Читать книгу The Travel Tales of Mr. Joseph Jorkens - Edward 18th Baron of Dunsany Plunkett - Страница 7

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It was a warm sunny day. Summer after many delays had come at last to London, and the heat beat back from the walls and pavement so that the streets were baking. Just after lunch, when it seemed about at its hottest, I was walking down the Strand going eastwards, when whom should I see far off in the clear bright air, but Jorkens coming towards me. If he saw me he has better sight than one would think that he has from the general look of his eyes. Certainly he appeared not to. Instead of any sign of recognition he pulled out the end of his watch-chain and began absently swinging it. As we drew nearer I saw something blue on the watch-chain, some sort of charm flashing round and round. And then we were right opposite each other, within a yard, his eyes still far away from me.

“Hullo, Mr. Jorkens,” I said.

I never saw a man look more surprised.

“Hullo,” he answered.

“Taking a walk?” I said.

It was quite true. He was.

“Ever seen one of these?” he asked, the charm now hanging still at the end of the watch-chain.

I looked at it, a little wavy thing, all blue and shiny; hard stone, but all cut into ripples; and blue, blue, blue, right down into the deeps of it. It wasn’t turquoise and it wasn’t labradorite, and it was too opaque for a gem; I don’t know what it was; but I never saw any little ornament that so set you thinking of water.

“No. What is it?” I said.

“It’s a charm,” said Jorkens.

“What does it do?” I asked.

“Oh it doesn’t do anything very much,” he said. “It keeps you from dying of thirst. I find it handy now and then.”

“Come into Moltano’s and tell me about it,” I said. For there is one thing about Jorkens, and that is that he will always tell you a story. Whether you believe it or not is your own affair. But he is always good for a story. Another thing about him is that he likes to be offered a drink.

“You won’t mind Moltano’s?” I asked. “It’s down below the level of the street, but ...”

“No, not a bit,” said Jorkens. So down we went.

“The trouble about thirst,” said Jorkens, “is that you never know when it’s going to catch you. I don’t very often want a drink, but when I do ...”

“On a day like this,” I said, “I should think we all want a drink. What shall we have, Mr. Jorkens?”

“On a day like this,” he said, “I should think a whiskey and soda.”

“I expect you’re probably right,” I said. And I ordered two whiskies and sodas.

We sat down, and they arrived.

“You were telling me about that spell,” I began.

“Yes,” said Jorkens. “Yes. It’s a curious thing; but it works, you know. Always did.”

“Does it really?” I said.

“Yes. You wouldn’t think it, you know; but I was almost dying of thirst just now. It’s the unexpected warmth, I expect, coming suddenly like this. And I happened to have run out of change; and there it was.”

I saw that he was grateful to his little blue charm and not to me; but it was his story I wanted, not his gratitude; so I gently guided him back to it.

“Have you had it long?” I said.

“Yes, quite a while,” he answered. “I had it from a friend. He died, died practically penniless, and left me his odds and ends. I came by it that way.”

“He didn’t die of thirst then,” I said.

“No, not of thirst,” said Jorkens. “It was very curious that he didn’t die of thirst, for the whole scene was set for it. Whatever Fates were guiding him must have meant him to die of thirst, but in the end the charm was too strong for them. Yes it works, damn it. It works.”

I made some other of the remarks that may be likened to little dead twigs that one throws down to keep a fire going.

“He got it from a witch in Africa,” said Jorkens. “A long, long way up the Nile, where they worship witches. She had a lot of charms for various purposes, and this was to prevent you from dying of thirst. My friend Blanders bought this one because he was going northwards for a long trip in the Sahara. And he had been there before, and thirst was what he was afraid of. He showed it me once, and I remember him telling me that she had charms against drowning, and against being eaten by crocodiles. But he couldn’t take them all; and as he was leaving the Nile, and could swim, he didn’t want those two.

“He showed it me in London when he got back. And almost at once he was off again, and away he went into the Sahara and was never heard of for months.”

“What happened to him there?” I threw in as another dried twig, while Jorkens sipped his whiskey.

“Well,” said Jorkens, “he went in from the North. Took a few camels and men, as he’d done before; and went in as far as he could, and then turned round and came back again. Merely seeing how far he could go with very little to drink. That was what it amounted to. Might have played that game anywhere. But playing it with the Sahara was like teasing a dog till it bit you. Teasing a tiger I should say. Only he had such infernal trust in this damned blue stone. And I can’t deny it was justified.

“Well, he gets six camels, and I think five Arabs, and starts one day from El Kantara. And there was the desert waiting for him. Of course it has its charm. Who’d go there at all if it hadn’t? Its beauty and its serenity; as though it were part of some planet that knows none of our cares. But, for all that, it was waiting for him. And he must have seen it too, if he wasn’t a fool. And he wasn’t, only that he trusted too much to this damned blue stone. There’s a look on the Sahara that I’ve often seen myself. It isn’t anger exactly; it isn’t even malice; it’s just a quiet, patient, everlasting waiting in the sun for your bones. Well, he must have seen that as he went in from El Kantara.

“He went south for weeks. He went south until the Arabs would go no further, and it was time to turn, charm or no charm. It was one of those Arabs that told me all about it afterwards. If they had let him go any further there would apparently not have been the ghost of a chance of any of them getting back. They hadn’t water enough. But he was a pioneer by birth, and when the charm against thirst was added to that it seemed to have gone to his head, and he went on till they stopped him. Well, a few days after that, on the way back, the Arabs one evening took a pretty serious view of things. They all made up their minds that they couldn’t do it. And it was then that Blanders told them about his charm. They all looked at it and fingered it, and it impressed them enormously. And for the next few days they went on merrily. In fact they remained in high spirits right up to the time that their camels began to die. After that, when only two camels were left, and only as much water as each man had in a bottle, and there were a hundred miles still to go, no one of any sense would have believed in a charm against thirst. And nobody did but Blanders.

“Well, those camels very soon died; and the evening that they all drank the very last drop of their water, Arabs and Blanders alike, they were still fifty miles from the mountains. The next day they began to see the tips of the crags, and the sight heartened them, for they were sure of water there. Old storms have filled those mountains with water-courses and cut them far out into the desert; and, dry though they are, the smooth beds that the torrents have polished are scooped in scores of places into great basins, by boulders that sudden streams have once whirled round and round. In these basins, when they are deep enough, water will lie for months, in fact till the next storm. There would be no missing them if once they could get to the mountains, there would be ten or a dozen such holes in each ravine, with probably a cloud of butterflies hovering above them. But they were fifty miles from the mountains.

“That day they did thirty miles. The crags were clear, and looked near. At sunset they turned the colour of peonies, and from that to translucent blue, the blue coming up from below, till all the mountain was sapphire. Blanders felt they were mocking him, so the Arabs say. Then night came with those enormous stars that hang above the Sahara, all seeming calmly sure that that little company would die of thirst in the desert, the Arabs believing them, and Blanders alone believing in this blue charm. At dawn the mountains went through their tricks again; they leapt out of night into peony, paled into rose, flashed as they always do into briar rose while you looked at them, and all in a matter of moments were pale brown rock.

“The six men started off with twenty miles to do and the mountains looked very close, close at hand as they do before thunder. And sure enough they had only marched an hour, when they saw black rain-clouds heavy along the mountains. But not a drop fell in the desert. And soon they heard the thunder from the storm that was lashing those peaks. They watched it for moments of hope, then saw that it was certainly moving away from them, and into the interior of the mountains. At some word of despair from Blanders, the Arabs told him that every hollow amongst the crags before him would now be full of water; the first slope they came to would have water in abundance, and it was no more than fifteen miles away. That comforted Blanders little; these men accustomed to the rigours of Ramadan could do it: he could not. And yet he clung still to some queer blind faith in the blue stone. A few more miles he struggled on; certainly he would have lain down and died hours earlier if it had not been for the hope that he got from the stone; and then ten miles from the mountains he gave up. The Arabs pointed to the mountains now just before them, and to the thunderstorm that was still amongst their peaks. But Blanders could go no further.

“ ‘The charm,’ they said. He who had cheered them on with the tale of the charm was now being cheered by them with his own tale. It shows how low his supply of hope had sunk.

“ ‘The charm,’ they said with parched lips. And at that he did indeed rouse himself. He roused himself and went on for a few more miles, till they got amongst the ravines that run out from the mountains, the steep dry rocky beds of lost streams. Here they could no longer go straight, but had to make wide detours until they came to places where they could clamber easily down and up the other side. A walk over the flat Sahara was one thing for a man to do on hope and hope alone, but this rough walking was beyond Blanders’s powers. ‘If you can go on, go on,’ he said. ‘I shall stay and dig here. There has been water here once. If I dig deep enough I may find some.’

“There had certainly been water once: it was a river-bed ten feet deep, with boulders in it the size of sheep, that had been smoothed and rounded like marbles by some old torrent. Most of the bed of it was smooth and polished rock, but there were patches of sand too, and in one of these he began to dig with a knife. Once more the Arabs pointed to the mountains, quite near and drenched with rain, but Blanders knew that he could go no further, and perhaps for all his despair about his power to walk, he may have had a confidence in the charm greater than we can guess. Then the Arabs neither left him nor helped him to dig, but sat down and watched him from the bank with their grey bournouses huddled round them. And there was Blanders digging with a knife, and only this blue stone between him and the knowledge that death from thirst was certain. He glanced once at the Arabs’ faces, and saw there no flicker of hope that he would find water in that thirsty sand. They were sitting there parched as he. That look on their faces was a blow to him; and still his faith in the charm kept him working on. Some of the rounded pebbles must have been far bigger than Blanders, huddled there digging. The thunder was rolling further and further off.

“Suddenly the Arabs shouted. Blanders looked up and did not understand. But it would have been too late if he had understood. There never is time on those occasions, when the storms send down the rivers that make those water-courses. It came down round a corner, the old river, the rightful possessor of that watercourse, rolling the boulders along with it like a boy playing marbles. And Blanders was swept away for over a mile. And round his neck on its chain, when they found his body, where Mahommedans carry a verse in a satchel of leather, lay that triumphant amulet.”

“Drowned!” I said.

“Drowned,” said Jorkens. “He could have had a charm against drowning, for the same price; but one never knows what is in store.”

“And they come down like that?” I asked.

“I asked the Arabs that,” Jorkens replied, “and they told me that they are forbidden by their religion to camp in one of those water-courses, or even to pray there.”

He seemed to brood a moment and added bitterly: “That’s the way of all those charms.”

“Well, any way,” I said, “it’s not treating you like that.”

I felt the remark was lame as soon as I said it, but I was not prepared for the fury of his rejoinder.

“You think because it got me a drink,” he exclaimed, “that it is not packed as full of curses as an African witch can pack it. They’re all the same, all these charms, spells and mascots that promise so much. All the same. What has it done for me? All that it promises, and then it gets level. Just as it did with Blanders. It’s the same with all these bargains; always was: man is always outwitted.

“What does it do for me? Gets me a drink. And what does the drink do? Why, the little devil promises me strength and health, and activity mental and bodily, and a philosophy to face the drift of things, that is so much against one, my boy. And I believe it, I always believe it. And what has it brought me to? Oh, yes, I know what you’d say. It’s very good of you, but there it is. And all the devilry in that damned blue stone is as strong as when first it was carved by some black devil in Africa. It will take me the same way as Blanders. Slower, that’s all. But what is time to these ancient devilries?”

I hardly knew what to say. I was turning over a few phrases of consolation all equally lame, when Jorkens suddenly smiled.

“Well, we’ve got on to a pretty gloomy topic,” he said.

I cannot claim to be a tactful person, and yet sometimes an inner feeling tells me the right thing to do without knowing at all why. It prompted me now.

“Have another drink,” I said to that disconsolate figure.

“Thank you,” said Jorkens, “I will.”