Читать книгу Jorkens Remembers Africa - Edward 18th Baron of Dunsany Plunkett - Страница 5

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All through the summer Jorkens had told us no story. He often lunched at the Billiards Club, but it was never his custom to talk much while he was eating, and afterwards he used to rest in a chair. I would not say he slept; it was rather more of a torpor; and, although he muttered sometimes, he told no story. Nobody minded; there are all sorts of things to do in summer: gardening, golf, weeding lawns, and a hundred other things that take up one’s time and one’s interest and give one plenty to talk about, without needing to listen to Jorkens. I recollect one member of our club telling me a story about gardening. It was not in the least true, but it served to pass the time away and entitled one to tell a similar tale in return. Then someone else would talk of his garden, and so on. And all the while Jorkens lay undisturbed in his chair. But when November came, when gardening was over, when the days grew short in London almost suddenly, and the fog and the night began to shut down upon us in earnest, then it hardly seemed that any tales we might tell could bring back to our memories any ray of lost summer, and some of us naturally turned to Jorkens then; for, whatever we may think of the method he had of inspiring himself, his tales had at any rate an origin in lands that shimmered with sunshine, and he seemed to have the knack of bringing some of it to us through the dark and early evening that hung bleak by our windows. So one November day, quite early in the month, I took the liberty of talking to Jorkens while he rested after his lunch; and though he did not immediately recall who I was, or follow the trend of my remarks, I certainly brought back his attention to us, so that later on when another of us referred to one or two of his earlier gallantries, a twinkle woke in his eye, though he did not speak. He did not speak until he had had some refreshment that I was only too glad to provide for him; and then I questioned him directly. I had framed my question with some care, knowing that the unusual had an unfailing attraction for Jorkens. “Have you ever failed,” I asked, “in any affair with a lady?”

For a moment he seemed about to say “No,” when the banality of such an answer froze the word on his lips, and for several seconds he appeared deep in thought.

“Only once,” said Jorkens. “No, only once. Oh, it is a long time ago now, and it was a long long way from here. I’ll tell you. It was in the island of Anaktos. You probably don’t know it, in the Mediterranean, far away from here. In the Mediterranean in the early summer. Well, it’s all gone now. But that summer in Anaktos I first saw her, walking along a path under the pepper trees in the bright morning. There were eighteen of them, sisters of the Greek Reformed Church. They had a convent on the island, and it was easy to see where she came from; that was not the difficulty. The difficulty was in speaking to her at all, or in even seeing her face. Yes, they don’t wear cowls, those sisters; they veil themselves completely. They wear white gloves too: you don’t see an inch of skin. They have some sort of holy saying that where a fly can alight there is room for Satan. Well, there it was, you see. And yet, for all that, I got the idea, and never have I had any idea more strongly, that she was extraordinarily beautiful. She was tall and slender and she had lovely hands, and she walked with a stride as graceful and light as the step of any young antelope, slipping unseen from the forest on hooves unheard by the lions. Of her hair I can tell you nothing, and I never saw her eyes.

“She walked third on the left, of the eighteen. It was a difficult situation: I was determined to speak to her alone; and you can do that even when they are walking with seventeen others, if once you can catch their eye; but when you cannot even see their eyes, you cannot make any sign to one more than to the whole lot. Even if I waited at a corner and signed just as she came round ... no, there seemed no way of doing it. Oh, I did a lot of thinking. I thought of leaving a note in the path, with a leaf over it, and pulling the leaf away with a bit of silk just as the second two passed it, and it would be right before her. She always walked in the same place in that procession. But that would have been no use, because they would have all seen her stoop to pick it up, and I knew where that note would have gone. I somehow felt sure when I first saw the procession that it would come the same way every day at the same hour, except of course on saints’ days; and, sure enough, it did. And every day my belief in her surpassing beauty grew stronger, and for a week I could think of nothing that was any good at all. They’d a good wall at the convent; quite ten feet high, and broken glass on the top that didn’t look to me particularly Christian. But it wasn’t the wall that stopped me, but the impossibility of finding her if I got over, before I found one of the others, or nine of them for that matter, for that’s what the odds were. If I threw a note over, the odds were no better; and of course I didn’t even know her name.

“Well, at the end of the week the idea came to me. Of course all great ideas are simple ones; but I’d been thinking too hard, and so I hadn’t hit on it. And when it did come I can take no credit for it: I didn’t get it by thinking. I was walking to a place, a little wood, where I could be alone and think things out, one day when she had passed me for the seventh or eighth time, with that gentle and beautiful stride, her hands swaying very softly like slightly wind-blown flowers; I was pushing into the wood, which nobody owned or tended, when a burr stuck to my clothes. I doubt if I should ever have found any way to speak to her, if it had not been for that. I had barely touched the burr and yet it stuck; and when I tried to pull it off it seemed to stick harder than ever.

“That’s what I got my idea from. And what I did was to write a note on tissue paper and roll it up very small and fasten it on to the burr. I simply wrote, ‘Most beautiful of the sisters, here or in any land; I must speak with you. Tell me where to come. If you refuse, be sure that I shall, go to everlasting perdition.’

“I didn’t set much store by the last sentence, because after all she was a woman. But just in case she was too much frozen by dogma, then the threat of hell would be just the thing for her; because it is their job to keep souls from hell, not to send them there. So I threw that in on the tiny bit of paper. Practically blackmail.

“Well, I never quite knew which part of the letter fetched her, but some part of it did. For I walked towards them along their path next day and threw the burr at her dress as she passed; and, not the day following that, but the day after that one, the same burr hit my jacket as we passed at the usual place. Her note said ‘At five tomorrow in our orchard, if you can climb the wall by the ilex.’

“If I could climb the wall. Five stone less than I am now, and invisible wings to lift me; that’s what one has in youth. Yes, I could climb the wall. I made a sort of ladder for the near side, out of logs, and took up plenty of sacking for the glass bottles. Then I fastened a rope to the trunk of a handy tree and took the end over the wall with me to get back by. The ilex was no use for climbing down, but it was a world of use for concealing me from the windows. And there was the orchard underneath me, and plenty of cover from the trees if you went carefully. She was standing there expecting me, and looking pretty grim, so far as you could tell by her attitude; to make up, I almost fancied, for her lapse in answering my note. Why, even reading it, in a place like that, was probably more of a sin than shoplifting would be here. Well, there she stood, looking pretty forbidding, but it was her all right; there could be no doubt of that, though her face was still muffled up and gloves covered her hands and wrists.

“Her first words to me were: ‘Why did you write that you would go to everlasting perdition? What did you mean by it?’

“ ‘Because,’ I said, ‘your beauty has so profoundly enchanted me.’

“ ‘How can you know,’ she asked, ‘if I am beautiful or not?’

“And I was so enthralled by a strange certainty that I answered: ‘I know.’

“And then she went back to her original question, ‘Why everlasting perdition?’

“ ‘Because,’ I said, ‘there would be nothing else left for me.’

“ ‘But how?’ she asked.

“ ‘Easy enough,’ I said. ‘Just helplessly drifting.’

“She wouldn’t leave that point for a long while. But I didn’t want to talk about my soul. I had better things to talk of. You know how it is if you’re with a beautiful woman, and she is all wrapped up in mystery; you don’t think much about your soul. But she didn’t want to talk of anything else. I began to wish I had never mentioned it. And yet, if I hadn’t, who knows if I’d ever have seen her. I thought at first that I had attracted the woman in her, and that she was only pretending to be more interested in everlasting perdition. But she stuck to her point until I began to wonder. And such a place for a talk like that; the grey boles of old apple trees clustered in a quiet angle of the great convent wall, the green lawns flashing beyond through gaps in the gnarled branches, with the old ilex shadowing us and sheltering us from view. What a place for a talk about Hell! But she would have it. And I would have it that it was to Hell I would go if her beauty took no pity on me.

“Again, ‘How do you know if I am beautiful?’

“And again I swore to her in all sincerity that I surely knew she was lovely.

“And then she ridiculed me; and then my turn came. ‘Take off those veils,’ I said. ‘And prove it.’

“And at first she said ‘No,’ and that it was against the rules of their Order. But I said, ‘No. You have mocked at truth. You laughed at me for saying that you were beautiful. Truth comes before all your rules.’

“I argued like that with her for a while, and at last I saw I was winning. She hadn’t said she would unveil, but I knew she was going to; I was as sure as one sometimes is that some bursting bud in Spring, on an early morning, will be an open flower by noon. Her hands moved to her hood where all those veils were fastened, then she let them drop again and began to talk of her childhood. Who she was and what she was she did not say, but she spoke of a terror that came when she was young, moving from village to village as quietly as lengthening shadows, and bringing death with it or life-long disfigurement: that was the smallpox. ‘I was perhaps,’ she said, and seemed to tremble as though Satan would hear her, ‘perhaps I was beautiful then.’

“ ‘And what, what happened then?’ I asked as well as I could, for something came to me suddenly, like an icy wind through the apple-trunks, a fear, for the first time, of something amiss.

“ ‘The smallpox,’ she said simply. ‘I just escaped with my life. Of my beauty’ (and still she said the word as though it were sin to speak it) ‘nothing remained, and scarcely even my features.’

“ ‘Scarcely ...’ I blurted out, and found no more to say. And she kindly filled the gap in our shattered conversation.

“ ‘You do not wish to see my face now?’ she said.

“But that was not true. I could have wept to hear of the ruin of that beauty of which I felt so sure. And yet I could not believe that in the ruins was no trace at all of the radiant face I had fancied. And fancy wasn’t the word for it either: it seemed nothing less than insight.

“So I said, ‘Yes. Still. And as much as ever.’

“I thought that the glory that is in beautiful faces might linger there even yet.

“And then to console her for whatever was lost, and because it was perfectly true, I said: ‘You have a beautiful voice.’

“And she answered: ‘All my people have beautiful voices.’

“And as yet she had said nothing of who they were.

“ ‘Your people?’ I said.

“ ‘Yes, the Hottentots,’ was her answer.

“ ‘The Hottentots!’ I exclaimed.

“And she seemed offended by something she heard in my voice, and repeated proudly, ‘The Hottentots.’

“Did I tell you we were speaking in English, and perfect English?

“ ‘But you speak English,’ I gasped.

“ ‘The English rule there,’ she said.

“ ‘But the convent? The Order?’ I blurted out, clinging still to a despairing hope that what she told was impossible.

“ ‘It is open to all,’ she said, ‘accepting the discipline of the Greek Reformed Church.’

“I was silent, silent, silent. You could hear the young leaves swaying to a small breeze lost in the apple trees. And then after a long while she spoke again. She turned her veiled face to me, I remember, and said: ‘You still wish to see my face?’

“And I said ‘Yes.’ What else could one say? I could hardly say No, even if I hadn’t asked her to unveil. When I said Yes, she moved her hands again to her hood and began the untying of a great number of knots, and all of them seemed as tight as though some elder hand had wrenched them shut with a jerk. It gave my eyes time to rove, and my thoughts with them. Otherwise I should have seen her face. But now I saw, far enough off, I admit, but I saw two sisters walking over a lawn: I saw their white dresses every now and then as they crossed the little vistas between the trunks of the apple-trees. And I meant to tell her this, and to say that if unveiling was against the rules of her convent, now would not be the time to do it. But her hands were busy with the last of those knots. And all I said in the end was, ‘Perhaps not now.’

“Then I took one long long look at her, remembering my illusion, an illusion that is often with me still, coming suddenly back to me at a glimpse of orchards or ilex; then I went to my rope and got back over the wall.”

And Jorkens looked sadly into the deeps of the fire, as though the old illusion were glowing there still and a little warming the blood of the middle-aged man by its beauty, after Lord knows how long. In common gratitude I signed to the waiter.

Really there was no more for anyone to say. Watley needn’t have spoken at all. And yet he did. And this was what he said: “It was no illusion, Jorkens.”

“What!” said Jorkens.

“No illusion,” Watley repeated. “The sisters of the Greek Reformed Church are the loveliest girls in those islands. They make a point of it. Whenever they get a beautiful girl they count it a victory over Satan. And they are beautiful.”

“But a Hottentot,” said Jorkens, “disfigured by smallpox.”

“Oh, that,” said Watley with a wave of his hand as though sweeping smallpox and Hottentot out of the world. “They keep their wits about them. ‘Be cunninger than the Tempter’ is one of their mottoes.”

Jorkens gripped the whiskey that was by now beside him, and drained it without a word. Again I signed to the waiter. Still Jorkens was utterly silent, and seemingly miles away from us, or more likely years and years. Another whiskey came, and he drained that too. And as he still said nothing, sitting there heedless of us, we went quietly away from the room and left him alone. As I went through the door he still seemed searching and searching for something lost in the sinking glow of the fire.