Читать книгу The Travel Tales of Mr. Joseph Jorkens - Edward 18th Baron of Dunsany Plunkett - Страница 6

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The next time that Murcote brought me again to his Club we arrived a little late. Lunch was over, and nine or ten of them were gathered before that fireplace they have; and that talk of theirs had commenced, the charm of which was that there was no way of predicting upon what topics it would touch. It all depended upon who was there, and who was leading the talk, and what his mood was; and of course on all manner of irrelevant things besides, such as whiskey, and the day’s news or rumour.

But to-day they had evidently all been talking of cricket, and the reason of that was clearer than men usually seem to think such reasons are. I seemed to see it almost the moment that I sat down; and nobody told it me, but the air seemed heavy with it. The reason that they talked about cricket was that there was a group there that day that were out of sympathy with Mr. Jorkens; bored perhaps by his long reminiscences, irritated by his lies, or disgusted by the untidy mess that intemperance made of his tie. Whatever it was it was clear enough that they were talking vigorously of cricket because they felt sure that that topic if well adhered to must keep the old fellow away from the trackless lands and the jungles, and that, if he must talk of Africa, it could only be to some tidy trim well-ordered civilised part of it that he could get from the subject of cricket. They felt so sure of this.

They had evidently been talking of cricket for some time, and were resolute to keep on it, when shortly after I sat down amongst them one turned to Jorkens himself and said, “Are you going to watch the match at Lord’s?”

“No, no,” said Jorkens sadly. “I never watch cricket now.”

“But you used to a good deal, didn’t you?” said another, determined not to let Jorkens get away from cricket.

“Oh yes,” said Jorkens, “once; right up to that time when Cambridge beat Surrey by one run.” He sighed heavily and continued: “You remember that?”

“Yes,” said someone. “But tell us about it.”

They thought they were on safe ground there. And so they started Jorkens upon a story, thinking they had him far from the cactus jungles. But that old wanderer was not kept so easily in English fields, his imagination to-day or his memory or whatever you call it, any more than his body had been in the old days, of which he so often told.

“It’s a long story,” said Jorkens. “You remember Jembu?”

“Of course,” said the cricketers.

“You remember his winning hit,” said Jorkens.

“Yes, a two wasn’t it?” said someone.

“Yes,” said Jorkens, “it was. And you remember how he got it?”

That was too much for the cricketers. None quite remembered. And then Murcote spoke. “Didn’t he put it through the slips with his knee?” he said.

“Exactly,” said Jorkens. “Exactly. That’s what he did. Put it through the slips with his knee. And only a leg-bye. He never hit it. Only a leg-bye.” And his voice dropped into mumbles.

“What did you say?” said one of the ruthless cricketers, determined to keep him to cricket.

“Only a leg-bye,” said Jorkens. “He never hit it.”

“Well he won the match all right,” said one, “with that couple of runs. It didn’t matter how he got them.”

“Didn’t it!” said Jorkens. “Didn’t it!”

And in the silence that followed the solemnity of his emphasis he looked from face to face. Nobody had any answer. Jorkens had got them.

“I’ll tell you whether it mattered or not, that couple of leg-byes,” said Jorkens then. And in the silence he told this story:

“I knew Jembu at Cambridge. He was younger than me of course, but I used to go back to Cambridge often to see those towers and the flat fen country, and so I came to know Jembu. He was no cricketer. No no, Jembu was no cricketer. He dressed as white men dress and spoke perfect English, but they could not teach him cricket. He used to play golf and things like that. And sometimes in the evening he would go right away by himself and sit down on the grass and sing. He was like that all his first year. And then one day they seem to have got him to play a bit, and then he got interested, probably because he saw the admiration they had for his marvellous fielding. But as for batting, as for making a run, well, his average was less than one in something like ten innings.

“And then he came by the ambition to play for Cambridge. You never know with these natives what on earth they will set their hearts on. And I suppose that if he had not fulfilled his ambition he would have died, or committed murder or something. But, as you know, he played for Cambridge at the end of his second year.”

“Yes,” said someone.

“Yes, but do you know how?” said Jorkens.

“Why by being the best bat of his time I suppose,” said Murcote.

“He never made more than fifty,” said Jorkens, with a certain sly look in his eye as it seemed to me.

“No,” said Murcote, “but within one or two of it whenever he went to the wickets for something like two years.”

“One doesn’t want more than that,” said another.

“No,” said Jorkens. “But he did the day that they played Surrey. Well, I’ll tell you how he came to play for Cambridge.”

“Yes, do,” they said.

“When Jembu decided that he must play for Cambridge he practised at the nets for a fortnight, then broke his bat over his knee and disappeared.”

“Where did he go to?” said someone a little incredulously.

“He went home,” said Jorkens.

“Home?” they said.

“I was on the same boat with him,” said Jorkens drawing himself up at the sound of doubt in their voices.

“You were going to tell us how Jembu played for Cambridge,” said one called Terbut, a lawyer, who seemed as much out of sympathy with Jorkens and his ways as any of them.

“Wait a moment,” said Jorkens. “I told you he could not bat. Now, when one of these African natives wants to do something that he can’t, you know what he always does? He goes to a witch doctor. And when Jembu made up his mind to play for Cambridge he put the whole force of his personality into that one object, every atom of will he had inherited from all his ferocious ancestors. He gave up reading divinity, and everything, and just practised at the nets as I told you, all day long for a fortnight.”

“Not an easy thing to break a bat over his knee,” said Terbut.

“His strength was enormous,” said Jorkens. “I was more interested in cricket in those days than in anything else. I visited Jembu in his rooms just at that time. Into the room where we sat he had put the last touches of tidiness: I never saw anything so neat, all his divinity books put away trim in their shelves, he must have had over a hundred of them, and everything in the room with that air about it that a dog would recognise as foreboding a going away.

“ ‘I am going home,’ he said.

“ ‘What, giving up cricket?’ I asked.

“ ‘No,’ he answered and his gaze looked beyond me as though concerned with some far-off contentment. ‘No, but I must make runs.’

“ ‘You want practice,’ I said.

“ ‘I want prayer,’ he answered.

“ ‘But you can pray here,’ I said.

He shook his head.

“ ‘No, no,’ he answered with that far-away look again.

“Well, I only cared for cricket. Nothing else interested me then. And I wanted to see how he would do it. I suppose I shouldn’t trouble about it nowadays. But the memory of his perfect fielding, and his keenness for the one thing I cared about, and his tremendous ambition, as it seemed to me then, to play cricket for Cambridge, made the whole thing a quest that I must see the end of.

“ ‘Where will you pray?’ I said.

“ ‘There’s a man that is very good at all that sort of thing,’ he answered.

“ ‘Where does he live?’ I said.

“ ‘Home.’

“Well it turned out he had taken a cabin on one of the Union Castle line. And I decided to go with him. I booked my passage on the same boat; and, when we got into the Mediterranean, deck cricket began, and Jembu was always bowled in the first few balls even at that. I am no cricketer, I worshipped the great players all the more for that; I don’t pretend to have been a cricketer; but I stayed at the wickets longer than Jembu every time, all through the Mediterranean till we got to the Red Sea, and it became too hot to play cricket, or even to think of it for more than a minute or two on end. The equator felt cool and refreshing after that. And then one day we came into Killindini. Jembu had two ponies to meet us there and twenty or thirty men.”

“Wired to them I suppose,” said Terbut.

“No,” said Jorkens. “He had wired to some sort of a missionary who was in touch with Jembu’s people. Jembu you know was a pretty important chieftain, and when anyone got word to his people that Jembu wanted them, they had to come. They had tents for us, and mattresses, and they put them on their heads and carried them away through Africa, while we rode. It was before the days of the railway, and it was a long trek, and uphill all the way. We rose eight thousand feet in two hundred miles. We went on day after day into the interior of Africa: you know the country?”

“We have heard you tell of it,” said someone.

“Yes, yes,” said Jorkens, cutting out, as I thought, a good deal of local colour that he had intended to give us. “And one day Kenya came in sight like a head between two great shoulders; and then Jembu turned northwards. Yes, he turned northwards as far as I could make out; and travelled much more quickly; and we came to nine thousand feet, and forests of cedar. And every evening Jembu and I used to play stump cricket, and I always bowled him out in an over or two; and then the sun would set and we lit our fires.”

“Was it cold?” said Terbut.

“To keep off lions,” said Jorkens.

“You bowled out Jembu?” said another incredulously, urged to speech by an honest doubt, or else to turn Jorkens away from one of his interminable lion-stories.

“A hundred times,” said Jorkens, “if I have done it once.”

“Jembu,” some of us muttered almost involuntarily, for the fame of his batting lived on, as indeed it does still.

“Wait till I tell you,” said Jorkens. “In a day or two we began to leave the high ground: bamboos took the place of cedars; trees I knew nothing of took the place of bamboos; and we came in sight of hideous forests of cactus; when we burned their trunks in our camp-fires, mobs of great insects rushed out of the shrivelling bark. And one day we came in sight of hills that Jembu knew, with a forest lying dark in the valleys and folds of them, and Jembu’s own honey-pots tied to the upper branches.

“These honey-pots were the principal source, I fancy, of Jembu’s wealth, narrow wooden pots about three feet long, in which the wild bees lived, and guarded by men that you never see, waiting with bows and arrows. It was the harvest of these in a hundred square miles of forest that sent Jembu to Cambridge to study divinity, and learn our ways and our language. Of course he had cattle too, and plenty of ivory came his way, and raw gold now and then; and, in a quiet way, I should fancy, a good many slaves.

“Jembu’s face lighted up when he saw his honey-pots, and the forest that was his home, dark under those hills that were all flashing in sunlight. But no thought of his home or his honey-pots made him forget for a single instant his ambition to play for Cambridge, and that night at the edge of the forest he was handling a bat still, and I was still bowling him out.

“Next day we came to the huts of Jembu’s people. Queer people. I should have liked to have shown you a photograph of them. I had a small camera with me. But whenever I put it up they all ran away.

“We came to their odd reed huts.

“Undergrowth had been cleared and the earth stamped hard by bare feet, but they did not ever seem to have thinned the trees, and their huts were in and out among the great trunks. My tent was set up a little way from the huts, while Jembu went to his people. Men came and offered me milk and fruit and chickens, and went away. And in the evening Jembu came to me.

“ ‘I am going to pray now,’ he said.

“I thought he meant there and then, and rose to leave the tent to him.

“ ‘No,’ he said, ‘one can’t pray by oneself.’

“Then I gathered that by ‘pray’ he meant some kind of worship, and that the man he had told me of in his rooms at Cambridge would be somewhere near now. I was so keen on cricket in those days that anything affecting it always seemed to me of paramount importance, and I said ‘May I come too?’

“Jembu merely beckoned with his hand and walked on.

“We went through the dark of the forest for some few minutes, and saw in the shade a great building standing alone. A sort of cathedral of thatch. Inside, a great space seemed bare. The walls near to the ground were of reed and ivory: above, it was all a darkness of rafters and thatch. The long thin reeds were vertical, and every foot or so a great tusk of an elephant stood upright in the wall. Nuggets of gold here and there were fastened against the tusks by thin strands of copper. Presently I could make out that a thin line of brushwood was laid in a wide circle on the floor. Inside it Jembu sat down on the hard mud. And I went far away from it and sat in a corner, though not too near to the reeds, because, if anything would make a good home for a cobra, they would. And Jembu said never a word; and I waited.

“Then a man stepped through the reeds in the wall that Jembu was facing, dressed in a girdle of feathers hanging down from his loins, wing feathers they seemed to be, out of a crane. He went to some sort of iron pot that stood on the floor, that I had not noticed before, and lifted the lid and took fire from it, and lit the thin line of brushwood that ran round Jembu. Then he began to dance. He must have been twelve or fifteen feet from Jembu when he began to dance, and he danced round him in circles, or leapt is a better word, for it was too fierce for a dance. He took no notice of me. After he had been dancing some time I saw that his circles were narrowing; and presently he came to the line of brushwood at a point that the fire had not reached, and leapt through it and danced on round Jembu. Jembu sat perfectly still, with his eyes fixed. The weirdest shadows were galloping now round the walls from the waving flames of the brushwood; and any man such as us must have been sick and giddy from the frightful pace of those now narrow circles that he was making round Jembu, but he leapt nimbly on. He was within a few feet of my friend now. What would he do, I was wondering, when he reached him? Still Jembu never stirred, either hand or eyelid. Stray leaves drifting up from the dancing savage’s feet were already settling on Jembu. And all of a sudden the black dancer fainted.

“He lay on the ground before Jembu, his feet a yard from him, and one arm flung out away from him, so that that hand lay in the brushwood. The flames were near to the hand, but Jembu never stirred. They reached it and scorched it: Jembu never lifted a finger, and the heathen dancer neither moved nor flinched. I knew then that this swoon that he had gone into was a real swoon, whatever was happening. The flames died down round the hand, died down round the whole circle; till only a glow remained, and the shadow of Jembu was as still on the wall as a black bronze image of Buddha.

“I began to get up then, with the idea of doing something for the unconscious man, but Jembu caught the movement, slight as it was, although he was not looking at me; and, still without giving me a glance of his eye, waved me sharply away with a jerk of his left hand. So I left the man lying there, as silent as Jembu. And there I sat, while Jembu seemed not to be breathing, and the embers went out and the place seemed dimmer than ever for the light of the fire that was gone. And then the dancing man came to, and got up and bent over Jembu, and spoke to him, and turned; and all at once he was gone through the slit in the reeds by which he had entered the temple. Then Jembu turned his head, and I looked at him.

“ ‘He has promised,’ he said.

“ ‘Who?’ I asked.

“ ‘Mungo,’ said Jembu.

“ ‘Was that Mungo?’ I asked.

“ ‘He? No! Only his servant.’

“ ‘Who is Mungo?’ I asked.

“ ‘We don’t know,’ said Jembu, with so much finality that I said no more of that.

“But I asked what he had promised.

“ ‘Fifty runs,’ replied Jembu.

“ ‘In one innings?’ I asked.

“ ‘Whenever I bat,’ said Jembu.

“ ‘Whenever you bat!’ I said. ‘Why! That will get you into any eleven. Once or twice would attract notice, but a steady average of fifty, and always to be relied on, it mayn’t be spectacular, but you’d be the prop of any eleven.’

“He seemed so sure of it that I was quite excited; I could not imagine a more valuable man to have in a team than one who could always do that, day after day, against any kind of bowling, on a good wicket or bad.

“ ‘But I must never make more,’ said Jembu.

“ ‘You’ll hardly want to,’ I said.

“ ‘Not a run more,’ said Jembu, gazing straight at the wall.

“ ‘What will happen if you do?’ I asked.

“ ‘You never know with Mungo,’ Jembu replied.

“ ‘Don’t you?’ I said.

“ ‘No man knows that,’ said Jembu.

“ ‘You’ll be able to play for Cambridge now,’ I said.

“Jembu got up from the floor and we came away.

“He spoke to his people that evening in the firelight. Told them he was going back to Cambridge again, told them what he was going to do there, I suppose; though what they made of it, or what they thought Cambridge was, Mungo only knows. But I saw from his face, and from theirs, that he made that higher civilisation, to which he was going back, very beautiful to them, a sort of landmark far far on ahead of them, to which I suppose they thought that they would one day come themselves. Fancy them playing cricket!

“Well, next day we turned round and started back again, hundreds of miles to the sea. The lions ...”

“We’ve heard about them,” said Terbut.

“Oh well,” said Jorkens.

But if they wouldn’t hear his lion-stories they wanted to hear how Jembu played for Cambridge: it was the glamour of Jembu’s name after all these years that was holding them. And soon he was back with his story of the long trek to the sea from somewhere North of a line between Kenya and the great lake.

He told us of birds that to me seemed quite incredible, birds with horny faces, and voices like organ-notes; and he told us of the cactus-forests again, speaking of cactus as though it could grow to the size of trees; and he told us of the falls of the Guaso Nyero, going down past a forest trailing grey beards of moss; there may be such falls as he told of above some such forest, but we thought more likely he had picked up tales of some queer foreign paradise, and was giving us them as geography, or else that he had smoked opium or some such drug, and had dreamed of them. One never knew with Jorkens.

He told us how they came to the coast again; and apparently there are trees in Mombasa with enormous scarlet flowers, that I have often seen made out of linen in windows of drapers’ shops, but according to him they are real.

Well, I will let him tell his own story.

“We had to wait in that oven” (he meant Mombasa) “for several days before we could get a ship, and when we got home the cricket season was over. It was an odd thing, but Jembu went to the nets at once, and began hitting about, as he had been doing in the Red Sea; and there was no doubt about it that he was an unmistakable batsman. And he always stopped before there was any possibility that he could by any means be supposed to have made fifty.

“I talked to him about Mungo now and then but could get nothing much out of him: he became too serious for that, whenever one mentioned Mungo, and of the dancing man in the temple I got barely a word; indeed I never even knew his name. He read divinity still, but not with the old zest, so far as I could gather whenever I went to see him, and I think that his thoughts were far away with Mungo.

“And as soon as May came round he was back at cricket; and sure enough, as you know, he played for Cambridge. That was the year he played first; and you have only to look at old score books to see that he never made less than forty-six all that year. He always got very shy when he neared fifty: he was too afraid of a four if he passed forty-six, and that was why he always approached it so gingerly, often stopping at forty-seven, though what he liked to do was to get to forty-six and then to hit a four and hear them applauding his fifty. For he was very fond of the good opinion of Englishmen, though the whole of our civilisation was really as nothing to him, compared with the fear of Mungo.

“Well, his average was magnificent; considering how often he was not out, it must have been nearly eighty. And then next year was the year he played against Surrey. All through May and June he went on with his forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine and fifty; and Cambridge played Surrey early in July. I needn’t tell you of that match; after Oxford v. Cambridge in 1870, and Eton v. Harrow in 1910, I suppose it’s the best-remembered match in history. You remember how Cambridge had two runs to win and Jembu was in with Halket, the last wicket. Halket was their wicket-keeper and hardly able to deal with this situation; at least Jembu thought not, for he had obviously been getting the bowling all to himself for some time. But now he had made fifty. With the whole ground roaring applause at Jembu’s fifty, and two runs still to win I laid a pretty large bet at two to one against Cambridge. Most of them knew his peculiarity of not passing fifty, but I was the only man on the ground that knew of his fear of Mungo. I alone had seen his face when the dancing man went round him, I alone knew the terms. The bet was a good deal more than I could afford. A good deal more. Well, Jembu had the bowling, two to win, and the first ball he stopped very carefully, and then one came a little outside the off stump; and Jembu put his leg across the wicket and played the ball neatly through the slips with his knee. They ran two, and the game was over. Jembu’s score of course stayed at fifty, no leg-byes could affect that, as anyone knows who has ever heard of cricket. How could anyone think otherwise? But that damned African spirit knew nothing of cricket. How should he know, if you come to think of it? Born probably ages ago in some tropical marsh, from which he had risen to hang over African villages, haunting old women and travellers lost in the forest, or blessing or cursing the crops with moods that changed with each wind, what should he know of the feelings or rules of a sportsman? Spirits like that keep their word as far as I’ve known: it was nothing but honest ignorance; and he had credited poor Jembu with fifty-two though not a ball that had touched his bat that day had had any share in more than fifty runs.

“And I’ve learned this of life, that you must abide by the mistakes of your superiors. Your own you may sometimes atone for, but with the mistakes of your superiors, so far as they affect you, there is nothing to do but to suffer for them.

“There was no appeal for Jembu against Mungo’s mistake. Who would have listened to him? Certainly no one here: certainly no one in Africa. Jembu went back to see what Mungo had done, as soon as he found out the view that Mungo had taken. He found out that soon enough, by dropping back to his old score of one and nothing in three consecutive innings. The Cambridge captain assured him that that might happen to anybody, and that he mustn’t think of giving up cricket. But Jembu knew. And he went back to his forest beyond Mount Kenya, to see what Mungo had done.

“And only a few years later I came on Jembu again, in a small hotel in Marseilles, where they give you excellent fish. They have them in a little tank of water, swimming about alive, and you choose your fish and they cook it. I went there only three or four years after that match against Surrey, being in Marseilles for a day; and a black waiter led me to the glass tank, and I looked up from the fishes, and it was Jembu. And we had a long talk, and he told me all that had happened because of those two leg-byes that had never been near his bat.

“It seems that a tribe that had never liked Jembu’s people had broken into his forest and raided his honey-pots. They had taken his ivory, and burnt his cathedral of thatch, and driven off all his slaves. I knew from speeches that he had made at Cambridge that Jembu in principle was entirely opposed to slavery; but it is altogether another matter to have one’s slaves driven away, and not know where they have gone to or whether they will be well cared for. It was that that broke his heart as much as the loss of his honey-pots; and they got his wives too. His people were scattered, and all his cattle gone; there was nothing after that raid left for Jembu in Africa.

“He wandered down to the coast; he tried many jobs; but Mungo was always against him. He drifted to Port Said as a stowaway, to Marseilles as a sailor, and there deserted, and was many things more, before he rose to the position of waiter; and I question if Mungo had even done with him then. A certain fatalistic feeling he had, which he called resignation, seemed to bear him up and to comfort him. The word resignation, I think, came out of his books of divinity; but the feeling came from far back, out of old dark forests of Africa. And, wherever it came from, it cheered him awhile at his work in that inn of Marseilles, and caused him to leave gravy just where it fell, on the starched shirt-front that he wore all day. He was not unhappy, but he looked for nothing better; after all, he had won that match for Cambridge against Surrey, I don’t see what more he could want, and many a man has less. But when I said good-bye to him I felt sure that Mungo would never alter his mind, either to understand, or to pardon, those two leg-byes.”

“Did you ask him,” said Terbut, “how Mungo knew that he got those two leg-byes?”

“No,” said Jorkens, “I didn’t ask him that.”