Странник по звездам / The Star-Rover

“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. Don’t tell him anything about what’s happened to us. Just try to get him to come in and talk with us.”

But Lee refused to talk.

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.

Thousands of shots must have rained in on us. Two of our men were wounded. Bill, Silas and a baby were killed.

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. The men began digging the well.

The children were complaining for water, and the babies. Robert, another wounded man, lay about ten feet from mother and me. Some of the women were raving against the Mormons and Indians. Some of the women prayed and sang gospel hymns.

The situation grew worse in the afternoon. The sun made a furnace of our hole in the sand. Four men were wounded, and one of them very badly.

Father came in and sat for a few minutes alongside mother and me without speaking.

“Jesse,” he asked, “are you afraid of the Indians?”

I shook my head emphatically.

“Are you afraid of the damned Mormons?”

“Not of any damned Mormon,” I answered.

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.

“We’re going to dress you up as girls,” he continued, “so that maybe they won’t fire on you.”

I insisted on going as I was, as a male human that wore pants; but father suggested that he would find some other boy to dress up as a girl.

“Go slow,” father cautioned, as we began our way. “Walk like girls.”

Not a shot was fired. We made the spring safely, filled our pails. 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 made—fifteen or twenty. We walked slowly, always going out with hands clasped, always coming back slowly with four pails of water. Jed and I were heroes. The women wept and blessed us, and kissed us and mauled us.

Nothing happened all morning. Not a shot was fired. Only the sun blazed down through the quiet air. At noon Will Hamilton took two large pails and started for the spring. Not a shot was fired, nor was any fired all the time he continued to go out and bring back water.

About two o’clock, 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.

The women were so relieved that they were crying and kissing one another, blessing God. The proposal, which our men had accepted, was that we would surrender and be protected from the Indians.

“We had to do it,” I heard father tell mother.

“But what if they intend treachery?” mother asked.

He shrugged his shoulders.

Some of our men were unchaining one of our wagons and rolling it out of the way. I ran to see what was happening. Lee himself came in, 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.

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 Mormons.

Two of our wounded men who could not walk were put into the wagons, and along with them were put all the little children. Jed and I were large for our age; so Lee told us we were to march with the women on foot.

So the march began, the two wagons first. Lee kept along with the women and walking children. Behind us came our men. We could see the Mormons 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 noticed their solemn faces. They looked like men at a funeral. The women noticed this too, and some of them began to cry.

I walked right behind my mother. All happened when our men were just abreast of the Mormons. I heard a loud order, “Do your duty!” All the rifles of the Mormons went off at once, and our men were falling down. 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. When the little boy that was I was running the blackness came upon him. All memory there ceases, for Jesse there ceased, and, as Jesse, ceased for ever. The form that was Jesse, the body that was his, being matter and apparitional, 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 Standing’s which soon is to be taken out and hanged and sent into the nothingness whither all apparitions go.

Chapter XIV

When, at the conclusion of my first ten days’ term in the jacket, I was brought back to consciousness by Doctor Jackson’s thumb pressing open an eyelid, I opened both eyes and smiled up into the face of Warden Atherton.

“The ten days are up, Warden,” I whispered.

“Well, we’re going to unlace you,” he growled.

“You observed my smile,” I said. “You remember we had a little wager. Don’t bother to unlace me first. Just give some tobacco to Morrell and Oppenheimer.”

“Who ever heard of a man,” Doctor Jackson said, “smiling after ten days in the jacket?”

“Unlace him, Hutchins,” Warden Atherton said.

“Why such haste?” I queried, in a whisper. “Why such haste? I don’t have to catch a train, and I am so comfortable as I am that I prefer not to be disturbed.”

But they unlaced me.

“No wonder he was comfortable,” said Captain Jamie. “He didn’t feel anything. He’s paralysed.”

“Your grandmother is paralysed,” sneered the Warden. “Get him up[62] and you’ll see him stand.”

Hutchins and the doctor dragged me to my feet.

“Now let go!” the Warden commanded.

My body had been practically dead for ten days, and as a result, I had no power over my flesh. So I crumpled, pitched sidewise, and gashed my forehead against the wall.

“You see,” said Captain Jamie.

“A good actor,” retorted the Warden.

“You’re right, Warden,” I whispered from the floor. “I did it on purpose. Lift me up again, and I’ll repeat it. I promise you lots of fun.”

I shall not describe the agony of returning circulation. When they finally left me I lay for the rest of the day stupid and half-comatose. There is such a thing as anaesthesia of pain. And I have known that anaesthesia.

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 eat.

The program, 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. “It’s a pity I don’t die in the jacket.”

At this time I doubt that I weighed more than ninety pounds. Yet, two years before, when the doors of San Quentin first closed on me[63], I had weighed one hundred and sixty-five 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.

Ed Morrell wanted to know if I had succeeded with the experiment; but when he attempted to talk with me he was shut up by the guard.

“That’s all right, Ed,” I rapped to him. “You and Jake keep quiet, and I’ll tell you about it. The guard can’t prevent you from listening, and he can’t prevent me from talking. They have done their worst, and I am still here.”

Hour by hour, I rapped on and on the tale of my adventures. Morrell and Oppenheimer were able to do some talking.

“Hallucinations,” Oppenheimer rapped his verdict.

Yes, was my thought; our dreams and hallucinations come from our experiences.

“When I was a mailman I drank too much once,” Oppenheimer continued. “And I saw very strange things. I guess that is what all the novel-writers do.”

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, he could visit 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 real thing was he, was thought, spirit.

“The grocery store on the corner changed its master,” 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 Morrell’s response. “Or how could I have known it?”

“All right,” rapped Oppenheimer the unbelieving. “You can prove it easy. Get yourself thrown into the jacket, climb out of your body, and go to San Francisco. Just about two or three a.m. they are running the morning papers off the press. Read the latest news. Then get here and tell me what you read. Then we’ll wait and get a morning paper, when it comes in, from a guard. Then, if what you told me is in that paper, I will believe you.”

It was a good test. I agreed with Oppenheimer that such a proof would be absolute.

“My mother believed in spirits,” said Oppenheimer. “When I was a kid she was always seeing them and talking with them and getting advice from them. But the spirits couldn’t tell her where the old man could find a job or find some golden coins or how to win in a lottery. Never. They told her rubbish, for example, that the old man’s uncle had had a goitre, or that the old man’s grandfather had died of galloping consumption[64], or that we were going to move, which was very easy, seeing as we moved on an average of six times a year.”

I think, had Oppenheimer had the opportunity for education, he would have been a good scientist. His logic was admirable. “You’ve got to show me,” was the rule by which he considered all things. 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. It might well be that we kept one another from insanity.

On the other hand, we had much and terrible pain. Our guards were brutes. Our surroundings were vile. Our food was filthy, monotonous, innutritious.

We had no books to read. Our knuckle-talk was a violation of the rules. The world practically did not exist. It was more a ghost-world. Oppenheimer, for instance, had never seen an automobile or a motor-cycle. He 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.

I taught Oppenheimer to play chess. Consider how tremendous such an achievement is—to teach a man, thirteen cells away, by means of knuckle-raps; 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, Oppenheimer became a real master at the game—he who had never seen chess in his life.

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.

Chapter XV

I was once Adam Strang[65], an Englishman. The period of my living, as I can guess it, was somewhere between 1550 and 1650. It has been a great regret to me, that I had not been a good student of history.

I recollect so little of the first thirty years of my Adam Strang existence. I, Adam Strang, found myself on sandy islands somewhere near the equator in the western Pacific Ocean[66]. There are thousands of people on these islands, although I am the only white man. The natives are big-muscled, broad-shouldered, tall. The king, Raa Kook[67], 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. These natives with whom I live are Polynesian, I know, because their hair is straight and black. 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 think much about it. I live in the present. I am careless, improvident, uncautious and happy. Fish, fruits, vegetables, and seaweed—a full stomach—and I am content. No man dare lift hand or weapon to me. I am taboo, I am sacred.

I know all about how I happened to be there alone of all my ship’s company—it was a great drowning and a great wind; but I do not like to think about the catastrophe.

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[68], the king’s sister. I was broad-shouldered, deep-chested[69], well-set-up[70]. I was of value to Raa Kook and enjoyed his royal protection. I could work in iron, and our wrecked ship had brought the first iron to Raa Kook’s land. We went in canoes to get iron from the wreck. These natives were wonderful divers and workers under water. But on the land, due to my strength, I could beat any of them.

In those waters, at that time, the ships were rare. I might well have lived out my days there, in peace and fatness, under the sun, had it not been for the Sparwehr[71]. The Sparwehr was a Dutch ship which found me.

Have I not said that I was a gay-hearted, bearded giant, irresponsible boy that had never grown up? When the Sparwehrs’ water-casks were filled, I left Raa Kook and his pleasant land, left Lei-Lei and all her sisters, and with laughter on my lips sailed away.

We were in quest of new lands of silk and spices. In truth, we found fevers, violent deaths, pestilential paradises where death and beauty went together. Captain Maartens[72] sought the islands of Solomon, old lost Atlantis which he hoped to find.

We crossed the Straits of Japan[73] and were entering the Yellow Sea on our way to China, when we laid the Sparwehr on the rocks. We drifted in upon the land in the chill light of a stormy dawn across a heartless sea. It was winter, there was no name to this country on which we drove, no record of it ever having been visited by navigators. We were eighteen. The rest had perished.

Captain Maartens touched me and pointed upward. Twenty feet below the truck there was a cliff. Above the cliff was a cleft. Two days and nights we were on that cliff, for there was way neither up nor down. The third morning a fishing-boat found us.

The boat went back to the village for help, and most of the villagers were getting us down. They were a poor and wretched folk, their food was difficult even for the stomach of a sailor. Their rice was brown as chocolate.

Their houses were earthen-walled[74] and straw-thatched[75]. Here we lay and rested for some days. The village was on an island, and the villagers must have told about us to the mainland; for one morning three big junks arrived.

One Korean was surrounded by half a dozen attendants, clad in silk. Kwan Yung-jin[76], as I came to know his name, was what might be called magistrate or governor of the district or province. Fully a hundred soldiers were also landed and marched into the village. I stepped forward as interpreter, for already I knew several Korean words. But Kwan Yung-jin scowled, turned his back and addressed the head man of the village while his six satellites made a cordon between us. Kwan Yung-jin gave a command. Several of the soldiers approached Tromp[77], who was sitting on the ground. Tromp was rather stupid, and before he knew what was doing a plank, with a scissors-like opening and closing, was about his neck and clamped.

Then the trouble began, for it was Kwan Yung-jin’s intention to plank all of us. Oh, we fought with a hundred soldiers and many villagers, while Kwan Yung-jin stood apart in his silks. Here was where I earned my name Yi Yong-ik[78], the Mighty.

“Oh God, what will happen then?” asked Vandervoot[79], another sailor, when we had been taken aboard.

We sat on the open deck. And from the high poop Kwan Yung-jin gazed down at us as if he did not see us. To the mainland we were taken and thrown into a stinking, vermin-infested prison. Such was our introduction to the land of Cho-Sen[80].

In prison we lay for many days. Kwan Yung-jin had sent a dispatch to Keijo[81], the capital, to find what royal disposition was. 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. Ladies in palanquins came to see the strange devils cast up by the sea, too.

I have often thought that Kwan Yung-jin suffered from indigestion. Without any reason, whenever the whim came to him, we were all taken out on the street before the prison and well beaten with sticks.

We were pleased when an end to our beatings came. This was caused by the arrival of Kim. Kim? He was a captain of fifty men when I met him. He was in command of the palace guards. And in the end he died for the Lady Om’s[82] sake and for mine. Kim—well, Kim was Kim.

Immediately he arrived the planks were taken from our necks and we were lodged in the best inn. We were still prisoners, but honourable prisoners, with a guard of fifty mounted soldiers. The next day we were on way to the royal palace. The Emperor, so Kim told me, had expressed a desire to gaze upon the strange sea devils.

It was a journey of many days. In a way we were a travelling menagerie. All the country folk flocked to the roadside to see us pass. It was an unending circus procession.

We ate white rice, meat which we found to be dog, and the pickles. And there was drink, real drink, not milky slush, but white stuff distilled from rice, a pint of which would kill a weakling and make a strong man mad and merry.

Due to my strength I was more an honoured guest than a prisoner, and I rode by Kim’s side. Kim was young. Kim was human. Kim was universal. He and I talked and laughed and joked the day long and half the night. I learned their language. And I learned the Korean points of view, the Korean humour. Kim taught me different songs

Hendrik Hamel[83] encouraged and urged me in my friendship with Kim: Kim’s favour went through me to him and all our company. I here mention Hendrik Hamel as my adviser.

Keijo was a vast city where all the population was dressed in 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.