The star-rober by Jack London
The Jacket (The Star-Rover)
By
Jack London
CHAPTER I
All my life I have had an awareness of other times and places. I have been
aware of other persons in me.Oh, and trust me, so have you, my reader that
is to be. Read back into your childhood, and this sense of awareness I speak
of will be remembered as an experience of your childhood. You were then not
fixed, not crystallized. You were plastic, a soul in flux, a consciousness and
an identity in the process of formingay, of forming and forgetting.
You have forgotten much, my reader, and yet, as you read these lines, you
remember dimly the hazy vistas of other times and places into which your
child eyes peered. They seem dreams to you to-day. Yet, if they were dreams,
dreamed then, whence the substance of them? Our dreams are grotesquely
compounded of the things we know. The stuff of our sheerest dreams is the
stuff of our experience. As a child, a wee child, you dreamed you fell great
heights; you dreamed you flew through the air as things of the air fly; you
were vexed by crawling spiders and many-legged creatures of the slime; you
heard other voices, saw other faces nightmarishly familiar, and gazed upon
sunrises and sunsets other than you know now, looking back, you ever looked
upon.
Very well. These child glimpses are of other-worldness, of other-lifeness,
of things that you had never seen in this particular world of your particular
life. Then whence? Other lives? Other worlds? Perhaps, when you have
read all that I shall write, you will have received answers to the perplexities I
have propounded to you, and that you yourself, ere you came to read me,
propounded to yourself.
***
Wordsworth knew. He was neither seer nor prophet, but just ordinary man
like you or any man. What he knew, you know, any man knows. But he most
aptly stated it in his passage that begins Not in utter nakedness, not in entire
forgetfulness. . .
Ah, truly, shades of the prison-house close about us, the new-born things,
and all too soon do we forget. And yet, when we were new-born we did
remember other times and places. We, helpless infants in arms or creeping
quadruped-like on the floor, dreamed our dreams of air-flight. Yes; and we
endured the torment and torture of nightmare fears of dim and monstrous
things. We new-born infants, without experience, were born with fear, with
memory of fear; and memory is experience.
As for myself, at the beginnings of my vocabulary, at so tender a period
that I still made hunger noises and sleep noises, yet even then did I know that I
had been a star-rover. Yes, I, whose lips had never lisped the word king,
remembered that I had once been the son of a king. MoreI remembered that
once I had been a slave and a son of a slave, and worn an iron collar round my
neck.
Still more. When I was three, and four, and five years of age, I was not yet
I. I was a mere becoming, a flux of spirit not yet cooled solid in the mould of
my particular flesh and time and place. In that period all that I had ever been
in ten thousand lives before strove in me, and troubled the flux of me, in the
effort to incorporate itself in me and become me.
Silly, isnt it? But remember, my reader, whom I hope to have travel far
with me through time and spaceremember, please, my reader, that I have
thought much on these matters, that through bloody nights and sweats of dark
that lasted years-long, I have been alone with my many selves to consult and
contemplate my many selves. I have gone through the hells of all existences
to bring you news which you will share with me in a casual comfortable hour
over my printed page.
So, to return, I say, during the ages of three and four and five, I was not yet
I. I was merely becoming as I took form in the mould of my body, and all the
mighty, indestructible past wrought in the mixture of me to determine what the
form of that becoming would be. It was not my voice that cried out in the
night in fear of things known, which I, forsooth, did not and could not know.
The same with my childish angers, my loves, and my laughters. Other voices
screamed through my voice, the voices of men and women aforetime, of all
shadowy hosts of progenitors. And the snarl of my anger was blended with
the snarls of beasts more ancient than the mountains, and the vocal madness of
my child hysteria, with all the red of its wrath, was chorded with the insensate,
stupid cries of beasts pre-Adamic and progeologic in time.
And there the secret is out. The red wrath! It has undone me in this, my
present life. Because of it, a few short weeks hence, I shall be led from this
cell to a high place with unstable flooring, graced above by a well-stretched
rope; and there they will hang me by the neck until I am dead. The red wrath
always has undone me in all my lives; for the red wrath is my disastrous
catastrophic heritage from the time of the slimy things ere the world was
prime.
***
It is time that I introduce myself. I am neither fool nor lunatic. I want you
to know that, in order that you will believe the things I shall tell you. I am
Darrell Standing. Some few of you who read this will know me immediately.
But to the majority, who are bound to be strangers, let me exposit myself.
Eight years ago I was Professor of Agronomics in the College of Agriculture
of the University of California. Eight years ago the sleepy little university
town of Berkeley was shocked by the murder of Professor Haskell in one of
the laboratories of the Mining Building. Darrell Standing was the murderer.
I am Darrell Standing. I was caught red-handed. Now the right and the
wrong of this affair with Professor Haskell I shall not discuss. It was purely a
private matter. The point is, that in a surge of anger, obsessed by that
catastrophic red wrath that has cursed me down the ages, I killed my fellow
professor. The court records show that I did; and, for once, I agree with the
court records.
No; I am not to be hanged for his murder. I received a life-sentence for my
punishment. I was thirty-six years of age at the time. I am now forty-four
years old. I have spent the eight intervening years in the California State
Prison of San Quentin. Five of these years I spent in the dark. Solitary
confinement, they call it. Men who endure it, call it living death. But through
these five years of death-in-life I managed to attain freedom such as few men
have ever known. Closest-confined of prisoners, not only did I range the
world, but I ranged time. They who immured me for petty years gave to me,
all unwittingly, the largess of centuries. Truly, thanks to Ed Morrell, I have
had five years of star-roving. But Ed Morrell is another story. I shall tell you
about him a little later. I have so much to tell I scarce know how to begin.
Well, a beginning. I was born on a quarter-section in Minnesota. My
mother was the daughter of an immigrant Swede. Her name was Hilda
Tonnesson. My father was Chauncey Standing, of old American stock. He
traced back to Alfred Standing, an indentured servant, or slave if you please,
who was transported from England to the Virginia plantations in the days that
were even old when the youthful Washington went a-surveying in the
Pennsylvania wilderness.
A son of Alfred Standing fought in the War of the Revolution; a grandson,
in the War of 1812. There have been no wars since in which the Standings
have not been represented. I, the last of the Standings, dying soon without
issue, fought as a common soldier in the Philippines, in our latest war, and to
do so I resigned, in the full early ripeness of career, my professorship in the
University of Nebraska. Good heavens, when I so resigned I was headed for
the Deanship of the College of Agriculture in that universityI, the star-rover,
the red-blooded adventurer, the vagabondish Cain of the centuries, the militant
priest of remotest times, the moon-dreaming poet of ages forgotten and to-day
unrecorded in mans history of man!
And here I am, my hands dyed red in Murderers Row, in the State Prison
of Folsom, awaiting the day decreed by the machinery of state when the
servants of the state will lead me away into what they fondly believe is the
darkthe dark they fear; the dark that gives them fearsome and superstitious
fancies; the dark that drives them, drivelling and yammering, to the altars of
their fear-created, anthropomorphic gods.
No; I shall never be Dean of any college of agriculture. And yet I knew
agriculture. It was my profession. I was born to it, reared to it, trained to it;
and I was a master of it. It was my genius. I can pick the high-percentage
butter-fat cow with my eye and let the Babcock Tester prove the wisdom of
my eye. I can look, not at land, but at landscape, and pronounce the virtues
and the shortcomings of the soil. Litmus paper is not necessary when I
determine a soil to be acid or alkali. I repeat, farm-husbandry, in its highest
scientific terms, was my genius, and is my genius. And yet the state, which
includes all the citizens of the state, believes that it can blot out this wisdom of
mine in the final dark by means of a rope about my neck and the abruptive jerk
of gravitationthis wisdom of mine that was incubated through the
millenniums, and that was well-hatched ere the farmed fields of Troy were
ever pastured by the flocks of nomad shepherds!
Corn? Who else knows corn? There is my demonstration at Wistar,
whereby I increased the annual corn-yield of every county in Iowa by half a
million dollars. This is history. Many a farmer, riding in his motor-car to-day,
knows who made possible that motor-car. Many a sweet-bosomed girl and
bright-browed boy, poring over high-school text-books, little dreams that I
made that higher education possible by my corn demonstration at Wistar.
And farm management! I know the waste of superfluous motion without
studying a moving picture record of it, whether it be farm or farm-hand, the
layout of buildings or the layout of the farm-hands labour. There is my
handbook and tables on the subject. Beyond the shadow of any doubt, at this
present moment, a hundred thousand farmers are knotting their brows over its
spread pages ere they tap out their final pipe and go to bed. And yet, so far
was I beyond my tables, that all I needed was a mere look at a man to know
his predispositions, his co-ordinations, and the index fraction of his motionwastage.
And here I must close this first chapter of my narrative. It is nine oclock,
and in Murderers Row that means lights out. Even now, I hear the soft tread
of the gum-shoed guard as he comes to censure me for my coal-oil lamp still
burning. As if the mere living could censure the doomed to die!
CHAPTER II
I am Darrell Standing. They are going to take me out and hang me pretty
soon. In the meantime I say my say, and write in these pages of the other
times and places.
After my sentence, I came to spend the rest of my natural life in the
prison of San Quentin. I proved incorrigible. An incorrigible is a terrible
human beingat least such is the connotation of incorrigible in prison
psychology. I became an incorrigible because I abhorred waste motion. The
prison, like all prisons, was a scandal and an affront of waste motion. They
put me in the jute-mill. The criminality of wastefulness irritated me. Why
should it not? Elimination of waste motion was my speciality. Before the
invention of steam or steam-driven looms three thousand years before, I had
rotted in prison in old Babylon; and, trust me, I speak the truth when I say that
in that ancient day we prisoners wove more efficiently on hand-looms than did
the prisoners in the steam-powered loom-rooms of San Quentin.
The crime of waste was abhorrent. I rebelled. I tried to show the guards a
score or so of more efficient ways. I was reported. I was given the dungeon
and the starvation of light and food. I emerged and tried to work in the chaos
of inefficiency of the loom-rooms. I rebelled. I was given the dungeon, plus
the strait-jacket. I was spread-eagled, and thumbed-up, and privily beaten by
the stupid guards whose totality of intelligence was only just sufficient to
show them that I was different from them and not so stupid.
Two years of this witless persecution I endured. It is terrible for a man to
be tied down and gnawed by rats. The stupid brutes of guards were rats, and
they gnawed the intelligence of me, gnawed all the fine nerves of the quick of
me and of the consciousness of me. And I, who in my past have been a most
valiant fighter, in this present life was no fighter at all. I was a farmer, an
agriculturist, a desk-tied professor, a laboratory slave, interested only in the
soil and the increase of the productiveness of the soil.
I fought in the Philippines because it was the tradition of the Standings to
fight. I had no aptitude for fighting. It was all too ridiculous, the introducing
of disruptive foreign substances into the bodies of little black men-folk. It was
laughable to behold Science prostituting all the might of its achievement and
the wit of its inventors to the violent introducing of foreign substances into the
bodies of black folk.
As I say, in obedience to the tradition of the Standings I went to war and
found that I had no aptitude for war. So did my officers find me out, because
they made me a quartermasters clerk, and as a clerk, at a desk, I fought
through the Spanish-American War.
So it was not because I was a fighter, but because I was a thinker, that I
was enraged by the motion-wastage of the loom-rooms and was persecuted by
the guards into becoming an incorrigible. Ones brain worked and I was
punished for its working. As I told Warden Atherton, when my incorrigibility
had become so notorious that he had me in on the carpet in his private office to
plead with me; as I told him then:
It is so absurd, my dear Warden, to think that your rat-throttlers of guards
can shake out of my brain the things that are clear and definite in my brain.
The whole organization of this prison is stupid. You are a politician. You can
weave the political pull of San Francisco saloon-men and ward heelers into a
position of graft such as this one you occupy; but you cant weave jute. Your
loom-rooms are fifty years behind the times. . . .
But why continue the tirade?for tirade it was. I showed him what a fool
he was, and as a result he decided that I was a hopeless incorrigible.
Give a dog a bad nameyou know the saw. Very well. Warden Atherton
gave the final sanction to the badness of my name. I was fair game. More
than one convicts dereliction was shunted off on me, and was paid for by me
in the dungeon on bread and water, or in being triced up by the thumbs on my
tip-toes for long hours, each hour of which was longer than any life I have
ever lived.
Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel. The guards
and the men over me, from the Warden down, were stupid monsters. Listen,
and you shall learn what they did to me. There was a poet in the prison, a
convict, a weak-chinned, broad-browed, degenerate poet. He was a forger. He
was a coward. He was a snitcher. He was a stoolstrange words for a
professor of agronomics to use in writing, but a professor of agronomics may
well learn strange words when pent in prison for the term of his natural life.
This poet-forgers name was Cecil Winwood. He had had prior
convictions, and yet, because he was a snivelling cur of a yellow dog, his last
sentence had been only for seven years. Good credits would materially reduce
this time. My time was life. Yet this miserable degenerate, in order to gain
several short years of liberty for himself, succeeded in adding a fair portion of
eternity to my own lifetime term.
I shall tell what happened the other way around, for it was only after a
weary period that I learned. This Cecil Winwood, in order to curry favour
with the Captain of the Yard, and thence the Warden, the Prison Directors, the
Board of Pardons, and the Governor of California, framed up a prison-break.
Now note three things: (a) Cecil Winwood was so detested by his fellowconvicts
that they would not have permitted him to bet an ounce of Bull
Durham on a bed-bug raceand bed-bug racing was a great sport with the
convicts; (b) I was the dog that had been given a bad name: (c) for his frameup,
Cecil Winwood needed the dogs with bad names, the lifetimers, the
desperate ones, the incorrigibles.
But the lifers detested Cecil Winwood, and, when he approached them
with his plan of a wholesale prison-break, they laughed at him and turned
away with curses for the stool that he was. But he fooled them in the end,
forty of the bitterest-wise ones in the pen. He approached them again and
again. He told of his power in the prison by virtue of his being trusty in the
Wardens office, and because of the fact that he had the run of the dispensary.
Show me, said Long Bill Hodge, a mountaineer doing life for train
robbery, and whose whole soul for years had been bent on escaping in order to
kill the companion in robbery who had turned states evidence on him.
Cecil Winwood accepted the test. He claimed that he could dope the
guards the night of the break.
Talk is cheap, said Long Bill Hodge. What we want is the goods.
Dope one of the guards to-night. Theres Barnum. Hes no good. He beat up
that crazy Chink yesterday in Bughouse Alleywhen he was off duty, too.
Hes on the night watch. Dope him to-night an make him lose his job. Show
me, and well talk business with you.
All this Long Bill told me in the dungeons afterward. Cecil Winwood
demurred against the immediacy of the demonstration. He claimed that he
must have time in which to steal the dope from the dispensary. They gave him
the time, and a week later he announced that he was ready. Forty hard-bitten
lifers waited for the guard Barnum to go to sleep on his shift. And Barnum
did. He was found asleep, and he was discharged for sleeping on duty.
Of course, that convinced the lifers. But there was the Captain of the Yard
to convince. To him, daily, Cecil Winwood was reporting the progress of the
breakall fancied and fabricated in his own imagination. The Captain of the
Yard demanded to be shown. Winwood showed him, and the full details of the
showing I did not learn until a year afterward, so slowly do the secrets of
prison intrigue leak out.
Winwood said that the forty men in the break, in whose confidence he was,
had already such power in the Prison that they were about to begin smuggling
in automatic pistols by means of the guards they had bought up.
Show me, the Captain of the Yard must have demanded.
And the forger-poet showed him. In the Bakery, night work was a regular
thing. One of the convicts, a baker, was on the first night-shift. He was a
stool of the Captain of the Yard, and Winwood knew it.
To-night, he told the Captain, Summerface will bring in a dozen 44
automatics. On his next time off hell bring in the ammunition. But to-night
hell turn the automatics over to me in the bakery. Youve got a good stool
there. Hell make you his report to-morrow.
Now Summerface was a strapping figure of a bucolic guard who hailed
from Humboldt County. He was a simple-minded, good-natured dolt and not
above earning an honest dollar by smuggling in tobacco for the convicts. On
that night, returning from a trip to San Francisco, he brought in with him
fifteen pounds of prime cigarette tobacco. He had done this before, and
delivered the stuff to Cecil Winwood. So, on that particular night, he, all
unwitting, turned the stuff over to Winwood in the bakery. It was a big, solid,
paper-wrapped bundle of innocent tobacco. The stool baker, from
concealment, saw the package delivered to Winwood and so reported to the
Captain of the Yard next morning.
But in the meantime the poet-forgers too-lively imagination ran away with
him. He was guilty of a slip that gave me five years of solitary confinement
and that placed me in this condemned cell in which I now write. And all the
time I knew nothing about it. I did not even know of the break he had
inveigled the forty lifers into planning. I knew nothing, absolutely nothing.
And the rest knew little. The lifers did not know he was giving them the cross.
The Captain of the Yard did not know that the cross know was being worked
on him. Summerface was the most innocent of all. At the worst, his
conscience could have accused him only of smuggling in some harmless
tobacco.
And now to the stupid, silly, melodramatic slip of Cecil Winwood. Next
morning, when he encountered the Captain of the Yard, he was triumphant.
His imagination took the bit in its teeth.
Well, the stuff came in all right as you said, the captain of the Yard
remarked.
And enough of it to blow half the prison sky-high, Winwood
corroborated.
Enough of what? the Captain demanded.
Dynamite and detonators, the fool rattled on. Thirty-five pounds of it.
Your stool saw Summerface pass it over to me.
And right there the Captain of the Yard must have nearly died. I can
actually sympathize with himthirty-five pounds of dynamite loose in the
prison.
They say that Captain Jamiethat was his nicknamesat down and held
his head in his hands.
Where is it now? he cried. I want it. Take me to it at once.
And right there Cecil Winwood saw his mistake.
I planted it, he liedfor he was compelled to lie because, being merely
tobacco in small packages, it was long since distributed among the convicts
along the customary channels.
Very well, said Captain Jamie, getting himself in hand. Lead me to it at
once.
But there was no plant of high explosives to lead him to. The thing did not
exist, had never existed save in the imagination of the wretched Winwood.
In a large prison like San Quentin there are always hiding-places for
things. And as Cecil Winwood led Captain Jamie he must have done some
rapid thinking.
As Captain Jamie testified before the Board of Directors, and as Winwood
also so testified, on the way to the hiding-place Winwood said that he and I
had planted the powder together.
And I, just released from five days in the dungeons and eighty hours in the
jacket; I, whom even the stupid guards could see was too weak to work in the
loom-room; I, who had been given the day off to recuperatefrom too terrible
punishmentI was named as the one who had helped hide the non-existent
thirty-five pounds of high explosive!
Winwood led Captain Jamie to the alleged hiding-place. Of course they
found no dynamite in it.
My God! Winwood lied. Standing has given me the cross. Hes lifted
the plant and stowed it somewhere else.
The Captain of the Yard said more emphatic things than My God! Also,
on the spur of the moment but cold-bloodedly, he took Winwood into his own
private office, looked the doors, and beat him up frightfullyall of which
came out before the Board of Directors. But that was afterward. In the
meantime, even while he took his beating, Winwood swore by the truth of
what he had told.
What was Captain Jamie to do? He was convinced that thirty-five pounds
of dynamite were loose in the prison and that forty desperate lifers were ready
for a break. Oh, he had Summerface in on the carpet, and, although
Summerface insisted the package contained tobacco, Winwood swore it was
dynamite and was believed.
At this stage I enter or, rather, I depart, for they took me away out of the
sunshine and the light of day to the dungeons, and in the dungeons and in the
solitary cells, out of the sunshine and the light of day, I rotted for five years.
I was puzzled. I had only just been released from the dungeons, and was
lying pain-racked in my customary cell, when they took me back to the
dungeon.
Now, said Winwood to Captain Jamie, though we dont know where it
is, the dynamite is safe. Standing is the only man who does know, and he
cant pass the word out from the dungeon. The men are ready to make the
break. We can catch them red-handed. It is up to me to set the time. Ill tell
them two oclock to-night and tell them that, with the guards doped, Ill
unlock their cells and give them their automatics. If, at two oclock to-night,
you dont catch the forty I shall name with their clothes on and wide awake,
then, Captain, you can give me solitary for the rest of my sentence. And with
Standing and the forty tight in the dungeons, well have all the time in the
world to locate the dynamite.
If we have to tear the prison down stone by stone, Captain Jamie added
valiantly.
That was six years ago. In all the intervening time they have never found
that non-existent explosive, and they have turned the prison upside-down a
thousand times in searching for it. Nevertheless, to his last day in office
Warden Atherton believed in the existence of that dynamite. Captain Jamie,
who is still Captain of the Yard, believes to this day that the dynamite is
somewhere in the prison. Only yesterday, he came all the way up from San
Quentin to Folsom to make one more effort to get me to reveal the hidingplace.
I know he will never breathe easy until they swing me off.
CHAPTER III
All that day I lay in the dungeon cudgelling my brains for the reason of this
new and inexplicable punishment. All I could conclude was that some stool
had lied an infraction of the rules on me in order to curry favour with the
guards.
Meanwhile Captain Jamie fretted his head off and prepared for the night,
while Winwood passed the word along to the forty lifers to be ready for the
break. And two hours after midnight every guard in the prison was under
orders. This included the day-shift which should have been asleep. When two
oclock came, they rushed the cells occupied by the forty. The rush was
simultaneous. The cells were opened at the same moment, and without
exception the men named by Winwood were found out of their bunks, fully
dressed, and crouching just inside their doors. Of course, this was verification
absolute of all the fabric of lies that the poet-forger had spun for Captain
Jamie. The forty lifers were caught in red-handed readiness for the break.
What if they did unite, afterward, in averring that the break had been planned
by Winwood? The Prison Board of Directors believed, to a man, that the forty
lied in an effort to save themselves. The Board of Pardons likewise believed,
for, ere three months were up, Cecil Winwood, forger and poet, most
despicable of men, was pardoned out.
Oh, well, the stir, or the pen, as they call it in convict argot, is a training
school for philosophy. No inmate can survive years of it without having had
burst for him his fondest illusions and fairest metaphysical bubbles. Truth
lives, we are taught; murder will out. Well, this is a demonstration that murder
does not always come out. The Captain of the Yard, the late Warden Atherton,
the Prison Board of Directors to a manall believe, right now, in the
existence of that dynamite that never existed save in the slippery-geared and
all too-accelerated brain of the degenerate forger and poet, Cecil Winwood.
And Cecil Winwood still lives, while I, of all men concerned, the utterest,
absolutist, innocentest, go to the scaffold in a few short weeks.
***
And now I must tell how entered the forty lifers upon my dungeon
stillness. I was asleep when the outer door to the corridor of dungeons
clanged open and aroused me. Some poor devil, was my thought; and my
next thought was that he was surely getting his, as I listened to the scuffling of
feet, the dull impact of blows on flesh, the sudden cries of pain, the filth of
curses, and the sounds of dragging bodies. For, you see, every man was manhandled
all the length of the way.
Dungeon-door after dungeon-door clanged open, and body after body was
thrust in, flung in, or dragged in. And continually more groups of guards
arrived with more beaten convicts who still were being beaten, and more
dungeon-doors were opened to receive the bleeding frames of men who were
guilty of yearning after freedom.
Yes, as I look back upon it, a man must be greatly a philosopher to survive
the continual impact of such brutish experiences through the years and years.
I am such a philosopher. I have endured eight years of their torment, and now,
in the end, failing to get rid of me in all other ways, they have invoked the
machinery of state to put a rope around my neck and shut off my breath by the
weight of my body. Oh, I know how the experts give expert judgment that the
fall through the trap breaks the victims neck. And the victims, like
Shakespeares traveller, never return to testify to the contrary. But we who
have lived in the stir know of the cases that are hushed in the prison crypts,
where the victims necks are not broken.
It is a funny thing, this hanging of a man. I have never seen a hanging, but
I have been told by eye-witnesses the details of a dozen hangings so that I
know what will happen to me. Standing on the trap, leg-manacled and armmanacled,
the knot against the neck, the black cap drawn, they will drop me
down until the momentum of my descending weight is fetched up abruptly
short by the tautening of the rope. Then the doctors will group around me, and
one will relieve another in successive turns in standing on a stool, his arms
passed around me to keep me from swinging like a pendulum, his ear pressed
close to my chest, while he counts my fading heart-beats. Sometimes twenty
minutes elapse after the trap is sprung ere the heart stops beating. Oh, trust
me, they make most scientifically sure that a man is dead once they get him on
a rope.
I still wander aside from my narrative to ask a question or two of society. I
have a right so to wander and so to question, for in a little while they are going
to take me out and do this thing to me. If the neck of the victim be broken by
the alleged shrewd arrangement of knot and noose, and by the alleged shrewd
calculation of the weight of the victim and the length of slack, then why do
they manacle the arms of the victim? Society, as a whole, is unable to answer
this question. But I know why; so does any amateur who ever engaged in a
lynching bee and saw the victim throw up his hands, clutch the rope, and ease
the throttle of the noose about his neck so that he might breathe.
Another question I will ask of the smug, cotton-wooled member of society,
whose soul has never strayed to the red hells. Why do they put the black cap
over the head and the face of the victim ere they drop him through the trap?
Please remember that in a short while they will put that black cap over my
head. So I have a right to ask. Do they, your hang-dogs, O smug citizen, do
these your hang-dogs fear to gaze upon the facial horror of the horror they
perpetrate for you and ours and at your behest?
Please remember that I am not asking this question in the twelve-hundredth
year after Christ, nor in the time of Christ, nor in the twelve-hundredth year
before Christ. I, who am to be hanged this year, the nineteen-hundred-andthirteenth
after Christ, ask these questions of you who are assumably Christs
followers, of you whose hang-dogs are going to take me out and hide my face
under a black cloth because they dare not look upon the horror they do to me
while I yet live.
And now back to the situation in the dungeons. When the last guard
departed and the outer door clanged shut, all the forty beaten, disappointed
men began to talk and ask questions. But, almost immediately, roaring like a
bull in order to be heard, Skysail Jack, a giant sailor of a lifer, ordered silence
while a census could be taken. The dungeons were full, and dungeon by
dungeon, in order of dungeons, shouted out its quota to the roll-call. Thus,
every dungeon was accounted for as occupied by trusted convicts, so that there
was no opportunity for a stool to be hidden away and listening.
Of me, only, were the convicts dubious, for I was the one man who had not
been in the plot. They put me through a searching examination. I could but
tell them how I had just emerged from dungeon and jacket in the morning, and
without rhyme or reason, so far as I could discover, had been put back in the
dungeon after being out only several hours. My record as an incorrigible was
in my favour, and soon they began to talk.
As I lay there and listened, for the first time I learned of the break that had
been a-hatching. Who had squealed? was their one quest, and throughout
the night the quest was pursued. The quest for Cecil Winwood was vain, and
the suspicion against him was general.
Theres only one thing, lads, Skysail Jack finally said. Itll soon be
morning, and then theyll take us out and give us bloody hell. We were caught
dead to rights with our clothes on. Winwood crossed us and squealed.
Theyre going to get us out one by one and mess us up. Theres forty of us.
Any lyins bound to be found out. So each lad, when they sweat him, just tells
the truth, the whole truth, so help him God.
And there, in that dark hole of mans inhumanity, from dungeon cell to
dungeon cell, their mouths against the gratings, the two-score lifers solemnly
pledged themselves before God to tell the truth.
Little good did their truth-telling do them. At nine oclock the guards, paid
bravoes of the smug citizens who constitute the state, full of meat and sleep,
were upon us. Not only had we had no breakfast, but we had had no water.
And beaten men are prone to feverishness. I wonder, my reader, if you can
glimpse or guess the faintest connotation of a man beatenbeat up, we
prisoners call it. But no, I shall not tell you. Let it suffice to know that these
beaten, feverish men lay seven hours without water.
At nine the guards arrived. There were not many of them. There was no
need for many, because they unlocked only one dungeon at a time. They were
equipped with pick-handlesa handy tool for the disciplining of a helpless
man. One dungeon at a time, and dungeon by dungeon, they messed and
pulped the lifers. They were impartial. I received the same pulping as the
rest. And this was merely the beginning, the preliminary to the examination
each man was to undergo alone in the presence of the paid brutes of the state.
It was the forecast to each man of what each man might expect in inquisition
hall.
I have been through most of the red hells of prison life, but, worst of all,
far worse than what they intend to do with me in a short while, was the
particular hell of the dungeons in the days that followed.
Long Bill Hodge, the hard-bitten mountaineer, was the first man
interrogated. He came back two hours lateror, rather, they conveyed him
back, and threw him on the stone of his dungeon floor. They then took away
Luigi Polazzo, a San Francisco hoodlum, the first native generation of Italian
parentage, who jeered and sneered at them and challenged them to wreak their
worst upon him.
It was some time before Long Bill Hodge mastered his pain sufficiently to
be coherent.
What about this dynamite? he demanded. Who knows anything about
dynamite?
And of course nobody knew, although it had been the burden of the
interrogation put to him.
Luigi Polazzo came back in a little less than two hours, and he came back a
wreck that babbled in delirium and could give no answer to the questions
showered upon him along the echoing corridor of dungeons by the men who
were yet to get what he had got, and who desired greatly to know what things
had been done to him and what interrogations had been put to him.
Twice again in the next forty-eight hours Luigi was taken out and
interrogated. After that, a gibbering imbecile, he went to live in Bughouse
Alley. He has a strong constitution. His shoulders are broad, his nostrils wide,
his chest is deep, his blood is pure; he will continue to gibber in Bughouse
Alley long after I have swung off and escaped the torment of the penitentiaries
of California.
Man after man was taken away, one at a time, and the wrecks of men were
brought back, one by one, to rave and howl in the darkness. And as I lay there
and listened to the moaning and the groaning, and all the idle chattering of
pain-addled wits, somehow, vaguely reminiscent, it seemed to me that
somewhere, some time, I had sat in a high place, callous and proud, and
listened to a similar chorus of moaning and groaning. Afterwards, as you shall
learn, I identified this reminiscence and knew that the moaning and the
groaning was of the sweep-slaves manacled to their benches, which I heard
from above, on the poop, a soldier passenger on a galley of old Rome. That
was when I sailed for Alexandria, a captain of men, on my way to Jerusalem . .
. but that is a story I shall tell you later. In the meanwhile . . . .
CHAPTER IV
In the meanwhile obtained the horror of the dungeons, after the discovery
of the plot to break prison. And never, during those eternal hours of waiting,
was it absent from my consciousness that I should follow these other convicts
out, endure the hells of inquisition they endured, and be brought back a wreck
and flung on the stone floor of my stone-walled, iron-doored dungeon.
They came for me. Ungraciously and ungently, with blow and curse, they
haled me forth, and I faced Captain Jamie and Warden Atherton, themselves
arrayed with the strength of half a dozen state-bought, tax-paid brutes of
guards who lingered in the room to do any bidding. But they were not needed.
Sit down, said Warden Atherton, indicating a stout arm-chair.
I, beaten and sore, without water for a night long and a day long, faint with
hunger, weak from a beating that had been added to five days in the dungeon
and eighty hours in the jacket, oppressed by the calamity of human fate,
apprehensive of what was to happen to me from what I had seen happen to the
othersI, a wavering waif of a human man and an erstwhile professor of
agronomy in a quiet college town, I hesitated to accept the invitation to sit
down.
Warden Atherton was a large man and a very powerful man. His hands
flashed out to a grip on my shoulders. I was a straw in his strength. He lifted
me clear of the floor and crashed me down in the chair.
Now, he said, while I gasped and swallowed my pain, tell me all about
it, Standing. Spit it outall of it, if you know whats healthy for you.
I dont know anything about what has happened . . ., I began.
That was as far as I got. With a growl and a leap he was upon me. Again
he lifted me in the air and crashed me down into the chair.
No nonsense, Standing, he warned. Make a clean breast of it. Where is
the dynamite?
I dont know anything of any dynamite, I protested.
Once again I was lifted and smashed back into the chair.
I have endured tortures of various sorts, but when I reflect upon them in
the quietness of these my last days, I am confident that no other torture was
quite the equal of that chair torture. By my body that stout chair was battered
out of any semblance of a chair. Another chair was brought, and in time that
chair was demolished. But more chairs were brought, and the eternal
questioning about the dynamite went on.
When Warden Atherton grew tired, Captain Jamie relieved him; and then
the guard Monohan took Captain Jamies place in smashing me down into the
chair. And always it was dynamite, dynamite, Where is the dynamite? and
there was no dynamite. Why, toward the last I would have given a large
portion of my immortal soul for a few pounds of dynamite to which I could
confess.
I do not know how many chairs were broken by my body. I fainted times
without number, and toward the last the whole thing became nightmarish. I
was half-carried, half-shoved and dragged back to the dark. There, when I
became conscious, I found a stool in my dungeon. He was a pallid-faced, little
dope-fiend of a short-timer who would do anything to obtain the drug. As
soon as I recognized him I crawled to the grating and shouted out along the
corridor:
There is a stool in with me, fellows! Hes Ignatius Irvine! Watch out
what you say!
The outburst of imprecations that went up would have shaken the fortitude
of a braver man than Ignatius Irvine. He was pitiful in his terror, while all
about him, roaring like beasts, the pain-racked lifers told him what awful
things they would do to him in the years that were to come.
Had there been secrets, the presence of a stool in the dungeons would have
kept the men quiet, As it was, having all sworn to tell the truth, they talked
openly before Ignatius Irvine. The one great puzzle was the dynamite, of
which they were as much in the dark as was I. They appealed to me. If I
knew anything about the dynamite they begged me to confess it and save them
all from further misery. And I could tell them only the truth, that I knew of no
dynamite.
One thing the stool told me, before the guards removed him, showed how
serious was this matter of the dynamite. Of course, I passed the word along,
which was that not a wheel had turned in the prison all day. The thousands of
convict-workers had remained locked in their cells, and the outlook was that
not one of the various prison-factories would be operated again until after the
discovery of some dynamite that somebody had hidden somewhere in the
prison.
And ever the examination went on. Ever, one at a time, convicts were
dragged away and dragged or carried back again. They reported that Warden
Atherton and Captain Jamie, exhausted by their efforts, relieved each other
every two hours. While one slept, the other examined. And they slept in their
clothes in the very room in which strong man after strong man was being
broken.
And hour by hour, in the dark dungeons, our madness of torment grew.
Oh, trust me as one who knows, hanging is an easy thing compared with the
way live men may be hurt in all the life of them and still live. I, too, suffered
equally with them from pain and thirst; but added to my suffering was the fact
that I remained conscious to the sufferings of the others. I had been an
incorrigible for two years, and my nerves and brain were hardened to
suffering. It is a frightful thing to see a strong man broken. About me, at the
one time, were forty strong men being broken. Ever the cry for water went up,
and the place became lunatic with the crying, sobbing, babbling and raving of
men in delirium.
Dont you see? Our truth, the very truth we told, was our damnation.
When forty men told the same things with such unanimity, Warden Atherton
and Captain Jamie could only conclude that the testimony was a memorized
lie which each of the forty rattled off parrot-like.
From the standpoint of the authorities, their situation was as desperate as
ours. As I learned afterward, the Board of Prison Directors had been
summoned by telegraph, and two companies of state militia were being rushed
to the prison.
It was winter weather, and the frost is sometimes shrewd even in a
California winter. We had no blankets in the dungeons. Please know that it is
very cold to stretch bruised human flesh on frosty stone. In the end they did
give us water. Jeering and cursing us, the guards ran in the fire-hoses and
played the fierce streams on us, dungeon by dungeon, hour after hour, until
our bruised flesh was battered all anew by the violence with which the water
smote us, until we stood knee-deep in the water which we had raved for and
for which now we raved to cease.
I shall skip the rest of what happened in the dungeons. In passing I shall
merely state that no one of those forty lifers was ever the same again. Luigi
Polazzo never recovered his reason. Long Bill Hodge slowly lost his sanity,
so that a year later, he, too, went to live in Bughouse Alley. Oh, and others
followed Hodge and Polazzo; and others, whose physical stamina had been
impaired, fell victims to prison-tuberculosis. Fully 25 per cent. of the forty
have died in the succeeding six years.
After my five years in solitary, when they took me away from San Quentin
for my trial, I saw Skysail Jack. I could see little, for I was blinking in the
sunshine like a bat, after five years of darkness; yet I saw enough of Skysail
Jack to pain my heart. It was in crossing the Prison Yard that I saw him. His
hair had turned white. He was prematurely old. His chest had caved in. His
cheeks were sunken. His hands shook as with palsy. He tottered as he
walked. And his eyes blurred with tears as he recognized me, for I, too, was a
sad wreck of what had once been a man. I weighed eighty-seven pounds. My
hair, streaked with gray, was a five-years growth, as were my beard and
moustache. And I, too, tottered as I walked, so that the guards helped to lead
me across that sun-blinding patch of yard. And Skysail Jack and I peered and
knew each other under the wreckage.
Men such as he are privileged, even in a prison, so that he dared an
infraction of the rules by speaking to me in a cracked and quavering voice.
Youre a good one, Standing, he cackled. You never squealed.
But I never knew, Jack, I whispered backI was compelled to whisper,
for five years of disuse had well-nigh lost me my voice. I dont think there
ever was any dynamite.
Thats right, he cackled, nodding his head childishly. Stick with it.
Dont ever letm know. Youre a good one. I take my hat off to you,
Standing. You never squealed.
And the guards led me on, and that was the last I saw of Skysail Jack. It
was plain that even he had become a believer in the dynamite myth.
***
Twice they had me before the full Board of Directors. I was alternately
bullied and cajoled. Their attitude resolved itself into two propositions. If I
delivered up the dynamite, they would give me a nominal punishment of thirty
days in the dungeon and then make me a trusty in the prison library. If I
persisted in my stubbornness and did not yield up the dynamite, then they
would put me in solitary for the rest of my sentence. In my case, being a life
prisoner, this was tantamount to condemning me to solitary confinement for
life.
Oh, no; California is civilized. There is no such law on the statute books.
It is a cruel and unusual punishment, and no modern state would be guilty of
such a law. Nevertheless, in the history of California I am the third man who
has been condemned for life to solitary confinement. The other two were Jake
Oppenheimer and Ed Morrell. I shall tell you about them soon, for I rotted
with them for years in the cells of silence.
Oh, another thing. They are going to take me out and hang me in a little
whileno, not for killing Professor Haskell. I got life-imprisonment for that.
They are going to take me out and hang me because I was found guilty of
assault and battery. And this is not prison discipline. It is law, and as law it
will be found in the criminal statutes.
I believe I made a mans nose bleed. I never saw it bleed, but that was the
evidence. Thurston, his name was. He was a guard at San Quentin. He
weighed one hundred and seventy pounds and was in good health. I weighed
under ninety pounds, was blind as a bat from the long darkness, and had been
so long pent in narrow walls that I was made dizzy by large open spaces.
Really, mime was a well-defined case of incipient agoraphobia, as I quickly
learned that day I escaped from solitary and punched the guard Thurston on
the nose.
I struck him on the nose and made it bleed when he got in my way and
tried to catch hold of me. And so they are going to hang me. It is the written
law of the State of California that a lifetimer like me is guilty of a capital
crime when he strikes a prison guard like Thurston. Surely, he could not have
been inconvenienced more than half an hour by that bleeding nose; and yet
they are going to hang me for it.
And, see! This law, in my case, is ex post facto. It was not a law at the
time I killed Professor Haskell. It was not passed until after I received my
life-sentence. And this is the very point: my life-sentence gave me my status
under this law which had not yet been written on the books. And it is because
of my status of lifetimer that I am to be hanged for battery committed on the
guard Thurston. It is clearly ex post facto, and, therefore, unconstitutional.
But what bearing has the Constitution on constitutional lawyers when they
want to put the notorious Professor Darrell Standing out of the way? Nor do I
even establish the precedent with my execution. A year ago, as everybody
who reads the newspapers knows, they hanged Jake Oppenheimer, right here
in Folsom, for a precisely similar offence . . . only, in his case of battery, he
was not guilty of making a guards nose bleed. He cut a convict
unintentionally with a bread-knife.
It is strangelife and mens ways and laws and tangled paths. I am
writing these lines in the very cell in Murderers Row that Jake Oppenheimer
occupied ere they took him out and did to him what they are going to do to
me.
I warned you I had many things to write about. I shall now return to my
narrative. The Board of Prison Directors gave me my choice: a prison
trustyship and surcease from the jute-looms if I gave up the non-existent
dynamite; life imprisonment in solitary if I refused to give up the non-existent
dynamite.
They gave me twenty-four hours in the jacket to think it over. Then I was
brought before the Board a second time. What could I do? I could not lead
them to the dynamite that was not. I told them so, and they told me I was a
liar. They told me I was a hard case, a dangerous man, a moral degenerate, the
criminal of the century. They told me many other things, and then they carried
me away to the solitary cells. I was put into Number One cell. In Number
Five lay Ed Morrell. In Number Twelve lay Jake Oppenheimer. And he had
been there for ten years. Ed Morrell had been in his cell only one year. He
was serving a fifty-years sentence. Jake Oppenheimer was a lifer. And so
was I a lifer. Wherefore the outlook was that the three of us would remain
there for a long time. And yet, six years only are past, and not one of us is in
solitary. Jake Oppenheimer was swung off. Ed Morrell was made head trusty
of San Quentin and then pardoned out only the other day. And here I am in
Folsom waiting the day duly set by Judge Morgan, which will be my last day.
The fools! As if they could throttle my immortality with their clumsy
device of rope and scaffold! I shall walk, and walk again, oh, countless times,
this fair earth. And I shall walk in the flesh, be prince and peasant, savant and
fool, sit in the high place and groan under the wheel.
CHAPTER V
It was very lonely, at first, in solitary, and the hours were long. Time was
marked by the regular changing of the guards, and by the alternation of day
and night. Day was only a little light, but it was better than the all-dark of the
night. In solitary the day was an ooze, a slimy seepage of light from the bright
outer world.
Never was the light strong enough to read by. Besides, there was nothing
to read. One could only lie and think and think. And I was a lifer, and it
seemed certain, if I did not do a miracle, make thirty-five pounds of dynamite
out of nothing, that all the years of my life would be spent in the silent dark.
My bed was a thin and rotten tick of straw spread on the cell floor. One
thin and filthy blanket constituted the covering. There was no chair, no table
nothing but the tick of straw and the thin, aged blanket. I was ever a short
sleeper and ever a busy-brained man. In solitary one grows sick of oneself in
his thoughts, and the only way to escape oneself is to sleep. For years I had
averaged five hours sleep a night. I now cultivated sleep. I made a science of
it. I became able to sleep ten hours, then twelve hours, and, at last, as high as
fourteen and fifteen hours out of the twenty-four. But beyond that I could not
go, and, perforce, was compelled to lie awake and think and think. And that
way, for an active-brained man, lay madness.
I sought devices to enable me mechanically to abide my waking hours. I
squared and cubed long series of numbers, and by concentration and will
carried on most astonishing geometric progressions. I even dallied with the
squaring of the circle . . . until I found myself beginning to believe that that
possibility could be accomplished. Whereupon, realizing that there, too, lay
madness, I forwent the squaring of the circle, although I assure you it required
a considerable sacrifice on my part, for the mental exercise involved was a
splendid time-killer.
By sheer visualization under my eyelids I constructed chess-boards and
played both sides of long games through to checkmate. But when I had
become expert at this visualized game of memory the exercise palled on me.
Exercise it was, for there could be no real contest when the same player played
both sides. I tried, and tried vainly, to split my personality into two
personalities and to pit one against the other. But ever I remained the one
player, with no planned ruse or strategy on one side that the other side did not
immediately apprehend.
And time was very heavy and very long. I played games with flies, with
ordinary house-flies that oozed into solitary as did the dim gray light; and
learned that they possessed a sense of play. For instance, lying on the cell
floor, I established an arbitrary and imaginary line along the wall some three
feet above the floor. When they rested on the wall above this line they were
left in peace. The instant they lighted on the wall below the line I tried to
catch them. I was careful never to hurt them, and, in time, they knew as
precisely as did I where ran the imaginary line. When they desired to play,
they lighted below the line, and often for an hour at a time a single fly would
engage in the sport. When it grew tired, it would come to rest on the safe
territory above.
Of the dozen or more flies that lived with me, there was only one who did
not care for the game. He refused steadfastly to play, and, having learned the
penalty of alighting below the line, very carefully avoided the unsafe territory.
That fly was a sullen, disgruntled creature. As the convicts would say, it had a
grouch against the world. He never played with the other flies either. He
was strong and healthy, too; for I studied him long to find out. His
indisposition for play was temperamental, not physical.
Believe me, I knew all my flies. It was surprising to me the multitude of
differences I distinguished between them. Oh, each was distinctly an
individualnot merely in size and markings, strength, and speed of flight, and
in the manner and fancy of flight and play, of dodge and dart, of wheel and
swiftly repeat or wheel and reverse, of touch and go on the danger wall, or of
feint the touch and alight elsewhere within the zone. They were likewise
sharply differentiated in the minutest shades of mentality and temperament.
I knew the nervous ones, the phlegmatic ones. There was a little
undersized one that would fly into real rages, sometimes with me, sometimes
with its fellows. Have you ever seen a colt or a calf throw up its heels and
dash madly about the pasture from sheer excess of vitality and spirits? Well,
there was one flythe keenest player of them all, by the waywho, when it
had alighted three or four times in rapid succession on my taboo wall and
succeeded each time in eluding the velvet-careful swoop of my hand, would
grow so excited and jubilant that it would dart around and around my head at
top speed, wheeling, veering, reversing, and always keeping within the limits
of the narrow circle in which it celebrated its triumph over me.
Why, I could tell well in advance when any particular fly was making up
its mind to begin to play. There are a thousand details in this one matter alone
that I shall not bore you with, although these details did serve to keep me from
being bored too utterly during that first period in solitary. But one thing I must
tell you. To me it is most memorablethe time when the one with a grouch,
who never played, alighted in a moment of absent-mindedness within the
taboo precinct and was immediately captured in my hand. Do you know, he
sulked for an hour afterward.
And the hours were very long in solitary; nor could I sleep them all away;
nor could I while them away with house-flies, no matter how intelligent. For
house-flies are house-flies, and I was a man, with a mans brain; and my brain
was trained and active, stuffed with culture and science, and always geared to
a high tension of eagerness to do. And there was nothing to do, and my
thoughts ran abominably on in vain speculations. There was my pentose and
methyl-pentose determination in grapes and wines to which I had devoted my
last summer vacation at the Asti Vineyards. I had all but completed the series
of experiments. Was anybody else going on with it, I wondered; and if so,
with what success?
You see, the world was dead to me. No news of it filtered in. The history
of science was making fast, and I was interested in a thousand subjects. Why,
there was my theory of the hydrolysis of casein by trypsin, which Professor
Walters had been carrying out in his laboratory. Also, Professor Schleimer
had similarly been collaborating with me in the detection of phytosterol in
mixtures of animal and vegetable fats. The work surely was going on, but
with what results? The very thought of all this activity just beyond the prison
walls and in which I could take no part, of which I was never even to hear, was
maddening. And in the meantime I lay there on my cell floor and played
games with house-flies.
And yet all was not silence in solitary. Early in my confinement I used to
hear, at irregular intervals, faint, low tappings. From farther away I also heard
fainter and lower tappings. Continually these tappings were interrupted by the
snarling of the guard. On occasion, when the tapping went on too persistently,
extra guards were summoned, and I knew by the sounds that men were being
strait-jacketed.
The matter was easy of explanation. I had known, as every prisoner in San
Quentin knew, that the two men in solitary were Ed Morrell and Jake
Oppenheimer. And I knew that these were the two men who tapped knuckletalk
to each other and were punished for so doing.
That the code they used was simple I had not the slightest doubt, yet I
devoted many hours to a vain effort to work it out. Heaven knowsit had to
be simple, yet I could not make head nor tail of it. And simple it proved to be,
when I learned it; and simplest of all proved the trick they employed which
had so baffled me. Not only each day did they change the point in the
alphabet where the code initialled, but they changed it every conversation,
and, often, in the midst of a conversation.
Thus, there came a day when I caught the code at the right initial, listened
to two clear sentences of conversation, and, the next time they talked, failed to
understand a word. But that first time!
SayEdwhatwould yougiverightnowforbrown
papersandasackofBullDurham! asked the one who tapped
from farther away.
I nearly cried out in my joy. Here was communication! Here was
companionship! I listened eagerly, and the nearer tapping, which I guessed
must be Ed Morrells, replied:
Iwoulddotwentyhoursstraitinthejacketforafive
centsack
Then came the snarling interruption of the guard: Cut that out, Morrell!
It may be thought by the layman that the worst has been done to men
sentenced to solitary for life, and therefore that a mere guard has no way of
compelling obedience to his order to cease tapping.
But the jacket remains. Starvation remains. Thirst remains. Manhandling
remains. Truly, a man pent in a narrow cell is very helpless.
So the tapping ceased, and that night, when it was next resumed, I was all
at sea again. By pre-arrangement they had changed the initial letter of the
code. But I had caught the clue, and, in the matter of several days, occurred
again the same initialment I had understood. I did not wait on courtesy.
Hello, I tapped
Hello, stranger, Morrell tapped back; and, from Oppenheimer, Welcome
to our city.
They were curious to know who I was, how long I was condemned to
solitary, and why I had been so condemned. But all this I put to the side in
order first to learn their system of changing the code initial. After I had this
clear, we talked. It was a great day, for the two lifers had become three,
although they accepted me only on probation. As they told me long after, they
feared I might be a stool placed there to work a frame-up on them. It had been
done before, to Oppenheimer, and he had paid dearly for the confidence he
reposed in Warden Athertons tool.
To my surpriseyes, to my elation be it saidboth my fellow-prisoners
knew me through my record as an incorrigible. Even into the living grave
Oppenheimer had occupied for ten years had my fame, or notoriety, rather,
penetrated.
I had much to tell them of prison happenings and of the outside world.
The conspiracy to escape of the forty lifers, the search for the alleged
dynamite, and all the treacherous frame-up of Cecil Winwood was news to
them. As they told me, news did occasionally dribble into solitary by way of
the guards, but they had had nothing for a couple of months. The present
guards on duty in solitary were a particularly bad and vindictive set.
Again and again that day we were cursed for our knuckle talking by
whatever guard was on. But we could not refrain. The two of the living dead
had become three, and we had so much to say, while the manner of saying it
was exasperatingly slow and I was not so proficient as they at the knuckle
game.
Wait till Pie-Face comes on to-night, Morrell rapped to me. He sleeps
most of his watch, and we can talk a streak.
How we did talk that night! Sleep was farthest from our eyes. Pie-Face
Jones was a mean and bitter man, despite his fatness; but we blessed that
fatness because it persuaded to stolen snatches of slumber. Nevertheless our
incessant tapping bothered his sleep and irritated him so that he reprimanded
us repeatedly. And by the other night guards we were roundly cursed. In the
morning all reported much tapping during the night, and we paid for our little
holiday; for, at nine, came Captain Jamie with several guards to lace us into
the torment of the jacket. Until nine the following morning, for twenty-four
straight hours, laced and helpless on the floor, without food or water, we paid
the price for speech.
Oh, our guards were brutes! And under their treatment we had to harden to
brutes in order to live. Hard work makes calloused hands. Hard guards make
hard prisoners. We continued to talk, and, on occasion, to be jacketed for
punishment. Night was the best time, and, when substitute guards chanced to
be on, we often talked through a whole shift.
Night and day were one with us who lived in the dark. We could sleep any
time, we could knuckle-talk only on occasion. We told one another much of
the history of our lives, and for long hours Morrell and I have lain silently,
while steadily, with faint, far taps, Oppenheimer slowly spelled out his lifestory,
from the early years in a San Francisco slum, through his gang-training,
through his initiation into all that was vicious, when as a lad of fourteen he
served as night messenger in the red light district, through his first detected
infraction of the laws, and on and on through thefts and robberies to the
treachery of a comrade and to red slayings inside prison walls.
They called Jake Oppenheimer the Human Tiger. Some cub reporter
coined the phrase that will long outlive the man to whom it was applied. And
yet I ever found in Jake Oppenheimer all the cardinal traits of right
humanness. He was faithful and loyal. I know of the times he has taken
punishment in preference to informing on a comrade. He was brave. He was
patient. He was capable of self-sacrificeI could tell a story of this, but shall
not take the time. And justice, with him, was a passion. The prison-killings
done by him were due entirely to this extreme sense of justice. And he had a
splendid mind. A lifetime in prison, ten years of it in solitary, had not dimmed
his brain.
Morrell, ever a true comrade, too had a splendid brain. In fact, and I who
am about to die have the right to say it without incurring the charge of
immodesty, the three best minds in San Quentin from the Warden down were
the three that rotted there together in solitary. And here at the end of my days,
reviewing all that I have known of life, I am compelled to the conclusion that
strong minds are never docile. The stupid men, the fearful men, the men
ungifted with passionate rightness and fearless championshipthese are the
men who make model prisoners. I thank all gods that Jake Oppenheimer, Ed
Morrell, and I were not model prisoners.
CHAPTER VI
There is more than the germ of truth in things erroneous in the childs
definition of memory as the thing one forgets with. To be able to forget means
sanity. Incessantly to remember, means obsession, lunacy. So the problem I
faced in solitary, where incessant remembering strove for possession of me,
was the problem of forgetting. When I gamed with flies, or played chess with
myself, or talked with my knuckles, I partially forgot. What I desired was
entirely to forget.
There were the boyhood memories of other times and placesthe trailing
clouds of glory of Wordsworth. If a boy had had these memories, were they
irretrievably lost when he had grown to manhood? Could this particular
content of his boy brain be utterly eliminated? Or were these memories of
other times and places still residual, asleep, immured in solitary in brain cells
similarly to the way I was immured in a cell in San Quentin?
Solitary life-prisoners have been known to resurrect and look upon the sun
again. Then why could not these other-world memories of the boy resurrect?
But how? In my judgment, by attainment of complete forgetfulness of
present and of manhood past.
And again, how? Hypnotism should do it. If by hypnotism the conscious
mind were put to sleep, and the subconscious mind awakened, then was the
thing accomplished, then would all the dungeon doors of the brain be thrown
wide, then would the prisoners emerge into the sunshine.
So I reasonedwith what result you shall learn. But first I must tell how,
as a boy, I had had these other-world memories. I had glowed in the clouds of
glory I trailed from lives aforetime. Like any boy, I had been haunted by the
other beings I had been at other times. This had been during my process of
becoming, ere the flux of all that I had ever been had hardened in the mould of
the one personality that was to be known by men for a few years as Darrell
Standing.
Let me narrate just one incident. It was up in Minnesota on the old farm. I
was nearly six years old. A missionary to China, returned to the United States
and sent out by the Board of Missions to raise funds from the farmers, spent
the night in our house. It was in the kitchen just after supper, as my mother
was helping me undress for bed, and the missionary was showing photographs
of the Holy Land.
And what I am about to tell you I should long since have forgotten had I
not heard my father recite it to wondering listeners so many times during my
childhood.
I cried out at sight of one of the photographs and looked at it, first with
eagerness, and then with disappointment. It had seemed of a sudden most
familiar, in much the same way that my fathers barn would have been in a
photograph. Then it had seemed altogether strange. But as I continued to look
the haunting sense of familiarity came back.
The Tower of David, the missionary said to my mother.
No! I cried with great positiveness.
You mean that isnt its name? the missionary asked.
I nodded.
Then what is its name, my boy?
Its name is . . . I began, then concluded lamely, I, forget.
It dont look the same now, I went on after a pause. Theyve ben fixin
it up awful.
Here the missionary handed to my mother another photograph he had
sought out.
I was there myself six months ago, Mrs. Standing. He pointed with his
finger. That is the Jaffa Gate where I walked in and right up to the Tower of
David in the back of the picture where my finger is now. The authorities are
pretty well agreed on such matters. El Kulah, as it was known by
But here I broke in again, pointing to rubbish piles of ruined masonry on
the left edge of the photograph.
Over there somewhere, I said. That name you just spoke was what the
Jews called it. But we called it something else. We called it . . . I forget.
Listen to the youngster, my father chuckled. Youd think hed ben
there.
I nodded my head, for in that moment I knew I had been there, though all
seemed strangely different. My father laughed the harder, but the missionary
thought I was making game of him. He handed me another photograph. It
was just a bleak waste of a landscape, barren of trees and vegetation, a shallow
canyon with easy-sloping walls of rubble. In the middle distance was a cluster
of wretched, flat-roofed hovels.
Now, my boy, where is that? the missionary quizzed.
And the name came to me!
Samaria, I said instantly.
My father clapped his hands with glee, my mother was perplexed at my
antic conduct, while the missionary evinced irritation.
The boy is right, he said. It is a village in Samaria. I passed through it.
That is why I bought it. And it goes to show that the boy has seen similar
photographs before.
This my father and mother denied.
But its different in the picture, I volunteered, while all the time my
memory was busy reconstructing the photograph. The general trend of the
landscape and the line of the distant hills were the same. The differences I
noted aloud and pointed out with my finger.
The houses was about right here, and there was more trees, lots of trees,
and lots of grass, and lots of goats. I can see em now, an two boys drivin
em. An right here is a lot of men walkin behind one man. An over
thereI pointed to where I had placed my villageis a lot of tramps. They
aint got nothin on exceptin rags. An theyre sick. Their faces, an hands,
an legs is all sores.
Hes heard the story in church or somewhereyou remember, the healing
of the lepers in Luke, the missionary said with a smile of satisfaction. How
many sick tramps are there, my boy?
I had learned to count to a hundred when I was five years old, so I went
over the group carefully and announced:
Ten of em. Theyre all wavin their arms an yellin at the other men.
But they dont come near them? was the query.
I shook my head. They just stand right there an keep a-yellin like they
was in trouble.
Go on, urged the missionary. What next? Whats the man doing in the
front of the other crowd you said was walking along?
Theyve all stopped, an hes sayin something to the sick men. An the
boys with the goats s stopped to look. Everybodys lookin.
And then?
Thats all. The sick men are headin for the houses. They aint yellin any
more, an they dont look sick any more. An I just keep settin on my horse alookin
on.
At this all three of my listeners broke into laughter.
An Im a big man! I cried out angrily. An I got a big sword!
The ten lepers Christ healed before he passed through Jericho on his way
to Jerusalem, the missionary explained to my parents. The boy has seen
slides of famous paintings in some magic lantern exhibition.
But neither father nor mother could remember that I had ever seen a magic
lantern.
Try him with another picture, father suggested.
Its all different, I complained as I studied the photograph the missionary
handed me. Aint nothin here except that hill and them other hills. This
ought to be a country road along here. An over there ought to be gardens, an
trees, an houses behind big stone walls. An over there, on the other side, in
holes in the rocks ought to be where they buried dead folks. You see this
place?they used to throw stones at people there until they killed m. I never
seen m do it. They just told me about it.
And the hill? the missionary asked, pointing to the central part of the
print, for which the photograph seemed to have been taken. Can you tell us
the name of the hill?
I shook my head.
Never had no name. They killed folks there. Ive seem m more n
once.
This time he agrees with the majority of the authorities, announced the
missionary with huge satisfaction. The hill is Golgotha, the Place of Skulls,
or, as you please, so named because it resembles a skull. Notice the
resemblance. That is where they crucified He broke off and turned to me.
Whom did they crucify there, young scholar? Tell us what else you see.
Oh, I sawmy father reported that my eyes were bulging; but I shook my
head stubbornly and said:
I aint a-goin to tell you because youre laughin at me. I seen lots an
lots of men killed there. They nailed em up, an it took a long time. I seen
but I aint a-goin to tell. I dont tell lies. You ask dad an ma if I tell lies.
Hed whale the stuffin out of me if I did. Ask m.
And thereat not another word could the missionary get from me, even
though he baited me with more photographs that sent my head whirling with a
rush of memory-pictures and that urged and tickled my tongue with spates of
speech which I sullenly resisted and overcame.
He will certainly make a good Bible scholar, the missionary told father
and mother after I had kissed them good-night and departed for bed. Or else,
with that imagination, hell become a successful fiction-writer.
Which shows how prophecy can go agley. I sit here in Murderers Row,
writing these lines in my last days, or, rather, in Darrell Standings last days
ere they take him out and try to thrust him into the dark at the end of a rope,
and I smile to myself. I became neither Bible scholar nor novelist. On the
contrary, until they buried me in the cells of silence for half a decade, I was
everything that the missionary forecasted notan agricultural expert, a
professor of agronomy, a specialist in the science of the elimination of waste
motion, a master of farm efficiency, a precise laboratory scientist where
precision and adherence to microscopic fact are absolute requirements.
And I sit here in the warm afternoon, in Murderers Row, and cease from
the writing of my memoirs to listen to the soothing buzz of flies in the drowsy
air, and catch phrases of a low-voiced conversation between Josephus Jackson,
the negro murderer on my right, and Bambeccio, the Italian murderer on my
left, who are discussing, through grated door to grated door, back and forth
past my grated door, the antiseptic virtues and excellences of chewing tobacco
for flesh wounds.
And in my suspended hand I hold my fountain pen, and as I remember that
other hands of me, in long gone ages, wielded ink-brush, and quill, and stylus,
I also find thought-space in time to wonder if that missionary, when he was a
little lad, ever trailed clouds of glory and glimpsed the brightness of old starroving
days.
Well, back to solitary, after I had learned the code of knuckle-talk and still
found the hours of consciousness too long to endure. By self-hypnosis, which
I began successfully to practise, I became able to put my conscious mind to
sleep and to awaken and loose my subconscious mind. But the latter was an
undisciplined and lawless thing. It wandered through all nightmarish
madness, without coherence, without continuity of scene, event, or person.
My method of mechanical hypnosis was the soul of simplicity. Sitting
with folded legs on my straw-mattress, I gazed fixedly at a fragment of bright
straw which I had attached to the wall of my cell near the door where the most
light was. I gazed at the bright point, with my eyes close to it, and tilted
upward till they strained to see. At the same time I relaxed all the will of me
and gave myself to the swaying dizziness that always eventually came to me.
And when I felt myself sway out of balance backward, I closed my eyes and
permitted myself to fall supine and unconscious on the mattress.
And then, for half-an-hour, ten minutes, or as long as an hour or so, I
would wander erratically and foolishly through the stored memories of my
eternal recurrence on earth. But times and places shifted too swiftly. I knew
afterward, when I awoke, that I, Darrell Standing, was the linking personality
that connected all bizarreness and grotesqueness. But that was all. I could
never live out completely one full experience, one point of consciousness in
time and space. My dreams, if dreams they may be called, were rhymeless
and reasonless.
Thus, as a sample of my rovings: in a single interval of fifteen minutes of
subconsciousness I have crawled and bellowed in the slime of the primeval
world and sat beside Haasfurther and cleaved the twentieth century air in a
gas-driven monoplane. Awake, I remembered that I, Darrell Standing, in the
flesh, during the year preceding my incarceration in San Quentin, had flown
with Haas further over the Pacific at Santa Monica. Awake, I did not
remember the crawling and the bellowing in the ancient slime. Nevertheless,
awake, I reasoned that somehow I had remembered that early adventure in the
slime, and that it was a verity of long-previous experience, when I was not yet
Darrell Standing but somebody else, or something else that crawled and
bellowed. One experience was merely more remote than the other. Both
experiences were equally realor else how did I remember them?
Oh, what a fluttering of luminous images and actions! In a few short
minutes of loosed subconsciousness I have sat in the halls of kings, above the
salt and below the salt, been fool and jester, man-at-arms, clerk and monk; and
I have been ruler above all at the head of the tabletemporal power in my
own sword arm, in the thickness of my castle walls, and the numbers of my
fighting men; spiritual power likewise mine by token of the fact that cowled
priests and fat abbots sat beneath me and swigged my wine and swined my
meat.
I have worn the iron collar of the serf about my neck in cold climes; and I
have loved princesses of royal houses in the tropic-warmed and sun-scented
night, where black slaves fanned the sultry air with fans of peacock plumes,
while from afar, across the palm and fountains, drifted the roaring of lions and
the cries of jackals. I have crouched in chill desert places warming my hands
at fires builded of camels dung; and I have lain in the meagre shade of sunparched
sage-brush by dry water-holes and yearned dry-tongued for water,
while about me, dismembered and scattered in the alkali, were the bones of
men and beasts who had yearned and died.
I have been sea-cuny and bravo, scholar and recluse. I have pored over
hand-written pages of huge and musty tomes in the scholastic quietude and
twilight of cliff-perched monasteries, while beneath on the lesser slopes,
peasants still toiled beyond the end of day among the vines and olives and
drove in from pastures the blatting goats and lowing kine; yes, and I have led
shouting rabbles down the wheel-worn, chariot-rutted paves of ancient and
forgotten cities; and, solemn-voiced and grave as death, I have enunciated the
law, stated the gravity of the infraction, and imposed the due death on men,
who, like Darrell Standing in Folsom Prison, had broken the law.
Aloft, at giddy mastheads oscillating above the decks of ships, I have
gazed on sun-flashed water where coral-growths iridesced from profounds of
turquoise deeps, and conned the ships into the safety of mirrored lagoons
where the anchors rumbled down close to palm-fronded beaches of seapounded
coral rock; and I have striven on forgotten battlefields of the elder
days, when the sun went down on slaughter that did not cease and that
continued through the night-hours with the stars shining down and with a cool
night wind blowing from distant peaks of snow that failed to chill the sweat of
battle; and again, I have been little Darrell Standing, bare-footed in the dewlush
grass of spring on the Minnesota farm, chilblained when of frosty
mornings I fed the cattle in their breath-steaming stalls, sobered to fear and
awe of the splendour and terror of God when I sat on Sundays under the rant
and preachment of the New Jerusalem and the agonies of hell-fire.
Now, the foregoing were the glimpses and glimmerings that came to me,
when, in Cell One of Solitary in San Quentin, I stared myself unconscious by
means of a particle of bright, light-radiating straw. How did these things come
to me? Surely I could not have manufactured them out of nothing inside my
pent walls any more than could I have manufactured out of nothing the thirtyfive
pounds of dynamite so ruthlessly demanded of me by Captain Jamie,
Warden Atherton, and the Prison Board of Directors.
I am Darrell Standing, born and raised on a quarter section of land in
Minnesota, erstwhile professor of agronomy, a prisoner incorrigible in San
Quentin, and at present a death-sentenced man in Folsom. I do not know, of
Darrell Standings experience, these things of which I write and which I have
dug from out my store-houses of subconsciousness. I, Darrell Standing, born
in Minnesota and soon to die by the rope in California, surely never loved
daughters of kings in the courts of kings; nor fought cutlass to cutlass on the
swaying decks of ships; nor drowned in the spirit-rooms of ships, guzzling raw
liquor to the wassail-shouting and death-singing of seamen, while the ship
lifted and crashed on the black-toothed rocks and the water bubbled overhead,
beneath, and all about.
Such things are not of Darrell Standings experience in the world. Yet I,
Darrell Standing, found these things within myself in solitary in San Quentin
by means of mechanical self-hypnosis. No more were these experiences
Darrell Standings than was the word Samaria Darrell Standings when it
leapt to his child lips at sight of a photograph.
One cannot make anything out of nothing. In solitary I could not so make
thirty-five pounds of dynamite. Nor in solitary, out of nothing in Darrell
Standings experience, could I make these wide, far visions of time and space.
These things were in the content of my mind, and in my mind I was just
beginning to learn my way about.
CHAPTER VII
So here was my predicament: I knew that within myself was a Golconda of
memories of other lives, yet I was unable to do more than flit like a madman
through those memories. I had my Golconda but could not mine it.
I remembered the case of Stainton Moses, the clergyman who had been
possessed by the personalities of St. Hippolytus, Plotinus, Athenodorus, and of
that friend of Erasmus named Grocyn. And when I considered the
experiments of Colonel de Rochas, which I had read in tyro fashion in other
and busier days, I was convinced that Stainton Moses had, in previous lives,
been those personalities that on occasion seemed to possess him. In truth, they
were he, they were the links of the chain of recurrence.
But more especially did I dwell upon the experiments of Colonel de
Rochas. By means of suitable hypnotic subjects he claimed that he had
penetrated backwards through time to the ancestors of his subjects. Thus, the
case of Josephine which he describes. She was eighteen years old and she
lived at Voiron, in the department of the Isère. Under hypnotism Colonel de
Rochas sent her adventuring back through her adolescence, her girlhood, her
childhood, breast-infancy, and the silent dark of her mothers womb, and, still
back, through the silence and the dark of the time when she, Josephine, was
not yet born, to the light and life of a previous living, when she had been a
churlish, suspicious, and embittered old man, by name Jean-Claude Bourdon,
who had served his time in the Seventh Artillery at Besançon, and who died at
the age of seventy, long bedridden. Yes, and did not Colonel de Rochas in turn
hypnotize this shade of Jean-Claude Bourdon, so that he adventured farther
back into time, through infancy and birth and the dark of the unborn, until he
found again light and life when, as a wicked old woman, he had been
Philomène Carteron?
But try as I would with my bright bit of straw in the oozement of light into
solitary, I failed to achieve any such definiteness of previous personality. I
became convinced, through the failure of my experiments, that only through
death could I clearly and coherently resurrect the memories of my previous
selves.
But the tides of life ran strong in me. I, Darrell Standing, was so strongly
disinclined to die that I refused to let Warden Atherton and Captain Jamie kill
me. I was always so innately urged to live that sometimes I think that is why I
am still here, eating and sleeping, thinking and dreaming, writing this narrative
of my various mes, and awaiting the incontestable rope that will put an
ephemeral period in my long-linked existence.
And then came death in life. I learned the trick, Ed Morrell taught it me, as
you shall see. It began through Warden Atherton and Captain Jamie. They
must have experienced a recrudescence of panic at thought of the dynamite
they believed hidden. They came to me in my dark cell, and they told me
plainly that they would jacket me to death if I did not confess where the
dynamite was hidden. And they assured me that they would do it officially
without any hurt to their own official skins. My death would appear on the
prison register as due to natural causes.
Oh, dear, cotton-wool citizen, please believe me when I tell you that men
are killed in prisons to-day as they have always been killed since the first
prisons were built by men.
I well knew the terror, the agony, and the danger of the jacket. Oh, the
men spirit-broken by the jacket! I have seen them. And I have seen men
crippled for life by the jacket. I have seen men, strong men, men so strong
that their physical stamina resisted all attacks of prison tuberculosis, after a
prolonged bout with the jacket, their resistance broken down, fade away, and
die of tuberculosis within six months. There was Slant-Eyed Wilson, with an
unguessed weak heart of fear, who died in the jacket within the first hour
while the unconvinced inefficient of a prison doctor looked on and smiled.
And I have seen a man confess, after half an hour in the jacket, truths and
fictions that cost him years of credits.
I had had my own experiences. At the present moment half a thousand
scars mark my body. They go to the scaffold with me. Did I live a hundred
years to come those same scars in the end would go to the grave with me.
Perhaps, dear citizen who permits and pays his hang-dogs to lace the jacket
for youperhaps you are unacquainted with the jacket. Let me describe, it, so
that you will understand the method by which I achieved death in life, became
a temporary master of time and space, and vaulted the prison walls to rove
among the stars.
Have you ever seen canvas tarpaulins or rubber blankets with brass eyelets
set in along the edges? Then imagine a piece of stout canvas, some four and
one-half feet in length, with large and heavy brass eyelets running down both
edges. The width of this canvas is never the full girth of the human body it is
to surround. The width is also irregularbroadest at the shoulders, next
broadest at the hips, and narrowest at the waist.
The jacket is spread on the floor. The man who is to be punished, or who
is to be tortured for confession, is told to lie face-downward on the flat canvas.
If he refuses, he is man-handled. After that he lays himself down with a will,
which is the will of the hang-dogs, which is your will, dear citizen, who feeds
and fees the hang-dogs for doing this thing for you.
The man lies face-downward. The edges of the jacket are brought as
nearly together as possible along the centre of the mans back. Then a rope,
on the principle of a shoe-lace, is run through the eyelets, and on the principle
of a shoe-lacing the man is laced in the canvas. Only he is laced more
severely than any person ever laces his shoe. They call it cinching in prison
lingo. On occasion, when the guards are cruel and vindictive, or when the
command has come down from above, in order to insure the severity of the
lacing the guards press with their feet into the mans back as they draw the
lacing tight.
Have you ever laced your shoe too tightly, and, after half an hour,
experienced that excruciating pain across the instep of the obstructed
circulation? And do you remember that after a few minutes of such pain you
simply could not walk another step and had to untie the shoe-lace and ease the
pressure? Very well. Then try to imagine your whole body so laced, only
much more tightly, and that the squeeze, instead of being merely on the instep
of one foot, is on your entire trunk, compressing to the seeming of death your
heart, your lungs, and all the rest of your vital and essential organs.
I remember the first time they gave me the jacket down in the dungeons. It
was at the beginning of my incorrigibility, shortly after my entrance to prison,
when I was weaving my loom-task of a hundred yards a day in the jute-mill
and finishing two hours ahead of the average day. Yes, and my jute-sacking
was far above the average demanded. I was sent to the jacket that first time,
according to the prison books, because of skips and breaks in the cloth, in
short, because my work was defective. Of course this was ridiculous. In truth,
I was sent to the jacket because I, a new convict, a master of efficiency, a
trained expert in the elimination of waste motion, had elected to tell the stupid
head weaver a few things he did not know about his business. And the head
weaver, with Captain Jamie present, had me called to the table where atrocious
weaving, such as could never have gone through my loom, was exhibited
against me. Three times was I thus called to the table. The third calling meant
punishment according to the loom-room rules. My punishment was twentyfour
hours in the jacket.
They took me down into the dungeons. I was ordered to lie facedownward
on the canvas spread flat upon the floor. I refused. One of the
guards, Morrison, gulletted me with his thumbs. Mobins, the dungeon trusty,
a convict himself, struck me repeatedly with his fists. In the end I lay down as
directed. And, because of the struggle I had vexed them with, they laced me
extra tight. Then they rolled me over like a log upon my back.
It did not seem so bad at first. When they closed my door, with clang and
clash of levered boltage, and left me in the utter dark, it was eleven oclock in
the morning. For a few minutes I was aware merely of an uncomfortable
constriction which I fondly believed would ease as I grew accustomed to it.
On the contrary, my heart began to thump and my lungs seemed unable to
draw sufficient air for my blood. This sense of suffocation was terrorizing,
and every thump of the heart threatened to burst my already bursting lungs.
After what seemed hours, and after what, out of my countless succeeding
experiences in the jacket I can now fairly conclude to have been not more than
half-an-hour, I began to cry out, to yell, to scream, to howl, in a very madness
of dying. The trouble was the pain that had arisen in my heart. It was a sharp,
definite pain, similar to that of pleurisy, except that it stabbed hotly through
the heart itself.
To die is not a difficult thing, but to die in such slow and horrible fashion
was maddening. Like a trapped beast of the wild, I experienced ecstasies of
fear, and yelled and howled until I realized that such vocal exercise merely
stabbed my heart more hotly and at the same time consumed much of the little
air in my lungs.
I gave over and lay quiet for a long timean eternity it seemed then,
though now I am confident that it could have been no longer than a quarter of
an hour. I grew dizzy with semi-asphyxiation, and my heart thumped until it
seemed surely it would burst the canvas that bound me. Again I lost control of
myself and set up a mad howling for help.
In the midst of this I heard a voice from the next dungeon.
Shut up, it shouted, though only faintly it percolated to me. Shut up.
You make me tired.
Im dying, I cried out.
Pound your ear and forget it, was the reply.
But I am dying, I insisted.
Then why worry? came the voice. Youll be dead pretty quick an out
of it. Go ahead and croak, but dont make so much noise about it. Youre
interruptin my beauty sleep.
So angered was I by this callous indifference that I recovered self-control
and was guilty of no more than smothered groans. This endured an endless
timepossibly ten minutes; and then a tingling numbness set up in all my
body. It was like pins and needles, and for as long as it hurt like pins and
needles I kept my head. But when the prickling of the multitudinous darts
ceased to hurt and only the numbness remained and continued verging into
greater numbness I once more grew frightened.
How am I goin to get a wink of sleep? my neighbour, complained. I
aint any more happy than you. My jackets just as tight as yourn, an I want
to sleep an forget it.
How long have you been in? I asked, thinking him a new-comer
compared to the centuries I had already suffered.
Since day before yesterday, was his answer.
I mean in the jacket, I amended.
Since day before yesterday, brother.
My God! I screamed.
Yes, brother, fifty straight hours, an you dont hear me raisin a roar about
it. They cinched me with their feet in my back. I am some tight, believe me.
You aint the only one thats got troubles. You aint ben in an hour yet.
Ive been in hours and hours, I protested.
Brother, you may think so, but it dont make it so. Im just tellin you you
aint ben in an hour. I heard m lacin you.
The thing was incredible. Already, in less than an hour, I had died a
thousand deaths. And yet this neighbour, balanced and equable, calm-voiced
and almost beneficent despite the harshness of his first remarks, had been in
the jacket fifty hours!
How much longer are they going to keep you in? I asked.
The Lord only knows. Captain Jamie is real peeved with me, an he
wont let me out until Im about croakin. Now, brother, Im going to give you
the tip. The only way is shut your face an forget it. Yellin an hollerin dont
win you no money in this joint. An the way to forget is to forget. Just get to
rememberin every girl you ever knew. Thatll cat up hours for you. Mebbe
youll feel yourself gettin woozy. Well, get woozy. You cant beat that for
killin time. An when the girls wont hold you, get to thinkin of the fellows
you got it in for, an what youd do to em if you got a chance, an what youre
goin to do to em when you get that same chance.
That man was Philadelphia Red. Because of prior conviction he was
serving fifty years for highway robbery committed on the streets of Alameda.
He had already served a dozen of his years at the time he talked to me in the
jacket, and that was seven years ago. He was one of the forty lifers who were
double-crossed by Cecil Winwood. For that offence Philadelphia Red lost his
credits. He is middle-aged now, and he is still in San Quentin. If he survives
he will be an old man when they let him out.
I lived through my twenty-four hours, and I have never been the same man
since. Oh, I dont mean physically, although next morning, when they unlaced
me, I was semi-paralyzed and in such a state of collapse that the guards had to
kick me in the ribs to make me crawl to my feet. But I was a changed man
mentally, morally. The brute physical torture of it was humiliation and affront
to my spirit and to my sense of justice. Such discipline does not sweeten a
man. I emerged from that first jacketing filled with a bitterness and a
passionate hatred that has only increased through the years. My Godwhen I
think of the things men have done to me! Twenty-four hours in the jacket!
Little I thought that morning when they kicked me to my feet that the time
would come when twenty-four hours in the jacket meant nothing; when a
hundred hours in the jacket found me smiling when they released me; when
two hundred and forty hours in the jacket found the same smile on my lips.
Yes, two hundred and forty hours. Dear cotton-woolly citizen, do you
know what that means? It means ten days and ten nights in the jacket. Of
course, such things are not done anywhere in the Christian world nineteen
hundred years after Christ. I dont ask you to believe me. I dont believe it
myself. I merely know that it was done to me in San Quentin, and that I lived
to laugh at them and to compel them to get rid of me by swinging me off
because I bloodied a guards nose.
I write these lines to-day in the Year of Our Lord 1913, and to-day, in the
Year of Our Lord 1913, men are lying in the jacket in the dungeons of San
Quentin.
I shall never forget, as long as further living and further lives be
vouchsafed me, my parting from Philadelphia Red that morning. He had then
been seventy-four hours in the jacket.
Well, brother, youre still alive an kickin, he called to me, as I was
totteringly dragged from my cell into the corridor of dungeons.
Shut up, you, Red, the sergeant snarled at him.
Forget it, was the retort.
Ill get you yet, Red, the sergeant threatened.
Think so? Philadelphia Red queried sweetly, ere his tones turned to
savageness. Why, you old stiff, you couldnt get nothin. You couldnt get a
free lunch, much less the job youve got now, if it wasnt for your brothers
pull. An I guess we all aint mistaken on the stink of the place where your
brothers pull comes from.
It was admirablethe spirit of man rising above its extremity, fearless of
the hurt any brute of the system could inflict.
Well, so long, brother, Philadelphia Red next called to me. So long. Be
good, an love the Warden. An if you see em, just tell em that you saw me
but that you didnt see me saw.
The sergeant was red with rage, and, by the receipt of various kicks and
blows, I paid for Reds pleasantry.
CHAPTER VIII
In solitary, in Cell One, Warden Atherton and Captain Jamie proceeded to
put me to the inquisition. As Warden Atherton said to me:
Standing, youre going to come across with that dynamite, or Ill kill you
in the jacket. Harder cases than you have come across before I got done with
them. Youve got your choicedynamite or curtains.
Then I guess it is curtains, I answered, because I dont know of any
dynamite.
This irritated the Warden to immediate action. Lie down, he
commanded.
I obeyed, for I had learned the folly of fighting three or four strong men.
They laced me tightly, and gave me a hundred hours. Once each twenty-four
hours I was permitted a drink of water. I had no desire for food, nor was food
offered me. Toward the end of the hundred hours Jackson, the prison doctor,
examined my physical condition several times.
But I had grown too used to the jacket during my incorrigible days to let a
single jacketing injure me. Naturally, it weakened me, took the life out of me;
but I had learned muscular tricks for stealing a little space while they were
lacing me. At the end of the first hundred hours bout I was worn and tired,
but that was all. Another bout of this duration they gave me, after a day and a
night to recuperate. And then they gave one hundred and fifty hours. Much of
this time I was physically numb and mentally delirious. Also, by an effort of
will, I managed to sleep away long hours.
Next, Warden Atherton tried a variation. I was given irregular intervals of
jacket and recuperation. I never knew when I was to go into the jacket. Thus
I would have ten hours recuperation, and do twenty in the jacket; or I would
receive only four hours rest. At the most unexpected hours of the night my
door would clang open and the changing guards would lace me. Sometimes
rhythms were instituted. Thus, for three days and nights I alternated eight
hours in the jacket and eight hours out. And then, just as I was growing
accustomed to this rhythm, it was suddenly altered and I was given two days
and nights straight.
And ever the eternal question was propounded to me: Where was the
dynamite? Sometimes Warden Atherton was furious with me. On occasion,
when I had endured an extra severe jacketing, he almost pleaded with me to
confess. Once he even promised me three months in the hospital of absolute
rest and good food, and then the trusty job in the library.
Dr. Jackson, a weak stick of a creature with a smattering of medicine, grew
sceptical. He insisted that jacketing, no matter how prolonged, could never
kill me; and his insistence was a challenge to the Warden to continue the
attempt.
These lean college guys d fool the devil, he grumbled. Theyre
tougher n raw-hide. Just the same well wear him down. Standing, you hear
me. What youve got aint a caution to what youre going to get. You might
as well come across now and save trouble. Im a man of my word. Youve
heard me say dynamite or curtains. Well, that stands. Take your choice.
Surely you dont think Im holding out because I enjoy it? I managed to
gasp, for at the moment Pie-Face Jones was forcing his foot into my back in
order to cinch me tighter, while I was trying with my muscle to steal slack.
There is nothing to confess. Why, Id cut off my right hand right now to be
able to lead you to any dynamite.
Oh, Ive seen your educated kind before, he sneered. You get wheels in
your head, some of you, that make you stick to any old idea. You get baulky,
like horses. Tighter, Jones; that aint half a cinch. Standing, if you dont come
across its curtains. I stick by that.
One compensation I learned. As one grows weaker one is less susceptible
to suffering. There is less hurt because there is less to hurt. And the man
already well weakened grows weaker more slowly. It is of common
knowledge that unusually strong men suffer more severely from ordinary
sicknesses than do women or invalids. As the reserves of strength are
consumed there is less strength to lose. After all superfluous flesh is gone
what is left is stringy and resistant. In fact, that was what I becamea sort of
string-like organism that persisted in living.
Morrell and Oppenheimer were sorry for me, and rapped me sympathy and
advice. Oppenheimer told me he had gone through it, and worse, and still
lived.
Dont let them beat you out, he spelled with his knuckles. Dont let
them kill you, for that would suit them. And dont squeal on the plant.
But there isnt any plant, I rapped back with the edge of the sole of my
shoe against the gratingI was in the jacket at the time and so could talk only
with my feet. I dont know anything about the damned dynamite.
Thats right, Oppenheimer praised. Hes the stuff, aint he, Ed?
Which goes to show what chance I had of convincing Warden Atherton of
my ignorance of the dynamite. His very persistence in the quest convinced a
man like Jake Oppenheimer, who could only admire me for the fortitude with
which I kept a close mouth.
During this first period of the jacket-inquisition I managed to sleep a great
deal. My dreams were remarkable. Of course they were vivid and real, as
most dreams are. What made them remarkable was their coherence and
continuity. Often I addressed bodies of scientists on abstruse subjects, reading
aloud to them carefully prepared papers on my own researches or on my own
deductions from the researches and experiments of others. When I awakened
my voice would seem still ringing in my ears, while my eyes still could see
typed on the white paper whole sentences and paragraphs that I could read
again and marvel at ere the vision faded. In passing, I call attention to the fact
that at the time I noted that the process of reasoning employed in these dream
speeches was invariably deductive.
Then there was a great farming section, extending north and south for
hundreds of miles in some part of the temperate regions, with a climate and
flora and fauna largely resembling those of California. Not once, nor twice,
but thousands of different times I journeyed through this dream-region. The
point I desire to call attention to was that it was always the same region. No
essential feature of it ever differed in the different dreams. Thus it was always
an eight-hour drive behind mountain horses from the alfalfa meadows (where I
kept many Jersey cows) to the straggly village beside the big dry creek, where
I caught the little narrow-gauge train. Every land-mark in that eight-hour
drive in the mountain buckboard, every tree, every mountain, every ford and
bridge, every ridge and eroded hillside was ever the same.
In this coherent, rational farm-region of my strait-jacket dreams the minor
details, according to season and to the labour of men, did change. Thus on the
upland pastures behind my alfalfa meadows I developed a new farm with the
aid of Angora goats. Here I marked the changes with every dream-visit, and
the changes were in accordance with the time that elapsed between visits.
Oh, those brush-covered slopes! How I can see them now just as when the
goats were first introduced. And how I remembered the consequent changes
the paths beginning to form as the goats literally ate their way through the
dense thickets; the disappearance of the younger, smaller bushes that were not
too tall for total browsing; the vistas that formed in all directions through the
older, taller bushes, as the goats browsed as high as they could stand and reach
on their hind legs; the driftage of the pasture grasses that followed in the wake
of the clearing by the goats. Yes, the continuity of such dreaming was its
charm. Came the day when the men with axes chopped down all the taller
brush so as to give the goats access to the leaves and buds and bark. Came the
day, in winter weather, when the dry denuded skeletons of all these bushes
were gathered into heaps and burned. Came the day when I moved my goats
on to other brush-impregnable hillsides, with following in their wake my
cattle, pasturing knee-deep in the succulent grasses that grew where before had
been only brush. And came the day when I moved my cattle on, and my
plough-men went back and forth across the slopes contourploughing the
rich sod under to rot to live and crawling humous in which to bed my seeds of
crops to be.
Yes, and in my dreams, often, I got off the little narrow-gauge train where
the straggly village stood beside the big dry creek, and got into the buckboard
behind my mountain horses, and drove hour by hour past all the old familiar
landmarks of my alfalfa meadows, and on to my upland pastures where my
rotated crops of corn and barley and clover were ripe for harvesting and where
I watched my men engaged in the harvest, while beyond, ever climbing, my
goats browsed the higher slopes of brush into cleared, tilled fields.
But these were dreams, frank dreams, fancied adventures of my deductive
subconscious mind. Quite unlike them, as you shall see, were my other
adventures when I passed through the gates of the living death and relived the
reality of the other lives that had been mine in other days.
In the long hours of waking in the jacket I found that I dwelt a great deal
on Cecil Winwood, the poet-forger who had wantonly put all this torment on
me, and who was even then at liberty out in the free world again. No; I did not
hate him. The word is too weak. There is no word in the language strong
enough to describe my feelings. I can say only that I knew the gnawing of a
desire for vengeance on him that was a pain in itself and that exceeded all the
bounds of language. I shall not tell you of the hours I devoted to plans of
torture on him, nor of the diabolical means and devices of torture that I
invented for him. Just one example. I was enamoured of the ancient trick
whereby an iron basin, containing a rat, is fastened to a mans body. The only
way out for the rat is through the man himself. As I say, I was enamoured of
this until I realized that such a death was too quick, whereupon I dwelt long
and favourably on the Moorish trick ofbut no, I promised to relate no further
of this matter. Let it suffice that many of my pain-maddening waking hours
were devoted to dreams of vengeance on Cecil Winwood.
CHAPTER IX
One thing of great value I learned in the long, pain-weary hours of waking
namely, the mastery of the body by the mind. I learned to suffer passively,
as, undoubtedly, all men have learned who have passed through the postgraduate
courses of strait-jacketing. Oh, it is no easy trick to keep the brain in
such serene repose that it is quite oblivious to the throbbing, exquisite
complaint of some tortured nerve.
And it was this very mastery of the flesh by the spirit which I so acquired
that enabled me easily to practise the secret Ed Morrell told to me.
Think it is curtains? Ed Morrell rapped to me one night.
I had just been released from one hundred hours, and I was weaker than I
had ever been before. So weak was I that though my whole body was one
mass of bruise and misery, nevertheless I scarcely was aware that I had a body.
It looks like curtains, I rapped back. They will get me if they keep it up
much longer.
Dont let them, he advised. There is a way. I learned it myself, down
in the dungeons, when Massie and I got ours good and plenty. I pulled
through. But Massie croaked. If I hadnt learned the trick, Id have croaked
along with him. Youve got to be pretty weak first, before you try it. If you
try it when you are strong, you make a failure of it, and then that queers you
for ever after. I made the mistake of telling Jake the trick when he was strong.
Of course, he could not pull it off, and in the times since when he did need it,
it was too late, for his first failure had queered it. He wont even believe it
now. He thinks I am kidding him. Aint that right, Jake?
And from cell thirteen Jake rapped back, Dont swallow it, Darrell. Its a
sure fairy story.
Go on and tell me, I rapped to Morrell.
That is why I waited for you to get real weak, he continued. Now you
need it, and I am going to tell you. Its up to you. If you have got the will you
can do it. Ive done it three times, and I know.
Well, what is it? I rapped eagerly.
The trick is to die in the jacket, to will yourself to die. I know you dont
get me yet, but wait. You know how you get numb in the jackethow your
arm or your leg goes to sleep. Now you cant help that, but you can take it for
the idea and improve on it. Dont wait for your legs or anything to go to sleep.
You lie on your back as comfortable as you can get, and you begin to use your
will.
And this is the idea you must think to yourself, and that you must believe
all the time youre thinking it. If you dont believe, then theres nothing to it.
The thing you must think and believe is that your body is one thing and your
spirit is another thing. You are you, and your body is something else that
dont amount to shucks. Your body dont count. Youre the boss. You dont
need any body. And thinking and believing all this you proceed to prove it by
using your will. You make your body die.
You begin with the toes, one at a time. You make your toes die. You will
them to die. And if youve got the belief and the will your toes will die. That
is the big jobto start the dying. Once youve got the first toe dead, the rest
is easy, for you dont have to do any more believing. You know. Then you
put all your will into making the rest of the body die. I tell you, Darrell, I
know. Ive done it three times.
Once you get the dying started, it goes right along. And the funny thing is
that you are all there all the time. Because your toes are dead dont make you
in the least bit dead. By-and-by your legs are dead to the knees, and then to
the thighs, and you are just the same as you always were. It is your body that
is dropping out of the game a chunk at a time. And you are just you, the same
you were before you began.
And then what happens? I queried.
Well, when your body is all dead, and you are all there yet, you just skin
out and leave your body. And when you leave your body you leave the cell.
Stone walls and iron doors are to hold bodies in. They cant hold the spirit in.
You see, you have proved it. You are spirit outside of your body. You can
look at your body from outside of it. I tell you I know because I have done it
three timeslooked at my body lying there with me outside of it.
Ha! ha! ha! Jake Oppenheimer rapped his laughter thirteen cells away.
You see, thats Jakes trouble, Morrell went on. He cant believe. That
one time he tried it he was too strong and failed. And now he thinks I am
kidding.
When you die you are dead, and dead men stay dead, Oppenheimer
retorted.
I tell you Ive been dead three times, Morrell argued.
And lived to tell us about it, Oppenheimer jeered.
But dont forget one thing, Darrell, Morrell rapped to me. The thing is
ticklish. You have a feeling all the time that you are taking liberties. I cant
explain it, but I always had a feeling if I was away when they came and let my
body out of the jacket that I couldnt get back into my body again. I mean that
my body would be dead for keeps. And I didnt want it to be dead. I didnt
want to give Captain Jamie and the rest that satisfaction. But I tell you,
Darrell, if you can turn the trick you can laugh at the Warden. Once you make
your body die that way it dont matter whether they keep you in the jacket a
month on end. You dont suffer none, and your body dont suffer. You know
there are cases of people who have slept a whole year at a time. Thats the
way it will be with your body. It just stays there in the jacket, not hurting or
anything, just waiting for you to come back.
You try it. I am giving you the straight steer.
And if he dont come back? Oppenheimer, asked.
Then the laugh will be on him, I guess, Jake, Morrell answered.
Unless, maybe, it will be on us for sticking round this old dump when we
could get away that easy.
And here the conversation ended, for Pie-Face Jones, waking crustily from
stolen slumber, threatened Morrell and Oppenheimer with a report next
morning that would mean the jacket for them. Me he did not threaten, for he
knew I was doomed for the jacket anyway.
I lay long there in the silence, forgetting the misery of my body while I
considered this proposition Morrell had advanced. Already, as I have
explained, by mechanical self-hypnosis I had sought to penetrate back through
time to my previous selves. That I had partly succeeded I knew; but all that I
had experienced was a fluttering of apparitions that merged erratically and
were without continuity.
But Morrells method was so patently the reverse of my method of selfhypnosis
that I was fascinated. By my method, my consciousness went first of
all. By his method, consciousness persisted last of all, and, when the body
was quite gone, passed into stages so sublimated that it left the body, left the
prison of San Quentin, and journeyed afar, and was still consciousness.
It was worth a trial, anyway, I concluded. And, despite the sceptical
attitude of the scientist that was mine, I believed. I had no doubt I could do
what Morrell said he had done three times. Perhaps this faith that so easily
possessed me was due to my extreme debility. Perhaps I was not strong
enough to be sceptical. This was the hypothesis already suggested by Morrell.
It was a conclusion of pure empiricism, and I, too, as you shall see,
demonstrated it empirically.
CHAPTER X
And above all things, next morning Warden Atherton came into my cell on
murder intent. With him were Captain Jamie, Doctor Jackson, Pie-Face Jones,
and Al Hutchins. Al Hutchins was serving a forty-years sentence, and was in
hopes of being pardoned out. For four years he had been head trusty of San
Quentin. That this was a position of great power you will realize when I tell
you that the graft alone of the head trusty was estimated at three thousand
dollars a year. Wherefore Al Hutchins, in possession of ten or twelve
thousand dollars and of the promise of a pardon, could be depended upon to
do the Wardens bidding blind.
I have just said that Warden Atherton came into my cell intent on murder.
His face showed it. His actions proved it.
Examine him, he ordered Doctor Jackson.
That wretched apology of a creature stripped from me my dirt-encrusted
shirt that I had worn since my entrance to solitary, and exposed my poor
wasted body, the skin ridged like brown parchment over the ribs and soreinfested
from the many bouts with the jacket. The examination was
shamelessly perfunctory.
Will he stand it? the Warden demanded.
Yes, Doctor Jackson answered.
Hows the heart?
Splendid.
You think hell stand ten days of it, Doc.?
Sure.
I dont believe it, the Warden announced savagely. But well try it just
the same.Lie down, Standing.
I obeyed, stretching myself face-downward on the flat-spread jacket. The
Warden seemed to debate with himself for a moment.
Roll over, he commanded.
I made several efforts, but was too weak to succeed, and could only sprawl
and squirm in my helplessness.
Putting it on, was Jacksons comment.
Well, he wont have to put it on when Im done with him, said the
Warden. Lend him a hand. I cant waste any more time on him.
So they rolled me over on my back, where I stared up into Warden
Athertons face.
Standing, he said slowly, Ive given you all the rope I am going to. I
am sick and tired of your stubbornness. My patience is exhausted. Doctor
Jackson says you are in condition to stand ten days in the jacket. You can
figure your chances. But I am going to give you your last chance now. Come
across with the dynamite. The moment it is in my hands Ill take you out of
here. You can bathe and shave and get clean clothes. Ill let you loaf for six
months on hospital grub, and then Ill put you trusty in the library. You cant
ask me to be fairer with you than that. Besides, youre not squealing on
anybody. You are the only person in San Quentin who knows where the
dynamite is. You wont hurt anybodys feelings by giving in, and youll be all
to the good from the moment you do give in. And if you dont
He paused and shrugged his shoulders significantly.
Well, if you dont, you start in the ten days right now.
The prospect was terrifying. So weak was I that I was as certain as the
Warden was that it meant death in the jacket. And then I remembered
Morrells trick. Now, if ever, was the need of it; and now, if ever, was the time
to practise the faith of it. I smiled up in the face of Warden Atherton. And I
put faith in that smile, and faith in the proposition I made to him.
Warden, I said, do you see the way I am smiling? Well, if, at the end of
the ten days, when you unlace me, I smile up at you in the same way, will you
give a sack of Bull Durham and a package of brown papers to Morrell and
Oppenheimer?
Aint they the crazy ginks, these college guys, Captain Jamie snorted.
Warden Atherton was a choleric man, and he took my request for insulting
braggadocio.
Just for that you get an extra cinching, he informed me.
I made you a sporting proposition, Warden, I said quietly. You can
cinch me as tight as you please, but if I smile ten days from now will you give
the Bull Durham to Morrell and Oppenheimer?
You are mighty sure of yourself, he retorted.
Thats why I made the proposition, I replied.
Getting religion, eh? he sneered.
No, was my answer. It merely happens that I possess more life than
you can ever reach the end of. Make it a hundred days if you want, and Ill
smile at you when its over.
I guess ten days will more than do you, Standing.
Thats your opinion, I said. Have you got faith in it? If you have you
wont even lose the price of the two five-cents sacks of tobacco. Anyway,
what have you got to be afraid of?
For two cents Id kick the face off of you right now, he snarled.
Dont let me stop you. I was impudently suave. Kick as hard as you
please, and Ill still have enough face left with which to smile. In the
meantime, while you are hesitating, suppose you accept my original
proposition.
A man must be terribly weak and profoundly desperate to be able, under
such circumstances, to beard the Warden in solitary. Or he may be both, and,
in addition, he may have faith. I know now that I had the faith and so acted on
it. I believed what Morrell had told me. I believed in the lordship of the mind
over the body. I believed that not even a hundred days in the jacket could kill
me.
Captain Jamie must have sensed this faith that informed me, for he said:
I remember a Swede that went crazy twenty years ago. That was before
your time, Warden. Hed killed a man in a quarrel over twenty-five cents and
got life for it. He was a cook. He got religion. He said that a golden chariot
was coming to take him to heaven, and he sat down on top the red-hot range
and sang hymns and hosannahs while he cooked. They dragged him off, but
he croaked two days afterward in hospital. He was cooked to the bone. And
to the end he swore hed never felt the heat. Couldnt get a squeal out of
him.
Well make Standing squeal, said the Warden.
Since you are so sure of it, why dont you accept my proposition? I
challenged.
The Warden was so angry that it would have been ludicrous to me had I
not been in so desperate plight. His face was convulsed. He clenched his
hands, and, for a moment, it seemed that he was about to fall upon me and
give me a beating. Then, with an effort, he controlled himself.
All right, Standing, he snarled. Ill go you. But you bet your sweet life
youll have to go some to smile ten days from now. Roll him over, boys, and
cinch him till you hear his ribs crack. Hutchins, show him you know how to
do it.
And they rolled me over and laced me as I had never been laced before.
The head trusty certainly demonstrated his ability. I tried to steal what little
space I could. Little it was, for I had long since shed my flesh, while my
muscles were attenuated to mere strings. I had neither the strength nor bulk to
steal more than a little, and the little I stole I swear I managed by sheer
expansion at the joints of the bones of my frame. And of this little I was
robbed by Hutchins, who, in the old days before he was made head trusty, had
learned all the tricks of the jacket from the inside of the jacket.
You see, Hutchins was a cur at heart, or a creature who had once been a
man, but who had been broken on the wheel. He possessed ten or twelve
thousand dollars, and his freedom was in sight if he obeyed orders. Later, I
learned that there was a girl who had remained true to him, and who was even
then waiting for him. The woman factor explains many things of men.
If ever a man deliberately committed murder, Al Hutchins did that morning
in solitary at the Wardens bidding. He robbed me of the little space I stole.
And, having robbed me of that, my body was defenceless, and, with his foot in
my back while he drew the lacing light, he constricted me as no man had ever
before succeeded in doing. So severe was this constriction of my frail frame
upon my vital organs that I felt, there and then, immediately, that death was
upon me. And still the miracle of faith was mine. I did not believe that I was
going to die. I knewI say I knewthat I was not going to die. My head
was swimming, and my heart was pounding from my toenails to the hair-roots
in my scalp.
Thats pretty tight, Captain Jamie urged reluctantly.
The hell it is, said Doctor Jackson. I tell you nothing can hurt him.
Hes a wooz. He ought to have been dead long ago.
Warden Atherton, after a hard struggle, managed to insert his forefinger
between the lacing and my back. He brought his foot to bear upon me, with
the weight of his body added to his foot, and pulled, but failed to get any
fraction of an inch of slack.
I take my hat off to you, Hutchins, he said. You know your job. Now
roll him over and lets look at him.
They rolled me over on my back. I stared up at them with bulging eyes.
This I know: Had they laced me in such fashion the first time I went into the
jacket, I would surely have died in the first ten minutes. But I was well
trained. I had behind me the thousands of hours in the jacket, and, plus that, I
had faith in what Morrell had told me.
Now, laugh, damn you, laugh, said the Warden to me. Start that smile
youve been bragging about.
So, while my lungs panted for a little air, while my heart threatened to
burst, while my mind reeled, nevertheless I was able to smile up into the
Wardens face.
CHAPTER XI
The door clanged, shutting out all but a little light, and I was left alone on
my back. By the tricks I had long since learned in the jacket, I managed to
writhe myself across the floor an inch at a time until the edge of the sole of my
right shoe touched the door. There was an immense cheer in this. I was not
utterly alone. If the need arose, I could at least rap knuckle talk to Morrell.
But Warden Atherton must have left strict injunctions on the guards, for,
though I managed to call Morrell and tell him I intended trying the
experiment, he was prevented by the guards from replying. Me they could
only curse, for, in so far as I was in the jacket for a ten days bout, I was
beyond all threat of punishment.
I remember remarking at the time my serenity of mind. The customary
pain of the jacket was in my body, but my mind was so passive that I was no
more aware of the pain than was I aware of the floor beneath me or the walls
around me. Never was a man in better mental and spiritual condition for such
an experiment. Of course, this was largely due to my extreme weakness. But
there was more to it. I had long schooled myself to be oblivious to pain. I had
neither doubts nor fears. All the content of my mind seemed to be an absolute
faith in the over-lordship of the mind. This passivity was almost dream-like,
and yet, in its way, it was positive almost to a pitch of exaltation.
I began my concentration of will. Even then my body was numbing and
prickling through the loss of circulation. I directed my will to the little toe of
my right foot, and I willed that toe to cease to be alive in my consciousness. I
willed that toe to dieto die so far as I, its lord, and a different thing entirely
from it, was concerned. There was the hard struggle. Morrell had warned me
that it would be so. But there was no flicker of doubt to disturb my faith. I
knew that that toe would die, and I knew when it was dead. Joint by joint it
had died under the compulsion of my will.
The rest was easy, but slow, I will admit. Joint by joint, toe by toe, all the
toes of both my feet ceased to be. And joint by joint, the process went on.
Came the time when my flesh below the ankles had ceased. Came the time
when all below my knees had ceased.
Such was the pitch of my perfect exaltation, that I knew not the slightest
prod of rejoicing at my success. I knew nothing save that I was making my
body die. All that was I was devoted to that sole task. I performed the work
as thoroughly as any mason laying bricks, and I regarded the work as just
about as commonplace as would a brick-mason regard his work.
At the end of an hour my body was dead to the hips, and from the hips up,
joint by joint, I continued to will the ascending death.
It was when I reached the level of my heart that the first blurring and
dizzying of my consciousness occurred. For fear that I should lose
consciousness, I willed to hold the death I had gained, and shifted my
concentration to my fingers. My brain cleared again, and the death of my
arms to the shoulders was most rapidly accomplished.
At this stage my body was all dead, so far as I was concerned, save my
head and a little patch of my chest. No longer did the pound and smash of my
compressed heart echo in my brain. My heart was beating steadily but feebly.
The joy of it, had I dared joy at such a moment, would have been the cessation
of sensations.
At this point my experience differs from Morrells. Still willing
automatically, I began to grow dreamy, as one does in that borderland between
sleeping and waking. Also, it seemed as if a prodigious enlargement of my
brain was taking place within the skull itself that did not enlarge. There were
occasional glintings and flashings of light as if even I, the overlord, had ceased
for a moment and the next moment was again myself, still the tenant of the
fleshly tenement that I was making to die.
Most perplexing was the seeming enlargement of brain. Without having
passed through the wall of skull, nevertheless it seemed to me that the
periphery of my brain was already outside my skull and still expanding.
Along with this was one of the most remarkable sensations or experiences that
I have ever encountered. Time and space, in so far as they were the stuff of
my consciousness, underwent an enormous extension. Thus, without opening
my eyes to verify, I knew that the walls of my narrow cell had receded until it
was like a vast audience-chamber. And while I contemplated the matter, I
knew that they continued to recede. The whim struck me for a moment that if
a similar expansion were taking place with the whole prison, then the outer
walls of San Quentin must be far out in the Pacific Ocean on one side and on
the other side must be encroaching on the Nevada desert. A companion whim
was that since matter could permeate matter, then the walls of my cell might
well permeate the prison walls, pass through the prison walls, and thus put my
cell outside the prison and put me at liberty. Of course, this was pure fantastic
whim, and I knew it at the time for what it was.
The extension of time was equally remarkable. Only at long intervals did
my heart beat. Again a whim came to me, and I counted the seconds, slow
and sure, between my heart-beats. At first, as I clearly noted, over a hundred
seconds intervened between beats. But as I continued to count the intervals
extended so that I was made weary of counting.
And while this illusion of the extension of time and space persisted and
grew, I found myself dreamily considering a new and profound problem.
Morrell had told me that he had won freedom from his body by killing his
bodyor by eliminating his body from his consciousness, which, of course,
was in effect the same thing. Now, my body was so near to being entirely
dead that I knew in all absoluteness that by a quick concentration of will on
the yet-alive patch of my torso it, too, would cease to be. Butand here was
the problem, and Morrell had not warned me: should I also will my head to be
dead? If I did so, no matter what befell the spirit of Darrell Standing, would
not the body of Darrell Standing be for ever dead?
I chanced the chest and the slow-beating heart. The quick compulsion of
my will was rewarded. I no longer had chest nor heart. I was only a mind, a
soul, a consciousnesscall it what you willincorporate in a nebulous brain
that, while it still centred inside my skull, was expanded, and was continuing
to expand, beyond my skull.
And then, with flashings of light, I was off and away. At a bound I had
vaulted prison roof and California sky, and was among the stars. I say stars
advisedly. I walked among the stars. I was a child. I was clad in frail, fleecelike,
delicate-coloured robes that shimmered in the cool starlight. These robes,
of course, were based upon my boyhood observance of circus actors and my
boyhood conception of the garb of young angels.
Nevertheless, thus clad, I trod interstellar space, exalted by the knowledge
that I was bound on vast adventure, where, at the end, I would find all the
cosmic formulæ and have made clear to me the ultimate secret of the universe.
In my hand I carried a long glass wand. It was borne in upon me that with the
tip of this wand I must touch each star in passing. And I knew, in all
absoluteness, that did I but miss one star I should be precipitated into some
unplummeted abyss of unthinkable and eternal punishment and guilt.
Long I pursued my starry quest. When I say long, you must bear in
mind the enormous extension of time that had occurred in my brain. For
centuries I trod space, with the tip of my wand and with unerring eye and hand
tapping each star I passed. Ever the way grew brighter. Ever the ineffable
goal of infinite wisdom grew nearer. And yet I made no mistake. This was no
other self of mine. This was no experience that had once been mine. I was
aware all the time that it was I, Darrell Standing, who walked among the stars
and tapped them with a wand of glass. In short, I knew that here was nothing
real, nothing that had ever been nor could ever be. I knew that it was nothing
else than a ridiculous orgy of the imagination, such as men enjoy in drug
dreams, in delirium, or in mere ordinary slumber.
And then, as all went merry and well with me on my celestial quest, the tip
of my wand missed a star, and on the instant I knew I had been guilty of a
great crime. And on the instant a knock, vast and compulsive, inexorable and
mandatory as the stamp of the iron hoof of doom, smote me and reverberated
across the universe. The whole sidereal system coruscated, reeled and fell in
flame.
I was torn by an exquisite and disruptive agony. And on the instant I was
Darrell Standing, the life-convict, lying in his strait-jacket in solitary. And I
knew the immediate cause of that summons. It was a rap of the knuckle by Ed
Morrell, in Cell Five, beginning the spelling of some message.
And now, to give some comprehension of the extension of time and space
that I was experiencing. Many days afterwards I asked Morrell what he had
tried to convey to me. It was a simple message, namely: Standing, are you
there? He had tapped it rapidly, while the guard was at the far end of the
corridor into which the solitary cells opened. As I say, he had tapped the
message very rapidly. And now behold! Between the first tap and the second
I was off and away among the stars, clad in fleecy garments, touching each
star as I passed in my pursuit of the formulæ that would explain the last
mystery of life. And, as before, I pursued the quest for centuries. Then came
the summons, the stamp of the hoof of doom, the exquisite disruptive agony,
and again I was back in my cell in San Quentin. It was the second tap of Ed
Morrells knuckle. The interval between it and the first tap could have been
no more than a fifth of a second. And yet, so unthinkably enormous was the
extension of time to me, that in the course of that fifth of a second I had been
away star-roving for long ages.
Now I know, my reader, that the foregoing seems all a farrago. I agree
with you. It is farrago. It was experience, however. It was just as real to me
as is the snake beheld by a man in delirium tremens.
Possibly, by the most liberal estimate, it may have taken Ed Morrell two
minutes to tap his question. Yet, to me, æons elapsed between the first tap of
his knuckle and the last. No longer could I tread my starry path with that
ineffable pristine joy, for my way was beset with dread of the inevitable
summons that would rip and tear me as it jerked me back to my strait-jacket
hell. Thus my æons of star-wandering were æons of dread.
And all the time I knew it was Ed Morrells knuckle that thus cruelly held
me earth-bound. I tried to speak to him, to ask him to cease. But so
thoroughly had I eliminated my body from my consciousness that I was unable
to resurrect it. My body lay dead in the jacket, though I still inhabited the
skull. In vain I strove to will my foot to tap my message to Morrell. I
reasoned I had a foot. And yet, so thoroughly had I carried out the
experiment, I had no foot.
Nextand I know now that it was because Morrell had spelled his
message quite outI pursued my way among the stars and was not called
back. After that, and in the course of it, I was aware, drowsily, that I was
falling asleep, and that it was delicious sleep. From time to time, drowsily, I
stirredplease, my reader, dont miss that verbI STIRRED. I moved my
legs, my arms. I was aware of clean, soft bed linen against my skin. I was
aware of bodily well-being. Oh, it was delicious! As thirsting men on the
desert dream of splashing fountains and flowing wells, so dreamed I of
easement from the constriction of the jacket, of cleanliness in the place of
filth, of smooth velvety skin of health in place of my poor parchment-crinkled
hide. But I dreamed with a difference, as you shall see.
I awoke. Oh, broad and wide awake I was, although I did not open my
eyes. And please know that in all that follows I knew no surprise whatever.
Everything was the natural and the expected. I was I, be sure of that. But I
was not Darrell Standing. Darrell Standing had no more to do with the being I
was than did Darrell Standings parchment-crinkled skin have aught to do with
the cool, soft skin that was mine. Nor was I aware of any Darrell Standing
as I could not well be, considering that Darrell Standing was as yet unborn and
would not be born for centuries. But you shall see.
I lay with closed eyes, lazily listening. From without came the clacking of
many hoofs moving orderly on stone flags. From the accompanying jingle of
metal bits of man-harness and steed-harness I knew some cavalcade was
passing by on the street beneath my windows. Also, I wondered idly who it
was. From somewhereand I knew where, for I knew it was from the inn
yardcame the ring and stamp of hoofs and an impatient neigh that I
recognized as belonging to my waiting horse.
Came steps and movementssteps openly advertised as suppressed with
the intent of silence and that yet were deliberately noisy with the secret intent
of rousing me if I still slept. I smiled inwardly at the rascals trick.
Pons, I ordered, without opening my eyes, water, cold water, quick, a
deluge. I drank over long last night, and now my gullet scorches.
And slept over long to-day, he scolded, as he passed me the water, ready
in his hand.
I sat up, opened my eyes, and carried the tankard to my lips with both my
hands. And as I drank I looked at Pons.
Now note two things. I spoke in French; I was not conscious that I spoke
in French. Not until afterward, back in solitary, when I remembered what I am
narrating, did I know that I had spoken in Frenchay, and spoken well. As
for me, Darrell Standing, at present writing these lines in Murderers Row of
Folsom Prison, why, I know only high school French sufficient to enable me to
read the language. As for my speaking itimpossible. I can scarcely
intelligibly pronounce my way through a menu.
But to return. Pons was a little withered old man. He was born in our
houseI know, for it chanced that mention was made of it this very day I am
describing. Pons was all of sixty years. He was mostly toothless, and, despite
a pronounced limp that compelled him to go slippity-hop, he was very alert
and spry in all his movements. Also, he was impudently familiar. This was
because he had been in my house sixty years. He had been my fathers servant
before I could toddle, and after my fathers death (Pons and I talked of it this
day) he became my servant. The limp he had acquired on a stricken field in
Italy, when the horsemen charged across. He had just dragged my father clear
of the hoofs when he was lanced through the thigh, overthrown, and trampled.
My father, conscious but helpless from his own wounds, witnessed it all. And
so, as I say, Pons had earned such a right to impudent familiarity that at least
there was no gainsaying him by my fathers son.
Pons shook his head as I drained the huge draught.
Did you hear it boil? I laughed, as I handed back the empty tankard.
Like your father, he said hopelessly. But your father lived to learn
better, which I doubt you will do.
He got a stomach affliction, I devilled, so that one mouthful of spirits
turned it outside in. It were wisdom not to drink when ones tank will not hold
the drink.
While we talked Pons was gathering to my bedside my clothes for the day.
Drink on, my master, he answered. It wont hurt you. Youll die with a
sound stomach.
You mean mine is an iron-lined stomach? I wilfully misunderstood him.
I mean he began with a quick peevishness, then broke off as he
realized my teasing and with a pout of his withered lips draped my new sable
cloak upon a chair-back. Eight hundred ducats, he sneered. A thousand
goats and a hundred fat oxen in a coat to keep you warm. A score of farms on
my gentlemans fine back.
And in that a hundred fine farms, with a castle or two thrown in, to say
nothing, perhaps, of a palace, I said, reaching out my hand and touching the
rapier which he was just in the act of depositing on the chair.
So your father won with his good right arm, Pons retorted. But what
your father won he held.
Here Pons paused to hold up to scorn my new scarlet satin doubleta
wondrous thing of which I had been extravagant.
Sixty ducats for that, Pons indicted. Your fatherd have seen all the
tailors and Jews of Christendom roasting in hell before hed a-paid such a
price.
And while we dressedthat is, while Pons helped me to dressI
continued to quip with him.
It is quite clear, Pons, that you have not heard the news, I said slyly.
Whereat up pricked his ears like the old gossip he was.
Late news? he queried. Mayhap from the English Court?
Nay, I shook my head. But news perhaps to you, but old news for all of
that. Have you not heard? The philosophers of Greece were whispering it
nigh two thousand years ago. It is because of that news that I put twenty fat
farms on my back, live at Court, and am become a dandy. You see, Pons, the
world is a most evil place, life is most sad, all men die, and, being dead . . .
well, are dead. Wherefore, to escape the evil and the sadness, men in these
days, like me, seek amazement, insensibility, and the madnesses of dalliance.
But the news, master? What did the philosophers whisper about so long
ago?
That God was dead, Pons, I replied solemnly. Didnt you know that?
God is dead, and I soon shall be, and I wear twenty fat farms on my back.
God lives, Pons asserted fervently. God lives, and his kingdom is at
hand. I tell you, master, it is at hand. It may be no later than to-morrow that
the earth shall pass away.
So said they in old Rome, Pons, when Nero made torches of them to light
his sports.
Pons regarded me pityingly.
Too much learning is a sickness, he complained. I was always opposed
to it. But you must have your will and drag my old body about with youastudying
astronomy and numbers in Venice, poetry and all the Italian fol-derols
in Florence, and astrology in Pisa, and God knows what in that madman
country of Germany. Pish for the philosophers! I tell you, master, I, Pons,
your servant, a poor old man who knows not a letter from a pike-staffI tell
you God lives, and the time you shall appear before him is short. He paused
with sudden recollection, and added: He is here, the priest you spoke of.
On the instant I remembered my engagement.
Why did you not tell me before? I demanded angrily.
What did it matter? Pons shrugged his shoulders. Has he not been
waiting two hours as it is?
Why didnt you call me?
He regarded me with a thoughtful, censorious eye.
And you rolling to bed and shouting like chanticleer, Sing cucu, sing
cucu, cucu nu nu cucu, sing cucu, sing cucu, sing cucu, sing cucu.
He mocked me with the senseless refrain in an ear-jangling falsetto.
Without doubt I had bawled the nonsense out on my way to bed.
You have a good memory, I commented drily, as I essayed a moment to
drape my shoulders with the new sable cloak ere I tossed it to Pons to put
aside. He shook his head sourly.
No need of memory when you roared it over and over for the thousandth
time till half the inn was a-knock at the door to spit you for the sleep-killer you
were. And when I had you decently in the bed, did you not call me to you and
command, if the devil called, to tell him my lady slept? And did you not call
me back again, and, with a grip on my arm that leaves it bruised and black this
day, command me, as I loved life, fat meat, and the warm fire, to call you not
of the morning save for one thing?
Which was? I prompted, unable for the life of me to guess what I could
have said.
Which was the heart of one, a black buzzard, you said, by name
Martinelliwhoever he may befor the heart of Martinelli smoking on a
gold platter. The platter must be gold, you said; and you said I must call you
by singing, Sing cucu, sing cucu, sing cucu. Whereat you began to teach me
how to sing, Sing cucu, sing cucu, sing cucu.
And when Pons had said the name, I knew it at once for the priest,
Martinelli, who had been knocking his heels two mortal hours in the room
without.
When Martinelli was permitted to enter and as he saluted me by title and
name, I knew at once my name and all of it. I was Count Guillaume de
Sainte-Maure. (You see, only could I know then, and remember afterward,
what was in my conscious mind.)
The priest was Italian, dark and small, lean as with fasting or with a
wasting hunger not of this world, and his hands were as small and slender as a
womans. But his eyes! They were cunning and trustless, narrow-slitted and
heavy-lidded, at one and the same time as sharp as a ferrets and as indolent as
a basking lizards.
There has been much delay, Count de Sainte-Maure, he began promptly,
when Pons had left the room at a glance from me. He whom I serve grows
impatient.
Change your tune, priest, I broke in angrily. Remember, you are not
now in Rome.
My august master he began.
Rules augustly in Rome, mayhap, I again interrupted. This is France.
Martinelli shrugged his shoulders meekly and patiently, but his eyes,
gleaming like a basilisks, gave his shoulders the lie.
My august master has some concern with the doings of France, he said
quietly. The lady is not for you. My master has other plans. . . He
moistened his thin lips with his tongue. Other plans for the lady . . . and for
you.
Of course, by the lady I knew he referred to the great Duchess Philippa,
widow of Geoffrey, last Duke of Aquitaine. But great duchess, widow, and
all, Philippa was a woman, and young, and gay, and beautiful, and, by my
faith, fashioned for me.
What are his plans? I demanded bluntly.
They are deep and wide, Count Sainte-Mauretoo deep and wide for me
to presume to imagine, much less know or discuss with you or any man.
Oh, I know big things are afoot and slimy worms squirming
underground, I said.
They told me you were stubborn-necked, but I have obeyed commands.
Martinelli arose to leave, and I arose with him.
I said it was useless, he went on. But the last chance to change your
mind was accorded you. My august master deals more fairly than fair.
Oh, well, Ill think the matter over, I said airily, as I bowed the priest to
the door.
He stopped abruptly at the threshold.
The time for thinking is past, he said. It is decision I came for.
I will think the matter over, I repeated, then added, as afterthought: If
the ladys plans do not accord with mine, then mayhap the plans of your
master may fruit as he desires. For remember, priest, he is no master of mine.
You do not know my master, he said solemnly.
Nor do I wish to know him, I retorted.
And I listened to the lithe, light step of the little intriguing priest go down
the creaking stairs.
Did I go into the minutiæ of detail of all that I saw this half a day and half
a night that I was Count Guillaume de Sainte-Maure, not ten books the size of
this I am writing could contain the totality of the matter. Much I shall skip; in
fact, I shall skip almost all; for never yet have I heard of a condemned man
being reprieved in order that he might complete his memoirsat least, not in
California.
When I rode out in Paris that day it was the Paris of centuries agone. The
narrow streets were an unsanitary scandal of filth and slime. But I must skip.
And skip I shall, all of the afternoons events, all of the ride outside the walls,
of the grand fête given by Hugh de Meung, of the feasting and the drinking in
which I took little part. Only of the end of the adventure will I write, which
begins with where I stood jesting with Philippa herselfah, dear God, she was
wondrous beautiful. A great ladyay, but before that, and after that, and
always, a woman.
We laughed and jested lightly enough, as about us jostled the merry throng;
but under our jesting was the deep earnestness of man and woman well
advanced across the threshold of love and yet not too sure each of the other. I
shall not describe her. She was small, exquisitely slenderbut there, I am
describing her. In brief, she was the one woman in the world for me, and little
I recked the long arm of that gray old man in Rome could reach out half across
Europe between my woman and me.
And the Italian, Fortini, leaned to my shoulder and whispered:
One who desires to speak.
One who must wait my pleasure, I answered shortly.
I wait no mans pleasure, was his equally short reply.
And, while my blood boiled, I remembered the priest, Martinelli, and the
gray old man at Rome. The thing was clear. It was deliberate. It was the long
arm. Fortini smiled lazily at me while I thus paused for the moment to debate,
but in his smile was the essence of all insolence.
This, of all times, was the time I should have been cool. But the old red
anger began to kindle in me. This was the work of the priest. This was the
Fortini, poverished of all save lineage, reckoned the best sword come up out of
Italy in half a score of years. To-night it was Fortini. If he failed the gray old
mans command to-morrow it would be another sword, the next day another.
And, perchance still failing, then might I expect the common bravos steel in
my back or the common poisoners philter in my wine, my meat, or bread.
I am busy, I said. Begone.
My business with you presses, was his reply.
Insensibly our voices had slightly risen, so that Philippa heard.
Begone, you Italian hound, I said. Take your howling from my door. I
shall attend to you presently.
The moon is up, he said. The grass is dry and excellent. There is no
dew. Beyond the fish-pond, an arrows flight to the left, is an open space,
quiet and private.
Presently you shall have your desire, I muttered impatiently.
But still he persisted in waiting at my shoulder.
Presently, I said. Presently I shall attend to you.
Then spoke Philippa, in all the daring spirit and the iron of her.
Satisfy the gentlemans desire, Sainte-Maure. Attend to him now. And
good fortune go with you. She paused to beckon to her her uncle, Jean de
Joinville, who was passinguncle on her mothers side, of the de Joinvilles of
Anjou. Good fortune go with you, she repeated, and then leaned to me so
that she could whisper: And my heart goes with you, Sainte-Maure. Do not
be long. I shall await you in the big hall.
I was in the seventh heaven. I trod on air. It was the first frank admittance
of her love. And with such benediction I was made so strong that I knew I
could kill a score of Fortinis and snap my fingers at a score of gray old men in
Rome.
Jean de Joinville bore Philippa away in the press, and Fortini and I settled
our arrangements in a trice. We separatedhe to find a friend or so, and I to
find a friend or so, and all to meet at the appointed place beyond the fish-pond.
First I found Robert Lanfranc, and, next, Henry Bohemond. But before I
found them I encountered a windlestraw which showed which way blew the
wind and gave promise of a very gale. I knew the windlestraw, Guy de
Villehardouin, a raw young provincial, come up the first time to Court, but a
fiery little cockerel for all of that. He was red-haired. His blue eyes, small
and pinched close to ether, were likewise red, at least in the whites of them;
and his skin, of the sort that goes with such types, was red and freckled. He
had quite a parboiled appearance.
As I passed him by a sudden movement he jostled me. Oh, of course, the
thing was deliberate. And he flamed at me while his hand dropped to his
rapier.
Faith, thought I, the gray old man has many and strange tools, while to
the cockerel I bowed and murmured, Your pardon for my clumsiness. The
fault was mine. Your pardon, Villehardouin.
But he was not to be appeased thus easily. And while he fumed and
strutted I glimpsed Robert Lanfranc, beckoned him to us, and explained the
happening.
Sainte-Maure has accorded you satisfaction, was his judgment. He has
prayed your pardon.
In truth, yes, I interrupted in my suavest tones. And I pray your pardon
again, Villehardouin, for my very great clumsiness. I pray your pardon a
thousand times. The fault was mine, though unintentioned. In my haste to an
engagement I was clumsy, most woful clumsy, but without intention.
What could the dolt do but grudgingly accept the amends I so freely
proffered him? Yet I knew, as Lanfranc and I hastened on, that ere many days,
or hours, the flame-headed youth would see to it that we measured steel
together on the grass.
I explained no more to Lanfranc than my need of him, and he was little
interested to pry deeper into the matter. He was himself a lively youngster of
no more than twenty, but he had been trained to arms, had fought in Spain, and
had an honourable record on the grass. Merely his black eyes flashed when he
learned what was toward, and such was his eagerness that it was he who
gathered Henry Bohemond in to our number.
When the three of us arrived in the open space beyond the fish-pond
Fortini and two friends were already waiting us. One was Felix Pasquini,
nephew to the Cardinal of that name, and as close in his uncles confidence as
was his uncle close in the confidence of the gray old man. The other was
Raoul de Goncourt, whose presence surprised me, he being too good and
noble a man for the company he kept.
We saluted properly, and properly went about the business. It was nothing
new to any of us. The footing was good, as promised. There was no dew.
The moon shone fair, and Fortinis blade and mine were out and at earnest
play.
This I knew: good swordsman as they reckoned me in France, Fortini was
a better. This, too, I knew: that I carried my ladys heart with me this night,
and that this night, because of me, there would be one Italian less in the world.
I say I knew it. In my mind the issue could not be in doubt. And as our
rapiers played I pondered the manner I should kill him. I was not minded for a
long contest. Quick and brilliant had always been my way. And further, what
of my past gay months of carousal and of singing Sing cucu, sing cucu, sing
cucu, at ungodly hours, I knew I was not conditioned for a long contest.
Quick and brilliant was my decision.
But quick and brilliant was a difficult matter with so consummate a
swordsman as Fortini opposed to me. Besides, as luck would have it, Fortini,
always the cold one, always the tireless-wristed, always sure and long, as
report had it, in going about such business, on this night elected, too, the quick
and brilliant.
It was nervous, tingling work, for as surely as I sensed his intention of
briefness, just as surely had he sensed mine. I doubt that I could have done the
trick had it been broad day instead of moonlight. The dim light aided me.
Also was I aided by divining, the moment in advance, what he had in mind. It
was the time attack, a common but perilous trick that every novice knows, that
has laid on his back many a good man who attempted it, and that is so fraught
with danger to the perpetrator that swordsmen are not enamoured of it.
We had been at work barely a minute, when I knew under all his darting,
flashing show of offence that Fortini meditated this very time attack. He
desired of me a thrust and lunge, not that he might parry it but that he might
time it and deflect it by the customary slight turn of the wrist, his rapier point
directed to meet me as my body followed in the lunge. A ticklish thingay, a
ticklish thing in the best of light. Did he deflect a fraction of a second too
early, I should be warned and saved. Did he deflect a fraction of a second too
late, my thrust would go home to him.
Quick and brilliant is it? was my thought. Very well, my Italian friend,
quick and brilliant shall it be, and especially shall it be quick.
In a way, it was time attack against time attack, but I would fool him on the
time by being over-quick. And I was quick. As I said, we had been at work
scarcely a minute when it happened. Quick? That thrust and lunge of mine
were one. A snap of action it was, an explosion, an instantaneousness. I
swear my thrust and lunge were a fraction of a second quicker than any man is
supposed to thrust and lunge. I won the fraction of a second. By that fraction
of a second too late Fortini attempted to deflect my blade and impale me on
his. But it was his blade that was deflected. It flashed past my breast, and I
was ininside his weapon, which extended full length in the empty air behind
meand my blade was inside of him, and through him, heart-high, from right
side of him to left side of him and outside of him beyond.
It is a strange thing to do, to spit a live man on a length of steel. I sit here
in my cell, and cease from writing a space, while I consider the matter. And I
have considered it often, that moonlight night in France of long ago, when I
taught the Italian hound quick and brilliant. It was so easy a thing, that
perforation of a torso. One would have expected more resistance. There
would have been resistance had my rapier point touched bone. As it was, it
encountered only the softness of flesh. Still it perforated so easily. I have the
sensation of it now, in my hand, my brain, as I write. A womans hat-pin
could go through a plum pudding not more easily than did my blade go
through the Italian. Oh, there was nothing amazing about it at the time to
Guillaume de Sainte-Maure, but amazing it is to me, Darrell Standing, as I
recollect and ponder it across the centuries. It is easy, most easy, to kill a
strong, live, breathing man with so crude a weapon as a piece of steel. Why,
men are like soft-shell crabs, so tender, frail, and vulnerable are they.
But to return to the moonlight on the grass. My thrust made home, there
was a perceptible pause. Not at once did Fortini fall. Not at once did I
withdraw the blade. For a full second we stood in pauseI, with legs spread,
and arched and tense, body thrown forward, right arm horizontal and straight
out; Fortini, his blade beyond me so far that hilt and hand just rested lightly
against my left breast, his body rigid, his eyes open and shining.
So statuesque were we for that second that I swear those about us were not
immediately aware of what had happened. Then Fortini gasped and coughed
slightly. The rigidity of his pose slackened. The hilt and hand against my
breast wavered, then the arm drooped to his side till the rapier point rested on
the lawn. By this time Pasquini and de Goncourt had sprung to him and he
was sinking into their arms. In faith, it was harder for me to withdraw the
steel than to drive it in. His flesh clung about it as if jealous to let it depart.
Oh, believe me, it required a distinct physical effort to get clear of what I had
done.
But the pang of the withdrawal must have stung him back to life and
purpose, for he shook off his friends, straightened himself, and lifted his rapier
into position. I, too, took position, marvelling that it was possible I had spitted
him heart-high and yet missed any vital spot. Then, and before his friends
could catch him, his legs crumpled under him and he went heavily to grass.
They laid him on his back, but he was already dead, his face ghastly still under
the moon, his right hand still a-clutch of the rapier.
Yes; it is indeed a marvellous easy thing to kill a man.
We saluted his friends and were about to depart, when Felix Pasquini
detained me.
Pardon me, I said. Let it be to-morrow.
We have but to move a step aside, he urged, where the grass is still
dry.
Let me then wet it for you, Sainte-Maure, Lanfranc asked of me, eager
himself to do for an Italian.
I shook my head.
Pasquini is mine, I answered. He shall be first to-morrow.
Are there others? Lanfranc demanded.
Ask de Goncourt, I grinned. I imagine he is already laying claim to the
honour of being the third.
At this, de Goncourt showed distressed acquiescence. Lanfranc looked
inquiry at him, and de Goncourt nodded.
And after him I doubt not comes the cockerel, I went on.
And even as I spoke the red-haired Guy de Villehardouin, alone, strode to
us across the moonlit grass.
At least I shall have him, Lanfranc cried, his voice almost wheedling, so
great was his desire.
Ask him, I laughed, then turned to Pasquini. To-morrow, I said. Do
you name time and place, and I shall be there.
The grass is most excellent, he teased, the place is most excellent, and I
am minded that Fortini has you for company this night.
Twere better he were accompanied by a friend, I quipped. And now
your pardon, for I must go.
But he blocked my path.
Whoever it be, he said, let it be now.
For the first time, with him, my anger began to rise.
You serve your master well, I sneered.
I serve but my pleasure, was his answer. Master I have none.
Pardon me if I presume to tell you the truth, I said.
Which is? he queried softly.
That you are a liar, Pasquini, a liar like all Italians.
He turned immediately to Lanfranc and Bohemond.
You heard, he said. And after that you cannot deny me him.
They hesitated and looked to me for counsel of my wishes. But Pasquini
did not wait.
And if you still have any scruples, he hurried on, then allow me to
remove them . . . thus.
And he spat in the grass at my feet. Then my anger seized me and was
beyond me. The red wrath I call itan overwhelming, all-mastering desire to
kill and destroy. I forgot that Philippa waited for me in the great hall. All I
knew was my wrongsthe unpardonable interference in my affairs by the
gray old man, the errand of the priest, the insolence of Fortini, the impudence
of Villehardouin, and here Pasquini standing in my way and spitting in the
grass. I saw red. I thought red. I looked upon all these creatures as rank and
noisome growths that must be hewn out of my path, out of the world. As a
netted lion may rage against the meshes, so raged I against these creatures.
They were all about me. In truth, I was in the trap. The one way out was to
cut them down, to crush them into the earth and stamp upon them.
Very well, I said, calmly enough, although my passion was such that my
frame shook. You first, Pasquini. And you next, de Goncourt? And at the
end, de Villehardouin?
Each nodded in turn and Pasquini and I prepared to step aside.
Since you are in haste, Henry Bohemond proposed to me, and since
there are three of them and three of us, why not settle it at the one time?
Yes, yes, was Lanfrancs eager cry. Do you take de Goncourt. De
Villehardouin for mine.
But I waved my good friends back.
They are here by command, I explained. It is I they desire so strongly
that by my faith I have caught the contagion of their desire, so that now I want
them and will have them for myself.
I had observed that Pasquini fretted at my delay of speech-making, and I
resolved to fret him further.
You, Pasquini, I announced, I shall settle with in short account. I would
not that you tarried while Fortini waits your companionship. You, Raoul de
Goncourt, I shall punish as you deserve for being in such bad company. You
are getting fat and wheezy. I shall take my time with you until your fat melts
and your lungs pant and wheeze like leaky bellows. You, de Villehardouin, I
have not decided in what manner I shall kill.
And then I saluted Pasquini, and we were at it. Oh, I was minded to be
rarely devilish this night. Quick and brilliantthat was the thing. Nor was I
unmindful of that deceptive moonlight. As with Fortini would I settle with
him if he dared the time attack. If he did not, and quickly, then I would dare it.
Despite the fret I had put him in, he was cautious. Nevertheless I
compelled the play to be rapid, and in the dim light, depending less than usual
on sight and more than usual on feel, our blades were in continual touch.
Barely was the first minute of play past when I did the trick. I feigned a
slight slip of the foot, and, in the recovery, feigned loss of touch with
Pasquinis blade. He thrust tentatively, and again I feigned, this time making a
needlessly wide parry. The consequent exposure of myself was the bait I had
purposely dangled to draw him on. And draw him on I did. Like a flash he
took advantage of what he deemed an involuntary exposure. Straight and true
was his thrust, and all his will and body were heartily in the weight of the
lunge he made. And all had been feigned on my part and I was ready for him.
Just lightly did my steel meet his as our blades slithered. And just firmly
enough and no more did my wrist twist and deflect his blade on my basket hilt.
Oh, such a slight deflection, a matter of inches, just barely sufficient to send
his point past me so that it pierced a fold of my satin doublet in passing. Of
course, his body followed his rapier in the lunge, while, heart-high, right side,
my rapier point met his body. And my outstretched arm was stiff and straight
as the steel into which it elongated, and behind the arm and the steel my body
was braced and solid.
Heart-high, I say, my rapier entered Pasquinis side on the right, but it did
not emerge, on the left, for, well-nigh through him, it met a rib (oh, mankilling
is butchers work!) with such a will that the forcing overbalanced him,
so that he fell part backward and part sidewise to the ground. And even as he
fell, and ere he struck, with jerk and wrench I cleared my weapon of him.
De Goncourt was to him, but he waved de Goncourt to attend on me. Not
so swiftly as Fortini did Pasquini pass. He coughed and spat, and, helped by
de Villehardouin, propped his elbow under him, rested his head on hand, and
coughed and spat again.
A pleasant journey, Pasquini, I laughed to him in my red anger. Pray
hasten, for the grass where you lie is become suddenly wet and if you linger
you will catch your death of cold.
When I made immediately to begin with de Goncourt, Bohemond protested
that I should rest a space.
Nay, I said. I have not properly warmed up. And to de Goncourt,
Now will we have you dance and wheezeSalute!
De Goncourts heart was not in the work. It was patent that he fought
under the compulsion of command. His play was old-fashioned, as any
middle-aged mans is apt to be, but he was not an indifferent swordsman. He
was cool, determined, dogged. But he was not brilliant, and he was oppressed
with foreknowledge of defeat. A score of times, by quick and brilliant, he was
mine. But I refrained. I have said that I was devilish-minded. Indeed I was. I
wore him down. I backed him away from the moon so that he could see little
of me because I fought in my own shadow. And while I wore him down until
he began to wheeze as I had predicted, Pasquini, head on hand and watching,
coughed and spat out his life.
Now, de Goncourt, I announced finally. You see I have you quite
helpless. You are mine in any of a dozen ways. Be ready, brace yourself, for
this is the way I will.
And, so saying, I merely went from carte to tierce, and as he recovered
wildly and parried widely I returned to carte, took the opening, and drove
home heart-high and through and through. And at sight of the conclusion
Pasquini let go his hold on life, buried his face in the grass, quivered a
moment, and lay still.
Your master will be four servants short this night, I assured de
Villehardouin, in the moment just ere we engaged.
And such an engagement! The boy was ridiculous. In what bucolic school
of fence he had been taught was beyond imagining. He was downright
clownish. Short work and simple was my judgment, while his red hair
seemed a-bristle with very rage and while he pressed me like a madman.
Alas! It was his clownishness that undid me. When I had played with him
and laughed at him for a handful of seconds for the clumsy boor he was, he
became so angered that he forgot the worse than little fence he knew. With an
arm-wide sweep of his rapier, as though it bore heft and a cutting edge, he
whistled it through the air and rapped it down on my crown. I was in amaze.
Never had so absurd a thing happened to me. He was wide open, and I could
have run him through forthright. But, as I said, I was in amaze, and the next I
knew was the pang of the entering steel as this clumsy provincial ran me
through and charged forward, bull-like, till his hilt bruised my side and I was
borne backward.
As I fell I could see the concern on the faces of Lanfranc and Bohemond
and the glut of satisfaction in the face of de Villehardouin as he pressed me.
I was falling, but I never reached the grass. Came a blurr of flashing
lights, a thunder in my ears, a darkness, a glimmering of dim light slowly
dawning, a wrenching, racking pain beyond all describing, and then I heard
the voice of one who said:
I cant feel anything.
I knew the voice. It was Warden Athertons. And I knew myself for
Darrell Standing, just returned across the centuries to the jacket hell of San
Quentin. And I knew the touch of finger-tips on my neck was Warden
Athertons. And I knew the finger-tips that displaced his were Doctor
Jacksons. And it was Doctor Jacksons voice that said:
You dont know how to take a mans pulse from the neck. Thereright
thereput your fingers where mine are. Dye get it? Ah, I thought so. Heart
weak, but steady as a chronometer.
Its only twenty-four hours, Captain Jamie said, and he was never in
like condition before.
Putting it on, thats what hes doing, and you can stack on that, Al
Hutchins, the head trusty, interjected.
I dont know, Captain Jamie insisted. When a mans pulse is that low it
takes an expert to find it
Aw, I served my apprenticeship in the jacket, Al Hutchins sneered.
And Ive made you unlace me, Captain, when you thought I was croaking,
and it was all I could do to keep from snickering in your face.
What do you think, Doc? Warden Atherton asked.
I tell you the heart action is splendid, was the answer. Of course it is
weak. That is only to be expected. I tell you Hutchins is right. The man is
feigning.
With his thumb he turned up one of my eyelids, whereat I opened my other
eye and gazed up at the group bending over me.
What did I tell you? was Doctor Jacksons cry of triumph.
And then, although it seemed the effort must crack my face, I summoned
all the will of me and smiled.
They held water to my lips, and I drank greedily. It must be remembered
that all this while I lay helpless on my back, my arms pinioned along with my
body inside the jacket. When they offered me fooddry prison breadI
shook my head. I closed my eyes in advertisement that I was tired of their
presence. The pain of my partial resuscitation was unbearable. I could feel
my body coming to life. Down the cords of my neck and into my patch of
chest over the heart darting pains were making their way. And in my brain the
memory was strong that Philippa waited me in the big hall, and I was desirous
to escape away back to the half a day and half a night I had just lived in old
France.
So it was, even as they stood about me, that I strove to eliminate the live
portion of my body from my consciousness. I was in haste to depart, but
Warden Athertons voice held me back.
Is there anything you want to complain about? he asked.
Now I had but one fear, namely, that they would unlace me; so that it must
be understood that my reply was not uttered in braggadocio but was meant to
forestall any possible unlacing.
You might make the jacket a little tighter, I whispered. Its too loose for
comfort. I get lost in it. Hutchins is stupid. He is also a fool. He doesnt
know the first thing about lacing the jacket. Warden, you ought to put him in
charge of the loom-room. He is a more profound master of inefficiency than
the present incumbent, who is merely stupid without being a fool as well.
Now get out, all of you, unless you can think of worse to do to me. In which
case, by all means remain. I invite you heartily to remain, if you think in your
feeble imaginings that you have devised fresh torture for me.
Hes a wooz, a true-blue, dyed-in-the-wool wooz, Doctor Jackson
chanted, with the medicos delight in a novelty.
Standing, you are a wonder, the Warden said. Youve got an iron will,
but Ill break it as sure as God made little apples.
And youve the heart of a rabbit, I retorted. One-tenth the jacketing I
have received in San Quentin would have squeezed your rabbit heart out of
your long ears.
Oh, it was a touch, that, for the Warden did have unusual ears. They would
have interested Lombroso, I am sure.
As for me, I went on, I laugh at you, and I wish no worse fate to the
loom-room than that you should take charge of it yourself. Why, youve got
me down and worked your wickedness on me, and still I live and laugh in your
face. Inefficient? You cant even kill me. Inefficient? You couldnt kill a
cornered rat with a stick of dynamitereal dynamite, and not the sort you are
deluded into believing I have hidden away.
Anything more? he demanded, when I had ceased from my diatribe.
And into my mind flashed what I had told Fortini when he pressed his
insolence on me.
Begone, you prison cur, I said. Take your yapping from my door.
It must have been a terrible thing for a man of Warden Athertons stripe to
be thus bearded by a helpless prisoner. His face whitened with rage and his
voice shook as he threatened:
By God, Standing, Ill do for you yet.
There is only one thing you can do, I said. You can tighten this
distressingly loose jacket. If you wont, then get out. And I dont care if you
fail to come back for a week or for the whole ten days.
And what can even the Warden of a great prison do in reprisal on a
prisoner upon whom the ultimate reprisal has already been wreaked? It may
be that Warden Atherton thought of some possible threat, for he began to
speak. But my voice had strengthened with the exercise, and I began to sing,
Sing cucu, sing cucu, sing cucu. And sing I did until my door clanged and
the bolts and locks squeaked and grated fast.
CHAPTER XII
Now that I had learned the trick the way was easy. And I knew the way
was bound to become easier the more I travelled it. Once establish a line of
least resistance, every succeeding journey along it will find still less
resistance. And so, as you shall see, my journeys from San Quentin life into
other lives were achieved almost automatically as time went by.
After Warden Atherton and his crew had left me it was a matter of minutes
to will the resuscitated portion of my body back into the little death. Death in
life it was, but it was only the little death, similar to the temporary death
produced by an anæsthetic.
And so, from all that was sordid and vile, from brutal solitary and jacket
hell, from acquainted flies and sweats of darkness and the knuckle-talk of the
living dead, I was away at a bound into time and space.
Came the duration of darkness, and the slow-growing awareness of other
things and of another self. First of all, in this awareness, was dust. It was in
my nostrils, dry and acrid. It was on my lips. It coated my face, my hands,
and especially was it noticeable on the finger-tips when touched by the ball of
my thumb.
Next I was aware of ceaseless movement. All that was about me lurched
and oscillated. There was jolt and jar, and I heard what I knew as a matter of
course to be the grind of wheels on axles and the grate and clash of iron tyres
against rock and sand. And there came to me the jaded voices of men, in curse
and snarl of slow-plodding, jaded animals.
I opened my eyes, that were inflamed with dust, and immediately fresh
dust bit into them. On the coarse blankets on which I lay the dust was half an
inch thick. Above me, through sifting dust, I saw an arched roof of lurching,
swaying canvas, and myriads of dust motes descended heavily in the shafts of
sunshine that entered through holes in the canvas.
I was a child, a boy of eight or nine, and I was weary, as was the woman,
dusty-visaged and haggard, who sat up beside me and soothed a crying babe in
her arms. She was my mother; that I knew as a matter of course, just as I
knew, when I glanced along the canvas tunnel of the wagon-top, that the
shoulders of the man on the drivers seat were the shoulders of my father.
When I started to crawl along the packed gear with which the wagon was
laden my mother said in a tired and querulous voice, Cant you ever be still a
minute, Jesse?
That was my name, Jesse. I did not know my surname, though I heard my
mother call my father John. I have a dim recollection of hearing, at one time
or another, the other men address my father as Captain. I knew that he was the
leader of this company, and that his orders were obeyed by all.
I crawled out through the opening in the canvas and sat down beside my
father on the seat. The air was stifling with the dust that rose from the wagons
and the many hoofs of the animals. So thick was the dust that it was like mist
or fog in the air, and the low sun shone through it dimly and with a bloody
light.
Not alone was the light of this setting sun ominous, but everything about
me seemed ominousthe landscape, my fathers face, the fret of the babe in
my mothers arms that she could not still, the six horses my father drove that
had continually to be urged and that were without any sign of colour, so
heavily had the dust settled on them.
The landscape was an aching, eye-hurting desolation. Low hills stretched
endlessly away on every hand. Here and there only on their slopes were
occasional scrub growths of heat-parched brush. For the most part the surface
of the hills was naked-dry and composed of sand and rock. Our way followed
the sand-bottoms between the hills. And the sand-bottoms were bare, save for
spots of scrub, with here and there short tufts of dry and withered grass. Water
there was none, nor sign of water, except for washed gullies that told of
ancient and torrential rains.
My father was the only one who had horses to his wagon. The wagons
went in single file, and as the train wound and curved I saw that the other
wagons were drawn by oxen. Three or four yoke of oxen strained and pulled
weakly at each wagon, and beside them, in the deep sand, walked men with
ox-goads, who prodded the unwilling beasts along. On a curve I counted the
wagons ahead and behind. I knew that there were forty of them, including our
own; for often I had counted them before. And as I counted them now, as a
child will to while away tedium, they were all there, forty of them, all canvastopped,
big and massive, crudely fashioned, pitching and lurching, grinding
and jarring over sand and sage-brush and rock.
To right and left of us, scattered along the train, rode a dozen or fifteen
men and youths on horses. Across their pommels were long-barrelled rifles.
Whenever any of them drew near to our wagon I could see that their faces,
under the dust, were drawn and anxious like my fathers. And my father, like
them, had a long-barrelled rifle close to hand as he drove.
Also, to one side, limped a score or more of foot-sore, yoke-galled,
skeleton oxen, that ever paused to nip at the occasional tufts of withered grass,
and that ever were prodded on by the tired-faced youths who herded them.
Sometimes one or another of these oxen would pause and low, and such
lowing seemed as ominous as all else about me.
Far, far away I have a memory of having lived, a smaller lad, by the treelined
banks of a stream. And as the wagon jolts along, and I sway on the seat
with my father, I continually return and dwell upon that pleasant water flowing
between the trees. I have a sense that for an interminable period I have lived
in a wagon and travelled on, ever on, with this present company.
But strongest of all upon me is what is strong upon all the company,
namely, a sense of drifting to doom. Our way was like a funeral march.
Never did a laugh arise. Never did I hear a happy tone of voice. Neither
peace nor ease marched with us. The faces of the men and youths who
outrode the train were grim, set, hopeless. And as we toiled through the lurid
dust of sunset often I scanned my fathers face in vain quest of some message
of cheer. I will not say that my fathers face, in all its dusty haggardness, was
hopeless. It was dogged, and oh! so grim and anxious, most anxious.
A thrill seemed to run along the train. My fathers head went up. So did
mine. And our horses raised their weary heads, scented the air with longdrawn
snorts, and for the nonce pulled willingly. The horses of the outriders
quickened their pace. And as for the herd of scarecrow oxen, it broke into a
forthright gallop. It was almost ludicrous. The poor brutes were so clumsy in
their weakness and haste. They were galloping skeletons draped in mangy
hide, and they out-distanced the boys who herded them. But this was only for
a time. Then they fell back to a walk, a quick, eager, shambling, sore-footed
walk; and they no longer were lured aside by the dry bunch-grass.
What is it? my mother asked from within the wagon.
Water, was my fathers reply. It must be Nephi.
And my mother: Thank God! And perhaps they will sell us food.
And into Nephi, through blood-red dust, with grind and grate and jolt and
jar, our great wagons rolled. A dozen scattered dwellings or shanties
composed the place. The landscape was much the same as that through which
we had passed. There were no trees, only scrub growths and sandy bareness.
But here were signs of tilled fields, with here and there a fence. Also there
was water. Down the stream ran no current. The bed, however, was damp,
with now and again a water-hole into which the loose oxen and the saddlehorses
stamped and plunged their muzzles to the eyes. Here, too, grew an
occasional small willow.
That must be Bill Blacks mill they told us about, my father said,
pointing out a building to my mother, whose anxiousness had drawn her to
peer out over our shoulders.
An old man, with buckskin shirt and long, matted, sunburnt hair, rode back
to our wagon and talked with father. The signal was given, and the head
wagons of the train began to deploy in a circle. The ground favoured the
evolution, and, from long practice, it was accomplished without a hitch, so that
when the forty wagons were finally halted they formed a circle. All was
bustle and orderly confusion. Many women, all tired-faced and dusty like my
mother, emerged from the wagons. Also poured forth a very horde of
children. There must have been at least fifty children, and it seemed I knew
them all of long time; and there were at least two score of women. These went
about the preparations for cooking supper.
While some of the men chopped sage-brush and we children carried it to
the fires that were kindling, other men unyoked the oxen and let them
stampede for water. Next the men, in big squads, moved the wagons snugly
into place. The tongue of each wagon was on the inside of the circle, and,
front and rear, each wagon was in solid contact with the next wagon before
and behind. The great brakes were locked fast; but, not content with this, the
wheels of all the wagons were connected with chains. This was nothing new
to us children. It was the trouble sign of a camp in hostile country. One
wagon only was left out of the circle, so as to form a gate to the corral. Later
on, as we knew, ere the camp slept, the animals would be driven inside, and
the gate-wagon would be chained like the others in place. In the meanwhile,
and for hours, the animals would be herded by men and boys to what scant
grass they could find.
While the camp-making went on my father, with several others of the men,
including the old man with the long, sunburnt hair, went away on foot in the
direction of the mill. I remember that all of us, men, women, and even the
children, paused to watch them depart; and it seemed their errand was of grave
import.
While they were away other men, strangers, inhabitants of desert Nephi,
came into camp and stalked about. They were white men, like us, but they
were hard-faced, stern-faced, sombre, and they seemed angry with all our
company. Bad feeling was in the air, and they said things calculated to rouse
the tempers of our men. But the warning went out from the women, and was
passed on everywhere to our men and youths, that there must be no words.
One of the strangers came to our fire, where my mother was alone,
cooking. I had just come up with an armful of sage-brush, and I stopped to
listen and to stare at the intruder, whom I hated, because it was in the air to
hate, because I knew that every last person in our company hated these
strangers who were white-skinned like us and because of whom we had been
compelled to make our camp in a circle.
This stranger at our fire had blue eyes, hard and cold and piercing. His
hair was sandy. His face was shaven to the chin, and from under the chin,
covering the neck and extending to the ears, sprouted a sandy fringe of
whiskers well-streaked with gray. Mother did not greet him, nor did he greet
her. He stood and glowered at her for some time, he cleared his throat and
said with a sneer:
Wisht you was back in Missouri right now I bet.
I saw mother tighten her lips in self-control ere she answered:
We are from Arkansas.
I guess you got good reasons to deny where you come from, he next
said, you that drove the Lords people from Missouri.
Mother made no reply.
. . . Seein, he went on, after the pause accorded her, as youre now
comin a-whinin an a-beggin bread at our hands that you persecuted.
Whereupon, and instantly, child that I was, I knew anger, the old, red,
intolerant wrath, ever unrestrainable and unsubduable.
You lie! I piped up. We aint Missourians. We aint whinin. An we
aint beggars. We got the money to buy.
Shut up, Jesse! my mother cried, landing the back of her hand stingingly
on my mouth. And then, to the stranger, Go away and let the boy alone.
Ill shoot you full of lead, you damned Mormon! I screamed and sobbed
at him, too quick for my mother this time, and dancing away around the fire
from the back-sweep of her hand.
As for the man himself, my conduct had not disturbed him in the slightest.
I was prepared for I knew not what violent visitation from this terrible
stranger, and I watched him warily while he considered me with the utmost
gravity.
At last he spoke, and he spoke solemnly, with solemn shaking of the head,
as if delivering a judgment.
Like fathers like sons, he said. The young generation is as bad as the
elder. The whole breed is unregenerate and damned. There is no saving it, the
young or the old. There is no atonement. Not even the blood of Christ can
wipe out its iniquities.
Damned Mormon! was all I could sob at him. Damned Mormon!
Damned Mormon! Damned Mormon!
And I continued to damn him and to dance around the fire before my
mothers avenging hand, until he strode away.
When my father, and the men who had accompanied him, returned, campwork
ceased, while all crowded anxiously about him. He shook his head.
They will not sell? some woman demanded.
Again he shook his head.
A man spoke up, a blue-eyed, blond-whiskered giant of thirty, who
abruptly pressed his way into the centre of the crowd.
They say they have flour and provisions for three years, Captain, he said.
They have always sold to the immigration before. And now they wont sell.
And it aint our quarrel. Their quarrels with the government, an theyre
takin it out on us. It aint right, Captain. It aint right, I say, us with our
women an children, an California months away, winter comin on, an nothin
but desert in between. We aint got the grub to face the desert.
He broke off for a moment to address the whole crowd.
Why, you-all dont know what desert is. This around here aint desert. I
tell you its paradise, and heavenly pasture, an flowin with milk an honey
alongside what were goin to face.
I tell you, Captain, we got to get flour first. If they wont sell it, then we
must just up an take it.
Many of the men and women began crying out in approval, but my father
hushed them by holding up his hand.
I agree with everything you say, Hamilton, he began.
But the cries now drowned his voice, and he again held up his hand.
Except one thing you forgot to take into account, Hamiltona thing that
you and all of us must take into account. Brigham Young has declared martial
law, and Brigham Young has an army. We could wipe out Nephi in the shake
of a lambs tail and take all the provisions we can carry. But we wouldnt
carry them very far. Brighams Saints would be down upon us and we would
be wiped out in another shake of a lambs tail. You know it. I know it. We all
know it.
His words carried conviction to listeners already convinced. What he had
told them was old news. They had merely forgotten it in a flurry of
excitement and desperate need.
Nobody will fight quicker for what is right than I will, father continued.
But it just happens we cant afford to fight now. If ever a ruction starts we
havent a chance. And weve all got our women and children to recollect.
Weve got to be peaceable at any price, and put up with whatever dirt is
heaped on us.
But what will we do with the desert coming? cried a woman who nursed
a babe at her breast.
Theres several settlements before we come to the desert, father
answered. Fillmores sixty miles south. Then comes Corn Creek. And
Beavers another fifty miles. Next is Parowan. Then its twenty miles to
Cedar City. The farther we get away from Salt Lake the more likely theyll
sell us provisions.
And if they wont? the same woman persisted.
Then were quit of them, said my father. Cedar City is the last
settlement. Well have to go on, thats all, and thank our stars we are quit of
them. Two days journey beyond is good pasture, and water. They call it
Mountain Meadows. Nobody lives there, and thats the place well rest our
cattle and feed them up before we tackle the desert. Maybe we can shoot
some meat. And if the worst comes to the worst, well keep going as long as
we can, then abandon the wagons, pack what we can on our animals, and
make the last stages on foot. We can eat our cattle as we go along. It would
be better to arrive in California without a rag to our backs than to leave our
bones here; and leave them we will if we start a ruction.
With final reiterated warnings against violence of speech or act, the
impromptu meeting broke up. I was slow in falling asleep that night. My rage
against the Mormon had left my brain in such a tingle that I was still awake
when my father crawled into the wagon after a last round of the night-watch.
They thought I slept, but I heard mother ask him if he thought that the
Mormons would let us depart peacefully from their land. His face was turned
aside from her as he busied himself with pulling off a boot, while he answered
her with hearty confidence that he was sure the Mormons would let us go if
none of our own company started trouble.
But I saw his face at that moment in the light of a small tallow dip, and in
it was none of the confidence that was in his voice. So it was that I fell asleep,
oppressed by the dire fate that seemed to overhang us, and pondering upon
Brigham Young who bulked in my child imagination as a fearful, malignant
being, a very devil with horns and tail and all.
***
And I awoke to the old pain of the jacket in solitary. About me were the
customary four: Warden Atherton, Captain Jamie, Doctor Jackson, and Al
Hutchins. I cracked my face with my willed smile, and struggled not to lose
control under the exquisite torment of returning circulation. I drank the water
they held to me, waved aside the proffered bread, and refused to speak. I
closed my eyes and strove to win back to the chain-locked wagon-circle at
Nephi. But so long as my visitors stood about me and talked I could not
escape.
One snatch of conversation I could not tear myself away from hearing.
Just as yesterday, Doctor Jackson said. No change one way or the
other.
Then he can go on standing it? Warden Atherton queried.
Without a quiver. The next twenty-four hours as easy as the last. Hes a
wooz, I tell you, a perfect wooz. If I didnt know it was impossible, Id say he
was doped.
I know his dope, said the Warden. Its that cursed will of his. Id bet, if
he made up his mind, that he could walk barefoot across red-hot stones, like
those Kanaka priests from the South Seas.
Now perhaps it was the word priests that I carried away with me through
the darkness of another flight in time. Perhaps it was the cue. More probably
it was a mere coincidence. At any rate I awoke, lying upon a rough rocky
floor, and found myself on my back, my arms crossed in such fashion that
each elbow rested in the palm of the opposite hand. As I lay there, eyes
closed, half awake, I rubbed my elbows with my palms and found that I was
rubbing prodigious calluses. There was no surprise in this. I accepted the
calluses as of long time and a matter of course.
I opened my eyes. My shelter was a small cave, no more than three feet in
height and a dozen in length. It was very hot in the cave. Perspiration
noduled the entire surface of my body. Now and again several nodules
coalesced and formed tiny rivulets. I wore no clothing save a filthy rag about
the middle. My skin was burned to a mahogany brown. I was very thin, and I
contemplated my thinness with a strange sort of pride, as if it were an
achievement to be so thin. Especially was I enamoured of my painfully
prominent ribs. The very sight of the hollows between them gave me a sense
of solemn elation, or, rather, to use a better word, of sanctification.
My knees were callused like my elbows. I was very dirty. My beard,
evidently once blond, but now a dirt-stained and streaky brown, swept my
midriff in a tangled mass. My long hair, similarly stained and tangled, was all
about my shoulders, while wisps of it continually strayed in the way of my
vision so that sometimes I was compelled to brush it aside with my hands. For
the most part, however, I contented myself with peering through it like a wild
animal from a thicket.
Just at the tunnel-like mouth of my dim cave the day reared itself in a wall
of blinding sunshine. After a time I crawled to the entrance, and, for the sake
of greater discomfort, lay down in the burning sunshine on a narrow ledge of
rock. It positively baked me, that terrible sun, and the more it hurt me the
more I delighted in it, or in myself rather, in that I was thus the master of my
flesh and superior to its claims and remonstrances. When I found under me a
particularly sharp, but not too sharp, rock-projection, I ground my body upon
the point of it, rowelled my flesh in a very ecstasy of mastery and of
purification.
It was a stagnant day of heat. Not a breath of air moved over the river
valley on which I sometimes gazed. Hundreds of feet beneath me the wide
river ran sluggishly. The farther shore was flat and sandy and stretched away
to the horizon. Above the water were scattered clumps of palm-trees.
On my side, eaten into a curve by the river, were lofty, crumbling cliffs.
Farther along the curve, in plain view from my eyrie, carved out of the living
rock, were four colossal figures. It was the stature of a man to their ankle
joints. The four colossi sat, with hands resting on knees, with arms crumbled
quite away, and gazed out upon the river. At least three of them so gazed. Of
the fourth all that remained were the lower limbs to the knees and the huge
hands resting on the knees. At the feet of this one, ridiculously small,
crouched a sphinx; yet this sphinx was taller than I.
I looked upon these carven images with contempt, and spat as I looked. I
knew not what they were, whether forgotten gods or unremembered kings.
But to me they were representative of the vanity of earth-men and earthaspirations.
And over all this curve of river and sweep of water and wide sands beyond
arched a sky of aching brass unflecked by the tiniest cloud.
The hours passed while I roasted in the sun. Often, for quite decent
intervals, I forgot my heat and pain in dreams and visions and in memories.
All this I knewcrumbling colossi and river and sand and sun and brazen sky
was to pass away in the twinkling of an eye. At any moment the trumps of
the archangels might sound, the stars fall out of the sky, the heavens roll up as
a scroll, and the Lord God of all come with his hosts for the final judgment.
Ah, I knew it so profoundly that I was ready for such sublime event. That
was why I was here in rags and filth and wretchedness. I was meek and lowly,
and I despised the frail needs and passions of the flesh. And I thought with
contempt, and with a certain satisfaction, of the far cities of the plain I had
known, all unheeding, in their pomp and lust, of the last day so near at hand.
Well, they would see soon enough, but too late for them. And I should see.
But I was ready. And to their cries and lamentations would I arise, reborn and
glorious, and take my well-earned and rightful place in the City of God.
At times, between dreams and visions in which I was verily and before my
time in the City of God, I conned over in my mind old discussions and
controversies. Yes, Novatus was right in his contention that penitent apostates
should never again be received into the churches. Also, there was no doubt
that Sabellianism was conceived of the devil. So was Constantine, the archfiend,
the devils right hand.
Continually I returned to contemplation of the nature of the unity of God,
and went over and over the contentions of Noetus, the Syrian. Better,
however, did I like the contentions of my beloved teacher, Arius. Truly, if
human reason could determine anything at all, there must have been a time, in
the very nature of sonship, when the Son did not exist. In the nature of
sonship there must have been a time when the Son commenced to exist. A
father must be older than his son. To hold otherwise were a blasphemy and a
belittlement of God.
And I remembered back to my young days when I had sat at the feet of
Arius, who had been a presbyter of the city of Alexandria, and who had been
robbed of the bishopric by the blasphemous and heretical Alexander.
Alexander the Sabellianite, that is what he was, and his feet had fast hold of
hell.
Yes, I had been to the Council of Nicea, and seen it avoid the issue. And I
remembered when the Emperor Constantine had banished Arius for his
uprightness. And I remembered when Constantine repented for reasons of
state and policy and commanded Alexanderthe other Alexander, thrice
cursed, Bishop of Constantinopleto receive Arius into communion on the
morrow. And that very night did not Arius die in the street? They said it was
a violent sickness visited upon him in answer to Alexanders prayer to God.
But I said, and so said all we Arians, that the violent sickness was due to a
poison, and that the poison was due to Alexander himself, Bishop of
Constantinople and devils poisoner.
And here I ground my body back and forth on the sharp stones, and
muttered aloud, drunk with conviction:
Let the Jews and Pagans mock. Let them triumph, for their time is short.
And for them there will be no time after time.
I talked to myself aloud a great deal on that rocky shelf overlooking the
river. I was feverish, and on occasion I drank sparingly of water from a
stinking goatskin. This goatskin I kept hanging in the sun that the stench of
the skin might increase and that there might be no refreshment of coolness in
the water. Food there was, lying in the dirt on my cave-floora few roots and
a chunk of mouldy barley-cake; and hungry I was, although I did not eat.
All I did that blessed, livelong day was to sweat and swelter in the sun,
mortify my lean flesh upon the rock, gaze out of the desolation, resurrect old
memories, dream dreams, and mutter my convictions aloud.
And when the sun set, in the swift twilight I took a last look at the world so
soon to pass. About the feet of the colossi I could make out the creeping
forms of beasts that laired in the once proud works of men. And to the snarls
of the beasts I crawled into my hole, and, muttering and dozing, visioning
fevered fancies and praying that the last day come quickly, I ebbed down into
the darkness of sleep.
***
Consciousness came back to me in solitary, with the quartet of torturers
about me.
Blasphemous and heretical Warden of San Quentin whose feet have fast
hold of hell, I gibed, after I had drunk deep of the water they held to my lips.
Let the jailers and the trusties triumph. Their time is short, and for them
there is no time after time.
Hes out of his head, Warden Atherton affirmed.
Hes putting it over on you, was Doctor Jacksons surer judgment.
But he refuses food, Captain Jamie protested.
Huh, he could fast forty days and not hurt himself, the doctor answered.
And I have, I said, and forty nights as well. Do me the favour to tighten
the jacket and then get out of here.
The head trusty tried to insert his forefinger inside the lacing.
You couldnt get a quarter of an inch of slack with block and tackle, he
assured them.
Have you any complaint to make, Standing? the Warden asked.
Yes, was my reply. On two counts.
What are they?
First, I said, the jacket is abominably loose. Hutchins is an ass. He
could get a foot of slack if he wanted.
What is the other count? Warden Atherton asked.
That you are conceived of the devil, Warden.
Captain Jamie and Doctor Jackson tittered, and the Warden, with a snort,
led the way out of my cell.
***
Left alone, I strove to go into the dark and gain back to the wagon circle at
Nephi. I was interested to know the outcome of that doomed drifting of our
forty great wagons across a desolate and hostile land, and I was not at all
interested in what came of the mangy hermit with his rock-roweled ribs and
stinking water-skin. And I gained back, neither to Nephi nor the Nile, but to
But here I must pause in the narrative, my reader, in order to explain a few
things and make the whole matter easier to your comprehension. This is
necessary, because my time is short in which to complete my jacket-memoirs.
In a little while, in a very little while, they are going to take me out and hang
me. Did I have the full time of a thousand lifetimes, I could not complete the
last details of my jacket experiences. Wherefore I must briefen the narrative.
First of all, Bergson is right. Life cannot be explained in intellectual terms.
As Confucius said long ago: When we are so ignorant of life, can we know
death? And ignorant of life we truly are when we cannot explain it in terms
of the understanding. We know life only phenomenally, as a savage may
know a dynamo; but we know nothing of life noumenonally, nothing of the
nature of the intrinsic stuff of life.
Secondly, Marinetti is wrong when he claims that matter is the only
mystery and the only reality. I say and as you, my reader, realize, I speak with
authorityI say that matter is the only illusion. Comte called the world,
which is tantamount to matter, the great fetich, and I agree with Comte.
It is life that is the reality and the mystery. Life is vastly different from
mere chemic matter fluxing in high modes of notion. Life persists. Life is the
thread of fire that persists through all the modes of matter. I know. I am life.
I have lived ten thousand generations. I have lived millions of years. I have
possessed many bodies. I, the possessor of these many bodies, have persisted.
I am life. I am the unquenched spark ever flashing and astonishing the face of
time, ever working my will and wreaking my passion on the cloddy aggregates
of matter, called bodies, which I have transiently inhabited.
For look you. This finger of mine, so quick with sensation, so subtle to
feel, so delicate in its multifarious dexterities, so firm and strong to crook and
bend or stiffen by means of cunning leveragesthis finger is not I. Cut it off.
I live. The body is mutilated. I am not mutilated. The spirit that is I is whole.
Very well. Cut off all my fingers. I am I. The spirit is entire. Cut off both
hands. Cut off both arms at the shoulder-sockets. Cut off both legs at the hipsockets.
And I, the unconquerable and indestructible I, survive. Am I any the
less for these mutilations, for these subtractions of the flesh? Certainly not.
Clip my hair. Shave from me with sharp razors my lips, my nose, my ears
ay, and tear out the eyes of me by the roots; and there, mewed in that
featureless skull that is attached to a hacked and mangled torso, there in that
cell of the chemic flesh, will still be I, unmutilated, undiminished.
Oh, the heart still beats. Very well. Cut out the heart, or, better, fling the
flesh-remnant into a machine of a thousand blades and make mincemeat of it
and I, I, dont you understand, all the spirit and the mystery and the vital fire
and life of me, am off and away. I have not perished. Only the body has
perished, and the body is not I.
I believe Colonel de Rochas was correct when he asserted that under the
compulsion of his will he sent the girl Josephine, while she was in hypnotic
trance, back through the eighteen years she had lived, back through the silence
and the dark ere she had been born, back to the light of a previous living when
she was a bedridden old man, the ex-artilleryman, Jean-Claude Bourdon. And
I believe that Colonel de Rochas did truly hypnotize this resurrected shade of
the old man and, by compulsion of will, send him back through the seventy
years of his life, back into the dark and through the dark into the light of day
when he had been the wicked old woman, Philomène Carteron.
Already, have I not shown you, my reader, that in previous times,
inhabiting various cloddy aggregates of matter, I have been Count Guillaume
de Sainte-Maure, a mangy and nameless hermit of Egypt, and the boy Jesse,
whose father was captain of forty wagons in the great westward emigration.
And, also, am I not now, as I write these lines, Darrell Sanding, under sentence
of death in Folsom Prison and one time professor of agronomy in the College
of Agriculture of the University of California?
Matter is the great illusion. That is, matter manifests itself in form, and
form is apparitional. Where, now, are the crumbling rock-cliffs of old Egypt
where once I laired me like a wild beast while I dreamed of the City of God?
Where, now, is the body of Guillaume de Sainte-Maure that was thrust through
on the moonlit grass so long ago by the flame-headed Guy de Villehardouin?
Where, now, are the forty great wagons in the circle at Nephi, and all the men
and women and children and lean cattle that sheltered inside that circle? All
such things no longer are, for they were forms, manifestations of fluxing
matter ere they melted into the flux again. They have passed and are not.
And now my argument becomes plain. The spirit is the reality that
endures. I am spirit, and I endure. I, Darrell Standing, the tenant of many
fleshly tenements, shall write a few more lines of these memoirs and then pass
on my way. The form of me that is my body will fall apart when it has been
sufficiently hanged by the neck, and of it naught will remain in all the world of
matter. In the world of spirit the memory of it will remain. Matter has no
memory, because its forms are evanescent, and what is engraved on its forms
perishes with the forms.
One word more ere I return to my narrative. In all my journeys through
the dark into other lives that have been mine I have never been able to guide
any journey to a particular destination. Thus many new experiences of old
lives were mine before ever I chanced to return to the boy Jesse at Nephi.
Possibly, all told, I have lived over Jesses experiences a score of times,
sometimes taking up his career when he was quite small in the Arkansas
settlements, and at least a dozen times carrying on past the point where I left
him at Nephi. It were a waste of time to detail the whole of it; and so, without
prejudice to the verity of my account, I shall skip much that is vague and
tortuous and repetitional, and give the facts as I have assembled them out of
the various times, in whole and part, as I relived them.
CHAPTER XIII
Long before daylight the camp at Nephi was astir. The cattle were driven
out to water and pasture. While the men unchained the wheels and drew the
wagons apart and clear for yoking in, the women cooked forty breakfasts over
forty fires. The children, in the chill of dawn, clustered about the fires, sharing
places, here and there, with the last relief of the night-watch waiting sleepily
for coffee.
It requires time to get a large train such as ours under way, for its speed is
the speed of the slowest. So the sun was an hour high and the day was already
uncomfortably hot when we rolled out of Nephi and on into the sandy barrens.
No inhabitant of the place saw us off. All chose to remain indoors, thus
making our departure as ominous as they had made our arrival the night
before.
Again it was long hours of parching heat and biting dust, sage-brush and
sand, and a land accursed. No dwellings of men, neither cattle nor fences, nor
any sign of human kind, did we encounter all that day; and at night we made
our wagon-circle beside an empty stream, in the damp sand of which we dug
many holes that filled slowly with water seepage.
Our subsequent journey is always a broken experience to me. We made
camp so many times, always with the wagons drawn in circle, that to my child
mind a weary long time passed after Nephi. But always, strong upon all of us,
was that sense of drifting to an impending and certain doom.
We averaged about fifteen miles a day. I know, for my father had said it
was sixty miles to Fillmore, the next Mormon settlement, and we made three
camps on the way. This meant four days of travel. From Nephi to the last
camp of which I have any memory we must have taken two weeks or a little
less.
At Fillmore the inhabitants were hostile, as all had been since Salt Lake.
They laughed at us when we tried to buy food, and were not above taunting us
with being Missourians.
When we entered the place, hitched before the largest house of the dozen
houses that composed the settlement were two saddle-horses, dusty, streaked
with sweat, and drooping. The old man I have mentioned, the one with long,
sunburnt hair and buckskin shirt and who seemed a sort of aide or lieutenant to
father, rode close to our wagon and indicated the jaded saddle-animals with a
cock of his head.
Not sparin horseflesh, Captain, he muttered in a low voice. An what
in the name of Sam Hill are they hard-riding for if it aint for us?
But my father had already noted the condition of the two animals, and my
eager eyes had seen him. And I had seen his eyes flash, his lips tighten, and
haggard lines form for a moment on his dusty face. That was all. But I put
two and two together, and knew that the two tired saddle-horses were just one
more added touch of ominousness to the situation.
I guess theyre keeping an eye on us, Laban, was my fathers sole
comment.
It was at Fillmore that I saw a man that I was to see again. He was a tall,
broad-shouldered man, well on in middle age, with all the evidence of good
health and immense strengthstrength not alone of body but of will. Unlike
most men I was accustomed to about me, he was smooth-shaven. Several
days growth of beard showed that he was already well-grayed. His mouth
was unusually wide, with thin lips tightly compressed as if he had lost many of
his front teeth. His nose was large, square, and thick. So was his face square,
wide between the cheekbones, underhung with massive jaws, and topped with
a broad, intelligent forehead. And the eyes, rather small, a little more than the
width of an eye apart, were the bluest blue I had ever seen.
It was at the flour-mill at Fillmore that I first saw this man. Father, with
several of our company, had gone there to try to buy flour, and I, disobeying
my mother in my curiosity to see more of our enemies, had tagged along
unperceived. This man was one of four or five who stood in a group with the
miller during the interview.
You seen that smooth-faced old cuss? Laban said to father, after we had
got outside and were returning to camp.
Father nodded.
Well, thats Lee, Laban continued. I seenm in Salt Lake. Hes a
regular son-of-a-gun. Got nineteen wives and fifty children, they all say. An
hes rank crazy on religion. Now, whats he followin us up for through this
God-forsaken country?
Our weary, doomed drifting went on. The little settlements, wherever
water and soil permitted, were from twenty to fifty miles apart. Between
stretched the barrenness of sand and alkali and drought. And at every
settlement our peaceful attempts to buy food were vain. They denied us
harshly, and wanted to know who of us had sold them food when we drove
them from Missouri. It was useless on our part to tell them we were from
Arkansas. From Arkansas we truly were, but they insisted on our being
Missourians.
At Beaver, five days journey south from Fillmore, we saw Lee again. And
again we saw hard-ridden horses tethered before the houses. But we did not
see Lee at Parowan.
Cedar City was the last settlement. Laban, who had ridden on ahead, came
back and reported to father. His first news was significant.
I seen that Lee skedaddling out as I rid in, Captain. An theres more
men-folk an horses in Cedar City than the size of the place d warrant.
But we had no trouble at the settlement. Beyond refusing to sell us food,
they left us to ourselves. The women and children stayed in the houses, and
though some of the men appeared in sight they did not, as on former
occasions, enter our camp and taunt us.
It was at Cedar City that the Wainwright baby died. I remember Mrs.
Wainwright weeping and pleading with Laban to try to get some cows milk.
It may save the babys life, she said. And theyve got cows milk. I
saw fresh cows with my own eyes. Go on, please, Laban. It wont hurt you to
try. They can only refuse. But they wont. Tell them its for a baby, a wee
little baby. Mormon women have mothers hearts. They couldnt refuse a cup
of milk for a wee little baby.
And Laban tried. But, as he told father afterward, he did not get to see any
Mormon women. He saw only the Mormon men, who turned him away.
This was the last Mormon outpost. Beyond lay the vast desert, with, on the
other side of it, the dream land, ay, the myth land, of California. As our
wagons rolled out of the place in the early morning I, sitting beside my father
on the drivers seat, saw Laban give expression to his feelings. We had gone
perhaps half a mile, and were topping a low rise that would sink Cedar City
from view, when Laban turned his horse around, halted it, and stood up in the
stirrups. Where he had halted was a new-made grave, and I knew it for the
Wainwright babysnot the first of our graves since we had crossed the
Wasatch mountains.
He was a weird figure of a man. Aged and lean, long-faced, hollowchecked,
with matted, sunburnt hair that fell below the shoulders of his
buckskin shirt, his face was distorted with hatred and helpless rage. Holding
his long rifle in his bridle-hand, he shook his free fist at Cedar City.
Gods curse on all of you! he cried out. On your children, and on your
babes unborn. May drought destroy your crops. May you eat sand seasoned
with the venom of rattlesnakes. May the sweet water of your springs turn to
bitter alkali. May . . .
Here his words became indistinct as our wagons rattled on; but his heaving
shoulders and brandishing fist attested that he had only begun to lay the curse.
That he expressed the general feeling in our train was evidenced by the many
women who leaned from the wagons, thrusting out gaunt forearms and
shaking bony, labour-malformed fists at the last of Mormondom. A man, who
walked in the sand and goaded the oxen of the wagon behind ours, laughed
and waved his goad. It was unusual, that laugh, for there had been no laughter
in our train for many days.
Give m hell, Laban, he encouraged. Thems my sentiments.
And as our train rolled on I continued to look back at Laban, standing in
his stirrups by the babys grave. Truly he was a weird figure, with his long
hair, his moccasins, and fringed leggings. So old and weather-beaten was his
buckskin shirt that ragged filaments, here and there, showed where proud
fringes once had been. He was a man of flying tatters. I remember, at his
waist, dangled dirty tufts of hair that, far back in the journey, after a shower of
rain, were wont to show glossy black. These I knew were Indian scalps, and
the sight of them always thrilled me.
It will do him good, father commended, more to himself than to me.
Ive been looking for days for him to blow up.
I wish hed go back and take a couple of scalps, I volunteered.
My father regarded me quizzically.
Dont like the Mormons, eh, son?
I shook my head and felt myself swelling with the inarticulate hate that
possessed me.
When I grow up, I said, after a minute, Im goin gunning for them.
You, Jesse! came my mothers voice from inside the wagon. Shut your
mouth instanter. And to my father: You ought to be ashamed letting the boy
talk on like that.
Two days journey brought us to Mountain Meadows, and here, well
beyond the last settlement, for the first time we did not form the wagon-circle.
The wagons were roughly in a circle, but there were many gaps, and the
wheels were not chained. Preparations were made to stop a week. The cattle
must be rested for the real desert, though this was desert enough in all
seeming. The same low hills of sand were about us, but sparsely covered with
scrub brush. The flat was sandy, but there was some grassmore than we had
encountered in many days. Not more than a hundred feet from camp was a
weak spring that barely supplied human needs. But farther along the bottom
various other weak springs emerged from the hillsides, and it was at these that
the cattle watered.
We made camp early that day, and, because of the programme to stay a
week, there was a general overhauling of soiled clothes by the women, who
planned to start washing on the morrow. Everybody worked till nightfall.
While some of the men mended harness others repaired the frames and
ironwork of the wagons. Them was much heating and hammering of iron and
tightening of bolts and nuts. And I remember coming upon Laban, sitting
cross-legged in the shade of a wagon and sewing away till nightfall on a new
pair of moccasins. He was the only man in our train who wore moccasins and
buckskin, and I have an impression that he had not belonged to our company
when it left Arkansas. Also, he had neither wife, nor family, nor wagon of his
own. All he possessed was his horse, his rifle, the clothes he stood up in, and
a couple of blankets that were hauled in the Mason wagon.
Next morning it was that our doom fell. Two days journey beyond the last
Mormon outpost, knowing that no Indians were about and apprehending
nothing from the Indians on any count, for the first time we had not chained
our wagons in the solid circle, placed guards on the cattle, nor set a nightwatch.
My awakening was like a nightmare. It came as a sudden blast of sound. I
was only stupidly awake for the first moments and did nothing except to try to
analyze and identify the various noises that went to compose the blast that
continued without let up. I could hear near and distant explosions of rifles,
shouts and curses of men, women screaming, and children bawling. Then I
could make out the thuds and squeals of bullets that hit wood and iron in the
wheels and under-construction of the wagon. Whoever it was that was
shooting, the aim was too low. When I started to rise, my mother, evidently
just in the act of dressing, pressed me down with her hand. Father, already up
and about, at this stage erupted into the wagon.
Out of it! he shouted. Quick! To the ground!
He wasted no time. With a hook-like clutch that was almost a blow, so
swift was it, he flung me bodily out of the rear end of the wagon. I had barely
time to crawl out from under when father, mother, and the baby came down
pell-mell where I had been.
Here, Jesse! father shouted to me, and I joined him in scooping out sand
behind the shelter of a wagon-wheel. We worked bare-handed and wildly.
Mother joined in.
Go ahead and make it deeper, Jesse, father ordered,
He stood up and rushed away in the gray light, shouting commands as he
ran. (I had learned by now my surname. I was Jesse Fancher. My father was
Captain Fancher).
Lie down! I could hear him. Get behind the wagon wheels and burrow
in the sand! Family men, get the women and children out of the wagons!
Hold your fire! No more shooting! Hold your fire and be ready for the rush
when it comes! Single men, join Laban at the right, Cochrane at the left, and
me in the centre! Dont stand up! Crawl for it!
But no rush came. For a quarter of an hour the heavy and irregular firing
continued. Our damage had come in the first moments of surprise when a
number of the early-rising men were caught exposed in the light of the
campfires they were building. The Indiansfor Indians Laban declared them
to behad attacked us from the open, and were lying down and firing at us.
In the growing light father made ready for them. His position was near to
where I lay in the burrow with mother so that I heard him when he cried out:
Now! all together!
From left, right, and centre our rifles loosed in a volley. I had popped my
head up to see, and I could make out more than one stricken Indian. Their fire
immediately ceased, and I could see them scampering back on foot across the
open, dragging their dead and wounded with them.
All was work with us on the instant. While the wagons were being
dragged and chained into the circle with tongues insideI saw women and
little boys and girls flinging their strength on the wheel spokes to helpwe
took toll of our losses. First, and gravest of all, our last animal had been run
off. Next, lying about the fires they had been building, were seven of our
men. Four were dead, and three were dying. Other men, wounded, were
being cared for by the women. Little Rish Hardacre had been struck in the
arm by a heavy ball. He was no more than six, and I remember looking on
with mouth agape while his mother held him on her lap and his father set
about bandaging the wound. Little Rish had stopped crying. I could see the
tears on his cheeks while he stared wonderingly at a sliver of broken bone
sticking out of his forearm.
Granny White was found dead in the Foxwell wagon. She was a fat and
helpless old woman who never did anything but sit down all the time and
smoke a pipe. She was the mother of Abby Foxwell. And Mrs. Grant had
been killed. Her husband sat beside her body. He was very quiet. There were
no tears in his eyes. He just sat there, his rifle across his knees, and everybody
left him alone.
Under fathers directions the company was working like so many beavers.
The men dug a big rifle pit in the centre of the corral, forming a breastwork
out of the displaced sand. Into this pit the women dragged bedding, food, and
all sorts of necessaries from the wagons. All the children helped. There was
no whimpering, and little or no excitement. There was work to be done, and
all of us were folks born to work.
The big rifle pit was for the women and children. Under the wagons,
completely around the circle, a shallow trench was dug and an earthwork
thrown up. This was for the fighting men.
Laban returned from a scout. He reported that the Indians had withdrawn
the matter of half a mile, and were holding a powwow. Also he had seen them
carry six of their number off the field, three of which, he said, were deaders.
From time to time, during the morning of that first day, we observed clouds
of dust that advertised the movements of considerable bodies of mounted men.
These clouds of dust came toward us, hemming us in on all sides. But we saw
no living creature. One cloud of dirt only moved away from us. It was a large
cloud, and everybody said it was our cattle being driven off. And our forty
great wagons that had rolled over the Rockies and half across the continent
stood in a helpless circle. Without cattle they could roll no farther.
At noon Laban came in from another scout. He had seen fresh Indians
arriving from the south, showing that we were being closed in. It was at this
time that we saw a dozen white men ride out on the crest of a low hill to the
east and look down on us.
That settles it, Laban said to father. The Indians have been put up to
it.
Theyre white like us, I heard Abby Foxwell complain to mother. Why
dont they come in to us?
They aint whites, I piped up, with a wary eye for the swoop of mothers
hand. Theyre Mormons.
That night, after dark, three of our young men stole out of camp. I saw
them go. They were Will Aden, Abel Milliken, and Timothy Grant.
They are heading for Cedar City to get help, father told mother while he
was snatching a hasty bite of supper.
Mother shook her head.
Theres plenty of Mormons within calling distance of camp, she said.
If they wont help, and they havent shown any signs, then the Cedar City
ones wont either.
But there are good Mormons and bad Mormons father began.
We havent found any good ones so far, she shut him off.
Not until morning did I hear of the return of Abel Milliken and Timothy
Grant, but I was not long in learning. The whole camp was downcast by
reason of their report. The three had gone only a few miles when they were
challenged by white men. As soon as Will Aden spoke up, telling that they
were from the Fancher Company, going to Cedar City for help, he was shot
down. Milliken and Grant escaped back with the news, and the news settled
the last hope in the hearts of our company. The whites were behind the
Indians, and the doom so long apprehended was upon us.
This morning of the second day our men, going for water, were fired upon.
The spring was only a hundred feet outside our circle, but the way to it was
commanded by the Indians who now occupied the low hill to the east. It was
close range, for the hill could not have been more than fifteen rods away. But
the Indians were not good shots, evidently, for our men brought in the water
without being hit.
Beyond an occasional shot into camp the morning passed quietly. We had
settled down in the rifle pit, and, being used to rough living, were comfortable
enough. Of course it was bad for the families of those who had been killed,
and there was the taking care of the wounded. I was for ever stealing away
from mother in my insatiable curiosity to see everything that was going on,
and I managed to see pretty much of everything. Inside the corral, to the south
of the big rifle pit, the men dug a hole and buried the seven men and two
women all together. Only Mrs. Hastings, who had lost her husband and father,
made much trouble. She cried and screamed out, and it took the other women
a long time to quiet her.
On the low hill to the east the Indians kept up a tremendous powwowing
and yelling. But beyond an occasional harmless shot they did nothing.
Whats the matter with the ornery cusses? Laban impatiently wanted to
know. Cant they make up their minds what theyre goin to do, an then do
it?
It was hot in the corral that afternoon. The sun blazed down out of a
cloudless sky, and there was no wind. The men, lying with their rifles in the
trench under the wagons, were partly shaded; but the big rifle pit, in which
were over a hundred women and children, was exposed to the full power of
the sun. Here, too, were the wounded men, over whom we erected awnings of
blankets. It was crowded and stifling in the pit, and I was for ever stealing out
of it to the firing-line, and making a great to-do at carrying messages for
father.
Our grave mistake had been in not forming the wagon-circle so as to
inclose the spring. This had been due to the excitement of the first attack,
when we did not know how quickly it might be followed by a second one.
And now it was too late. At fifteen rods distance from the Indian position on
the hill we did not dare unchain our wagons. Inside the corral, south of the
graves, we constructed a latrine, and, north of the rifle pit in the centre, a
couple of men were told off by father to dig a well for water.
In the mid-afternoon of that day, which was the second day, we saw Lee
again. He was on foot, crossing diagonally over the meadow to the north-west
just out of rifle-shot from us. Father hoisted one of mothers sheets on a
couple of ox-goads lashed together. This was our white flag. But Lee took no
notice of it, continuing on his way.
Laban was for trying a long shot at him, but father stopped him, saying that
it was evident the whites had not made up their minds what they were going to
do with us, and that a shot at Lee might hurry them into making up their minds
the wrong way.
Here, Jesse, father said to me, tearing a strip from the sheet and fastening
it to an ox-goad. Take this and go out and try to talk to that man. Dont tell
him anything about whats happened to us. Just try to get him to come in and
talk with us.
As I started to obey, my chest swelling with pride in my mission, Jed
Dunham cried out that he wanted to go with me. Jed was about my own age.
Dunham, can your boy go along with Jesse? father asked Jeds father.
Twos better than one. Theyll keep each other out of mischief.
So Jed and I, two youngsters of nine, went out under the white flag to talk
with the leader of our enemies. But Lee would not talk. When he saw us
coming he started to sneak away. We never got within calling distance of him,
and after a while he must have hidden in the brush; for we never laid eyes on
him again, and we knew he couldnt have got clear away.
Jed and I beat up the brush for hundreds of yards all around. They hadnt
told us how long we were to be gone, and since the Indians did not fire on us
we kept on going. We were away over two hours, though had either of us
been alone he would have been back in a quarter of the time. But Jed was
bound to outbrave me, and I was equally bound to outbrave him.
Our foolishness was not without profit. We walked, boldly about under
our white flag, and learned how thoroughly our camp was beleaguered. To the
south of our train, not more than half a mile away, we made out a large Indian
camp. Beyond, on the meadow, we could see Indian boys riding hard on their
horses.
Then there was the Indian position on the hill to the east. We managed to
climb a low hill so as to look into this position. Jed and I spent half an hour
trying to count them, and concluded, with much guessing, that there must be at
least a couple of hundred. Also, we saw white men with them and doing a
great deal of talking.
North-east of our train, not more than four hundred yards from it, we
discovered a large camp of whites behind a low rise of ground. And beyond
we could see fifty or sixty saddle-horses grazing. And a mile or so away, to
the north, we saw a tiny cloud of dust approaching. Jed and I waited until we
saw a single man, riding fast, gallop into the camp of the whites.
When we got back into the corral the first thing that happened to me was a
smack from mother for having stayed away so long; but father praised Jed and
me when we gave our report.
Watch for an attack now maybe, Captain, Aaron Cochrane said to father.
That man the boys seen has rid in for a purpose. The whites are holding the
Indians till they get orders from higher up. Maybe that man brung the orders
one way or the other. They aint sparing horseflesh, thats one thing sure.
Half an hour after our return Laban attempted a scout under a white flag.
But he had not gone twenty feet outside the circle when the Indians opened
fire on him and sent him back on the run.
Just before sundown I was in the rifle pit holding the baby, while mother
was spreading the blankets for a bed. There were so many of us that we were
packed and jammed. So little room was there that many of the women the
night before had sat up and slept with their heads bowed on their knees. Right
alongside of me, so near that when he tossed his arms about he struck me on
the shoulder, Silas Dunlap was dying. He had been shot in the head in the first
attack, and all the second day was out of his head and raving and singing
doggerel. One of his songs, that he sang over and over, until it made mother
frantic nervous, was:
Said the first little devil to the second little devil,
Give me some tobaccy from your old tobaccy box.
Said the second little devil to the first little devil,
Stick close to your money and close to your rocks,
An youll always have tobaccy in your old tobaccy box.
I was sitting directly alongside of him, holding the baby, when the attack
burst on us. It was sundown, and I was staring with all my eyes at Silas
Dunlap who was just in the final act of dying. His wife, Sarah, had one hand
resting on his forehead. Both she and her Aunt Martha were crying softly.
And then it cameexplosions and bullets from hundreds of rifles. Clear
around from east to west, by way of the north, they had strung out in half a
circle and were pumping lead in our position. Everybody in the rifle pit
flattened down. Lots of the younger children set up a-squalling, and it kept the
women busy hushing them. Some of the women screamed at first, but not
many.
Thousands of shots must haven rained in on us in the next few minutes.
How I wanted to crawl out to the trench under the wagons where our men
were keeping up a steady but irregular fire! Each was shooting on his own
whenever he saw a man to pull trigger on. But mother suspected me, for she
made me crouch down and keep right on holding the baby.
I was just taking a look at Silas Dunlaphe was still quiveringwhen the
little Castleton baby was killed. Dorothy Castleton, herself only about ten,
was holding it, so that it was killed in her arms. She was not hurt at all. I
heard them talking about it, and they conjectured that the bullet must have
struck high on one of the wagons and been deflected down into the rifle pit. It
was just an accident, they said, and that except for such accidents we were safe
where we were.
When I looked again Silas Dunlap was dead, and I suffered distinct
disappointment in being cheated out of witnessing that particular event. I had
never been lucky enough to see a man actually die before my eyes.
Dorothy Castleton got hysterics over what had happened, and yelled and
screamed for a long time and she set Mrs. Hastings going again. Altogether
such a row was raised that father sent Watt Cummings crawling back to us to
find out what was the matter.
Well along into twilight the heavy firing ceased, although there were
scattering shots during the night. Two of our men were wounded in this
second attack, and were brought into the rifle pit. Bill Tyler was killed
instantly, and they buried him, Silas Dunlap, and the Castleton baby, in the
dark alongside of the others.
All during the night men relieved one another at sinking the well deeper;
but the only sign of water they got was damp sand. Some of the men fetched a
few pails of water from the spring, but were fired upon, and they gave it up
when Jeremy Hopkins had his left hand shot off at the wrist.
Next morning, the third day, it was hotter and dryer than ever. We awoke
thirsty, and there was no cooking. So dry were our mouths that we could not
eat. I tried a piece of stale bread mother gave me, but had to give it up. The
firing rose and fell. Sometimes there were hundreds shooting into the camp.
At other times came lulls in which not a shot was fired. Father was
continually cautioning our men not to waste shots because we were running
short of ammunition.
And all the time the men went on digging the well. It was so deep that
they were hoisting the sand up in buckets. The men who hoisted were
exposed, and one of them was wounded in the shoulder. He was Peter
Bromley, who drove oxen for the Bloodgood wagon, and he was engaged to
marry Jane Bloodgood. She jumped out of the rifle pit and ran right to him
while the bullets were flying and led him back into shelter. About midday the
well caved in, and there was lively work digging out the couple who were
buried in the sand. Amos Wentworth did not come to for an hour. After that
they timbered the well with bottom boards from the wagons and wagon
tongues, and the digging went on. But all they could get, and they were
twenty feet down, was damp sand. The water would not seep.
By this time the conditions in the rifle pit were terrible. The children were
complaining for water, and the babies, hoarse from much crying, went on
crying. Robert Carr, another wounded man, lay about ten feet from mother
and me. He was out of his head, and kept thrashing his arms about and calling
for water. And some of the women were almost as bad, and kept raving
against the Mormons and Indians. Some of the women prayed a great deal,
and the three grown Demdike sisters, with their mother, sang gospel hymns.
Other women got damp sand that was hoisted out of the bottom of the well,
and packed it against the bare bodies of the babies to try to cool and soothe
them.
The two Fairfax brothers couldnt stand it any longer, and, with pails in
their hands, crawled out under a wagon and made a dash for the spring. Giles
never got half way, when he went down. Roger made it there and back
without being hit. He brought two pails part-full, for some splashed out when
he ran. Giles crawled back, and when they helped him into the rifle pit he was
bleeding at the mouth and coughing.
Two part-pails of water could not go far among over a hundred of us, not
counting the, men. Only the babies, and the very little children, and the
wounded men, got any. I did not get a sip, although mother dipped a bit of
cloth into the several spoonfuls she got for the baby and wiped my mouth out.
She did not even do that for herself, for she left me the bit of damp rag to
chew.
The situation grew unspeakably worse in the afternoon. The quiet sun
blazed down through the clear windless air and made a furnace of our hole in
the sand. And all about us were the explosions of rifles and yells of the
Indians. Only once in a while did father permit a single shot from the trench,
and at that only by our best marksmen, such as Laban and Timothy Grant. But
a steady stream of lead poured into our position all the time. There were no
more disastrous ricochets, however; and our men in the trench, no longer
firing, lay low and escaped damage. Only four were wounded, and only one
of them very badly.
Father came in from the trench during a lull in the firing. He sat for a few
minutes alongside mother and me without speaking. He seemed to be
listening to all the moaning and crying for water that was going up. Once he
climbed out of the rifle pit and went over to investigate the well. He brought
back only damp sand, which he plastered thick on the chest and shoulders of
Robert Carr. Then he went to where Jed Dunham and his mother were, and
sent for Jeds father to come in from the trench. So closely packed were we
that when anybody moved about inside the rifle pit he had to crawl carefully
over the bodies of those lying down.
After a time father came crawling back to us.
Jesse, he asked, are you afraid of the Indians?
I shook my head emphatically, guessing that I was to be seat on another
proud mission.
Are you afraid of the damned Mormons?
Not of any damned Mormon, I answered, taking advantage of the
opportunity to curse our enemies without fear of the avenging back of
mothers hand.
I noted the little smile that curled his tired lips for the moment when he
heard my reply.
Well, then, Jesse, he said, will you go with Jed to the spring for water?
I was all eagerness.
Were going to dress the two of you up as girls, he continued, so that
maybe they wont fire on you.
I insisted on going as I was, as a male human that wore pants; but I
surrendered quickly enough when father suggested that he would find some
other boy to dress up and go along with Jed.
A chest was fetched in from the Chattox wagon. The Chattox girls were
twins and of about a size with Jed and me. Several of the women got around
to help. They were the Sunday dresses of the Chattox twins, and had come in
the chest all the way from Arkansas.
In her anxiety mother left the baby with Sarah Dunlap, and came as far as
the trench with me. There, under a wagon and behind the little breastwork of
sand, Jed and I received our last instructions. Then we crawled out and stood
up in the open. We were dressed precisely alikewhite stockings, white
dresses, with big blue sashes, and white sunbonnets. Jeds right and my left
hand were clasped together. In each of our free hands we carried two small
pails.
Take it easy, father cautioned, as we began our advance. Go slow.
Walk like girls.
Not a shot was fired. We made the spring safely, filled our pails, and lay
down and took a good drink ourselves. With a full pail in each hand we made
the return trip. And still not a shot was fired.
I cannot remember how many journeys we madefully fifteen or twenty.
We walked slowly, always going out with hands clasped, always coming back
slowly with four pails of water. It was astonishing how thirsty we were. We
lay down several times and took long drinks.
But it was too much for our enemies. I cannot imagine that the Indians
would have withheld their fire for so long, girls or no girls, had they not
obeyed instructions from the whites who were with them. At any rate Jed and
I were just starting on another trip when a rifle went off from the Indian hill,
and then another.
Come back! mother cried out.
I looked at Jed, and found him looking at me. I knew he was stubborn and
had made up his mind to be the last one in. So I started to advance, and at the
same instant he started.
You!Jesse! cried my mother. And there was more than a smacking in
the way she said it.
Jed offered to clasp hands, but I shook my head.
Run for it, I said.
And while we hotfooted it across the sand it seemed all the rifles on Indian
hill were turned loose on us. I got to the spring a little ahead, so that Jed had
to wait for me to fill my pails.
Now run for it, he told me; and from the leisurely way he went about
filling his own pails I knew he was determined to be in last.
So I crouched down, and, while I waited, watched the puffs of dust raised
by the bullets. We began the return side by side and running.
Not so fast, I cautioned him, or youll spill half the water.
That stung him, and he slacked back perceptibly. Midway I stumbled and
fell headlong. A bullet, striking directly in front of me, filled my eyes with
sand. For the moment I thought I was shot.
Done it a-purpose, Jed sneered as I scrambled to my feet. He had stood
and waited for me.
I caught his idea. He thought I had fallen deliberately in order to spill my
water and go back for more. This rivalry between us was a serious matterso
serious, indeed, that I immediately took advantage of what he had imputed and
raced back to the spring. And Jed Dunham, scornful of the bullets that were
puffing dust all around him, stood there upright in the open and waited for me.
We came in side by side, with honours even in our boys foolhardiness. But
when we delivered the water Jed had only one pailful. A bullet had gone
through the other pail close to the bottom.
Mother took it out on me with a lecture on disobedience. She must have
known, after what I had done, that father wouldnt let her smack me; for, while
she was lecturing, father winked at me across her shoulder. It was the first
time he had ever winked at me.
Back in the rifle pit Jed and I were heroes. The women wept and blessed
us, and kissed us and mauled us. And I confess I was proud of the
demonstration, although, like Jed, I let on that I did not like all such makingover.
But Jeremy Hopkins, a great bandage about the stump of his left wrist,
said we were the stuff white men were made out ofmen like Daniel Boone,
like Kit Carson, and Davy Crockett. I was prouder of that than all the rest.
The remainder of the day I seem to have been bothered principally with the
pain of my right eye caused by the sand that had been kicked into it by the
bullet. The eye was bloodshot, mother said; and to me it seemed to hurt just as
much whether I kept it open or closed. I tried both ways.
Things were quieter in the rifle pit, because all had had water, though
strong upon us was the problem of how the next water was to be procured.
Coupled with this was the known fact that our ammunition was almost
exhausted. A thorough overhauling of the wagons by father had resulted in
finding five pounds of powder. A very little more was in the flasks of the men.
I remembered the sundown attack of the night before, and anticipated it
this time by crawling to the trench before sunset. I crept into a place alongside
of Laban. He was busy chewing tobacco, and did not notice me. For some
time I watched him, fearing that when he discovered me he would order me
back. He would take a long squint out between the wagon wheels, chew
steadily a while, and then spit carefully into a little depression he had made in
the sand.
Hows tricks? I asked finally. It was the way he always addressed me.
Fine, he answered. Most remarkable fine, Jesse, now that I can chew
again. My mouth was that dry that I couldnt chew from sun-up to when you
brung the water.
Here a man showed head and shoulders over the top of the little hill to the
north-east occupied by the whites. Laban sighted his rifle on him for a long
minute. Then he shook his head.
Four hundred yards. Nope, I dont risk it. I might get him, and then
again I mightnt, an your dad is mighty anxious about the powder.
What do you think our chances are? I asked, man-fashion, for, after my
water exploit, I was feeling very much the man.
Laban seemed to consider carefully for a space ere he replied.
Jesse, I dont mind tellin you were in a damned bad hole. But well get
out, oh, well get out, you can bet your bottom dollar.
Some of us aint going to get out, I objected.
Who, for instance? he queried.
Why, Bill Tyler, and Mrs. Grant, and Silas Dunlap, and all the rest.
Aw, shucks, Jessetheyre in the ground already. Dont you know
everybody has to bury their dead as they traipse along? Theyve ben doin it
for thousands of years I reckon, and theres just as many alive as ever they
was. You see, Jesse, birth and death go hand-in-hand. And theyre born as
fast as they diefaster, I reckon, because theyve increased and multiplied.
Now you, you might a-got killed this afternoon packin water. But youre
here, aint you, a-gassin with me an likely to grow up an be the father of a
fine large family in Californy. They say everything grows large in Californy.
This cheerful way of looking at the matter encouraged me to dare sudden
expression of a long covetousness.
Say, Laban, supposin you got killed here
Who?me? he cried.
Im just sayin supposin, I explained.
Oh, all right then. Go on. Supposin I am killed?
Will you give me your scalps?
Your mall smack you if she catches you a-wearin them, he temporized.
I dont have to wear them when shes around. Now if you got killed,
Laban, somebodyd have to get them scalps. Why not me?
Why not? he repeated. Thats correct, and why not you? All right,
Jesse. I like you, and your pa. The minute Im killed the scalps is yourn, and
the scalpin knife, too. And theres Timothy Grant for witness. Did you hear,
Timothy?
Timothy said he had heard, and I lay there speechless in the stifling trench,
too overcome by my greatness of good fortune to be able to utter a word of
gratitude.
I was rewarded for my foresight in going to the trench. Another general
attack was made at sundown, and thousands of shots were fired into us.
Nobody on our side was scratched. On the other hand, although we fired
barely thirty shots, I saw Laban and Timothy Grant each get an Indian. Laban
told me that from the first only the Indians had done the shooting. He was
certain that no white had fired a shot. All of which sorely puzzled him. The
whites neither offered us aid nor attacked us, and all the while were on visiting
terms with the Indians who were attacking us.
Next morning found the thirst harsh upon us. I was out at the first hint of
light. There had been a heavy dew, and men, women, and children were
lapping it up with their tongues from off the wagon-tongues, brake-blocks, and
wheel-tyres.
There was talk that Laban had returned from a scout just before daylight;
that he had crept close to the position of the whites; that they were already up;
and that in the light of their campfires he had seen them praying in a large
circle. Also he reported from what few words he caught that they were
praying about us and what was to be done with us.
May God send them the light then, I heard one of the Demdike sisters
say to Abby Foxwell.
And soon, said Abby Foxwell, for I dont know what well do a whole
day without water, and our powder is about gone.
Nothing happened all morning. Not a shot was fired. Only the sun blazed
down through the quiet air. Our thirst grew, and soon the babies were crying
and the younger children whimpering and complaining. At noon Will
Hamilton took two large pails and started for the spring. But before he could
crawl under the wagon Ann Demdike ran and got her arms around him and
tried to hold him back. But he talked to her, and kissed her, and went on. Not
a shot was fired, nor was any fired all the time he continued to go out and
bring back water.
Praise God! cried old Mrs. Demdike. It is a sign. They have relented.
This was the opinion of many of the women.
About two oclock, after we had eaten and felt better, a white man
appeared, carrying a white flag. Will Hamilton went out and talked to him,
came back and talked with father and the rest of our men, and then went out to
the stranger again. Farther back we could see a man standing and looking on,
whom we recognized as Lee.
With us all was excitement. The women were so relieved that they were
crying and kissing one another, and old Mrs. Demdike and others were
hallelujahing and blessing God. The proposal, which our men had accepted,
was that we would put ourselves under the flag of truce and be protected from
the Indians.
We had to do it, I heard father tell mother.
He was sitting, droop-shouldered and dejected, on a wagon-tongue.
But what if they intend treachery? mother asked.
He shrugged his shoulders.
Weve got to take the chance that they dont, he said. Our ammunition
is gone.
Some of our men were unchaining one of our wagons and rolling it out of
the way. I ran across to see what was happening. In came Lee himself,
followed by two empty wagons, each driven by one man. Everybody crowded
around Lee. He said that they had had a hard time with the Indians keeping
them off of us, and that Major Higbee, with fifty of the Mormon militia, were
ready to take us under their charge.
But what made father and Laban and some of the men suspicious was
when Lee said that we must put all our rifles into one of the wagons so as not
to arouse the animosity of the Indians. By so doing we would appear to be the
prisoners of the Mormon militia.
Father straightened up and was about to refuse when he glanced to Laban,
who replied in an undertone. They aint no more use in our hands than in the
wagon, seein as the powders gone.
Two of our wounded men who could not walk were put into the wagons,
and along with them were put all the little children. Lee seemed to be picking
them out over eight and under eight. Jed and I were large for our age, and we
were nine besides; so Lee put us with the older bunch and told us we were to
march with the women on foot.
When he took our baby from mother and put it in a wagon she started to
object. Then I saw her lips draw tightly together, and she gave in. She was a
gray-eyed, strong-featured, middle-aged woman, large-boned and fairly stout.
But the long journey and hardship had told on her, so that she was hollowcheeked
and gaunt, and like all the women in the company she wore an
expression of brooding, never-ceasing anxiety.
It was when Lee described the order of march that Laban came to me. Lee
said that the women and the children that walked should go first in the line,
following behind the two wagons. Then the men, in single file, should follow
the women. When Laban heard this he came to me, untied the scalps from his
belt, and fastened them to my waist.
But you aint killed yet, I protested.
You bet your life I aint, he answered lightly.
Ive just reformed, thats all. This scalp-wearin is a vain thing and
heathen. He stopped a moment as if he had forgotten something, then, as he
turned abruptly on his heel to regain the men of our company, he called over
his shoulder, Well, so long, Jesse.
I was wondering why he should say good-bye when a white man came
riding into the corral. He said Major Higbee had sent him to tell us to hurry
up, because the Indians might attack at any moment.
So the march began, the two wagons first. Lee kept along with the women
and walking children. Behind us, after waiting until we were a couple of
hundred feet in advance, came our men. As we emerged from the corral we
could see the militia just a short distance away. They were leaning on their
rifles and standing in a long line about six feet apart. As we passed them I
could not help noticing how solemn-faced they were. They looked like men at
a funeral. So did the women notice this, and some of them began to cry.
I walked right behind my mother. I had chosen this position so that she
would not catch-sight of my scalps. Behind me came the three Demdike
sisters, two of them helping the old mother. I could hear Lee calling all the
time to the men who drove the wagons not to go so fast. A man that one of the
Demdike girls said must be Major Higbee sat on a horse watching us go by.
Not an Indian was in sight.
By the time our men were just abreast of the militiaI had just looked
back to try to see where Jed Dunham wasthe thing happened. I heard Major
Higbee cry out in a loud voice, Do your duty! All the rifles of the militia
seemed to go off at once, and our men were falling over and sinking down.
All the Demdike women went down at one time. I turned quickly to see how
mother was, and she was down. Right alongside of us, out of the bushes,
came hundreds of Indians, all shooting. I saw the two Dunlap sisters start on
the run across the sand, and took after them, for whites and Indians were all
killing us. And as I ran I saw the driver of one of the wagons shooting the two
wounded men. The horses of the other wagon were plunging and rearing and
their driver was trying to hold them.
***
It was when the little boy that was I was running after the Dunlap girls that
blackness came upon him. All memory there ceases, for Jesse Fancher there
ceased, and, as Jesse Fancher, ceased for ever. The form that was Jesse
Fancher, the body that was his, being matter and apparitional, like an
apparition passed and was not. But the imperishable spirit did not cease. It
continued to exist, and, in its next incarnation, became the residing spirit of
that apparitional body known as Darrell Standings which soon is to be taken
out and hanged and sent into the nothingness whither all apparitions go.
There is a lifer here in Folsom, Matthew Davies, of old pioneer stock, who
is trusty of the scaffold and execution chamber. He is an old man, and his
folks crossed the plains in the early days. I have talked with him, and he has
verified the massacre in which Jesse Fancher was killed. When this old lifer
was a child there was much talk in his family of the Mountain Meadows
Massacre. The children in the wagons, he said, were saved, because they were
too young to tell tales.
All of which I submit. Never, in my life of Darrell Standing, have I read a
line or heard a word spoken of the Fancher Company that perished at
Mountain Meadows. Yet, in the jacket in San Quentin prison, all this
knowledge came to me. I could not create this knowledge out of nothing, any
more than could I create dynamite out of nothing. This knowledge and these
facts I have related have but one explanation. They are out of the spirit
content of methe spirit that, unlike matter, does not perish.
In closing this chapter I must state that Matthew Davies also told me that
some years after the massacre Lee was taken by United States Government
officials to the Mountain Meadows and there executed on the site of our old
corral.
CHAPTER XIV
When, at the conclusion of my first ten days term in the jacket, I was
brought back to consciousness by Doctor Jacksons thumb pressing open an
eyelid, I opened both eyes and smiled up into the face of Warden Atherton.
Too cussed to live and too mean to die, was his comment.
The ten days are up, Warden, I whispered.
Well, were going to unlace you, he growled.
It is not that, I said. You observed my smile. You remember we had a
little wager. Dont bother to unlace me first. Just give the Bull Durham and
cigarette papers to Morrell and Oppenheimer. And for full measure heres
another smile.
Oh, I know your kind, Standing, the Warden lectured. But it wont get
you anything. If I dont break you, youll break all strait-jacket records.
Hes broken them already, Doctor Jackson said. Who ever heard of a
man smiling after ten days of it?
Well and bluff, Warden Atherton answered. Unlace him, Hutchins.
Why such haste? I queried, in a whisper, of course, for so low had life
ebbed in me that it required all the little strength I possessed and all the will of
me to be able to whisper even. Why such haste? I dont have to catch a
train, and I am so confounded comfortable as I am that I prefer not to be
disturbed.
But unlace me they did, rolling me out of the fetid jacket and upon the
floor, an inert, helpless thing.
No wonder he was comfortable, said Captain Jamie. He didnt feel
anything. Hes paralysed.
Paralysed your grandmother, sneered the Warden. Get him up on his
feat and youll see him stand.
Hutchins and the doctor dragged me to my feet.
Now let go! the Warden commanded.
Not all at once could life return into the body that had been practically
dead for ten days, and as a result, with no power as yet over my flesh, I gave at
the knees, crumpled, pitched sidewise, and gashed my forehead against the
wall.
You see, said Captain Jamie.
Good acting, retorted the Warden. That mans got nerve to do
anything.
Youre right, Warden, I whispered from the floor. I did it on purpose.
It was a stage fall. Lift me up again, and Ill repeat it. I promise you lots of
fun.
I shall not dwell upon the agony of returning circulation. It was to become
an old story with me, and it bore its share in cutting the lines in my face that I
shall carry to the scaffold.
When they finally left me I lay for the rest of the day stupid and halfcomatose.
There is such a thing as anæsthesia of pain, engendered by pain too
exquisite to be borne. And I have known that anæsthesia.
By evening I was able to crawl about my cell, but not yet could I stand up.
I drank much water, and cleansed myself as well as I could; but not until next
day could I bring myself to eat, and then only by deliberate force of my will.
The program me, as given me by Warden Atherton, was that I was to rest
up and recuperate for a few days, and then, if in the meantime I had not
confessed to the hiding-place of the dynamite, I should be given another ten
days in the jacket.
Sorry to cause you so much trouble, Warden, I had said in reply. Its a
pity I dont die in the jacket and so put you out of your misery.
At this time I doubt that I weighed an ounce over ninety pounds. Yet, two
years before, when the doors of San Quentin first closed on me, I had weighed
one hundred and sixty-five pounds. It seems incredible that there was another
ounce I could part with and still live. Yet in the months that followed, ounce
by ounce I was reduced until I know I must have weighed nearer eighty than
ninety pounds. I do know, after I managed my escape from solitary and struck
the guard Thurston on the nose, that before they took me to San Rafael for
trial, while I was being cleaned and shaved I weighed eighty-nine pounds.
There are those who wonder how men grow hard. Warden Atherton was a
hard man. He made me hard, and my very hardness reacted on him and made
him harder. And yet he never succeeded in killing me. It required the state
law of California, a hanging judge, and an unpardoning governor to send me
to the scaffold for striking a prison guard with my fist. I shall always contend
that that guard had a nose most easily bleedable. I was a bat-eyed, tottery
skeleton at the time. I sometimes wonder if his nose really did bleed. Of
course he swore it did, on the witness stand. But I have known prison guards
take oath to worse perjuries than that.
Ed Morrell was eager to know if I had succeeded with the experiment; but
when he attempted to talk with me he was shut up by Smith, the guard who
happened to be on duty in solitary.
Thats all right, Ed, I rapped to him. You and Jake keep quiet, and Ill
tell you about it. Smith cant prevent you from listening, and he cant prevent
me from talking. They have done their worst, and I am still here.
Cut that out, Standing! Smith bellowed at me from the corridor on which
all the cells opened.
Smith was a peculiarly saturnine individual, by far the most cruel and
vindictive of our guards. We used to canvass whether his wife bullied him or
whether he had chronic indigestion.
I continued rapping with my knuckles, and he came to the wicket to glare
in at me.
I told you to out that out, he snarled.
Sorry, I said suavely. But I have a sort of premonition that I shall go
right on rapping. Anderexcuse me for asking a personal questionwhat
are you going to do about it?
Ill he began explosively, proving, by his inability to conclude the
remark, that he thought in henids.
Yes? I encouraged. Just what, pray?
Ill have the Warden here, he said lamely.
Do, please. A most charming gentleman, to be sure. A shining example
of the refining influences that are creeping into our prisons. Bring him to me
at once. I wish to report you to him.
Me?
Yes, just precisely you, I continued. You persist, in a rude and boorish
manner, in interrupting my conversation with the other guests in this hostelry.
And Warden Atherton came. The door was unlocked, and he blustered into
my cell. But oh, I was so safe! He had done his worst. I was beyond his
power.
Ill shut off your grub, he threatened.
As you please, I answered. Im used to it. I havent eaten for ten days,
and, do you know, trying to begin to eat again is a confounded nuisance.
Oh, ho, youre threatening me, are you? A hunger strike, eh?
Pardon me, I said, my voice sulky with politeness. The proposition was
yours, not mine. Do try and be logical on occasion. I trust you will believe
me when I tell you that your illogic is far more painful for me to endure than
all your tortures.
Are you going to stop your knuckle-talking? he demanded.
No; forgive me for vexing youfor I feel so strong a compulsion to talk
with my knuckles that
For two cents Ill put you back in the jacket, he broke in.
Do, please. I dote on the jacket. I am the jacket baby. I get fat in the
jacket. Look at that arm. I pulled up my sleeve and showed a biceps so
attenuated that when I flexed it it had the appearance of a string. A real
blacksmiths biceps, eh, Warden? Cast your eyes on my swelling chest.
Sandow had better look out for his laurels. And my abdomenwhy, man, I
am growing so stout that my case will be a scandal of prison overfeeding.
Watch out, Warden, or youll have the taxpayers after you.
Are you going to stop knuckle-talk? he roared.
No, thanking you for your kind solicitude. On mature deliberation I have
decided that I shall keep on knuckle-talking.
He stared at me speechlessly for a moment, and then, out of sheer
impotency, turned to go.
One question, please.
What is it? he demanded over his shoulder.
What are you going to do about it?
From the choleric exhibition he gave there and then it has been an
unceasing wonder with me to this day that he has not long since died of
apoplexy.
Hour by hour, after the wardens discomfited departure, I rapped on and on
the tale of my adventures. Not until that night, when Pie-Face Jones came on
duty and proceeded to steal his customary naps, were Morrell and
Oppenheimer able to do any talking.
Pipe dreams, Oppenheimer rapped his verdict.
Yes, was my thought; our experiences are the stuff of our dreams.
When I was a night messenger I hit the hop once, Oppenheimer
continued. And I want to tell you you havent anything on me when it came
to seeing things. I guess that is what all the novel-writers dohit the hop so
as to throw their imagination into the high gear.
But Ed Morrell, who had travelled the same road as I, although with
different results, believed my tale. He said that when his body died in the
jacket, and he himself went forth from prison, he was never anybody but Ed
Morrell. He never experienced previous existences. When his spirit wandered
free, it wandered always in the present. As he told us, just as he was able to
leave his body and gaze upon it lying in the jacket on the cell floor, so could
he leave the prison, and, in the present, revisit San Francisco and see what was
occurring. In this manner he had visited his mother twice, both times finding
her asleep. In this spirit-roving he said he had no power over material things.
He could not open or close a door, move any object, make a noise, nor
manifest his presence. On the other hand, material things had no power over
him. Walls and doors were not obstacles. The entity, or the real thing that was
he, was thought, spirit.
The grocery store on the corner, half a block from where mother lived,
changed hands, he told us. I knew it by the different sign over the place. I
had to wait six months after that before I could write my first letter, but when I
did I asked mother about it. And she said yes, it had changed.
Did you read that grocery sign? Jake Oppenheimer asked.
Sure thing I did, was Morrells response. Or how could I have known
it?
All right, rapped Oppenheimer the unbelieving. You can prove it easy.
Some time, when they shift some decent guards on us that will give us a peep
at a newspaper, you get yourself thrown into the jacket, climb out of your
body, and sashay down to little old Frisco. Slide up to Third and Market just
about two or three a.m. when they are running the morning papers off the
press. Read the latest news. Then make a swift sneak for San Quentin, get
here before the newspaper tug crosses the bay, and tell me what you read.
Then well wait and get a morning paper, when it comes in, from a guard.
Then, if what you told me is in that paper, I am with you to a fare-you-well.
It was a good test. I could not but agree with Oppenheimer that such a
proof would be absolute. Morrell said he would take it up some time, but that
he disliked to such an extent the process of leaving his body that he would not
make the attempt until such time that his suffering in the jacket became too
extreme to be borne.
That is the way with all of themwont come across with the goods,
was Oppenheimers criticism. My mother believed in spirits. When I was a
kid she was always seeing them and talking with them and getting advice from
them. But she never come across with any goods from them. The spirits
couldnt tell her where the old man could nail a job or find a gold-mine or
mark an eight-spot in Chinese lottery. Not on your life. The bunk they told
her was that the old mans uncle had had a goitre, or that the old mans
grandfather had died of galloping consumption, or that we were going to move
house inside four months, which last was dead easy, seeing as we moved on an
average of six times a year.
I think, had Oppenheimer had the opportunity for thorough education, he
would have made a Marinetti or a Haeckel. He was an earth-man in his
devotion to the irrefragable fact, and his logic was admirable though frosty.
Youve got to show me, was the ground rule by which he considered all
things. He lacked the slightest iota of faith. This was what Morrell had
pointed out. Lack of faith had prevented Oppenheimer from succeeding in
achieving the little death in the jacket.
You will see, my reader, that it was not all hopelessly bad in solitary.
Given three minds such as ours, there was much with which to while away the
time. It might well be that we kept one another from insanity, although I must
admit that Oppenheimer rotted five years in solitary entirely by himself, ere
Morrell joined him, and yet had remained sane.
On the other hand, do not make the mistake of thinking that life in solitary
was one wild orgy of blithe communion and exhilarating psychological
research.
We had much and terrible pain. Our guards were brutesyour hang-dogs,
citizen. Our surroundings were vile. Our food was filthy, monotonous,
innutritious. Only men, by force of will, could live on so unbalanced a ration.
I know that our prize cattle, pigs, and sheep on the University Demonstration
Farm at Davis would have faded away and died had they received no more
scientifically balanced a ration than what we received.
We had no books to read. Our very knuckle-talk was a violation of the
rules. The world, so far as we were concerned, practically did not exist. It
was more a ghost-world. Oppenheimer, for instance, had never seen an
automobile or a motor-cycle. News did occasionally filter inbut such dim,
long-after-the-event, unreal news. Oppenheimer told me he had not learned of
the Russo-Japanese war until two years after it was over.
We were the buried alive, the living dead. Solitary was our tomb, in
which, on occasion, we talked with our knuckles like spirits rapping at a
séance.
News? Such little things were news to us. A change of bakerswe could
tell it by our bread. What made Pie-face Jones lay off a week? Was it
vacation or sickness? Why was Wilson, on the night shift for only ten days,
transferred elsewhere? Where did Smith get that black eye? We would
speculate for a week over so trivial a thing as the last.
Some convict given a month in solitary was an event. And yet we could
learn nothing from such transient and ofttimes stupid Dantes who would
remain in our inferno too short a time to learn knuckle-talk ere they went forth
again into the bright wide world of the living.
Still, again, all was not so trivial in our abode of shadows. As example, I
taught Oppenheimer to play chess. Consider how tremendous such an
achievement isto teach a man, thirteen cells away, by means of knuckleraps;
to teach him to visualize a chessboard, to visualize all the pieces, pawns
and positions, to know the various manners of moving; and to teach him it all
so thoroughly that he and I, by pure visualization, were in the end able to play
entire games of chess in our minds. In the end, did I say? Another tribute to
the magnificence of Oppenheimers mind: in the end he became my master at
the gamehe who had never seen a chessman in his life.
What image of a bishop, for instance, could possibly form in his mind
when I rapped our code-sign for bishop? In vain and often I asked him this
very question. In vain he tried to describe in words that mental image of
something he had never seen but which nevertheless he was able to handle in
such masterly fashion as to bring confusion upon me countless times in the
course of play.
I can only contemplate such exhibitions of will and spirit and conclude, as
I so often conclude, that precisely there resides reality. The spirit only is real.
The flesh is phantasmagoria and apparitional. I ask you howI repeat, I ask
you how matter or flesh in any form can play chess on an imaginary board
with imaginary pieces, across a vacuum of thirteen cell spanned only with
knuckle-taps?
CHAPTER XV
I was once Adam Strang, an Englishman. The period of my living, as near
as I can guess it, was somewhere between 1550 and 1650, and I lived to a ripe
old age, as you shall see. It has been a great regret to me, ever since Ed
Morrell taught me the way of the little death, that I had not been a more
thorough student of history. I should have been able to identity and place
much that is obscure to me. As it is, I am compelled to grope and guess my
way to times and places of my earlier existences.
A peculiar thing about my Adam Strang existence is that I recollect so little
of the first thirty years of it. Many times, in the jacket, has Adam Strang
recrudesced, but always he springs into being full-statured, heavy-thewed, a
full thirty years of age.
I, Adam Strang, invariably assume my consciousness on a group of low,
sandy islands somewhere under the equator in what must be the western
Pacific Ocean. I am always at home there, and seem to have been there some
time. There are thousands of people on these islands, although I am the only
white man. The natives are a magnificent breed, big-muscled, broadshouldered,
tall. A six-foot man is a commonplace. The king, Raa Kook, is at
least six inches above six feet, and though he would weigh fully three hundred
pounds, is so equitably proportioned that one could not call him fat. Many of
his chiefs are as large, while the women are not much smaller than the men.
There are numerous islands in the group, over all of which Raa Kook is
king, although the cluster of islands to the south is restive and occasionally in
revolt. These natives with whom I live are Polynesian, I know, because their
hair is straight and black. Their skin is a sun-warm golden-brown. Their
speech, which I speak uncommonly easy, is round and rich and musical,
possessing a paucity of consonants, being composed principally of vowels.
They love flowers, music, dancing, and games, and are childishly simple and
happy in their amusements, though cruelly savage in their angers and wars.
I, Adam Strang, know my past, but do not seem to think much about it. I
live in the present. I brood neither over past nor future. I am careless,
improvident, uncautious, happy out of sheer well-being and overplus of
physical energy. Fish, fruits, vegetables, and seaweeda full stomachand I
am content. I am high in place with Raa Kook, than whom none is higher, not
even Abba Taak, who is highest over the priest. No man dare lift hand or
weapon to me. I am taboosacred as the sacred canoe-house under the floor
of which repose the bones of heaven alone knows how many previous kings of
Raa Kooks line.
I know all about how I happened to be wrecked and be there alone of all
my ships companyit was a great drowning and a great wind; but I do not
moon over the catastrophe. When I think back at all, rather do I think far back
to my childhood at the skirts of my milk-skinned, flaxen-haired, buxom
English mother. It is a tiny village of a dozen straw-thatched cottages in
which I lived. I hear again blackbirds and thrushes in the hedges, and see
again bluebells spilling out from the oak woods and over the velvet turf like a
creaming of blue water. And most of all I remember a great, hairy-fetlocked
stallion, often led dancing, sidling, and nickering down the narrow street. I
was frightened of the huge beast and always fled screaming to my mother,
clutching her skirts and hiding in them wherever I might find her.
But enough. The childhood of Adam Strang is not what I set out to write.
I lived for several years on the islands which are nameless to me, and upon
which I am confident I was the first white man. I was married to Lei-Lei, the
kings sister, who was a fraction over six feet and only by that fraction topped
me. I was a splendid figure of a man, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, wellset-
up. Women of any race, as you shall see, looked on me with a favouring
eye. Under my arms, sun-shielded, my skin was milk-white as my mothers.
My eyes were blue. My moustache, beard and hair were that golden-yellow
such as one sometimes sees in paintings of the northern sea-kings. AyI
must have come of that old stock, long-settled in England, and, though born in
a countryside cottage, the sea still ran so salt in my blood that I early found my
way to ships to become a sea-cuny. That is what I wasneither officer nor
gentleman, but sea-cuny, hard-worked, hard-bitten, hard-enduring.
I was of value to Raa Kook, hence his royal protection. I could work in
iron, and our wrecked ship had brought the first iron to Raa Kooks land. On
occasion, ten leagues to the north-west, we went in canoes to get iron from the
wreck. The hull had slipped off the reef and lay in fifteen fathoms. And in
fifteen fathoms we brought up the iron. Wonderful divers and workers under
water were these natives. I learned to do my fifteen fathoms, but never could I
equal them in their fishy exploits. On the land, by virtue of my English
training and my strength, I could throw any of them. Also, I taught them
quarter-staff, until the game became a very contagion and broken heads
anything but novelties.
Brought up from the wreck was a journal, so torn and mushed and pulped
by the sea-water, with ink so run about, that scarcely any of it was
decipherable. However, in the hope that some antiquarian scholar may be able
to place more definitely the date of the events I shall describe, I here give an
extract. The peculiar spelling may give the clue. Note that while the letter s is
used, it more commonly is replaced by the letter f.
The wind being favourable, gave us an opportunity of examining and
drying some of our provifion, particularly, fome Chinefe hams and dry filh,
which conftituted part of our victualling. Divine service alfo was performed
on deck. In the afternoon the wind was foutherly, with frefh gales, but dry, fo
that we were able the following morning to clean between decks, and alfo to
fumigate the fhip with gunpowder.
But I must hasten, for my narrative is not of Adam Strang the shipwrecked
sea-cuny on a coral isle, but of Adam Strang, later named Yi Yong-ik, the
Mighty One, who was one time favourite of the powerful Yunsan, who was
lover and husband of the Lady Om of the princely house of Min, and who was
long time beggar and pariah in all the villages of all the coasts and roads of
Cho-Sen. (Ah, ha, I have you thereCho-Sen. It means the land of the
morning calm. In modern speech it is called Korea.)
Remember, it was between three and four centuries back that I lived, the
first white man, on the coral isles of Raa Kook. In those waters, at that time,
the keels of ships were rare. I might well have lived out my days there, in
peace and fatness, under the sun where frost was not, had it not been for the
Sparwehr. The Sparwehr was a Dutch merchantman daring the uncharted seas
for Indies beyond the Indies. And she found me instead, and I was all she
found.
Have I not said that I was a gay-hearted, golden, bearded giant of an
irresponsible boy that had never grown up? With scarce a pang, when the
Sparwehrs water-casks were filled, I left Raa Kook and his pleasant land, left
Lei-Lei and all her flower-garlanded sisters, and with laughter on my lips and
familiar ship-smells sweet in my nostrils, sailed away, sea-cuny once more,
under Captain Johannes Maartens.
A marvellous wandering, that which followed on the old Sparwehr. We
were in quest of new lands of silk and spices. In truth, we found fevers,
violent deaths, pestilential paradises where death and beauty kept charnelhouse
together. That old Johannes Maartens, with no hint of romance in that
stolid face and grizzly square head of his, sought the islands of Solomon, the
mines of Golcondaay, he sought old lost Atlantis which he hoped to find
still afloat unscuppered. And he found head-hunting, tree-dwelling
anthropophagi instead.
We landed on strange islands, sea-pounded on their shores and smoking at
their summits, where kinky-haired little animal-men made monkey-wailings in
the jungle, planted their forest run-ways with thorns and stake-pits, and blew
poisoned splinters into us from out the twilight jungle bush. And whatsoever
man of us was wasp-stung by such a splinter died horribly and howling. And
we encountered other men, fiercer, bigger, who faced us on the beaches in
open fight, showering us with spears and arrows, while the great tree drums
and the little tom-toms rumbled and rattled war across the tree-filled hollows,
and all the hills were pillared with signal-smokes.
Hendrik Hamel was supercargo and part owner of the Sparwehr adventure,
and what he did not own was the property of Captain Johannes Maartens. The
latter spoke little English, Hendrik Hamel but little more. The sailors, with
whom I gathered, spoke Dutch only. But trust a sea-cuny to learn Dutchay,
and Korean, as you shall see.
Toward the end we came to the charted country of Japan. But the people
would have no dealings with us, and two sworded officials, in sweeping robes
of silk that made Captain Johannes Maartens mouth water, came aboard of us
and politely requested us to begone. Under their suave manners was the iron
of a warlike race, and we knew, and went our way.
We crossed the Straits of Japan and were entering the Yellow Sea on our
way to China, when we laid the Sparwehr on the rocks. She was a crazy tub
the old Sparwehr, so clumsy and so dirty with whiskered marine-life on her
bottom that she could not get out of her own way. Close-hauled, the closest
she could come was to six points of the wind; and then she bobbed up and
down, without way, like a derelict turnip. Galliots were clippers compared
with her. To tack her about was undreamed of; to wear her required all hands
and half a watch. So situated, we were caught on a lee shore in an eight-point
shift of wind at the height of a hurricane that had beaten our souls sick for
forty-eight hours.
We drifted in upon the land in the chill light of a stormy dawn across a
heartless cross-sea mountain high. It was dead of winter, and between
smoking snow-squalls we could glimpse the forbidding coast, if coast it might
be called, so broken was it. There were grim rock isles and islets beyond
counting, dim snow-covered ranges beyond, and everywhere upstanding cliffs
too steep for snow, outjuts of headlands, and pinnacles and slivers of rock
upthrust from the boiling sea.
There was no name to this country on which we drove, no record of it ever
having been visited by navigators. Its coast-line was only hinted at in our
chart. From all of which we could argue that the inhabitants were as
inhospitable as the little of their land we could see.
The Sparwehr drove in bow-on upon a cliff. There was deep water to its
sheer foot, so that our sky-aspiring bowsprit crumpled at the impact and
snapped short off. The foremast went by the board, with a great snapping of
rope-shrouds and stays, and fell forward against the cliff.
I have always admired old Johannes Maartens. Washed and rolled off the
high poop by a burst of sea, we were left stranded in the waist of the ship,
whence we fought our way forard to the steep-pitched forecastle-head.
Others joined us. We lashed ourselves fast and counted noses. We were
eighteen. The rest had perished.
Johannes Maartens touched me and pointed upward through cascading
salt-water from the back-fling of the cliff. I saw what he desired. Twenty feet
below the truck the foremast ground and crunched against a boss of the cliff.
Above the boss was a cleft. He wanted to know if I would dare the leap from
the mast-head into the cleft. Sometimes the distance was a scant six feet. At
other times it was a score, for the mast reeled drunkenly to the rolling and
pounding of the hull on which rested its splintered butt.
I began the climb. But they did not wait. One by one they unlashed
themselves and followed me up the perilous mast. There was reason for haste,
for at any moment the Sparwehr might slip off into deep water. I timed my
leap, and made it, landing in the cleft in a scramble and ready to lend a hand to
those who leaped after. It was slow work. We were wet and half freezing in
the wind-drive. Besides, the leaps had to be timed to the roll of the hull and
the sway of the mast.
The cook was the first to go. He was snapped off the mast-end, and his
body performed cart-wheels in its fall. A fling of sea caught him and crushed
him to a pulp against the cliff. The cabin boy, a bearded man of twenty-odd,
lost hold, slipped, swung around the mast, and was pinched against the boss of
rock. Pinched? The life squeezed from him on the instant. Two others
followed the way of the cook. Captain Johannes Maartens was the last,
completing the fourteen of us that clung on in the cleft. An hour afterward the
Sparwehr slipped off and sank in deep water.
Two days and nights saw us near to perishing on that cliff, for there was
way neither up nor down. The third morning a fishing-boat found us. The
men were clad entirely in dirt white, with their long hair done up in a curious
knot on their patesthe marriage knot, as I was afterward to learn, and also,
as I was to learn, a handy thing to clutch hold of with one hand whilst you
clouted with the other when an argument went beyond words.
The boat went back to the village for help, and most of the villagers, most
of their gear, and most of the day were required to get us down. They were a
poor and wretched folk, their food difficult even for the stomach of a sea-cuny
to countenance. Their rice was brown as chocolate. Half the husks remained
in it, along with bits of chaff, splinters, and unidentifiable dirt which made one
pause often in the chewing in order to stick into his mouth thumb and
forefinger and pluck out the offending stuff. Also, they ate a sort of millet,
and pickles of astounding variety and ungodly hot.
Their houses were earthen-walled and straw-thatched. Under the floors ran
flues through which the kitchen smoke escaped, warming the sleeping-room in
its passage. Here we lay and rested for days, soothing ourselves with their
mild and tasteless tobacco, which we smoked in tiny bowls at the end of yardlong
pipes. Also, there was a warm, sourish, milky-looking drink, heady only
when taken in enormous doses. After guzzling I swear gallons of it, I got
singing drunk, which is the way of sea-cunies the world over. Encouraged by
my success, the others persisted, and soon we were all a-roaring, little reeking
of the fresh snow gale piping up outside, and little worrying that we were cast
away in an uncharted, God-forgotten land. Old Johannes Maartens laughed
and trumpeted and slapped his thighs with the best of us. Hendrik Hamel, a
cold-blooded, chilly-poised dark brunette of a Dutchman with beady black
eyes, was as rarely devilish as the rest of us, and shelled out silver like any
drunken sailor for the purchase of more of the milky brew. Our carrying-on
was a scandal; but the women fetched the drink while all the village that could
crowd in jammed the room to witness our antics.
The white man has gone around the world in mastery, I do believe, because
of his unwise uncaringness. That has been the manner of his going, although,
of course, he was driven on by restiveness and lust for booty. So it was that
Captain Johannes Maartens, Hendrik Hamel, and the twelve sea-cunies of us
roystered and bawled in the fisher village while the winter gales whistled
across the Yellow Sea.
From the little we had seen of the land and the people we were not
impressed by Cho-Sen. If these miserable fishers were a fair sample of the
natives, we could understand why the land was unvisited of navigators. But
we were to learn different. The village was on an in-lying island, and its
headmen must have sent word across to the mainland; for one morning three
big two-masted junks with lateens of rice-matting dropped anchor off the
beach.
When the sampans came ashore Captain Johannes Maartens was all
interest, for here were silks again. One strapping Korean, all in pale-tinted
silks of various colours, was surrounded by half a dozen obsequious
attendants, also clad in silk. Kwan Yung-jin, as I came to know his name, was
a yang-ban, or noble; also he was what might be called magistrate or governor
of the district or province. This means that his office was appointive, and that
he was a tithe-squeezer or tax-farmer.
Fully a hundred soldiers were also landed and marched into the village.
They were armed with three-pronged spears, slicing spears, and chopping
spears, with here and there a matchlock of so heroic mould that there were two
soldiers to a matchlock, one to carry and set the tripod on which rested the
muzzle, the other to carry and fire the gun. As I was to learn, sometimes the
gun went off, sometimes it did not, all depending upon the adjustment of the
fire-punk and the condition of the powder in the flash-pan.
So it was that Kwan-Yung-jin travelled. The headmen of the village were
cringingly afraid of him, and for good reason, as we were not overlong in
finding out. I stepped forward as interpreter, for already I had the hang of
several score of Korean words. He scowled and waved me aside. But what
did I reek? I was as tall as he, outweighed him by a full two stone, and my
skin was white, my hair golden. He turned his back and addressed the head
man of the village while his six silken satellites made a cordon between us.
While he talked more soldiers from the ship carried up several shoulder-loads
of inch-planking. These planks were about six feet long and two feet wide,
and curiously split in half lengthwise. Nearer one end than the other was a
round hole larger than a mans neck.
Kwan Yung-jin gave a command. Several of the soldiers approached
Tromp, who was sitting on the ground nursing a felon. Now Tromp was a
rather stupid, slow-thinking, slow-moving cuny, and before he knew what was
doing one of the planks, with a scissors-like opening and closing, was about
his neck and clamped. Discovering his predicament, he set up a bull-roaring
and dancing, till all had to back away to give him clear space for the flying
ends of his plank.
Then the trouble began, for it was plainly Kwan Yung-jins intention to
plank all of us. Oh, we fought, bare-fisted, with a hundred soldiers and as
many villagers, while Kwan Yung-jin stood apart in his silks and lordly
disdain. Here was where I earned my name Yi Yong-ik, the Mighty. Long
after our company was subdued and planked I fought on. My fists were of the
hardness of topping-mauls, and I had the muscles and will to drive them.
To my joy, I quickly learned that the Koreans did not understand a fistblow
and were without the slightest notion of guarding. They went down like
tenpins, fell over each other in heaps. But Kwan Yung-jin was my man, and
all that saved him when I made my rush was the intervention of his satellites.
They were flabby creatures. I made a mess of them and a muss and muck of
their silks ere the multitude could return upon me. There were so many of
them. They clogged my blows by the sneer numbers of them, those behind
shoving the front ones upon me. And how I dropped them! Toward the end
they were squirming three-deep under my feet. But by the time the crews of
the three junks and most of the village were on top of me I was fairly
smothered. The planking was easy.
God in heaven, what now! asked Vandervoot, another cuny, when we
had been bundled aboard a junk.
We sat on the open deck, like so many trussed fowls, when he asked the
question, and the next moment, as the junk heeled to the breeze, we shot down
the deck, planks and all, fetching up in the lee-scuppers with skinned necks.
And from the high poop Kwan Yung-jin gazed down at us as if he did not see
us. For many years to come Vandervoot was known amongst us as What-
Now Vandervoot. Poor devil! He froze to death one night on the streets of
Keijo; with every door barred against him.
To the mainland we were taken and thrown into a stinking, vermin-infested
prison. Such was our introduction to the officialdom of Cho-Sen. But I was
to be revenged for all of us on Kwan Yung-jin, as you shall see, in the days
when the Lady Om was kind and power was mine.
In prison we lay for many days. We learned afterward the reason. Kwan
Yung-jin had sent a dispatch to Keijo, the capital, to find what royal
disposition was to be made of us. In the meantime we were a menagerie.
From dawn till dark our barred windows were besieged by the natives, for no
member of our race had they ever seen before. Nor was our audience mere
rabble. Ladies, borne in palanquins on the shoulders of coolies, came to see
the strange devils cast up by the sea, and while their attendants drove back the
common folk with whips, they would gaze long and timidly at us. Of them we
saw little, for their faces were covered, according to the custom of the country.
Only dancing girls, low women, and granddams ever were seen abroad with
exposed faces.
I have often thought that Kwan Yung-jin suffered from indigestion, and
that when the attacks were acute he took it out on us. At any rate, without
rhyme or reason, whenever the whim came to him, we were all taken out on
the street before the prison and well beaten with sticks to the gleeful shouts of
the multitude. The Asiatic is a cruel beast, and delights in spectacles of human
suffering.
At any rate we were pleased when an end to our beatings came. This was
caused by the arrival of Kim. Kim? All I can say, and the best I can say, is
that he was the whitest man I ever encountered in Cho-Sen. He was a captain
of fifty men when I met him. He was in command of the palace guards before
I was done doing my best by him. And in the end he died for the Lady Oms
sake and for mine. Kimwell, Kim was Kim.
Immediately he arrived the planks were taken from our necks and we were
lodged in the beet inn the place boasted. We were still prisoners, but
honourable prisoners, with a guard of fifty mounted soldiers. The next day we
were under way on the royal highroad, fourteen sailormen astride the dwarf
horses that obtain in Cho-Sen, and bound for Keijo itself. The Emperor, so
Kim told me, had expressed a desire to gaze upon the strangeness of the sea
devils.
It was a journey of many days, half the length of Cho-Sen, north and south
as it lies. It chanced, at the first off-saddling, that I strolled around to witness
the feeding of the dwarf horses. And what I witnessed set me bawling, What
now, Vandervoot? till all our crew came running. As I am a living man what
the horses were feeding on was bean soup, hot bean soup at that, and naught
else did they have on all the journey but hot bean soup. It was the custom of
the country.
They were truly dwarf horses. On a wager with Kim I lifted one, despite
his squeals and struggles, squarely across my shoulders, so that Kims men,
who had already heard my new name, called me Yi Yong-ik, the Mighty One.
Kim was a large man as Koreans go, and Koreans are a tall muscular race, and
Kim fancied himself a bit. But, elbow to elbow and palm to palm, I put his
arm down at will. And his soldiers and the gaping villagers would look on and
murmur Yi Yong-ik.
In a way we were a travelling menagerie. The word went on ahead, so that
all the country folk flocked to the roadside to see us pass. It was an unending
circus procession. In the towns at night our inns were besieged by multitudes,
so that we got no peace until the soldiers drove them off with lance-pricks and
blows. But first Kim would call for the village strong men and wrestlers for
the fun of seeing me crumple them and put them in the dirt.
Bread there was none, but we ate white rice (the strength of which resides
in ones muscles not long), a meat which we found to be dog (which animal is
regularly butchered for food in Cho-Sen), and the pickles ungodly hot but
which one learns to like exceeding well. And there was drink, real drink, not
milky slush, but white, biting stuff distilled from rice, a pint of which would
kill a weakling and make a strong man mad and merry. At the walled city of
Chong-ho I put Kim and the city notables under the table with the stuffor on
the table, rather, for the table was the floor where we squatted to cramp-knots
in my hams for the thousandth time. And again all muttered Yi Yong-ik,
and the word of my prowess passed on before even to Keijo and the Emperors
Court.
I was more an honoured guest than a prisoner, and invariably I rode by
Kims side, my long legs near reaching the ground, and, where the going was
deep, my feet scraping the muck. Kim was young. Kim was human. Kim
was universal. He was a man anywhere in any country. He and I talked and
laughed and joked the day long and half the night. And I verify ate up the
language. I had a gift that way anyway. Even Kim marvelled at the way I
mastered the idiom. And I learned the Korean points of view, the Korean
humour, the Korean soft places, weak places, touchy places. Kim taught me
flower songs, love songs, drinking songs. One of the latter was his own, of the
end of which I shall give you a crude attempt at translation. Kim and Pak, in
their youth, swore a pact to abstain from drinking, which pact was speedily
broken. In old age Kim and Pak sing:
No, no, begone! The merry bowl
Again shall bolster up my soul
Against itself. What, good man, hold!
Canst tell me where red wine is sold?
Nay, just beyond yon peach-tree? There?
Good luck be thine; Ill thither fare.
Hendrik Hamel, scheming and crafty, ever encouraged and urged me in my
antic course that brought Kims favour, not alone to me, but through me to
Hendrik Hamel and all our company. I here mention Hendrik Hamel as my
adviser, for it has a bearing on much that followed at Keijo in the winning of
Yunsans favour, the Lady Oms heart, and the Emperors tolerance. I had the
will and the fearlessness for the game I played, and some of the wit; but most
of the wit I freely admit was supplied me by Hendrik Hamel.
And so we journeyed up to Keijo, from walled city to walled city across a
snowy mountain land that was hollowed with innumerable fat farming valleys.
And every evening, at fall of day, beacon fires sprang from peak to peak and
ran along the land. Always Kim watched for this nightly display. From all the
coasts of Cho-Sen, Kim told me, these chains of fire-speech ran to Keijo to
carry their message to the Emperor. One beacon meant the land was in peace.
Two beacons meant revolt or invasion. We never saw but one beacon. And
ever, as we rode, Vandervoot brought up the rear, wondering, God in heaven,
what now?
Keijo we found a vast city where all the population, with the exception of
the nobles or yang-bans, dressed in the eternal white. This, Kim explained,
was an automatic determination and advertisement of caste. Thus, at a glance,
could one tell, the status of an individual by the degrees of cleanness or of
filthiness of his garments. It stood to reason that a coolie, possessing but the
clothes he stood up in, must be extremely dirty. And to reason it stood that the
individual in immaculate white must possess many changes and command the
labour of laundresses to keep his changes immaculate. As for the yang-bans
who wore the pale, vari-coloured silks, they were beyond such common
yardstick of place.
After resting in an inn for several days, during which time we washed our
garments and repaired the ravages of shipwreck and travel, we were
summoned before the Emperor. In the great open space before the palace wall
were colossal stone dogs that looked more like tortoises. They crouched on
massive stone pedestals of twice the height of a tall man. The walls of the
palace were huge and of dressed stone. So thick were these walls that they
could defy a breach from the mightiest of cannon in a year-long siege. The
mere gateway was of the size of a palace in itself, rising pagoda-like, in many
retreating stories, each story fringed with tile-roofing. A smart guard of
soldiers turned out at the gateway. These, Kim told me, were the Tiger
Hunters of Pyeng-yang, the fiercest and most terrible fighting men of which
Cho-Sen could boast.
But enough. On mere description of the Emperors palace a thousand
pages of my narrative could be worthily expended. Let it suffice that here we
knew power in all its material expression. Only a civilization deep and wide
and old and strong could produce this far-walled, many-gabled roof of kings.
To no audience-hall were we sea-cunies led, but, as we took it, to a
feasting-hall. The feasting was at its end, and all the throng was in a merry
mood. And such a throng! High dignitaries, princes of the blood, sworded
nobles, pale priests, weather-tanned officers of high command, court ladies
with faces exposed, painted ki-sang or dancing girls who rested from
entertaining, and duennas, waiting women, eunuchs, lackeys, and palace
slaves a myriad of them.
All fell away from us, however, when the Emperor, with a following of
intimates, advanced to look us over. He was a merry monarch, especially so
for an Asiatic. Not more than forty, with a clear, pallid skin that had never
known the sun, he was paunched and weak-legged. Yet he had once been a
fine man. The noble forehead attested that. But the eyes were bleared and
weak-lidded, the lips twitching and trembling from the various excesses in
which he indulged, which excesses, as I was to learn, were largely devised and
pandered by Yunsan, the Buddhist priest, of whom more anon.
In our sea-garments we mariners were a motley crew, and motley was the
cue of our reception. Exclamations of wonder at our strangeness gave way to
laughter. The ki-sang invaded us, dragging us about, making prisoners of us,
two or three of them to one of us, leading us about like go many dancing boars
and putting us through our antics. It was offensive, true, but what could poor
sea-cunies do? What could old Johannes Maartens do, with a bevy of
laughing girls about him, tweaking his nose, pinching his arms, tickling his
ribs till he pranced? To escape such torment Hans Amden cleared a space and
gave a clumsy-footed Hollandish breakdown till all the Court roared its
laughter.
It was offensive to me who had been equal and boon companion of Kim
for many days. I resisted the laughing ki-sang. I braced my legs and stood
upright with folded arms; nor could pinch or tickle bring a quiver from me.
Thus they abandoned me for easier prey.
For Gods sake, man, make an impression, Hendrik Hamel, who had
struggled to me with three ki-sang dragging behind, mumbled.
Well might he mumble, for whenever he opened his mouth to speak they
crammed it with sweets.
Save us from this folly, he persisted, ducking his head about to avoid
their sweet-filled palms. We must have dignity, understand, dignity. This
will ruin us. They are making tame animals of us, playthings. When they
grow tired of us they will throw us out. Youre doing the right thing. Stick to
it. Stand them off. Command respect, respect for all of us
The last was barely audible, for by this time the ki-sang had stuffed his
mouth to speechlessness.
As I have said, I had the will and the fearlessness, and I racked my seacuny
brains for the wit. A palace eunuch, tickling my neck with a feather from
behind, gave me my start. I had already drawn attention by my aloofness and
imperviousness to the attacks of the ki-sang, so that many were looking on at
the eunuchs baiting of me. I gave no sign, made no move, until I had located
him and distanced him. Then, like a shot, without turning head or body,
merely by my arm I fetched him an open, back-handed slap. My knuckles
landed flat on his cheek and jaw. There was a crack like a spar parting in a
gale. He was bowled clean over, landing in a heap on the floor a dozen feet
away.
There was no laughter, only cries of surprise and murmurings and
whisperings of Yi Yong-ik. Again I folded my arms and stood with a fine
assumption of haughtiness. I do believe that I, Adam Strang, had among other
things the soul of an actor in me. For see what follows. I was now the most
significant of our company. Proud-eyed, disdainful, I met unwavering the
eyes upon me and made them drop, or turn awayall eyes but one. These
were the eyes of a young woman, whom I judged, by richness of dress and by
the half-dozen women fluttering at her back, to be a court lady of distinction.
In truth, she was the Lady Om, princess of the house of Min. Did I say
young? She was fully my own age, thirty, and for all that and her ripeness and
beauty a princess still unmarried, as I was to learn.
She alone looked me in the eyes without wavering until it was I who
turned away. She did not look me down, for there was neither challenge nor
antagonism in her eyesonly fascination. I was loth to admit this defeat by
one small woman, and my eyes, turning aside, lighted on the disgraceful rout
of my comrades and the trailing ki-sang and gave me the pretext. I clapped
my hands in the Asiatic fashion when one gives command.
Let be! I thundered in their own language, and in the form one addressee
underlings.
Oh, I had a chest and a throat, and could bull-roar to the hurt of ear-drums.
I warrant so loud a command had never before cracked the sacred air of the
Emperors palace.
The great room was aghast. The women were startled, and pressed toward
one another as for safety. The ki-sang released the cunies and shrank away
giggling apprehensively. Only the Lady Om made no sign nor motion but
continued to gaze wide-eyed into my eyes which had returned to hers.
Then fell a great silence, as if all waited some word of doom. A multitude
of eyes timidly stole back and forth from the Emperor to me and from me to
the Emperor. And I had wit to keep the silence and to stand there, arms
folded, haughty and remote.
He speaks our language, quoth the Emperor at the last; and I swear there
was such a relinquishment of held breaths that the whole room was one vast
sigh.
I was born with this language, I replied, my cuny wits running rashly to
the first madness that prompted. I spoke it at my mothers breast. I was the
marvel of my land. Wise men journeyed far to see me and to hear. But no
man knew the words I spoke. In the many years since I have forgotten much,
but now, in Cho-Sen, the words come back like long-lost friends.
An impression I certainly made. The Emperor swallowed and his lips
twitched ere he asked:
How explain you this?
I am an accident, I answered, following the wayward lead my wit had
opened. The gods of birth were careless, and I was mislaid in a far land and
nursed by an alien people. I am Korean, and now, at last, I have come to my
home.
What an excited whispering and conferring took place. The Emperor
himself interrogated Kim.
He was always thus, our speech in his mouth, from the time he came out
of the sea, Kim lied like the good fellow he was.
Bring me yang-bans garments as befits me, I interrupted, and you shall
see. As I was led away in compliance, I turned on the ki-sang. And leave
my slaves alone. They have journeyed far and are weary. They are my
faithful slaves.
In another room Kim helped me change, sending the lackeys away; and
quick and to the point was the dress-rehearsal he gave me. He knew no more
toward what I drove than did I, but he was a good fellow.
The funny thing, once back in the crowd and spouting Korean which I
claimed was rusty from long disuse, was that Hendrik Hamel and the rest, too
stubborn-tongued to learn new speech, did not know a word I uttered.
I am of the blood of the house of Koryu, I told the Emperor, that ruled
at Songdo many a long year agone when my house arose on the ruins of Silla.
Ancient history, all, told me by Kim on the long ride, and he struggled with
his face to hear me parrot his teaching.
These, I said, when the Emperor had asked me about my company,
these are my slaves, all except that old churl thereI indicated Johannes
Maartenswho is the son of a freed man. I told Hendrik Hamel to
approach. This one, I wantoned on, was born in my fathers house of a
seed slave who was born there before him. He is very close to me. We are of
an age, born on the same day, and on that day my father gave him me.
Afterwards, when Hendrik Hamel was eager to know all that I had said,
and when I told him, he reproached me and was in a pretty rage.
The fats in the fire, Hendrik, quoth I. What I have done has been out
of witlessness and the need to be saying something. But done it is. Nor you
nor I can pluck forth the fat. We must act our parts and make the best of it.
Taiwun, the Emperors brother, was a sot of sots, and as the night wore on
he challenged me to a drinking. The Emperor was delighted, and commanded
a dozen of the noblest sots to join in the bout. The women were dismissed,
and we went to it, drink for drink, measure for measure. Kim I kept by me,
and midway along, despite Hendrik Hamels warning scowls, dismissed him
and the company, first requesting, and obtaining, palace lodgment instead of
the inn.
Next day the palace was a-buzz with my feast, for I had put Taiwun and all
his champions snoring on the mats and walked unaided to my bed. Never, in
the days of vicissitude that came later, did Taiwun doubt my claim of Korean
birth. Only a Korean, he averred, could possess so strong a head.
The palace was a city in itself, and we were lodged in a sort of summerhouse
that stood apart. The princely quarters were mine, of course, and Hamel
and Maartens, with the rest of the grumbling cunies, had to content themselves
with what remained.
I was summoned before Yunsan, the Buddhist priest I have mentioned. It
was his first glimpse of me and my first of him. Even Kim he dismissed from
me, and we sat alone on deep mats in a twilight room. Lord, Lord, what a man
and a mind was Yunsan! He made to probe my soul. He knew things of other
lands and places that no one in Cho-Sen dreamed to know. Did he believe my
fabled birth? I could not guess, for his face was less changeful than a bowl of
bronze.
What Yunsans thoughts were only Yunsan knew. But in him, this poorclad,
lean-bellied priest, I sensed the power behind power in all the palace and
in all Cho-Sen. I sensed also, through the drift of speech, that he had use of
me. Now was this use suggested by the Lady Om?a nut I gave Hendrik
Hamel to crack. I little knew, and less I cared, for I lived always in the
moment and let others forecast, forfend, and travail their anxiety.
I answered, too, the summons of the Lady Om, following a sleek-faced,
cat-footed eunuch through quiet palace byways to her apartments. She lodged
as a princess of the blood should lodge. She, too, had a palace to herself,
among lotus ponds where grow forests of trees centuries old but so dwarfed
that they reached no higher than my middle. Bronze bridges, so delicate and
rare that they looked as if fashioned by jewel-smiths, spanned her lily ponds,
and a bamboo grove screened her palace apart from all the palace.
My head was awhirl. Sea-cuny that I was, I was no dolt with women, and I
sensed more than idle curiosity in her sending for me. I had heard love-tales
of common men and queens, and was a-wondering if now it was my fortune to
prove such tales true.
The Lady Om wasted little time. There were women about her, but she
regarded their presence no more than a carter his horses. I sat beside her on
deep mats that made the room half a couch, and wine was given me and
sweets to nibble, served on tiny, foot-high tables inlaid with pearl.
Lord, Lord, I had but to look into her eyesBut wait. Make no mistake.
The Lady Om was no fool. I have said she was of my own age. All of thirty
she was, with the poise of her years. She knew what she wanted. She knew
what she did not want. It was because of this she had never married, although
all pressure that an Asiatic court could put upon a woman had been vainly put
upon her to compel her to marry Chong Mong-ju. He was a lesser cousin of
the great Min family, himself no fool, and grasping so greedily for power as to
perturb Yunsan, who strove to retain all power himself and keep the palace and
Cho-Sen in ordered balance. Thus Yunsan it was who in secret allied himself
with the Lady Om, saved her from her cousin, used her to trim her cousins
wings. But enough of intrigue. It was long before I guessed a tithe of it, and
then largely through the Lady Oms confidences and Hendrik Hamels
conclusions.
The Lady Om was a very flower of woman. Women such as she are born
rarely, scarce twice a century the whole world over. She was unhampered by
rule or convention. Religion, with her, was a series of abstractions, partly
learned from Yunsan, partly worked out for herself. Vulgar religion, the
public religion, she held, was a device to keep the toiling millions to their toil.
She had a will of her own, and she had a heart all womanly. She was a beauty
yes, a beauty by any set rule of the world. Her large black eyes were neither
slitted nor slanted in the Asiatic way. They were long, true, but set squarely,
and with just the slightest hint of obliqueness that was all for piquancy.
I have said she was no fool. Behold! As I palpitated to the situation,
princess and sea-cuny and love not a little that threatened big, I racked my
cunys brains for wit to carry the thing off with manhood credit. It chanced,
early in this first meeting, that I mentioned what I had told all the Court, that I
was in truth a Korean of the blood of the ancient house of Koryu.
Let be, she said, tapping my lips with her peacock fan. No childs tales
here. Know that with me you are better and greater than of any house of
Koryu. You are . . .
She paused, and I waited, watching the daring grow in her eyes.
You are a man, she completed. Not even in my sleep have I ever
dreamed there was such a man as you on his two legs upstanding in the
world.
Lord, Lord! and what could a poor sea-cuny do? This particular sea-cuny,
I admit, blushed through his sea tan till the Lady Oms eyes were twin pools of
roguishness in their teasing deliciousness and my arms were all but about her.
And she laughed tantalizingly and alluringly, and clapped her hands for her
women, and I knew that the audience, for this once, was over. I knew, also,
there would be other audiences, there must be other audiences.
Back to Hamel, my head awhirl.
The woman, said he, after deep cogitation. He looked at me and sighed
an envy I could not mistake. It is your brawn, Adam Strang, that bull throat
of yours, your yellow hair. Well, its the game, man. Play her, and all will be
well with us. Play her, and I shall teach you how.
I bristled. Sea-cuny I was, but I was man, and to no man would I be
beholden in my way with women. Hendrik Hamel might be one time partowner
of the old Sparwehr, with a navigators knowledge of the stars and deep
versed in books, but with women, no, there I would not give him better.
He smiled that thin-lipped smile of his, and queried:
How like you the Lady Om?
In such matters a cuny is naught particular, I temporized.
How like you her? he repeated, his beady eyes boring into me.
Passing well, ay, and more than passing well, if you will have it.
Then win to her, he commanded, and some day we will get ship and
escape from this cursed land. Id give half the silks of the Indies for a meal of
Christian food again.
He regarded me intently.
Do you think you can win to her? he questioned.
I was half in the air at the challenge. He smiled his satisfaction.
But not too quickly, he advised. Quick things are cheap things. Put a
prize upon yourself. Be chary of your kindnesses. Make a value of your bull
throat and yellow hair, and thank God you have them, for they are of more
worth in a womans eyes than are the brains of a dozen philosophers.
Strange whirling days were those that followed, what of my audiences with
the Emperor, my drinking bouts with Taiwun, my conferences with Yunsan,
and my hours with the Lady Om. Besides, I sat up half the nights, by Hamels
command, learning from Kim all the minutiæ of court etiquette and manners,
the history of Korea and of gods old and new, and the forms of polite speech,
noble speech, and coolie speech. Never was sea-cuny worked so hard. I was a
puppetpuppet to Yunsan, who had need of me; puppet to Hamel, who
schemed the wit of the affair that was so deep that alone I should have
drowned. Only with the Lady Om was I man, not puppet . . . and yet, and yet,
as I look back and ponder across time, I have my doubts. I think the Lady
Om, too, had her will with me, wanting me for her hearts desire. Yet in this
she was well met, for it was not long ere she was my hearts desire, and such
was the immediacy of my will that not her will, nor Hendrik Hamels, nor
Yunsans, could hold back my arms from about her.
In the meantime, however, I was caught up in a palace intrigue I could not
fathom. I could catch the drift of it, no more, against Chong Mong-ju, the
princely cousin of the Lady Om. Beyond my guessing there were cliques and
cliques within cliques that made a labyrinth of the palace and extended to all
the Seven Coasts. But I did not worry. I left that to Hendrik Hamel. To him I
reported every detail that occurred when he was not with me; and he, with
furrowed brows, sitting darkling by the hour, like a patient spider unravelled
the tangle and spun the web afresh. As my body slave he insisted upon
attending me everywhere; being only barred on occasion by Yunsan. Of
course I barred him from my moments with the Lady Om, but told him in
general what passed, with exception of tenderer incidents that were not his
business.
I think Hamel was content to sit back and play the secret part. He was too
cold-blooded not to calculate that the risk was mine. If I prospered, he
prospered. If I crashed to ruin, he might creep out like a ferret. I am
convinced that he so reasoned, and yet it did not save him in the end, as you
shall see.
Stand by me, I told Kim, and whatsoever you wish shall be yours.
Have you a wish?
I would command the Tiger Hunters of Pyeng-Yang, and so command the
palace guards, he answered.
Wait, said I, and that will you do. I have said it.
The how of the matter was beyond me. But he who has naught can
dispense the world in largess; and I, who had naught, gave Kim captaincy of
the palace guards. The best of it is that I did fulfil my promise. Kim did come
to command the Tiger Hunters, although it brought him to a sad end.
Scheming and intriguing I left to Hamel and Yunsan, who were the
politicians. I was mere man and lover, and merrier than theirs was the time I
had. Picture it to yourselfa hard-bitten, joy-loving sea-cuny, irresponsible,
unaware ever of past or future, wining and dining with kings, the accepted
lover of a princess, and with brains like Hamels and Yunsans to do all
planning and executing for me.
More than once Yunsan almost divined the mind behind my mind; but
when he probed Hamel, Hamel proved a stupid slave, a thousand times less
interested in affairs of state and policy than was he interested in my health and
comfort and garrulously anxious about my drinking contests with Taiwun. I
think the Lady Om guessed the truth and kept it to herself; wit was not her
desire, but, as Hamel had said, a bull throat and a mans yellow hair.
Much that pawed between us I shall not relate, though the Lady Om is dear
dust these centuries. But she was not to be denied, nor was I; and when a man
and woman will their hearts together heads may fall and kingdoms crash and
yet they will not forgo.
Came the time when our marriage was mootedoh, quietly, at first, most
quietly, as mere palace gossip in dark corners between eunuchs and waitingwomen.
But in a palace the gossip of the kitchen scullions will creep to the
throne. Soon there was a pretty to-do. The palace was the pulse of Cho-Sen,
and when the palace rocked, Cho-Sen trembled. And there was reason for the
rocking. Our marriage would be a blow straight between the eyes of Chong
Mong-ju. He fought, with a show of strength for which Yunsan was ready.
Chong Mong-ju disaffected half the provincial priesthood, until they
pilgrimaged in processions a mile long to the palace gates and frightened the
Emperor into a panic.
But Yunsan held like a rock. The other half of the provincial priesthood
was his, with, in addition, all the priesthood of the great cities such as Keijo,
Fusan, Songdo, Pyen-Yang, Chenampo, and Chemulpo. Yunsan and the Lady
Om, between them, twisted the Emperor right about. As she confessed to me
afterward, she bullied him with tears and hysteria and threats of a scandal that
would shake the throne. And to cap it all, at the psychological moment,
Yunsan pandered the Emperor to novelties of excess that had been long
preparing.
You must grow your hair for the marriage knot, Yunsan warned me one
day, with the ghost of a twinkle in his austere eyes, more nearly facetious and
human than I had ever beheld him.
Now it is not meet that a princess espouse a sea-cuny, or even a claimant of
the ancient blood of Koryu, who is without power, or place, or visible symbols
of rank. So it was promulgated by imperial decree that I was a prince of
Koryu. Next, after breaking the bones and decapitating the then governor of
the five provinces, himself an adherent of Chong Mong-ju, I was made
governor of the seven home provinces of ancient Koryu. In Cho-Sen seven is
the magic number. To complete this number two of the provinces were taken
over from the hands of two more of Chong Mong-jus adherents.
Lord, Lord, a sea-cuny . . . and dispatched north over the Mandarin Road
with five hundred soldiers and a retinue at my back! I was a governor of
seven provinces, where fifty thousand troops awaited me. Life, death, and
torture, I carried at my disposal. I had a treasury and a treasurer, to say
nothing of a regiment of scribes. Awaiting me also was a full thousand of taxfarmers;
who squeezed the last coppers from the toiling people.
The seven provinces constituted the northern march. Beyond lay what is
now Manchuria, but which was known by us as the country of the Hong-du, or
Red Heads. They were wild raiders, on occasion crossing the Yalu in great
masses and over-running northern Cho-Sen like locusts. It was said they were
given to cannibal practices. I know of experience that they were terrible
fighters, most difficult to convince of a beating.
A whirlwind year it was. While Yunsan and the Lady Om at Keijo
completed the disgrace of Chong Mong-ju, I proceeded to make a reputation
for myself. Of course it was really Hendrik Hamel at my back, but I was the
fine figure-head that carried it off. Through me Hamel taught our soldiers drill
and tactics and taught the Red Heads strategy. The fighting was grand, and
though it took a year, the years end saw peace on the northern border and no
Red Heads but dead Red Heads on our side the Yalu.
I do not know if this invasion of the Red Heads is recorded in Western
history, but if so it will give a clue to the date of the times of which I write.
Another clue: when was Hideyoshi the Shogun of Japan? In my time I heard
the echoes of the two invasions, a generation before, driven by Hideyoshi
through the heart of Cho-Sen from Fusan in the south to as far north as Pyeng-
Yang. It was this Hideyoshi who sent back to Japan a myriad tubs of pickled
ears and noses of Koreans slain in battle. I talked with many old men and
women who had seen the fighting and escaped the pickling.
Back to Keijo and the Lady Om. Lord, Lord, she was a woman. For forty
years she was my woman. I know. No dissenting voice was raised against the
marriage. Chong Mong-ju, clipped of power, in disgrace, had retired to sulk
somewhere on the far north-east coast. Yunsan was absolute. Nightly the
single beacons flared their message of peace across the land. The Emperor
grew more weak-legged and blear-eyed what of the ingenious deviltries
devised for him by Yunsan. The Lady Om and I had won to our hearts
desires. Kim was in command of the palace guards. Kwan Yung-jin, the
provincial governor who had planked and beaten us when we were first cast
away, I had shorn of power and banished for ever from appearing within the
walls of Keijo.
Oh, and Johannes Maartens. Discipline is well hammered into a sea-cuny,
and, despite my new greatness, I could never forget that he had been my
captain in the days we sought new Indies in the Sparwehr. According to my
tale first told in Court, he was the only free man in my following. The rest of
the cunies, being considered my slaves, could not aspire to office of any sort
under the crown. But Johannes could, and did. The sly old fox! I little
guessed his intent when he asked me to make him governor of the paltry little
province of Kyong-ju. Kyong-ju had no wealth of farms or fisheries. The
taxes scarce paid the collecting, and the governorship was little more than an
empty honour. The place was in truth a graveyarda sacred graveyard, for on
Tabong Mountain were shrined and sepultured the bones of the ancient kings
of Silla. Better governor of Kyong-ju than retainer of Adam Strang, was what
I thought was in his mind; nor did I dream that it was except for fear of
loneliness that caused him to take four of the cunies with him.
Gorgeous were the two years that followed. My seven provinces I
governed mainly though needy yang-bans selected for me by Yunsan. An
occasional inspection, done in state and accompanied by the Lady Om, was all
that was required of me. She possessed a summer palace on the south coast,
which we frequented much. Then there were mans diversions. I became
patron of the sport of wrestling, and revived archery among the yang-bans.
Also, there was tiger-hunting in the northern mountains.
A remarkable thing was the tides of Cho-Sen. On our north-east coast
there was scarce a rise and fall of a foot. On our west coast the neap tides ran
as high as sixty feet. Cho-Sen had no commerce, no foreign traders. There
was no voyaging beyond her coasts, and no voyaging of other peoples to her
coasts. This was due to her immemorial policy of isolation. Once in a decade
or a score of years Chinese ambassadors arrived, but they came overland,
around the Yellow Sea, across the country of the Hong-du, and down the
Mandarin Road to Keijo. The round trip was a year-long journey. Their
mission was to exact from our Emperor the empty ceremonial of
acknowledgment of Chinas ancient suzerainty.
But Hamel, from long brooding, was ripening for action. His plans grew
apace. Cho-Sen was Indies enough for him could he but work it right. Little
he confided, but when he began to play to have me made admiral of the Cho-
Sen navy of junks, and to inquire more than casually of the details of the storeplaces
of the imperial treasury, I could put two and two together.
Now I did not care to depart from Cho-Sen except with the Lady Om.
When I broached the possibility of it she told me, warm in my arms, that I was
her king and that wherever I led she would follow. As you shall see it was
truth, full truth, that she uttered.
It was Yunsans fault for letting Chong Mong-ju live. And yet it was not
Yunsans fault. He had not dared otherwise. Disgraced at Court, nevertheless
Chong Mong-ju had been too popular with the provincial priesthood. Yunsan
had been compelled to hold his hand, and Chong Mong-ju, apparently sulking
on the north-east coast, had been anything but idle. His emissaries, chiefly
Buddhist priests, were everywhere, went everywhere, gathering in even the
least of the provincial magistrates to allegiance to him. It takes the cold
patience of the Asiatic to conceive and execute huge and complicated
conspiracies. The strength of Chong Mong-jus palace clique grew beyond
Yunsans wildest dreaming. Chong Mong-ju corrupted the very palace guards,
the Tiger Hunters of Pyeng-Yang whom Kim commanded. And while Yunsan
nodded, while I devoted myself to sport and to the Lady Om, while Hendrik
Hamel perfected plans for the looting of the Imperial treasury, and while
Johannes Maartens schemed his own scheme among the tombs of Tabong
Mountain, the volcano of Chong Mong-jus devising gave no warning beneath
us.
Lord, Lord, when the storm broke! It was stand out from under, all hands,
and save your necks. And there were necks that were not saved. The
springing of the conspiracy was premature. Johannes Maartens really
precipitated the catastrophe, and what he did was too favourable for Chong
Mong-ju not to advantage by.
For, see. The people of Cho-Sen are fanatical ancestor-worshippers, and
that old pirate of a booty-lusting Dutchman, with his four cunies, in far
Kyong-ju, did no less a thing than raid the tombs of the gold-coffined, longburied
kings of ancient Silla. The work was done in the night, and for the rest
of the night they travelled for the sea-coast. But the following day a dense fog
lay over the land and they lost their way to the waiting junk which Johannes
Maartens had privily outfitted. He and the cunies were rounded in by Yi Sunsin,
the local magistrate, one of Chong Mong-jus adherents. Only Herman
Tromp escaped in the fog, and was able, long after, to tell me of the adventure.
That night, although news of the sacrilege was spreading through Cho-Sen
and half the northern provinces had risen on their officials, Keijo and the
Court slept in ignorance. By Chong Mong-jus orders the beacons flared their
nightly message of peace. And night by night the peace-beacons flared, while
day and night Chong Mong-jus messengers killed horses on all the roads of
Cho-Sen. It was my luck to see his messenger arrive at Keijo. At twilight, as
I rode out through the great gate of the capital, I saw the jaded horse fall and
the exhausted rider stagger in on foot; and I little dreamed that that man
carried my destiny with him into Keijo.
His message sprang the palace revolution. I was not due to return until
midnight, and by midnight all was over. At nine in the evening the
conspirators secured possession of the Emperor in his own apartments. They
compelled him to order the immediate attendance of the heads of all
departments, and as they presented themselves, one by one, before his eyes,
they were cut down. Meantime the Tiger Hunters were up and out of hand.
Yunsan and Hendrik Hamel were badly beaten with the flats of swords and
made prisoners. The seven other cunies escaped from the palace along with
the Lady Om. They were enabled to do this by Kim, who held the way, sword
in hand, against his own Tiger Hunters. They cut him down and trod over
him. Unfortunately he did not die of his wounds.
Like a flaw of wind on a summer night the revolution, a palace revolution
of course, blew and was past. Chong Mong-ju was in the saddle. The
Emperor ratified whatever Chong Mong-ju willed. Beyond gasping at the
sacrilege of the kings tombs and applauding Chong Mong-ju, Cho-Sen was
unperturbed. Heads of officials fell everywhere, being replaced by Chong
Mong-jus appointees; but there were no risings against the dynasty.
And now to what befell us. Johannes Maartens and his three cunies, after
being exhibited to be spat upon by the rabble of half the villages and walled
cities of Cho-Sen, were buried to their necks in the ground of the open space
before the palace gate. Water was given them that they might live longer to
yearn for the food, steaming hot and savoury and changed hourly, that was
place temptingly before them. They say old Johannes Maartens lived longest,
not giving up the ghost for a full fifteen days.
Kim was slowly crushed to death, bone by bone and joint by joint, by the
torturers, and was a long time in dying. Hamel, whom Chong Mong-ju
divined as my brains, was executed by the paddlein short, was promptly and
expeditiously beaten to death to the delighted shouts of the Keijo populace.
Yunsan was given a brave death. He was playing a game of chess with the
jailer, when the Emperors, or, rather, Chong Mong-jus, messenger arrived
with the poison-cup. Wait a moment, said Yunsan. You should be bettermannered
than to disturb a man in the midst of a game of chess. I shall drink
directly the game is over. And while the messenger waited Yunsan finished
the game, winning it, then drained the cup.
It takes an Asiatic to temper his spleen to steady, persistent, life-long
revenge. This Chong Mong-ju did with the Lady Om and me. He did not
destroy us. We were not even imprisoned. The Lady Om was degraded of all
rank and divested of all possessions. An imperial decree was promulgated and
posted in the last least village of Cho-Sen to the effect that I was of the house
of Koryu and that no man might kill me. It was further declared that the eight
sea-cunies who survived must not be killed. Neither were they to be favoured.
They were to be outcasts, beggars on the highways. And that is what the Lady
Om and I became, beggars on the highways.
Forty long years of persecution followed, for Chong Mong-jus hatred of
the Lady Om and me was deathless. Worse luck, he was favoured with long
life as well as were we cursed with it. I have said the Lady Om was a wonder
of a woman. Beyond endlessly repeating that statement, words fail me, with
which to give her just appreciation. Somewhere I have heard that a great lady
once said to her lover: A tent and a crust of bread with you. In effect that is
what the Lady Om said to me. More than to say it, she lived the last letter of
it, when more often than not crusts were not plentiful and the sky itself was
our tent.
Every effort I made to escape beggary was in the end frustrated by Chong
Mong-ju. In Songdo I became a fuel-carrier, and the Lady Om and I shared a
hut that was vastly more comfortable than the open road in bitter winter
weather. But Chong Mong-ju found me out, and I was beaten and planked and
put out upon the road. That was a terrible winter, the winter poor What-
Now Vandervoot froze to death on the streets of Keijo.
In Pyeng-yang I became a water-carrier, for know that that old city, whose
walls were ancient even in the time of David, was considered by the people to
be a canoe, and that, therefore, to sink a well inside the walls would be to
scupper the city. So all day long thousands of coolies, water-jars yoked to
their shoulders, tramp out the river gate and back. I became one of these, until
Chong Mong-ju sought me out, and I was beaten and planked and set upon the
highway.
Ever it was the same. In far Wiju I became a dog-butcher, killing the
brutes publicly before my open stall, cutting and hanging the caresses for sale,
tanning the hides under the filth of the feet of the passers-by by spreading the
hides, raw-side up, in the muck of the street. But Chong Mong-ju found me
out. I was a dyers helper in Pyonhan, a gold-miner in the placers of Kangwun,
a rope-maker and twine-twister in Chiksan. I plaited straw hats in
Padok, gathered grass in Whang-hai, and in Masenpo sold myself to a rice
farmer to toil bent double in the flooded paddies for less than a coolies pay.
But there was never a time or place that the long arm of Chong Mong-ju did
not reach out and punish and thrust me upon the beggars way.
The Lady Om and I searched two seasons and found a single root of the
wild mountain ginseng, which is esteemed so rare and precious a thing by the
doctors that the Lady Om and I could have lived a year in comfort from the
sale of our one root. But in the selling of it I was apprehended, the root
confiscated, and I was better beaten and longer planked than ordinarily.
Everywhere the wandering members of the great Peddlers Guild carried
word of me, of my comings and goings and doings, to Chong Mong-ju at
Keijo. Only twice, in all the days after my downfall, did I meet Chong Mongju
face to face. The first time was a wild winter night of storm in the high
mountains of Kang-wun. A few hoarded coppers had bought for the Lady Om
and me sleeping space in the dirtiest and coldest corner of the one large room
of the inn. We were just about to begin on our meagre supper of horse-beans
and wild garlic cooked into a stew with a scrap of bullock that must have died
of old age, when there was a tinkling of bronze pony bells and the stamp of
hoofs without. The doors opened, and entered Chong Mong-ju, the
personification of well-being, prosperity and power, shaking the snow from
his priceless Mongolian furs. Place was made for him and his dozen retainers,
and there was room for all without crowding, when his eyes chanced to light
on the Lady Om and me.
The vermin there in the cornerclear it out, he commanded.
And his horse-boys lashed us with their whips and drove us out into the
storm. But there was to be another meeting, after long years, as you shall see.
There was no escape. Never was I permitted to cross the northern frontier.
Never was I permitted to put foot to a sampan on the sea. The Peddlers Guild
carried these commands of Chong Mong-ju to every village and every soul in
all Cho-Sen. I was a marked man.
Lord, Lord, Cho-Sen, I know your every highway and mountain path, all
your walled cities and the least of your villages. For two-score years I
wandered and starved over you, and the Lady Om ever wandered and starved
with me. What we in extremity have eaten!Leavings of dogs flesh, putrid
and unsaleable, flung to us by the mocking butchers; minari, a water-cress
gathered from stagnant pools of slime; spoiled kimchi that would revolt the
stomachs of peasants and that could be smelled a mile. AyI have stolen
bones from curs, gleaned the public road for stray grains of rice, robbed ponies
of their steaming bean-soup on frosty nights.
It is not strange that I did not die. I knew and was upheld by two things:
the first, the Lady Om by my side; the second, the certain faith that the time
would come when my thumbs and fingers would fast-lock in the gullet of
Chong Mong-ju.
Turned always away at the city gates of Keijo, where I sought Chong
Mong-ju, we wandered on, through seasons and decades of seasons, across
Cho-Sen, whose every inch of road was an old story to our sandals. Our
history and identity were wide-scattered as the land was wide. No person
breathed who did not know us and our punishment. There were coolies and
peddlers who shouted insults at the Lady Om and who felt the wrath of my
clutch in their topknots, the wrath of my knuckles in their faces. There were
old women in far mountain villages who looked on the beggar woman by my
side, the lost Lady Om, and sighed and shook their heads while their eyes
dimmed with tears. And there were young women whose faces warmed with
compassion as they gazed on the bulk of my shoulders, the blue of my eyes,
and my long yellow hairI who had once been a prince of Koryu and the
ruler of provinces. And there were rabbles of children that tagged at our heels,
jeering and screeching, pelting us with filth of speech and of the common
road.
Beyond the Yalu, forty miles wide, was the strip of waste that constituted
the northern frontier and that ran from sea to sea. It was not really waste land,
but land that had been deliberately made waste in carrying out Cho-Sens
policy of isolation. On this forty-mile strip all farms, villages and cities had
been destroyed. It was no mans land, infested with wild animals and
traversed by companies of mounted Tiger Hunters whose business was to kill
any human being they found. That way there was no escape for us, nor was
there any escape for us by sea.
As the years passed my seven fellow-cunies came more to frequent Fusan.
It was on the south-east coast where the climate was milder. But more than
climate, it lay nearest of all Cho-Sen to Japan. Across the narrow straits, just
farther than the eye can see, was the one hope of escape Japan, where
doubtless occasional ships of Europe came. Strong upon me is the vision of
those seven ageing men on the cliffs of Fusan yearning with all their souls
across the sea they would never sail again.
At times junks of Japan were sighted, but never lifted a familiar topsail of
old Europe above the sea-rim. Years came and went, and the seven cunies and
myself and the Lady Om, passing through middle life into old age, more and
more directed our footsteps to Fusan. And as the years came and went, now
one, now another failed to gather at the usual place. Hans Amden was the first
to die. Jacob Brinker, who was his road-mate, brought the news. Jacob
Brinker was the last of the seven, and he was nearly ninety when he died,
outliving Tromp a scant two years. I well remember the pair of them, toward
the last, worn and feeble, in beggars rags, with beggars bowls, sunning
themselves side by side on the cliffs, telling old stories and cackling shrillvoiced
like children. And Tromp would maunder over and over of how
Johannes Maartens and the cunies robbed the kings on Tabong Mountain, each
embalmed in his golden coffin with an embalmed maid on either side; and of
how these ancient proud ones crumbled to dust within the hour while the
cunies cursed and sweated at junking the coffins.
As sure as loot is loot, old Johannes Maartens would have got away and
across the Yellow Sea with his booty had it not been for the fog next day that
lost him. That cursed fog! A song was made of it, that I heard and hated
through all Cho-Sen to my dying day. Here run two lines of it:
Yanggukeni chajin anga
Wheanpong tora deunda,
The thick fog of the Westerners
Broods over Whean peak.
For forty years I was a beggar of Cho-Sen. Of the fourteen of us that were
cast away only I survived. The Lady Om was of the same indomitable stuff,
and we aged together. She was a little, weazened, toothless old woman toward
the last; but ever she was the wonder woman, and she carried my heart in hers
to the end. For an old man, three score and ten, I still retained great strength.
My face was withered, my yellow hair turned white, my broad shoulders
shrunken, and yet much of the strength of my sea-cuny days resided in the
muscles left me.
Thus it was that I was able to do what I shall now relate. It was a spring
morning on the cliffs of Fusan, hard by the highway, that the Lady Om and I
sat warming in the sun. We were in the rags of beggary, prideless in the dust,
and yet I was laughing heartily at some mumbled merry quip of the Lady Om
when a shadow fell upon us. It was the great litter of Chong Mong-ju, borne
by eight coolies, with outriders before and behind and fluttering attendants on
either side.
Two emperors, civil war, famine, and a dozen palace revolutions had come
and gone; and Chong Mong-ju remained, even then the great power at Keijo.
He must have been nearly eighty that spring morning on the cliffs when he
signalled with palsied hand for his litter to be rested down that he might gaze
upon us whom he had punished for so long.
Now, O my king, the Lady Om mumbled low to me, then turned to
whine an alms of Chong Mong-ju, whom she affected not to recognize.
And I knew what was her thought. Had we not shared it for forty years?
And the moment of its consummation had come at last. So I, too, affected not
to recognize my enemy, and, putting on an idiotic senility, I, too, crawled in
the dust toward the litter whining for mercy and charity.
The attendants would have driven me back, but with age-quavering cackles
Chong Mong-ju restrained them. He lifted himself on a shaking elbow, and
with the other shaking hand drew wider apart the silken curtains. His withered
old face was transfigured with delight as he gloated on us.
O my king, the Lady Om whined to me in her beggars chant; and I
knew all her long-tried love and faith in my emprise were in that chant.
And the red wrath was up in me, ripping and tearing at my will to be free.
Small wonder that I shook with the effort to control. The shaking, happily,
they took for the weakness of age. I held up my brass begging bowl, and
whined more dolefully, and bleared my eyes to hide the blue fire I knew was
in them, and calculated the distance and my strength for the leap.
Then I was swept away in a blaze of red. There was a crashing of curtains
and curtain-poles and a squawking and squalling of attendants as my hands
closed on Chong Mong-jus throat. The litter overturned, and I scarce knew
whether I was heads or heels, but my clutch never relaxed.
In the confusion of cushions and quilts and curtains, at first few of the
attendants blows found me. But soon the horsemen were in, and their heavy
whip-butts began to fall on my head, while a multitude of hands clawed and
tore at me. I was dizzy, but not unconscious, and very blissful with my old
fingers buried in that lean and scraggly old neck I had sought for so long. The
blows continued to rain on my head, and I had whirling thoughts in which I
likened myself to a bulldog with jaws fast-locked. Chong Mong-ju could not
escape me, and I know he was well dead ere darkness, like that of an
anæsthetic, descended upon me there on the cliffs of Fusan by the Yellow Sea.
CHAPTER XVI
Warden Atherton, when he thinks of me, must feel anything but pride. I
have taught him what spirit is, humbled him with my own spirit that rose
invulnerable, triumphant, above all his tortures. I sit here in Folsom, in
Murderers Row, awaiting my execution; Warden Atherton still holds his
political job and is king over San Quentin and all the damned within its walls;
and yet, in his heart of hearts, he knows that I am greater than he.
In vain Warden Atherton tried to break my spirit. And there were times,
beyond any shadow of doubt, when he would have been glad had I died in the
jacket. So the long inquisition went on. As he had told me, and as he told me
repeatedly, it was dynamite or curtains.
Captain Jamie was a veteran in dungeon horrors, yet the time came when
he broke down under the strain I put on him and on the rest of my torturers.
So desperate did he become that he dared words with the Warden and washed
his hands of the affair. From that day until the end of my torturing he never
set foot in solitary.
Yes, and the time came when Warden Atherton grew afraid, although he
still persisted in trying to wring from me the hiding-place of the non-existent
dynamite. Toward the last he was badly shaken by Jake Oppenheimer.
Oppenheimer was fearless and outspoken. He had passed unbroken through
all their prison hells, and out of superior will could beard them to their teeth.
Morrell rapped me a full account of the incident. I was unconscious in the
jacket at the time.
Warden, Oppenheimer had said, youve bitten off more than you can
chew. It aint a case of killing Standing. Its a case of killing three men, for as
sure as you kill him, sooner or later Morrell and I will get the word out and
what you have done will be known from one end of California to the other.
Youve got your choice. Youve either got to let up on Standing or kill all
three of us. Standings got your goat. So have I. So has Morrell. You are a
stinking coward, and you havent got the backbone and guts to carry out the
dirty butchers work youd like to do.
Oppenheimer got a hundred hours in the jacket for it, and, when he was
unlaced, spat in the Wardens face and received a second hundred hours on
end. When he was unlaced this time, the Warden was careful not to be in
solitary. That he was shaken by Oppenheimers words there is no doubt.
But it was Doctor Jackson who was the arch-fiend. To him I was a
novelty, and he was ever eager to see how much more I could stand before I
broke.
He can stand twenty days off the bat, he bragged to the Warden in my
presence.
You are conservative, I broke in. I can stand forty days. Pshaw! I can
stand a hundred when such as you administer it. And, remembering my seacunys
patience of forty years waiting ere I got my hands on Chong Mongjus
gullet, I added: You prison curs, you dont know what a man is. You
think a man is made in your own cowardly images. Behold, I am a man. You
are feeblings. I am your master. You cant bring a squeal out of me. You
think it remarkable, for you know how easily you would squeal.
Oh, I abused them, called them sons of toads, hells scullions, slime of the
pit. For I was above them, beyond them. They were slaves. I was free spirit.
My flesh only lay pent there in solitary. I was not pent. I had mastered the
flesh, and the spaciousness of time was mine to wander in, while my poor
flesh, not even suffering, lay in the little death in the jacket.
Much of my adventures I rapped to my two comrades. Morrell believed,
for he had himself tasted the little death. But Oppenheimer, enraptured with
my tales, remained a sceptic to the end. His regret was naïve, and at times
really pathetic, in that I had devoted my life to the science of agriculture
instead of to fiction writing.
But, man, I reasoned with him, what do I know of myself about this
Cho-Sen? I am able to identify it with what is to-day called Korea, and that is
about all. That is as far as my reading goes. For instance, how possibly, out
of my present lifes experience, could I know anything about kimchi? Yet I
know kimchi. It is a sort of sauerkraut. When it is spoiled it stinks to heaven.
I tell you, when I was Adam Strang, I ate kimchi thousands of times. I know
good kimchi, bad kimchi, rotten kimchi. I know the best kimchi is made by
the women of Wosan. Now how do I know that? It is not in the content of my
mind, Darrell Standings mind. It is in the content of Adam Strangs mind,
who, through various births and deaths, bequeathed his experiences to me,
Darrell Standing, along with the rest of the experiences of those various other
lives that intervened. Dont you see, Jake? That is how men come to be, to
grow, how spirit develops.
Aw, come off, he rapped back with the quick imperative knuckles I knew
so well. Listen to your uncle talk now. I am Jake Oppenheimer. I always
have been Jake Oppenheimer. No other guy is in my makings. What I know I
know as Jake Oppenheimer. Now what do I know? Ill tell you one thing. I
know kimchi. Kimchi is a sort of sauerkraut made in a country that used to be
called Cho-Sen. The women of Wosan make the best kimchi, and when
kimchi is spoiled it stinks to heaven. You keep out of this, Ed. Wait till I tie
the professor up.
Now, professor, how do I know all this stuff about kimchi? It is not in the
content of my mind.
But it is, I exulted. I put it there.
All right, old boss. Then who put it into your mind?
Adam Strang.
Not on your tintype. Adam Strang is a pipe-dream. You read it
somewhere.
Never, I averred. The little I read of Korea was the war correspondence
at the time of the Japanese-Russian War.
Do you remember all you read? Oppenheimer queried.
No.
Some you forget?
Yes, but
Thats all, thank you, he interrupted, in the manner of a lawyer abruptly
concluding a cross-examination after having extracted a fatal admission from a
witness.
It was impossible to convince Oppenheimer of my sincerity. He insisted
that I was making it up as I went along, although he applauded what he called
my to-be-continued-in-our-next, and, at the times they were resting me up
from the jacket, was continually begging and urging me to run off a few more
chapters.
Now, professor, cut out that high-brow stuff, he would interrupt Ed
Morrells and my metaphysical discussions, and tell us more about the kisang
and the cunies. And, say, while youre about it, tell us what happened to
the Lady Om when that rough-neck husband of hers choked the old geezer and
croaked.
How often have I said that form perishes. Let me repeat. Form perishes.
Matter has no memory. Spirit only remembers, as here, in prison cells, after
the centuries, knowledge of the Lady Om and Chong Mong-ju persisted in my
mind, was conveyed by me into Jake Oppenheimers mind, and by him was
reconveyed into my mind in the argot and jargon of the West. And now I have
conveyed it into your mind, my reader. Try to eliminate it from your mind.
You cannot. As long as you live what I have told will tenant your mind.
Mind? There is nothing permanent but mind. Matter fluxes, crystallizes, and
fluxes again, and forms are never repeated. Forms disintegrate into the eternal
nothingness from which there is no return. Form is apparitional and passes, as
passed the physical forms of the Lady Om and Chong Mong-ju. But the
memory of them remains, shall always remain as long as spirit endures, and
spirit is indestructible.
One thing sticks out as big as a house, was Oppenheimers final criticism
of my Adam Strang adventure. And that is that youve done more hanging
around Chinatown dumps and hop-joints than was good for a respectable
college professor. Evil communications, you know. I guess thats what
brought you here.
Before I return to my adventures I am compelled to tell one remarkable
incident that occurred in solitary. It is remarkable in two ways. It shows the
astounding mental power of that child of the gutters, Jake Oppenheimer; and it
is in itself convincing proof of the verity of my experiences when in the jacket
coma.
Say, professor, Oppenheimer tapped to me one day. When you was
spieling that Adam Strang yarn, I remember you mentioned playing chess with
that royal souse of an emperors brother. Now is that chess like our kind of
chess?
Of course I had to reply that I did not know, that I did not remember the
details after I returned to my normal state. And of course he laughed goodnaturedly
at what he called my foolery. Yet I could distinctly remember that in
my Adam Strang adventure I had frequently played chess. The trouble was
that whenever I came back to consciousness in solitary, unessential and
intricate details faded from my memory.
It must be remembered that for convenience I have assembled my
intermittent and repetitional jacket experiences into coherent and consecutive
narratives. I never knew in advance where my journeys in time would take
me. For instance, I have a score of different times returned to Jesse Fancher in
the wagon-circle at Mountain Meadows. In a single ten-days bout in the
jacket I have gone back and back, from life to life, and often skipping whole
series of lives that at other times I have covered, back to prehistoric time, and
back of that to days ere civilization began.
So I resolved, on my next return from Adam Strangs experiences,
whenever it might be, that I should, immediately, I on resuming
consciousness, concentrate upon what visions and memories. I had brought
back of chess playing. As luck would have it, I had to endure Oppenheimers
chaffing for a full month ere it happened. And then, no sooner out of jacket
and circulation restored, than I started knuckle-rapping the information.
Further, I taught Oppenheimer the chess Adam Strang had played in Cho-
Sen centuries agone. It was different from Western chess, and yet could not
but be fundamentally the same, tracing back to a common origin, probably
India. In place of our sixty-four squares there are eighty-one squares. We
have eight pawns on a side; they have nine; and though limited similarly, the
principle of moving is different.
Also, in the Cho-Sen game, there are twenty pieces and pawns against our
sixteen, and they are arrayed in three rows instead of two. Thus, the nine
pawns are in the front row; in the middle row are two pieces resembling our
castles; and in the back row, midway, stands the king, flanked in order on
either side by gold money, silver money, knight, and spear. It will be
observed that in the Cho-Sen game there is no queen. A further radical
variation is that a captured piece or pawn is not removed from the board. It
becomes the property of the captor and is thereafter played by him.
Well, I taught Oppenheimer this gamea far more difficult achievement
than our own game, as will be admitted, when the capturing and recapturing
and continued playing of pawns and pieces is considered. Solitary is not
heated. It would be a wickedness to ease a convict from any spite of the
elements. And many a dreary day of biting cold did Oppenheimer and I forget
that and the following winter in the absorption of Cho-Sen chess.
But there was no convincing him that I had in truth brought this game back
to San Quentin across the centuries. He insisted that I had read about it
somewhere, and, though I had forgotten the reading, the stuff of the reading
was nevertheless in the content of my mind, ripe to be brought out in any pipedream.
Thus he turned the tenets and jargon of psychology back on me.
Whats to prevent your inventing it right here in solitary? was his next
hypothesis. Didnt Ed invent the knuckle-talk? And aint you and me
improving on it right along? I got you, bo. You invented it. Say, get it
patented. I remember when I was night-messenger some guy invented a fool
thing called Pigs in Clover and made millions out of it.
Theres no patenting this, I replied. Doubtlessly the Asiatics have been
playing it for thousands of years. Wont you believe me when I tell you I
didnt invent it?
Then you must have read about it, or seen the Chinks playing it in some
of those hop-joints you was always hanging around, was his last word.
But I have a last word. There is a Japanese murderer here in Folsomor
was, for he was executed last week. I talked the matter over with him; and the
game Adam Strang played, and which I taught Oppenheimer, proved quite
similar to the Japanese game. They are far more alike than is either of them
like the Western game.
CHAPTER XVII
You, my reader, will remember, far back at the beginning of this narrative,
how, when a little lad on the Minnesota farm, I looked at the photographs of
the Holy Land and recognized places and pointed out changes in places. Also
you will remember, as I described the scene I had witnessed of the healing of
the lepers, I told the missionary that I was a big man with a big sword, astride
a horse and looking on.
That childhood incident was merely a trailing cloud of glory, as
Wordsworth puts it. Not in entire forgetfulness had I, little Darrell Standing,
come into the world. But those memories of other times and places that
glimmered up to the surface of my child consciousness soon failed and faded.
In truth, as is the way with all children, the shades of the prison-house closed
about me, and I remembered my mighty past no more. Every man born of
woman has a past mighty as mine. Very few men born of women have been
fortunate enough to suffer years of solitary and strait-jacketing. That was my
good fortune. I was enabled to remember once again, and to remember,
among other things, the time when I sat astride a horse and beheld the lepers
healed.
My name was Ragnar Lodbrog. I was in truth a large man. I stood half a
head above the Romans of my legion. But that was later, after the time of my
journey from Alexandria to Jerusalem, that I came to command a legion. It
was a crowded life, that. Books and books, and years of writing could not
record it all. So I shall briefen and no more than hint at the beginnings of it.
Now all is clear and sharp save the very beginning. I never knew my
mother. I was told that I was tempest-born, on a beaked ship in the Northern
Sea, of a captured woman, after a sea fight and a sack of a coastal stronghold.
I never heard the name of my mother. She died at the height of the tempest.
She was of the North Danes, so old Lingaard told me. He told me much that I
was too young to remember, yet little could he tell. A sea fight and a sack,
battle and plunder and torch, a flight seaward in the long ships to escape
destruction upon the rocks, and a killing strain and struggle against the frosty,
foundering seaswho, then, should know aught or mark a stranger woman in
her hour with her feet fast set on the way of death? Many died. Men marked
the living women, not the dead.
Sharp-bitten into my child imagination are the incidents immediately after
my birth, as told me by old Lingaard. Lingaard, too old to labour at the
sweeps, had been surgeon, undertaker, and midwife of the huddled captives in
the open midships. So I was delivered in storm, with the spume of the cresting
seas salt upon me.
Not many hours old was I when Tostig Lodbrog first laid eyes on me. His
was the lean ship, and his the seven other lean ships that had made the foray,
fled the rapine, and won through the storm. Tostig Lodbrog was also called
Muspell, meaning The Burning; for he was ever aflame with wrath. Brave
he was, and cruel he was, with no heart of mercy in that great chest of his. Ere
the sweat of battle had dried on him, leaning on his axe, he ate the heart of
Ngrun after the fight at Hasfarth. Because of mad anger he sold his son,
Garulf, into slavery to the Juts. I remember, under the smoky rafters of
Brunanbuhr, how he used to call for the skull of Guthlaf for a drinking beaker.
Spiced wine he would have from no other cup than the skull of Guthlaf.
And to him, on the reeling deck after the storm was past, old Lingaard
brought me. I was only hours old, wrapped naked in a salt-crusted wolfskin.
Now it happens, being prematurely born, that I was very small.
Ho! ho!a dwarf! cried Tostig, lowering a pot of mead half-drained
from his lips to stare at me.
The day was bitter, but they say he swept me naked from the wolfskin, and
by my foot, between thumb and forefinger, dangled me to the bite of the wind.
A roach! he ho-hod. A shrimp! A sea-louse! And he made to squash
me between huge forefinger and thumb, either of which, Lingaard avers, was
thicker than my leg or thigh.
But another whim was upon him.
The youngling is a-thirst. Let him drink.
And therewith, head-downward, into the half-pot of mead he thrust me.
And might well have drowned in this drink of menI who had never known a
mothers breast in the briefness of time I had livedhad it not been for
Lingaard. But when he plucked me forth from the brew, Tostig Lodbrog
struck him down in a rage. We rolled on the deck, and the great bear hounds,
captured in the fight with the North Danes just past, sprang upon us.
Ho! ho! roared Tostig Lodbrog, as the old man and I and the wolfskin
were mauled and worried by the dogs.
But Lingaard gained his feet, saving me but losing the wolfskin to the
hounds.
Tostig Lodbrog finished the mead and regarded me, while Lingaard knew
better than to beg for mercy where was no mercy.
Hop o my thumb, quoth Tostig. By Odin, the women of the North
Danes are a scurvy breed. They birth dwarfs, not men. Of what use is this
thing? He will never make a man. Listen you, Lingaard, grow him to be a
drink-boy at Brunanbuhr. And have an eye on the dogs lest they slobber him
down by mistake as a meat-crumb from the table.
I knew no woman. Old Lingaard was midwife and nurse, and for nursery
were reeling decks and the stamp and trample of men in battle or storm. How
I survived puling infancy, God knows. I must have been born iron in a day of
iron, for survive I did, to give the lie to Tostigs promise of dwarf-hood. I
outgrew all beakers and tankards, and not for long could he half-drown me in
his mead pot. This last was a favourite feat of his. It was his raw humour, a
sally esteemed by him delicious wit.
My first memories are of Tostig Lodbrogs beaked ships and fighting men,
and of the feast hall at Brunanbuhr when our boats lay beached beside the
frozen fjord. For I was made drink-boy, and amongst my earliest recollections
are toddling with the wine-filled skull of Guthlaf to the head of the table where
Tostig bellowed to the rafters. They were madmen, all of madness, but it
seemed the common way of life to me who knew naught else. They were men
of quick rages and quick battling. Their thoughts were ferocious; so was their
eating ferocious, and their drinking. And I grew like them. How else could I
grow, when I served the drink to the bellowings of drunkards and to the skalds
singing of Hialli, and the bold Hogni, and of the Niflungs gold, and of
Gudruns revenge on Atli when she gave him the hearts of his children and
hers to eat while battle swept the benches, tore down the hangings raped from
southern coasts, and, littered the feasting board with swift corpses.
Oh, I, too, had a rage, well tutored in such school. I was but eight when I
showed my teeth at a drinking between the men of Brunanbuhr and the Juts
who came as friends with the jarl Agard in his three long ships. I stood at
Tostig Lodbrogs shoulder, holding the skull of Guthlaf that steamed and stank
with the hot, spiced wine. And I waited while Tostig should complete his
ravings against the North Dane men. But still he raved and still I waited, till
he caught breath of fury to assail the North Dane woman. Whereat I
remembered my North Dane mother, and saw my rage red in my eyes, and
smote him with the skull of Guthlaf, so that he was wine-drenched, and wineblinded,
and fire-burnt. And as he reeled unseeing, smashing his great groping
clutches through the air at me, I was in and short-dirked him thrice in belly,
thigh and buttock, than which I could reach no higher up the mighty frame of
him.
And the jarl Agards steel was out, and his Juts joining him as he shouted:
A bear cub! A bear cub! By Odin, let the cub fight!
And there, under that roaring roof of Brunanbuhr, the babbling drink-boy
of the North Danes fought with mighty Lodbrog. And when, with one stroke,
I was flung, dazed and breathless, half the length of that great board, my flying
body mowing down pots and tankards, Lodbrog cried out command:
Out with him! Fling him to the hounds!
But the jarl would have it no, and clapped Lodbrog on the shoulder, and
asked me as a gift of friendship.
And south I went, when the ice passed out of the fjord, in Jarl Agards
ships. I was made drink-boy and sword-bearer to him, and in lieu of other
name was called Ragnar Lodbrog. Agards country was neighbour to the
Frisians, and a sad, flat country of fog and fen it was. I was with him for three
years, to his death, always at his back, whether hunting swamp wolves or
drinking in the great hall where Elgiva, his young wife, often sat among her
women. I was with Agard in south foray with his ships along what would be
now the coast of France, and there I learned that still south were warmer
seasons and softer climes and women.
But we brought back Agard wounded to death and slow-dying. And we
burned his body on a great pyre, with Elgiva, in her golden corselet, beside
him singing. And there were household slaves in golden collars that burned of
a plenty there with her, and nine female thralls, and eight male slaves of the
Angles that were of gentle birth and battle-captured. And there were live
hawks so burned, and the two hawk-boys with their birds.
But I, the drink-boy, Ragnar Lodbrog, did not burn. I was eleven, and
unafraid, and had never worn woven cloth on my body. And as the flames
sprang up, and Elgiva sang her death-song, and the thralls and slaves
screeched their unwillingness to die, I tore away my fastenings, leaped, and
gained the fens, the gold collar of my slavehood still on my neck, footing it
with the hounds loosed to tear me down.
In the fens were wild men, masterless men, fled slaves, and outlaws, who
were hunted in sport as the wolves were hunted.
For three years I knew never roof nor fire, and I grew hard as the frost, and
would have stolen a woman from the Juts but that the Frisians by mischance,
in a two days hunt, ran me down. By them I was looted of my gold collar and
traded for two wolf-hounds to Edwy, of the Saxons, who put an iron collar on
me, and later made of me and five other slaves a present to Athel of the East
Angles. I was thrall and fighting man, until, lost in an unlucky raid far to the
east beyond our marches, I was sold among the Huns, and was a swineherd
until I escaped south into the great forests and was taken in as a freeman by
the Teutons, who were many, but who lived in small tribes and drifted
southward before the Hun advance.
And up from the south into the great forests came the Romans, fighting
men all, who pressed us back upon the Huns. It was a crushage of the peoples
for lack of room; and we taught the Romans what fighting was, although in
truth we were no less well taught by them.
But always I remembered the sun of the south-land that I had glimpsed in
the ships of Agard, and it was my fate, caught in this south drift of the
Teutons, to be captured by the Romans and be brought back to the sea which I
had not seen since I was lost away from the East Angles. I was made a sweepslave
in the galleys, and it was as a sweep-slave that at last I came to Rome.
All the story is too long of how I became a freeman, a citizen, and a
soldier, and of how, when I was thirty, I journeyed to Alexandria, and from
Alexandria to Jerusalem. Yet what I have told from the time when I was
baptized in the mead-pot of Tostig Lodbrog I have been compelled to tell in
order that you may understand what manner of man rode in through the Jaffa
Gate and drew all eyes upon him.
Well might they look. They were small breeds, lighter-boned and lighterthewed,
these Romans and Jews, and a blonde like me they had never gazed
upon. All along the narrow streets they gave before me but stood to stare
wide-eyed at this yellow man from the north, or from God knew where so far
as they knew aught of the matter.
Practically all Pilates troops were auxiliaries, save for a handful of
Romans about the palace and the twenty Romans who rode with me. Often
enough have I found the auxiliaries good soldiers, but never so steadily
dependable as the Romans. In truth they were better fighting men the year
round than were we men of the North, who fought in great moods and sulked
in great moods. The Roman was invariably steady and dependable.
There was a woman from the court of Antipas, who was a friend of Pilates
wife and whom I met at Pilates the night of my arrival. I shall call her
Miriam, for Miriam was the name I loved her by. If it were merely difficult to
describe the charm of women, I would describe Miriam. But how describe
emotion in words? The charm of woman is wordless. It is different from
perception that culminates in reason, for it arises in sensation and culminates
in emotion, which, be it admitted, is nothing else than super-sensation.
In general, any woman has fundamental charm for any man. When this
charm becomes particular, then we call it love. Miriam had this particular
charm for me. Verily I was co-partner in her charm. Half of it was my own
mans life in me that leapt and met her wide-armed and made in me all that she
was desirable plus all my desire of her.
Miriam was a grand woman. I use the term advisedly. She was finebodied,
commanding, over and above the average Jewish woman in stature
and in line. She was an aristocrat in social caste; she was an aristocrat by
nature. All her ways were large ways, generous ways. She had brain, she had
wit, and, above all, she had womanliness. As you shall see, it was her
womanliness that betrayed her and me in they end. Brunette, olive-skinned,
oval-faced, her hair was blue-black with its blackness and her eyes were twin
wells of black. Never were more pronounced types of blonde and brunette in
man and woman met than in us.
And we met on the instant. There was no self-discussion, no waiting,
wavering, to make certain. She was mine the moment I looked upon her. And
by the same token she knew that I belonged to her above all men. I strode to
her. She half-lifted from her couch as if drawn upward to me. And then we
looked with all our eyes, blue eyes and black, until Pilates wife, a thin, tense,
overwrought woman, laughed nervously. And while I bowed to the wife and
gave greeting, I thought I saw Pilate give Miriam a significant glance, as if to
say, Is he not all I promised? For he had had word of my coming from
Sulpicius Quirinius, the legate of Syria. As well had Pilate and I been known
to each other before ever he journeyed out to be procurator over the Semitic
volcano of Jerusalem.
Much talk we had that night, especially Pilate, who spoke in detail of the
local situation, and who seemed lonely and desirous to share his anxieties with
some one and even to bid for counsel. Pilate was of the solid type of Roman,
with sufficient imagination intelligently to enforce the iron policy of Rome,
and not unduly excitable under stress.
But on this night it was plain that he was worried. The Jews had got on his
nerves. They were too volcanic, spasmodic, eruptive. And further, they were
subtle. The Romans had a straight, forthright way of going about anything.
The Jews never approached anything directly, save backwards, when they
were driven by compulsion. Left to themselves, they always approached by
indirection. Pilates irritation was due, as he explained, to the fact that the
Jews were ever intriguing to make him, and through him Rome, the catspaw in
the matter of their religious dissensions. As was well known to me, Rome did
not interfere with the religious notions of its conquered peoples; but the Jews
were for ever confusing the issues and giving a political cast to purely
unpolitical events.
Pilate waxed eloquent over the diverse sects and the fanatic uprisings and
riotings that were continually occurring.
Lodbrog, he said, one can never tell what little summer cloud of their
hatching may turn into a thunderstorm roaring and rattling about ones ears. I
am here to keep order and quiet. Despite me they make the place a hornets
nest. Far rather would I govern Scythians or savage Britons than these people
who are never at peace about God. Right now there is a man up to the north, a
fisherman turned preacher, and miracle-worker, who as well as not may soon
have all the country by the ears and my recall on its way from Rome.
This was the first I had heard of the man called Jesus, and I little remarked
it at the time. Not until afterward did I remember him, when the little summer
cloud had become a full-fledged thunderstorm.
I have had report of him, Pilate went on. He is not political. There is
no doubt of that. But trust Caiaphas, and Hanan behind Caiaphas, to make of
this fisherman a political thorn with which to prick Rome and ruin me.
This Caiaphas, I have heard of him as high priest, then who is this
Hanan? I asked.
The real high priest, a cunning fox, Pilate explained. Caiaphas was
appointed by Gratus, but Caiaphas is the shadow and the mouthpiece of
Hanan.
They have never forgiven you that little matter of the votive shields,
Miriam teased.
Whereupon, as a man will when his sore place is touched, Pilate launched
upon the episode, which had been an episode, no more, at the beginning, but
which had nearly destroyed him. In all innocence before his palace he had
affixed two shields with votive inscriptions. Ere the consequent storm that
burst on his head had passed the Jews had written their complaints to Tiberius,
who approved them and reprimanded Pilate.
I was glad, a little later, when I could have talk with Miriam. Pilates wife
had found opportunity to tell me about her. She was of old royal stock. Her
sister was wife of Philip, tetrarch of Gaulonitis and Batanæa. Now this Philip
was brother to Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and Peræa, and both were sons of
Herod, called by the Jews the Great. Miriam, as I understood, was at home
in the courts of both tetrarchs, being herself of the blood. Also, when a girl,
she had been betrothed to Archelaus at the time he was ethnarch of Jerusalem.
She had a goodly fortune in her own right, so that marriage had not been
compulsory. To boot, she had a will of her own, and was doubtless hard to
please in so important a matter as husbands.
It must have been in the very air we breathed, for in no time Miriam and I
were at it on the subject of religion. Truly, the Jews of that day battened on
religion as did we on fighting and feasting. For all my stay in that country
there was never a moment when my wits were not buzzing with the endless
discussions of life and death, law, and God. Now Pilate believed neither in
gods, nor devils, nor anything. Death, to him, was the blackness of unbroken
sleep; and yet, during his years in Jerusalem, he was ever vexed with the
inescapable fuss and fury of things religious. Why, I had a horse-boy on my
trip into Idumæa, a wretched creature that could never learn to saddle and who
yet could talk, and most learnedly, without breath, from nightfall to sunrise, on
the hair-splitting differences in the teachings of all the rabbis from Shemaiah
to Gamaliel.
But to return to Miriam.
You believe you are immortal, she was soon challenging me. Then why
do you fear to talk about it?
Why burden my mind with thoughts about certainties? I countered.
But are you certain? she insisted. Tell me about it. What is it like
your immortality?
And when I had told her of Niflheim and Muspell, of the birth of the giant
Ymir from the snowflakes, of the cow Andhumbla, and of Fenrir and Loki and
the frozen Jötunsas I say, when I had told her of all this, and of Thor and
Odin and our own Valhalla, she clapped her hands and cried out, with
sparkling eyes:
Oh, you barbarian! You great child! You yellow giant-thing of the frost!
You believer of old nurse tales and stomach satisfactions! But the spirit of
you, that which cannot die, where will it go when your body is dead?
As I have said, Valhalla, I answered. And my body shall be there, too.
Eating?drinking?fighting?
And loving, I added. We must have our women in heaven, else what is
heaven for?
I do not like your heaven, she said. It is a mad place, a beast place, a
place of frost and storm and fury.
And your heaven? I questioned.
Is always unending summer, with the year at the ripe for the fruits and
flowers and growing things.
I shook my head and growled:
I do not like your heaven. It is a sad place, a soft place, a place for
weaklings and eunuchs and fat, sobbing shadows of men.
My remarks must have glamoured her mind, for her eyes continued to
sparkle, and mine was half a guess that she was leading me on.
My heaven, she said, is the abode of the blest.
Valhalla is the abode of the blest, I asserted. For look you, who cares
for flowers where flowers always are? in my country, after the iron winter
breaks and the sun drives away the long night, the first blossoms twinkling on
the melting ice-edge are things of joy, and we look, and look again.
And fire! I cried out. Great glorious fire! A fine heaven yours where a
man cannot properly esteem a roaring fire under a tight roof with wind and
snow a-drive outside.
A simple folk, you, she was back at me. You build a roof and a fire in a
snowbank and call it heaven. In my heaven we do not have to escape the wind
and snow.
No, I objected. We build roof and fire to go forth from into the frost
and storm and to return to from the frost and storm. Mans life is fashioned
for battle with frost and storm. His very fire and roof he makes by his battling.
I know. For three years, once, I knew never roof nor fire. I was sixteen, and a
man, ere ever I wore woven cloth on my body. I was birthed in storm, after
battle, and my swaddling cloth was a wolfskin. Look at me and see what
manner of man lives in Valhalla.
And look she did, all a-glamour, and cried out:
You great, yellow giant-thing of a man! Then she added pensively,
Almost it saddens me that there may not be such men in my heaven.
It is a good world, I consoled her. Good is the plan and wide. There is
room for many heavens. It would seem that to each is given the heaven that is
his hearts desire. A good country, truly, there beyond the grave. I doubt not I
shall leave our feast halls and raid your coasts of sun and flowers, and steal
you away. My mother was so stolen.
And in the pause I looked at her, and she looked at me, and dared to look.
And my blood ran fire. By Odin, this was a woman!
What might have happened I know not, for Pilate, who had ceased from his
talk with Ambivius and for some time had sat grinning, broke the pause.
A rabbi, a Teutoberg rabbi! he gibed. A new preacher and a new
doctrine come to Jerusalem. Now will there be more dissensions, and riotings,
and stonings of prophets. The gods save us, it is a mad-house. Lodbrog, I
little thought it of you. Yet here you are, spouting and fuming as wildly as any
madman from the desert about what shall happen to you when you are dead.
One life at a time, Lodbrog. It saves trouble. It saves trouble.
Go on, Miriam, go on, his wife cried.
She had sat entranced during the discussion, with hands tightly clasped,
and the thought flickered up in my mind that she had already been corrupted
by the religious folly of Jerusalem. At any rate, as I was to learn in the days
that followed, she was unduly bent upon such matters. She was a thin woman,
as if wasted by fever. Her skin was tight-stretched. Almost it seemed I could
look through her hands did she hold them between me and the light. She was
a good woman, but highly nervous, and, at times, fancy-flighted about shades
and signs and omens. Nor was she above seeing visions and hearing voices.
As for me, I had no patience with such weaknesses. Yet was she a good
woman with no heart of evil.
***
I was on a mission for Tiberius, and it was my ill luck to see little of
Miriam. On my return from the court of Antipas she had gone into Batanæa to
Philips court, where was her sister. Once again I was back in Jerusalem, and,
though it was no necessity of my business to see Philip, who, though weak,
was faithful to Roman will, I journeyed into Batanæa in the hope of meeting
with Miriam.
Then there was my trip into Idumæa. Also, I travelled into Syria in
obedience to the command of Sulpicius Quirinius, who, as imperial legate,
was curious of my first-hand report of affairs in Jerusalem. Thus, travelling
wide and much, I had opportunity to observe the strangeness of the Jews who
were so madly interested in God. It was their peculiarity. Not content with
leaving such matters to their priests, they were themselves for ever turning
priests and preaching wherever they could find a listener. And listeners they
found a-plenty.
They gave up their occupations to wander about the country like beggars,
disputing and bickering with the rabbis and Talmudists in the synagogues and
temple porches. It was in Galilee, a district of little repute, the inhabitants of
which were looked upon as witless, that I crossed the track of the man Jesus.
It seems that he had been a carpenter, and after that a fisherman, and that his
fellow-fishermen had ceased dragging their nets and followed him in his
wandering life. Some few looked upon him as a prophet, but the most
contended that he was a madman. My wretched horse-boy, himself claiming
Talmudic knowledge second to none, sneered at Jesus, calling him the king of
the beggars, calling his doctrine Ebionism, which, as he explained to me, was
to the effect that only the poor should win to heaven, while the rich and
powerful were to burn for ever in some lake of fire.
It was my observation that it was the custom of the country for every man
to call every other man a madman. In truth, in my judgment, they were all
mad. There was a plague of them. They cast out devils by magic charms,
cured diseases by the laying on of hands, drank deadly poisons unharmed, and
unharmed played with deadly snakesor so they claimed. They ran away to
starve in the deserts. They emerged howling new doctrine, gathering crowds
about them, forming new sects that split on doctrine and formed more sects.
By Odin, I told Pilate, a trifle of our northern frost and snow would
cool their wits. This climate is too soft. In place of building roofs and hunting
meat, they are ever building doctrine.
And altering the nature of God, Pilate corroborated sourly. A curse on
doctrine.
So say I, I agreed. If ever I get away with unaddled wits from this mad
land, Ill cleave through whatever man dares mention to me what may happen
after I am dead.
Never were such trouble makers. Everything under the sun was pious or
impious to them. They, who were so clever in hair-splitting argument, seemed
incapable of grasping the Roman idea of the State. Everything political was
religious; everything religious was political. Thus every procurators hands
were full. The Roman eagles, the Roman statues, even the votive shields of
Pilate, were deliberate insults to their religion.
The Roman taking of the census was an abomination. Yet it had to be
done, for it was the basis of taxation. But there it was again. Taxation by the
State was a crime against their law and God. Oh, that Law! It was not the
Roman law. It was their law, what they called Gods law. There were the
zealots, who murdered anybody who broke this law. And for a procurator to
punish a zealot caught red-handed was to raise a riot or an insurrection.
Everything, with these strange people, was done in the name of God.
There were what we Romans called the thaumaturgi. They worked miracles to
prove doctrine. Ever has it seemed to me a witless thing to prove the
multiplication table by turning a staff into a serpent, or even into two serpents.
Yet these things the thaumaturgi did, and always to the excitement of the
common people.
Heavens, what sects and sects! Pharisees, Essenes, Sadduceesa legion
of them! No sooner did they start with a new quirk when it turned political.
Coponius, procurator fourth before Pilate, had a pretty time crushing the
Gaulonite sedition which arose in this fashion and spread down from Gamala.
In Jerusalem, that last time I rode in, it was easy to note the increasing
excitement of the Jews. They ran about in crowds, chattering and spouting.
Some were proclaiming the end of the world. Others satisfied themselves with
the imminent destruction of the Temple. And there were rank revolutionises
who announced that Roman rule was over and the new Jewish kingdom about
to begin.
Pilate, too, I noted, showed heavy anxiety. That they were giving him a
hard time of it was patent. But I will say, as you shall see, that he matched
their subtlety with equal subtlety; and from what I saw of him I have little
doubt but what he would have confounded many a disputant in the
synagogues.
But half a legion of Romans, he regretted to me, and I would take
Jerusalem by the throat . . . and then be recalled for my pains, I suppose.
Like me, he had not too much faith in the auxiliaries; and of Roman
soldiers we had but a scant handful.
Back again, I lodged in the palace, and to my great joy found Miriam there.
But little satisfaction was mine, for the talk ran long on the situation. There
was reason for this, for the city buzzed like the angry hornets nest it was. The
fast called the Passovera religious affair, of coursewas near, and
thousands were pouring in from the country, according to custom, to celebrate
the feast in Jerusalem. These newcomers, naturally, were all excitable folk,
else they would not be bent on such pilgrimage. The city was packed with
them, so that many camped outside the walls. As for me, I could not
distinguish how much of the ferment was due to the teachings of the
wandering fisherman, and how much of it was due to Jewish hatred for Rome.
A tithe, no more, and maybe not so much, is due to this Jesus, Pilate
answered my query. Look to Caiaphas and Hanan for the main cause of the
excitement. They know what they are about. They are stirring it up, to what
end who can tell, except to cause me trouble.
Yes, it is certain that Caiaphas and Hanan are responsible, Miriam said,
but you, Pontius Pilate, are only a Roman and do not understand. Were you a
Jew, you would realize that there is a greater seriousness at the bottom of it
than mere dissension of the sectaries or trouble-making for you and Rome.
The high priests and Pharisees, every Jew of place or wealth, Philip, Antipas,
myselfwe are all fighting for very life.
This fisherman may be a madman. If so, there is a cunning in his
madness. He preaches the doctrine of the poor. He threatens our law, and our
law is our life, as you have learned ere this. We are jealous of our law, as you
would be jealous of the air denied your body by a throttling hand on your
throat. It is Caiaphas and Hanan and all they stand for, or it is the fisherman.
They must destroy him, else he will destroy them.
Is it not strange, so simple a man, a fisherman? Pilates wife breathed
forth. What manner of man can he be to possess such power? I would that I
could see him. I would that with my own eyes I could see so remarkable a
man.
Pilates brows corrugated at her words, and it was clear that to the burden
on his nerves was added the overwrought state of his wifes nerves.
If you would see him, beat up the dens of the town, Miriam laughed
spitefully. You will find him wine-bibbing or in the company of nameless
women. Never so strange a prophet came up to Jerusalem.
And what harm in that? I demanded, driven against my will to take the
part of the fisherman. Have I not wine-guzzled a-plenty and passed strange
nights in all the provinces? The man is a man, and his ways are mens ways,
else am I a madman, which I here deny.
Miriam shook her head as she spoke.
He is not mad. Worse, he is dangerous. All Ebionism is dangerous. He
would destroy all things that are fixed. He is a revolutionist. He would
destroy what little is left to us of the Jewish state and Temple.
Here Pilate shook his head.
He is not political. I have had report of him. He is a visionary. There is
no sedition in him. He affirms the Roman tax even.
Still you do not understand, Miriam persisted. It is not what he plans; it
is the effect, if his plans are achieved, that makes him a revolutionist. I doubt
that he foresees the effect. Yet is the man a plague, and, like any plague,
should be stamped out.
From all that I have heard, he is a good-hearted, simple man with no evil
in him, I stated.
And thereat I told of the healing of the ten lepers I had witnessed in
Samaria on my way through Jericho.
Pilates wife sat entranced at what I told. Came to our ears distant
shoutings and cries of some street crowd, and we knew the soldiers were
keeping the streets cleared.
And you believe this wonder, Lodbrog? Pilate demanded. You believe
that in the flash of an eye the festering sores departed from the lepers?
I saw them healed, I replied. I followed them to make certain. There
was no leprosy in them.
But did you see them sore?before the healing? Pilate insisted.
I shook my head.
I was only told so, I admitted. When I saw them afterward, they had all
the seeming of men who had once been lepers. They were in a daze. There
was one who sat in the sun and ever searched his body and stared and stared at
the smooth flesh as if unable to believe his eyes. He would not speak, nor
look at aught else than his flesh, when I questioned him. He was in a maze.
He sat there in the sun and stared and stated.
Pilate smiled contemptuously, and I noted the quiet smile on Miriams face
was equally contemptuous. And Pilates wife sat as if a corpse, scarce
breathing, her eyes wide and unseeing.
Spoke Ambivius: Caiaphas holdshe told me but yesterdaythat the
fisherman claims that he will bring God down on earth and make here a new
kingdom over which God will rule
Which would mean the end of Roman rule, I broke in.
That is where Caiaphas and Hanan plot to embroil Rome, Miriam
explained. It is not true. It is a lie they have made.
Pilate nodded and asked:
Is there not somewhere in your ancient books a prophecy that the priests
here twist into the intent of this fishermans mind?
To this she agreed, and gave him the citation. I relate the incident to
evidence the depth of Pilates study of this people he strove so hard to keep in
order.
What I have heard, Miriam continued, is that this Jesus preaches the
end of the world and the beginning of Gods kingdom, not here, but in
heaven.
I have had report of that, Pilate raid. It is true. This Jesus holds the
justness of the Roman tax. He holds that Rome shall rule until all rule passes
away with the passing of the world. I see more clearly the trick Hanan is
playing me.
It is even claimed by some of his followers, Ambivius volunteered, that
he is God Himself.
I have no report that he has so said, Pilate replied.
Why not? his wife breathed. Why not? Gods have descended to earth
before.
Look you, Pilate said. I have it by creditable report, that after this Jesus
had worked some wonder whereby a multitude was fed on several loaves and
fishes, the foolish Galileans were for making him a king. Against his will they
would make him a king. To escape them he fled into the mountains. No
madness there. He was too wise to accept the fate they would have forced
upon him.
Yet that is the very trick Hanan would force upon you, Miriam reiterated.
They claim for him that he would be king of the Jewsan offence against
Roman law, wherefore Rome must deal with him.
Pilate shrugged his shoulders.
A king of the beggars, rather; or a king of the dreamers. He is no fool.
He is visionary, but not visionary of this worlds power. All luck go with him
in the next world, for that is beyond Romes jurisdiction.
He holds that property is sinthat is what hits the Pharisees, Ambivius
spoke up.
Pilate laughed heartily.
This king of the beggars and his fellow-beggars still do respect property,
he explained. For, look you, not long ago they had even a treasurer for their
wealth. Judas his name was, and there were words in that he stole from their
common purse which he carried.
Jesus did not steal? Pilates wife asked.
No, Pilate answered; it was Judas, the treasurer.
Who was this John? I questioned. He was in trouble up Tiberias way
and Antipas executed him.
Another one, Miriam answered. He was born near Hebron. He was an
enthusiast and a desert-dweller. Either he or his followers claimed that he was
Elijah raised from the dead. Elijah, you see, was one of our old prophets.
Was he seditious? I asked.
Pilate grinned and shook his head, then said:
He fell out with Antipas over the matter of Herodias. John was a
moralist. It is too long a story, but he paid for it with his head. No, there was
nothing political in that affair.
It is also claimed by some that Jesus is the Son of David, Miriam said.
But it is absurd. Nobody at Nazareth believes it. You see, his whole family,
including his married sisters, lives there and is known to all of them. They are
a simple folk, mere common people.
I wish it were as simple, the report of all this complexity that I must send
to Tiberius, Pilate grumbled. And now this fisherman is come to Jerusalem,
the place is packed with pilgrims ripe for any trouble, and Hanan stirs and stirs
the broth.
And before he is done he will have his way, Miriam forecast. He has
laid the task for you, and you will perform it.
Which is? Pilate queried.
The execution of this fisherman.
Pilate shook his head stubbornly, but his wife cried out:
No! No! It would be a shameful wrong. The man has done no evil. He
has not offended against Rome.
She looked beseechingly to Pilate, who continued to shake his head.
Let them do their own beheading, as Antipas did, he growled. The
fisherman counts for nothing; but I shall be no catspaw to their schemes. If
they must destroy him, they must destroy him. That is their affair.
But you will not permit it, cried Pilates wife.
A pretty time would I have explaining to Tiberius if I interfered, was his
reply.
No matter what happens, said Miriam, I can see you writing
explanations, and soon; for Jesus is already come up to Jerusalem and a
number of his fishermen with him.
Pilate showed the irritation this information caused him.
I have no interest in his movements, he pronounced. I hope never to
see him.
Trust Hanan to find him for you, Miriam replied, and to bring him to
your gate.
Pilate shrugged his shoulders, and there the talk ended. Pilates wife,
nervous and overwrought, must claim Miriam to her apartments, so that
nothing remained for me but to go to bed and doze off to the buzz and murmur
of the city of madmen.
***
Events moved rapidly. Over night the white heat of the city had scorched
upon itself. By midday, when I rode forth with half a dozen of my men, the
streets were packed, and more reluctant than ever were the folk to give way
before me. If looks could kill I should have been a dead man that day. Openly
they spat at sight of me, and, everywhere arose snarls and cries.
Less was I a thing of wonder, and more was I the thing hated in that I wore
the hated harness of Rome. Had it been any other city, I should have given
command to my men to lay the flats of their swords on those snarling fanatics.
But this was Jerusalem, at fever heat, and these were a people unable in
thought to divorce the idea of State from the idea of God.
Hanan the Sadducee had done his work well. No matter what he and the
Sanhedrim believed of the true inwardness of the situation, it was clear this
rabble had been well tutored to believe that Rome was at the bottom of it.
I encountered Miriam in the press. She was on foot, attended only by a
woman. It was no time in such turbulence for her to be abroad garbed as
became her station. Through her sister she was indeed sister-in-law to Antipas
for whom few bore love. So she was dressed discreetly, her face covered, so
that she might pass as any Jewish woman of the lower orders. But not to my
eye could she hide that fine stature of her, that carriage and walk, so different
from other womens, of which I had already dreamed more than once.
Few and quick were the words we were able to exchange, for the way
jammed on the moment, and soon my men and horses were being pressed and
jostled. Miriam was sheltered in an angle of house-wall.
Have they got the fisherman yet? I asked.
No; but he is just outside the wall. He has ridden up to Jerusalem on an
ass, with a multitude before and behind; and some, poor dupes, have hailed
him as he passed as King of Israel. That finally is the pretext with which
Hanan will compel Pilate. Truly, though not yet taken, the sentence is already
written. This fisherman is a dead man.
But Pilate will not arrest him, I defended. Miriam shook her head.
Hanan will attend to that. They will bring him before the Sanhedrim.
The sentence will be death. They may stone him.
But the Sanhedrim has not the right to execute, I contended.
Jesus is not a Roman, she replied. He is a Jew. By the law of the
Talmud he is guilty of death, for he has blasphemed against the law.
Still I shook my head.
The Sanhedrim has not the right.
Pilate is willing that it should take that right.
But it is a fine question of legality, I insisted. You know what the
Romans are in such matters.
Then will Hanan avoid the question, she smiled, by compelling Pilate to
crucify him. In either event it will be well.
A surging of the mob was sweeping our horses along and grinding our
knees together. Some fanatic had fallen, and I could feel my horse recoil and
half rear as it tramped on him, and I could hear the man screaming and the
snarling menace from all about rising to a roar. But my head was over my
shoulder as I called back to Miriam:
You are hard on a man you have said yourself is without evil.
I am hard upon the evil that will come of him if he lives, she replied.
Scarcely did I catch her words, for a man sprang in, seizing my bridle-rein
and leg and struggling to unhorse me. With my open palm, leaning forward, I
smote him full upon cheek and jaw. My hand covered the face of him, and a
hearty will of weight was in the blow. The dwellers in Jerusalem are not used
to mans buffets. I have often wondered since if I broke the fellows neck.
***
Next I saw Miriam was the following day. I met her in the court of Pilates
palace. She seemed in a dream. Scarce her eyes saw me. Scarce her wits
embraced my identity. So strange was she, so in daze and amaze and farseeing
were her eyes, that I was reminded of the lepers I had seen healed in
Samaria.
She became herself by an effort, but only her outward self. In her eyes was
a message unreadable. Never before had I seen womans eyes so.
She would have passed me ungreeted had I not confronted her way. She
paused and murmured words mechanically, but all the while her eyes dreamed
through me and beyond me with the largeness of the vision that filled them.
I have seen Him, Lodbrog, she whispered. I have seen Him.
The gods grant that he is not so ill-affected by the sight of you, whoever
he may be, I laughed.
She took no notice of my poor-timed jest, and her eyes remained full with
vision, and she would have passed on had I not again blocked her way.
Who is this he? I demanded. Some man raised from the dead to put
such strange light in your eyes?
One who has raised others from the dead, she replied. Truly I believe
that He, this Jesus, has raised the dead. He is the Prince of Light, the Son of
God. I have seen Him. Truly I believe that He is the Son of God.
Little could I glean from her words, save that she had met this wandering
fisherman and been swept away by his folly. For surely this Miriam was not
the Miriam who had branded him a plague and demanded that he be stamped
out as any plague.
He has charmed you, I cried angrily.
Her eyes seemed to moisten and grow deeper as she gave confirmation.
Oh, Lodbrog, His is charm beyond all thinking, beyond all describing.
But to look upon Him is to know that here is the all-soul of goodness and of
compassion. I have seen Him. I have heard Him. I shall give all I have to the
poor, and I shall follow Him.
Such was her certitude that I accepted it fully, as I had accepted the
amazement of the lepers of Samaria staring at their smooth flesh; and I was
bitter that so great a woman should be so easily wit-addled by a vagrant
wonder-worker.
Follow him, I sneered. Doubtless you will wear a crown when he wins
to his kingdom.
She nodded affirmation, and I could have struck her in the face for her
folly. I drew aside, and as she moved slowly on she murmured:
His kingdom is not here. He is the Son of David. He is the Son of God.
He is whatever He has said, or whatever has been said of Him that is good and
great.
***
A wise man of the East, I found Pilate chuckling. He is a thinker, this
unlettered fisherman. I have sought more deeply into him. I have fresh report.
He has no need of wonder-workings. He out-sophisticates the most sophistical
of them. They have laid traps, and He has laughed at their traps. Look you.
Listen to this.
Whereupon he told me how Jesus had confounded his confounders when
they brought to him for judgment a woman taken in adultery.
And the tax, Pilate exulted on. To Cæsar what is Cæsars, to God what
is Gods, was his answer to them. That was Hanans trick, and Hanan is
confounded. At last has there appeared one Jew who understands our Roman
conception of the State.
****
Next I saw Pilates wife. Looking into her eyes I knew, on the instant,
after having seen Miriams eyes, that this tense, distraught woman had
likewise seen the fisherman.
The Divine is within Him, she murmured to me. There is within Him a
personal awareness of the indwelling of God.
Is he God? I queried, gently, for say something I must.
She shook her head.
I do not know. He has not said. But this I know: of such stuff gods are
made.
***
A charmer of women, was my privy judgment, as I left Pilates wife
walking in dreams and visions.
The last days are known to all of you who read these lines, and it was in
those last days that I learned that this Jesus was equally a charmer of men. He
charmed Pilate. He charmed me.
After Hanan had sent Jesus to Caiaphas, and the Sanhedrim, assembled in
Caiaphass house, had condemned Jesus to death, Jesus, escorted by a howling
mob, was sent to Pilate for execution.
Now, for his own sake and for Romes sake, Pilate did not want to execute
him. Pilate was little interested in the fisherman and greatly interested in
peace and order. What cared Pilate for a mans life?for many mens lives?
The school of Rome was iron, and the governors sent out by Rome to rule
conquered peoples were likewise iron. Pilate thought and acted in
governmental abstractions. Yet, look: when Pilate went out scowling to meet
the mob that had fetched the fisherman, he fell immediately under the charm
of the man.
I was present. I know. It was the first time Pilate had ever seen him.
Pilate went out angry. Our soldiers were in readiness to clear the court of its
noisy vermin. And immediately Pilate laid eyes on the fisherman Pilate was
subduednay, was solicitous. He disclaimed jurisdiction, demanded that they
should judge the fisherman by their law and deal with him by their law, since
the fisherman was a Jew and not a Roman. Never were there Jews so obedient
to Roman rule. They cried out that it was unlawful, under Rome, for them to
put any man to death. Yet Antipas had beheaded John and come to no grief of
it.
And Pilate left them in the court, open under the sky, and took Jesus alone
into the judgment hall. What happened therein I know not, save that when
Pilate emerged he was changed. Whereas before he had been disinclined to
execute because he would not be made a catspaw to Hanan, he was now
disinclined to execute because of regard for the fisherman. His effort now was
to save the fisherman. And all the while the mob cried: Crucify him!
Crucify him!
You, my reader, know the sincerity of Pilates effort. You know how he
tried to befool the mob, first by mocking Jesus as a harmless fool; and second
by offering to release him according to the custom of releasing one prisoner at
time of the Passover. And you know how the priests quick whisperings led
the mob to cry out for the release of the murderer Bar-Abba.
In vain Pilate struggled against the fate being thrust upon him by the
priests. By sneer and jibe he hoped to make a farce of the transaction. He
laughingly called Jesus the King of the Jews and ordered him to be scourged.
His hope was that all would end in laughter and in laugher be forgotten.
I am glad to say that no Roman soldiers took part in what followed. It was
the soldiers of the auxiliaries who crowned and cloaked Jesus, put the reed of
sovereignty in his hand, and, kneeling, hailed him King of the Jews. Although
it failed, it was a play to placate. And I, looking on, learned the charm of
Jesus. Despite the cruel mockery of situation, he was regal. And I was quiet
as I gazed. It was his own quiet that went into me. I was soothed and
satisfied, and was without bewilderment. This thing had to be. All was well.
The serenity of Jesus in the heart of the tumult and pain became my serenity. I
was scarce moved by any thought to save him.
On the other hand, I had gazed on too many wonders of the human in my
wild and varied years to be affected to foolish acts by this particular wonder. I
was all serenity. I had no word to say. I had no judgment to pass. I knew that
things were occurring beyond my comprehension, and that they must occur.
Still Pilate struggled. The tumult increased. The cry for blood rang
through the court, and all were clamouring for crucifixion. Again Pilate went
back into the judgment hall. His effort at a farce having failed, he attempted to
disclaim jurisdiction. Jesus was not of Jerusalem. He was a born subject of
Antipas, and to Antipas Pilate was for sending Jesus.
But the uproar was by now communicating itself to the city. Our troops
outside the palace were being swept away in the vast street mob. Rioting had
begun that in the flash of an eye could turn into civil war and revolution. My
own twenty legionaries were close to hand and in readiness. They loved the
fanatic Jews no more than did I, and would have welcomed my command to
clear the court with naked steel.
When Pilate came out again his words for Antipas jurisdiction could not
be heard, for all the mob was shouting that Pilate was a traitor, that if he let the
fisherman go he was no friend of Tiberius. Close before me, as I leaned
against the wall, a mangy, bearded, long-haired fanatic sprang up and down
unceasingly, and unceasingly chanted: Tiberius is emperor; there is no king!
Tiberius is emperor; there is no king! I lost patience. The mans near noise
was an offence. Lurching sidewise, as if by accident, I ground my foot on his
to a terrible crushing. The fool seemed not to notice. He was too mad to be
aware of the pain, and he continued to chant: Tiberius is emperor; there is no
king!
I saw Pilate hesitate. Pilate, the Roman governor, for the moment was
Pilate the man, with a mans anger against the miserable creatures clamouring
for the blood of so sweet and simple, brave and good a spirit as this Jesus.
I saw Pilate hesitate. His gaze roved to me, as if he were about to signal to
me to let loose; and I half-started forward, releasing the mangled foot under
my foot. I was for leaping to complete that half-formed wish of Pilate and to
sweep away in blood and cleanse the court of the wretched scum that howled
in it.
It was not Pilates indecision that decided me. It was this Jesus that
decided Pilate and me. This Jesus looked at me. He commanded me. I tell
you this vagrant fisherman, this wandering preacher, this piece of driftage
from Galilee, commanded me. No word he uttered. Yet his command was
there, unmistakable as a trumpet call. And I stayed my foot, and held my
hand, for who was I to thwart the will and way of so greatly serene and
sweetly sure a man as this? And as I stayed I knew all the charm of himall
that in him had charmed Miriam and Pilates wife, that had charmed Pilate
himself.
You know the rest. Pilate washed his hands of Jesus blood, and the rioters
took his blood upon their own heads. Pilate gave orders for the crucifixion.
The mob was content, and content, behind the mob, were Caiaphas, Hanan,
and the Sanhedrim. Not Pilate, not Tiberius, not Roman soldiers crucified
Jesus. It was the priestly rulers and priestly politicians of Jerusalem. I saw. I
know. And against his own best interests Pilate would have saved Jesus, as I
would have, had it not been that no other than Jesus himself willed that he was
not to be saved.
Yes, and Pilate had his last sneer at this people he detested. In Hebrew,
Greek, and Latin he had a writing affixed to Jesus cross which read, The
King of the Jews. In vain the priests complained. It was on this very pretext
that they had forced Pilates hand; and by this pretext, a scorn and insult to the
Jewish race, Pilate abided. Pilate executed an abstraction that had never
existed in the real. The abstraction was a cheat and a lie manufactured in the
priestly mind. Neither the priests nor Pilate believed it. Jesus denied it. That
abstraction was The King of the Jews.
***
The storm was over in the courtyard. The excitement had simmered down.
Revolution had been averted. The priests were content, the mob was satisfied,
and Pilate and I were well disgusted and weary with the whole affair. And yet
for him and me was more and most immediate storm. Before Jesus was taken
away one of Miriams women called me to her. And I saw Pilate, summoned
by one of his wifes women, likewise obey.
Oh, Lodbrog, I have heard, Miriam met me. We were alone, and she
was close to me, seeking shelter and strength within my arms. Pilate has
weakened. He is going to crucify Him. But there is time. Your own men are
ready. Ride with them. Only a centurion and a handful of soldiers are with
Him. They have not yet started. As soon as they do start, follow. They must
not reach Golgotha. But wait until they are outside the city wall. Then
countermand the order. Take an extra horse for Him to ride. The rest is easy.
Ride away into Syria with Him, or into Idumæa, or anywhere so long as He be
saved.
She concluded with her arms around my neck, her face upturned to mine
and temptingly close, her eyes greatly solemn and greatly promising.
Small wonder I was slow of speech. For the moment there was but one
thought in my brain. After all the strange play I had seen played out, to have
this come upon me! I did not misunderstand. The thing was clear. A great
woman was mine if . . . if I betrayed Rome. For Pilate was governor, his order
had gone forth; and his voice was the voice of Rome.
As I have said, it was the woman of her, her sheer womanliness, that
betrayed Miriam and me in the end. Always she had been so clear, so
reasonable, so certain of herself and me, so that I had forgotten, or, rather, I
there learned once again the eternal lesson learned in all lives, that woman is
ever woman . . . that in great decisive moments woman does not reason but
feels; that the last sanctuary and innermost pulse to conduct is in womans
heart and not in womans head.
Miriam misunderstood my silence, for her body moved softly within my
arms as she added, as if in afterthought:
Take two spare horses, Lodbrog. I shall ride the other . . . with you . . .
with you, away over the world, wherever you may ride.
It was a bribe of kings; it was an act, paltry and contemptible, that was
demanded of me in return. Still I did not speak. It was not that I was in
confusion or in any doubt. I was merely sadgreatly and suddenly sad, in
that I knew I held in my arms what I would never hold again.
There is but one man in Jerusalem this day who can save Him, she
urged, and that man is you, Lodbrog.
Because I did not immediately reply she shook me, as if in impulse to
clarify wits she considered addled. She shook me till my harness rattled.
Speak, Lodbrog, speak! she commanded. You are strong and unafraid.
You are all man. I know you despise the vermin who would destroy Him.
You, you alone can save Him. You have but to say the word and the thing is
done; and I will well love you and always love you for the thing you have
done.
I am a Roman, I said slowly, knowing full well that with the words I
gave up all hope of her.
You are a man-slave of Tiberius, a hound of Rome, she flamed, but you
owe Rome nothing, for you are not a Roman. You yellow giants of the north
are not Romans.
The Romans are the elder brothers of us younglings of the north, I
answered. Also, I wear the harness and I eat the bread of Rome. Gently I
added: But why all this fuss and fury for a mere mans life? All men must
die. Simple and easy it is to die. To-day, or a hundred years, it little matters.
Sure we are, all of us, of the same event in the end.
Quick she was, and alive with passion to save as she thrilled within my
arms.
You do not understand, Lodbrog. This is no mere man. I tell you this is a
man beyond mena living God, not of men, but over men.
I held her closely and knew that I was renouncing all the sweet woman of
her as I said:
We are man and woman, you and I. Our life is of this world. Of these
other worlds is all a madness. Let these mad dreamers go the way of their
dreaming. Deny them not what they desire above all things, above meat and
wine, above song and battle, even above love of woman. Deny them not their
hearts desires that draw them across the dark of the grave to their dreams of
lives beyond this world. Let them pass. But you and I abide here in all the
sweet we have discovered of each other. Quickly enough will come the dark,
and you depart for your coasts of sun and flowers, and I for the roaring table
of Valhalla.
No! no! she cried, half-tearing herself away. You do not understand.
All of greatness, all of goodness, all of God are in this man who is more than
man; and it is a shameful death to die. Only slaves and thieves so die. He is
neither slave nor thief. He is an immortal. He is God. Truly I tell you He is
God.
He is immortal you say, I contended. Then to die to-day on Golgotha
will not shorten his immortality by a hairs breadth in the span of time. He is a
god you say. Gods cannot die. From all I have been told of them, it is certain
that gods cannot die.
Oh! she cried. You will not understand. You are only a great giant
thing of flesh.
Is it not said that this event was prophesied of old time? I queried, for I
had been learning from the Jews what I deemed their subtleties of thinking.
Yes, yes, she agreed, the Messianic prophecies. This is the Messiah.
Then who am I, I asked, to make liars of the prophets? to make of the
Messiah a false Messiah? Is the prophecy of your people so feeble a thing that
I, a stupid stranger, a yellow northling in the Roman harness, can give the lie
to prophecy and compel to be unfulfilledthe very thing willed by the gods
and foretold by the wise men?
You do not understand, she repeated.
I understand too well, I replied. Am I greater than the gods that I may
thwart the will of the gods? Then are gods vain things and the playthings of
men. I am a man. I, too, bow to the gods, to all gods, for I do believe in all
gods, else how came all gods to be?
She flung herself so that my hungry arms were empty of her, and we stood
apart and listened to the uproar of the street as Jesus and the soldiers emerged
and started on their way. And my heart was sore in that so great a woman
could be so foolish. She would save God. She would make herself greater
than God.
You do not love me, she said slowly, and slowly grew in her eyes a
promise of herself too deep and wide for any words.
I love you beyond your understanding, it seems, was my reply. I am
proud to love you, for I know I am worthy to love you and am worth all love
you may give me. But Rome is my foster-mother, and were I untrue to her, of
little pride, of little worth would be my love for you.
The uproar that followed about Jesus and the soldiers died away along the
street. And when there was no further sound of it Miriam turned to go, with
neither word nor look for me.
I knew one last rush of mad hunger for her. I sprang and seized her. I
would horse her and ride away with her and my men into Syria away from this
cursed city of folly. She struggled. I crushed her. She struck me on the face,
and I continued to hold and crush her, for the blows were sweet. And there
she ceased to struggle. She became cold and motionless, so that I knew there
was no womans love that my arms girdled. For me she was dead. Slowly I
let go of her. Slowly she stepped back. As if she did not see me she turned
and went away across the quiet room, and without looking back passed
through the hangings and was gone.
***
I, Ragnar Lodbrog, never came to read nor write. But in my days I have
listened to great talk. As I see it now, I never learned great talk, such as that of
the Jews, learned in their law, nor such as that of the Romans, learned in their
philosophy and in the philosophy of the Greeks. Yet have I talked in
simplicity and straightness, as a man may well talk who has lived life from the
ships of Tostig Lodbrog and the roof of Brunanbuhr across the world to
Jerusalem and back again. And straight talk and simple I gave Sulpicius
Quirinius, when I went away into Syria to report to him of the various matters
that had been at issue in Jerusalem.
CHAPTER XVIII
Suspended animation is nothing new, not alone in the vegetable world and
in the lower forms of animal life, but in the highly evolved, complex organism
of man himself. A cataleptic trance is a cataleptic trance, no matter how
induced. From time immemorial the fakir of India has been able voluntarily to
induce such states in himself. It is an old trick of the fakirs to have themselves
buried alive. Other men, in similar trances, have misled the physicians, who
pronounced them dead and gave the orders that put them alive under the
ground.
As my jacket experiences in San Quentin continued I dwelt not a little on
this problem of suspended animation. I remembered having read that the far
northern Siberian peasants made a practice of hibernating through the long
winters just as bears and other wild animals do. Some scientist studied these
peasants and found that during these periods of the long sleep respiration
and digestion practically ceased, and that the heart was at so low tension as to
defy detection by ordinary laymans examination.
In such a trance the bodily processes are so near to absolute suspension
that the air and food consumed are practically negligible. On this reasoning,
partly, was based my defiance of Warden Atherton and Doctor Jackson. It was
thus that I dared challenge them to give me a hundred days in the jacket. And
they did not dare accept my challenge.
Nevertheless I did manage to do without water, as well as food, during my
ten-days bouts. I found it an intolerable nuisance, in the deeps of dream
across space and time, to be haled back to the sordid present by a despicable
prison doctor pressing water to my lips. So I warned Doctor Jackson, first,
that I intended doing without water while in the jacket; and next, that I would
resist any efforts to compel me to drink.
Of course we had our little struggle; but after several attempts Doctor
Jackson gave it up. Thereafter the space occupied in Darrell Standings life by
a jacket-bout was scarcely more than a few ticks of the clock. Immediately I
was laced I devoted myself to inducing the little death. From practice it
became simple and easy. I suspended animation and consciousness so quickly
that I escaped the really terrible suffering consequent upon suspending
circulation. Most quickly came the dark. And the next I, Darrell Standing,
knew was the light again, the faces bending over me as I was unlaced, and the
knowledge that ten days had passed in the twinkling of an eye.
But oh, the wonder and the glory of those ten days spent by me elsewhere!
The journeys through the long chain of existences! The long darks, the
growings of nebulous lights, and the fluttering apparitional selves that dawned
through the growing light!
Much have I pondered upon the relation of these other selves to me, and of
the relation of the total experience to the modern doctrine of evolution. I can
truly say that my experience is in complete accord with our conclusions of
evolution.
I, like any man, am a growth. I did not begin when I was born nor when I
was conceived. I have been growing, developing, through incalculable
myriads of millenniums. All these experiences of all these lives, and of
countless other lives, have gone to the making of the soul-stuff or the spiritstuff
that is I. Dont you see? They are the stuff of me. Matter does not
remember, for spirit is memory. I am this spirit compounded of the memories
of my endless incarnations.
Whence came in me, Darrell Standing, the red pulse of wrath that has
wrecked my life and put me in the condemned cells? Surely it did not come
into being, was not created, when the babe that was to be Darrell Standing was
conceived. That old red wrath is far older than my mother, far older than the
oldest and first mother of men. My mother, at my inception, did not create
that passionate lack of fear that is mine. Not all the mothers of the whole
evolution of men manufactured fear or fearlessness in men. Far back beyond
the first men were fear and fearlessness, love, hatred, anger, all the emotions,
growing, developing, becoming the stuff that was to become men.
I am all of my past, as every protagonist of the Mendelian law must agree.
All my previous selves have their voices, echoes, promptings in me. My every
mode of action, heat of passion, flicker of thought is shaded, toned,
infinitesimally shaded and toned, by that vast array of other selves that
preceded me and went into the making of me.
The stuff of life is plastic. At the same time this stuff never forgets.
Mould it as you will, the old memories persist. All manner of horses, from ton
Shires to dwarf Shetlands, have been bred up and down from those first wild
ponies domesticated by primitive man. Yet to this day man has not bred out
the kick of the horse. And I, who am composed of those first horse-tamers,
have not had their red anger bred out of me.
I am man born of woman. My days are few, but the stuff of me is
indestructible. I have been woman born of woman. I have been a woman and
borne my children. And I shall be born again. Oh, incalculable times again
shall I be born; and yet the stupid dolts about me think that by stretching my
neck with a rope they will make me cease.
Yes, I shall be hanged . . . soon. This is the end of June. In a little while
they will try to befool me. They will take me from this cell to the bath,
according to the prison custom of the weekly bath. But I shall not be brought
back to this cell. I shall be dressed outright in fresh clothes and be taken to the
death-cell. There they will place the death-watch on me. Night or day,
waking or sleeping, I shall be watched. I shall not be permitted to put my head
under the blankets for fear I may anticipate the State by choking myself.
Always bright light will blaze upon me. And then, when they have well
wearied me, they will lead me out one morning in a shirt without a collar and
drop me through the trap. Oh, I know. The rope they will do it with is wellstretched.
For many a month now the hangman of Folsom has been stretching
it with heavy weights so as to take the spring out of it.
Yes, I shall drop far. They have cunning tables of calculations, like interest
tables, that show the distance of the drop in relation to the victims weight. I
am so emaciated that they will have to drop me far in order to break my neck.
And then the onlookers will take their hats off, and as I swing the doctors will
press their ears to my chest to count my fading heart-beats, and at last they
will say that I am dead.
It is grotesque. It is the ridiculous effrontery of men-maggots who think
they can kill me. I cannot die. I am immortal, as they are immortal; the
difference is that I know it and they do not know it.
Pah! I was once a hangman, or an executioner, rather. Well I remember it!
I used the sword, not the rope. The sword is the braver way, although all ways
are equally inefficacious. Forsooth, as if spirit could be thrust through with
steel or throttled by a rope!
CHAPTER XIX
Next to Oppenheimer and Morrell, who rotted with me through the years
of darkness, I was considered the most dangerous prisoner in San Quentin. On
the other hand I was considered the toughesttougher even than
Oppenheimer and Morrell. Of course by toughness I mean enduringness.
Terrible as were the attempts to break them in body and in spirit, more terrible
were the attempts to break me. And I endured. Dynamite or curtains had been
Warden Athertons ultimatum. And in the end it was neither. I could not
produce the dynamite, and Warden Atherton could not induce the curtains.
It was not because my body was enduring, but because my spirit was
enduring. And it was because, in earlier existences, my spirit had been
wrought to steel-hardness by steel-hard experiences. There was one
experience that for long was a sort of nightmare to me. It had neither
beginning nor end. Always I found myself on a rocky, surge-battered islet so
low that in storms the salt spray swept over its highest point. It rained much.
I lived in a lair and suffered greatly, for I was without fire and lived on
uncooked meat.
Always I suffered. It was the middle of some experience to which I could
get no clue. And since, when I went into the little death I had no power of
directing my journeys, I often found myself reliving this particularly
detestable experience. My only happy moments were when the sun shone, at
which times I basked on the rocks and thawed out the almost perpetual chill I
suffered.
My one diversion was an oar and a jackknife. Upon this oar I spent much
time, carving minute letters and cutting a notch for each week that passed.
There were many notches. I sharpened the knife on a flat piece of rock, and
no barber was ever more careful of his favourite razor than was I of that knife.
Nor did ever a miser prize his treasure as did I prize the knife. It was as
precious as my life. In truth, it was my life.
By many repetitions, I managed to bring back out of the jacket the legend
that was carved on the oar. At first I could bring but little. Later, it grew
easier, a matter of piecing portions together. And at last I had the thing
complete. Here it is:
This is to acquaint the person into whose hands this Oar may fall, that
Daniel Foss, a native of Elkton, in Maryland, one of the United States of
America, and who sailed from the port of Philadelphia, in 1809, on board the
brig Negociator, bound to the Friendly Islands, was cast upon this desolate
island the February following, where he erected a hut and lived a number of
years, subsisting on sealshe being the last who survived of the crew of said
brig, which ran foul of an island of ice, and foundered on the 25th Nov. 1809.
There it was, quite clear. By this means I learned a lot about myself. One
vexed point, however, I never did succeed in clearing up. Was this island
situated in the far South Pacific or the far South Atlantic? I do not know
enough of sailing-ship tracks to be certain whether the brig Negociator would
sail for the Friendly Islands via Cape Horn or via the Cape of Good Hope. To
confess my own ignorance, not until after I was transferred to Folsom did I
learn in which ocean were the Friendly Islands. The Japanese murderer,
whom I have mentioned before, had been a sailmaker on board the Arthur
Sewall ships, and he told me that the probable sailing course would be by way
of the Cape of Good Hope. If this were so, then the dates of sailing from
Philadelphia and of being wrecked would easily determine which ocean.
Unfortunately, the sailing date is merely 1809. The wreck might as likely
have occurred in one ocean as the other.
Only once did I, in my trances, get a hint of the period preceding the time
spent on the island. This begins at the moment of the brigs collision with the
iceberg, and I shall narrate it, if for no other reason, at least to give an account
of my curiously cool and deliberate conduct. This conduct at this time, as you
shall see, was what enabled me in the end to survive alone of all the ships
company.
I was awakened, in my bunk in the forecastle, by a terrific crash. In fact,
as was true of the other six sleeping men of the watch below, awaking and
leaping from bunk to floor were simultaneous. We knew what had happened.
The others waited for nothing, rushing only partly clad upon deck. But I knew
what to expect, and I did wait. I knew that if we escaped at all, it would be by
the longboat. No man could swim in so freezing a sea. And no man, thinly
clad, could live long in the open boat. Also, I knew just about how long it
would take to launch the boat.
So, by the light of the wildly swinging slush-lamp, to the tumult on deck
and to cries of Shes sinking! I proceeded to ransack my sea-chest for
suitable garments. Also, since they would never use them again, I ransacked
the sea chests of my shipmates. Working quickly but collectedly, I took
nothing but the warmest and stoutest of clothes. I put on the four best woollen
shirts the forecastle boasted, three pairs of pants, and three pairs of thick
woollen socks. So large were my feet thus incased that I could not put on my
own good boots. Instead, I thrust on Nicholas Wiltons new boots, which were
larger and even stouter than mine. Also, I put on Jeremy Nalors pea jacket
over my own, and, outside of both, put on Seth Richards thick canvas coat
which I remembered he had fresh-oiled only a short while previous.
Two pairs of heavy mittens, John Roberts muffler which his mother had
knitted for him, and Joseph Dawes beaver cap atop my own, both bearing earand
neck-flaps, completed my outfitting. The shouts that the brig was sinking
redoubled, but I took a minute longer to fill my pockets with all the plug
tobacco I could lay hands on. Then I climbed out on deck, and not a moment
too soon.
The moon, bursting through a crack of cloud, showed a bleak and savage
picture. Everywhere was wrecked gear, and everywhere was ice. The sails,
ropes, and spars of the mainmast, which was still standing, were fringed with
icicles; and there came over me a feeling almost of relief in that never again
should I have to pull and haul on the stiff tackles and hammer ice so that the
frozen ropes could run through the frozen shivs. The wind, blowing half a
gale, cut with the sharpness that is a sign of the proximity of icebergs; and the
big seas were bitter cold to look upon in the moonlight.
The longboat was lowering away to larboard, and I saw men, struggling on
the ice-sheeted deck with barrels of provisions, abandon the food in their haste
to get away. In vain Captain Nicholl strove with them. A sea, breaching
across from windward, settled the matter and sent them leaping over the rail in
heaps. I gained the captains shoulder, and, holding on to him, I shouted in his
ear that if he would board the boat and prevent the men from casting off, I
would attend to the provisioning.
Little time was given me, however. Scarcely had I managed, helped by the
second mate, Aaron Northrup, to lower away half-a-dozen barrels and kegs,
when all cried from the boat that they were casting off. Good reason they had.
Down upon us from windward was drifting a towering ice-mountain, while to
leeward, close aboard, was another ice-mountain upon which we were driving.
Quicker in his leap was Aaron Northrup. I delayed a moment, even as the
boat was shoving away, in order to select a spot amidships where the men
were thickest, so that their bodies might break my fall. I was not minded to
embark with a broken member on so hazardous a voyage in the longboat.
That the men might have room at the oars, I worked my way quickly aft into
the sternsheets. Certainly, I had other and sufficient reasons. It would be
more comfortable in the sternsheets than in the narrow bow. And further, it
would be well to be near the afterguard in whatever troubles that were sure to
arise under such circumstances in the days to come.
In the sternsheets were the mate, Walter Drake, the surgeon, Arnold
Bentham, Aaron Northrup, and Captain Nicholl, who was steering. The
surgeon was bending over Northrup, who lay in the bottom groaning. Not so
fortunate had he been in his ill-considered leap, for he had broken his right leg
at the hip joint.
There was little time for him then, however, for we were labouring in a
heavy sea directly between the two ice islands that were rushing together.
Nicholas Wilton, at the stroke oar, was cramped for room; so I better stowed
the barrels, and, kneeling and facing him, was able to add my weight to the
oar. Forard, I could see John Roberts straining at the bow oar. Pulling on his
shoulders from behind, Arthur Haskins and the boy, Benny Hardwater, added
their weight to his. In fact, so eager were all hands to help that more than one
was thus in the way and cluttered the movements of the rowers.
It was close work, but we went clear by a matter of a hundred yards, so
that I was able to turn my head and see the untimely end of the Negociator.
She was caught squarely in the pinch and she was squeezed between the ice as
a sugar plum might be squeezed between thumb and forefinger of a boy. In
the shouting of the wind and the roar of water we heard nothing, although the
crack of the brigs stout ribs and deckbeams must have been enough to waken
a hamlet on a peaceful night.
Silently, easily, the brigs sides squeezed together, the deck bulged up, and
the crushed remnant dropped down and was gone, while where she had been
was occupied by the grinding conflict of the ice-islands. I felt regret at the
destruction of this haven against the elements, but at the same time was well
pleased at thought of my snugness inside my four shirts and three coats.
Yet it proved a bitter night, even for me. I was the warmest clad in the
boat. What the others must have suffered I did not care to dwell upon over
much. For fear that we might meet up with more ice in the darkness, we
bailed and held the boat bow-on to the seas. And continually, now with one
mitten, now with the other, I rubbed my nose that it might not freeze. Also,
with memories lively in me of the home circle in Elkton, I prayed to God.
In the morning we took stock. To commence with, all but two or three had
suffered frost-bite. Aaron Northrup, unable to move because of his broken
hip, was very bad. It was the surgeons opinion that both of Northrups feet
were hopelessly frozen.
The longboat was deep and heavy in the water, for it was burdened by the
entire ships company of twenty-one. Two of these were boys. Benny
Hardwater was a bare thirteen, and Lish Dickery, whose family was near
neighbour to mine in Elkton, was just turned sixteen. Our provisions consisted
of three hundred-weight of beef and two hundred-weight of pork. The halfdozen
loaves of brine-pulped bread, which the cook had brought, did not
count. Then there were three small barrels of water and one small keg of beer.
Captain Nicholl frankly admitted that in this uncharted ocean he had no
knowledge of any near land. The one thing to do was to run for more clement
climate, which we accordingly did, setting our small sail and steering
quartering before the fresh wind to the north-east.
The food problem was simple arithmetic. We did not count Aaron
Northrup, for we knew he would soon be gone. At a pound per day, our five
hundred pounds would last us twenty-five days; at half a pound, it would last
fifty. So half a pound had it. I divided and issued the meat under the captains
eyes, and managed it fairly enough, God knows, although some of the men
grumbled from the first. Also, from time to time I made fair division among
the men of the plug tobacco I had stowed in my many pocketsa thing which
I could not but regret, especially when I knew it was being wasted on this man
and that who I was certain could not live a day more, or, at best, two days or
three.
For we began to die soon in the open boat. Not to starvation but to the
killing cold and exposure were those earlier deaths due. It was a matter of the
survival of the toughest and the luckiest. I was tough by constitution, and
lucky inasmuch as I was warmly clad and had not broken my leg like Aaron
Northrup. Even so, so strong was he that, despite being the first to be severely
frozen, he was days in passing. Vance Hathaway was the first. We found him
in the gray of dawn crouched doubled in the bow and frozen stiff. The boy,
Lish Dickery, was the second to go. The other boy, Benny Hardwater, lasted
ten or a dozen days.
So bitter was it in the boat that our water and beer froze solid, and it was a
difficult task justly to apportion the pieces I broke off with Northrups
claspknife. These pieces we put in our mouths and sucked till they melted.
Also, on occasion of snow-squalls, we had all the snow we desired. All of
which was not good for us, causing a fever of inflammation to attack our
mouths so that the membranes were continually dry and burning. And there
was no allaying a thirst so generated. To suck more ice or snow was merely to
aggravate the inflammation. More than anything else, I think it was this that
caused the death of Lish Dickery. He was out of his head and raving for
twenty-four hours before he died. He died babbling for water, and yet he did
not die for need of water. I resisted as much as possible the temptation to suck
ice, contenting myself with a shred of tobacco in my cheek, and made out with
fair comfort.
We stripped all clothing from our dead. Stark they came into the world,
and stark they passed out over the side of the longboat and down into the dark
freezing ocean. Lots were cast for the clothes. This was by Captain Nicholls
command, in order to prevent quarrelling.
It was no time for the follies of sentiment. There was not one of us who
did not know secret satisfaction at the occurrence of each death. Luckiest of
all was Israel Stickney in casting lots, so that in the end, when he passed, he
was a veritable treasure trove of clothing. It gave a new lease of life to the
survivors.
We continued to run to the north-east before the fresh westerlies, but our
quest for warmer weather seemed vain. Ever the spray froze in the bottom of
the boat, and I still chipped beer and drinking water with Northrups knife.
My own knife I reserved. It was of good steel, with a keen edge and stoutly
fashioned, and I did not care to peril it in such manner.
By the time half our company was overboard, the boat had a reasonably
high freeboard and was less ticklish to handle in the gusts. Likewise there was
more room for a man to stretch out comfortably.
A source of continual grumbling was the food. The captain, the mate, the
surgeon, and myself, talking it over, resolved not to increase the daily whack
of half a pound of meat. The six sailors, for whom Tobias Snow made himself
spokesman, contended that the death of half of us was equivalent to a doubling
of our provisioning, and that therefore the ration should be increased to a
pound. In reply, we of the afterguard pointed out that it was our chance for
life that was doubled did we but bear with the half-pound ration.
It is true that eight ounces of salt meat did not go far in enabling us to live
and to resist the severe cold. We were quite weak, and, because of our
weakness, we frosted easily. Noses and cheeks were all black with frost-bite.
It was impossible to be warm, although we now had double the garments we
had started with.
Five weeks after the loss of the Negociator the trouble over the food came
to a head. I was asleep at the timeit was nightwhen Captain Nicholl
caught Jud Hetchkins stealing from the pork barrel. That he was abetted by
the other five men was proved by their actions. Immediately Jud Hetchkins
was discovered, the whole six threw themselves upon us with their knives. It
was close, sharp work in the dim light of the stars, and it was a mercy the boat
was not overturned. I had reason to be thankful for my many shirts and coats
which served me as an armour. The knife-thrusts scarcely more than drew
blood through the so great thickness of cloth, although I was scratched to
bleeding in a round dozen of places.
The others were similarly protected, and the fight would have ended in no
more than a mauling all around, had not the mate, Walter Dakon, a very
powerful man, hit upon the idea of ending the matter by tossing the mutineers
overboard. This was joined in by Captain Nicholl, the surgeon, and myself,
and in a trice five of the six were in the water and clinging to the gunwale.
Captain Nicholl and the surgeon were busy amidships with the sixth, Jeremy
Nalor, and were in the act of throwing him overboard, while the mate was
occupied with rapping the fingers along the gunwale with a boat-stretcher. For
the moment I had nothing to do, and so was able to observe the tragic end of
the mate. As he lifted the stretcher to rap Seth Richards fingers, the latter,
sinking down low in the water and then jerking himself up by both hands,
sprang half into the boat, locked his arms about the mate and, falling backward
and outboard, dragged the mate with him. Doubtlessly he never relaxed his
grip, and both drowned together.
Thus left alive of the entire ships company were three of us: Captain
Nicholl, Arnold Bentham (the surgeon), and myself. Seven had gone in the
twinkling of an eye, consequent on Jud Hetchkins attempt to steal provisions.
And to me it seemed a pity that so much good warm clothing had been wasted
there in the sea. There was not one of us who could not have managed
gratefully with more.
Captain Nicholl and the surgeon were good men and honest. Often
enough, when two of us slept, the one awake and steering could have stolen
from the meat. But this never happened. We trusted one another fully, and we
would have died rather than betray that trust.
We continued to content ourselves with half a pound of meat each per day,
and we took advantage of every favouring breeze to work to the northard.
Not until January fourteenth, seven weeks since the wreck, did we come up
with a warmer latitude. Even then it was not really warm. It was merely not
so bitterly cold.
Here the fresh westerlies forsook us and we bobbed and blobbed about in
doldrummy weather for many days. Mostly it was calm, or light contrary
winds, though sometimes a burst of breeze, as like as not from dead ahead,
would last for a few hours. In our weakened condition, with so large a boat, it
was out of the question to row. We could merely hoard our food and wait for
God to show a more kindly face. The three of us were faithful Christians, and
we made a practice of prayer each day before the apportionment of food. Yes,
and each of us prayed privately, often and long.
By the end of January our food was near its end. The pork was entirely
gone, and we used the barrel for catching and storing rainwater. Not many
pounds of beef remained. And in all the nine weeks in the open boat we had
raised no sail and glimpsed no land. Captain Nicholl frankly admitted that
after sixty-three days of dead reckoning he did not know where we were.
The twentieth of February saw the last morsel of food eaten. I prefer to
skip the details of much that happened in the next eight days. I shall touch
only on the incidents that serve to show what manner of men were my
companions. We had starved so long, that we had no reserves of strength on
which to draw when the food utterly ceased, and we grew weaker with great
rapidity.
On February twenty-fourth we calmly talked the situation over. We were
three stout-spirited men, full of life and toughness, and we did not want to die.
No one of us would volunteer to sacrifice himself for the other two. But we
agreed on three things: we must have food; we must decide the matter by
casting lots; and we would cast the lots next morning if there were no wind.
Next morning there was wind, not much of it, but fair, so that we were able
to log a sluggish two knots on our northerly course. The mornings of the
twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh found us with a similar breeze. We were
fearfully weak, but we abided by our decision and continued to sail.
But with the morning of the twenty-eighth we knew the time was come.
The longboat rolled drearily on an empty, windless sea, and the stagnant,
overcast sky gave no promise of any breeze. I cut three pieces of cloth, all of
a size, from my jacket. In the ravel of one of these pieces was a bit of brown
thread. Whoever drew this lost. I then put the three lots into my hat, covering
it with Captain Nicholls hat.
All was ready, but we delayed for a time while each prayed silently and
long, for we knew that we were leaving the decision to God. I was not
unaware of my own honesty and worth; but I was equally aware of the honesty
and worth of my companions, so that it perplexed me how God could decide
so fine-balanced and delicate a matter.
The captain, as was his right and due, drew first. After his hand was in the
hat he delayed for sometime with closed eyes, his lips moving a last prayer.
And he drew a blank. This was righta true decision I could not but admit to
myself; for Captain Nicholls life was largely known to me and I knew him to
be honest, upright, and God-fearing.
Remained the surgeon and me. It was one or the other, and, according to
ships rating, it was his due to draw next. Again we prayed. As I prayed I
strove to quest back in my life and cast a hurried tally-sheet of my own worth
and unworth.
I held the hat on my knees with Captain Nicholls hat over it. The surgeon
thrust in his hand and fumbled about for some time, while I wondered whether
the feel of that one brown thread could be detected from the rest of the ravel.
At last he withdrew his hand. The brown thread was in his piece of cloth.
I was instantly very humble and very grateful for Gods blessing thus extended
to me; and I resolved to keep more faithfully than ever all of His
commandments. The next moment I could not help but feel that the surgeon
and the captain were pledged to each other by closer ties of position and
intercourse than with me, and that they were in a measure disappointed with
the outcome. And close with that thought ran the conviction that they were
such true men that the outcome would not interfere with the plan arranged.
I was right. The surgeon bared arm and knife and prepared to open a great
vein. First, however, he spoke a few words.
I am a native of Norfolk in the Virginias, he said, where I expect I have
now a wife and three children living. The only favour that I have to request of
you is, that should it please God to deliver either of you from your perilous
situation, and should you be so fortunate as to reach once more your native
country, that you would acquaint my unfortunate family with my wretched
fate.
Next he requested courteously of us a few minutes in which to arrange his
affairs with God. Neither Captain Nicholl nor I could utter a word, but with
streaming eyes we nodded our consent.
Without doubt Arnold Bentham was the best collected of the three of us.
My own anguish was prodigious, and I am confident that Captain Nicholl
suffered equally. But what was one to do? The thing was fair and proper and
had been decided by God.
But when Arnold Bentham had completed his last arrangements and made
ready to do the act, I could contain myself no longer, and cried out:
Wait! We who have endured so much surely can endure a little more. It
is now mid-morning. Let us wait until twilight. Then, if no event has
appeared to change our dreadful destiny, do you Arnold Bentham, do as we
have agreed.
He looked to Captain Nicholl for confirmation of my suggestion, and
Captain Nicholl could only nod. He could utter no word, but in his moist and
frosty blue eyes was a wealth of acknowledgment I could not misread.
I did not, I could not, deem it a crime, having so determined by fair
drawing of lots, that Captain Nicholl and myself should profit by the death of
Arnold Bentham. I could not believe that the love of life that actuated us had
been implanted in our breasts by aught other than God. It was Gods will, and
we His poor creatures could only obey and fulfil His will. And yet, God was
kind. In His all-kindness He saved us from so terrible, though so righteous, an
act.
Scarce had a quarter of an hour passed, when a fan of air from the west,
with a hint of frost and damp in it, crisped on our cheeks. In another five
minutes we had steerage from the filled sail, and Arnold Bentham was at the
steering sweep.
Save what little strength you have, he had said. Let me consume the
little strength left in me in order that it may increase your chance to survive.
And so he steered to a freshening breeze, while Captain Nicholl and I lay
sprawled in the boats bottom and in our weakness dreamed dreams and
glimpsed visions of the dear things of life far across the world from us.
It was an ever-freshening breeze of wind that soon began to puff and gust.
The cloud stuff flying across the sky foretold us of a gale. By midday Arnold
Bentham fainted at the steering, and, ere the boat could broach in the tidy sea
already running, Captain Nicholl and I were at the steering sweep with all the
four of our weak hands upon it. We came to an agreement, and, just as
Captain Nicholl had drawn the first lot by virtue of his office, so now he took
the first spell at steering. Thereafter the three of us spelled one another every
fifteen minutes. We were very weak and we could not spell longer at a time.
By mid-afternoon a dangerous sea was running. We should have rounded
the boat to, had our situation not been so desperate, and let her drift bow-on to
a sea-anchor extemporized of our mast and sail. Had we broached in those
great, over-topping seas, the boat would have been rolled over and over.
Time and again, that afternoon, Arnold Bentham, for our sakes, begged
that we come to a sea-anchor. He knew that we continued to run only in the
hope that the decree of the lots might not have to be carried out. He was a
noble man. So was Captain Nicholl noble, whose frosty eyes had wizened to
points of steel. And in such noble company how could I be less noble? I
thanked God repeatedly, through that long afternoon of peril, for the privilege
of having known two such men. God and the right dwelt in them and no
matter what my poor fate might be, I could but feel well recompensed by such
companionship. Like them I did not want to die, yet was unafraid to die. The
quick, early doubt I had had of these two men was long since dissipated. Hard
the school, and hard the men, but they were noble men, Gods own men.
I saw it first. Arnold Bentham, his own death accepted, and Captain
Nicholl, well nigh accepting death, lay rolling like loose-bodied dead men in
the boats bottom, and I was steering when I saw it. The boat, foaming and
surging with the swiftness of wind in its sail, was uplifted on a crest, when,
close before me, I saw the sea-battered islet of rock. It was not half a mile off.
I cried out, so that the other two, kneeling and reeling and clutching for
support, were peering and staring at what I saw.
Straight for it, Daniel, Captain Nicholl mumbled command. There may
be a cove. There may be a cove. It is our only chance.
Once again he spoke, when we were atop that dreadful lee shore with no
cove existent.
Straight for it, Daniel. If we go clear we are too weak ever to win back
against sea and wind.
He was right. I obeyed. He drew his watch and looked, and I asked the
time. It was five oclock. He stretched out his hand to Arnold Bentham, who
met and shook it weakly; and both gazed at me, in their eyes extending that
same hand-clasp. It was farewell, I knew; for what chance had creatures so
feeble as we to win alive over those surf-battered rocks to the higher rocks
beyond?
Twenty feet from shore the boat was snatched out of my control. In a trice
it was overturned and I was strangling in the salt. I never saw my companions
again. By good fortune I was buoyed by the steering-oar I still grasped, and
by great good fortune a fling of sea, at the right instant, at the right spot, threw
me far up the gentle slope of the one shelving rock on all that terrible shore. I
was not hurt. I was not bruised. And with brain reeling from weakness I was
able to crawl and scramble farther up beyond the clutching backwash of the
sea.
I stood upright, knowing myself saved, and thanking God, and staggering
as I stood. Already the boat was pounded to a thousand fragments. And
though I saw them not, I could guess how grievously had been pounded the
bodies of Captain Nicholl and Arnold Bentham. I saw an oar on the edge of
the foam, and at certain risk I drew it clear. Then I fell to my knees, knowing
myself fainting. And yet, ere I fainted, with a sailors instinct I dragged my
body on and up among the cruel hurting rocks to faint finally beyond the reach
of the sea.
I was near a dead man myself, that night, mostly in stupor, only dimly
aware at times of the extremity of cold and wet that I endured. Morning
brought me astonishment and terror. No plant, not a blade of grass, grew on
that wretched projection of rock from the oceans bottom. A quarter of a mile
in width and a half mile in length, it was no more than a heap of rocks.
Naught could I discover to gratify the cravings of exhausted nature. I was
consumed with thirst, yet was there no fresh water. In vain I tasted to my
mouths undoing every cavity and depression in the rocks. The spray of the
gale so completely had enveloped every portion of the island that every
depression was filled with water salt as the sea.
Of the boat remained nothingnot even a splinter to show that a boat had
been. I stood possessed of my garments, a stout knife, and the one oar I had
saved. The gale had abated, and all that day, staggering and falling, crawling
till hands and knees bled, I vainly sought water.
That night, nearer death than ever, I sheltered behind a rock from the wind.
A heavy shower of rain made me miserable. I removed my various coats and
spread them to soak up the rain; but, when I came to wring the moisture from
them into my mouth, I was disappointed, because the cloth had been
thoroughly impregnated with the salt of the ocean in which I had been
immersed. I lay on my back, my mouth open to catch the few rain-drops that
fell directly into it. It was tantalizing, but it kept my membranes moist and me
from madness.
The second day I was a very sick man. I, who had not eaten for so long,
began to swell to a monstrous fatnessmy legs, my arms, my whole body.
With the slightest of pressures my fingers would sink in a full inch into my
skin, and the depressions so made were long in going away. Yet did I labour
sore in order to fulfil Gods will that I should live. Carefully, with my hands, I
cleaned out the salt water from every slight hole, in the hope that succeeding
showers of rain might fill them with water that I could drink.
My sad lot and the memories of the loved ones at Elkton threw me into a
melancholy, so that I often lost my recollection for hours at a time. This was a
mercy, for it veiled me from my sufferings that else would have killed me.
In the night I was roused by the beat of rain, and I crawled from hole to
hole, lapping up the rain or licking it from the rocks. Brackish it was, but
drinkable. It was what saved me, for, toward morning, I awoke to find myself
in a profuse perspiration and quite free of all delirium.
Then came the sun, the first time since my stay on the island, and I spread
most of my garments to dry. Of water I drank my careful fill, and I calculated
there was ten days supply if carefully husbanded. It was amazing how rich I
felt with this vast wealth of brackish water. And no great merchant, with all
his ships returned from prosperous voyages, his warehouses filled to the
rafters, his strong-boxes overflowing, could have felt as wealthy as did I when
I discovered, cast up on the rocks, the body of a seal that had been dead for
many days. Nor did I fail, first, to thank God on my knees for this
manifestation of His ever-unfailing kindness. The thing was clear to me: God
had not intended I should die. From the very first He had not so intended.
I knew the debilitated state of my stomach, and I ate sparingly in the
knowledge that my natural voracity would surely kill me did I yield myself to
it. Never had sweeter morsels passed my lips, and I make free to confess that I
shed tears of joy, again and again, at contemplation of that putrefied carcass.
My heart of hope beat strong in me once more. Carefully I preserved the
portions of the carcass remaining. Carefully I covered my rock cisterns with
flat stones so that the suns rays might not evaporate the precious fluid and in
precaution against some upspringing of wind in the night and the sudden
flying of spray. Also I gathered me tiny fragments of seaweed and dried them
in the sun for an easement between my poor body and the rough rocks
whereon I made my lodging. And my garments were drythe first time in
days; so that I slept the heavy sleep of exhaustion and of returning health.
When I awoke to a new day I was another man. The absence of the sun
did not depress me, and I was swiftly to learn that God, not forgetting me
while I slumbered, had prepared other and wonderful blessings for me. I
would have fain rubbed my eyes and looked again, for, as far as I could see,
the rocks bordering upon the ocean were covered with seals. There were
thousands of them, and in the water other thousands disported themselves,
while the sound that went up from all their throats was prodigious and
deafening. I knew it when: I saw itmeat lay there for the taking, meat
sufficient for a score of ships companies.
I directly seized my oarthan which there was no other stick of wood on
the islandand cautiously advanced upon all that immensity of provender. It
was quickly guessed by me that these creatures of the sea were unacquainted
with man. They betrayed no signals of timidity at my approach, and I found it
a boys task to rap them on the head with the oar.
And when I had so killed my third and my fourth, I went immediately and
strangely mad. Indeed quite bereft was I of all judgment as I slew and slew
and continued to slay. For the space of two hours I toiled unceasingly with the
oar till I was ready to drop. What excess of slaughter I might have been guilty
of I know not, for at the end of that time, as if by a signal, all the seals that still
lived threw themselves into the water and swiftly disappeared.
I found the number of slain seals to exceed two hundred, and I was
shocked and frightened because of the madness of slaughter that had
possessed me. I had sinned by wanton wastefulness, and after I had duly
refreshed myself with this good wholesome food, I set about as well as I could
to make amends. But first, ere the great task began, I returned thanks to that
Being through whose mercy I had been so miraculously preserved. Thereupon
I laboured until dark, and after dark, skinning the seals, cutting the meat into
strips, and placing it upon the tops of rocks to dry in the sun. Also, I found
small deposits of salt in the nooks and crannies of the rocks on the weather
side of the island. This I rubbed into the meat as a preservative.
Four days I so toiled, and in the end was foolishly proud before God in that
no scrap of all that supply of meat had been wasted. The unremitting labour
was good for my body, which built up rapidly by means of this wholesome
diet in which I did not stint myself. Another evidence of Gods mercy; never,
in the eight years I spent on that barren islet, was there so long a spell of clear
weather and steady sunshine as in the period immediately following the
slaughter of the seals.
Months were to pass ore ever the seals revisited my island. But in the
meantime I was anything but idle. I built me a hut of stone, and, adjoining it,
a storehouse for my cured meat. The hut I roofed with many sealskins, so that
it was fairly water-proof. But I could never cease to marvel, when the rain
beat on that roof, that no less than a kings ransom in the London fur market
protected a castaway sailor from the elements.
I was quickly aware of the importance of keeping some kind of reckoning
of time, without which I was sensible that I should soon lose all knowledge of
the day of the week, and be unable to distinguish one from the other, and not
know which was the Lords day.
I remembered back carefully to the reckoning of time kept in the longboat
by Captain Nicholl; and carefully, again and again, to make sure beyond any
shadow of uncertainty, I went over the tale of the days and nights I had spent
on the island. Then, by seven stones outside my hut, I kept my weekly
calendar. In one place on the oar I cut a small notch for each week, and in
another place on the oar I notched the months, being duly careful indeed, to
reckon in the additional days to each month over and beyond the four weeks.
Thus I was enabled to pay due regard to the Sabbath. As the only mode of
worship I could adopt, I carved a short hymn, appropriate to my situation, on
the oar, which I never failed to chant on the Sabbath. God, in His all-mercy,
had not forgotten me; nor did I, in those eight years, fail at all proper times to
remember God.
It was astonishing the work required, under such circumstances, to supply
ones simple needs of food and shelter. Indeed, I was rarely idle, that first
year. The hut, itself a mere lair of rocks, nevertheless took six weeks of my
time. The tardy curing and the endless scraping of the sealskins, so as to make
them soft and pliable for garments, occupied my spare moments for months
and months.
Then there was the matter of my water supply. After any heavy gale, the
flying spray salted my saved rainwater, so that at times I was grievously put to
live through till fresh rains fell unaccompanied by high winds. Aware that a
continual dropping will wear a stone, I selected a large stone, fine and tight of
texture and, by means of smaller stones, I proceeded to pound it hollow. In
five weeks of most arduous toil I managed thus to make a jar which I
estimated to hold a gallon and a half. Later, I similarly made a four-gallon jar.
It took me nine weeks. Other small ones I also made from time to time. One,
that would have contained eight gallons, developed a flaw when I had worked
seven weeks on it.
But it was not until my fourth year on the island, when I had become
reconciled to the possibility that I might continue to live there for the term of
my natural life, that I created my masterpiece. It took me eight months, but it
was tight, and it held upwards of thirty gallons. These stone vessels were a
great gratification to meso much so, that at times I forgot my humility and
was unduly vain of them. Truly, they were more elegant to me than was ever
the costliest piece of furniture to any queen. Also, I made me a small rock
vessel, containing no more than a quart, with which to convey water from the
catching-places to my large receptacles. When I say that this one-quart vessel
weighed all of two stone, the reader will realize that the mere gathering of the
rainwater was no light task.
Thus, I rendered my lonely situation as comfortable as could be expected.
I had completed me a snug and secure shelter; and, as to provision, I had
always on hand a six months supply, preserved by salting and drying. For
these things, so essential to preserve life, and which one could scarcely have
expected to obtain upon a desert island, I was sensible that I could not be too
thankful.
Although denied the privilege of enjoying the society of any human
creature, not even of a dog or a cat, I was far more reconciled to my lot than
thousands probably would have been. Upon the desolate spot, where fate had
placed me, I conceived myself far more happy than many, who, for
ignominious crimes, were doomed to drag out their lives in solitary
confinement with conscience ever biting as a corrosive canker.
However dreary my prospects, I was not without hope that that Providence,
which, at the very moment when hunger threatened me with dissolution, and
when I might easily have been engulfed in the maw of the sea, had cast me
upon those barren rocks, would finally direct some one to my relief.
If deprived of the society of my fellow creatures, and of the conveniences
of life, I could not but reflect that my forlorn situation was yet attended with
some advantages. Of the whole island, though small, I had peaceable
possession. No one, it was probable, would ever appear to dispute my claim,
unless it were the amphibious animals of the ocean. Since the island was
almost inaccessible, at night my repose was not disturbed by continual
apprehension of the approach of cannibals or of beasts of prey. Again and
again I thanked God on my knees for these various and many benefactions.
Yet is man ever a strange and unaccountable creature. I, who had asked of
Gods mercy no more than putrid meat to eat and a sufficiency of water not too
brackish, was no sooner blessed with an abundance of cured meat and sweet
water than I began to know discontent with my lot. I began to want fire, and
the savour of cooked meat in my mouth. And continually I would discover
myself longing for certain delicacies of the palate such as were part of the
common daily fare on the home table at Elkton. Strive as I would, ever my
fancy eluded my will and wantoned in day-dreaming of the good things I had
eaten and of the good things I would eat if ever I were rescued from my lonely
situation.
It was the old Adam in me, I supposethe taint of that first father who
was the first rebel against Gods commandments. Most strange is man, ever
insatiable, ever unsatisfied, never at peace with God or himself, his days filled
with restlessness and useless endeavour, his nights a glut of vain dreams of
desires wilful and wrong. Yes, and also I was much annoyed by my craving
for tobacco. My sleep was often a torment to me, for it was then that my
desires took licence to rove, so that a thousand times I dreamed myself
possessed of hogsheads of tobaccoay, and of warehouses of tobacco, and of
shiploads and of entire plantations of tobacco.
But I revenged myself upon myself. I prayed God unceasingly for a
humble heart, and chastised my flesh with unremitting toil. Unable to improve
my mind, I determined to improve my barren island. I laboured four months
at constructing a stone wall thirty feet long, including its wings, and a dozen
feet high. This was as a protection to the hut in the periods of the great gales
when all the island was as a tiny petrel in the maw of the hurricane. Nor did I
conceive the time misspent. Thereafter I lay snug in the heart of calm while
all the air for a hundred feet above my head was one stream of gust-driven
water.
In the third year I began me a pillar of rock. Rather was it a pyramid, foursquare,
broad at the base, sloping upward not steeply to the apex. In this
fashion I was compelled to build, for gear and timber there was none in all the
island for the construction of scaffolding. Not until the close of the fifth year
was my pyramid complete. It stood on the summit of the island. Now, when I
state that the summit was but forty feet above the sea, and that the peak of my
pyramid was forty feet above the summit, it will be conceived that I, without
tools, had doubled the stature of the island. It might be urged by some
unthinking ones that I interfered with Gods plan in the creation of the world.
Not so, I hold. For was not I equally a part of Gods plan, along with this heap
of rocks upjutting in the solitude of ocean? My arms with which to work, my
back with which to bend and lift, my hands cunning to clutch and holdwere
not these parts too in Gods plan? Much I pondered the matter. I know that I
was right.
In the sixth year I increased the base of my pyramid, so that in eighteen
months thereafter the height of my monument was fifty feet above the height
of the island. This was no tower of Babel. It served two right purposes. It
gave me a lookout from which to scan the ocean for ships, and increased the
likelihood of my island being sighted by the careless roving eye of any
seaman. And it kept my body and mind in health. With hands never idle,
there was small opportunity for Satan on that island. Only in my dreams did
he torment me, principally with visions of varied foods and with imagined
indulgence in the foul weed called tobacco.
On the eighteenth day of the month of June, in the sixth year of my sojourn
on the island, I descried a sail. But it passed far to leeward at too great a
distance to discover me. Rather than suffering disappointment, the very
appearance of this sail afforded me the liveliest satisfaction. It convinced me
of a fact that I had before in a degree doubted, to wit: that these seas were
sometimes visited by navigators.
Among other things, where the seals hauled up out of the sea, I built widespreading
wings of low rock walls that narrowed to a cul de sac, where I might
conveniently kill such seals as entered without exciting their fellows outside
and without permitting any wounded or frightening seal to escape and spread a
contagion of alarm. Seven months to this structure alone were devoted.
As the time passed, I grew more contented with my lot, and the devil came
less and less in my sleep to torment the old Adam in me with lawless visions
of tobacco and savoury foods. And I continued to eat my seal meat and call it
good, and to drink the sweet rainwater of which always I had plenty, and to be
grateful to God. And God heard me, I know, for during all my term on that
island I knew never a moment of sickness, save two, both of which were due
to my gluttony, as I shall later relate.
In the fifth year, ere I had convinced myself that the keels of ships did on
occasion plough these seas, I began carving on my oar minutes of the more
remarkable incidents that had attended me since I quitted the peaceful shores
of America. This I rendered as intelligible and permanent as possible, the
letters being of the smallest size. Six, and even five, letters were often a days
work for me, so painstaking was I.
And, lest it should prove my hard fortune never to meet with the longwished
opportunity to return to my friends and to my family at Elkton, I
engraved, or nitched, on the broad end of the oar, the legend of my ill fate
which I have already quoted near the beginning of this narrative.
This oar, which had proved so serviceable to me in my destitute situation,
and which now contained a record of my own fate and that of my shipmates, I
spared no pains to preserve. No longer did I risk it in knocking seals on the
head. Instead, I equipped myself with a stone club, some three feet in length
and of suitable diameter, which occupied an even month in the fashioning.
Also, to secure the oar from the weather (for I used it in mild breezes as a
flagstaff on top of my pyramid from which to fly a flag I made me from one of
my precious shirts) I contrived for it a covering of well-cured sealskins.
In the month of March of the sixth year of my confinement I experienced
one of the most tremendous storms that was perhaps ever witnessed by man.
It commenced at about nine in the evening, with the approach of black clouds
and a freshening wind from the south-west, which, by eleven, had become a
hurricane, attended with incessant peals of thunder and the sharpest lightning I
had ever witnessed.
I was not without apprehension for the safety of the island. Over every
part the seas made a clean breach, except of the summit of my pyramid. There
the life was nigh beaten and suffocated out of my body by the drive of the
wind and spray. I could not but be sensible that my existence was spared
solely because of my diligence in erecting the pyramid and so doubling the
stature of the island.
Yet, in the morning, I had great reason for thankfulness. All my saved
rainwater was turned brackish, save that in my largest vessel which was
sheltered in the lee of the pyramid. By careful economy I knew I had drink
sufficient until the next rain, no matter how delayed, should fall. My hut was
quite washed out by the seas, and of my great store of seal meat only a
wretched, pulpy modicum remained. Nevertheless I was agreeably surprised
to find the rocks plentifully distributed with a sort of fish more nearly like the
mullet than any I had ever observed. Of these I picked up no less than twelve
hundred and nineteen, which I split and cured in the sun after the manner of
cod. This welcome change of diet was not without its consequence. I was
guilty of gluttony, and for all of the succeeding night I was near to deaths
door.
In the seventh year of my stay on the island, in the very same month of
March, occurred a similar storm of great violence. Following upon it, to my
astonishment, I found an enormous dead whale, quite fresh, which had been
cast up high and dry by the waves. Conceive my gratification when in the
bowels of the great fish I found deeply imbedded a harpoon of the common
sort with a few fathoms of new line attached thereto.
Thus were my hopes again revived that I should finally meet with an
opportunity to quit the desolate island. Beyond doubt these seas were
frequented by whalemen, and, so long as I kept up a stout heart, sooner or later
I should be saved. For seven years I had lived on seal meat, so that at sight of
the enormous plentitude of different and succulent food I fell a victim to my
weakness and ate of such quantities that once again I was well nigh to dying.
And yet, after all, this, and the affair of the small fish, were mere
indispositions due to the foreignness of the food to my stomach, which had
learned to prosper on seal meat and on nothing but seal meat.
Of that one whale I preserved a full years supply of provision. Also,
under the suns rays, in the rock hollows, I tried out much of the oil, which,
with the addition of salt, was a welcome thing in which to dip my strips of
seal-meat whilst dining. Out of my precious rags of shirts I could even have
contrived a wick, so that, with the harpoon for steel and rock for flint, I might
have had a light at night. But it was a vain thing, and I speedily forwent the
thought of it. I had no need for light when Gods darkness descended, for I
had schooled myself to sleep from sundown to sunrise, winter and summer.
I, Darrell Standing, cannot refrain from breaking in on this recital of an
earlier existence in order to note a conclusion of my own. Since human
personality is a growth, a sum of all previous existences added together, what
possibility was there for Warden Atherton to break down my spirit in the
inquisition of solitary? I am life that survived, a structure builded up through
the ages of the pastand such a past! What were ten days and nights in the
jacket to me?to me, who had once been Daniel Foss, and for eight years
learned patience in that school of rocks in the far South Ocean?
***
At the end of my eighth year on the island in the month of September,
when I had just sketched most ambitious plans to raise my pyramid to sixty
feet above the summit of the island, I awoke one morning to stare out upon a
ship with topsails aback and nearly within hail. That I might be discovered, I
swung my oar in the air, jumped from rock to rock, and was guilty of all
manner of livelinesses of action, until I could see the officers on the quarterdeck
looking at me through their spyglasses. They answered by pointing to
the extreme westerly end of the island, whither I hastened and discovered their
boat manned by half a dozen men. It seems, as I was to learn afterward, the
ship had been attracted by my pyramid and had altered its course to make
closer examination of so strange a structure that was greater of height than the
wild island on which it stood.
But the surf proved to be too great to permit the boat to land on my
inhospitable shore. After divers unsuccessful attempts they signalled me that
they must return to the ship. Conceive my despair at thus being unable to quit
the desolate island. I seized my oar (which I had long since determined to
present to the Philadelphia Museum if ever I were preserved) and with it
plunged headlong into the foaming surf. Such was my good fortune, and my
strength and agility, that I gained the boat.
I cannot refrain from telling here a curious incident. The ship had by this
time drifted so far away, that we were all of an hour in getting aboard. During
this time I yielded to my propensities that had been baffled for eight long
years, and begged of the second mate, who steered, a piece of tobacco to chew.
This granted, the second mate also proffered me his pipe, filled with prime
Virginia leaf. Scarce had ten minutes passed when I was taken violently sick.
The reason for this was clear. My system was entirely purged of tobacco, and
what I now suffered was tobacco poisoning such as afflicts any boy at the time
of his first smoke. Again I had reason to be grateful to God, and from that day
to the day of my death, I neither used nor desired the foul weed.
***
I, Darrell Standing, must now complete the amazingness of the details of
this existence which I relived while unconscious in the strait-jacket in San
Quentin prison. I often wondered if Daniel Foss had been true in his resolve
and deposited the carved oar in the Philadelphia Museum.
It is a difficult matter for a prisoner in solitary to communicate with the
outside world. Once, with a guard, and once with a short-timer in solitary, I
entrusted, by memorization, a letter of inquiry addressed to the curator of the
Museum. Although under the most solemn pledges, both these men failed me.
It was not until after Ed Morrell, by a strange whirl of fate, was released from
solitary and appointed head trusty of the entire prison, that I was able to have
the letter sent. I now give the reply, sent me by the curator of the Philadelphia
Museum, and smuggled to me by Ed Morrell:
***
It is true there is such an oar here as you have described. But few persons
can know of it, for it is not on exhibition in the public rooms. In fact, and I
have held this position for eighteen years, I was unaware of its existence
myself.
But upon consulting our old records I found that such an oar had been
presented by one Daniel Foss, of Elkton, Maryland, in the year 1821. Not
until after a long search did we find the oar in a disused attic lumber-room of
odds and ends. The notches and the legend are carved on the oar just as you
have described.
We have also on file a pamphlet presented at the same time, written by the
said Daniel Foss, and published in Boston by the firm of N. Coverly, Jr., in the
year 1834. This pamphlet describes eight years of a castaways life on a desert
island. It is evident that this mariner, in his old age and in want, hawked this
pamphlet about among the charitable.
I am very curious to learn how you became aware of this oar, of the
existence of which we of the museum were ignorant. Am I correct in
assuming that you have read an account in some diary published later by this
Daniel Foss? I shall be glad for any information on the subject, and am
proceeding at once to have the oar and the pamphlet put back on exhibition.
Very truly yours,
HOSEA SALSBURTY.
CHAPTER XX
The time came when I humbled Warden Atherton to unconditional
surrender, making a vain and empty mouthing of his ultimatum, Dynamite or
curtains. He gave me up as one who could not be killed in a strait-jacket. He
had had men die after several hours in the jacket. He had had men die after
several days in the jacket, although, invariably, they were unlaced and carted
into hospital ere they breathed their last . . . and received a death certificate
from the doctor of pneumonia, or Brights disease, or valvular disease of the
heart.
But me Warden Atherton could never kill. Never did the urgency arise of
carting my maltreated and perishing carcass to the hospital. Yet I will say that
Warden Atherton tried his best and dared his worst. There was the time when
he double-jacketed me. It is so rich an incident that I must tell it.
It happened that one of the San Francisco newspapers (seeking, as every
newspaper and as every commercial enterprise seeks, a market that will enable
it to realize a profit) tried to interest the radical portion of the working class in
prison reform. As a result, union labour possessing an important political
significance at the time, the time-serving politicians at Sacramento appointed a
senatorial committee of investigation of the state prisons.
This State Senate committee investigated (pardon my italicized sneer) San
Quentin. Never was there so model an institution of detention. The convicts
themselves so testified. Nor can one blame them. They had experienced
similar investigations in the past. They knew on which side their bread was
buttered. They knew that all their sides and most of their ribs would ache very
quickly after the taking of their testimony . . . if said testimony were adverse to
the prison administration. Oh, believe me, my reader, it is a very ancient story.
It was ancient in old Babylon, many a thousand years ago, as I well remember
of that old time when I rotted in prison while palace intrigues shook the court.
As I have said, every convict testified to the humaneness of Warden
Athertons administration. In fact, so touching were their testimonials to the
kindness of the Warden, to the good and varied quality of the food and the
cooking, to the gentleness of the guards, and to the general decency and ease
and comfort of the prison domicile, that the opposition newspapers of San
Francisco raised an indignant cry for more rigour in the management of our
prisons, in that, otherwise, honest but lazy citizens would be seduced into
seeking enrolment as prison guests.
The Senate Committee even invaded solitary, where the three of us had
little to lose and nothing to gain. Jake Oppenheimer spat in its faces and told
its members, all and sundry, to go to hell. Ed Morrell told them what a
noisome stews the place was, insulted the Warden to his face, and was
recommended by the committee to be given a taste of the antiquated and
obsolete punishments that, after all, must have been devised by previous
Wardens out of necessity for the right handling of hard characters like him.
I was careful not to insult the Warden. I testified craftily, and as a scientist,
beginning with small beginnings, making an art of my exposition, step by step,
by tiny steps, inveigling my senatorial auditors on into willingness and
eagerness to listen to the next exposure, the whole fabric so woven that there
was no natural halting place at which to drop a period or interpolate a query . .
. in this fashion, thus, I got my tale across.
Alas! no whisper of what I divulged ever went outside the prison walls.
The Senate Committee gave a beautiful whitewash to Warden Atherton and
San Quentin. The crusading San Francisco newspaper assured its workingclass
readers that San Quentin was whiter than snow, and further, that while it
was true that the strait-jacket was still a recognized legal method of
punishment for the refractory, that, nevertheless, at the present time, under the
present humane and spiritually right-minded Warden, the strait-jacket was
never, under any circumstance, used.
And while the poor asses of labourers read and believed, while the Senate
Committee dined and wined with the Warden at the expense of the state and
the tax payer, Ed Morrell, Jake Oppenheimer, and I were lying in our jackets,
laced just a trifle more tightly and more vindictively than we had ever been
laced before.
It is to laugh, Ed Morrell tapped to me, with the edge of the sole of his
shoe.
I should worry, tapped Jake.
And as for me, I too capped my bitter scorn and laughter, remembered the
prison houses of old Babylon, smiled to myself a huge cosmic smile, and
drifted off and away into the largeness of the little death that made me heir of
all the ages and the rider full-panoplied and astride of time.
Yea, dear brother of the outside world, while the whitewash was running
off the press, while the august senators were wining and dining, we three of
the living dead, buried alive in solidarity, were sweating our pain in the canvas
torture.
And after the dinner, warm with wine, Warden Atherton himself came to
see how fared it with us. Me, as usual, they found in coma. Doctor Jackson
for the first time must have been alarmed. I was brought back across the dark
to consciousness with the bite of ammonia in my nostrils. I smiled into the
faces bent over me.
Shamming, snorted the Warden, and I knew by the flush on his face and
the thickness in his tongue that he had been drinking.
I licked my lips as a sign for water, for I desired to speak.
You are an ass, I at last managed to say with cold distinctness. You are
an ass, a coward, a cur, a pitiful thing so low that spittle would be wasted on
your face. In such matter Jake Oppenheimer is over-generous with you. As
for me, without shame I tell you the only reason I do not spit upon you is that I
cannot demean myself nor so degrade my spittle.
Ive reached the limit of my patience! he bellowed. I will kill you,
Standing!
Youve been drinking, I retorted. And I would advise you, if you must
say such things, not to take so many of your prison curs into your confidence.
They will snitch on you some day, and you will lose your job.
But the wine was up and master of him.
Put another jacket on him, he commanded. You are a dead man,
Standing. But youll not die in the jacket. Well bury you from the hospital.
This time, over the previous jacket, the second jacket was put on from
behind and laced up in front.
Lord, Lord, Warden, it is bitter weather, I sneered. The frost is sharp.
Wherefore I am indeed grateful for your giving me two jackets. I shall be
almost comfortable.
Tighter! he urged to Al Hutchins, who was drawing the lacing. Throw
your feet into the skunk. Break his ribs.
I must admit that Hutchins did his best.
You will lie about me, the Warden raved, the flush of wine and wrath
flooding ruddier into his face. Now see what you get for it. Your number is
taken at last, Standing. This is your finish. Do you hear? This is your finish.
A favour, Warden, I whispered faintly. Faint I was. Perforce I was
nearly unconscious from the fearful constriction. Make it a triple jacketing,
I managed to continue, while the cell walls swayed and reeled about me and
while I fought with all my will to hold to my consciousness that was being
squeezed out of me by the jackets. Another jacket . . . Warden . . . It . . . will .
. . be . . . so . . . much . . . er . . . warmer.
And my whisper faded away as I ebbed down into the little death.
I was never the same man after that double-jacketing. Never again, to this
day, no matter what my food, was I properly nurtured. I suffered internal
injuries to an extent I never cared to investigate. The old pain in my ribs and
stomach is with me now as I write these lines. But the poor, maltreated
machinery has served its purpose. It has enabled me to live thus far, and it
will enable me to live the little longer to the day they take me out in the shirt
without a collar and stretch my neck with the well-stretched rope.
But the double-jacketing was the last straw. It broke down Warden
Atherton. He surrendered to the demonstration that I was unkillable. As I told
him once:
The only way you can get me, Warden, is to sneak in here some night
with a hatchet.
Jake Oppenheimer was responsible for a good one on the Warden which I
must relate:
I say, Warden, it must be straight hell for you to have to wake up every
morning with yourself on your pillow.
And Ed Morrell to the Warden:
Your mother must have been damn fond of children to have raised you.
It was really an offence to me when the jacketing ceased. I sadly missed
that dream world of mine. But not for long. I found that I could suspend
animation by the exercise of my will, aided mechanically by constricting my
chest and abdomen with the blanket. Thus I induced physiological and
psychological states similar to those caused by the jacket. So, at will, and
without the old torment, I was free to roam through time.
Ed Morrell believed all my adventures, but Jake Oppenheimer remained
sceptical to the last. It was during my third year in solitary that I paid
Oppenheimer a visit. I was never able to do it but that once, and that one time
was wholly unplanned and unexpected.
It was merely after unconsciousness had come to me that I found myself in
his cell. My body, I knew, lay in the jacket back in my own cell. Although
never before had I seen him, I knew that this man was Jake Oppenheimer. It
was summer weather, and he lay without clothes on top his blanket. I was
shocked by his cadaverous face and skeleton-like body. He was not even the
shell of a man. He was merely the structure of a man, the bones of a man, still
cohering, stripped practically of all flesh and covered with a parchment-like
skin.
Not until back in my own cell and consciousness was I able to mull the
thing over and realize that just as was Jake Oppenheimer, so was Ed Morrell,
so was I. And I could not but thrill as I glimpsed the vastitude of spirit that
inhabited these frail, perishing carcasses of usthe three incorrigibles of
solitary. Flesh is a cheap, vain thing. Grass is flesh, and flesh becomes grass;
but the spirit is the thing that abides and survives. I have no patience with
these flesh-worshippers. A taste of solitary in San Quentin would swiftly
convert them to a due appreciation and worship of the spirit.
But to return to my experience in Oppenheimers cell. His body was that
of a man long dead and shrivelled by desert heat. The skin that covered it was
of the colour of dry mud. His sharp, yellow-gray eyes seemed the only part of
him that was alive. They were never at rest. He lay on his back, and the eyes
darted hither and thither, following the flight of the several flies that disported
in the gloomy air above him. I noted, too, a scar, just above his right elbow,
and another scar on his right ankle.
After a time he yawned, rolled over on his side, and inspected an angrylooking
sore just above his hip. This he proceeded to cleanse and dress by the
crude methods men in solitary must employ. I recognized the sore as one of
the sort caused by the strait-jacket. On my body, at this moment of writing,
are hundreds of scars of the jacket.
Next, Oppenheimer rolled on his back, gingerly took one of his front upper
toothan eye teethbetween thumb and forefinger, and consideratively
moved it back and forth. Again he yawned, stretched his arms, rolled over,
and knocked the call to Ed Morrell.
I read the code as a matter of course.
Thought you might be awake, Oppenheimer tapped. How goes it with
the Professor?
Then, dim and far, I could hear Morrells taps enunciating that they had put
me in the jacket an hour before, and that, as usual, I was already deaf to all
knuckle talk.
He is a good guy, Oppenheimer rapped on. I always was suspicious of
educated mugs, but he aint been hurt none by his education. He is sure
square. Got all the spunk in the world, and you could not get him to squeal or
double cross in a million years.
To all of which, and with amplification, Ed Morrell agreed. And I must,
right here, ere I go a word further, say that I have lived many years and many
lives, and that in those many lives I have known proud moments; but that the
proudest moment I have ever known was the moment when my two comrades
in solitary passed this appraisal of me. Ed Morrell and Jake Oppenheimer
were great spirits, and in all time no greater honour was ever accorded me than
this admission of me to their comradeship. Kings have knighted me, emperors
have ennobled me, and, as king myself, I have known stately moments. Yet of
it all nothing do I adjudge so splendid as this accolade delivered by two lifers
in solitary deemed by the world as the very bottom-most of the human
cesspool.
Afterwards, recuperating from this particular bout with the jacket, I
brought up my visit to Jakes cell as a proof that my spirit did leave my body.
But Jake was unshakable.
It is guessing that is more than guessing, was his reply, when I had
described to him his successive particular actions at the time my spirit had
been in his cell. It is figuring. You have been close to three years in solitary
yourself, Professor, and you can come pretty near to figuring what any guy
will do to be killing time. There aint a thing you told me that you and Ed
aint done thousands of times, from lying with your clothes off in hot weather
to watching flies, tending sores, and rapping.
Morrell sided with me, but it was no use.
Now dont take it hard, Professor, Jake tapped. I aint saying you lied.
I just say you get to dreaming and figuring in the jacket without knowing
youre doing it. I know you believe what you say, and that you think it
happened; but it dont buy nothing with me. You figure it, but you dont know
you figure itthat is something you know all the time, though you dont know
you know it until you get into them dreamy, woozy states.
Hold on, Jake, I tapped. You know I have never seen you with my own
eyes. Is that right?
I got to take your word for it, Professor. You might have seen me and not
known it was me.
The point is, I continued, not having seen you with your clothes off,
nevertheless I am able to tell you about that scar above your right elbow, and
that scar on your right ankle.
Oh, shucks, was his reply. Youll find all that in my prison description
and along with my mug in the rogues gallery. They is thousands of chiefs of
police and detectives know all that stuff.
I never heard of it, I assured him.
You dont remember that you ever heard of it, he corrected. But you
must have just the same. Though you have forgotten about it, the information
is in your brain all right, stored away for reference, only youve forgot where
it is stored. Youve got to get woozy in order to remember.
Did you ever forget a mans name you used to know as well as your own
brothers? I have. There was a little juror that convicted me in Oakland the
time I got handed my fifty-years. And one day I found Id forgotten his name.
Why, bo, I lay here for weeks puzzling for it. Now, just because I could not
dig it out of my memory box was no sign it was not there. It was mislaid, that
was all. And to prove it, one day, when I was not even thinking about it, it
popped right out of my brain to the tip of my tongue. Stacy, I said right out
loud. Joseph Stacy. That was it. Get my drive?
You only tell me about them scars what thousands of men know. I dont
know how you got the information, I guess you dont know yourself. That
aint my lookout. But there she is. Telling me what many knows buys nothing
with me. You got to deliver a whole lot more than that to make me swallow
the rest of your whoppers.
Hamiltons Law of Parsimony in the weighing of evidence! So
intrinsically was this slum-bred convict a scientist, that he had worked out
Hamiltons law and rigidly applied it.
And yetand the incident is deliciousJake Oppenheimer was
intellectually honest. That night, as I was dozing off, he called me with the
customary signal.
Say, Professor, you said you saw me wiggling my loose tooth. That has
got my goat. That is the one thing I cant figure out any way you could know.
It only went loose three days ago, and I aint whispered it to a soul.
CHAPTER XXI
Pascal somewhere says: In viewing the march of human evolution, the
philosophic mind should look upon humanity as one man, and not as a
conglomeration of individuals.
I sit here in Murderers Row in Folsom, the drowsy hum of flies in my ears
as I ponder that thought of Pascal. It is true. Just as the human embryo, in its
brief ten lunar months, with bewildering swiftness, in myriad forms and
semblances a myriad times multiplied, rehearses the entire history of organic
life from vegetable to man; just as the human boy, in his brief years of
boyhood, rehearses the history of primitive man in acts of cruelty and
savagery, from wantonness of inflicting pain on lesser creatures to tribal
consciousness expressed by the desire to run in gangs; just so, I, Darrell
Standing, have rehearsed and relived all that primitive man was, and did, and
became until he became even you and me and the rest of our kind in a
twentieth century civilization.
Truly do we carry in us, each human of us alive on the planet to-day, the
incorruptible history of life from lifes beginning. This history is written in
our tissues and our bones, in our functions and our organs, in our brain cells
and in our spirits, and in all sorts of physical and psychic atavistic urgencies
and compulsions. Once we were fish-like, you and I, my reader, and crawled
up out of the sea to pioneer in the great, dry-land adventure in the thick of
which we are now. The marks of the sea are still on us, as the marks of the
serpent are still on us, ere the serpent became serpent and we became we,
when pre-serpent and pre-we were one. Once we flew in the air, and once we
dwelt arboreally and were afraid of the dark. The vestiges remain, graven on
you and me, and graven on our seed to come after us to the end of our time on
earth.
What Pascal glimpsed with the vision of a seer, I have lived. I have seen
myself that one man contemplated by Pascals philosophic eye. Oh, I have a
tale, most true, most wonderful, most real to me, although I doubt that I have
wit to tell it, and that you, my reader, have wit to perceive it when told. I say
that I have seen myself that one man hinted at by Pascal. I have lain in the
long trances of the jacket and glimpsed myself a thousand living men living
the thousand lives that are themselves the history of the human man climbing
upward through the ages.
Ah, what royal memories are mine, as I flutter through the æons of the
long ago. In single jacket trances I have lived the many lives involved in the
thousand-years-long Odysseys of the early drifts of men. Heavens, before I
was of the flaxen-haired Aesir, who dwelt in Asgard, and before I was of the
red-haired Vanir, who dwelt in Vanaheim, long before those times I have
memories (living memories) of earlier drifts, when, like thistledown before the
breeze, we drifted south before the face of the descending polar ice-cap.
I have died of frost and famine, fight and flood. I have picked berries on
the bleak backbone of the world, and I have dug roots to eat from the fatsoiled
fens and meadows. I have scratched the reindeers semblance and the
semblance of the hairy mammoth on ivory tusks gotten of the chase and on the
rock walls of cave shelters when the winter storms moaned outside. I have
cracked marrow-bones on the sites of kingly cities that had perished centuries
before my time or that were destined to be builded centuries after my passing.
And I have left the bones of my transient carcasses in pond bottoms, and
glacial gravels, and asphaltum lakes.
I have lived through the ages known to-day among the scientists as the
Paleolithic, the Neolithic, and the Bronze. I remember when with our
domesticated wolves we herded our reindeer to pasture on the north shore of
the Mediterranean where now are France and Italy and Spain. This was before
the ice-sheet melted backward toward the pole. Many processions of the
equinoxes have I lived through and died in, my reader . . . only that I
remember and that you do not.
I have been a Son of the Plough, a Son of the Fish, a Son of the Tree. All
religions from the beginnings of mans religious time abide in me. And when
the Dominie, in the chapel, here in Folsom of a Sunday, worships God in his
own good modern way, I know that in him, the Dominie, still abide the
worships of the Plough, the Fish, the Treeay, and also all worships of
Astarte and the Night.
I have been an Aryan master in old Egypt, when my soldiers scrawled
obscenities on the carven tombs of kings dead and gone and forgotten
aforetime. And I, the Aryan master in old Egypt, have myself builded my two
burial placesthe one a false and mighty pyramid to which a generation of
slaves could attest; the other humble, meagre, secret, rock-hewn in a desert
valley by slaves who died immediately their work was done. . . . And I wonder
me here in Folsom, while democracy dreams its enchantments oer the
twentieth century world, whether there, in the rock-hewn crypt of that secret,
desert valley, the bones still abide that once were mine and that stiffened my
animated body when I was an Aryan master high-stomached to command.
And on the great drift, southward and eastward under the burning sun that
perished all descendants of the houses of Asgard and Vanaheim, I have been a
king in Ceylon, a builder of Aryan monuments under Aryan kings in old Java
and old Sumatra. And I have died a hundred deaths on the great South Sea
drift ere ever the rebirth of me came to plant monuments, that only Aryans
plant, on volcanic tropic islands that I, Darrell Standing, cannot name, being
too little versed to-day in that far sea geography.
If only I were articulate to paint in the frail medium of words what I see
and know and possess incorporated in my consciousness of the mighty
driftage of the races in the times before our present written history began!
Yes, we had our history even then. Our old men, our priests, our wise ones,
told our history into tales and wrote those tales in the stars so that our seed
after us should not forget. From the sky came the life-giving rain and the
sunlight. And we studied the sky, learned from the stars to calculate time and
apportion the seasons; and we named the stars after our heroes and our foods
and our devices for getting food; and after our wanderings, and drifts, and
adventures; and after our functions and our furies of impulse and desire.
And, alas! we thought the heavens unchanging on which we wrote all our
humble yearnings and all the humble things we did or dreamed of doing.
When I was a Son of the Bull, I remember me a lifetime I spent at star-gazing.
And, later and earlier, there were other lives in which I sang with the priests
and bards the taboo-songs of the stars wherein we believed was written our
imperishable record. And here, at the end of it all, I pore over books of
astronomy from the prison library, such as they allow condemned men to read,
and learn that even the heavens are passing fluxes, vexed with star-driftage as
the earth is by the drifts of men.
Equipped with this modern knowledge, I have, returning through the little
death from my earlier lives, been able to compare the heavens then and now.
And the stars do change. I have seen pole stars and pole stars and dynasties of
pole stars. The pole star to-day is in Ursa Minor. Yet, in those far days I have
seen the pole star in Draco, in Hercules, in Vega, in Cygnus, and in Cepheus.
No; not even the stars abide, and yet the memory and the knowledge of them
abides in me, in the spirit of me that is memory and that is eternal. Only spirit
abides. All else, being mere matter, passes, and must pass.
Oh, I do see myself to-day that one man who appeared in the elder world,
blonde, ferocious, a killer and a lover, a meat-eater and a root-digger, a gypsy
and a robber, who, club in hand, through millenniums of years wandered the
world around seeking meat to devour and sheltered nests for his younglings
and sucklings.
I am that man, the sum of him, the all of him, the hairless biped who
struggled upward from the slime and created love and law out of the anarchy
of fecund life that screamed and squalled in the jungle. I am all that that man
was and did become. I see myself, through the painful generations, snaring
and killing the game and the fish, clearing the first fields from the forest,
making rude tools of stone and bone, building houses of wood, thatching the
roofs with leaves and straw, domesticating the wild grasses and meadow-roots,
fathering them to become the progenitors of rice and millet and wheat and
barley and all manner of succulent edibles, learning to scratch the soil, to sow,
to reap, to store, beating out the fibres of plants to spin into thread and to
weave into cloth, devising systems of irrigation, working in metals, making
markets and trade-routes, building boats, and founding navigationay, and
organizing village life, welding villages to villages till they became tribes,
welding tribes together till they became nations, ever seeking the laws of
things, ever making the laws of humans so that humans might live together in
amity and by united effort beat down and destroy all manner of creeping,
crawling, squalling things that might else destroy them.
I was that man in all his births and endeavours. I am that man to-day,
waiting my due death by the law that I helped to devise many a thousand years
ago, and by which I have died many times before this, many times. And as I
contemplate this vast past history of me, I find several great and splendid
influences, and, chiefest of these, the love of woman, mans love for the
woman of his kind. I see myself, the one man, the lover, always the lover.
Yes, also was I the great fighter, but somehow it seems to me as I sit here and
evenly balance it all, that I was, more than aught else, the great lover. It was
because I loved greatly that I was the great fighter.
Sometimes I think that the story of man is the story of the love of woman.
This memory of all my past that I write now is the memory of my love of
woman. Ever, in the ten thousand lives and guises, I loved her. I love her
now. My sleep is fraught with her; my waking fancies, no matter whence they
start, lead me always to her. There is no escaping her, that eternal, splendid,
ever-resplendent figure of woman.
Oh, make no mistake. I am no callow, ardent youth. I am an elderly man,
broken in health and body, and soon to die. I am a scientist and a philosopher.
I, as all the generations of philosophers before me, know woman for what she
isher weaknesses, and meannesses, and immodesties, and ignobilities, her
earth-bound feet, and her eyes that have never seen the stars. Butand the
everlasting, irrefragable fact remains: Her feet are beautiful, her eyes are
beautiful, her arms and breasts are paradise, her charm is potent beyond all
charm that has ever dazzled men; and, as the pole willy-nilly draws the needle,
just so, willy-nilly, does she draw men.
Woman has made me laugh at death and distance, scorn fatigue and sleep.
I have slain men, many men, for love of woman, or in warm blood have
baptized our nuptials or washed away the stain of her favour to another. I have
gone down to death and dishonour, my betrayal of my comrades and of the
stars black upon me, for womans sakefor my sake, rather, I desired her so.
And I have lain in the barley, sick with yearning for her, just to see her pass
and glut my eyes with the swaying wonder of her and of her hair, black with
the night, or brown or flaxen, or all golden-dusty with the sun.
For woman is beautiful . . . to man. She is sweet to his tongue, and
fragrance in his nostrils. She is fire in his blood, and a thunder of trumpets;
her voice is beyond all music in his ears; and she can shake his soul that else
stands steadfast in the draughty presence of the Titans of the Light and of the
Dark. And beyond his star-gazing, in his far-imagined heavens, Valkyrie or
houri, man has fain made place for her, for he could see no heaven without
her. And the sword, in battle, singing, sings not so sweet a song as the woman
sings to man merely by her laugh in the moonlight, or her love-sob in the dark,
or by her swaying on her way under the sun while he lies dizzy with longing in
the grass.
I have died of love. I have died for love, as you shall see. In a little while
they will take me out, me, Darrell Standing, and make me die. And that death
shall be for love. Oh, not lightly was I stirred when I slew Professor Haskell
in the laboratory at the University of California. He was a man. I was a man.
And there was a woman beautiful. Do you understand? She was a woman
and I was a man and a lover, and all the heredity of love was mine up from the
black and squalling jungle ere love was love and man was man.
Oh, ay, it is nothing new. Often, often, in that long past have I given life
and honour, place and power for love. Man is different from woman. She is
close to the immediate and knows only the need of instant things. We know
honour above her honour, and pride beyond her wildest guess of pride. Our
eyes are far-visioned for star-gazing, while her eyes see no farther than the
solid earth beneath her feet, the lovers breast upon her breast, the infant lusty
in the hollow of her arm. And yet, such is our alchemy compounded of the
ages, woman works magic in our dreams and in our veins, so that more than
dreams and far visions and the blood of life itself is woman to us, who, as
lovers truly say, is more than all the world. Yet is this just, else would man not
be man, the fighter and the conqueror, treading his red way on the face of all
other and lesser lifefor, had man not been the lover, the royal lover, he could
never have become the kingly fighter. We fight best, and die best, and live
best, for what we love.
I am that one man. I see myself the many selves that have gone into the
constituting of me. And ever I see the woman, the many women, who have
made me and undone me, who have loved me and whom I have loved.
I remember, oh, long ago when human kind was very young, that I made
me a snare and a pit with a pointed stake upthrust in the middle thereof, for the
taking of Sabre-Tooth. Sabre-Tooth, long-fanged and long-haired, was the
chiefest peril to us of the squatting place, who crouched through the nights
over our fires and by day increased the growing shell-bank beneath us by the
clams we dug and devoured from the salt mud-flats beside us.
And when the roar and the squall of Sabre-Tooth roused us where we
squatted by our dying embers, and I was wild with far vision of the proof of
the pit and the stake, it was the woman, arms about me, leg-twining, who
fought with me and restrained me not to go out through the dark to my desire.
She was part-clad, for warmth only, in skins of animals, mangy and fire-burnt,
that I had slain; she was swart and dirty with camp smoke, unwashed since the
spring rains, with nails gnarled and broken, and hands that were calloused like
footpads and were more like claws than like hands; but her eyes were blue as
the summer sky is, as the deep sea is, and there was that in her eyes, and in her
clasped arms about me, and in her heart beating against mine, that withheld
me . . . though through the dark until dawn, while Sabre-Tooth squalled his
wrath and his agony, I could hear my comrades snickering and sniggling to
their women in that I had not the faith in my emprise and invention to venture
through the night to the pit and the stake I had devised for the undoing of
Sabre-Tooth. But my woman, my savage mate held me, savage that I was, and
her eyes drew me, and her arms chained me, and her twining legs and heart
beating to mine seduced me from my far dream of things, my mans
achievement, the goal beyond goals, the taking and the slaying of Sabre-Tooth
on the stake in the pit.
Once I wan Ushu, the archer. I remember it well. For I was lost from my
own people, through the great forest, till I emerged on the flat lands and grass
lands, and was taken in by a strange people, kin in that their skin was white,
their hair yellow, their speech not too remote from mine. And she was Igar,
and I drew her as I sang in the twilight, for she was destined a race-mother,
and she was broad-built and full-dugged, and she could not but draw to the
man heavy-muscled, deep-chested, who sang of his prowess in man-slaying
and in meat-getting, and so, promised food and protection to her in her
weakness whilst she mothered the seed that was to hunt the meat and live after
her.
And these people knew not the wisdom of my people, in that they snared
and pitted their meat and in battle used clubs and stone throwing-sticks and
were unaware of the virtues of arrows swift-flying, notched on the end to fit
the thong of deer-sinew, well-twisted, that sprang into straightness when
released to the spring of the ask-stick bent in the middle.
And while I sang, the stranger men laughed in the twilight. And only she,
Igar, believed and had faith in me. I took her alone to the hunting, where the
deer sought the water-hole. And my bow twanged and sang in the covert, and
the deer fell fast-stricken, and the warm meat was sweet to us, and she was
mine there by the water-hole.
And because of Igar I remained with the strange men. And I taught them
the making of bows from the red and sweet-smelling wood like unto cedar.
And I taught them to keep both eyes open, and to aim with the left eye, and to
make blunt shafts for small game, and pronged shafts of bone for the fish in
the clear water, and to flake arrow-heads from obsidian for the deer and the
wild horse, the elk and old Sabre-Tooth. But the flaking of stone they laughed
at, till I shot an elk through and through, the flaked stone standing out and
beyond, the feathered shaft sunk in its vitals, the whole tribe applauding.
I was Ushu, the archer, and Igar was my woman and mate. We laughed
under the sun in the morning, when our man-child and woman-child, yellowed
like honey-bees, sprawled and rolled in the mustard, and at night she lay close
in my arms, and loved me, and urged me, because of my skill at the seasoning
of woods and the flaking of arrow-heads, that I should stay close by the camp
and let the other men bring to me the meat from the perils of hunting. And I
listened, and grew fat and short-breathed, and in the long nights, unsleeping,
worried that the men of the stranger tribe brought me meat for my wisdom and
honour, but laughed at my fatness and undesire for the hunting and fighting.
And in my old age, when our sons were man-grown and our daughters
were mothers, when up from the southland the dark men, flat-browed, kinkyheaded,
surged like waves of the sea upon us and we fled back before them to
the hill-slopes, Igar, like my mates far before and long after, leg-twining, armclasping,
unseeing far visions, strove to hold me aloof from the battle.
And I tore myself from her, fat and short-breathed, while she wept that no
longer I loved her, and I went out to the night-fighting and dawn-fighting,
where, to the singing of bowstrings and the shrilling of arrows, feathered,
sharp-pointed, we showed them, the kinky-heads, the skill of the killing and
taught them the wit and the willing of slaughter.
And as I died them at the end of the fighting, there were death songs and
singing about me, and the songs seemed to sing as these the words I have
written when I was Ushu, the archer, and Igar, my mate-woman, leg-twining,
arm-clasping, would have held me back from the battle.
Once, and heaven alone knows when, save that it was in the long ago when
man was young, we lived beside great swamps, where the hills drew down
close to the wide, sluggish river, and where our women gathered berries and
roots, and there were herds of deer, of wild horses, of antelope, and of elk, that
we men slew with arrows or trapped in the pits or hill-pockets. From the river
we caught fish in nets twisted by the women of the bark of young trees.
I was a man, eager and curious as the antelope when we lured it by waving
grass clumps where we lay hidden in the thick of the grass. The wild rice
grew in the swamp, rising sheer from the water on the edges of the channels.
Each morning the blackbirds awoke us with their chatter as they left their
roosts to fly to the swamp. And through the long twilight the air was filled
with their noise as they went back to their roosts. It was the time that the rice
ripened. And there were ducks also, and ducks and blackbirds feasted to
fatness on the ripe rice half unhusked by the sun.
Being a man, ever restless, ever questing, wondering always what lay
beyond the hills and beyond the swamps and in the mud at the rivers bottom,
I watched the wild ducks and blackbirds and pondered till my pondering gave
me vision and I saw. And this is what I saw, the reasoning of it:
Meat was good to eat. In the end, tracing it back, or at the first, rather, all
meat came from grass. The meat of the duck and of the blackbird came from
the seed of the swamp rice. To kill a duck with an arrow scarce paid for the
labour of stalking and the long hours in hiding. The blackbirds were too small
for arrow-killing save by the boys who were learning and preparing for the
taking of larger game. And yet, in rice season, blackbirds and ducks were
succulently fat. Their fatness came from the rice. Why should I and mine not
be fat from the rice in the same way?
And I thought it out in camp, silent, morose, while the children squabbled
about me unnoticed, and while Arunga, my mate-woman, vainly scolded me
and urged me to go hunting for more meat for the many of us.
Arunga was the woman I had stolen from the hill-tribes. She and I had
been a dozen moons in learning common speech after I captured her. Ah, that
day when I leaped upon her, down from the over-hanging tree-branch as she
padded the runway! Fairly upon her shoulders with the weight of my body I
smote her, my fingers wide-spreading to clutch her. She squalled like a cat
there in the runway. She fought me and bit me. The nails of her hands were
like the claws of a tree-cat as they tore at me. But I held her and mastered her,
and for two days beat her and forced her to travel with me down out of the
canyons of the Hill-Men to the grass lands where the river flowed through the
rice-swamps and the ducks and the blackbirds fed fat.
I saw my vision when the rice was ripe. I put Arunga in the bow of the
fire-hollowed log that was most rudely a canoe. I bade her paddle. In the
stern I spread a deerskin she had tanned. With two stout sticks I bent the
stalks over the deerskin and threshed out the grain that else the blackbirds
would have eaten. And when I had worked out the way of it, I gave the two
stout sticks to Arunga, and sat in the bow paddling and directing.
In the past we had eaten the raw rice in passing and not been pleased with
it. But now we parched it over our fire so that the grains puffed and exploded
in whiteness and all the tribe came running to taste.
After that we became known among men as the Rice-Eaters and as the
Sons of the Rice. And long, long after, when we were driven by the Sons of
the River from the swamps into the uplands, we took the seed of the rice with
us and planted it. We learned to select the largest grains for the seed, so that
all the rice we thereafter ate was larger-grained and puffier in the parching and
the boiling.
But Arunga. I have said she squalled and scratched like a cat when I stole
her. Yet I remember the time when her own kin of the Hill-Men caught me
and carried me away into the hills. They were her father, his brother, and her
two own blood-brothers. But she was mine, who had lived with me. And at
night, where I lay bound like a wild pig for the slaying, and they slept weary
by the fire, she crept upon them and brained them with the war-club that with
my hands I had fashioned. And she wept over me, and loosed me, and fled
with me, back to the wide sluggish river where the blackbirds and wild ducks
fed in the rice swampsfor this was before the time of the coming of the Sons
of the River.
For she was Arunga, the one woman, the eternal woman. She has lived in
all times and places. She will always live. She is immortal. Once, in a far
land, her name was Ruth. Also has her name been Iseult, and Helen,
Pocahontas, and Unga. And no stranger man, from stranger tribes, but has
found her and will find her in the tribes of all the earth.
I remember so many women who have gone into the becoming of the one
woman. There was the time that Har, my brother, and I, sleeping and pursuing
in turn, ever hounding the wild stallion through the daytime and night, and in a
wide circle that met where the sleeping one lay, drove the stallion unresting
through hunger and thirst to the meekness of weakness, so that in the end he
could but stand and tremble while we bound him with ropes twisted of deerhide.
On our legs alone, without hardship, aided merely by witthe plan was
minemy brother and I walked that fleet-footed creature into possession.
And when all was ready for me to get on his backfor that had been my
vision from the firstSelpa, my woman, put her arms about me, and raised
her voice and persisted that Har, and not I, should ride, for Har had neither
wife nor young ones and could die without hurt. Also, in the end she wept, so
that I was raped of my vision, and it was Har, naked and clinging, that
bestrode the stallion when he vaulted away.
It was sunset, and a time of great wailing, when they carried Har in from
the far rocks where they found him. His head was quite broken, and like
honey from a fallen bee-tree his brains dripped on the ground. His mother
strewed wood-ashes on her head and blackened her face. His father cut off
half the fingers of one hand in token of sorrow. And all the women, especially
the young and unwedded, screamed evil names at me; and the elders shook
their wise heads and muttered and mumbled that not their fathers nor their
fathers fathers had betrayed such a madness. Horse meat was good to eat;
young colts were tender to old teeth; and only a fool would come to close
grapples with any wild horse save when an arrow had pierced it, or when it
struggled on the stake in the midst of the pit.
And Selpa scolded me to sleep, and in the morning woke me with her
chatter, ever declaiming against my madness, ever pronouncing her claim
upon me and the claims of our children, till in the end I grew weary, and
forsook my far vision, and said never again would I dream of bestriding the
wild horse to fly swift as its feet and the wind across the sands and the grass
lands.
And through the years the tale of my madness never ceased from being
told over the camp-fire. Yet was the very telling the source of my vengeance;
for the dream did not die, and the young ones, listening to the laugh and the
sneer, redreamed it, so that in the end it was Othar, my eldest-born, himself a
sheer stripling, that walked down a wild stallion, leapt on its back, and flew
before all of us with the speed of the wind. Thereafter, that they might keep
up with him, all men were trapping and breaking wild horses. Many horses
were broken, and some men, but I lived at the last to the day when, at the
changing of camp-sites in the pursuit of the meat in its seasons, our very
babes, in baskets of willow-withes, were slung side and side on the backs of
our horses that carried our camp-trappage and dunnage.
I, a young man, had seen my vision, dreamed my dream; Selpa, the
woman, had held me from that far desire; but Othar, the seed of us to live after,
glimpsed my vision and won to it, so that our tribe became wealthy in the
gains of the chase.
There was a womanon the great drift down out of Europe, a weary drift
of many generations, when we brought into India the shorthorn cattle and the
planting of barley. But this woman was long before we reached India. We
were still in the mid-most of that centuries-long drift, and no shrewdness of
geography can now place for me that ancient valley.
The woman was Nuhila. The valley was narrow, not long, and the swift
slope of its floor and the steep walls of its rim were terraced for the growing of
rice and of milletthe first rice and millet we Sons of the Mountain had
known. They were a meek people in that valley. They had become soft with
the farming of fat land made fatter by water. Theirs was the first irrigation we
had seen, although we had little time to mark their ditches and channels by
which all the hill waters flowed to the fields they had builded. We had little
time to mark, for we Sons of the Mountain, who were few, were in flight
before the Sons of the Snub-Nose, who were many. We called them the
Noseless, and they called themselves the Sons of the Eagle. But they were
many, and we fled before them with our shorthorn cattle, our goats, and our
barleyseed, our women and children.
While the Snub-Noses slew our youths at the rear, we slew at our fore the
folk of the valley who opposed us and were weak. The village was mud-built
and grass-thatched; the encircling wall was of mud, but quite tall. And when
we had slain the people who had built the wall, and sheltered within it our
herds and our women and children, we stood on the wall and shouted insult to
the Snub-Noses. For we had found the mud granaries filled with rice and
millet. Our cattle could eat the thatches. And the time of the rains was at
hand, so that we should not want for water.
It was a long siege. Near to the beginning, we gathered together the
women, and elders, and children we had not slain, and forced them out
through the wall they had builded. But the Snub-Noses slew them to the last
one, so that there was more food in the village for us, more food in the valley
for the Snub-Noses.
It was a weary long siege. Sickness smote us, and we died of the plague
that arose from our buried ones. We emptied the mud-granaries of their rice
and millet. Our goats and shorthorns ate the thatch of the houses, and we, ere
the end, ate the goats and the shorthorns.
Where there had been five men of us on the wall, there came a time when
there was one; where there had been half a thousand babes and younglings of
ours, there were none. It was Nuhila, my woman, who cut off her hair and
twisted it that I might have a strong string for my bow. The other women did
likewise, and when the wall was attacked, stood shoulder to shoulder with us,
in the midst of our spears and arrows raining down potsherds and cobblestones
on the heads of the Snub-Noses.
Even the patient Snub-Noses we well-nigh out-patienced. Came a time
when of ten men of us, but one was alive on the wall, and of our women
remained very few, and the Snub-Noses held parley. They told us we were a
strong breed, and that our women were men-mothers, and that if we would let
them have our women they would leave us alone in the valley to possess for
ourselves and that we could get women from the valleys to the south.
And Nuhila said no. And the other women said no. And we sneered at the
Snub-Noses and asked if they were weary of fighting. And we were as dead
men then, as we sneered at our enemies, and there was little fight left in us we
were so weak. One more attack on the wall would end us. We knew it. Our
women knew it. And Nuhila said that we could end it first and outwit the
Snub-Noses. And all our women agreed. And while the Snub-Noses prepared
for the attack that would be final, there, on the wall, we slew our women.
Nuhila loved me, and leaned to meet the thrust of my sword, there on the wall.
And we men, in the love of tribehood and tribesmen, slew one another till
remained only Horda and I alive in the red of the slaughter. And Horda was
my elder, and I leaned to his thrust. But not at once did I die. I was the last of
the Sons of the Mountain, for I saw Horda, himself fall on his blade and pass
quickly. And dying with the shouts of the oncoming Snub-Noses growing dim
in my ears, I was glad that the Snub-Noses would have no sons of us to bring
up by our women.
I do not know when this time was when I was a Son of the Mountain and
when we died in the narrow valley where we had slain the Sons of the Rice
and the Millet. I do not know, save that it was centuries before the widespreading
drift of all us Sons of the Mountain fetched into India, and that it
was long before ever I was an Aryan master in Old Egypt building my two
burial places and defacing the tombs of kings before me.
I should like to tell more of those far days, but time in the present is short.
Soon I shall pass. Yet am I sorry that I cannot tell more of those early drifts,
when there was crushage of peoples, or descending ice-sheets, or migrations
of meat.
Also, I should like to tell of Mystery. For always were we curious to solve
the secrets of life, death, and decay. Unlike the other animals, man was for
ever gazing at the stars. Many gods he created in his own image and in the
images of his fancy. In those old times I have worshipped the sun and the
dark. I have worshipped the husked grain as the parent of life. I have
worshipped Sar, the Corn Goddess. And I have worshipped sea gods, and
river gods, and fish gods.
Yes, and I remember Ishtar ere she was stolen from us by the Babylonians,
and Ea, too, was ours, supreme in the Under World, who enabled Ishtar to
conquer death. Mitra, likewise, was a good old Aryan god, ere he was filched
from us or we discarded him. And I remember, on a time, long after the drift
when we brought the barley into India, that I came down into India, a horsetrader,
with many servants and a long caravan at my back, and that at that time
they were worshipping Bodhisatwa.
Truly, the worships of the Mystery wandered as did men, and between
filchings and borrowings the gods had as vagabond a time of it as did we. As
the Sumerians took the loan of Shamashnapishtin from us, so did the Sons of
Shem take him from the Sumerians and call him Noah.
Why, I smile me to-day, Darrell Standing, in Murderers Row, in that I was
found guilty and awarded death by twelve jurymen staunch and true. Twelve
has ever been a magic number of the Mystery. Nor did it originate with the
twelve tribes of Israel. Star-gazers before them had placed the twelve signs of
the Zodiac in the sky. And I remember me, when I was of the Assir, and of the
Vanir, that Odin sat in judgment over men in the court of the twelve gods, and
that their names were Thor, Baldur, Niord, Frey, Tyr, Bregi, Heimdal, Hoder,
Vidar, Ull, Forseti, and Loki.
Even our Valkyries were stolen from us and made into angels, and the
wings of the Valkyries horses became attached to the shoulders of the angels.
And our Helheim of that day of ice and frost has become the hell of to-day,
which is so hot an abode that the blood boils in ones veins, while with us, in
our Helheim, the place was so cold as to freeze the marrow inside the bones.
And the very sky, that we dreamed enduring, eternal, has drifted and veered,
so that we find to-day the scorpion in the place where of old we knew the goat,
and the archer in the place of the crab.
Worships and worships! Ever the pursuit of the Mystery! I remember the
lame god of the Greeks, the master-smith. But their vulcan was the Germanic
Wieland, the master-smith captured and hamstrung lame of a leg by Nidung,
the kind of the Nids. But before that he was our master-smith, our forger and
hammerer, whom we named Il-marinen. And him we begat of our fancy,
giving him the bearded sun-god for father, and nursing him by the stars of the
bear. For, he, Vulcan, or Wieland, or Il-marinen, was born under the pine tree,
from the hair of the wolf, and was called also the bear-father ere ever the
Germans and Greeks purloined and worshipped him. In that day we called
ourselves the Sons of the Bear and the Sons of the Wolf, and the bear and the
wolf were our totems. That was before our drift south on which we joined
with the Sons of the Tree-Grove and taught them our totems and tales.
Yes, and who was Kashyapa, who was Pururavas, but our lame mastersmith,
our iron-worker, carried by us in our drifts and re-named and
worshipped by the south-dwellers and the east-dwellers, the Sons of the Pole
and of the Fire Drill and Fire Socket.
But the tale is too long, though I should like to tell of the three-leaved Herb
of Life by which Sigmund made Sinfioti alive again. For this is the very
soma-plant of India, the holy grail of King Arthur, thebut enough! enough!
And yet, as I calmly consider it all, I conclude that the greatest thing in
life, in all lives, to me and to all men, has been woman, is woman, and will be
woman so long as the stars drift in the sky and the heavens flux eternal
change. Greater than our toil and endeavour, the play of invention and fancy,
battle and star-gazing and mysterygreatest of all has been woman.
Even though she has sung false music to me, and kept my feet solid on the
ground, and drawn my star-roving eyes ever back to gaze upon her, she, the
conserver of life, the earth-mother, has given me my great days and nights and
fulness of years. Even mystery have I imaged in the form of her, and in my
star-charting have I placed her figure in the sky.
All my toils and devices led to her; all my far visions saw her at the end.
When I made the fire-drill and fire-socket, it was for her. It was for her,
although I did not know it, that I put the stake in the pit for old Sabre-Tooth,
tamed the horse, slew the mammoth, and herded my reindeer south in advance
of the ice-sheet. For her I harvested the wild rice, tamed the barley, the wheat,
and the corn.
For her, and the seed to come after whose image she bore, I have died in
tree-tops and stood long sieges in cave-mouths and on mud-walls. For her I
put the twelve signs in the sky. It was she I worshipped when I bowed before
the ten stones of jade and adored them as the moons of gestation.
Always has woman crouched close to earth like a partridge hen mothering
her young; always has my wantonness of roving led me out on the shining
ways; and always have my star-paths returned me to her, the figure
everlasting, the woman, the one woman, for whose arms I had such need that
clasped in them I have forgotten the stars.
For her I accomplished Odysseys, scaled mountains, crossed deserts; for
her I led the hunt and was forward in battle; and for her and to her I sang my
songs of the things I had done. All ecstasies of life and rhapsodies of delight
have been mine because of her. And here, at the end, I can say that I have
known no sweeter, deeper madness of being than to drown in the fragrant
glory and forgetfulness of her hair.
One word more. I remember me Dorothy, just the other day, when I still
lectured on agronomy to farmer-boy students. She was eleven years old. Her
father was dean of the college. She was a woman-child, and a woman, and she
conceived that she loved me. And I smiled to myself, for my heart was
untouched and lay elsewhere.
Yet was the smile tender, for in the childs eyes I saw the woman eternal,
the woman of all times and appearances. In her eyes I saw the eyes of my
mate of the jungle and tree-top, of the cave and the squatting-place. In her
eyes I saw the eyes of Igar when I was Ushu the archer, the eyes of Arunga
when I was the rice-harvester, the eyes of Selpa when I dreamed of bestriding
the stallion, the eyes of Nuhila who leaned to the thrust of my sword. Yes,
there was that in her eyes that made them the eyes of Lei-Lei whom I left with
a laugh on my lips, the eyes of the Lady Om for forty years my beggar-mate
on highway and byway, the eyes of Philippa for whom I was slain on the grass
in old France, the eyes of my mother when I was the lad Jesse at the Mountain
Meadows in the circle of our forty great wagons.
She was a woman-child, but she was daughter of all women, as her mother
before her, and she was the mother of all women to come after her. She was
Sar, the corn-goddess. She was Isthar who conquered death. She was Sheba
and Cleopatra; she was Esther and Herodias. She was Mary the Madonna, and
Mary the Magdalene, and Mary the sister of Martha, also she was Martha.
And she was Brünnhilde and Guinevere, Iseult and Juliet, Héloïse and
Nicolette. Yes, and she was Eve, she was Lilith, she was Astarte. She was
eleven years old, and she was all women that had been, all women to be.
I sit in my cell now, while the flies hum in the drowsy summer afternoon,
and I know that my time is short. Soon they will apparel me in the shirt
without a collar. . . . But hush, my heart. The spirit is immortal. After the
dark I shall live again, and there will be women. The future holds the little
women for me in the lives I am yet to live. And though the stars drift, and the
heavens lie, ever remains woman, resplendent, eternal, the one woman, as I,
under all my masquerades and misadventures, am the one man, her mate.
CHAPTER XXII
My time grows very short. All the manuscript I have written is safely
smuggled out of the prison. There is a man I can trust who will see that it is
published. No longer am I in Murderers Row. I am writing these lines in the
death cell, and the death-watch is set on me. Night and day is this death-watch
on me, and its paradoxical function is to see that I do not die. I must be kept
alive for the hanging, or else will the public be cheated, the law blackened,
and a mark of demerit placed against the time-serving warden who runs this
prison and one of whose duties is to see that his condemned ones are duly and
properly hanged. Often I marvel at the strange way some men make their
livings.
This shall be my last writing. To-morrow morning the hour is set. The
governor has declined to pardon or reprieve, despite the fact that the Anti-
Capital-Punishment League has raised quite a stir in California. The reporters
are gathered like so many buzzards. I have seen them all. They are queer
young fellows, most of them, and most queer is it that they will thus earn
bread and butter, cocktails and tobacco, room-rent, and, if they are married,
shoes and schoolbooks for their children, by witnessing the execution of
Professor Darrell Standing, and by describing for the public how Professor
Darrell Standing died at the end of a rope. Ah, well, they will be sicker than I
at the end of the affair.
As I sit here and muse on it all, the footfalls of the death-watch going up
and down outside my cage, the mans suspicious eyes ever peering in on me,
almost I weary of eternal recurrence. I have lived so many lives. I weary of
the endless struggle and pain and catastrophe that come to those who sit in the
high places, tread the shining ways, and wander among the stars.
Almost I hope, when next I reinhabit form, that it shall be that of a
peaceful farmer. There is my dream-farm. I should like to engage just for one
whole life in that. Oh, my dream-farm! My alfalfa meadows, my efficient
Jersey cattle, my upland pastures, my brush-covered slopes melting into tilled
fields, while ever higher up the slopes my angora goats eat away brush to
tillage!
There is a basin there, a natural basin high up the slopes, with a generous
watershed on three sides. I should like to throw a dam across the fourth side,
which is surprisingly narrow. At a paltry price of labour I could impound
twenty million gallons of water. For, see: one great drawback to farming in
California is our long dry summer. This prevents the growing of cover crops,
and the sensitive soil, naked, a mere surface dust-mulch, has its humus burned
out of it by the sun. Now with that dam I could grow three crops a year,
observing due rotation, and be able to turn under a wealth of green manure. . .
.
***
I have just endured a visit from the Warden. I say endured advisedly.
He is quite different from the Warden of San Quentin. He was very nervous,
and perforce I had to entertain him. This is his first hanging. He told me so.
And I, with a clumsy attempt at wit, did not reassure him when I explained
that it was also my first hanging. He was unable to laugh. He has a girl in
high school, and his boy is a freshman at Stanford. He has no income outside
his salary, his wife is an invalid, and he is worried in that he has been rejected
by the life insurance doctors as an undesirable risk. Really, the man told me
almost all his troubles. Had I not diplomatically terminated the interview he
would still be here telling me the remainder of them.
My last two years in San Quentin were very gloomy and depressing. Ed
Morrell, by one of the wildest freaks of chance, was taken out of solitary and
made head trusty of the whole prison. This was Al Hutchins old job, and it
carried a graft of three thousand dollars a year. To my misfortune, Jake
Oppenheimer, who had rotted in solitary for so many years, turned sour on the
world, on everything. For eight months he refused to talk even to me.
In prison, news will travel. Give it time and it will reach dungeon and
solitary cell. It reached me, at last, that Cecil Winwood, the poet-forger, the
snitcher, the coward, and the stool, was returned for a fresh forgery. It will be
remembered that it was this Cecil Winwood who concocted the fairy story that
I had changed the plant of the non-existent dynamite and who was responsible
for the five years I had then spent in solitary.
I decided to kill Cecil Winwood. You see, Morrell was gone, and
Oppenheimer, until the outbreak that finished him, had remained in the
silence. Solitary had grown monotonous for me. I had to do something. So I
remembered back to the time when I was Adam Strang and patiently nursed
revenge for forty years. What he had done I could do if once I locked my
hands on Cecil Winwoods throat.
It cannot be expected of me to divulge how I came into possession of the
four needles. They were small cambric needles. Emaciated as my body was, I
had to saw four bars, each in two places, in order to make an aperture through
which I could squirm. I did it. I used up one needle to each bar. This meant
two cuts to a bar, and it took a month to a cut. Thus I should have been eight
months in cutting my way out. Unfortunately, I broke my last needle on the
last bar, and I had to wait three months before I could get another needle. But
I got it, and I got out.
I regret greatly that I did not get Cecil Winwood. I had calculated well on
everything save one thing. The certain chance to find Winwood would be in
the dining-room at dinner hour. So I waited until Pie-Face Jones, the sleepy
guard, should be on shift at the noon hour. At that time I was the only inmate
of solitary, so that Pie-Face Jones was quickly snoring. I removed my bars,
squeezed out, stole past him along the ward, opened the door and was free . . .
to a portion of the inside of the prison.
And here was the one thing I had not calculated onmyself. I had been
five years in solitary. I was hideously weak. I weighed eighty-seven pounds.
I was half blind. And I was immediately stricken with agoraphobia. I was
affrighted by spaciousness. Five years in narrow walls had unfitted me for the
enormous declivity of the stairway, for the vastitude of the prison yard.
The descent of that stairway I consider the most heroic exploit I ever
accomplished. The yard was deserted. The blinding sun blazed down on it.
Thrice I essayed to cross it. But my senses reeled and I shrank back to the
wall for protection. Again, summoning all my courage, I attempted it. But my
poor blear eyes, like a bats, startled me at my shadow on the flagstones. I
attempted to avoid my own shadow, tripped, fell over it, and like a drowning
man struggling for shore crawled back on hands and knees to the wall.
I leaned against the wall and cried. It was the first time in many years that
I had cried. I remember noting, even in my extremity, the warmth of the tears
on my cheeks and the salt taste when they reached my lips. Then I had a chill,
and for a time shook as with an ague. Abandoning the openness of the yard as
too impossible a feat for one in my condition, still shaking with the chill,
crouching close to the protecting wall, my hands touching it, I started to skirt
the yard.
Then it was, somewhere along, that the guard Thurston espied me. I saw
him, distorted by my bleared eyes, a huge, well-fed monster, rushing upon me
with incredible speed out of the remote distance. Possibly, at that moment, he
was twenty feet away. He weighed one hundred and seventy pounds. The
struggle between us can be easily imagined, but somewhere in that brief
struggle it was claimed that I struck him on the nose with my fist to such
purpose as to make that organ bleed.
At any rate, being a lifer, and the penalty in California for battery by a lifer
being death, I was so found guilty by a jury which could not ignore the
asseverations of the guard Thurston and the rest of the prison hang-dogs that
testified, and I was so sentenced by a judge who could not ignore the law as
spread plainly on the statute book.
I was well pummelled by Thurston, and all the way back up that
prodigious stairway I was roundly kicked, punched, and cuffed by the horde of
trusties and guards who got in one anothers way in their zeal to assist him.
Heavens, if his nose did bleed, the probability is that some of his own kind
were guilty of causing it in the confusion of the scuffle. I shouldnt care if I
were responsible for it myself, save that it is so pitiful a thing for which to
hang a man. . . .
***
I have just had a talk with the man on shift of my death-watch. A little less
than a year ago, Jake Oppenheimer occupied this same death-cell on the road
to the gallows which I will tread to-morrow. This man was one of the deathwatch
on Jake. He is an old soldier. He chews tobacco constantly, and
untidily, for his gray beard and moustache are stained yellow. He is a
widower, with fourteen living children, all married, and is the grandfather of
thirty-one living grandchildren, and the great-grandfather of four younglings,
all girls. It was like pulling teeth to extract such information. He is a queer
old codger, of a low order of intelligence. That is why, I fancy, he has lived so
long and fathered so numerous a progeny. His mind must have crystallized
thirty years ago. His ideas are none of them later than that vintage. He rarely
says more than yes and no to me. It is not because he is surly. He has no ideas
to utter. I dont know, when I live again, but what one incarnation such as his
would be a nice vegetative existence in which to rest up ere I go star-roving
again. . . .
But to go back. I must take a line in which to tell, after I was hustled and
bustled, kicked and punched, up that terrible stairway by Thurston and the rest
of the prison-dogs, of the infinite relief of my narrow cell when I found myself
back in solitary. It was all so safe, so secure. I felt like a lost child returned
home again. I loved those very walls that I had so hated for five years. All
that kept the vastness of space, like a monster, from pouncing upon me were
those good stout walls of mine, close to hand on every side. Agoraphobia is a
terrible affliction. I have had little opportunity to experience it, but from that
little I can only conclude that hanging is a far easier matter. . . .
I have just had a hearty laugh. The prison doctor, a likable chap, has just
been in to have a yarn with me, incidentally to proffer me his good offices in
the matter of dope. Of course I declined his proposition to shoot me so full
of morphine through the night that to-morrow I would not know, when I
marched to the gallows, whether I was coming or going.
But the laugh. It was just like Jake Oppenheimer. I can see the lean
keenness of the man as he strung the reporters with his deliberate bull which
they thought involuntary. It seems, his last morning, breakfast finished,
incased in the shirt without a collar, that the reporters, assembled for his last
word in his cell, asked him for his views on capital punishment.
Who says we have more than the slightest veneer of civilization coated
over our raw savagery when a group of living men can ask such a question of
a man about to die and whom they are to see die?
But Jake was ever game. Gentlemen, he said, I hope to live to see the
day when capital punishment is abolished.
I have lived many lives through the long ages. Man, the individual, has
made no moral progress in the past ten thousand years. I affirm this
absolutely. The difference between an unbroken colt and the patient draughthorse
is purely a difference of training. Training is the only moral difference
between the man of to-day and the man of ten thousand years ago. Under his
thin skin of morality which he has had polished onto him, he is the same
savage that he was ten thousand years ago. Morality is a social fund, an
accretion through the painful ages. The new-born child will become a savage
unless it is trained, polished, by the abstract morality that has been so long
accumulating.
Thou shalt not killpiffle! They are going to kill me to-morrow
morning. Thou shalt not killpiffle! In the shipyards of all civilized
countries they are laying to-day the keels of Dreadnoughts and of
Superdreadnoughts. Dear friends, I who am about to die, salute you with
Piffle!
I ask you, what finer morality is preached to-day than was preached by
Christ, by Buddha, by Socrates and Plato, by Confucius and whoever was the
author of the Mahabharata? Good Lord, fifty thousand years ago, in our
totem-families, our women were cleaner, our family and group relations more
rigidly right.
I must say that the morality we practised in those old days was a finer
morality than is practised to-day. Dont dismiss this thought hastily. Think of
our child labour, of our police graft and our political corruption, of our food
adulteration and of our slavery of the daughters of the poor. When I was a Son
of the Mountain and a Son of the Bull, prostitution had no meaning. We were
clean, I tell you. We did not dream such depths of depravity. Yea, so are all
the lesser animals of to-day clean. It required man, with his imagination,
aided by his mastery of matter, to invent the deadly sins. The lesser animals,
the other animals, are incapable of sin.
I read hastily back through the many lives of many times and many places.
I have never known cruelty more terrible, nor so terrible, as the cruelty of our
prison system of to-day. I have told you what I have endured in the jacket and
in solitary in the first decade of this twentieth century after Christ. In the old
days we punished drastically and killed quickly. We did it because we so
desired, because of whim, if you so please. But we were not hypocrites. We
did not call upon press, and pulpit, and university to sanction us in our
wilfulness of savagery. What we wanted to do we went and did, on our legs
upstanding, and we faced all reproof and censure on our legs upstanding, and
did not hide behind the skirts of classical economists and bourgeois
philosophers, nor behind the skirts of subsidized preachers, professors, and
editors.
Why, goodness me, a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, five years ago, in
these United States, assault and battery was not a civil capital crime. But this
year, the year of Our Lord 1913, in the State of California, they hanged Jake
Oppenheimer for such an offence, and to-morrow, for the civil capital crime of
punching a man on the nose, they are going to take me out and hang me.
Query: Doesnt it require a long time for the ape and the tiger to die when such
statutes are spread on the statute book of California in the nineteen-hundredand-
thirteenth year after Christ? Lord, Lord, they only crucified Christ. They
have done far worse to Jake Oppenheimer and me. . . .
***
As Ed Morrell once rapped to me with his knuckles: The worst possible
use you can put a man to is to hang him. No, I have little respect for capital
punishment. Not only is it a dirty game, degrading to the hang-dogs who
personally perpetrate it for a wage, but it is degrading to the commonwealth
that tolerates it, votes for it, and pays the taxes for its maintenance. Capital
punishment is so silly, so stupid, so horribly unscientific. To be hanged by
the neck until dead is societys quaint phraseology . . .
***
Morning is comemy last morning. I slept like a babe throughout the
night. I slept so peacefully that once the death-watch got a fright. He thought
I had suffocated myself in my blankets. The poor mans alarm was pitiful.
His bread and butter was at stake. Had it truly been so, it would have meant a
black mark against him, perhaps discharge and the outlook for an unemployed
man is bitter just at present. They tell me that Europe began liquidating two
years ago, and that now the United States has begun. That means either a
business crisis or a quiet panic and that the armies of the unemployed will be
large next winter, the bread-lines long. . . .
I have had my breakfast. It seemed a silly thing to do, but I ate it heartily.
The Warden came with a quart of whiskey. I presented it to Murderers Row
with my compliments. The Warden, poor man, is afraid, if I be not drunk, that
I shall make a mess of the function and cast reflection on his management . . .
They have put on me the shirt without a collar. . .
It seems I am a very important man this day. Quite a lot of people are
suddenly interested in me. . . .
The doctor has just gone. He has taken my pulse. I asked him to. It is
normal. . . .
I write these random thoughts, and, a sheet at a time, they start on their
secret way out beyond the walls. . . .
I am the calmest man in the prison. I am like a child about to start on a
journey. I am eager to be gone, curious for the new places I shall see. This
fear of the lesser death is ridiculous to one who has gone into the dark so often
and lived again. . . .
The Warden with a quart of champagne. I have dispatched it down
Murderers Row. Queer, isnt it, that I am so considered this last day. It must
be that these men who are to kill me are themselves afraid of death. To quote
Jake Oppenheimer: I, who am about to die, must seem to them something
God-awful. . . .
Ed Morrell has just sent word in to me. They tell me he has paced up and
down all night outside the prison wall. Being an ex-convict, they have redtaped
him out of seeing me to say good-bye. Savages? I dont know.
Possibly just children. Ill wager most of them will be afraid to be alone in the
dark to-night after stretching my neck.
But Ed Morrells message: My hand is in yours, old pal. I know youll
swing off game. . . .
***
The reporters have just left. Ill see them next, and last time, from the
scaffold, ere the hangman hides my face in the black cap. They will be
looking curiously sick. Queer young fellows. Some show that they have been
drinking. Two or three look sick with foreknowledge of what they have to
witness. It seems easier to be hanged than to look on. . . .
***
My last lines. It seems I am delaying the procession. My cell is quite
crowded with officials and dignitaries. They are all nervous. They want it
over. Without a doubt, some of them have dinner engagements. I am really
offending them by writing these few words. The priest has again preferred his
request to be with me to the end. The poor manwhy should I deny him that
solace? I have consented, and he now appears quite cheerful. Such small
things make some men happy! I could stop and laugh for a hearty five
minutes, if they were not in such a hurry.
Here I close. I can only repeat myself. There is no death. Life is spirit,
and spirit cannot die. Only the flesh dies and passes, ever a-crawl with the
chemic ferment that informs it, ever plastic, ever crystallizing, only to melt
into the flux and to crystallize into fresh and diverse forms that are ephemeral
and that melt back into the flux. Spirit alone endures and continues to build
upon itself through successive and endless incarnations as it works upward
toward the light. What shall I be when I live again? I wonder. I wonder. . . .
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