worn by a queen—my wife.”

“Ah, you married, then”

“We married. At first, the King of Flores refused the idea of such a union, not on account of my position so much as of the fact that he did not want to lose her. But she prevailed. She brought with her a dot of a million francs, and when I declared my intention of carrying on the only business I knew and my conviction that no man ought to live on his wife’s money, he agreed.

“‘Go forward,’ he said, ‘but do big things, start in Paris, and for a beginning I will lend you what money you want at an interest of five per cent.’ So I came to the Rue de la Paix.

“You see, he was a great man. So much above the littleness of life that he saw no discredit in the word shop. So great that he did not hesitate to buy by force the object he wanted, or to hand over to me through reason the object he wished to keep.

“Civilization would have called him a brigand, but civilization could not have understood this man of a larger and simpler day.”