Читать книгу Jorkens Has a Large Whiskey - Edward 18th Baron of Dunsany Plunkett - Страница 8

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A good many of us at the Billiards Club are interested in gardening, but it gives a certain amount of zest to the atmosphere of the club to know that, when our tales of horticultural achievement are over, there is a good substratum of the various professions, represented by lawyers, doctors, retired soldiers, etc.; so that in the end our talk is sufficiently varied. I have heard stories of vegetables there that would be of world-wide interest; in particular one concerning the size of a single bloom of a cauliflower, which would probably surprise my readers; and had these stories been true, I should have given them to the world long ago. On the day of which I shall tell there had been a story of extraordinary interest about the size of a pumpkin, grown by a member named Meakers, but to give its dimensions might be to mislead my readers; so that, rather than risk such a thing, I suppress the tale altogether. From this story the topic had passed into legal hands, and the extraordinary triumph of a rising young lawyer named Foggett was being related by a member named Taravel, himself a lawyer. Foggett had been defending a man accused of being drunk while in charge of a motor-car; he had driven it about twenty-five yards from his own door, on the wrong side of the road, and then collapsed over the wheel, while the car had come to a standstill against some convenient railings; it was a difficult case to defend, and elder lawyers looked on to see what a young man would make of it. What seemed to increase the difficulty of the defence was that over the whole of the twenty-five yards there lay a trail of empty gin bottles, and the prosecution had brought a witness to show that the man’s breath smelt of gin. This witness when asked about it in the box had been so emphatic that he had added to his statement about the breath, “The whole air smelt of gin.” It was upon this statement that Foggett laid his groundwork.

“Were there any gin bottles in the car?” he asked.

“No.”

“Was the gutter full of gin bottles?”

“Yes.”

“Did gin smell?”

“Yes.”

“Might not the smell of gin in the air, and in the breath that breathed it, be from the bottles that had been left in the gutter?”

The answer was mumbled, but had seemed to serve Foggett’s purpose. And then he had turned to a description of the atmosphere of London all through November and December, for it was in London in later December that the alleged offence had occurred, a description that was probably unequalled in those courts. He dwelt on the gloom that had come down late in October, the frequent fogs and the cold, the almost complete veiling of the sun for the short time that it should have been over the houses, and this going on and on with scarce any relief till Christmas. He quoted reports from the meteorologists’ office just where they suited his purpose, but never enough to check with tiresome detail the splendid flow of his oratory. The very gloom of the court, for it was only January, helped the less imaginative among the jury to see the picture that Foggett’s words were painting; and he welcomed this aid and put it to every use, though his brilliance might have dispensed with it. He took the gloom of those two months in London and seemed to condense it and hang it over the jury. Was he attempting to show a justification for drunkenness? the judge asked.

“No, my lord,” said Foggett, “but to show that it was not drunkenness from which my client was suffering.”

“What then?” said the judge.

“Sunstroke,” said Foggett.

And then the jury began to see light. It was not to drink that the gloom of the weather had been driving the accused, according to Foggett, but to artificial sun-bathing; and in despair at the long weeks of darkness the man had overdone it. He made them see that drink could not bring back the sun that London had lost; that the urgent need was for ultra-violet rays. The judge made a few ineffectual efforts, but the jury were away after Foggett, and the accused was triumphantly acquitted, and was given the ovation upon leaving the court, that properly belonged to his counsel.

For a while the lawyers that were in the club talked over Taravel’s story, till the followers of other avocations were stung into emulation and began to tell tales to show what their callings could do; even a chess-player tried to join in. Old tales of many professions were brought to light, showing heights to which their most gifted followers came, and as every tale was ended, another member would hastily draw his cigar, to get it well alight before he partially neglected it to talk, and would usually begin with, “That reminds me of a case....” And so we would get another story. So they went on. And then Jorkens spoke.

“It’s not always the regular professions,” he said, “that achieve the greatest things.”

“Not?” said somebody.

“No,” said Jorkens.

A silence fell on the club; perhaps they’d had tales enough; but I for one have a certain liking for Jorkens, or it may be that a slight curiosity was aroused in me by the prospect of some touch of novelty that there might be in work outside the well-known professions. So I said to Jorkens: “I don’t suppose you could give us an actual example.”

“A very remarkable achievement in medicine,” said Jorkens, “one of the most remarkable in our time, was the discovery of a man I knew slightly. He wasn’t a doctor.”

“Why not?” asked Terbut.

“He did want to be,” said Jorkens. “Studied for medicine, and all that; in fact knew a great deal of it; but the authorities took some dislike to his private life, so that he was never a qualified doctor.”

“What was the matter with his private life?” asked Terbut.

“I never quite knew,” said Jorkens. “Just bad all round, I fancy. I rather think; mind you, I don’t know; but I rather think that Scotland Yard have his finger prints. I was at school with him, and he left that rather suddenly. Then I heard of him studying medicine. And after that he seemed to drift a bit, and one heard snatches of rumours about him; until finally I heard someone openly say of him what I told you about Scotland Yard, which I think rather stamps a man. But his intellect was amazing, and he made this remarkable discovery.”

“What was it?” asked Terbut.

Which was exactly what I was hoping that Terbut would ask.

“By a short treatment; two or three weeks;” said Jorkens, “he could make a man twenty years older.”

“But, but,” began Terbut.

“Twenty years older in every single respect,” said Jorkens; “teeth, wrinkles, colour of hair, figure, baldness, shortness of breath; actually older in every particular.”

“But, but,” said Terbut again.

But Jorkens went on ahead of him: “And it answered to every test; blood-pressure, stethoscope, or any other test you please.”

Again Terbut butted in, and still Jorkens ran on.

“And what is more, after a month’s convalescence, the man could go to him again, and he could make him twenty years older still; white hairs this time instead of grey, and everything to match.”

“But, but, but,” said Terbut, “who would want to be twenty years older? Can you answer me that?”

“I’ll tell you a story,” said Jorkens.

We all leaned forward to listen, or sat back in our chairs, according to our different ways of settling ourselves to pass a quarter of an hour away; for each of the professions had had its tale, and we somehow felt it the due of that great body of men on whom none leaves cards that they also should have their little meed of praise for whatever they might have done.

“A man stood in the sun,” said Jorkens, “at the door of a lodging-house, and rang the bell, while the sea pounded gravel behind him. He was perhaps forty. Presently the landlady came to the door, which she opened herself, and standing there on the threshold she summed him up thus, before either of them spoke: ‘Thirty-eight or thirty-nine, been ill, well-enough off for the front room, worried about something, quiet young man except when he drinks cocktails, hasty then.’ ”

“How did she know all that?” asked Terbut.

“Know all that?” said Jorkens. “Why! Doesn’t every trade know something of its own raw materials? I don’t know how they do it. But they know at a glance. They have to. Take jewellers, or bootmakers, or ...”

“Yes, I know,” I said. “They all find it quite simple.”

“Oh, well,” said Terbut.

“Very well,” said Jorkens. “So, when she’d done that, she said, ‘It’s a nice morning.’ And he said ‘Very nice.’ And then they got to talking about that front room. And he said he wanted to live quietly for a few weeks, as he had not been very well; nothing infectious. And all that was settled; and he lived in the front bedroom in a way that Mrs. Hemens, his landlady, described afterwards as ‘nice and quiet,’ and had his meals there by himself. And yet, for all Mrs. Hemens’ professional summing up of her lodger, there was one thing about him that she couldn’t make out; and she didn’t know what it was.

“Mrs. Hemens used to go up to her lodger’s room once a day and have a few minutes’ talk with him. He was pleasant-spoken enough.

“Gradually the thing that Mrs. Hemens could not understand crystallized itself into this, that he looked one thing and talked another. It was not that he was trying to deceive her about anything; he didn’t seem, she thought, to be doing that; it was merely that he talked about football, while he looked more likely to care for golf, and asked of all manner of things that looked out of his line altogether; and so it went on and she seemed to get no nearer; to get no nearer, I mean, to what was part of her life’s work, to learn the history, status and income of all her lodgers. Naturally she used suspicion, as well as other kinds of research, to further her quest for information: she even discussed crime with him as the newspapers provided the cases, but there did not seem any case to which she could fit him. There were plenty of crimes recorded, but the perpetrators of them were soon laid by the heels; until there only remained one mystery, the murder of a woman in London; and the alleged murderer was known, but had escaped, and was still at large. But his age was given by Scotland Yard as twenty. They discussed that murder one day: ‘It’s young men that do that sort of murder before they settle down and get sense,’ said the lodger.

“ ‘It’s bad men that do it,’ Mrs. Hemens had said.

“ ‘Yes, but young ones,’ the lodger insisted.

“He had a little stubbly beard, and was growing it longer. When he had been there ten days without receiving a letter from anyone, Mrs. Hemens went down to the police station and carefully described her lodger, but no one answering to her description was wanted by the police.

“One day, as though drawn irresistibly to speak of a topic that he had long avoided, he blurted out to Mrs. Hemens, ‘How old do you think I am?’

“And she had answered ‘Thirty-five,’ only meaning to please him.

“The shadow of some horror had seemed to touch him at that. ‘Thirty-five!’ he exclaimed. ‘I am nearer forty-five.’

“ ‘Put you at thirty-five or thirty-six,’ she repeated. And his uneasiness seemed to increase.

“From then on he never went out, even at night, but haunted his room like a ghost, the front bedroom that looked over the sea; till one day he blurted out furtively, ‘I must leave at once. I have an important appointment in London.’

“To London he went, and to the house of Caber, which he knew well enough where to find: he had been there before: it was Caber who had made him forty: he was a young man of twenty, wanted for murder.”

“You haven’t told us his name,” said Terbut.

“Boran,” said Jorkens.

“Why! I remember that case,” said Terbut.

And I said so too, and several of the rest of us. He had murdered a woman, cutting her throat in a flat, and locking it up, by which he gained twenty-four hours, and twelve hours more while the police found out who did it; then he had disappeared. As a matter of fact he had gone to Caber’s house, and Caber had hidden him while he did the course; and he had slipped out one night, a man of forty, and gone down to the seaside.

“Let me see. Didn’t something go wrong with him under an anaesthetic?” said someone.

“Not a bit of it,” said Jorkens. “I’ll tell you what happened. He slipped back to Caber’s house, the night that he left the lodgings, and when there was no one about in the street he gave the knock on the little door, that Caber’s patients knew, and Caber heard it and came down and let him in. I fancy he had to ring the bell before knocking, so as to wake Caber, then wait half a minute and knock; but I don’t know exactly what Caber’s arrangements were; they didn’t quite know that even at Scotland Yard. It was he that told me what became of Boran. Nothing to do with an anaesthetic.”

“You seem to have known Caber fairly well,” said Terbut.

“No,” said Jorkens. “I had happened to find out about his practice, that is to say treating people in the way I have told you. Of course it was all pretty secret, but somebody had to know or he would never have had any patients; and amongst the right people, as he called them (the wrong people, as we should say), it was pretty widely known. His clientele, as he called it, was limited, not only by there being rather few cases in which men needed to be twenty years older, but also by his fee, which was a thousand pounds.”

“A thousand pounds!” exclaimed Terbut.

“Yes,” replied Jorkens. “More murderers can scrape that together than you would suppose, when it comes to that or the rope. Look at the expensive defences they often put up. Well, a man committed his murder, then he would often wait a few days till he found that Scotland Yard had got on his tracks, and then, if he knew about Caber, and it is wonderful how the news of him percolated (it was like underground water) he would slip down to the Caledonian Market, where more than one could tell him of Caber’s address and how to knock on his door. If you went down there with a fiver in your hand, it mightn’t be long before you came on one of the right men yourself.”

“Thank you,” muttered Terbut.

“No, no, no. I am not suggesting anything,” said Jorkens. “Well then, his fee was a thousand; and Boran came running in panting for fright, and his extra twenty years, all because his landlady had said he looked thirty-five. It seemed too close to twenty, and Boran didn’t seem to himself to have altered much, not knowing that there were all kinds of scientific tests that would have proved he was long past twenty. He panicked and asked for another twenty years.”

“Sixty,” said Terbut.

“Yes,” said Jorkens, “but with ten more years to live at least, as Boran had figured it out; and then dying in bed. He thought it well worth it. And you must remember, for you say you do remember the case, that the police had photographs of him in every paper that ever published photographs, even The Times; who said they didn’t usually do that sort of work; but Scotland Yard were so keen, that they had to. Well, naturally Caber didn’t try to dissuade him, if he wasn’t satisfied with the twenty years that he had got already, forty in all; he merely pocketed his second thousand and started off on the course. I think a fortnight was all it took. Of course he never told me how he did it; you’d hardly get a qualified doctor to do that. I fancy he used cocktails a good deal; distilled essences of them, you know; and of course a great many other things. He never told me that. But he told me much more than what came out later. The course was going perfectly satisfactorily, he told me; following the lines of the first; in fact Boran took to it very well. He was ageing all over; every evening when Caber made his observations at the same hour, in the room in which he hid Boran, he could see definite progress; and at the end of ten days the white hairs were coming on nicely. Everything else of course was keeping pace, and Boran was fattening rapidly and developing a beautiful stoop. When I call it beautiful you know what I mean; I mean beautiful from Caber’s point of view; you know what collectors are, and how much a beetle or a postage stamp may mean to them; well, stoops and wrinkles and shortness of breath, and even a touch of sciatica, were all that to Caber. And they were coming on nicely. At the end of the fortnight Boran might have gone to any police station in London and said ‘I am Boran, the man that did that murder,’ and conviction would have been impossible, so he should have had another ten years to live if his make-up was timed to run down at seventy; but there was no end to that fortnight for Boran. It wasn’t any anaesthetic: he didn’t have any. In fact it was nothing that came out at the inquest. Not a word of that was true. It was merely that Boran’s constitution, or whatever you call it, was timed to run to about fifty-eight. Call it Fate, if you like. The way I look at it is that men die at various ages, according to their make-up, and fifty-eight was Boran’s time.”

“But Boran was only twenty,” blurted out Terbut.

“I told you,” said Jorkens patiently, “that Caber was making him older. He was ageing him in every respect. After twelve days Boran began to show symptoms that a proper doctor would have recognized. Heart trouble, I fancy. By dawn on the thirteenth day Caber was getting alarmed. He tried every remedy then of which he knew anything, against the most deadly disease that is known to man.”

“Dear me,” said Terbut. “What is that?”

“Old age,” said Jorkens; “and you want to be careful. Well, he didn’t make any headway, and by the time that people were about, Boran was dead. It was a nasty position for Caber. Boran looked younger when he was dead, and Caber pulled out his white hairs and smartened him up a bit, and managed to get him identified. He was naturally keen that, if he had to have a corpse in his house, he could say it was the body of someone that Scotland Yard wanted to hang; but, even then, he felt himself in the position of a poacher who has shot a fox that the foxhounds are hunting. And that’s very much the position that he was in too. But in the end Scotland Yard were very sporting about it. They wanted to see Boran dead, and they took the sensible view that, provided Caber hadn’t actually murdered him, they could afford to do without the trial and the hanging of Boran. And of course Caber hadn’t murdered him; so there was that inquest and the evidence that you read; not a word of it true of course, but interesting as showing the point of view that the police very reasonably took. And that is really about all that Caber told me.”

“He seems to have told you a good deal,” said Terbut.

“A certain amount,” said Jorkens.

“I wonder,” said Terbut, “how one manages to get a man like that to tell one so much.”

“Personally,” said Jorkens, “I got him to tell it me for an old tie.”

“An old tie?” said Terbut.

“Yes,” said Jorkens, “our old school-tie. It can only be got by those that have been at the school and that are properly qualified to wear it. The few shops that supply it have all our names in a book. Caber wasn’t qualified.”