Читать книгу Jorkens Remembers Africa - Edward 18th Baron of Dunsany Plunkett - Страница 7

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We could not remember, any of us at the Club, who it was that first invented the twopenny stamp on cheques. There were eight or nine of us there, and not one of us could put a name to him. Of course a lot of us knew, but we’d all forgotten it. And that started us talking of the tricks memory plays. Some said memory didn’t matter so much; some said it was looking forward that mattered most in business, or even watching closely what was going on around you now. And at that Jorkens stepped in. No, memory was the thing, he said; he could have made more by a good steady memory than by any amount of looking into the future.

“I don’t see how that could be,” said a stock-broker, who had just bought Jaffirs at 62, on pretty good information that they would go to 75. As a matter of fact they fell to 59¼.

But Jorkens stuck to his point. “With a good all-round memory,” he said, “I could have made millions.”

“But how?” asked the stock-broker.

“Well, it was this way,” said Jorkens. “I had a rather nice pearl in a tie-pin. And things weren’t quite going the way I liked; financially, I mean. Well, to cut a long story short, I decided to pop my pearl. I remember waiting till it was dark one winter’s evening, so as to get to the pawnshop decently unobserved. And I went in and unscrewed the pearl off its pin, and saw it no more. That put the financial position on a sound basis again; but I came out a little what you call ruefully, and I suppose my face must have shown it, and I was sticking back what was left of my gold pin into my tie. Funny how anyone could have noticed all that, but I’ve observed that when people are a little bit drunk they sometimes do. Anyway there was a tall man leaning against a wall, a man I had never seen before in my life, and he looked at me in a lazy sort of way, not troubling to move his head, only his eyes, and even them he seemed barely troubling to turn and keep open; and he said, ‘You want to go to Carrapaccas beach. That’s where you want to go.’ And he gave me the latitude and longitude. ‘Pearls to be had for the gathering there,’ he said.

“And I asked him what he meant, why he spoke to me. I asked him all kinds of things. But all he would say was, ‘You go to Carrappas beach,’ not even giving it the same name the second time.

“Well, I jotted the latitude and longitude down on my shirt-cuff; both shirt-cuffs, to be quite sure; and I thought the thing over a lot. And the first thing I saw as I thought things over was that the man was perfectly genuine; he had probably had this secret for years, and then one day he had had a drop too much, and had blurted the thing out. You may say what you like against drink, but you don’t find a man to tell you a thing like that, just because he’s sorry for you for losing a pearl, when he’s sober. And mind you the Carrappas beaches, or whatever he called them, were there. The longitude was a long way East, and the latitude a lot South, and I started one day from London, heading for Aden. Did I tell you all this was in London? No place like it for starting on journeys. Well, I started from London and came again to Aden. I had a very curious romance there once. In fact I was married in Aden. Well, well, that’s all gone now.

“So I came to Aden and began looking about. What I was looking for was three sailors; I fancied we could do it with that; and one of those queer small boats with green keels. Sails, of course. Well, I found two sailors; just the men I was looking for. One was named Bill, and the other The Portugee, though both looked English to me so far as I could tell. And they could get another man who was a half-wit, who they said would do very well. The beauty of that was that only two had to be in it. I told them at once it was something to do with treasure, and they said that the third hand could be left on board when the rest of us went ashore, and would be quite happy singing a song that he sang. I never knew what his name was; Bill and the Portugee used just to shout at him, and he would always answer. His home was Aden; I never learned where the other two came from. Well, I told Bill the latitude and the longitude, and we slipped out in a tiny ship one morning from Aden, sailing towards India. And it was a long, long time before we came to Carrappas beach, or whatever it was. And day after day the sky was the same blistering blue, till sunset flamed in our faces, gazing back over the stern, and there came every evening behind us the same outburst of stars, and all the way the half-wit sang the same song; only the sea altered. And at last we got there, as Bill had promised we would, a tiny bay with a white beach shining, shut off by rocks from the rest of the coast, and from the inner land by a cliff, a low cliff steep behind it. The little bay was no more than fifty yards long. We cast anchor then, and I swam ashore with Bill and the Portugee, and the half-wit sat on the deck singing his song. All that the drunken man had said was more than true. I hardly like to call him drunken, when I think what he did for me, all out of pure kindness. But you know what I mean; he had had a few drinks and they had made him quick to notice things and quick to feel for other people, and perfectly truthful; you know the old proverb. Probably too the drinks had brightened his memory, even to tiny details like latitude and longitude. I shall never forget the peculiar crunch as we walked. The pearls were mostly the size of good large peas, and seemed to go down to about six or eight inches on to a hard grey sand; but to that depth of six or eight inches along that fifty yards, and from the sea to the cliff, the beach was entirely composed of them. From sea to cliff was about fifteen yards, so that if you multiply that by fifty yards for the length, and by half a foot for the depth, you will see how much that was of solid pearls. I haven’t done the sum myself. They didn’t go out under the sea; it was nothing but dead oyster shells there. A funny little current scooped around that bay; we could see it doing it still, though the shells were all empty now; but once it must have idly gathered those pearls, and idly flung them on to the little beach, and roamed away into the Indian Ocean beyond the gaze of man. Well, of course there was nothing to do but to fill our pockets, and we set about doing that; and it was a very curious thing—you may hardly believe me—but it was all I could do to get Bill to fill more than one pocket. Of course we had to swim back to the ship, which makes a reasonable explanation, but it wasn’t Bill’s reason at all. It was simply a fear he had of growing too rich. ‘What’s it worth?’ he kept saying of his one pocketful. ‘Over two hundred thousand,’ I said at a guess. ‘Can’t see the difference between two hundred thousand and four hundred thousand,’ Bill would say.

“ ‘There’s a lot of difference,’ I’d tell him.

“ ‘Yes, when I’ve spent the two hundred thousand,’ Bill would go on.

“ ‘Well, there you are,’ I’d say.

“ ‘And when will that be?’ Bill would answer.

“I saw his point.

“And another thing he was very keen on. Bill seemed to have read of men who had come by big fortunes; won lotteries and one thing and another; and according to Bill they went all to pieces quickly, and Bill was frightened. It was all I could do to get him to fill the other pocket. The Portugee was quietly filling his, but with an uneasy ear taking in all Bill’s warnings. You know there was something a bit frightening about all that wealth. There was enough of it to have financed a war, or to have ruined a good-sized country in almost any other way. I didn’t stay more than a few minutes after my pockets were full, to sit on the beach and let the pearls run through my fingers. Then we swam back to the ship. I said to Bill, ‘What about one more load of pearls?’ For it seemed a pity not to. And Bill said only, ‘Up anchor.’ And the Portugee said, ‘I expect that’s best.’ And the half-wit stopped his song and got up the anchor, and we turned homeward towards Aden.

“In little more than a fortnight we came to that cindery harbour, safe with our pearls. And there we sold a few in a quiet way, without waking suspicion, and paid the half-wit a thousand pounds for his wages, and went on to Port Said. The three of us took cabins on a large ship bound for London, in order to sell our pearls, and late one evening we came into Port Said and were to sail on next morning. By the time we’d paid off the half-wit and paid for our cabins we hadn’t much ready money left, but Bill said he knew how to get some. Bill had gone pretty slow on drinks since he got the pearls, but gambling was a thing he would never give up. ‘We can afford it now,’ he used to say, which is of course what you never can do. So we went ashore at Port Said, and took our pearls with us, as we’d none of us trust all that out of our sight. And we came to a house Bill knew. Now, wasn’t it a curious thing that Bill, who wouldn’t trouble to put another two hundred thousand pounds in his pocket, was keen as mustard to make a hundred pounds or so in a Port Said gambling den? And it wasn’t that he’d altered his mind about his pocketfuls of pearls being enough: he was never going back to that bay. Again and again I suggested it, but there was some sort of terror about that little white beach of pearls that seemed to have somehow got hold of him; or else it was some sort of general principle, perhaps inherited from simple folk for numberless generations, that seemed to warn him there was something unnatural and dangerous about so vast a display of easy wealth as lay on that beach in clear sunlight. I often wondered what it exactly was, that terror of the lovely little beach. It never quite caught me; unless at moments, at the turn of a thought, there may have seemed to be something lurking; but whatever it was it must have been lasting and strong to have kept that man in London leaning against a wall, and making no effort; nor ever likely to, as I judge; to go East into sunlight, and help himself to that wealth that in a generous drunken moment the good fellow had given to me.

“I wasn’t keen on the gambling myself, but it seemed only friendly to keep an eye on the other two. So I slipped a revolver into my pocket and came with them. And I was probably drawn too by that feeling one used to have that, if the name of Port Said should turn up in a conversation, one has seen all that there is to see there. One liked to be able to say, if any particular den was mentioned, ‘Oh yes, I dropped fifty pounds there.’

“I dropped more than that.

“Any way we came to the house; and Bill and I and the Portugee went in; and soon we were playing and winning. The stakes aren’t high downstairs, and you usually win there. In fact that downstairs room reminded me of a trail of grain over grass leading up to a trap. Upstairs the stakes were much higher, and upstairs we asked to go. A Greek ran the show downstairs, the sort of Greek you might meet at night in the shadier parts of Port Said, and very often did: the man upstairs was a Greek too, but not the kind that you would count on meeting; he seemed worse than what I’d been warned against. As we walked in he looked at us, each in turn, and it was when he looked at you that his eyes seemed to light up, and the blood seemed to pale in his face, and all the man’s power and energy went to those eyes.

“ ‘High stakes here,’ he said.

“I nodded my head, and Bill and the Portugee began to babble something.

“ ‘Got the stuff?’ snapped the Greek.

“The man’s style irritated me. I suppose I lost my temper. Certainly Bill and the Portugee looked pretty angry at the way he was speaking to us. I never answered a word to him. I merely slipped a hand into my pocket and brought out a handful of pearls, all gleaming in the ugly light of that room. And the Greek looked at them with his lips slowly widening, for a long while before he spoke. And then he said, ‘Pearls,’ in quite a funny small voice. And I was just going to say Yes. It was like a page in a book, like a page with a picture of a man in a dingy room with pearls in his hand, just going to speak; you turn the page and come on something quite different, nothing to do with pearls, no room, and nobody speaking. Just silence and open air. And then the voice of a man coming up out of deeps of silence, saying the same thing over again, but with words that didn’t as yet bring any meaning. A long time passed like that. Then the words again, and this time they seemed to mean something, if only one steadied oneself and tried to think.

“ ‘He fainted in the street,’ a man was saying.

“I was in a street right enough: I could see that as soon as I looked. And a man I had never seen before was saying that to a policeman. Fainted indeed! There was a lump on my forehead the size of two eggs, not to mention a taste in my mouth that I always get after chloroform.”

“And the pearls?” blurted out the broker.

“The pearls,” said Jorkens, and a sad smile shone for a moment. “Men found unconscious at night in the streets of Port Said never have pearls on them.”

Jorkens remained shaking his head for a long time. “I suppose not,” said someone to break the silence and bring him back to his tale.

“No,” said Jorkens.

And after a while, in a voice that seemed low with mourning for his few weeks of fabulous wealth, Jorkens gave us what was left of his tale. “I never saw Bill or the Portugee again. Living or dead I never found trace of them. I took the policeman back to the house of the Greek, and was easily able to identify it. The downstairs room was the same as ever and I identified the man who ran it, as soon as we were able to wake him up and get him to come out of bed. What I couldn’t do was to find the upstairs room, or even the staircase that led to it. As far as I could see we went all over the house, and I could neither say what had happened nor where it had happened, while the Greek was swearing by all kinds of things, that to him and the policeman were holy, that nothing had happened at all. How they’d made the change I was never able to see. So I just withdrew my charges, and gave the policeman backsheesh, and got back to the ship, and never saw any of my pearls again, except one that got lost in the lining, or ever saw trace again of the upstairs Greek. I got that one pearl in the lining fitted on to my tie-pin. Carrappas or Carrapaccas I could not find on any map, and no one I questioned in twenty sea-ports had ever heard of either; so, that one pearl back in my tie-pin was all I got out of the kindly advice of the drunken man by the wall.”

“But the latitude and the longitude,” said Terbut, with the quiet air of one playing a mate.

“You see, that,” said Jorkens, “was what I couldn’t remember.”