The pearly beach. Dunsany, Edward John moreton DRAX plunkett, 18' Baron (1878 — 1957), Irish poet, dramatist and novelist

by Lord Dunsany

DUNSANY, EDWARD JOHN MORETON DRAX PLUNKETT, 18" ' Baron (1878 — 1957), Irish poet, dramatist and novelist, born in London, and educated at Eton College and the Royal Military Col­lege, Sandhurst. He served in the Boer War and World War I. Lord Dunsany wrote in many different media but was successful as a play­wright. Nearly all of his works are characterized by mysticism, fan­tasy, and rich, imaginative language. His stories frequently draw upon Celtic and oriental mythology. Among his best-known plays are " The Gllittering Gate" (1909), " The Gods of the Mountain" (1911), and " If" (1921). His other works include novels, collections of short sto­ries, and autobiographies.

We could not remember, any of us at the Club, who it was that first invented the twopenny stamp on checks¹. There were eight or nine of us there, and not one of us could put a name to him. Of course a lot of us knew, but we'd all forgotten it. And that started us talking of the tricks memory plays. Some said memory didn't matter so much; some said it was looking forward that mattered most in business, or even watching closely what was going on around you now. And at that Jorkens stepped in. No, memory was the thing, he said; he could have made more by a good steady memory than by any amount of looking into the future.

" I don't see how that could be, " said a stockbroker, who had just bought Jaffirs at 62², on pretty good information that they would go to 75. As a matter of fact they fell to 59.

But Jorkens stuck to his point. " With a good allround memory, " he said, " I could have made millions."

" But how? " asked the stockbroker.

" Well, it was this way, " said Jorkens. " I had a rather nice pearl in a tiepin. And things weren't quite going the way I liked; financially, I mean. Well, to cut a long story short, I decided to hock my pearl. I remember waiting till it was dark one winter's evening, so as to get to the pawnshop decently unobserved. And T went in and unscrewed the pearl off its pin, and saw it no more. That put the financial position on a sound basis again; but 1

144THE PEARLY BEACH

came out a little what you call ruefully, and I suppose my face must have shown it, and I was sticking back what was left of my gold pin into my tie. Funny how anyone could have noticed all that, but I've observed that when people are a little bit drunk they sometimes do. Anyway there was a tall man leaning against a wall, a man I had never seen before in my life, and he looked at me in a lazy sort of way, not troubling to move his head, only his eyes, and even then he seemed barely troubling to turn and keep open; and he said, 'You want to go to Carrapaccas beach. That's where you want to go.' And he gave me the latitude and longitude. 'Pearls to be had for the gathering there³, he said.

And I asked him what he meant, why he spoke to me. I asked him all kinds of things. But all he would say was, 'You go to Carrappas beach, ' not even giving it the same name the second time.

Well I jotted the latitude and longitude down on my shirt cuff, and 1 thought the thing over a lot. And the first thing I saw as I thought things over was that the man was perfectly genuine; he had probably had this secret for years, and then one day he had had a drop too much⁴, and had blurted the thing out. You may say what you like against drink, but you don't find a man to tell you a thing like that, just because he's sorry for you for losing a pearl, when he's sober. And mind you the Carrappas beaches, or whatever he called them, were there. The longitude was a long way east, and the latitude a lot south, and T started one day from London, heading for Aden⁵. Did I tell you all this was in London? No place like it for starting on jour­neys. Well, i started from London and came again to Aden. I had a very curious romance there once.

So I came to Aden and began looking about. What I was looking for was three sailors; 1 fancied we could do with that; and one of those queer small boats with green keels. Sails, of course. Well, I found two sailors, just the men I was looking for. One was named Bill and the other the Portugee⁶, though both looked English to me so far as 1 could tell. And they could get another man who was a half-wit⁷, who they said would do very well. The beauty of that was that only two had to be in it.^s I told them at once it was something to do with treasure, and they said that the third hand could be left on board when the rest of us went ashore, and would be quite happy singing a song that he sang. I never knew what his name was; Bill and the Poitugee used just to shout at him, and he would always answer. His home was Aden; I never learned where the other two came from. Well, T told Bill the latitude and the longitude, and we slipped out in a tiny ship one morn-