Jorkens Remembers Africa by Lord Dunsany

Author:Lord Dunsany
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fiction, short stories
Publisher: Distributed Proofreaders Canada
Published: 1934-12-15T05:00:00+00:00

XII

IN THE GARDEN OF MEMORIES

I never heard the beginning of this story. I never heard exactly how it happened, and Jorkens never referred to it again. Jorkens was already talking as I came into the Club. And I saw by his look, so far from us and the club, and the world as it lies today outside our window, that he told of the long past. “I must have seen the house many times,” he was saying, “before I knew that it was there. I must have often looked straight at it from far off and seen its whitish wall among the trees, and the dark roof above it; but the roof was so like the dark mass of the trees, and the wall so like the glare of a grey sky, that I never knew I was looking at the house. As you came near it, it was completely hidden by the high wall of the garden. Sometimes I wondered what was behind the garden wall, but the ivy on top of it seemed to hide it all with a frown, and though my wonder found out more than my eyes, which as yet had made out nothing, I got no further than guesses till the day that I shot the snipe, and it went away about three hundred yards, then soared and suddenly dropped; and that led me up to the wall, but there was no gate. When I could find no entrance of any sort I put down my gun and tried to climb at the lowest part of the wall, but I found as soon as I put my hand upon it that the old wall that had crumbled already, crumbled faster under my hand than it had done under the years. The mortar was only dust: it seemed only waiting for the touch of a hand, but none ever came. And now the grey stones fell so easily from their places that soon I was on the top without far to climb, and more stones slid away as I dropped on the other side. There lay before me a garden beside a river, the house at the far end of the garden. The house was in the middle of the far wall, and on the side of the river there was no wall at all, the water giving there the seclusion in which the old house seemed to have wrapped itself. Even where I stood I was not quite in the garden, but amongst a group of trees sheltered by two walls; between me and the garden a stream ran down to the river. The stream, at any rate in its last few yards, was a bit too broad for jumping, but a strange old arch of stone led over it to the garden. No track whatever led over the little bridge.

“I stood a long while there, looking into the garden. My snipe must have fallen into the river, and would soon come drifting past, but still I stood there gazing.

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