Jorkens Borrows Another Whiskey

Lord Dunsany

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Brief Foreword to the Complete Edition of Jorkens:

There is a belief that artists die twice, the second time, when they disappear under oblivion. Forty-three years after death, there are faint stirrings of Dunsany in the readership at large.

The Poet struggles in vain to catch fame’s eye runs “The Assignation,” “but in departing she looked over her shoulder and proposed a meeting a hundred years hence.”

The year 2005 will be a hundred years since “The Gods of Pegana,” Dunsany’s first book, was issued. Will she now remember him?

Edward Plunkett, Lord Dunsany

April 2003

Dunsany Castle

Preface

I have named this book as I have because, as any who have followed what I have been able to tell of Jorkens will realize, whiskey by its stimulating effect upon his memory is, after all, the origin of most of the stories with which he has enlightened our club. And I have rightly called the drink borrowed, because from the first drink to the last that any of us have offered him it has always been his intention to repay, as soon as certain dividends which he is still expecting shall have accrued to his account at his bank.

The Two-Way War

We were talking, one day in the club, of wonderful inventions, when rightly or wrongly it occurred to one of our members to draw Jorkens into the discussion. “What do you think is the most wonderful invention of our time, Jorkens?” he asked.

“Well,” said Jorkens, and for a while he said no more, and a look came into his face as though he were rapidly meditating. And, knowing Jorkens as I do, I can say definitely that this is what he was doing. He was no doubt running through in his memory all the inventions that at one time or another he had mentioned to us, realizing that to name one of them would scarcely be to rise to the present occasion. Perhaps only a few seconds were so occupied, and then he said, “The most wonderful invention? Why, I should say the most wonderful invention was probably the futuroscope.”

I think we all felt that, whether wonderful or not, we should probably hear of an invention of which we knew little, or even nothing. And so we did. “The futuroscope?” said one of us.

“Yes, the futuroscope,” said Jorkens.

“Perhaps you could tell us a little about it,” the same man said.

“Well, yes, a little,” said Jorkens, “if you are interested in it.”

“Very much,” I said. And his story started.

“Methery was the man,” he said, and seemed to wait a moment for one of us to say that he had never heard of Methery. But none of us did; I think none of our little group who had listened before to any of the rather remarkable inventions of which Jorkens has told us expected actually to be familiar with the inventor’s name; after all, we are not scientists. And so Jorkens went on. “I got to know him in the way one does, like sticks drifting down a river, and meeting awhile by chance and drifting on again, perhaps to meet again, perhaps not. He had lodgings in London, and asked me one day to come and see his invention. I didn’t know him very well, and I think that the reason he asked me was that he had met the full share of doubt that all new things have to face, and known many moments of the depression that it brings to the makers of them, and saw something in me (I don’t know what) that made him think I should not cast doubt on his work. So he brought me to his small lodgings and we went upstairs, and there was his invention under a black cloth, looking rather like a fairly large camera. ‘That’s it,’ he said.

“ ‘What is it?’ I asked.

“ ‘I call it the futuroscope,’ he replied. ‘You know how the wireless gathers up sounds out of the ether. I think this is almost as wonderful in its way: it gathers up scenes.’

“ ‘A sort of television?’ I said.

“ ‘Yes and no,’ he replied. ‘But television works solely in the present.’

“ ‘And your thing?’ I asked.

“ ‘It’s quite like television in a way,’ he said, ‘only it looks into the future.’

“ ‘I see. The futuroscope,’ I muttered.

“ ‘Yes, that’s what I call it,’ he said.

“ ‘Then it can see the future?’ I said. Not very intelligent of course, but who was expecting to see a thing like that? And I had nothing ready to say.

“ ‘Well, not the whole future,’ he said, ‘but I get glimpses and flashes out of it. Quite clear pictures sometimes.’

“ ‘But that’s more wonderful than television,’ I gasped.

“ ‘Well, I wouldn’t say that,’ he replied. ‘But it is rather wonderful; if only I could get people to see it.’

“ ‘They won’t?’ I asked.

“ ‘Not they,’ he said.

“ ‘Would you let me have a look at one of your pictures?’ I asked.

“And he took one more glance at me, from which he seemed to satisfy himself that I was not likely to belittle his invention with any sceptical nonsense, and then he went straight to the machine. He took the black cloth off and began turning a knob. ‘At 2240,’ he said, or whatever the number was, ‘it’s a perfectly clear picture. I don’t know the time of it; there’s no indication of that, but various things about it make me think it is not far ahead; being so clear, for one thing; and then the people in it don’t seem to have altered their kit much.’

“ ‘There are people there?’ I said, again not very intelligently.

“ ‘Oh, yes, lots of them,’ he said. And then he turned on the thing, while I peered through a glass as he told me, a dark circular glass about the size of the rim of a coffee-cup, and as he turned his knob the glass began to illuminate, and I saw a landscape, with guns in it.

“ ‘The time I don’t know,’ he repeated, ‘but the place is North America.’

“ ‘Yes, I see,’ I said. ‘The gunners are wearing American uniforms. The steel helmets are unmistakable.’

“ ‘Yes,’ he said; ‘though that would not really tell one what country it was. One must go by the foliage: the oaks and the maples. You see, it’s evidently war, and in war an army may be in any country.’

“ ‘Yes, I see,’ I said again. ‘The guns are firing. But couldn’t it be practice, or a salute?’

“For I didn’t like the idea of another war fairly soon, and he had told me that the scene was not far ahead.

“ ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’ve often looked at it, and I’ve always been sure it’s war.’

“ ‘How can you tell that?’ I asked.

“ ‘You’d see it,’ he said, ‘if you’d looked at it as often as I have. There is a certain intense energy there, and the men work on and on without ever giving way to fatigue, and they’re working them harder than they would ever work them in peace.’

“ ‘Mightn’t it be a very special review?’ I asked.

“ ‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s where you’re wrong. They’d work hard, of course, at a review; but there’d be lots of discipline and lots of ceremonial. You don’t have officers and privates chatting at big reviews. You don’t have any of all this. It’s all different. Take a look.’

“I did so, and I began to see that those hurrying men were doing much as he said, as they carried big shells and loaded the guns they were working to the limit, and all ceremonial was gone, and it was certainly no salute or even practice; the guns were firing too fast. It was America right enough, for it was evidently the Fall, and there was no mistaking the flame of the maples and the large red leaves of the oaks.

“ ‘Is the light right now?’ he asked, as he turned his knob.

“ ‘Perfect,’ I said.

“ ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘Then take a careful look. I picked that one to show you, because there’s a very odd thing about it. You see those two rows of guns?’

“ ‘I do,’ I said. ‘They’re not fifty yards apart, and they’re firing in opposite directions.’

“ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s what I wanted to show you. It’s a bit more than fifty.’

“There were two lines of guns, about forty in each, perhaps sixty or seventy yards apart, with their ammunition wagons between the two lines, all firing as fast as they could, one line firing West, as far as one could tell by the shadows, the other East. I said they were firing shells, but they were rather rockets, for one could see discharges of smoke from them. The guns were in fact powerful rocket-tubes rather than cannon.

“ ‘They seem to be attacked from front and rear,’ I said, ‘like the Gloucesters in the Peninsula.’

“ ‘I have thought of that,’ said Methery. ‘But I don’t think that’s what it is. You see, unless the attacking forces are at exactly equal distances, there seems no reason why the two defending lines of artillery should be together like that, and then there’s no sign of any attack that has driven each back on the other; there’s no sign of any attack at all. What I believe is happening is that the enemy, whoever he is, has not yet located the guns; in fact, I believe that the shells have not yet reached him.’

“ ‘A long way off,’ I said, or something of that sort.

“ ‘A very long way off, I think,’ he answered.

“I peered into the queer machine again, and saw no sign of shells bursting. And the guns fired on and on. It was war right enough. I was puzzled by the futuroscope, and puzzled by what I saw. I should have liked to have known how on earth he made the instrument, and I wanted to know what it was that those guns were doing. But I had taken up some of his time already, and I didn’t know him very well. I couldn’t ask him about everything. So I asked him about this war that was raging in front of my eyes.

“ ‘Yes, I see,’ I said. ‘But what are they firing at, the ones that are firing this way?’

“ ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘There’s no indication.’

“ ‘And the other row?’ I asked. ‘The ones that are firing the other way?’

“ ‘At the same enemy,’ he said. ‘Probably at the very same city. Tactically nothing could be more effective, the two lots of shells coming in from the two directions.’

“For a while I could make neither head or tail of it. I don’t know if you can. And then his quiet assurance spread to me somehow or other, and somehow I got his idea.

“ ‘Not all the way round the world, you don’t mean,’ I said.

“ ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Each of them going half-way.’

“Whatever I had seen, whatever he had found out, excited me so much that I asked little about his invention. I didn’t know him very well, as I said; I had taken up enough of his time already, and it was time to go. Otherwise I should have asked him more of the invention itself, which seemed to me odder than wireless; but I find all inventions are getting very odd, including those wonderful rockets, shelling a town from both sides, from the East and the West. I did hear something about his invention later, if he was the same man going round with the same invention, as I feel sure he was. I heard the story of a man going round from office to office, bits and scraps of news of him, trying to get the Government to take up a strange new invention: he tried the War Office and then the Foreign Office. And then one day I heard of him, full of high hopes, having been granted an appointment at a Government office. He was trying to influence the diplomatic people at the time, and he thought that his appointment was with one of them. And then he looked up the address and found who it was. Poor devil, it was a disappointment, and he broke up his machine and never went on with it. I think it was the same man, Methery. Lucky for him he looked up the address, and gave it all up in time, or he’d have gone and knocked at the door of the Lunacy Commissioners, who appear to have been waiting for him.”

A Nice Lot of Diamond

One of us said to Jorkens one day in the club, “I remember you telling us once a rather unusual story about a diamond.”

“Well, yes,” said Jorkens, “it was a bit unusual.”

I remembered the story. It was about a diamond of huge expanse, and Jorkens had tried to skate on it. The question addressed to Jorkens was obviously made to draw him, and whether for purposes of instruction for ourselves, or in order to direct some humorous shaft of criticism against him when the story was over does not matter: it was a dull day in London and any twist of the conversation that indicated Africa, or anywhere in the sun, seemed to me distinctly desirable. And so perhaps Jorkens thought, for he went on at once, “Yes, I saw a nice lot of them once. I’ll tell you how it was, if you like.”

“Yes, do, Jorkens,” some of us said.

“Well,” he said, “I was in Durban one day, or rather a little outside it on one of the garden-like hills of the district they call Berea, where the moon-flower grew and the jacaranda and far more flowers than I know the names of. It was just a blaze of flowers, and pale blue hills in the distance, seen through the stalks of them. Well, I was introduced to a lady there, who had come down from up-country, where as a matter of fact she had spent most of her life.”

“Up-country?” asked one of us rather meticulously. “Where was that?”

“That,” said Jorkens, “was exactly what she wouldn’t tell me. I like to give you any details I can. No use telling you about a country and not saying where it is, but this particular detail was the one thing I couldn’t get. She had got some queer idea about the natives, this woman: thought that the white men exploited them, sold them bad food, and somehow lured them away from the wholesome meal that their women grind in querns; and she wouldn’t give them away. She had been doctoring them and helping them in various funny ways, and had seen diamonds among them, and wasn’t going to say where. How the conversation got round to diamonds I don’t quite remember, but, when it did, she talked about them very much as one might talk of lizards or stalactites, or anything else one might meet in one’s travels, not as a marketable commodity. She was a queer woman. All she seemed to care about was the health and well-being of a lot of Bantu people, that most of us don’t bother about. But if she didn’t seem to be quite all there about the value to be set upon diamonds, she was very much all there when it came to concealing where they were to be found. And that was my little difficulty. I didn’t say a word about wanting to know where they were, or show that I was the least interested. I got on to another topic as quickly as possible, one of her own topics, which was African music. I talked to her about it for over an hour, or rather listened to her. And not a word did I say about diamonds all that day. I met her again next day, calling at the house in which she was staying, a little house in a garden; and we sat in the stoep and talked of music again. And she sang for me one of those curious African songs. I got her to sing it again, and even a third time; and it was not till then that I began to indicate some slight interest in what you asked me just now, what part of the country it was in which she had been. And that was where she shut up, just closed her mouth, and then hummed the tune to herself and then said it was a fine day. Well of course you may say it is a fine day here: it is rare, and worth commenting on. But, when she said it was a fine day in Natal, I saw that she was just laughing at me, and that she wasn’t quite as much of a fool as I thought, and that I should get no further. But I had that song. She had sung it three times, and I remembered it, a strange haunting thing, a sort of song that made me think of rivers at night, running through gorges where large animals were and utterly strange birds. I remember it still. She had been collecting the songs of many districts, and this was the song of the diamond-district as I may call it; but never a clue did I get from her as to where that might be. She talked so openly, and even vividly, that it took a long time to realize what a deceptive character she was. Not one clue to tell one whether she came from the North or the West, or even the East for that matter: for all she told me, she might just as well have come out of the sea. But I had that song. I had the song and I travelled about Africa for a year. A cape wagon and eight oxen. Quite alone. It wouldn’t have done to have had anyone with me. I’ve known many reliable men whom one could trust with most things, and they’d never let you down. But diamonds are something special, and it would not have been fair to anyone to tempt him with things like that. So I went alone. The Bantu people are cheery and musical. I often heard them singing. And then one day, after a year, I heard that song; a Zulu running home to his kraal one evening, and singing that song as he ran. And that wasn’t the end of my journey either. I went on and on with my wagon over the veld, living on biltong, and on fresh meat that I shot, and hearing that song again, and then no more for a week, and then for a third time; then travelling beyond all sound of it for a fortnight and coming back. And so I got at last a pretty good map in my head of the district of that song. But what the name of it was I couldn’t tell you, or even how to get there, for I drifted into it by accident after a great deal of wandering, and drifted out of it guided by stars and luck. It was quite a small district. And then I began to search it. It didn’t really take me very long, as I only had to look for unlikely places, places well away from tracks and away from waterholes; and so I found it one day, a little, long, rocky valley with a narrow entrance between two little cliffs, almost like a high gateway. Inside this gateway it widened out a bit, but not very much, and it was all dry and stony, and pretty well all the smaller stones were diamonds. They all had a pale blue tint, but they were diamonds all right. They were brownish on the outside, as were all the other rocks, and in fact the whole of that part of Africa, but I chipped one of them by throwing it against another, and it was pale blue all the way through, and shining like sea-water. Of course you don’t see a blue diamond every day, and diamonds of that size never. And there were thousands of them. Well, I made my plans there and then, and my plans were simply to fill up my ox-wagon with them and never come there again. Once I had put those diamonds on the market I would be watched for the rest of my life, and I knew what would happen if I tried to go back; other wagons would drift in too, and the place would become a town. Well, I don’t like crowds, especially where there’s diamonds lying about, so that’s what I decided to do. The sun was nearly setting when I got to the valley of diamonds, and, as one doesn’t get any twilight in those parts, I went back to my wagon and lit a fire and boiled a kettle and made a good pot of tea and had supper, and thought over my plans. And of course I thought of other things too. I thought of buying a nice big house in London, or perhaps two of them side by side, if one wasn’t big enough, with a hole knocked in a wall to join them, and a doorway with nice marble pillars. And I thought of what fun I should have there. All sorts of things I was going to do, things that people who can afford them don’t think of, but I thought them all out that night alone with my fire and the stars. And I told them about it too. I told the fire and the stars. And the fire chuckled and the stars winked. The fire got tired after a while, but the stars never got tired: they just stayed there and listened to all I said, and winked at me as I said it. And one of them came down later on in the night and wanted to warn me about something. You may say I dreamed that part of it, and perhaps I did. Certainly one of them fell, while I was wide awake. It came streaming down the sky. And certainly something spoke to me. But it may have been one of the little winds that are always about on the veld, or it may have been some wild beast: I don’t know what it was. Anyway, all I said to it was: ‘I don’t want advice or warning from you or anyone else. I’m worth a hundred million pounds, and I don’t need advice from anyone.’ And so it went away. And a bird sang, and it was morning, and the fire was grey, and the stars were all gone.

“Well, I cooked my breakfast and went off down to the valley, still feeling that I didn’t want any advice from anyone, though I couldn’t help remembering that someone had tried to warn me, whether there was any sense in what he was saying or not. And there was no sense in it; it was only a wind. That is all that it could have been. I went to the valley and in through the narrow opening, and there were the pale blue diamonds lying thick on the ground. The first thing I did was to walk the length of the valley, for it was under two miles long. And there were diamonds all the way. Quite a narrow valley, as I told you, and all the flat part of it was littered with diamonds. I walked along the bottom of the valley, over diamonds for nearly a mile, and then I came on my first shock. I had three shocks that morning. The first shock was when I came on a round grey mark on the ground, the old mark of a white man’s fire. I went half a mile more and came on my second shock, the mark of another old camp-fire. And a little further on I came on the third. Three camp-fires in the camps of three different men.”

“Were they all white men?” asked Terbut.

“Yes, all of them,” said Jorkens.

“How did you know?” said Terbut.

“Because they had been eating the sort of stuff that white men eat,” said Jorkens. “There were tins lying about with funny names on them, names like meeto and coffeeo and teao. The natives will come to it someday, but they haven’t learned yet, and the things are still the privilege of the white man.”

“And how did you know they were three different men?” Terbut continued.

“Why,” said Jorkens, “all three used quite different tins. I should say they were almost men of three different classes. But any way they were quite different men. Well, they set me thinking. I saw at once there were only the two alternatives, the two obvious ones; they had all left the diamonds behind, or they had taken some away. Yet no blue diamonds had been poured on to the market, or any of that size at all. I knew that perfectly well, and that was no great secret to have discovered: among those that know anything at all there was no one who didn’t know that much. Then, if those men had taken diamonds away, they never got to a town. Should I get to any town, if I tried where they had failed? That’s what I thought as I worked on the second alternative. It was worth taking a risk for a hundred million or so. But it somehow looked like three to nothing against me. I turned to the other alternative: what if all three had decided those diamonds were better left where they were? In the one case something they had not known had obviously overtaken them. But in the other case they knew something. And that bit of knowledge had seemed better to them than a hundred million each. And perhaps it might be better for me. Who were these men whose advice I was taking, if it was their advice? I never saw one of them in my life, and only knew that they had camped in that valley, and knew the stuff that they ate. I wouldn’t take warning or advice from a star, but I took one or the other from them. If they had tried to get to a town and had never got there, then what I took was a warning: if they knew some reason why one had better not try, then I took their advice. I daresay one or two others since then have come to that valley too. But there have been no pale blue diamonds bigger than golf balls seen on the London market. I don’t know why.”