Читать книгу The Middle Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze - James Thurber - Страница 8

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If you know the more remote little islands off the Florida coast, you may have met--although I greatly doubt it--Captain Darke. Darrell Darke. His haunted key is, for this reason and that, the most inaccessible of them all. I came upon it quite by chance and doubt that I could find it again. I saw him first that moment when my shining little launch, so impudently summer-resortish, pushed its nose against the lonely pier on which he stood. Tall, dark, melancholy, his white shirt open at the throat, he reminded me instantly of that other solitary wanderer among forgotten islands, the doomed Lord Jim.

I stepped off the boat and he came toward me with a lean brown hand out-thrust. “I’m Darke,” he said, simply, “Darrell Darke.” I shook hands with him. He seemed pleased to encounter someone from the outside world. I found out later that no white man had set foot on his remote little key for several years.

He took me to a little thatched hut and waved me to a bamboo chair. It was a pleasant place, with a bed of dried palm leaves, a few withered books, some fishing equipment, and a bright rifle. Darke produced from somewhere a bottle with a greenish heavy liquid in it, and two glasses. “Opono,” he said, apologetically. “Made from the sap of the opono tree. Horrible stuff, but kicky.” I asked him if he would care for a touch of Bacardi, of which I had a quart on the launch, and he said he would. I went down and got it....

“A newspaperman, eh?” said Darke, with interest, as I filled up the glasses for the third time. “You must meet a lot of interesting people.” I really felt that I had met a lot of interesting people and, under slight coaxing, began to tell about them: Gene Tunney, Eddie Rickenbacker, the Grand Duchess Marie, William Gibbs McAdoo. Darke listened to my stories with quick attention, thirsty as he was for news of the colorful civilization which, he told me, he had put behind him twenty years before.

“You must,” I said at last, to be polite, “have met some interesting people yourself.”

“No,” he said. “All of a stripe, until you came along. Last chap that put in here, for example, was a little fellow name of Mark Menafee who turned up one day some three years ago in an outboard motor. He was only a trainer of fugitives from justice.” Darke reached for the glass I had filled again.

“I never heard of anyone being that,” I said. “What did he do?”

“He coached fugitives from justice,” said Darke. “Seems Menafee could spot one instantly. Take the case of Burt Fredericks he told me about. Fredericks was a bank defaulter from Connecticut. Menafee spotted him on a Havana boat--knew him from his pictures in the papers. ‘Hello, Burt,’ says Menafee, casually. Fredericks whirled around. Then he caught himself and stared blankly at Menafee. ‘My name is Charles Brandon,’ he says. Menafee won his confidence and for a fee and his expenses engaged to coach Fredericks not to be caught off his guard and answer to the name of Burt. He’d shadow Fredericks from city to city, contriving to come upon him unexpectedly in dining-rooms, men’s lounges, bars, and crowded hotel lobbies. ‘Why Burt!’ Menafee would say, gaily, or ‘It’s old Fredericks!’ like someone meeting an old friend after years. Fredericks got so he never let on--unless he was addressed as Charlie or Brandon. Far as I know he was never caught. Menafee made enough to keep going, coaching fugitives, but it was a dullish kind of job.” Darke fell silent. I sat watching him.

“Did you ever meet any other uninteresting people?” I asked.

“There was Harrison Cammery,” said Darke, after a moment. “He put in here one night in a storm, dressed in full evening clothes. Came from New York--I don’t know how. There never was a sign of a boat or anything to show how he got here. He was always that way while he was here, dully incomprehensible. He had the most uninteresting of manias, which is monomania. He was a goldfish-holder.” Darke stopped and seemed inclined to let the story end there.

“What do you mean, a goldfish-holder?” I demanded.

“Cammery had been a professional billiard-player,” said Darke. “He told me that the strain of developing absolutely nerveless hands finally told on him. He had trained so that he could balance five BB shot on the back of each of his fingers indefinitely. One night, at a party where the host had a bowl of goldfish, the guests got to trying to catch them with one grab of their hand. Nobody could do it until Cammery tried. He caught up one of the fish and held it lightly in his closed hand. He told me that the wettish fluttering of that fish against the palm of his hand became a thing he couldn’t forget. He got to snatching up goldfish and holding them, wherever he went. At length he had to have a bowl of them beside the table when he played his billiard matches, and would hold one between innings the way tennis-players take a mouthful of water. The effect finally was to destroy his muscular precision, so he took to the islands. One day he was gone from here--I don’t know how. I was glad enough. A singularly one-track and boring fellow.”

“Who else has put in here?” I asked, filling them up again.

“Early in 1913,” said Darke, after a pause in which he seemed to make an effort to recall what he was after, “early in 1913 an old fellow with a white beard--must have been seventy-five or eighty--walked into this hut one day. He was dripping wet. Said he swam over from the mainland and he probably did. It’s fifty miles. Lots of boats can be had for the taking along the main coast, but this fellow was apparently too stupid to take one. He was as dull about everything as about that. Used to recite short stories word for word--said he wrote them himself. He was a writer like you, but he didn’t seem to have met any interesting people. Talked only about himself, where he’d come from, what he’d done. I didn’t pay any attention to him. I was glad when, one night, he disappeared. His name was...” Darke put his head back and stared at the roof of his hut, striving to remember. “Oh, yes,” he said. “His name was Bierce. Ambrose Bierce.”

“You say that was in 1913, early in 1913?” I asked, excitedly.

“Yes, I’m sure of it,” said Darke, “because it was the same year C-18769 showed up here.”

“Who was C-18769?” I asked.

“It was a carrier pigeon,” said Darke. “Flew in here one night tuckered by the trip from the mainland, and flopped down on that bed with its beak open, panting hard. It was red-eyed and dishevelled. I noticed it had something sizable strapped under its belly and I saw its registration number, on a silver band fastened to its leg: C-18769. When it got rested up it hung around here for quite a while. I didn’t pay much attention to it. In those days I used to get the New York papers about once a month off a supply boat that used to put in at an island ten miles from here. I’d row over. One day I saw a notice in one of the papers about this bird. Some concern or other, for a publicity stunt, had arranged to have this bird carry a thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills from the concern’s offices to the place where the bird homed, some five hundred miles away. The bird never got there. The papers had all kinds of theories: the bird had been shot and robbed, it had fallen in the water and drowned, or it had got lost.”

“The last was right,” I said. “It must have got lost.”

“Lost, hell,” said Darke. “After I read the stories I caught it up one day, suddenly, and examined the packet strapped to it. It only had four hundred and sixty-five dollars left.”

I felt a little weak. Finally, in a small voice, I asked: “Did you turn it over to the authorities?”

“Certainly not,” said Darrell Darke. “A man or a bird’s life is his own to lead, down here. I simply figured this pigeon for a fool, and let him go. What could he do, after the money was gone? Nothing.” Darke rolled and lighted a cigarette and smoked a while, silently. “That’s the kind of beings you meet with down here,” he said. “Stupid, dullish, lacking in common sense, fiddling along aimlessly. Menafee, Cammery, Bierce, C-18769--all the same. It gets monotonous. Tell me more about this Grand Duchess Marie. She must be a most interesting person.”