Странник по звездам / The Star-Rover

“No.”

“Some you forget?”

“Yes, but—”

“That’s all, thank you,” he interrupted, in the manner of a lawyer.

It was impossible to convince Oppenheimer of my sincerity. But he was listening my stories with pleasure.

“Now, professor,” he would say, “tell us more about your adventures. And tell us what happened to the Lady Om when that husband of hers choked the old geezer and died.”

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 Oppenheimer’s 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, will always remain as long as spirit endures, and spirit is indestructible.

Before I return to my adventures I want 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 were spieling that Adam Strang yarn, I remember you mentioned playing chess with an emperor’s 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 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.

So I resolved, on my next return from Adam Strang’s experiences, whenever it might be, that I should immediately concentrate upon my visions and memories. I had brought back my memories of chess playing.

Further, I taught Oppenheimer the chess Adam Strang had played in Cho-Sen centuries ago. It was different from Western chess. In place of our sixty-four squares there were eighty-one squares. We have eight pawns; they have nine; and 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. It will be observed that in the Cho-Sen game there is no queen. Moreover, 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 game—a far more difficult achievement than our own game! But 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.

“Maybe you have invented this game right here in solitary?” was his next hypothesis. “Didn’t Ed invent the knuckle-talk? I got you. You invented it. Get it patented. You can make millions out of it.”

“Doubtlessly,” I replied, “the Asiatics have been playing it for thousands of years. Won’t you believe me when I tell you I didn’t invent it?”

“Then you must have read about it, or seen the Chinese people playing,” was his last word.

But there is a Japanese murderer here—or was, for he was executed last week. I talked to him: the game Adam Strang played, and which I taught Oppenheimer, proved quite similar to the Japanese game.

Chapter XVII

You, my reader, will remember, 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.

Those memories of other times and places that glimmered up to the surface of my child consciousness soon failed and faded. Very few men 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[99]. I was a large man. I never knew my mother. I never heard the name of my mother.

My first memories are ships and fighting men. I went south, when the ice passed out of the fjord, in Agard’s[100] ships. I was made drink-boy[101] and sword-bearer[102] to him, and was called Ragnar Lodbrog. I was with him for three years, to his death, always at his back, whether hunting wolves or drinking in the great hall where his young wife often sat among her women.

When Agard was wounded to death, we burned his body on a great pyre, with his wife. And there were slaves in golden collars that burned there with her, and nine female thralls, and eight male slaves.

But I, the drink-boy, Ragnar Lodbrog, did not burn. I was eleven, and unafraid. As the flames sprang up, and Agard’s wife sang her death-song[103], 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. In the fens were wild men, fled slaves, and outlaws.

For three years I knew never roof nor fire. Then I went south into the great forests and was taken in as a freeman by the Teutons, who were many, but who lived in small tribes. Then the Teutons were captured by the Romans and I was brought back to the sea. I was made a sweep-slave in the galleys[104], and as a sweep-slave 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. They were very small, these Romans and Jews, and a blonde like me they had never gazed upon.

There was a woman, who was a friend of Pilate’s wife and whom I met at Pilate’s the night of my arrival. I shall call her Miriam[105]. I could describe Miriam. But how describe emotion in words? The charm of woman is wordless. 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. Miriam was a grand woman. She was fine-bodied, 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. She had brain, she had wit, and, above all, she had womanliness. As you will see, it was her womanliness that betrayed her and me in the end. Brunette, olive-skinned, oval-faced, her hair was blue-black with its blackness and her eyes were twin wells of black.

She was mine the moment I looked upon her. And she knew that I belonged to her above all men. And then we looked with all our eyes, blue eyes and black, until Pilate’s 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?” Pilate and I had been known to each other before he became a procurator.

That night we had much talk, especially Pilate, who spoke in detail of the local situation, and who seemed lonely and desirous to share his anxieties with some one. It was plain that he was worried. The Jews had got on his nerves. They were too volcanic, spasmodic, eruptive. The Jews never approached anything directly. Pilate’s irritation was due, as he explained, to the fact that the Jews were always thinking about intrigues.

“Lodbrog,” Pilate said, “I am here to keep order and quiet. But they make the place a hornets’ nest. These people are never at peace about God. Right now there is a man in the north, a fisherman turned preacher, and miracle-worker[106].”

This was the first I had heard of the man called Jesus.

“I have had report of him,” Pilate went on. “He is not political. There is no doubt of that. But Caiaphas[107] and Hanan[108] behind Caiaphas will make of this fisherman a political thorn to 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 is the shadow of Hanan.”

I was glad, a little later, when I could have talk with Miriam. Pilate’s wife had found opportunity to tell me about her. Her sister was wife of Philip. When a girl, she had been betrothed to Archelaus,[109] at the time he was ethnarch of Jerusalem[110]. She was very rich, so that marriage had not been compulsory.

The Jews of that day lived on religion as did we on fighting and feasting. For all my stay in that country there was never a moment when I did not hear 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. 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 Thor and Odin and Valhalla[111], she clapped her hands and cried out, with sparkling eyes:

“Oh, you barbarian! You great child! You believer of old nurse tales! 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 will 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 men.”

“My heaven,” she said, “is the abode of the blest.”

“Valhalla is the abode of the blest,” I asserted. “Look, who cares for flowers where flowers always are? In my country, after the winter breaks and the sun drives away the long night, the first blossoms are things of joy, and we look, and look again. And fire! Great glorious fire! A roaring fire under a tight roof with wind and snow outside!”

“A simple folk, you,” she told me. “You build a roof and a fire in snow 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. Man’s life is fashioned for battle with frost and storm. For three years, once, I knew never roof nor fire. I was sixteen, I was born in storm, after battle, and my cloth was a wolfskin. Look at me and see what men live in Valhalla.”

She looked and cried out:

“You great giant!” Then she added pensively, “It saddens me that there may not be such men in my heaven.”

“It is a good world,” I consoled her. “There is room for many heavens. To each is given the heaven that is his heart’s desire. A good country, truly, there beyond the grave. I shall steal you away. My mother was so stolen.”

And in the pause I looked at her, and she looked at me. By Odin, this was a woman!

Travelling 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 their priests, they were themselves priests and preaching wherever they could find a listener. And they could easily find many listeners.

People 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 seems that Jesus had been a carpenter, and after that a fisherman, and his fellow-fishermen had thrown their nets away and followed him. Some few looked upon him as a prophet, but the most contended that he was a madman. My wretched horse-boy[112] sneered at Jesus, calling him the king of the beggars, calling his doctrine Ebionism: only the poor should go 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. They cast out devils by magic charms, cured diseases by the laying on of hands, drank deadly poisons unharmed, and unharmed played with deadly snakes. They ran away to starve in the deserts. They were howling new doctrines, gathering crowds about them, forming new sects. After that they formed more sects.

“By Odin,” I told Pilate, “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.

“Indeed,” I agreed. “If ever I get away from this mad land, I’ll kill everybody who will 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. And they seemed incapable of grasping the Roman idea of the State. Everything political was religious; everything religious was political. The Roman eagles, the Roman statues, even the shields of Pilate, were deliberate insults to their religion.

Everything, what these strange people did, was done in the name of God. Heavens, what sects and sects! Pharisees, Essenes, Sadducees[113]—a legion of them! When I rode in Jerusalem, it was easy to note the increasing excitement of the Jews. They were chattering and spouting. Some were proclaiming the end of the world. Others satisfied themselves with the imminent destruction of the Temple. And there were revolutionaries who announced that Roman rule was over and the new Jewish kingdom about to begin. Pilate, I noted, showed heavy anxiety.

I lodged in the palace, and to my great joy found Miriam there. The Passover was near, and thousands were pouring in from the country, to celebrate the feast in Jerusalem. These newcomers, naturally, were all crazy folk. 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.

“Not much is due to this Jesus,” Pilate said. “Look to Caiaphas and Hanan for the main cause of the excitement. They want 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 here. This fisherman may be a madman. If so, he is a very cunning madman. He preaches the doctrine of the poor. He threatens our law, and our law is our life, as you have learned. We are jealous of our law. Caiaphas and Hanan must destroy the fisherman, else he will destroy them.”

“Is it not strange, a fisherman?” Pilate’s wife said. “What man can possess such power? I would like to see him–such a remarkable man.”

“If you want to see him, visit the dens of the town,” Miriam laughed spitefully. “You will find him in the company of nameless women[114]. A very strange prophet came to Jerusalem.”

“And what harm in that?” I demanded. “Why is he a madman?”

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. This man is 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 here I told of the healing of the ten lepers I had witnessed on my way.

“And you believe this wonder, Lodbrog?” Pilate demanded. “You believe that 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.

“No,” I admitted. “But there was one who sat in the sun and ever searched his body as if unable to believe his eyes. He would not speak, when I questioned him. He sat there in the sun and stared and stated.”

Pilate smiled contemptuously, and I noted the quiet smile on Miriam’s face was equally contemptuous. Ambivius[115] said:

“Caiaphas told me yesterday that 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.

“It is not true,” Miriam explained. “It is a lie Caiaphas and Hanan have made. What I have heard, is that this Jesus preaches the end of the world and the beginning of God’s kingdom, not here, but in heaven.”

“I have had report of that[116],” Pilate said. “It is true. This Jesus holds the justness of the Roman tax. He holds that Rome will rule until the world passes away.”

“It is even claimed by some of his followers,” Ambivius said, “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.”

“They claim for him that he would be king of the Jews,” Miriam noted. “This is an offence against Roman law.”

Pilate shrugged his shoulders.

“A king of the beggars, rather; or a king of the dreamers. He is no fool. He dreams about the power, but not of this world’s power. I wish him luck in the next world, for that is beyond Rome’s jurisdiction.”

“He says that property is sin,” Ambivius spoke up.

Pilate laughed.

“This king of the beggars and his fellow-beggars still do respect property,” he explained. “For, look, not long ago they had even a treasurer for their wealth. Judas his name was.”

“It is also claimed by some that Jesus is the Son of David,” Miriam said. “But it is absurd. Nobody at Nazareth[117] 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.”

“And now this fisherman is in Jerusalem,” Pilate grumbled.

“Hanan has laid the task for you,” Miriam said, “and you will perform it.”