The Travel Tales of Mr. Joseph Jorkens by Lord Dunsany

Author:Lord Dunsany
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fiction, fantasy, short stories
Publisher: Distributed Proofreaders Canada
Published: 1931-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

A DRINK AT A RUNNING STREAM

We were debating one day at the club what was the best drink. One said vermouth because it was good for the liver, another said gin because it was good for the lights, and almost every drink was mentioned in turn, till one wondered how human organs kept working at all, where alcohol was not to be had in abundance.

And then Jorkens joined in with the remark: “The best drink I ever had in my life was out of a running stream.”

A silence fell at that. It was not so much the staleness of the story that depressed us, as the feeling that, excellent as its moral was, Jorkens was not quite the man to tell it. We didn’t mind tales that had been told before; one often has to put up with that at a club, and does so quite readily; but it jarred on the feelings of men to whom a tumbler of whiskey was nothing, to hear that tale, so intimately associated with the memory of gentle governesses, told by a man like Jorkens.

We said “Was it really?” or “Yes, I suppose it was,” and turned quickly to other topics. But Terbut, who never will let Jorkens alone, probably welcomed the idea of letting him make a fool of himself; he consequently leaned forward, all politeness, and begged Jorkens to tell us the story. After that of course there was no stopping it, and we had to sit and listen.

“Yes,” said Jorkens, “a drink out of a running stream.”

“And muddy water, I suppose,” said Terbut, for that’s the form the story usually takes.

“No,” said Jorkens. “No, it wasn’t muddy. Clear, clear as crystal. I’ll tell you how it happened. It was when I was in Canada, just after the war, in the fall of 1919. It’s gorgeous there in the fall; the leaves of the oak-trees glow like embers; and the maple standing amongst them, or out in the fields by itself, shines like a lonely flame. I know nothing in nature more like a flame than a maple. I was there looking for a job of some sort, being slightly low in funds; and I knew nobody, except Jiggers, Lord Ludd’s Dun as he is now; it’s the old spelling of London of course. And he was no good to me then; he was as broke as myself. He had some trifling job with one of the biggest Canadian distillers, but it only barely kept body and soul together. Yes, if you’d asked Lord Ludd’s Dun to lend you a fiver in those days he’d merely have turned round and borrowed ten cents off you. Well he and I were out for a walk one day along the American border, and I said that something ought to be able to be done to get a few bottles of whiskey over. And he looked at the frontier with the gaze of a man seeing further than me, and said nothing. And

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