Читать книгу Jorkens Has a Large Whiskey - Edward 18th Baron of Dunsany Plunkett - Страница 6

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A member of our club had made a little coup on the Stock Exchange; nothing very much, but enough to bring the conversation round to investments, transactions and such. And so we got to talking of the whole art of making money; until one of us suddenly introduced the theme of leaving that game, of giving it up altogether, retiring and living far away from towns on such money as one had made. For those who care to know the general feeling of the Billiards Club upon such topics as this, I may say that the consensus of opinion was very soon evident, and it held that it cannot be done; that you cannot deliberately turn from acquiring gold, where it is at all plentiful and you have the power to acquire it. The issue was slightly confused at first by several members saying that they had retired from business themselves: the personal histories of the commercial careers of members of the Billiards Club will not interest the general public, so let it suffice to say that old age, bankruptcy, depreciation of stocks, or general commercial depression, are four factors that amongst them accounted for every case. It is the turning away from gold while it is still to be had in handfuls that in our opinion, as soon as it crystallized, cannot be done by any man.

“That is so,” said Jorkens suddenly.

We thought he was asleep in his chair.

He said it so finally, so judicially, that, even though he confirmed the opinion of all of us, Terbut felt that he must contradict.

“It is not so easy for anyone to find gold just now,” said Terbut.

“There’s no difficulty in that,” said Jorkens, away amongst shadows that bowed and trembled before the fire.

“Can you find it?” said Terbut, from the table where most of us still lingered late after lunch; and outside was the darkening sky of a forbidding December.

“Plenty of it,” said Jorkens.

“Where?” answered Terbut, rather naturally.

“If you’ve a good map,” began Jorkens.

And Terbut almost ran to an atlas that there was lying about, and had it in Jorkens’ hand before there was time for the conversation to take any other turn. And Jorkens opened it with perfect composure, and turned the pages to India.

“It’s on an island in a lake,” said Jorkens. “The island’s barely an acre, a quarter mile out from the shore. It’s heaped with nuggets. Big ones; the lake’s an old crater nearly a mile across; and I imagine that all that gold must have been thrown up by volcanoes. The nuggets are big as flints, the kind that you see in flint-heaps gathered up from a farm. There was probably a pool of it once, all molten, a mile or so down, a lake perhaps; and the volcano shot it up, a fountain of gold. I should have liked to have seen it going up. They say that granite has often been shot up like that.”

“Did you mention the name of the lake?” said Terbut.

“Umboodwa,” said Jorkens.

“Could you show it us on the map?” continued Terbut.

“Yes,” replied Jorkens. “The actual name’s not marked, but there, where there’s no sign of water, it’s just there, by my finger.”

“No sign of water?” repeated Terbut.

“No,” Jorkens continued, “the Government don’t allow it to appear on any map.”

“Is it there at all?” asked Terbut.

“Certainly,” said Jorkens. “I’ve seen it.”

“You’ve seen it?” said Terbut.

“Yes,” said Jorkens.

“A bit difficult, wasn’t it?” said Terbut. “If the Government wouldn’t let it be marked on the map, they can hardly have been very keen on your going there.”

“They weren’t so particular in those days,” said Jorkens.

“And what made them grow more so?” went on the tenacious Terbut.

“You see,” said Jorkens reflectively, “I was the only one that ever came back from it.”

“The only one?” Terbut muttered.

“I think so,” said Jorkens.

And then we got the rather peculiar tale of how Jorkens went to Umboodwa.

“I first heard of it,” said he, “at a club they had in the hills. Some of them asked me to dine there once or twice.”

“What were you doing in India, Jorkens?” asked one of us.

“Just looking round,” said Jorkens; “taking a look at the lie of the land.”

“That all?” said Terbut.

“That and one thing and another,” said Jorkens. “And I happened to come to the Terai, and upon the hills above me was this club, among a few houses, white like patches of snow. I dined there once or twice. Well, they used to play pretty high in those days. I don’t give you the name of the club, because they asked me not to mention what happened that night. I’ll tell you, but I’ll suppress names. Well, one night when I was there a young fellow got up from one of those tables, having lost £250. Lost it in one sitting. He got up very white and said: ‘I must go to Umboodwa.’

“The men to whom he had lost the money shrugged their shoulders at that, and with no more said by anyone he went out of the room.

“I naturally began to ask about Umboodwa. ‘Oh, it’s a place,’ was the sort of answer I got. There seems to have been some kind of distrust of it even then. And with their effort to hush up the episode of losing £250 at a sitting I heard little more about Umboodwa then. But I persevered and was very soon on the track of it. After all, you can’t easily hide a lake nearly a mile across and something like three miles long. What I didn’t quite like about it was that, by the time I had found out all I wanted to know of how to get to the lake, I began to ask about that young fellow who had walked out, all white, from the club. The bare fact is, he was never heard of again. I didn’t like that, naturally. But I went to Umboodwa.

“I got there from the hills in a couple of days. I got to within fifteen miles of it by train; and then hired a bullock-tonga, and travelled in that as far as there was a road, and then walked over the circular line of low hills that hide the lake from the world. Below me from the top of the hills there lay a perfect circle, part land and part lake. In the lake was a little island, a quarter of a mile from the shore, with a tiny temple on it. There was another small temple on the mainland, at the nearest point to the island, and there seemed to be no paths anywhere. There was no particular scenery to tell you of, except for the perfection of that circle that was made by the low hills. By the little temple opposite the island there were one or two men walking about. There were no boats whatever.

“I walked down to the two men, who seemed to take no notice of my coming until I was quite close, and one of them then came a little way forward to meet me. They both looked the kind of Indians that spend their time contemplating things, and I hardly expected either of them to be practical guides. But the one that was coming to meet me said at once: ‘You want gold?’ So that at any rate he knew what I had come about. It was curious being asked such a question by this Indian: over here we take it for granted.

“ ‘Yes, please,’ I said.

“ ‘Will you please to take a ticket? It is two rupees,’ he told me; which is about half a crown. And he motioned me to the other man.”

“Half a crown for a ticket to pick up gold nuggets?” exclaimed Terbut.

“No,” answered Jorkens, “for a bathing-suit.”

“A bathing-suit,” muttered Terbut.

“There are a lot of places like that,” Jorkens replied, “where they won’t let you enter the water without a bathing-suit. But here it was particularly necessary, because the suit was equipped with pockets in which to carry the gold. But in any case they wouldn’t let you go in without it. So I paid my half-crown for a little paper ticket, and went and got the kit. It was handed out to me by a man in a little shack by the temple, very much as you might get your bathing kit at a swimming bath in England. But everything else was different. The kit was different; and the attitude of the two men by the shore, though you couldn’t describe it, was different from anything else whatever. They both sat down and they watched me; they watched me alertly all the time I was there, and utterly without interest. That’s odd, you know; and it gave me an odd feeling; to be watched by eyes that noted your every movement, and yet without caring, as one could see by the look of them, whether one prospered or failed in anything that one wanted, or even whether one were alive or dead. That look on their faces as they watched me left me no illusions as to what they would do if I got into difficulties swimming back from the island; they would go on with their watching. I didn’t know, when I came to that conclusion, how long they both had been at that very thing. They must have been at it for years.”

“At what?” said Terbut.

“Watching men drowning,” said Jorkens.

“Murdering them, do you mean?” said Terbut, suddenly indignant.

“Not in the least,” said Jorkens. “Just watching the very thing we were speaking of a little while ago, the difficulty men find in stopping the acquisition of gold.

“Well, I stripped and the fellow in the shack by the temple strapped the bathing kit on to me: it fastened from behind. In front there were two large bags to carry the nuggets, with the opening below, so that you had to close them when filled, to prevent everything falling out. They closed with padlocks, and, as the man who took my ticket kept the key, there was no opening them till one brought them back to the temple. Well, he told me one or two things about the lake; told me the depth of it, though I don’t know how he knew that; said that it was five miles; and said that sometimes there were storms on it, local storms when no wind was blowing. And he told me about the nuggets on the island and said that I could take as many as I liked; any man might do that who bought the two-rupee ticket, but he could only go once. There is a rather similar arrangement in the Sudan, where you buy a licence to shoot (amongst other things) two Mrs. Gray’s Cob: you can never go back again for the rest of your life to shoot any more of that animal, when once you have got your two.”

“I wonder you didn’t go across in a boat,” said Terbut, “and get the whole lot, you could surely have got a boat there.”

“A boat,” said Jorkens. “That’s just what one couldn’t do. To begin with it would be stealing; for the gold on that island legally belongs to the idol they keep in that temple; not a very nice idol either; and the ownership is definitely respected by the Government of India. Your two-rupee ticket only entitles you to bring away what you can swim with. More than that the idol does not grant. As for boats, boats anywhere near that lake are contrary to the religion of the people whose little temple is there, and contrary to the edicts of the idol, drawn up for it by its priests. Bringing a boat there would be just like taking a bicycle into St. Paul’s cathedral: it isn’t done, and it can’t be.

“Well, I walked down to the shore and into the warm water, and found the queer kit they had fastened on me hampered me very little. A swim of four hundred yards or so didn’t tire me much in those days, and whenever I felt in the least need of a rest I turned over and floated. And so I came to the island in under ten minutes.

“And there the nuggets were, in enormous numbers, lying like flints in the stoniest field that anyone ever set eyes on; and an old man sitting upon the ground outside a little temple was watching, without raising his eyes at my arrival, as though he only cared to see which of the nuggets I’d take. They were lying all over the shore like big potatoes. I began to calculate how many I should be able to carry, after a good rest before swimming back; I picked up several and felt the weight of them; I found out how to get them into the sacks which had the openings below; I did it by lying down and tilting myself a little up from my heels. And then I looked at the old man again. And a look at his eyes made me think again about the whole business: he looked too much like Destiny watching a village that was going to get an avalanche or some other disaster; children and chickens running about, and men singing, and nobody guessing that all that wouldn’t go on year after year for ages; and only Destiny knowing. He looked like that. And I began to think of the other two men, and the man who had sold me the ticket. I began to get the idea that whoever took one nugget would take one or two more, and that those men might not be so ready as they appeared to give all that gold away to any stranger at the price of half a crown. And gradually from that, looking every now and then at the eyes of the old man sitting there without speaking, I very luckily came upon the idea that the only way to get safe from that place at all was to acquire the idea about gold that they evidently held themselves in the two little temples; to ignore it, that is to say, altogether, and to leave it alone as one would leave alone cobras. You see, you wouldn’t much think of swimming with leaden belts strapped on to you, belts that you couldn’t get off; yet there’s this advantage in lead, there’s no temptation to take just a little bit more, and a little bit more again, beyond the amount you are sure you can safely carry. For a moment I thought of taking just one fair-sized nugget; but I see now that, if I had, I should never have stopped at one. And, just as I was making up my mind, I took one more look at the old man sitting there, who never had spoken yet. And somehow that look was enough. I ran down to the water, butting my toe on a horribly large nugget, and dived in and swam back for the shore; and a nasty storm was coming up from beneath, a very nasty storm, but I reached the shore before it got to its worst. There are thousands of men that have kept away from acquiring gold, and many no doubt have been as near as I, but any nearer is impossible; any nearer than that and it drags you down.”

And Jorkens uttered a sigh. The sigh of a man who has barely escaped a great peril? The sigh of a man who has lost incomparable riches? I don’t know which it was.