Chapters 10
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1 Adventures of the Dying Detective 44:14
The Adventure of the Dying Detective by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Mrs. Hudson, the landlady of Sherlock Holmes, was a long-suffering woman. Not only was her first floor flat, invaded at all hours by throngs of singular and often undesirable characters, but her remarkable lodger showed an eccentricity and irregularity in his life, which must have sorely tried her patience. His incredible untidiness, His addiction to music at strange hours, his occasional revolver practice within doors, his weird and often malodorous scientific experiments, and the atmosphere of violence and danger which hung around him, made him the very worst tenant in London. On the other hand, his payments were princely. I have no doubt that the house might have been purchased at the price which Holmes paid for his rooms during the years that I was with him.
The landlady stood in the deepest awe of him, and never dared to interfere with him, however outrageous his proceedings might seem. She was fond of him, too, for he had a remarkable gentleness and courtesy in his dealings with women. He disliked and distrusted the sex, but he was always a chivalrous opponent. Knowing how genuine was her regard for him, I listened earnestly to her story when she came to my rooms in the second year of my married life, and told me the sad condition to which my poor friend was reduced. He's dying, Dr. Watson. said she. For three days he has been sinking, and I doubt if he will last the day. He would not let me get a doctor. This morning, when I saw the bones sticking out of his face and his great bright eyes looking at me, I could stand no more of it.
With your leave or without it, Mr. Holmes, I am going for a doctor this very hour, said I. "'Let it be Watson, then,' said he. "'I wouldn't waste an hour in coming to him, sir, or you may not see him alive.' I was horrified, for I had heard nothing of his illness. I need not say that I rushed for my coat and my hat. As I drove back, I asked for the details. There is little I can tell you, sir. He has been working at a case down at Rotherhith, in an alley near the river, and he has brought this illness back with him. He took to his bed on Wednesday afternoon, and has never moved since. For those three days neither food nor drink passed his lips. Good God! Why did you not call in a doctor? "'He wouldn't have it, sir.' "'You know how masterful he is.
I don't dare to disobey him. But he's not long for this world, as you'll see for yourself the moment you set eyes on him.' He was indeed a deplorable spectacle. In the dim light of a foggy November day, the sick room was a gloomy spot, but it was that gaunt Wasted face, staring at me from the bed, which sent a chill to my heart. His eyes had the brightness of fever. There was a hectic flush upon either cheek, and dark crusts clung to his lips. The thin hands upon the coverlet twitched incessantly. His voice was croaking and spasmodic. He lay listlessly as I entered the room, but the sight of me brought a gleam of recognition to his eyes. "'Well, Watson, we seem to have fallen upon evil days,' said he in a feeble voice, but with something of his old carelessness of manner.
"'My dear fellow,' I cried, approaching him, "'stand back, stand right back!' said he with a sharp imperiousness which I had associated only with moments of crisis. If you approach me, Watson, I shall order you out of this house. But why? Because it is my desire. Is that not enough? Yes, Mrs. Hudson was right. He was more masterful than ever. It was pitiful, however, to see his exhaustion. I only wish to help, I explained. Exactly. You will help best by doing what you are told. Certainly, Holmes. He relaxed the austerity of his manner. You are not angry, he asked, gasping for breath. Poor devil! How could I be angry when I saw him lying in such a plight before me? It's for your own sake, Watson, he croaked.
For my sake? I know what is the matter with me. It is a coolie disease from Sumatra, a thing that the Dutch knew more about than we, though they have made little of it up to date. One thing only is certain. It is infallibly deadly, and it is horribly contagious. He spoke now with a feverish energy, the long hands twitching and jerking as he motioned me away. Contagious by touch, Watson. That's it. By touch. Keep your distance, and all is well. Good heavens, Holmes! Do you suppose that such a consideration weighs with me of an instant? It would not affect me in the case of a stranger. Do you imagine it would prevent me from doing my duty to sold a friend? Again I advanced. But he repulsed me with a look of furious anger.
If you will stand there, I will talk. If you do not, you must leave the room. I have so deep a respect for the extraordinary qualities of Holmes that I have always deferred to his wishes, even when I least understood them. But now all my professional instincts were aroused. Let him be my master elsewhere. I, at least, was in a sick-room. Holmes, said I, you are not yourself. A sick man is but a child, and so I will treat you. Whether you like it or not, I will examine your symptoms and treat you for them. He looked at me with venomous eyes. If I am to have a doctor, "'Whether I will or not, let me at least have someone in whom I have confidence,' said he. "'Then you have none in me. In your friendship, certainly.
But facts are facts, Watson, and, after all, you are only a general practitioner with very limited experience and mediocre qualifications. It is painful to have to say these things, but you leave me no choice.' I was bitterly hurt. Such a remark is unworthy of you, Holmes. It shows me very clearly the state of your own nerves. But if you have no confidence in me, I would not intrude my services. Let me bring Sir Jasper Meek, or Penrose Fisher, or any of the best men in London, but some one you must have, and that is final. If you think that I am going to stand here and see you die without either helping you myself or bringing in any one else to help you, then you have mistaken your man. You mean well, Watson," said the sick man, with something between a sob and a groan.
Shall I demonstrate your own ignorance? What would you know, pray, of Tapanuli fever? Would you know of the Black Formosa corruption? I have never heard of either. There are many problems of disease, many strange pathological possibilities, in the East, Watson. He paused under each sentence to collect his failing strength. I have learned so much more during recent researches which have a medical criminal aspect. It was in the course of them that I contracted this complaint. You can do nothing. Possibly not. But I happen to know that Dr. Ainstry, the greatest living authority upon tropical disease, is now in London. All remonstrance is useless, Holmes. I am going this instant to fetch him. I turned resolutely to the door.
Never have I had such a shock. In an instant, with a tiger-spring, the dying man had intercepted me. I heard the sharp snap of a twisted key. The next moment he had staggered back to his bed, exhausted and panting after one tremendous outflame of energy. "'You won't take the key from me by force, Watson. I've got you, my friend. Here you are.' And here you will stay until I will otherwise. But I'll humor you. You've only my own good at heart. Of course I know that very well. You shall have your way, but give me time to get my strength. Not now, Watson, not now. It's four o'clock. At six you can go. This is insanity, Holmes. Only two hours, Watson. I promise you will go at six. Are you content to wait?
I seem to have no choice. None in the world, Watson. Thank you. I need no help in arranging the clothes. You will please keep your distance. Now, Watson, there is one other condition that I would make. You will seek help. Not from the man you mention, but from the one that I choose. By all means. The first three sensible words that you have uttered since you entered this room, Watson. You will find some books over there. I am somewhat exhausted. I wonder how a battery feels when it pours electricity into a non-conductor. At six, Watson. We resume our conversation. But it was destined to be resumed long before that hour, and in circumstances which gave me a shock hardly second to that caused by a spring to the door.
I had stood for some minutes looking at the silent figure in the bed. His face was almost covered by the clothes, and he appeared to be asleep. Then, Unable to settle down to reading, I walked slowly around the room, examining the pictures of celebrated criminals with which every wall was adorned. Finally, in my aimless preambulation, I came to the mantelpiece. A litter of pipes, Tobacco pouches, syringes, penknives, revolver cartridges, and other debris was scattered over it. In the midst of these was a small black-and-white ivory box with a sliding lid. It was a neat little thing, and I had stretched out my hand to examine it more closely, when it was a dreadful cry that he gave. a yell which might have been heard down the street.
My skin went cold, and my hair bristled at that horrible scream. As I turned, I caught a glimpse of the convulsed face and frantic eyes. I stood paralyzed, with the little box in my hand. Put it down. Down this instant, Watson. This instant, I say. His head sank back upon the pillow, and he gave a deep sigh of relief as I replaced the box upon the mantelpiece. I hate to have my things touched, Watson. You know that I hate it. You fidget me beyond endurance. You, a doctor, you are enough to drive a patient into an asylum. Sit down, man, and let me have my rest.
The incident left a most unpleasant impression upon my mind. The violent and causeless excitement, followed by this brutality of speech, so far removed from his usual suavity, showed me how deep was the disorganization of his mind. Of all runes, that of a noble mind is the most deplorable. I sat in silent dejection until the stipulated time had passed. He seemed to have been watching the clock as well as I, for it was hardly six, before he began to talk with the same feverish animation as before. "'Now, Watson,' said he, "'have you any change in your pocket?' "'Yes. Any silver? A good deal. How many half-crowns?' I have five. Ah, too few, too few. How very unfortunate, Watson. However, such as they are, you can put them in your watch pocket, and all the rest of your money in your left trouser pocket.
Thank you. It will balance you so much better like that." This was raving insanity. He shuddered, and again made a sound between a cough and the A sob. You will now light the gas, Watson, but you will be very careful that not for one instant shall it be more than half on. I implore you to be careful, Watson. Thank you. That is excellent. No, you need not draw the blind. Now you will have the kindness to place some letters and papers upon this table within my reach. Thank you. Now some of that litter from the mantelpiece. Excellent, Watson. There is sugar tongs there. Kindly place that small ivory box with its assistance. Place it here among the papers. Good. You can now go and fetch Mr. Culverton Smith, of 13 Lower Burke Street.
To tell the truth, my desire to fetch a doctor had somewhat weakened. For poor Holmes was so obviously delirious that it seemed dangerous to leave him. However, he was as eager now to consult the person named as he had been obstinate in refusing. I never heard the name, said I. Possibly not, my good Watson. It may surprise you to know that the man upon earth who is best versed in this disease is not a medical man, but a planter. Mr. Culverton Smith is a well-known resident of Sumatra, now visiting London. An outbreak of the disease upon his plantation, which was distant from medical aid, caused him to study it himself, with some rather far-reaching consequences. He is a very methodical person, and I did not desire you to start before six, because I was well aware that you would not find him in his study.
If you could persuade him to come here and give us the benefit of his unique experience of this disease, the investigation of which has been his dearest hobby, I cannot doubt that he could help me. I gave Holmes's remarks as a consecutive whole, and will not attempt to indicate how they were interrupted by gaspings for breath. and those clutchings of his hands which indicated the pain from which he was suffering. His appearances changed for the worse during the few hours that I had been with him. Those hectic spots were more pronounced, the eyes shone more brightly out of darker hollows, and a cold sweat glimmered upon his brow. He still retained, however, the jaunty gallantry of his speech. To the last gasp, he would always be the master.
"'You will tell him exactly how you left me,' said he. "'You will convey the very impression which is in your mind—a dying man, a dying and delirious man. Indeed, I cannot think why the whole bed of the ocean—' Is not one solid mass of oysters, so prolific the creatures seem?
Ah, I am wondering. Strange how the brain controls the brain. What was I saying, Watson? My directions for Mr. Culverton Smith. Ah, yes, I remember. My life depends upon it. Plead with him, Watson. There is no good feeling between us. His nephew, Watson. I had suspicions of foul play, and I allowed him to see it. The boy died horribly. He has a grudge against me. You will soften him, Watson. Beg him. Pray him. Get him here by any means. He could save me. Only he. I will bring him in a cab if I have to carry him down to it. You will do nothing of the sort. You will persuade him to come. and then you will return in front of him. Make any excuse so as not to come with him. Don't forget, Watson. You won't fail me.
You never did fail me. No doubt there are natural enemies which limit the increase of the creatures. You and I, Watson, we have done our part. Shall the world, then, be overrun by oysters? No, no, horrible. You'll convey all that is in your mind.
I left him full of the image of this magnificent intellect babbling like a foolish child. He had handed me the key, and with a happy thought I took it with me lest he should lock himself in. Mrs. Hudson was waiting, trembling and weeping, in the passage. Behind me As I passed from the flat, I heard Holmes's high, thin voice in some delirious chant. Below, as I stood whistling for a cab, a man came on me through the fog. "'How is Mr. Holmes, sir?' he asked. "'It was an old acquaintance, Inspector Morton, of Scotland Yard, dressed in unofficial tweeds. He is very ill,' I answered. He looked at me in a most singular fashion. Had it not been too fiendish, I could have imagined that the gleam of the fanlight showed exultation in his face.
I heard some rumor of it," said he. The cab had driven up, and I left him. Lower Burke Street It proved to be a line of fine houses lying in the vague borderland between Notting Hill and Kensington. The particular one at which my cabman pulled up had an air of smug and demure respectability in its old-fashioned iron railings, its massive folding door, and its shining brasswork. All was in keeping with a solemn butler, who appeared framed in the pink radiance of a tinted electrical light behind him. Yes, Mr. Culverton Smith is in. Dr. Watson. Very good, sir. I will take up your card. My humble name and title did not appear to impress Mr. Culverton Smith. Through the half-open door I heard a high, petulant, penetrating voice.
Who is this person? What does he want? Dear me, Staples, how often have I said that I am not to be disturbed in my hours of study? There came a gentle flow of soothing explanation from the butler. Well, I won't see him, Staples. I can't have my work interrupted like this. I am not at home. Say so. Tell him to come in the morning if he really must see me. Again the gentle murmur. Well, well, give him that message. He can come in the morning, or he could stay away. My work must not be hindered. I thought of Holmes tossing upon his bed of sickness and counting the minutes, perhaps, until I can bring help to him. It was not a time to stand upon ceremony. His life depended upon my promptness. Before the apologetic butler had delivered his message, I had pushed past him and was in the room.
With a shrill cry of anger, a man rose from a reclining chair beside the fire. I saw a great yellow face, coarse-grained and greasy, with heavy double chin, and two sullen, menacing gray eyes which glared at me from under tufted and sandy brows. A high-balled head, had a small velvet-smoking cap posed coquettishly upon one side of its pink curve. The skull was of enormous capacity, and yet, as I looked down, I saw to my amazement that the figure of the man was small and frail, twisted in the shoulders, and back like one who has suffered from rickets in his childhood. What's this? he cried in a high, screaming voice. What is the meaning of this intrusion? Didn't I send you word that I would see you tomorrow morning?
I am sorry, said I. But the manner cannot be delayed. Mr. Sherlock Holmes— The mention of my friend's name had an extraordinary effect upon the little man. The look of anger passed in an instant from his face. His features became tense and alert. "'Have you come from Holmes?' he asked. "'I have just left him.' "'What about Holmes? How is he?' "'He is desperately ill. That is why I have come.' The man motioned me to a chair, and turned to resume his own. As he did so, I caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror over the masterpiece. I could not have sworn that it was set in a malicious and abominable smile. Yet I persuaded myself that it must have been some nervous contraction, which I had surprised, for he turned to me an instant later with genuine concern upon his features.
"'I am sorry to hear this,' said he. "'I only know Mr. Holmes through some business dealings which we have had, But I have every respect for his talents and his character. He is an amateur of crime, as I am of disease. For him the villain, for me the microbe. There are my prisons, he continued, pointing to a row of bottles and jars which stood upon a side table. Among those gelatin cultivations, some of the very worst offenders in the world are now doing time. It was an account of your special knowledge that Mr. Holmes desired to see you. He has a high opinion of you, and thought that you were the one man in London who could help him. The little man started, and the jaunty smoking clap slid to the floor.
Why? he asked. Why should Mr. Holmes think that I could help him in his trouble? "'Because of your knowledge of eastern diseases.' "'But why should he think that this disease he has contracted is eastern? Because in some professional inquiry he has been working among Chinese sailors down in the docks.' Mr. Culverton Smith smiled pleasantly, and picked up his smoking-cap. "'Oh, that's it, is it?' said he. I trust the matter is not so grave as you suppose. How long has he been ill? About three days. Is he delirious? Occasionally. Tut-tut, that sounds serious. It would be inhuman not to answer his call. I very much resent any interruption to my work, Dr. Watson, but this case is certainly exceptional.
I will come with you at once. I remembered Holmes's injunction. "'I have another apartment,' said I. "'Very good. I will go alone. I have a note of Mr. Holmes's address. You can rely upon my being there within half an hour, at most.' It was with a sinking heart that I re-entered Holmes's bedroom. For all that I knew, the worst might have happened in my absence. To my enormous relief, He had improved greatly in the interval. His appearance was as ghastly as ever, but all trace of delirium had left him, and he spoke in a feeble voice. It was true, but even more than his usual crispness and lucidity. Well, did you see Watson? Yes, he is coming. Admirable, Watson. Admirable. You are the best of messengers.
He wished to return with me. That would never do, Watson. That would be obviously impossible. Did he ask what ailed me? I told him about the Chinese in the East End. Exactly. Well, Watson, you have done all that a good friend could. You can now disappear from the scene. I must wait and hear his opinion, Holmes. Of course you must, but I have reason to suppose that this opinion would be very much more frank and valuable if he imagines that we are alone. There is just room behind the head of my bed, Watson. My dear Holmes, I fear there is no alternative, Watson. The room does not lend itself to concealment, which is as well as it is the less likely to arouse suspicion. But just there, Watson, I fancy that it could be done.
Suddenly he sat up with a rigid intentness upon his haggard face. There are the wheels, Watson. Quick, man, if you love me. And don't budge. Whatever happens, whatever happens, do you hear? Don't speak. Don't move. Just listen with all your ears. Then, in an instant, his sudden access of strength departed, and his masterful, purposeful talk droned away into the low, vague murmurings of a semi-delirious man.
From the hiding-place, into which I had been so swiftly hustled, I heard the footfalls upon the stair, with the opening and the closing of the bedroom door. Then, to my surprise, there came a long silence, broken only by the heavy breathings and gaspings of the sick man. I could imagine that our visitor was standing by the bedside and looking down at the suffering. At last that strange hush was broken. Holmes! he cried. Holmes! in the insistent tone of one who awakens a sleeper. Can't you hear me, Holmes? There was a rustling, as if he had shaken the sick man roughly by the shoulder. Is that you, Mr. Smith? Holmes whispered. I hardly dared hope that you would come. The other laughed. "'I could imagine not,' he said.
"'And yet, you see, I am here. Coals of fire, Holmes—coals of fire. It is very good of you—very noble of you. I appreciate your special knowledge.' Our visitor sniggered. "'You do. You are fortunately the only man in London who does. Do you know what is the matter with you?' "'The same.' "'Ah!' You recognize your symptoms? Only too well. Well, I shouldn't be surprised, Holmes. I shouldn't be surprised if it were the same. A bad look-out for you if it is. Poor Victor was a dead man on the fourth day, a strong, hardy young fellow. It was certainly, as you said, very surprising that you should have contracted and out-of-the-way Asiatic disease in the heart of London, a disease, too, Of which I have made such a very truly special study.
Singular coincidence, Holmes. Very smart of you to notice it, but rather uncharitable to suggest that it was cause and effect. I knew that you did it. Oh, you did, did you? Well, you couldn't prove it anyhow. But what do you think of yourself spreading reports about me like that, and then crawling to me for help the moment you are in trouble? What sort of game is that, eh? I heard the rasping, labored breathing of the sick man. Give me the water, he gasped. You're precious near your end, my friend. But I don't want you to go until I have had a word with you. That's why I give you water. Then don't slop it about. That's right. Can you understand what I say? Holmes groaned. Do what you can for me.
Let bygones be bygones, he whispered. I'll put the words out of my head. I swear I will. Only cure me, and I'll forget it. Forget what? Well, about Victor Savage's death. You as good as admitted just now that you had done it, I'll forget it. You can forget it. Or remember it, just as you like. I don't see you in the witness box. Quite another shaped box, my good Holmes, I assure you. It matters nothing to me that you should know how my nephew died. It's not him we are talking about. It's you. Yes, yes. The fellow who came for me—I've forgotten his name—said that you contracted it down in the east end among the sailors. I can only account for it so. You are proud of your brains, Holmes, are you not?
Think yourself smart, don't you? You came across someone who was smarter this time. Now cast your mind back, Holmes. Can you think of no other way you could have gotten this thing? I can't think. My mind is gone. For heaven's sake, help me. Yes, I will help you. I'll help you to understand just where you are and how you got there. I'd like to know before you die. Give me something to ease my pain. Painful, is it? Yes, the coolies used to do some squealing towards the end. Takes you as cramp, I fancy. Yes, yes, it is cramp. Well, can you hear what I say anyhow? Listen now. Can you remember any unusual incident in your life just about the time your symptoms began? No, no, nothing. Think again. I'm too ill to think.
Well, then, let me help you. Did anything come by post? By post? A box by chance? I'm fading. I'm gone. Listen, Holmes. There was a sound as if he was shaking the dying man. And it was all that I could do to hold myself quiet in my hiding-place. You must hear me. You shall hear me. Do you remember a box? An ivory box? It came on Wednesday. You opened it. Do you remember? Yes, yes, I opened it. There was a sharp spring inside it. Some joke. It was no joke, as you will find to your cost. You fool! You would have it, and you have got it. Who asked you to cross my path? If you had left me alone, I would not have hurt you. I remember, Holmes gasped, the spring. It drew blood. This box. This on the table.
The very one by George. And it may as well leave the room in my pocket. There goes your last shred of evidence. But you have the truth now, Holmes, and you could die with the knowledge that I killed you. You knew too much of the fate of Victor Savage, so I have sent you to share it. You are very near the end, Holmes. I will sit here, and I will watch you die. Holmes's voice had sunk to an almost inaudible whisper. "'What is that?' said Smith. "'Turn up the gas.' Ah, the shadows began to fall. Do they? Yes, I will turn it up, that I may see you the better. He crossed the room, and the light suddenly brightened. Is there any other little service that I can do for you, my friend? A match and a cigarette.
I nearly called out in my joy and my amazement. He was speaking in his natural voice. A little weak, perhaps, but the very voice I knew. There was a long pause, and I felt that Culverton Smith was standing in silent amazement, looking down at his companion. "'What's the meaning of this?' I heard him say at last in a dry, rasping tone. "'The best way of successfully acting a part is to be it,' said Holmes. I gave you my word that for three days I have tasted neither food nor drink, until you were good enough to pour me out that glass of water. But it is the tobacco which I find most irksome. Ah, here are some cigarettes. I heard the striking of a match. This is very much better. Aloha, aloha. Do you hear the step of a friend?
There were footfalls outside. The door opened. and Inspector Morton appeared. "'All is in order, and this is your man,' said Holmes. The officer gave the usual cautions. "'I arrest you on the charge of the murder of one Victor Savage.' "'And you might add of the attempted murder of one Sherlock Holmes,' replied my friend with a chuckle. To save an invalid trouble, Inspector, Mr. Culverton Smith was good enough to give our signal by turning up the gas. By the way, the prisoner has a small box in the right-hand pocket of his coat, which it would be as well to remove. Thank you. I would handle it gingerly if I were you. Put it down there. It may play its part in the trial. There was a sudden rush and a scuffle, followed by the clash of iron and a cry of pain.
"'You'll only get yourself hurt,' said the inspector. "'Stand still, will you?' There was the click of the closing handcuffs. "'A nice trap,' cried the high, snarling voice. "'It will bring you into the dark homes, not me.' He asked me to come here to cure him. I was sorry for him, and I came. Now he will pretend, no doubt, that I have said anything which he may invent which will corroborate his insane suspicions. You can lie as you like, Holmes. My word is always as good as yours. Good heavens! cried Holmes. I had totally forgotten him. My dear Watson, I owe you a thousand apologies, to think that I should have overlooked you. I need not introduce you to Mr. Culverton Smith, since I understand that you met somewhat earlier in the evening.
Have you the cab below? I will follow you when I am dressed, for I may be of some use at the station. I never needed it more. said Holmes, as he refreshed himself with a glass of claret and some biscuits in the intervals of his toilet. However, as you know, my habits are irregular, and such a feat means less to me than to most men. It was very essential that I should impress Mrs. Hudson with the reality of my condition, since she was to convey it to you. and you in turn to him. You won't be offended, Watson. You will realize that among your many talents dissimulation finds no place, and that if you had shared my secret you would never have been able to impress Smith with the urgent necessity of his presence, which was the vital point of the whole scheme.
Knowing his vindictive nature, I was perfectly certain that he would come to look upon his handiwork. But your appearance, Holmes, your ghastly face. Three days of absolute fast does not improve one's beauty, Watson. For the rest, there is nothing which a sponge may not cure, and with Vaseline upon one's forehead, belladonna in one's eyes, rouge over the cheekbones, and crusts of beeswax round one's lips, A very satisfying effect can be produced. Malingering is a subject upon which I have sometimes thought of writing a monograph. A little occasional talk about half-crowns, oysters, or any other extraneous subject produces a pleasing effect of delirium. But why would you not let me near you, since there was in truth no infection?
Can you ask, my dear Watson? Do you imagine that I have no respect for your medical talents? Could I fancy that your astute judgment would pass a dying man who, however weak, had no rise of pulse or temperature? At four yards I could deceive you. If I failed to do so, who would bring my smith within my grasp? No, Watson. I would not touch that box. You can just see if you look at it sideways where the sharp spring, like a viper's tooth, emerges as you open it. I dare say it was by some such device that poor savage, who stood between this monster and a reversion, was done to death. My correspondence, however, is, as you know, a varied one. and I somewhat upon my guard against my packages which reached me.
It was clear to me, however, that by pretending that I had really succeeded in his design, I might surprise a confession. The pretence I have carried out with the thoroughness of the true artist. Thank you, Watson. You must help me on with my coat. When we have finished at the police station, I think that something nutritious at Simpson's would not be out of place.
End of The Adventures of the Dying Detective by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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2 The Butterfly 6:40
Butterfly by Hans Christian Andersen. The butterfly wished to procure a bride for himself. Of course, one of the flowers, a pretty little one. He looked about him. Each one sat quietly and thoughtfully on her stalk, as a young maiden should sit, when she is not affianced. But there were many of them, and it was a difficult matter to choose amongst them. The butterfly could not make up his mind, so he flew to the daisy. The French call her Marguerite. They know that she can tell fortunes, and she does this When lovers pluck off leaf after leaf, and ask her at each one a question about the beloved one. How does he love me? With all his heart? With sorrow? Above all? Can not refrain from it? Quite secretly.
A little bit? Not at all? Or questions to the same import? Each one asks in his own language. The butterfly flew towards her and questioned her. He did not pluck off the leaves, but kissed each separate one, thinking that, by so doing, he would make himself more agreeable to the good creature. Sweet Marguerite Daisy, said he, of all the flowers, you are the wisest woman. You can prophesy. Tell me, shall I obtain this one? Or that one? Which one? If I but know this, I can fly to the charming one at once and pay my court. Marguerite did not answer. She could not bear to be called a woman, for she was a young girl. And when one is a young girl, one is not a woman. He asked again. He asked a third time.
But as she did not answer a single word, He questioned her no more, and flew away, without further parley, intent on his courtship. It was early springtime, and there was an abundance of snowdrops and crocuses. They are very neat, said the butterfly. Pretty little confirmed ones, but a little green. He, like all young men, looked at older girls. From thence he flew to the Anemones, But he found them a little too sentimental. The tulips, too showy. The broom, not of a good family. The linden blossoms, too small. Then they had so many relations as to the apple blossoms. Why, to look at them, you would think them as healthy as roses. But to-day, they blossom, and to-morrow, if the wind blows, They drop off.
A marriage with them would be too short. The pea-blossom pleased him most. She was pink and white, she was pure and refined, and belonged to the housewifely girls that looked well and still can make themselves useful in the kitchen. He had almost concluded to make love to her, when he saw hanging near to her a pea-pod with its white blossom. Who is that? asked he. That is my sister, said the pea-blossom. How now? Is that the way you look when older? This terrified the butterfly, and he flew away. The honeysuckles were hanging over the fence, young ladies with long faces and yellow skins, but he did not fancy their style of beauty. Yes, but which did he like? Ask him. The spring passed, the summer passed, and then came the autumn.
The flowers appeared in their most beautiful dresses, but of what avail was this? The butterfly's fresh, youthful feelings had vanished. In old age, the heart longs for fragrance, and dahlias and gilly-flowers are scentless. So the butterfly flew to the mint. She has no flower at all, but she is herself a flower, for she is fragrant from head to foot, and each leaf is filled with perfume. I shall take her! But the mint stood stiff and still, and at last said, Friendship, but nothing more. I am old, and you are old. We can live very well for one another. But to marry? No! Do not let us make fools of ourselves in our old age. So the butterfly obtained no one. The butterfly remained a bachelor. Many violent and transient showers came late in the autumn.
The wind blew so coldly down the back of the old willow trees that it cracked within them. It did not do to fly about in summer garments, for even love itself would then grow cold. The butterfly, however, preferred not to fly out at all. He had by chance entered a doorway, and there was a fire in the stove. Yes, it was just as warm there as in summertime. There he could live. Life is not enough, said he. One must have sunshine, liberty, and a little flower. He flew against the window-panes. was seen, was run through by a pin and placed in a curiosity box. One could not do more for him. Now I am also seated on a stalk like a flower, said the butterfly. It is not so comfortable after all, but it is as well as being married, for then one is tied down.
He consoled himself with this. What a wretched consolation, said the flower that grew in the pot in the room. One cannot entirely trust to flowers that grow in pots, thought the butterfly. They have too much intercourse with men.
The End of the Butterfly by Hans Christian Andersen
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3 The Garden of Paradise 33:10
The Garden of Paradise by Hans Christian Andersen. Read by West Winds Twelve. There was once a king's son. Nobody had so many or such beautiful books as he had. He could read about everything which had ever happened in this world, and see it all represented in the most beautiful pictures. He could get information about every nation and every country. But as to where the Garden of Paradise was to be found, not a word could be discovered, and this was the very thing he thought most about. His grandmother had told him, when he was quite a little fellow, and was about to begin his school life, that every flower in the garden of paradise was a delicious cake, and that the pistils were full of wine.
In one flower, history was written, in another, geography or tables. You had only to eat the cake, and you knew the lesson. The more you ate, the more history, geography, and tables you knew. All this he believed then, But as he grew older and wiser and learnt more, he easily perceived that the delights of the garden of paradise must be far beyond all this. Oh, why did Eve take of the tree of knowledge? Why did Adam eat the forbidden fruit? If it had only been I, it would not have happened. Never would sin have entered the world. This is what he said then, and he still said it when he was seventeen. His thoughts were full of the garden of paradise. He walked into the wood one day. He was alone, for that is his greatest pleasure.
Evening came on, the clouds drew up, and it rained as if the whole heaven had become a sluice from which the water poured in sheets. It was as dark as it is otherwise in the deepest well. Now he slipped on the wet grass, and then he fell on the bare stones which jutted out of the rocky ground. Everything was dripping, and at last the poor prince hadn't got a dry thread on him. He had to climb over huge rocks where the water oozed out of the thick moss. He was almost fainting. Just then he heard a curious murmuring, and saw in front of him a big, lighted cave. A fire was burning in the middle, big enough to roast a stag, which was in fact being done. A splendid stag, with its huge antlers, was stuck on a spit, being slowly turned around between the hewn trunks of two fir-trees.
An oldish woman, tall and strong enough to be a man dressed up, sat by the fire throwing on logs from time to time. "'Come in, by all means,' she said. "'Sit down by the fire, so that your clothes may dry.' "'There is a shocking draught here,' said the prince, as he sat down on the ground. "'It will be worse than this when my sons come home,' said the woman. "'You are in the cavern of the winds. My sons are the four winds of the world. Do you understand?' "'Who are your sons?' asked the prince. Well, that's not so easy to answer when the question is stupidly put, said the woman. My sons, do as they like, they are playing rounders now with the clouds up there in the great hall, and she pointed up into the sky.
Oh, indeed, said the prince. You seem to speak very harshly, and you are not so gentle as the women I generally see about me. Oh, I dare say they have nothing else to do. I have to be harsh if I am to keep my boys under control, but I can do it, although they are a stiff-necked lot. Do you see those four sacks hanging on the wall? They are just as frightened of them as you used to be of the cane behind the looking-glass. I can double the boys up, I can tell you, and then they have to go into the bag. We don't stand upon ceremony, and there they have to stay. They can't get out to play their tricks until it suits me to let them. But here we have one of them. It was the North Wind who came in with an icy blast.
Great hailstones peppered about the floor, and snowflakes drifted in. He was dressed in bearskin trousers and jacket, and he had a sealskin cap drawn over his ears. Long icicles were hanging from his beard. And one hailstone after another dropped down from the collar of his jacket. "'Don't go straight to the fire,' said the prince. "'You might easily get Chilbane's.' "'Chilbane's,' said the North Wind, with a loud laugh. "'Chilblane's! They are my greatest delight. What sort of a feeble creature are you? How did you get into the Cave of the Winds?' "'He is my guest,' said the old woman. And if you are not pleased with that explanation, you may go into the bag. Now you know my opinion. This had its effect, and the North Wind told them where he came from, and where he had been for the last month.
I come from the Arctic Seas, he said. I have been on Bering Island with the Russian Walrus Hunters. I sat at the helm And slept when they sailed from the North Cape, and when I woke, now and then the stormy petrels were flying about my legs. They are queer birds. They give a brisk flap of their wings, and then keep them stretched out and motionless. And even then they have speed enough. Pray, don't be too long-winded, said the mother of the winds. So at last you got to Bering Island. It's perfectly splendid. There you have a floor to dance upon, as flat as a pancake. Half-thawed snow, with moss. There were bones of whales, and polar bears lying about. They looked like the legs and arms of giants covered with green mold.
One would think that the sun had never shone on them. I gave a little puff to the fog so that one could see the shed. It was a house built of wreckage, and covered with the skins of whales. The flesh side was turned outwards. It was all red and green. A living polar bear sat on the roof growling. I went to the shore, and looked at the birds' nests, looked at the unfledged young ones, screaming and gaping. Then I blew down thousands of their throats, and they learnt to shut their mouths. Lower down the walruses were rolling about like monster maggots with pigs' heads and teeth a yard long. You're a good story-teller, my boy, said his mother. It makes my mouth water to hear you. Then there was a hunt.
The harpoons were plunged into the walruses' breasts, and the steaming blood spurted out of them like fountains over the ice. Then I remembered my part of the game. I blew up and made my ships, the mountain-high icebergs, nip the boats. Phew! How they whistled and how they screamed! But I whistled louder. They were obliged to throw the dead walruses, chests and ropes, out upon the ice. I shook the snowflakes over them and let them drift southward to taste the salt water. They will never come back to Bering Island. Then you have been doing evil, said the mother of the winds. What good I did, the others may tell you, said he. But here we have my brother from the West. I like him best of all. He smells of the sea and brings a splendid cool breeze with him.
Is that the little Zephyr? asked the Prince. Yes. Certainly it is, Zephyr, but he is not so little as all that. He used to be a pretty boy once, but that's gone by. He looked like a wild man of the woods, but he had a padded hat on, so as not to come to any harm. He carried a mahogany club, cut in the American mahogany forests. It could not be anything less than that. Where do you come from? asked his mother. From the forest wildernesses, he said. Where the thorny creepers make a fence between every tree, where the water-snake lies in the wet grass, and where human beings seem to be superfluous. What did you do there? I looked at the mighty river, saw where it dashed over the rocks in dust, and flew with the clouds to carry the rainbow.
I saw... The wild buffalo swimming in the river, but the stream carried him away. He floated with the wild duck, which soared into the sky at the rapids, but the buffalo was carried over with the water. I liked that, and blew a storm, so that the primeval trees had to sail too, and they were whirled about like shavings. And you have done nothing else? asked the old woman. I have been turning somersaults in the savannas. Patting the wild horse, and shaking down coconuts. Oh, yes, I have plenty of stories to tell, but one need not tell everything. You know that very well, old woman. And then he kissed his mother so heartily that she nearly fell backwards. He was indeed a wild boy. South Wind appeared now, in a turban and a flowing Bedouin's cloak.
It is fearfully cold in here, he said, throwing wood on the fire. It is easy to see that the north wind got here first. It is hot enough here to roast a polar bear, said the north wind. You are a polar bear yourself, said the south wind. Do you want to go into the bag? asked the old woman. Sit down on that stone and tell us where you have been. In Africa, mother, he answered. I have been chasing the lion with the hottentots in Kaffirland. What grass there is on those plains! As green as an olive, the gounou was dancing about, and the ostriches ran races with me. But I am still the fastest. I went to the desert with its yellow sand. It looks like the bottom of the sea. I met a caravan. They were killing their last camel to get water to drink.
But it wasn't much they got. The sun was blazing above, and the sand burning below. There were no limits to the outstretched desert. Then I burrowed into the fine, loose sand, and whirled it up in great columns. That was a dance! You should have seen how despondently the dromedary stood, and the merchant drew his caftan over his head. He threw himself down before me, as if I had been allah, his god. Now they are buried, and there is a pyramid of sand over them all. When I blow it away, sometimes the sun will bleach their bones, and then the travelers will see that people have been there before. Otherwise you would hardly believe it in the desert. Then you have only been doing harm, said the mother.
Into the bag you go. And before he knew where he was, she had the south wind by the waist and in the bag. It rolled about on the ground, but she sat upon it, and then it had to be quiet. Your sons are lively fellows, said the prince. Yes, indeed, she said. But I can master them. Here comes the fourth. It was the east wind, and he was dressed like a chinaman. Oh, have you come from that quarter? said the mother. I thought you had been in the garden of paradise. I am only going there tomorrow, said the east wind. It will be a hundred years tomorrow since I have been there. I have just come from China, where I danced around the porcelain tower till all the bells jingled. The officials were flogged in the streets, the bamboo canes were broken over their shoulders, and they were all people ranging from the first to the ninth rank.
They shrieked, Many thanks, Father and Benefactor! But they didn't mean what they said, and I went on ringing the bells and singing, Tsing Tsang Tsu. You are quite uproarious about it, said the old woman. It's a good thing you are going to the Garden of Paradise tomorrow. It always has a good effect on your behavior. Mind you, drink deep of the well of wisdom, and bring a little bottle home to me. That I will, said the East Wind. But why have you put my brother from the South into the bag? Out with him! He must tell me about the phoenix. The princess always wants to hear about that bird when I call every hundred years. Open the bag. Then you'll be my sweetest mother, and I'll give you two pockets full of tea, as green and fresh as when I picked it.
Well, for the sake of the tea, and because you are my darling, I will open my bag.
She did open it. And the south wind crept out, but he was quite crestfallen because the strange prince had seen his disgrace. "'Here is a palm-leaf for the princess,' said the south wind. "'The old phoenix, the only one in the world, gave it to me.' He scratched his whole history on it with his bill, for the hundred years of his life, and she can read it for herself. I saw how the phoenix set fire to his nest himself, and sat on it while it burnt, like the widow of a hindoo. Oh, how the dry branches crackled, how it smoked, and what a smell there was! At last it all burst into flame. The old bird was burnt to ashes, but his egg lay glowing in the fire. It broke with a loud bang, and the young one flew out.
Now it It rules over all the birds, and it is the only phoenix in the world. He bit a hole in the leaf I gave you. That is his greeting to the princess. Let us have something to eat now, said the mother of the winds, and they all sat down to eat the roast stag, and the prince sat by the side of the east wind, so they soon became good friends. I say, said the prince, Just tell me who is this princess, and where is the Garden of Paradise? Oh, ho! said the east wind. If that is where you want to go, you must fly with me tomorrow. But I may as well tell you that no human being has been there since Adam and Eve's time. You know all about them, I suppose, from your Bible stories. Of course, said the prince.
When they were driven away, the Garden of Eden sank into the ground, but it kept its warm sunshine, its mild air, and all its charms. The Queen of the Fairies lives there. The Island of Bliss, where death never enters, and where living is a delight, is there. Get on my back to-morrow, and I will take you with me. I think I can manage it. But you mustn't talk now. I want to go to sleep. When the prince woke up in the early morning, He was not a little surprised to find that he was already high above the clouds. He was sitting on the back of the East Wind. Who was holding him carefully, they were so high up that woods and fields, rivers and lakes, looked like a large colored map. "'Good morning,' said the East Wind.
"'You may as well sleep a little longer, for there is not much to be seen in this flat country below us.' Unless you want to count the churches. They look like chalk dots on the green board. He called the fields, and Meadows the green board. It was very rude of me to leave without saying good-bye to your mother and brothers, said the prince. One is excused when one is asleep, said the east wind, and they flew on faster than ever. You could mark their flight by the rustling of the trees as they passed over the woods, and whenever they crossed a lake or the sea, the waves rose and the great ships dipped low down in the water, like floating swans. Towards evening, the large towns were amusing, as it grew dark, with all their lights twinkling now here, now there, just as when one burns a piece of paper and sees all the little sparks like children coming home from school.
The prince clapped his hands But the east wind told him he had better leave off and hold tight, or he might fall and find himself hanging on to a church steeple. The eagle in the great forest flew swiftly, but the east wind flew more swiftly still. The Cossack on his little horse sped fast over the plains, but the prince sped faster still. Now you can see the Himalayas, said the east wind. They are the highest mountains in Asia. We shall soon reach the Garden of Paradise. They took a more southerly direction, and the air became scented with spices and flowers. Figs and pomegranates grew wild, and the wild vines were covered with blue and green grapes. They both descended here, and stretched themselves on the soft grass, where the flowers nodded to the wind, as much as to say, Welcome back.
Are we in the garden of paradise now? asked the prince. No, certainly not, answered the east wind. But we shall soon be there. Do you see that wall of rock, and the great cavern where the wild vine hangs like a big curtain? We have to go through there. Wrap yourself up in your cloak. The sun is burning here, but a step farther on it is icy cold. The bird which flies past the cavern has one wing out here, in the heat of summer, and the other is there in the cold of winter. So that is the way to the garden of paradise, said the prince. Now they entered the cavern. Oh, how icily cold it was! But it did not last long. The east wind spread his wings, and they shone like the brightest flame. But what a cave it was!
Large blocks of stone from which the water dripped. Hung over them in the most extraordinary shapes. At one moment it was so low and narrow that they had to crawl on hands and knees. The next it was as wide and lofty as if they were in the open air. It looked like a chapel of the dead, with mute organ pipes and petrified banners. We seem to be journeying along Death's Road to the Garden of Paradise, said the Prince. But the east wind never answered a word. He only pointed before them, where a beautiful blue light was shining. The blocks of stone above them grew dimmer and dimmer, and at last they became as transparent as a white cloud in the moonshine. The air was also deliciously soft, as fresh as on the mountain tops, and as scented as down among the roses in the valley.
A river ran there as clear as the air itself, and the fish in it were like gold and silver, purple eels, which gave out blue sparks with every curve, gamboled about in the water, and the broad leaves of the water-lilies were tinged with the hues of the rainbow, while the flower itself was like a fiery orange flame, nourished by the water, just as oil keeps a lamp constantly burning. A firm bridge of marble, as delicately and skilfully carved as if it were lace and glass beads, led over the water to the island of bliss, where the garden of paradise bloomed. The east wind took the prince in his arms and bore him over. The flowers and leaves there sang all the beautiful old songs of his childhood, but sang them more wonderfully than any human voice could sing them.
Were these palm-trees, or giant water-plants, growing here? The prince had never seen such rich and mighty trees. The most wonderful climbing plants hung in wreaths, such as were only to be found pictured in gold and colours on the margins of old books of the saints, or entwined among their initial letters. It was the most extraordinary combination of birds, flowers, and scrolls. Close by, on the grass, stood a flock of peacocks, with their brilliant tails outspread. Yes, indeed, it seemed so, but when the prince touched them he saw that they were not birds, but plants. They were big dock-leaves, which shone like peacocks'-tails. Lions and tigers sprang like agile cats among the green hedges, which were scented with the blossom of the olive, and the lion and the tiger were tame.
The wild dove, glistening like a pearl, beat the lion's mane with his wings, and the antelope, otherwise so shy, stood by, nodding, just as if he wanted to join the game. The fairy of the garden now advanced to meet them. Her garments shone like the sun, and her face beamed like that of a happy mother rejoicing over her child. She was young and very beautiful, and was surrounded by a band of lovely girls, Each with a gleaming star in her hair. When the east wind gave her the inscribed leaf from the phoenix, her eyes sparkled with delight. She took the prince's hand and led him into her palace, where the walls were the color of the brightest tulips in the sunlight. The ceiling was one great shining flower, and the longer one gazed into it, the deeper the calyx seemed to be.
The prince went to the window, and looking through one of the panes saw the tree of knowledge, with the serpent and Adam and Eve standing by. Are they not driven out? he asked, and the fairies smiled and explained that time had burned a picture into each pane, but not of the kind one usually sees. They were alive, the leaves on the trees moved, and the people came and went like the reflections in a mirror. He looked through another pane, and he saw Jacob's dream, with the ladder going straight up into heaven, and angels with great wings were fluttering up and down. All that had ever happened in this world lived and moved on these window-panes. Only time could imprint such wonderful pictures. The fairy smiled and led him into a large, lofty room, the walls of which were like transparent paintings of faces, one more beautiful than the other.
These were millions of the blessed who smiled and sang, and all their songs melted into one perfect melody. The highest ones were so tiny that they seemed smaller than the very smallest rose-butt, no bigger than a pinpoint in a drawing. In the middle of the room stood a large tree with handsome, drooping branches. Golden apples, large and small, hung like oranges among its green leaves. It was the tree of knowledge, of whose fruit Adam and Eve had eaten. From every leaf hung a shining red drop of dew. It was as if the tree wept tears of blood. "'Now let us get into the boat,' said the fairy." We shall find refreshment on the swelling waters. The boat rocks, but it does not move from the spot.
All the countries of the world will pass before our eyes. It was a curious sight to see the whole coast move. Here came lofty snow-clad Alps, with their clouds and dark fir-trees. The horn echoed sadly among them, and the shepherd yodeled sweetly in the valleys. Then, banyan-trees bent their long, droopy branches over the boat. Black swans floated on the water, and the strangest animals and flowers appeared on the shore. This was New Holland, the fifth portion of the world, which glided past them with a view of its blue mountains. They heard the song of priests, and saw the dances of the savages to the sound of drums and pipes of bone. The pyramids of Egypt reaching to the clouds with fallen columns, and sphinxes half-buried in sand next sailed past them.
Then came Aurora Borealis, blazing over the peaks of the north. They were fireworks which could not be imitated. The prince was so happy, and he saw a hundred times more than we have described. Can I stay here always? he asked. "'That depends upon yourself,' answered the fairy. "'If you do not, like Adam, allow yourself to be tempted to do what is forbidden, you can stay here always. "'I will not touch the apples on the tree of knowledge,' said the prince. "'There are thousands of other fruits here as beautiful.' "'Test yourself, and if you are not strong enough, go back with the east wind who brought you.' He is going away now, and will not come back for a hundred years. The time will fly in this place like a hundred hours, but that is a long time for temptation and sin.
Every evening, when I leave you, I must say, Come with me, and I must beckon to you. But stay behind. Do not come with me, for with every step you take, your longing will grow stronger. You will reach the hall where grows the tree of knowledge. I sleep beneath its fragrant, drooping branches. You will bend over me, and I must smile. But if you press a kiss upon my lips, Paradise will sink deep down into the earth, and it will be lost to you. The sharp winds of the wilderness will whistle around you. The cold rain will drop from your hair. Sorrow and labor will be your lot. "'I will remain here,' said the prince. And the east wind kissed him on the mouth, and said, "'Be strong, then we shall meet again in a hundred years.
Farewell, farewell,' and the east wind spread his great wings. They shone like poppies at the harvest time, or the northern lights, in a cold winter. "'Good-bye, good-bye,' whispered the flowers. Storks and pelicans flew in a line, like waving ribbons, conducting him to the boundaries of the garden. Now we begin our dancing, said the fairy. At the end, when I dance with you, as the sun goes down, you will see me beckon to you, and cry, Come with me, but do not come. I have to repeat it every night for a hundred years. Every time you resist, you will grow stronger, and at last you will not even think of following. Tonight is the first time. Remember my warning. And the fairy led him into a large hall of white transparent lilies.
The yellow stamens in each formed a little golden harp, which echoed the sound of strings and flutes. Lovely girls, slender and lithesome, dressed in floating gauze, which revealed their exquisite limbs, gliding in the dance, and sang of the joy of living, that they would never die, and that the garden of paradise would bloom forever. The sun went down, and the sky was bathed in golden light, which gave the lilies the effect of roses, and the prince drank of the foaming wine handed to him by the maidens. He felt such joy as he had never known before. He saw the background of the hall opening where the tree of knowledge stood in a radiance which blinded him. The song proceeding from it was soft and lovely, like his mother's voice, and she seemed to say, My child, my beloved child.
Then the fairy beckoned to him and said so tenderly, "'Come with me,' that he rushed towards her, forgetting his promise, forgetting everything on the very first evening that she smiled and beckoned to him. The fragrance and the scented air around grew stronger, the harps sounded sweeter than ever, and it seemed as if the millions of smiling heads in the hall where the tree grew, nodded and sang. One must know everything, Man is Lord of the Earth. They were no longer tears of blood which fell from the tree. It seemed to him that they were red, shining stars. "'Come with me! Come with me!' spoke those trembling tones, and at every step the prince's cheeks burnt hotter and hotter, and his blood coursed more rapidly.
"'I must go,' he said. "'It is no sin. I must see her asleep.' Nothing will be lost if I do not kiss her, and that I will not do. My will is strong. The fairy dropped her shimmery garment, drew back the branches, and a moment after was hidden within their depths. "'I have not sinned yet,' said the prince. "'Nor will I.' Then he drew back the branches. There she lay asleep already.' Beautiful, as only the fairy in the garden of paradise can be. She smiled in her dreams. He bent over her and saw the tears welling up under her eyelashes. "'Do you weep for me?' he whispered. "'Weep not, beautiful maiden. I only now understand the full bliss of paradise.' It surges through my blood and through my thoughts.
I feel the strength of the angels and of everlasting life in my mortal limbs. If it were to be everlasting night to me, a moment like this were worth it. And he kissed away the tears from her eyes. His mouth touched hers. Then came a sound like thunder. Louder and more awful than he had ever heard before, and everything around collapsed. The beautiful fairy, the flowery paradise, sank deeper and deeper. The prince saw it sink into the darkness of night. It shone, far off, like a little tiny twinkling star. The chill of death crept over his limbs. He closed his eyes and lay long, as if dead. The cold rain fell on his face, and the sharp wind blew around his head, and at last his memory came back.
What have I done? He sighed. I have sinned like Adam, sinned so heavily that Paradise has sunk low beneath the earth, and he opened his eyes. He could still see the star, the far-away star, which twinkled like Paradise. It was the morning star in the sky, He got up and found himself in the wood near the cave of the winds, and the mother of the winds sat by his side. She looked angry and raised her hand. So, soon as the first evening, she said? I thought as much. If you were my boy, you should go into the bag. Ah, he shall soon go there, said Death. He was a strong old man, with a scythe in his hand and great black wings. He shall be laid in a coffin, but not now. I only mark him, and then leave him for a time to wander about on the earth to expiate his sin and to grow better.
I will come some time. When he least expects me, I shall come back, lay him in a black coffin, put it on my head, and fly to the skies. The garden of paradise blooms there too, and if he is good and holy he shall enter into it. But if his thoughts are wicked and his heart is still full of sin, he will sink deeper in his coffin than paradise sank, and I shall only go once in every thousand years to see if he is to sink deeper or to rise to the stars. The twinkling stars up there.
The end. The Garden of Paradise by Hans Christian Andersen.
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4 In the Year 2889 37:39
Org, by Esther. In the year, two thousand, eight hundred and eighty-nine. Little though they seem to think of it, the people of this twenty-ninth century live continually in fairyland. Surfeited as they are with marvels, they are indifferent in presence of each new marvel. To them, all seems natural. Could they but duly appreciate the refinements of civilization in our day? Could they but compare the present with the past, and so better comprehend the advance we have made? How much fairer they would find our modern towns, with populations amounting sometimes to Ten million souls, their streets three hundred feet wide, their houses one thousand feet in height, with a temperate the same in all seasons, with their lines of aerial locomotion crossing the sky in every direction.
If they would but picture to themselves the state of things that once existed, when through muddy streets rumbling boxes of wheels, drawn by horses—yes, horses—were the only means of conveyance. Think of the railroads of the olden time, and you will be able to appreciate the pneumatic tubes through which to-day one travels at the rate of one thousand miles an hour. Would not our contemporaries prize the telephone and the telephote more highly if they had not forgotten the telegraph? Singularly enough, all these transformations rest upon principles which were perfectly familiar to our remote ancestors, but which they disregarded. Heat, for instance, is as ancient as man himself. Electricity was known three thousand years ago, and steam one thousand, one hundred years ago.
Nay, so early as ten centuries ago, it was known that the differences between the several chemical and physical forces depend on the mode of vibration of the etheric particles, which is for each specifically different. When at last the kinship of all these forces was discovered, it is simply astounding that five hundred years should still have to elapse before men could analyze and describe the several modes of vibration that constitute these differences. Above all, it is singular that the mode of reproducing these forces directly from one another, and of reproducing one without the others, should have remained undiscovered till less than a hundred years ago. Nevertheless, such was the course of events, for it was not till the year 2792 that the famous Oswald Niehr made this great discovery.
Truly was he a great benefactor of the human race. His admiral discovery led to many another. Hence is sprung a Pleiad of inventors, its brightest star being our great Joseph Jackson. To Jackson we are indebted for those wonderful instruments The new accumulators. Some of these absorb and condense the living force contained in the sun's rays, others the electricity stored in our globe, others, again, the energy coming from whatever source, as a waterfall, a stream, the winds, etc. He, too, it was, that invented the transformer, a more wonderful contrivance still. Which takes the living force from the accumulator, and on the simple pressure of a button, gives it back to space in whatever form may be desired, whether as heat, light, electricity, or mechanical force, after having first obtained from it the work required.
From the day when these two instruments were contrived is to be dated the era of true progress. They have put into the hands of man a power that is almost infinite. As for their applications, they are numberless. Mitigating the rigors of winter, by giving back to the atmosphere the surplus heat stored up during the summer, they have revolutionized agriculture. By supplying motive power for aerial navigation, They have given to commerce a mighty impetus. To them we are indebted for the continuous production of electricity without batteries or dynamos, of light without combustion or incandescence, and for an unfailing supply of mechanical energy for all the needs of industry. Yes, all these wonders have been wrought by the accumulator and the transformer.
And can we not to them also trace, indirectly, this latest wonder of all, The great Earth Chronicle building in 253rd Avenue, which was dedicated the other day. If George Washington Smith, the founder of the Manhattan Chronicle, could come back to life to-day, what would he think, were he to behold that this palace of marble and gold belongs to his remote descendant, Fritz Napoleon Smith, who, after thirty generations have come and gone, is owner of the same newspaper which his ancestor established. For George Washington Smith's newspaper has lived generation after generation, now passing out of the family, and on coming back to it. When, two hundred years ago, the political center of the United States was transferred from Washington to Centropolis, the newspaper followed the government and assumed the name of Earth Chronicle.
Unfortunately, it was unable to maintain itself at the high level of its name. Pressed on all sides by rival journals of a more modern type, it was continually in danger of collapse. Twenty years ago, its subscription list contained but a few hundred thousand names, and then Mr. Fritz Napoleon Smith bought it for a mere trifle, and originated telephonic journalism. Every one is familiar with Fritz Napoleon Smith's system, a system made possible by the enormous development of telephony during the last hundred years. Instead of being printed, the Earth Chronicle is every morning spoken to subscribers, who, in interesting conversations with reporters, statesmen and scientists, learn the news of the day.
Furthermore, each subscriber owns a phonograph, and to this instrument he leaves the task of gathering the news whenever he happens not to be in a mood to listen directly himself. As for purchasers of single copies, they can, at a very trifling cost, learn all that is in the paper of the day at any of the innumerable phonographs set up nearly everywhere.
Fritz Napoleon Smith's innovation galvanized the old newspaper. In the course of a few years, the number of subscribers grew to be 80 million, and Smith's wealth went on growing, till now it reaches the almost unimaginable figure of 10 billion. This lucky hit has enabled him to erect his new building. A vast edifice with four facades, each three thousand two hundred and fifty feet in length, over which proudly floats the hundred-starred flag of the Union thanks to the same lucky hit, he is to-day king of newspaperdom. Indeed, he would be king of all the Americans, too, if Americans could ever accept a king. You do not believe it? Well, then, look at the plenipotentiaries of all nations, and our own ministers themselves crowding about his door, entreating his counsels, begging for his approbation, imploring the aid of his all-powerful organ.
Reckon up the number of scientists and artists that he supports, of inventors that he has under his pay. Yes, a king is he, and in truth— His is a royalty full of burdens. His labours are incessant, and there is no doubt at all that in earlier times any man would have succumbed under the overpowering stress of the toil which Mr. Smith has to perform. Very fortunately for him, thanks to the progress of hygiene, which, abating all the old sources of unhealthfulness, has lifted the mean of human life from thirty-seven up to fifty-two years, Men have stronger constitutions now than heretofore. The discovery of nutritive air is still in the future, but in the meantime men to-day consume food that is compounded and prepared according to scientific principles, and they breathe an atmosphere freed from the microorganisms that formerly used to swarm in it.
Hence they live longer than their forefathers, and know nothing of the innumerable diseases of olden times. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding these considerations, Fritz Napoleon Smith's mode of life may well astonish one. His iron constitution is taxed to the utmost by the heavy strain that is put upon it. Vain the attempt to estimate the amount of labour he undergoes. An example alone can give an idea of it. Let us then go about with him for one day, as he attends to his multifarious concernments. What day? That matters little. It is the same every day. Let us then take at random September 25th of this present year, 2889. This morning, Mr. Fritz Napoleon Smith awoke in very bad humor. His wife having left for France eight days ago, he was feeling disconsolate.
Incredible, though it seems, in all the ten years since their marriage, this is the first time that Mrs. Edith Smith, the professional beauty, has been so long absent from home. Two or three days usually suffice for her frequent trips to Europe. The first thing that Mr. Smith does is to connect his phototelephote, the wires of which communicate with his Paris mansion. The telephote here is another of the great triumphs of science in our time. The transmission of speech is an old story. The transmission of images by means of sensitive mirrors connected by wires is a thing but of yesterday. A valuable invention indeed, and Mr. Smith this morning was not niggard of blessings for the inventor, when by its aid he was able distinctly to see his wife, notwithstanding the distance that separated him from her.
Mrs. Smith, weary after the ball, or the visit to the theatre the preceding night, is still abed, though it is near noontide at Paris. She is asleep, her head sunk in the lace-covered pillows. What? She stirs. Her lips move. She is dreaming, perhaps. Yes, dreaming. She is talking, pronouncing a name—his name, Fritz. The delightful vision gave a happier turn to Mr. Smith's thoughts. And now, at the call of imperative duty, lighthearted, he springs from his bed and enters his mechanical dresser. Two minutes later, the machine deposited him, all dressed at the threshold of his office. The round of journalistic work has now begun. First, he enters the hall of the novel writers, a vast apartment crowned with an enormous transparent cupola.
In one corner is a telephone, Through which a hundred Earth Chronicle literatures in turn recount to the public, in daily instalments, a hundred novels. Addressing one of these authors, who was waiting his turn, "'Capital, capital, my dear fellow,' said he, "'your last story, the scene where the village maid discusses interesting philosophical problems with her lover, shows your very acute power of observation.' Never have the ways of country folk been better portrayed. Keep on, my dear Archibald, keep on. Since yesterday, thanks to you, there is a gain of five thousand subscribers. Mr. John Last, he began again, turning to a new arrival. I am not so well pleased with your work. Your story is not a picture of life.
It lacks the elements of truth. And why? Simply because you run straight on to the end, and because you do not analyze. Your heroes do this thing or that from this or that motives, which you assign without ever a thought of dissecting their mental and moral natures. Our feelings, you must remember, are far more complex than all that. In real life, every act is the resultant of a hundred thoughts that come and go. And these you must study, each by itself, if you would create a living character. But, you will say, in order to note these fleeting thoughts, one must know them. Must be able to follow them in their capricious meanderings. Why, any child can do that, as you know. You have simply to make use of hypnotism, electrical or human, which gives one a twofold being.
Setting free the witness personality, so that it may see, understand, and remember the reasons which determine the personality that acts. Just study yourself, as you live from day to day, my dear last. Imitate your associate, whom I was complimenting a moment ago. Let yourself be hypnotized. What's that? You have tried it already? Not sufficiently, then. Not sufficiently. Mr. Smith continues his round and enters the reporters' hall. Here, one thousand five hundred reporters, in their respective places, facing an equal number of telephones, are communicating to the subscriber the news of the world as gathered during the night. The organization of this matchless service has often been described.
Besides his telephone, each reporter, as the reader is aware, has in front of him a set of communicators, which enable him to communicate with any desired telephotic line. Thus the subscribers not only hear the news, but see the occurrences. When an incident is described that is already passed, photographs of its main features are transmitted with the narrative. And there is no confusion with all. The reporters' items, just like the different stories and all the other component parts of the journal, are classified automatically according to an ingenious system, and reach the hearer in due succession. Furthermore, the hearers are free to listen only to what specifically concerns them. They may at pleasure give attention to one editor, and refuse it to another.
Mr. Smith next addresses one of the ten reporters in the Astronomical Department, a department still in the embryonic stage, but which will yet play an important part in journalism. "'Well, Cash, what's the news?' "'We have photo telegrams from Mercury, Venus, and Mars. Are those from Mars of any interest?' "'Yes, indeed. There is a revolution in the Central Empire.' "'And what of Jupiter?' asked Mr. Smith. "'Nothing yet. We cannot quite understand their signals. Perhaps ours do not reach them.' "'That's bad,' exclaimed Mr. Smith, as he hurried away, not in the best of humour, towards the hall of the scientific editors. With their heads bent down over the electric computers, thirty scientific men were absorbed in transcendental calculations.
The coming of Mr. Smith was like the falling of a bomb among them. "'Well, gentlemen, what is this, I hear?' No answers from Jupiter? Is it always to be thus? Come, Cooley, you have been at work now twenty years on this problem, and yet—' True enough,' replied the man addressed. "'Our science of optics is still very defective, and though our mile and three-quarter telescopes—' "'Listen to that, Peter,' broke in Mr. Smith, turning to a second scientist. "'Optical science defective? Optical science is your specialty. But—' he continued again, addressing William Cooley—' Failing with Jupiter, are we getting any results from the moon? The case is no better there. This time you do not lay the blame on the science of optics.
The moon is immeasurably less distant than Mars. Yet with Mars our communication is fully established. I presume you will not say that you lack telescopes. Telescopes? Oh, no. The trouble here is about inhabitants. That's it," added Peer. "'So, then, the moon is positively uninhabited?' asked Mr. Smith. "'At least,' answered Cooley, "'on the face which she presents to us, as for the opposite side, who knows?' "'Ah, the opposite side, you think, then,' remarked Mr. Smith musingly, "'that if one could but—could what? Why turn the moon about face?' "'Ah, there's something in that,' cried the two men at once. And indeed, so confidence was their air. They seemed to have no doubt as to the possibility of success in such an undertaking.
"'Meanwhile,' asked Mr. Smith, after a moment's silence, "'have you no news of interest to-day?' "'Indeed we have,' answered Cooley. "'The elements of Olympus are definitely settled. That great planet gravitates beyond Neptune at the mean distance of—'11,400,799,642 miles from the Sun.' And to traverse its vast orbit takes one thousand, three hundred and eleven years, two hundred and ninety-four days, twelve hours, forty-three minutes, and nine seconds. "'Why didn't you tell me that sooner?' cried Mr. Smith. "'Now inform the reporters of this straightaway. You know how eager is the curiosity of the public with regard to these astronomical questions. That news must go into to-day's issue.' Then, the two men bowing to him, Mr.
Smith passed into the next hall, an enormous gallery of three thousand two hundred feet in length, devoted to atmospheric advertising. Every one has noticed those enormous advertisements reflected from the clouds, so large that they may be seen by the populace of whole cities, or even of entire countries. This, too, is one of Mr. Fritz Napoleon Smith's ideas. And in the Earth Chronicle Building, a thousand projectors are constantly engaged in displaying upon the clouds these mammoth advertisements.
When Mr. Smith to-day entered the Sky Advertising Department, he found the operators sitting with folded arms at their motionless projectors, and inquired as to the cause of their inaction. In response, the man addressed simply pointed to the sky, which was of a pure blue. "'Yes,' muttered Mr. Smith. "'A cloudless sky. That's too bad. But what's to be done? Shall we produce rain?' "'That we might do. But is it of any use?' "'What we need is clouds, not rain. Go,' said he, addressing the head engineer, "'go see Mr. Samuel Mark, of the Meteorological Division of the Scientific Department, and tell him for me to go to work in earnest on the question of artificial clouds.' It will never do for us to be always thus, the mercy of cloudless skies.
Mr. Smith's daily tour through the several departments of his newspaper is now finished. Next, from the advertisement hall, he passes to the reception chamber, where the ambassadors accredited to the American government are awaiting him, desirous of having a word of counsel or advice from the all-powerful editor. A discussion was going on when he entered. Your Excellency will pardon me, the French ambassador was saying to the Russian, but I see nothing in the map of Europe that requires change. The North for the Slavs? Why, yes, of course. But the South for the Matins? Our common frontier, the Rhine, it seems to me, serves very well. Besides, my government, as you must know, will firmly oppose every movement, not only against Paris, our capital, Or, our two great prefectures, Rome and Madrid, but also against the kingdom of Jerusalem, the dominion of St.
Peter, of which France means to be the trusty defender. "'Well said,' exclaimed Mr. Smith. "'How is it,' he asked, turning to the Russian ambassador, "'that you Russians are not content with your vast empire, the most extensive in the world, stretching from the banks of the Rhine to the celestial mountains, and the Karakoram, whose shores are washed by the frozen ocean, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Indian Ocean. Then, what is the use of threats? Is war possible in view of modern inventions? Asphyxiating shells, capable of being projected a distance of sixty miles, an electric spark of ninety miles, that can at one stroke annihilate a battalion. To say nothing of the plague, the cholera, the yellow fever, that the belligerents might spread among their antagonists mutually, and which would, in a few days, destroy the greatest armies.
True, answered the Russian. But can we do all that we wish? As for us Russians, pressed on our eastern frontier by the Chinese, we must at any cost put forth our strength for an effort towards the west. Oh, is that all? "'In that case,' said Mr. Smith, "'the thing can be arranged. I will speak to the Secretary of State about it. The attention of the Chinese government shall be called to the matter. This is not the first time that the Chinese have bothered us.' Under these conditions, of course," and the Russian ambassador declared himself satisfied. "'Ah, Sir John, what can I do for you?' asked Mr. Smith, as he turned to the representative of the people of Great Britain, who till now had remained silent.
A great deal, was the reply, if the Earth Chronicle would put open a campaign on our behalf. And for what object? Simply for the annulment of the Act of Congress annexing to the United States the British Islands. Though by a just turnabout of things here below, Great Britain has become a colony of the United States. The English are not yet reconciled to the situation. At regular intervals, They are ever addressing to the American government vain complaints. "'A campaign against the annexation that has been an accomplished fact for a hundred and fifty years?' exclaimed Mr. Smith. "'How can your people suppose that I would do anything so unpatriotic?' "'We at home think that your people must now be sated.
The Monroe Doctrine is fully applied. The whole of America belongs to the Americans. What more do you want? Besides, we will pay for what we ask.' Indeed, answered Mr. Smith, without manifesting the slightest irritation. Well, you English will ever be the same. No, no, sir John. Do not count on me for help. Give up our fairest province, Britain? Why not ask France generously to renounce the possession of Africa, that magnificent colony, the complete conquest of which cost her the labour of eight hundred years? You will be well received. "'You decline. All is over, then,' murmured the British agent sadly. "'The United Kingdom falls to the share of the Americans, the Indians to that of—' "'The Russians,' said Mr.
Smith, completing the sentence. "'Australia has an independent government.' "'Then nothing at all remains for us,' sighed Sir John, downcast. "'Nothing?' asked Mr. Smith, laughing. "'Well, now there's Gibraltar.' With this sally, the audience ended. The clock was striking twelve, the hour of breakfast. Mr. Smith returns to his chamber. Where the bed stood in the morning, a table all spread comes up through the floor. For Mr. Smith, being above all a practical man, has reduced the problem of existence to its simplest terms. For him, instead of the endless suites of apartments, Of the olden time, one room fitted with ingenious mechanical contrivances is enough. Here he sleeps, takes his meals, in short, lives.
He seats himself. In the mirror of the phototelephote is seen the same chamber at Paris which appeared in it this morning. A table furnished forth is likewise in readiness here. For notwithstanding the difference of hours, Mr. Smith and his wife have arranged to take their meals simultaneously. It is delightful, thus, to take breakfast, tete-a-tete, with one who is three thousand miles or so away. Just now, Mrs. Smith's chamber has no occupant. "'She is late. Woman's punctuality. Progress everywhere, except there,' muttered Mr. Smith, as he turned the tap for the first dish. "'She is late. Woman's punctuality. Progress everywhere, except there,' muttered Mr. Smith, as he turned the tap for the first dish.
For, like all wealthy folk in our day, Mr. Smith has done away with the domestic kitchen, and is a subscriber to the Grand Alimentation Company, which sends through a great network of troops to subscribers' residences all sorts of dishes, as a varied assortment is always in readiness. A subscription costs money, to be sure, but the cuisine is of the best, and the system has this advantage, that it does away with the pestering race of the cordon bleus. Mr. Smith received and ate, all alone, the hors d'oeuvres entrees, roti, and legumes that constituted the repast. He was just finishing the dessert when Mrs. Smith appeared in the mirror of the telephote. "'Where have you been?' asked Mr. Smith through the telephone.
"'What? You are already at the dessert? Then I am late,' she exclaimed with a winsome negativity. "'Where have I been?' you ask. "'At my dressmaker's. The hats are just lovely this season. I suppose I forgot to note the time, and so am I a little late.' "'Yes, a little,' growled Mr. Smith. "'So little that I have already quite finished breakfast. Excuse me if I leave you now, but I must be going.' "'Oh, certainly, my dear. Good-bye till evening.' Smith stepped into his air-coach, which was in waiting for him at a window. "'Where do you wish to go, sir?' inquired the coachman. "'Let me see. I have three hours,' Mr. Smith mused. "'Jack, take me to my accumulator works at Niagara.' For Mr. Smith has obtained a lease of the Great Falls of Niagara.
For ages the energy developed by the Falls went unutilized. Smith, applying Jackson's invention, now collects this energy, and lets or sells it. His visit to the works took more time than he had anticipated. It was four o'clock when he returned home, just in time for the daily audience which he grants to callers.
One readily understands how a man, situated as Smith is, must be beset with requests of all kinds. Now it is an inventor needing capital. Again it is some visionary who comes to advocate a brilliant scheme which must surely yield millions of profit. A choice has to be made between these projects, Rejecting the worthless, examining the questionable ones, accepting the meritorious. To this work Mr. Smith devotes every day two full hours. The callers were fewer today than usual, only twelve of them. Of these, eight had only impractical schemes to propose. In fact, one of them wanted to revive painting, an art, fallen into desitude owing to the progress made in colour photography. Another, a physician, boasted that he had discovered a cure for nasal catarrh.
These impracticables were dismissed in short order. Of the four projects favourably received, the first was that of a young man whose broad forehead betokened his intellectual power. "'Sir, I am a chemist,' he began, "'and as such I come to you.' "'Well?' Once the elementary bodies," said the young chemist, "'were held to be sixty-two in number. A hundred years ago they were reduced to ten. Now only three remain irresolvable. "'As you are aware?' "'Yes, yes. Well, sir, these also I will show to be composite. In a few months, a few weeks, I shall have succeeded in solving the problem. Indeed, it may take only a few days.' "'And then?' "'Then, sir, I shall simply have determined the absolute.' All I want is money enough to carry my research to a successful issue."
"'Very well,' said Mr. Smith. "'And what will be the practical outcome of your discovery?' "'The practical outcome? Why, that we shall be able to produce easily all bodies whatever—stone, wood, metal fibers.' "'And flesh and blood?' queried Mr. Smith, interrupting him. "'Do you pretend that you expect to manufacture a human being out and out?' "'Why not?' Mr. Smith advanced one hundred thousand dollars to the young chemist, and engaged his services for the Earth Chronicle Laboratory.
The second of the four successful applicants, starting from experiments made so long ago as the nineteenth century, and again and again repeated, had conceived the idea of removing an entire city, all at once, from one place to another. His special project had to do with the city of Granton, situated, as everybody knows, some fifteen miles inland. He proposes to transport the city on rails, and to change it into a watering-place. The profit, of course, would be enormous. Mr. Smith, captivated by the scheme, bought a half interest in it. "'As you are aware, sir,' began applicant number three. By the aid of our solar and terrestrial accumulators and transformers, we are able to make all the seasons the same.
I propose to do something better still. Transform into heat, a portion of the surplus energy at our disposal. Send this heat to the poles. Then the polar regions, relieved of their snow-capped, will become a vast territory available for man's use. What do you think of the scheme? Leave your plans with me, and come back in a week. I will have them examined in the meantime. Finally, the fourth announced the early solution of a weighty scientific problem. Everyone will remember the bold experiment made a hundred years ago by Dr. Nathaniel Faithburn. The doctor, being a firm believer in human hibernation, In other words, in the possibility of suspending our vital functions, and of calling them into action again after a time, resolved to subject the theory to a practical test.
To this end, having first made his last will, and pointed out the proper method of awaking him, having also directed that his sleep was to continue a hundred years to a day from the date of his apparent death, he unhesitatingly put the theory to the proof in his own person. Reduced to the condition of a mummy, Dr. Faithburn was coffined and laid in a tomb. Time went on. September 25th, 2889, being the day set for his resurrection, it was proposed to Mr. Smith that he should permit the second part of the experiment to be performed at his residence this evening. Agreed. Be here at 10 o'clock, answered Mr. Smith, and with that the day's audience was closed.
Left to himself, feeling tired, he lay down on an extension chair. Then, touching a knob, he established communication with the central concert hall, whence our greatest maestros send out to subscribers their delightful successions of accords determined by recondite algebraic formulas. Night was approaching. Entranced by the harmony, forgetful of the hour, Smith did not notice it was growing dark. It was quite dark when he was aroused by the sound of a door opening. "'Who is there?' he asked, touching a communicator. Suddenly, in consequence of the vibrations produced, the air became luminous. "'Ah, you, doctor?' "'Yes,' was the reply. "'How are you?' "'I'm feeling well. Good. Let me see your tongue.
All right, your pulse. Regular. And your appetite. Only passably good.' Yes, the stomach. There's the rub. You are overworked if your stomach is out of repair. It must be mended. That requires study. We must think about it. In the meantime, said Mr. Smith, you will dine with me. As in the morning, the table rose out of the floor. Again, as in the morning, the potage, ratou, ragu, and legumes were supplied through the food pipes. Towards the close of the meal, phototelephonic communication was made with Paris. Smith saw his wife seated alone at the dinner-table, looking anything but pleased at her loneliness. "'Pardon me, my dear, for having left you alone,' he said through the telephone. "'I was with Dr.
Wilkins.' "'Ah, the good doctor,' remarked Mrs. Smith, her countenance lighting up. "'Yes, but pray, when are you coming home?' "'This evening.' "'Very well. Do you come by tube or by air-train?' "'Oh, by tube.' Yes. And at what hour will you arrive? About eleven, I suppose. Eleven? By Centropolis time, you mean? Yes. Good-bye, then. For a little while, said Mr. Smith, as he severed communication with Paris. Dinner over. Dr. Wilkins wished to depart. I shall expect you at ten, said Mr. Smith. To-day, it seems, is the day for the return to life of the famous Dr. Faithburn. You did not think of it, I suppose. The awakening is to take place here in my house. You must come and see. I shall depend on you being here.
"'I will come back,' answered Dr. Wilkins. Left alone, Mr. Smith busied himself with examining his accounts, a task of vast magnitude, having to do with transactions which involve a daily expenditure of upward of eight hundred thousand dollars. Fortunately, indeed, the stupendous progress of mechanic art in modern times make it comparatively easy. Thanks to the piano-electro-reckoner, the most complex calculations can be made in a few seconds. In two hours Mr. Smith completed his task. Just in time, scarcely had he turned over the last page when Dr. Wilkins arrived. After him came the body of Dr. Faithburn, Escorted by a numerous company of men of science. They commenced work at once. The casket being laid down in the middle of the room, the telephote was got in readiness.
The outer world, already notified, was anxiously expectant, for the whole world could be eye-witness of the performance of a reporter, meanwhile, like the chorus in the ancient drama, explaining it all, viva, vassay, through the telephone. They are opening the casket, he explained. Now they are taking Faithburn out of it. A veritable mummy, yellow, hard and dry. Strike the body, and it resounds like a block of wood. They are now applying heat. Now electricity. No result. These experiments are suspended for a moment while Dr. Wilkins makes an examination of the body. Dr. Wilkins, rising, declares the man to be dead. Dead! exclaims every one present. Yes, answers Dr. Wilkins, dead. And how long has he been dead?
Dr. Wilkins makes another examination. A hundred years, he replies. The case stood just as the reporter said. Faithburn was dead—quite certainly dead. Here is a method that needs improvement, remarked Mr. Smith to Dr. Wilkins, as the Scientific Committee on Hibernation bore the casket out. So much for that experiment. But if poor Faithburn is dead, at least he is sleeping, he continued. I wish I could get some sleep. I am tired out. Doctor, quite tired out. Do you not think that a bath would refresh me? Certainly. But you must wrap yourself up very well before you go out into the hallway. You must not expose yourself to cold. Hallway? Why, doctor, as you well know, everything is done by machinery here.
It is not for me to go to the bath. The bath will come to me. Just look. And he pressed a button. After a few seconds a faint rumbling was heard, which grew louder and louder. Suddenly the door opened, and the tub appeared. Such, for this year of grace, twenty eight eighty nine, is the history of one day in the life of the editor of the Earth Chronicle, and the history of that one day is the history of three hundred and sixty-five days every year, except leap years, then of three hundred and sixty-six days, For as yet no means has been found of increasing the length of the terrestrial year.
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5 Love of Life 52:00
Love of Life by Jack London. From Love of Life and Other Stories. Read by John Taylor, Southeast Missouri, December 2006.
This out of all will remain. They have lived and have tossed. So much of the game will be gain, though the gold of the dice has been lost.
They limped painfully down the bank, and once the foremost of the two men staggered among the rough-strewn rocks. They were tired and weak, and their faces had the drawn expression of patience which comes of hardship long endured. They were heavily burdened with blanket-packs, which were strapped to their shoulders. Head-straps passing across the forehead helped support these packs. Each man carried a rifle. They walked in a stooped posture, the shoulders well forward, the head still farther forward, the eyes bent upon the ground. "'I wish we had just about two of them cartridges that's laying in that cache of iron,' said the second man. His voice was utterly and drearily expressionless. He spoke without enthusiasm, and the first man, limping into the milky stream that foamed over the rocks, vouchsafed no reply.
The other man followed at his heels. They did not remove their footgear, though the water was icy cold, so cold that their ankles ached and their feet went numb. In places, the water dashed against their knees, and both men staggered for footing. The man who followed slipped on a smooth boulder, nearly fell, but recovered himself with a violent effort, at the same time uttering a sharp exclamation of pain. He seemed faint and dizzy, and put out his free hand while he reeled as though seeking support against the air. When he had studied himself, he stepped forward, but reeled again and nearly fell. Then he stood still and looked at the other man, who had never turned his head. The man stood still for fully a minute, as though debating with himself.
Then he called out, "'I say, Bill, I've sprained my ankle.' Bill staggered on through the milky water. He did not look around. The man watched him go, and though his face was expressionless as ever, His eyes were like the eyes of a wounded deer. The other man limped up the farther bank and continued straight on without looking back. The man in the stream watched him. His lips trembled a little, so that the rough thatch of brown hair which covered them was visibly agitated. His tongue even strayed out to moisten them. "'Bill!' he cried out. It was the pleading cry of a strong man in distress, but Bill's head did not turn. The man watched him go, limping grotesquely and lurching forward with stammering gait up the slow slope toward the soft skyline of the low-lying hill.
He watched him go till he passed over the crest and disappeared. Then he turned his gaze and slowly took in the circle of the world that remained to him now that Bill was gone. Near the horizon, the sun was smouldering dimly. Almost obscured by formless mists and vapors which gave an impression of mass and density without outline or tangibility. The man pulled out his watch, the while resting his weight on one leg. It was four o'clock, and as the season was near the last of July or first of August, he did not know the precise date within a week or two. He knew that the sun roughly marked the northwest. He looked to the south, and knew that somewhere beyond those bleak hills lay the Great Bear Lake.
Also, he knew that in that direction the Arctic Circle cut its forbidding way across the Canadian Barrens. This stream in which he stood was a feeder to the Coppermine River, which in turn flowed north and emptied into Coronation Gulf and the Arctic Ocean. He had never been there, but he had seen it once on a Hudson Bay Company chart. Again his gaze completed the circle of the world about him. It was not a heartening spectacle. Everywhere was soft skyline. The hills were all low-lying. There were no trees, no shrubs, no grasses. Not but a tremendous and terrible desolation that sent fear swiftly dawning into his eyes. "'Bill,' he whispered, once, and twice. "'Bill!' He cowered in the midst of the milky water, as though the vastness were pressing in upon him with overwhelming force, brutally crushing him with its complacent awfulness.
He began to shake, as with an ague fit, till the gun fell from his hand with a splash. This served to rouse him. He fought with his fear, and pulled himself together, groping in the water and recovering the weapon. He hitched his pack farther over on his left shoulder so as to take a portion of its weight off the injured ankle. Then he proceeded, slowly and carefully, wincing with pain, to the bank. He did not stop. With a desperation that was madness, unmindful of the pain, he hurried up the slope to the crest of the hill over which his comrade had disappeared. More grotesque and comical by far than that limping, jerking comrade. But at the crest he saw a shallow valley, empty of life. He fought with his fear again, overcame it, hitched the pack still farther over on his left shoulder, and lurched on down the slope.
The bottom of the valley was soggy with water, which the thick moss held, sponge-like, close to the surface. This water squirted out from under his feet at every step, and each time he lifted a foot, The action culminated in a sucking sound as the wet moss reluctantly released its grip. He picked his way from Muskeg to Muskeg, and followed the other man's footsteps along and across the rocky ledges which thrust like islets through the sea of moss. Though alone, he was not lost. Farther on, he knew he would come to where dead spruce and fir, very small and weazened, bordered the shore of a little lake. The Tichen Nechili, in the tongue of the country, the land of little sticks, and into that lake flowed a small stream, the water of which was not milky.
There was rush-grass on that stream. This he remembered well, but no timber, and he would follow it till its first trickle seized at a divide. He would cross this divide to the first trickle of another stream, flowing to the west, which he would follow until it emptied into the river Dees, And here he would find a cache under an upturned canoe, and piled over with many rocks. And in this cache would be ammunition for his empty gun, fish-hooks and lines, a small net, all the utilities for the killing and snaring of food. Also he would find flour, not much, a piece of bacon, and some beans. Bill would be waiting for him there, and they would paddle away, south down the Deese to the Great Bear Lake, and south across the lake they would go, ever south till they gained the Mackenzie, and south, still south, they would go, while the winter raced vainly after them, and the ice formed in the eddies, and the days grew chill and crisp, south to some warm Hudson Bay Company post, where timber grew tall and generous, and there was grub without end.
These were the thoughts of the man as he strove onward. But hard as he strove with his body, he strove equally hard with his mind, trying to think that Bill had not deserted him, that Bill would surely wait for him at the cache. He was compelled to think this thought, or else there would not be any use to strive, and he would have lain down and died. And as the dim ball of the sun sank slowly into the northwest, he covered every inch, and many times, of his and Bill's flight south before the down-coming winter. And he conned the grub of the cache and the grub of the Hudson Bay Company post over and over again. He had not eaten for two days. For a far longer time he had not had all he wanted to eat.
Often he stooped and picked pale musk-keg berries, put them into his mouth, and chewed and swallowed them. A musk-keg berry is a bit of seed enclosed in a bit of water. In the mouth the water melts away, and the seed chews sharp and bitter. The man knew there was no nourishment in the berries, but he chewed them patiently with a hope greater than knowledge and defying experience. At nine o'clock he stubbed his toe on a rocky ledge, and from sheer weariness and weakness staggered and fell. He lay for some time, without movement, on his side. Then he slipped out of the pack straps and clumsily dragged himself into a sitting posture. It was not yet dark, and in the lingering twilight he groped about among the rocks for shreds of dry moss.
When he had gathered a heap he built a fire. A smouldering, smudgy fire, and put a tin pot of water on to boil.
He unwrapped his pack, and the first thing he did was to count his matches. There were sixty-seven. He counted them three times to make sure. He divided them into several portions, wrapping them in oil paper, disposing of one bunch in his empty tobacco pouch, of another bunch in the inside band of his battered hat, Of a third bunch under his shirt on the chest. This accomplished, a panic came upon him, and he unwrapped them all and counted them again. There were still sixty-seven. He dried his wet footgear by the fire. The moccasins were in soggy shreds, the blanket socks were worn through in places, and his feet were raw and bleeding. His ankle was throbbing, and he gave it an examination. It had swollen to the size of his knee.
He tore a long strip from one of his two blankets and bound the ankle tightly. He tore other strips and bound them about his feet to serve for both moccasins and socks. Then he drank the pot of water, steaming hot, wound his watch, and crawled between his blankets. He slept like a dead man. The brief darkness around midnight came and went. The sun arose in the northeast. At least the day dawned in that quarter, for the sun was hidden by gray clouds. At six o'clock he awoke, quietly lying on his back. He gazed straight up into the gray sky and knew that he was hungry. As he rolled over on his elbow, he was startled by a loud snort, and saw a bull caribou regarding him with an alert curiosity. The animal was not more than fifty feet away, and Instantly into the man's mind leaped the vision and the savour of a caribou steak sizzling and frying over a fire.
Mechanically, he reached for the empty gun, drew a bead, and pulled the trigger. The bull snorted and leaped away, his hoofs rattling and clattering as he fled across the ledges. The man cursed and flung the empty gun from him. He groaned aloud as he started to drag himself to his feet. It was a slow and arduous task. His joints were like rusty hinges. They worked harshly in their sockets, with much friction, and each bending or unbending was accomplished only through a sheer exertion of will. When he finally gained his feet, another minute or so was consumed in straightening up, so that he could stand erect as a man should stand.
He crawled up a small knoll and surveyed the prospect. There were no trees. No bushes, nothing but a gray sea of moss, scarcely diversified by gray rocks, gray lakelets, and gray streamlets. The sky was gray. There was no sun, nor hint of sun. He had no idea of North, and he had forgotten the way he had come to this spot the night before. But he was not lost. He knew that. Soon he would come to the land of the Little Sticks, He felt that it lay off to the left somewhere, not far, possibly just over the next low hill. He went back to put his pack into shape for travelling. He assured himself of the existence of his three separate parcels of matches, though he did not stop to count them. But he did linger, debating over a squat, moose-hide sack.
It was not large. He could hide it under his two hands. He knew that it weighed fifteen pounds, as much as all the rest of the pack, and it worried him. He finally set it to one side and proceeded to roll the pack. He paused to gaze at the squat moose-hide sack. He picked it up hastily with a defiant glance about him, as though the desolation were trying to rob him of it, and when he rose to his feet to stagger on into the day, it was included in the pack on his back. He bore away to the left, stopping now and again to eat muskeg berries. His ankle had stiffened, his limp was more pronounced, but the pain of it was as nothing compared with the pain of his stomach. The hunger pains were sharp.
They gnawed and gnawed until he could not keep his mind steady on the course he must pursue to gain the land of little sticks. The muskeg berries did not allay this gnawing. While they made his tongue and the roof of his mouth soar with their irritating bite.
He came upon a valley where Rock Ptarmigan rose on whirring wings from the ledges and muskegs. Coo! Coo! Coo! Coo! was the cry they made. He threw stones at them, but could not hit them. He placed his pack on the ground and stalked them as a cat stalks a sparrow. The sharp rocks cut through his pants legs till his knees left a trail of blood, but the hurt was lost in the hurt of his hunger. He squirmed over the wet moss, saturating his clothes and chilling his body, but he was not aware of it, so great was his fever for food. And always the ptarmigan rose, whirring before him, till their cur, cur, cur became a mock to him, and he cursed them and cried aloud at them with their own cry.
Once he crawled upon one that must have been asleep. He did not see it till it shot up in his face from its rocky nook. He made a clutch as startled as was the rise of the ptarmigan, and there remained in his hand three tail feathers. As he watched its flight, he hated it, as though it had done him some terrible wrong. Then he returned and shouldered his pack. As the day wore along, he came into valleys or swales where game was more plentiful. A band of caribou passed by, twenty and odd animals, tantalizingly within rifle range. He felt a wild desire to run after them, a certitude that he could run them down. A black fox came toward him, carrying a ptarmigan in his mouth. The man shouted. It was a fearful cry, but the fox, leaping away in fright, did not drop the ptarmigan.
Later in the day he followed a stream, milky with lime, which ran through sparse patches of rush-grass. Grasping these rushes firmly near the root, he pulled up what resembled a young onion-sprout no larger than a shingle nail. It was tender, and his teeth sank into it with a crunch that promised deliciously of food. But its fibers were tough. It was composed of stringy filaments saturated with water, like the berries, and devoid of nourishment. He threw off his pack and went into the rush grass on hands and knees, crunching and munching like some bovine creature. He was very weary and often wished to rest, to lie down and sleep, but he was continually driven on, not so much by his desire to gain the land of little sticks as by his hunger.
He searched little ponds for frogs, and dug up the earth with his nails for worms, though he knew in spite that neither frogs nor worms existed so far north. He looked into every pool of water vainly, until, as the long twilight came on, he discovered a solitary fish the size of a minnow in such a pool. He plunged his arm in up to the shoulder, but it eluded him. He reached for it with both hands and stirred up the milky mud at the bottom. In his excitement, he fell in, wetting himself to the waist. Then the water was too muddy to admit of his seeing the fish, and he was compelled to wait until the sediment had settled. The pursuit was renewed till the water was again muddied. But he could not wait.
He unstrapped the tin bucket and began to bail the pool. He bailed wildly at first, splashing himself and flinging the water so short a distance that it ran back into the pool. He worked more carefully, striving to be cool, though his heart was pounding against his chest and his hands were trembling. At the end of half an hour the pool was nearly dry. Not a cupful of water remained, and there was no fish. He found a hidden crevice among the stones, through which it had escaped to the adjoining and larger pool. A pool which he could not empty in a night and a day. Had he known of the crevice, he could have closed it with a rock at the beginning, and the fish would have been his. Thus he thought, and crumpled up, and sank down upon the wet earth.
At first he cried softly to himself. Then he cried loudly to the pitiless desolation that ringed him around, and for a long time after he was shaken by great dry sobs.
He built a fire and warmed himself by drinking quarts of hot water, and made a camp on a rocky ledge in the same fashion he had the night before. The last thing he did was to see that his matches were dry and to wind his watch. The blankets were wet and clammy. His ankle pulsed with pain. But he knew only that he was hungry. And through his restless sleep he dreamed of feasts and banquets, and of food served and spread in all imaginable ways. He awoke chilled and sick. There was no sun. The gray of earth and sky had become deeper, more profound. A raw wind was blowing, and the first flurries of snow were whitening the hill-tops. The air about him thickened and grew white while he made a fire and boiled more water.
It was wet snow, half rain, and the flakes were large and soggy. At first they melted as soon as they came in contact with the earth, but evermore fell, covering the ground, putting out the fire, spoiling a supply of moss fuel. This was a signal for him to strap on his pack and stumble onward. He knew not where. He was not concerned with the land of little sticks, nor with Bill and the cash under the upturned canoe by the river Deese. He was mastered by the verb to eat. He was hunger mad. He took no heed of the course he pursued, so long as that course led him through the swale bottoms. He felt his way through the wet snow to the watery muskeg berries, and went by feel as he pulled up the rush grass by the roots.
But it was tasteless stuff, and did not satisfy. He found a weed that tasted sour, and he ate all he could find of it, which was not much, for it was a creeping growth, easily hidden under the several inches of snow.
He had no fire that night, nor hot water, and crawled under his blanket to sleep the broken, hungry sleep. The snow turned into a cold rain. He awakened many times to feel it falling on his upturned face. Day came, a gray day, and no sun. It had ceased raining. The keenness of his hunger had departed. Sensibility, as far as concerned the yearning for food, had been exhausted. There was a dull, heavy ache in his stomach, but it did not bother him so much. He was more rational, and once more he was chiefly interested in the land of little Styx and the cache by the River Deese. He ripped the remnant of one of his blankets into strips and bound his bleeding feet. Also he recinched the injured ankle and prepared himself for a day of travel.
When he came to his pack, he paused long over the squat moose-hide sack, but in the end it went with him. The snow had melted under the rain, and only the hilltop showed white. The sun came out, and he succeeded in locating the points of the compass, though he knew now that he was lost. Perhaps in his previous day's wanderings he had edged away too far to the left. He now bore off to the right to counteract the possible deviation from his true course. Though the hunger pains were no longer so exquisite, he realized that he was weak. He was compelled to pause for frequent rests when he attacked the muskeg berries and rush-grass patches. His tongue felt dry and large, as though covered with a fine hairy growth, and it tasted bitter in his mouth.
His heart gave him a great deal of trouble. When he had travelled a few minutes, it would begin a remorseless thump, thump, thump, and then leap up and go away in a painful flutter of beats that choked him and made him go faint and dizzy. In the middle of the day he found two minnows in a large pool. It was impossible to bail it, but he was calmer now and managed to catch them in his tin bucket. They were no longer than his little finger, but he was not particularly hungry. The dull ache in his stomach had been growing duller and fainter. It seemed almost that his stomach was dozing. He ate the fish raw, masticating with painstaking care, for the eating was an act of pure reason. While he had no desire to eat, he knew that he must eat to live.
In the evening he caught three more minnows. Eating two, and saving the third for breakfast. The son had dried stray shreds of moss, and he was able to warm himself with hot water. He had not covered more than ten miles that day, and the next day, traveling whenever his heart permitted him, he covered no more than five miles. But his stomach did not give him the slightest uneasiness. It had gone to sleep. He was in a strange country, too, and the caribou were growing more plentiful. also the wolves. Often their yelps drifted across the desolation, and once he saw three of them slinking away before his path. Another night, and in the morning, being more rational, he untied the leather string that fastened the squat moose-hide sack.
From its open mouth poured a yellow stream of coarse gold-dust and nuggets. He roughly divided the golden halves, Cashing one half on a prominent ledge wrapped in a piece of blanket, and returning the other half to the sack. He also began to use the strips of the one remaining blanket for his feet. He still clung to his gun, for there were cartridges in that cache by the River Deese.
This was a day of fog, and this day hunger awoke in him again. He was very weak, and was affected with a giddiness which at times blinded him. It was no uncommon thing now for him to stumble and fall, and, stumbling once, he fell squarely into a ptarmigan nest. There were four newly-hatched chicks a day old, little specks of pulsating life, no more than a mouthful, and he ate them ravenously, thrusting them alive into his mouth and crunching them like egg-shells between his teeth. The mother ptarmigan beat about him with great outcry. He used his gun as a club with which to knock her over, but she dodged out of reach. He threw stones at her, and with one chance shot broke a wing. Then she fluttered away, running, trailing the broken wing, with him in pursuit.
The chicks had no more than whetted his appetite. He hopped and bobbed clumsily along on his injured ankle, throwing stones and screaming hoarsely at times. At other times, hopping and bobbing silently along, Picking himself up grimly and patiently when he fell, or rubbing his eyes with his hand when the giddiness threatened to overpower him. The chase led him across swampy ground in the bottom of the valley, and he came upon footprints in the soggy moss. They were not his own. He could see that. They must be Bill's. But he could not stop, for the mother ptarmigan was running on. He would catch her first. Then he would return and investigate. He exhausted the mother ptarmigan, but he exhausted himself.
She lay panting on her side. He lay panting on his side, a dozen feet away, unable to crawl to her. And as he recovered, she recovered, fluttering out of reach as his hungry hand went out to her. The chase was resumed. Night settled down, and she escaped. He stumbled from weakness and pitched head foremost on his face, cutting his cheek, his pack upon his back. He did not move for a long while. Then he rolled over on his side, wound his watch, and lay there till morning.
Another day of fog. Half of his last blanket had gone into foot wrappings. He failed to pick up Bill's trail. It did not matter. His hunger was driving him too compellingly. Only he wondered if Bill, too, were lost. By midday the irk of his pack became too oppressive. Again he divided the gold, this time merely spilling half of it on the ground. In the afternoon he threw the rest of it away, there remaining to him only the half-blanket, the tin bucket, and the rifle.
An hallucination began to trouble him. He felt confident that one cartridge remained to him. It was in the chamber of the rifle, and he had overlooked it. On the other hand, he knew all the time that the chamber was empty. But the hallucination persisted. He fought it off for hours, then threw his rifle open, and was confronted with emptiness. The disappointment was as bitter as though he had really expected to find the cartridge. He plodded on for half an hour when the hallucination arose again. Again he fought it, and still it persisted, till, for very relief, he opened his rifle to unconvince himself. At times his mind wandered farther afield, and he plodded on, a mere automaton, strange conceits and whimsicalities gnawing at his brain like worms.
But these excursions out of the reel were of brief duration. For ever the pangs of the hunger bite called him back. He was jerked back abruptly once from such an excursion by a sight that caused him nearly to faint. He reeled and swayed, doddering like a drunken man to keep from falling. Before him stood a horse. A horse! He could not believe his eyes. A thick mist was in them, inner shot with sparkling points of light. He rubbed his eyes savagely to clear his vision, and beheld not a horse, but a great brown bear. The animal was studying him with a bellicose curiosity. The man had brought his gun halfway to his shoulder before he realized. He lowered it and drew his hunting knife from its beaded sheath at his hip.
Before him was meat and life. He ran his thumb along the edge of his knife. It was sharp. The point was sharp. He would fling himself upon the bear and kill it. But his heart began its warning, Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump Thump. Then followed the wild upward leap and tattoo of flutters, the pressing as of an iron band about his forehead, the creeping of the dizziness into his brain.
His desperate courage was evicted by a great surge of fear. In his weakness, what if the animal attacked him? He drew himself up to his most imposing stature, gripping the knife and staring hard at the bear. The bear advanced clumsily a couple of steps, reared up, and gave vent to a tentative growl. If the man ran, he would run after him. But the man did not run. He was animated now with the courage of fear. He, too, growled savagely, terribly, voicing the fear that is to life germane and that lies twisted about life's deepest roots. The bear edged away to one side, Growling menacingly, himself appalled by this mysterious creature that appeared upright and unafraid. But the man did not move. He stood like a statue till the danger was past, when he yielded to a fit of trembling and sank down into the wet moss.
He pulled himself together and went on, afraid now in a new way. It was not the fear that he should die passively from lack of food. But that he should be destroyed violently before starvation had exhausted the last particle of the endeavor in him that made toward surviving. There were the wolves. Back and forth across the desolation drifted their howls, weaving the very air into a fabric of menace that was so tangible that he found himself, arms in the air, pressing it back from him as it might be the walls of a wind-blown tent. Now and again the wolves, in packs of two and three, crossed his path, but they sheered clear of him. They were not in sufficient numbers, and besides, they were hunting the caribou, which did not battle, while this strange creature that walked erect might scratch and bite.
In the late afternoon he came upon scattered bones where the wolves had made a kill. The debris had been a caribou calf an hour before, squawking and running, and very much alive. He contemplated the bones, clean-picked and polished, pink with the cell-life in them which had not yet died. Could it possibly be that he might be that ere the day was done? Such was life, eh? A vain and fleeting thing. It was only life that pained. There was no hurt in death. To die was to sleep. It meant cessation, rest. Then why was he not content to die? But he did not moralize long. He was squatting in the moss, a bone in his mouth, sucking at the shreds of life that still dighted faintly pink. The sweet meaty taste, thin and elusive, almost as a memory, maddened him.
He closed his jaws on the bones and crunched. Sometimes it was the bone that broke. Sometimes his teeth. Then he crushed the bones between rocks, pounded them to a pulp, and swallowed them. He pounded his fingers, too, in his haste, and yet found a moment in which to feel surprise at the fact that his fingers did not hurt much when caught under the descending rock.
Came frightful days of snow and rain. He did not know when he made camp, when he broke camp. He traveled in the night as much as in the day. He rested wherever he fell, crawled on whenever the dying life in him flickered up and burned less dimly. He, as a man, no longer strove. It was the life in him, unwilling to die, that drove him on. He did not suffer. His nerves had become blunted, numb, while his mind was filled with weird visions and delicious dreams. But ever he sucked and chewed on the crushed bones of the caribou calf, the least remains of which he had gathered up and carried with him. He crossed no more hills or divides, but automatically followed a large stream which flowed through a wide and shallow valley.
He did not see this stream, nor this valley. He saw nothing save visions. Soul and body walked or crawled side by side, yet apart, So slender was the thread that bound them. He awoke in his right mind, lying on his back on a rocky ledge. The sun was shining bright and warm. Afar off he heard the squawking of caribou calves. He was aware of vague memories of rain and wind and snow, but whether he had been beaten by the storm for two days or two weeks he did not know. For some time he lay without movement. The genial sunshine pouring upon him and saturating his miserable body with its warmth. A fine day, he thought. Perhaps he could manage to locate himself. By painful effort, he rolled over on his side.
Below him flowed a wide and sluggish river. Its unfamiliarity puzzled him. Slowly, he followed it with his eyes, winding in wide sweeps among the bleak, bare hills. Bleeker and bare and lower-lying than any hills he had yet encountered. Slowly, deliberately, without excitement or more than the most casual interest, he followed the course of the strange stream toward the skyline, and saw it emptying into a bright and shining sea. He was still unexcited. Most unusual, he thought, a vision or a mirage, most likely a vision, a trick of his disordered mind. He was confirmed in this by sight of a ship lying at anchor in the midst of the shining sea. He closed his eyes for a while, then opened them.
Strange how the vision persisted, yet not strange. He knew there were no seas or ships in the heart of the barren lands, just as he had known there was no cartridge in the empty rifle. He heard a snuffle behind him, a half-choking gasp or cough. Very slowly, because of his exceeding weakness and stiffness, he rolled over on his other side. He could see nothing near at hand, but he waited patiently. Again came the snuffle and cough, and outlined between two jagged rocks not a score of feet away he made out the gray head of a wolf. The sharp ears were not pricked so sharply as he had seen them on other wolves. The eyes were bleared and bloodshot. The head seemed to droop limply and forlornly. The animal blinked continually in the sunshine.
It seemed sick. As he looked, it snuffled and coughed again. This, at least, was real, he thought, and turned on the other side so that he might see the reality of the world which had been veiled from him before by the vision. But the sea still shone in the distance, and the ship was plainly discernible. Was it reality, after all? He closed his eyes for a long while and thought, and then it came to him. He had been making north by east, away from the Dees Divide and into the Copper Mine Valley. This wide and sluggish river was the Copper Mine. That shining sea was the Arctic Ocean. That ship was a whaler, strayed east, far east from the mouth of the Mackenzie, and it was lying at anchor in Coronation Gulf.
He remembered the Hudson Bay Company chart he had seen long ago, and it was all clear and reasonable to him. He sat up and turned his attention to immediate affairs. He had worn through the blanket wrappings, and his feet were shapeless lumps of raw meat. His last blanket was gone. Rifle and knife were both missing. He had lost his hat somewhere, with a bunch of matches in the band, but the matches against his chest were safe and dry inside the tobacco-pouch and oil paper. He looked at his watch. It marked eleven o'clock, and was still running. Evidently, he had kept it wound. He was calm and collected. Though extremely weak, he had no sensation of pain. He was not hungry. The thought of food was not even pleasant to him, and whatever he did was done by his reason alone.
He ripped off his pants legs to the knees and bound them about his feet. Somehow he had succeeded in retaining the tin bucket. He would have some hot water before he began what he foresaw was to be a terrible journey to the ship. His movements were slow. He shook as with a palsy. When he started to collect dry moss, he found he could not rise to his feet. He tried again and again, then contented himself with crawling about on hands and knees. Once he crawled near to the sick wolf. The animal dragged itself reluctantly out of his way, licking its chops with a tongue which seemed hardly to have the strength to curl. The man noticed that the tongue was not the customary healthy red. It was a yellowish brown, and seemed coated with a rough and half-dry mucus.
After he had drunk a quart of hot water, the man found he was able to stand, and even to walk as well as a dying man might be supposed to walk. Every minute or so he was compelled to rest. His steps were feeble and uncertain, just as the wolves that trailed him were feeble and uncertain. And that night, when the shining sea was blotted out by blackness, he knew he was nearer to it by no more than four miles. Throughout the night he heard the cough of the sick wolf, and now and then the squawking of the caribou-calves. There was life all around him, but it was strong life, very much alive and well, and he knew the sick wolf clung to the sick man's trail in the hope that the man would die first.
In the morning, on opening his eyes, he beheld it regarding him with a wistful and hungry stare. It stood crouched with tail between its legs, like a miserable and woe-begone dog. It shivered in the chill morning wind, and grinned dispiritedly when the man spoke to it in a voice that achieved no more than a hoarse whisper. The sun rose brightly, and all morning the man tottered and fell toward the ship on the shining sea. The weather was perfect. It was the brief Indian summer of the high latitudes. It might last a week. Tomorrow or the next day, it might be gone. In the afternoon, the man came upon a trail. It was of another man, who did not walk, but who dragged himself on all fours. The man thought it might be Bill, but he thought in a dull, uninterested way.
He had no curiosity. In fact, sensation and emotion had left him. He was no longer susceptible to pain. Stomach and nerves had gone to sleep, yet the life that was in him drove him on. He was very weary, but it refused to die. It was because it refused to die that he still ate muskeg berries and minnows, drank his hot water, and kept a wary eye on the sick wolf. He followed the trail of the other man who dragged himself along, and soon came to the end of it. A few fresh-picked bones where the soggy moss was marked by the footpads of many wolves. He saw a squat moose-hide sack, mate to his own, which had been torn by sharp teeth. He picked it up, though its weight was almost too much for his feeble fingers.
Bill had carried it to the last. Ha! Ha! He would have the laugh on Bill. He would survive and carry it to the ship in the shining sea. His mirth was hoarse and ghastly, like a raven's croak, and the sick wolf joined him, howling lugubriously. The man seized suddenly. How could he have the laugh on Bill, if that were Bill, if those bones, so pinky-white and clean, were Bill? He turned away. Well, Bill had deserted him, but he would not take the gold, nor would he suck Bill's bones. Bill would have, though, had it been the other way around, he mused as he staggered on.
He came to a pool of water. Stooping over in quest of minnows, he jerked his head back as though he had been stung. He had caught sight of his reflected face. So horrible was it that sensibility awoke long enough to be shocked. There were three minnows in the pool, which was too large to drain. And after several ineffectual attempts to catch them in the tin bucket, he forbore. He was afraid, because of his great weakness, that he might fall in and drown. It was for this reason that he did not trust himself to the river, astride one of the many drift-logs which lined its sand-spits. That day he decreased the distance between him and the ship by three miles, the next day by two, for he was crawling now as Bill had crawled.
And the end of the fifth day found the ship still seven miles away, and him unable to make even a mile a day. Still, the Indian summer held on, and he continued to crawl and faint, turn and turn about, and ever the sick wolf coughed and wheezed at his heels. His knees had become raw meat like his feet, and though he patted them with a shirt from his back, it was a red track he left behind him on the moss and stones. Once, glancing back, he saw the wolf licking hungrily his bleeding trail, and he saw sharply what his own end might be, unless—unless he could get the wolf. Then began as grim a tragedy of existence as was ever played, a sick man that crawled, a sick wolf that limped, two creatures dragging their dying carcasses across the desolation, and hunting each other's lives.
Had it been a well-wolf, it would not have mattered so much to the man. But the thought of going to feed the maw of that loathsome and all but dead thing was repugnant to him. He was finicky. His mind had begun to wander again, and to be perplexed by hallucinations, while his lucid intervals grew rarer and shorter. He was awakened once from a faint by a wheeze close in his ear. The wolf leaped lamely back, losing its footing and falling in its weakness. It was ludicrous, but he was not amused, nor was he even afraid. He was too far gone for that. But his mind was for the moment clear, and he lay and considered. The ship was no more than four miles away. He could see it quite distinctly when he rubbed the mists out of his eyes, and he could see the white sail of a small boat cutting the water of the shining sea.
But he could never crawl those four miles. He knew that, and was very calm in the knowledge. He knew that he could not crawl half a mile. And yet he wanted to live. It was unreasonable that he should die after all he had undergone. Fate asked too much of him. And dying, He declined to die. It was stark madness, perhaps, but in the very grip of death he defied death and refused to die. He closed his eyes and composed himself with infinite precaution. He steeled himself to keep above the suffocating languor that lapped like a rising tide through all the walls of his being. It was very like a sea, this deadly languor, that rose and rose and drowned his consciousness bit by bit. Sometimes he was all but submerged, swimming through oblivion with a faltering stroke, and again, by some strange alchemy of the soul, he would find another shred of will and strike out more strongly.
Without movement he lay on his back, and he could hear, slowly drawing nearer and nearer, The wheezing intake and output of the sick wolf's breath. It drew closer, ever closer, through an infinitude of time, and he did not move. It was at his ear. The harsh, dry tongue grated like sandpaper against his cheek. His hands shot out, or at least he willed them to shoot out. The fingers were curved like talons, but they closed on empty air. Swiftness and certitude require strength, and the man had not this strength. The patience of the wolf was terrible. The man's patience was no less terrible. For half a day he lay motionless, fighting off unconsciousness, and waiting for the thing that was to feed upon him, and upon which he wished to feed.
Sometimes the languid sea rose over him, and he dreamed long dreams. But ever through it all, waking and dreaming, he waited for the wheezing breath and the harsh caress of the tongue. He did not hear the breath, and he slipped slowly from some dream to the feel of the tongue along his hand. He waited. The fangs pressed softly. The pressure increased. The wolf was exerting its last strength in an effort to sink teeth in the food for which it had waited so long. But the man had waited long, and the lacerated hand closed on the jaw. Slowly, while the wolf struggled feebly and the hand clutched feebly, the other hand crept across to a grip. Five minutes later, the whole weight of the man's body was on top of the wolf.
The hands had not sufficient strength to choke the wolf, but the face of the man was pressed close to the throat of the wolf, And the mouth of the man was full of hair. At the end of half an hour, the man was aware of a warm trickle in his throat. It was not pleasant. It was like molten lead being forced into his stomach, and it was forced by will alone. Later, the man rolled over on his back and slept. There were some members of a scientific expedition on the whale-ship Bedford. From the deck, they remarked a strange object on the shore. It was moving down the beach toward the water. They were unable to classify it, and being scientific men, they climbed into the whaleboat alongside and went ashore to sea.
And they saw something that was alive, but which could hardly be called a man. It was blind, unconscious. It squirmed along the ground like some monstrous worm. Most of its efforts were ineffectual. But it was persistent, and it writhed and twisted and went ahead perhaps a score of feet an hour. Three weeks afterward, the man laying a bunk on the whale-ship Bedford, and with tears streaming down his wasted cheeks, told who he was and what he had undergone. He also babbled incoherently of his mother, of sunny Southern California, and a home among the orange groves and flowers. The days were not many after that when he sat at the table with the scientific men and ship's officers. He gloated over the spectacle of so much food, watching it anxiously as it went into the mouths of others.
With the disappearance of each mouthful, an expression of deep regret came into his eyes. He was quite sane, yet he hated those men at meal-time. He was haunted by a fear that the food would not last. He inquired of the cook, The cabin-boy, the captain, concerning the food stores. They reassured him countless times, but he could not believe them, and pried cunningly about the lazarette to sea with his own eyes. It was noticed that the man was getting fat. He grew stouter with each day. The scientific men shook their heads and theorized. They limited the man at his meals, but still his girth increased, and he swelled prodigiously under his shirt. The sailors grinned. They knew, and when the scientific men set a watch on the man, they knew too.
They saw him slouch forward after breakfast, and, like a mendicant with outstretched palm, accost a sailor. The sailor grinned and passed him a fragment of sea biscuit. He clutched at it avariciously, looking at it as a miser looks at gold, and thrust it into his shirt bosom. Similar were the donations from other grinning sailors. The scientific men were discreet. They let him alone, but they privily examined his bunk. It was lined with hardtack. The mattress was stuffed with hardtack. Every nook and cranny was filled with hardtack. Yet he was sane. He was taking precautions against another possible famine. That was all. He would recover from it, the scientific men said, and he did, ere the Bedford's anchor rumbled down in San Francisco Bay.
The End of Love of Life by Jack London, from Love of Life and Other Stories by Jack London, read by John Taylor, Southeast Missouri, December 2006.
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6 The nice people 23:12
The Nice People by Henri Collar Bonner. They certainly are nice people, I ascended to my wife's observation, using the colloquial phrase with a consciousness that it was anything but nice English. And I'll bet that their three children are better brought up than most of... Two children, corrected my wife. Three, he told me. My dear, she said there were two. He said three. Oh, you've simply forgotten. I'm sure she told me they had only two, a boy and a girl. Well, I didn't enter into particulars. No, dear, and you couldn't have understood him. Two children. All right, I said. But I don't think it was all right. As a near-sighted man learns by enforced observation to recognize persons at a distance when the face is not visible to the normal eye, so the man with a bad memory learns, almost unconsciously, to listen carefully and report accurately.
My memory is bad, but I have not had time to forget that Mr. Brewster Breed He told me that afternoon that he had three children, at present left in the care of his mother-in-law, while he and Mrs. Breed took their summer vacation. Two children, repeated my wife, and they are staying with his aunt Jenny. He told me with his mother-in-law, I put in. My wife looked at me with a serious expression. Men may not remember much of what they are told about children. But any man knows the difference between an aunt and a mother-in-law. But don't you think they're nice people? asked my wife. Oh, certainly, I replied. Only they seem to be a little mixed up about their children. That isn't a nice thing to say, returned my wife.
I could not deny it. And yet, the next morning, one bridge came down and seated themselves opposite us at the table. Beaming and smiling in their natural, pleasant, well-bred fashion, I knew to a social certainty that they were nice people. He was a fine-looking fellow in his knit tennis flannels, slim, graceful, twenty-eight or thirty years old, with a Frenchie-pointed beard. She was nice in all her pretty clothes, and she herself was pretty with that type of prettiness. Which outwears most other types. The prettiness that lies in a rounded figure, a dusky skin, plump, rosy cheeks, white teeth and black eyes. She might have been 25. You guessed that she was prettier than she was at 20, and that she was prettier still at 40.
The nice people were all we wanted to make us happy in Mr. Jacobus' summer boarding house on top of Orange Mountain. For a week we had come down to breakfast each morning, wondering why we wasted this precious day of idleness with a company gathered around Jacob's board. What joy of human companionship was to be had out of Mrs. Ted and Miss Huggenkamp, the two middle-aged gossips from Scranton's path, out of Mr. and Mrs. Beagle, an injurited head bookkeeper and his prim and sensuous wife. Out of old Major Alquette, retired businessman, who, having once sold a few shares on commission, wrote for a surplus of average stock company that was started, and tried to induce every one to invest who would listen to him.
He looked around at those dull eyes, the truthful indices of mean and barren minds, and decided that he would leave that morning. Then we ate Mrs. Jacob's biscuits, Light Azororo's clavets, drank her honest coffee, inhaled the perfume and flayed azaleas with which she decked her table, and decided to postpone our departure one more day. And then we wondered what to take our morning glance at what we called our view, and it seemed to us as if Tab or Hugenkamp, Bonhochit, and the Biggles could not drive us away in a year. I was not surprised when, after breakfast, my wife invited the breeds to walk with us to our view. The Hugenkamp's Beagle-Tab orchids, a contingent, never stirred off Jacob's veranda, but we both felt that the breeds would not profane that sacred scene.
We strolled slowly across the fields. Passed through the little belt of woods, and, as I heard Mrs. Breed's little cry, a startled rapture, I motioned to Breed to look up. "'By Job!' he cried, heavenly!' We looked off from the brow of the mountain, over fifteen miles of billowing green, to where, far across a far stretch of pale blue, lay a dim purple line that renew a state in Ireland. Tons and villages lay before us and under us. There were ridges and hills, uplands and lowlands, woods and plains, all mast and meagled in that great silent sea of sunlight green. For silent it was to us, standing in the silence of a high place, silent with the sandy stillness that had made us listen, without shaking though.
For the sound of bells coming up from the spires, The tree tops that lay as far beneath us as the light clouds were above us that wrapped great shadows upon our heads and faint specks of shade upon the broad sweep of land at the mountain's foot.
And so that is your view, asked Mrs. Breed after a moment. You are very generous to make it ours too. Then we lay down on grass. And Britt began to talk in a gentle voice as if he felt the influence of the place. He had paddled a canoe in his earlier days, he said, and he knew every river and creek in that vast stretch of landscape. He found these landmarks and pointed out to us where the Pasaic and the Hackensack flowed. Invisible to us, hidden behind great ridges that in our sight were but the combing of the green waves upon which we looked down. And yet, on the further side of those broad ridges and rises were scores of villages, a little world of country life, lying unseen under our eyes.
A good deal like looking at humanity, he said. There is such a I think as getting so far above our fellow men that we see only one side of them. Ah, how much better was this sort of talk than the chattering gossip of the tab and the Hagenkamp, than the major dissertations upon his everlasting circulars. My wife and I exchanged glances. Now, when I went up the Matterhorn, Mrs. Breed began. Why, dear," interrupted his wife, I didn't know you ever went up the Matterhorn.
It did was five years ago, said Mr. Brede hurriedly. I... I didn't tell you. When I was on the other side, you know, it was rather dangerous. Well, as I was saying, it looked... Oh, it didn't look at all like this. A cloud floated overhead. Throwing its great shadow over the field where we lay. The shadow passed over the mountain's brow and reappeared far below, a rapidly decreasing plot, flying eastward over the golden greens. My wife and I exchanged glances once more. Somehow, the shadow lingered over us all. As we went home, the breads went side by side along the narrow path, and my wife and I walked together. I think, she asked me, that a man would climb the Matterhorn the very first year he was married.
I don't know, my dear, I answered evadly. This isn't the first year I've been married, not by a good many, and I wouldn't climb it for a farm. You know what I mean, she said. I did. When we reached the boarding house, Mr. Jacobus took me inside.
"'You know,' he began his discourse, "'my wife, she used to live in New York.' I didn't know, but I said yes. "'She says the numbers on the streets run crisscross-like. "'Thirty-four's on one side of the street, and thirty-five on the other. How's that?' "'That is the invariable rule, I believe. "'Then I'd say there are new folk that Union... Wives seem so mighty taken up with. Do you know anything about them?
I know nothing about the character of your borders, Mr. Jacobus, I replied, conscious of some irritability, if I choose to associate with any of them. Oh, just so, just so, broken Jacobus. I ain't nothing to say against its sociability. But do you know them? Why, certainly not," I replied. Well, that was all I was asking you. You see, when he came here to take the rooms, he wasn't there then. He told my wife that he lived at number 34 in his street, and yesterday she told her that they lived at number 35. He said he lived in an apartment house. Now, there can't be no apartment house on two sides of the same street, can they?
What street was it? I inquired wearily.
121st Street.
Maybe, I replied, still more wearily. That's Harlem. Nobody knows what people will do in Harlem. I went up to my wife's room. Don't you think it's queer? She asked me. I think I'll have a talk with that young man tonight, I said, and see if he can give some account of himself. But, my dear, my wife said gravely, she doesn't know whether they've had the measles or not. Why, Great Scott, I exclaimed, they must have had them when they were children. Please don't be stupid, said my wife. I meant their children.
After dinner that night, or rather, after supper, for he had dinner in the middle of the day at Jacobus, I walked down the long veranda to ask Breed, who was placidly smoking at the other end, to accompany me on a twilight stroll. Half-way down I met Major Hockett.
That friend of yours, he said, indicating the unconscious figure at the further end of the house, seems to be a queer sort of a dick. He told me that he was out of business and just looking round for a chance to invest his capital. And I've been telling him what an everlasting big show he had to take stock in the Capitaline Trust Company. Starts next month. Four million capital. I told you all about it. Oh well, he says, let's wait and think about it. Wait, says I. The Capitaline Trust Won't wait for you, my boy. This is letting you on the ground floor, says I, and it's now or never. Oh, let it wait, says he. I don't know what's into the man.
I don't know how well he knows his own business, Major, I said as I started again for Reed's end on the veranda. But I was troubled nonetheless. The Major could not have influenced I was a little bit of a sale on one share of stock in the capital and company. But that stock was a great investment, a rare chance for a purchaser with a few thousand dollars. Perhaps it was no more remarkable that Brits should not invest than that I should not, and yet it seemed to add one circumstance more to the other suspicious circumstances. When I went upstairs that evening, I found my wife putting her hair to bed. I don't know how I can better describe an operation familiar to every married man. I waited until the last stress was coiled up, and then I spoke.
I've talked with Brad, I said, and I didn't have to catch the child's him. He seemed to feel that some sort of explanation was looked for, and he was very outspoken. You were right about the children. That is, I must have misunderstood him. There are only two. But the Matterhorn episode was simple enough. He didn't realize how dangerous it was until he had got so far into it, and that he couldn't go back out. And he didn't tell her, because he left her here, you see, and under the circumstances.
Left her here, cried my wife. I've been sitting with her the whole afternoon, sewing, and she told me that he left her at Geneva. And came back and took her to Bessel, and the baby was born there. Now I'm sure, dear, because I asked her.
Perhaps I was mistaken when I thought you said she was on this side of the water, I suggested with bitter, biting irony. You poor dear. Did I abuse you? said my wife. But do you know, Mrs. Dev said she didn't know how many lumps of sugar he took in his coffee. Now that seems queer, doesn't it? It did. It was a small thing, but it looks queer, very queer.
The next morning, it was clear that war was declared against the Brits. They came down to breakfast somewhat late, and as soon as they arrived, the Pilots' Swooped up the last fragments that remained on their plates and made a stately march out of the dining room. Then, Miss Hugenkamp arose and departed, leaving a whole fishbowl on her plate. Even as Atalanta might have dropped an apple behind her to tempt her pursuer to check his speed, so Miss Hugenkamp left that fishbowl behind her and between her maiden self and contamination. We had finished our breakfast. My wife and I, before the bridge appeared. We talked it over, and agreed that we were glad that we had not been obliged to take sides upon such insufficient testimony.
After breakfast, it was the custom of the male half of Jacob's household to go around the corner of the building and smoke their pipes and cigars where they would not annoy the ladies. We sat under a trellis covered with a grapevine, That had borne no grapes in the memory of men. This vine, however, bore leaves, and this, on that pleasant summer morning, shielded from us two persons who were in earnest conversation in straggling half that flower garden at the side of the house.
I don't want, we heard Mr. Jacobus say, to enter in no man's privacy. But I do want to know who it may be like that I have in my house. Now what I ask of you, and I don't want you to take it as in no ways personal, is have you your marriage license with you? No, we heard the voice of Mr. Brown reply. Have you yours? I think it was a chance shot. But he told me all the same. The Major, he was a widower, and Mr. Beagle and I looked at each other, and Mr. Jacobus, on the other side of the great trellis, looked at. I don't know what, and was as silent as we were.
Where is your marriage license, Married Reader? Do you know? Four men, not including Mr. Breed, Studer sat on one side of the other of the great trellis, and not one of them knew where his marriage license was. Each of us had had one, the major had had three. But where were they? Where is yours? Sucked in your best man's pocket? Deposited in his desk? Or washed to a pulp in his white waistcoat? If white waistcoats be the fashion of the hour? washed out of existence. Can you tell where it is? Can you? Unless you are one of those people who framed that interesting document and hang it up on their drawing room's walls. Mr. Breed's voice arose, after an awful stillness of what seemed like five minutes, and was probably thirty seconds.
Mr. Jacobus. Will you make out your bill at once, and let me pay it? I shall leave by the six o'clock train, and will you also send the wagon for my trunks? I ain't said I want it. The day you leave, began Mr. Jacobus, but pretty cut him short. Bring me your bill. But, remonstrated Jacobus, if ye ain't... Bring me your bill, said Mr. Breed.
My wife and I went out for our morning walk. But it seemed to us, when we looked at our view, as if we could only see those invisible villages of which Breed had told us, the other side of the ridges and rises of which we caught no glimpse from lofty hills or from the heights of human south-esteem. We meant to stay out until the Breeds had taken their departure, but we returned just in time to see Pete, the Jacob of Starkey, The blacker of boots, the brash of coats, the general handyman of the house loading the Breed trunks on Jacob's wagon. And, as we stepped upon the veranda, down came Mrs. Breed, leaning on Mr. Breed's arm as though she were ill, and it was clear that she had been crying. There were heavy rings about her pretty black eyes.
My wife took a step toward her. Look at that dress, dear," she whispered. She never thought anything like this was going to happen when she put that on. It was a pretty, delicate, dainty dress, a graceful, narrow-stripped affair. Her hat was trimmed with a narrow-stripped silk of the same color, maroon and white, and in her hand she held a parasol that matched their dress.
She's had a new dress on twice a day, said my wife. But that's the prettiest yet. Oh, somehow, I'm awfully sorry they're going. But going they were. They moved toward the steps. Mr. Breed looked toward my wife, and my wife moved toward Mrs. Breed. But the ostracized woman, as though she felt the deep humiliation of her position, turned sharply away and opened her parasol to shield her eyes from the sun. A shower of rice, a half-pound shower of rice, fell down over her pretty hat and her pretty dress, and fell in a spectrum circle on the floor, outlining her skirt, and there it lay in a broad, unheavened band, bright in the morning sun. Mrs. Breed was in my wife's arms, sobbing as if her young heart would break.
Oh, you poor... Dear silly children, my wife cried, and Mrs. Breed sobbed on her shoulder. Why didn't you tell us?
We didn't want to be taken for a bridal couple, sobbed Mrs. Breed, and we didn't dream that what awful lies we had to tell, and all the awful mixed-upness. A bit. No, dear, dear, dear.
Pete, commanded Mr. Jacobus, put back them trunks. These folks stays here as long as they want. Mr. Breed held out a large, hard hand.
I've...
ought to have known better, he said. A malice doubt of Mr. Breed vanished as he choked The two women were walking off toward our view, each with an arm about the other's waist, touched by a sudden sisterhood of sympathy. "'Gentlemen,' said Mr. Breed, addressing Jacobus, Beagle, the Major and me, "'there is a hostel round the street where they sell a honest new turkey beer. I recognize the obligation of the situation.' We five men filled down the street. The two men went toward the pleasant slope, where the sunlight gilded the forehead of the great hill. On Mr. Jacob's veranda lay a spattered circle shining grains of rice. Two Mr. Jacob's pigeons flew down and picked up the shining grains, making grateful noises far down in their throats.
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7 An Old Mate Of Your Father's 11:29
An Old Mate of Your Father's by Henry Lawson.
You remember when we hurried home from the old bush school how we were sometimes startled by a bearded apparition, Who smiled kindly down on us, and whom our mother introduced, as we raked off our hats, as an old mate of your father's on the diggings, Johnny. And he would pat our heads and say we were fine boys, or girls, as the case may have been, and that we had our father's nose but our mother's eyes, or the other way about, and say that the baby was the dead spit of its mother, and then added, For Father's benefit. But yet he's like you, Tom. It did seem strange to the children to hear him address the old man by his Christian name, considering that the mother always referred to him as Father.
She called the old mate Mr. So-and-so, and Father called him Bill, or something to that effect. Occasionally the old mate would come dressed in the later city fashion. and at other times in a new suit of Rich-me-downs, and yet again he would turn up in clean white moleskins, washed tweed coat, crimian shirt, blucher boots, soft felt hat, with a fresh-looking speckled handkerchief round his neck. But his face was mostly round and brown and jolly. His hands were always horny, and his beard grey. Sometimes he might have seemed strange and uncouth to us at first, but the old man never appeared the least surprised at anything he said or did. They understood each other so well, and we would soon take to this relic of our father's past, who would have fruit or lollies for us, strange that he always remembered them, and would surreptitiously slip shillings into our dirty little hands.
And tell us stories about the old days, when me and your father was on the diggings, and you wasn't thought of, my boy. Sometimes the old mate would stay over Sunday, and in the forenoon or after dinner he and father would take a walk amongst the deserted shafts of Sapeling Gully or along Quartz Ridge, and criticize old ground, and talk of past diggers' mistakes, and second bottoms, and feelers. and dips, and leads, also outcrops, and absently picked up pieces of quartz and slate, rubbed them on their sleeves, looked at them in an obstructed manner, and dropped them again. And they would talk of some old lead they had worked on. Hogan's party was here on one side of us. Macintosh was here on the other.
Mac was getting good gold, and so was Hogan. And now— Why the blankety-blank went we on gold, and the mate would always agree that there was gold in them ridges and gullies yet, if a man only had the money behind him to get at it, and then perhaps the governor would show him a spot where he intended to put down a shaft some day. The old man was always thinking of putting down a shaft. And these two old fifty-niners would mooch round and sit on their heels on the sunny mulloch heaps, and break clay lumps between their hands, and lay plans for the putting down of shafts and smoke, till an urchin was sent to look for his father and Mr. So-and-so, and tell him to come to their dinner. And again, mostly in the fresh of the morning, They would hang about the fences on the selection and review the livestock.
Five dusty skeleton cows, a hollow-sided carp or two, and one shocking piece of a queen's scenery, which, by the way, the old mate always praised. But the selector's heart was not in farming, nor on selections. It was far away with the last new rush in Western Australia or Queensland, Or perhaps buried in the worked-out ground of Tambora, Married Man's Creek, or Araluen, and by and by the memory of some half-forgotten reef, or lead, or last chance, nil desperandum, or Brown Snake claim would take their thoughts far back and away from the dusty patch of sods and struggling sprouts called the crop, or the few discouraged Half-dead slits, which comprised the orchard. Then their conversation would be pointed with many golden points, Bakery Hill, Deep Creeks, Maitland Bars, Specimen Flats, and Chinaman's Gullies.
And so they'd yarn till the youngster came to tell them that mother says the breakfast is getting cold. And then the old mate would rouse himself and stretch and say, Well, We mustn't keep the missus waiting, Tom. And after tea they would sit on a log of the wood-heap, or the edge of the veranda, that is, in warm weather, and yarn about Ballarat and Bendigo, of the days when we spoke of being on a place oftener than at it. On Ballarat, on Galgon, on Lambing Flat, on Creswick, And they would use the definite article before the names as, on the terrain, the Lachlan, the Home Rule, the Canadian Lead. Then again they'd yarn of old mates, such as Tom Brook, Jack Henwright, and poor Martin Ratcliffe, who was killed in his golden hole, and of the men whom they didn't seem to have known much about, and who went by the names of Adelaide Adolphus, Corny George, and other names which might have been more or less applicable.
And sometimes they'd get talking, low and mysterious-like, about the Eureka Stockade, and if we didn't understand and ask questions, what was the Eureka Stockade, or what did they do it for? Father'd say, "'Now, run away, Sonny, and don't bother. Me and Mr. So-and-so want to talk.' Father had the mark of a hole on his leg, which he said he got through a gun accident when a boy, and a scar on his side that we saw when he was in swimming with us. He said he got that in an accident in a quartz crushing machine. Mr. So-and-so had a big scar on the side of his forehead that was caused by a pick accidentally slipping out of a loop in the rope, and falling down a shaft where he was working, But how was it they talked low, and their eyes brightened up, and they didn't look at each other, but away over sunset, and had to get up and walk about and take a stroll in the cool of the evening when they talked about Eureka.
And again they talked lower and more mysterious-like, and perhaps Mother would be passing the wood-heap and catch a word, and ask, Who was she, Tom? And Tom, Father. would say, "'Oh, you didn't know her, Mary. She belonged to a family Bill knew at home.' And Bill would look solemn till Mother had gone, and then they would smile a quiet smile, and stretch and say, "'Ah, well,' and start something else. They had yarns for the fireside too, some of those old mates of our fathers, and one of them would often tell how a girl, a queen of the diggings, was married. and had her wedding ring made out of the gold of that field, and how the diggers weighed their gold with the new wedding ring for luck by hanging the ring on the hook of the scales and attaching their chamois-leather gold bags to it.
Whereupon she boasted that four hundred ounces of the precious metal passed through her wedding ring, and how they lowered the young bride, blindfolded, down a golden hole in a big bucket, and got her to point out the drive from which the gold came that her ring was made out of. The point of this story seems to have been lost, or else we forget it, but it was characteristic. Had the girl been lowered down a dupper and asked to point out the way to the gold, and had she done so successfully, there would have been some sense in it, and they would talk of King and Maggie Oliver. and G. V. Brooke, and others, and remember how the diggers went five miles out to meet the coach that brought the girl actress, and took the horses out and brought her in, in triumph, and worshipped her, and sent her off in glory, and threw nuggets into her lap, and how she stood upon the box seat, and tore her sailor hat to pieces, and threw the fragments amongst the crown, and how the diggers fought for the bits and thrust them inside their shirt-bosoms, and how she broke down and cried, and could in her turn have worshipped those men, loved them, every one.
They were boys all, and gentlemen all. There were college men, artists, poets, musicians, journalists, bohemians all, men from all the lands and one. They understood art. and Poverty was dead. And perhaps the old mate would say slyly, but with a sad, quiet smile, "'Have you got that bit of straw yet, Tom?' Those old mates had each three pasts behind them, the two they told each other when they became mates, and the one they had shared. And when the visitor had gone by the coach, we noticed that the old man would smoke a lot and think as much. and take great interest in the fire, and be a trifle irritable, perhaps. Those old mates of our father's are, getting few and far between, and only happen along once in a way to keep the old man's memory afresh, as it were.
We met one to-day, and had a yarn with him, and afterwards we got thinking, and somehow begun to wonder whether those ancient friends of ours were, or were not, Better and kinder to their mates than we of the rising generation are to our fathers, and the doubt is painfully on the wrong side.
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8 The Sun-Dog trail 51:09
The Sun Dog Trail by Jack London from Love of Life and Other Stories. Read by John Taylor, SE, MO. December, 2006. Sitka Charlie smoked his pipe and gazed thoughtfully at the Police Gazette illustration on the wall. For half an hour he had been steadily regarding it, and for half an hour I had been slyly watching him. Something else was going on in that mind of his, and whatever it was, I knew it was well worth knowing. He had lived life, and seen things, and performed that prodigy of prodigies, Namely, the turning of his back on his own people, and in, so far as it was possible for an Indian, becoming a white man even in his mental processes. As he phrased it himself, he had come into the warm, sat among us, by our fires, and become one of us.
He had never learned to read, nor write, but his vocabulary was remarkable. And more remarkable still was the completeness with which he had assumed the white man's point of view, the white man's attitude towards things.
We had struck this deserted cabin after a hard day on trail. The dogs had been fed, the supper dishes washed, the beds made, and we were now enjoying that most delicious hour that comes each day, and but once each day on the Alaskan trail, the hour when nothing intervenes between the tired body and bed Save the smoking of the evening pipe.
Some former denizen of the cabin had decorated its walls with illustrations torn from magazines and newspapers, and it was these illustrations that had held Sitka Charlie's attention from the moment of our arrival two hours before. He had studied them intently, ranging from one to another and back again, and I could see that there was uncertainty in his mind and bepuzzlement. Well? I finally broke the silence. He took the pipe from his mouth and said simply, "'I do not understand.' He smoked on again, and again removed the pipe, using it to point at the Police Gazette illustration. "'That picture—what does it mean? I do not understand.' A man with a preposterously wicked face, his right hand pressed dramatically to his heart, was falling backward to the floor.
Confronting him with a face that was a composite of destroying Angel and Adonis was a man holding a smoking revolver. One man is killing the other man, I said, aware of a distinct bepuzzlement of my own, and of failure to explain. Why? asked Sitka Charlie. I do not know, I confessed. That picture is all end, he said. It has no beginning. It is life, I said. Life has beginning, he objected. I was silenced for the moment, while his eyes wandered on to an adjoining decoration, a photographic reproduction of somebody's Lita and the Swan. That picture, he said, has no beginning. It has no end. I do not understand pictures. Look at that picture," I commanded, pointing to a third decoration. It means something.
Tell me what it means to you. He studied it for several minutes. The little girl is sick, he said finally. That is the doctor looking at her. They have been up all night. See, the oil is low in the lamp. The first morning light is coming in at the window. It is a great sickness. Maybe she will die. That is why the doctor looks so hard. That is the mother. It is a great sickness, because the mother's head is on the table and she is crying. "'How do you know she is crying?' I interrupted. "'You cannot see her face. Perhaps she is asleep.' Sitka Charlie looked at me in swift surprise, then back at the picture. It was evident that he had not reasoned the impression. "'Perhaps she is asleep,' he repeated.
He studied it closely. No, she is not asleep. The shoulders show that she is not asleep. I have seen the shoulders of a woman who cried. The mother is crying. It is a very great sickness. And now you understand the picture, I cried. He shook his head and asked. The little girl. Does it die? It was my turn for silence. Does it die? He reiterated. You are a painter, man. Maybe you know. No, I do not know, I confessed. It is not life, he delivered himself dogmatically. In life, little girl die or get well. Something happen in life. In picture, nothing happen. No, I do not understand pictures. His disappointment was patent. It was his desire to understand all things that white men understand, And here, in this matter, he failed.
I felt, also, that there was challenge in his attitude. He was bent upon compelling me to show him the wisdom of pictures. Besides, he had remarkable powers of visualization. I had long since learned this. He visualized everything. He saw life in pictures, felt life in pictures, generalized life in pictures, and yet He did not understand pictures when seen through other men's eyes and expressed by those men with color and line upon canvas. Pictures are bits of life, I said. We paint life as we see it. For instance, Charlie, you are coming along the trail. It is night. You see a cabin. The window is lighted. You look through the window for one second, or for two seconds. You see something, and you go on your way.
You saw maybe a man writing a letter. You saw something without beginning or end. Nothing happened. Yet it was a bit of life you saw. You remember it afterward. It is like a picture in your memory. The window is the frame of the picture. I could see that he was interested, and I knew that as I spoke he had looked through the window and seen the man writing the letter. "'There is a picture you have painted that I understand,' he said. "'It is a true picture. It has much meaning. It is in your cabin at Dawson. It is a faro-table. There are men playing. It is a large game. The limit is off.' "'How do you know the limit is off?' I broke in excitedly. For here was where my work could be tried out on an unbiased judge who knew life only, and not art, and who was a sheer master of reality.
Also, I was very proud of that particular piece of work. I had named it The Last Turn, and I believed it to be one of the best things I had ever done. There are no chips on the table, Sitka Charlie explained. The men are playing with markers. That means the roof is the limit. One man play yellow markers. Maybe one yellow marker worth $1,000, maybe $2,000. One man play red markers. Maybe they are worth $500, maybe $1,000. It is a very big game. Everybody play very high, up to the roof. How do I know? You make the dealer with blood a little bit warm in his face. I was delighted. The lookout. You make him lean forward in his chair. Why he leaned forward? Why his face very much quiet? Why his eyes very much bright?
Why dealer warm with blood a little bit in the face? Why all men very quiet? The man with yellow markers? The man with white markers? The man with red markers? Why nobody talk? Because very much money. Because last turn. How do you know it is the last turn? I asked. The king is coppered. The seven is played open, he answered. Nobody bet on other cards. Other cards all gone. Everybody one mind. Everybody play king to lose, seven to win. Maybe bank lose twenty thousand dollars. Maybe bank win. Yes, that picture I understand. Yet you do not know the end, I cried triumphantly. It is the last turn, but the cards are not yet turned. In the picture they will never be turned. Nobody will ever know who wins nor who loses.
And the men will sit there and never talk, he said, wonder and awe growing in his face, and the lookout will lean forward, and the blood will be warm in the face of the dealer. It is a strange thing. Always will they sit there, always, and the cards will never be turned. It is a picture, I said. It is life. You have seen things like it yourself. He looked at me and pondered. then said very slowly, "'No, as you say, there is no end to it. Nobody will ever know the end. Yet it is a true thing. I have seen it. It is life.' For a long time he smoked on in silence, weighing the pictorial wisdom of the white man and verifying it by the facts of life. He nodded his head several times, and grunted once or twice.
Then he knocked the ashes from his pipe, carefully refilled it, and after a thoughtful pause lighted it again. "'Then have I, too, seen many pictures of life,' he began. "'Pictures not painted, but seen with the eyes. I have looked at them like through the window at the man writing the letter. I have seen many pieces of life, without beginning, without end, without understanding.' With a sudden change of position, he turned his eyes full upon me and regarded me thoughtfully. "'Look you,' he said. "'You are a painter-man. How would you paint this, which I saw, a picture without beginning, the ending of which I do not understand, a piece of life, with the northern lights for a candle and Alaska for a frame?' "'It is a large canvas,' I murmured.
But he ignored me. For the picture he had in mind was before his eyes, and he was seeing it. There are many names for this picture, he said. But in the picture there are many sun-dogs, and it comes into my mind to call it the Sun-Dog Trail. It was a long time ago, seven years ago, the fall of ninety-seven, when I saw the woman first time. At Lake Linderman I had one canoe, very good Peterborough canoe. I came over Chilkoot Pass with good Peterborough canoe. I came over Chilkoot Pass with two thousand letters for Dawson. I was letter carrier. Everybody rushed to Klondike at that time. Many people on trail. Many people chop down trees and make boats. Last water, snow in the air, snow on the ground, ice on the lake, on the river, ice in the yetis.
Every day, more snow, more ice. Maybe one day, maybe three days, maybe six days, any day, maybe freeze up come. Then no more water, all ice. Everybody walk. Dawson, six hundred miles, long time walk. Boat go very quick. Everybody want to go boat. Everybody say, Charlie, two hundred dollars, you take me in canoe. Charlie, three hundred dollars. Charlie, four hundred dollars. I say no, all the time I say no. I am letter-carrier. In morning I get to Lake Linderman. I walk all night and am much tired. I cook breakfast, I eat, then I sleep on the beach three hours. I wake up. It is ten o'clock. Snow is falling. There is wind, much wind that blows fair. Also, there is a woman who sits in the snow alongside.
She is white woman. She is young. Very pretty. Maybe she is twenty years old, maybe twenty-five years old. She look at me. I look at her. She is very tired. She is no dance woman. I see that right away. She is good woman, and she is very tired. You are Sitka Charlie, she says. I get up quick and roll blankets so snow does not get inside. I go to Dawson, she says. I go in your canoe. How much? I do not want anybody in my canoe. I do not like to say no. So I say, one thousand dollars. Just for fun, I say it, so a woman cannot come with me. Much better than say no. She look at me very hard. Then she says, when you start? I say, right away. Then she says, all right. She will give me one thousand dollars.
What can I say? I do not want the woman, yet I have given my word that for one thousand dollars she can come. I am surprised. Maybe she make fun, too, so I say, let me see thousand dollars. And that woman, that young woman, all alone on the trail, there in the snow, she takes out one thousand dollars in greenbacks, and she put them in my hand. I look at money. I look at her. What can I say? I say, No, my canoe very small. There is no room for outfit. She laughed. She says, I am great traveler. This is my outfit. She kick one small pack in the snow. It is two fur robes, canvas outside, some woman's clothes inside. I pick it up. Maybe thirty-five pounds. I am surprised. She take it away from me.
She says, Come, let us start. She carries pack into canoe. What can I say? I put my blankets into canoe. We start. And that is the way I saw the woman first time. The wind was fair. I put up small sail. The canoe went very fast. It flew like a bird over the high waves. The woman was much afraid. What for you come Klondike much afraid, I ask? She laugh at me, a hard laugh, but she is still much afraid. Also she is very tired. I run canoe through rapids to Lake Bennett. Water very bad, and women cry out because she is afraid. We go down Lake Bennett. Snow, ice, wind like a gale, but women is very tired and go to sleep. That night we camp at Windy Arm. Women sit by fire and eat supper. I look at her.
She is pretty. She fix hair. There is much hair, and it is brown. Also, sometimes it is like gold in the firelight, when she turn her head so, and flashes come from it like golden fire. The eyes are large and brown, sometimes warm like a candle behind a curtain, sometimes very hard and bright like broken ice when sun shines upon it. When she smile—how can I say? When she smile—I know white man like to kiss her. Just like that, when she smile. She never do hard work. Her hands are soft like baby's hand. She is soft all over like baby. She is not thin, but round like baby. Her arm, her leg, her muscles, all soft and round like baby. Her waist is small, and when she stand up, when she walk, or move her head or arm, it is—I do not know the word— But it is nice to look at, like—maybe I can say she is built on lines like the lines of a good canoe, just like that, and when she move she is like the movement of the good canoe sliding through still water, or leaping through water when it is white and fast and angry.
It is very good to see. Why does she come into Klondike all alone, with plenty of money? I do not know. Next day I ask her. She laughs and says, Sitka, Charlie, that is none of your business. I give you one thousand dollars. Take me to Dawson. That only is your business. Next day, after that, I ask her what is her name. She laughs, then she says, Mary Jones. That is my name. I do not know her name, but I know all the time that Mary Jones is not her name. It is very cold in Canoe, and because of cold sometimes she not feel good. Sometimes she feel good, and she sing. Her voice is like a silver bell, and I feel good all over, like when I go into church at Holy Cross Mission, and when she sing I feel strong and paddle like hell.
Then she laugh and says, You think we get to Dawson before frees up Charlie? Sometimes she sit in Canoe and is thinking far away, her eyes like that. All empty. She does not see Sitka Charlie, nor the ice, nor the snow. She is far away. Very often she is like that, thinking far away. Sometimes, when she is thinking far away, her face is not good to see. It looks like a face that is angry, like the face of one man when he went to kill another man. Last day to Dawson. Very bad. Shore ice in all the eddies. Mush ice in the stream. I cannot paddle. The canoe freezes to ice. I cannot get to shore. There is much danger. All the time we go down Yukon in the ice. That night there is much noise of ice.
Then I stop. Canoe stop. Everything stop. Let us go to shore, the woman says. I say no better wait. By and by, everything start downstream again. There is much snow. I cannot see. At eleven o'clock at night, everything stop. At one o'clock, everything start again. At three o'clock, everything stop. Canoe is smashed like eggshell, but is on top of ice and cannot sink. I hear dogs howling. We wait. We sleep. By and by morning come. There is no more snow. It is the freeze-up, and there is Dawson. Canoe smash and stop. Right at Dawson. Sitka Charlie has come in with two thousand letters on very last water.
The woman rent a cabin on the hill, and for one week I see her no more. Then one day she come to me. Charlie, she says, how do you like to work for me? You drive dogs, make camp, travel with me. I say that I make too much money carrying letters. She says, Charlie, I will pay you more money. I tell her that pick and shovel man get $15 a day in the mines. She says, "'That is $450 a month.' And I say, "'Sitka Charlie is no pick and shovel man.' Then she says, "'I understand, Charlie. I will give you $750 each month. It is a good price, and I go to work for her.' I buy for her dogs and sled. We travel up Klondike, up Bonanza and Eldorado, over to Indian River, to Sulphur Creek, to Dominion, back across Divide to Gold Bottom, and to Too Much Gold, and back to Dawson.
All the time she looked for something. I do not know what. I am puzzled. What thing you look for, I ask? She laugh. You look for gold, I ask. She laugh. Then she says, That is none of your business, Charlie. And after that, I never ask any more. She has a small revolver which she carries in her belt. Sometimes on trail she makes practice with revolver. I laugh. What for you laugh, Charlie, she asked. What for you play with that, I say? It is no good. It is too small. It is for a child, a little plaything. When we get back to Dawson, she asks me to buy a good revolver for her. I buy a Colts Forty-Four. It is very heavy, but she carry it in her belt all the time. At Dawson comes the man. Which way he come I do not know.
Only do I know he is Chekka Quo, what you call Tenderfoot. His hands are soft, just like hers. He never do hard work. He is soft all over. At first, I think, maybe he is her husband, but he is too young. Also, they make two beds at night. He is maybe twenty years old. His eyes blue, his hair yellow, he has a little mustache, which is yellow. His name is John Jones. Maybe he is her brother. I do not know. I ask questions no more. Only I think his name not John Jones. Other people call him Mr. Gurvan. I do not think that is his name. I do not think her name is Miss Gurvan, which other people call her. I think nobody know their names. One night I am asleep at Dawson. He wake me up. He says, Get the dogs ready.
We start. No more do I ask questions. So I get the dogs ready, and we start. We go down the Yukon. It is nighttime. It is November, and it is very cold. Sixty-five below. She is soft. He is soft. The cold bites. They get tired. They cry under their breaths to themselves. By and by, I say, better we stop and make camp, but they say that they will go on. Three times, I say, better to make camp and rest, but each time they say they will go on. After that, I say nothing. All the time, day after day, is it that way. They are very soft. They get stiff and sore. They do not understand moccasins, and their feet hurt very much. They limp. They stagger like drunken people. They cry under their breaths, and all the time they say, On!
On! We will go on! They are like crazy people. All the time do they go on, and on. Why do they go on? I do not know. Only do they go on. What are they after? I do not know. They are not after gold. There is no stampede. Besides, they spend plenty of money. But I ask questions no more. I, too, go on and on, because I am strong on the trail, and because I am greatly paid. We make Circle City. That for which they look is not there. I think now that we will rest, and rest the dogs. But we do not rest. Not for one day do we rest. Come," says the woman to the man, let us go on. And we go on. We leave the Yukon. We cross the divide to the west. and swing down into Tanana country. There are new diggings there, but that for which they look is not there, and we take the back trail to Circle City.
It is a hard journey. December is most gone. The days are short. It is very cold. One morning it is seventy below zero. Better that we don't travel to-day, I say. Else will the frost be unwarmed in the breathing and bite all the edges of our lungs. After that we will have bad cough, and maybe next spring will come pneumonia. But they are Chekka Quo. They do not understand the trail. They are like dead people, they are so tired. But they say, Let us go on. We go on. The frost bites their lungs, and they get the dry cough. They cough till the tears run down their cheeks. When bacon is frying, they must run away from the fire and cough half an hour in the snow. They freeze their cheeks a little bit, so that the skin turns black and is very sore.
Also, the man freezes his thumb till the end is like to come off, and he must wear a large thumb on his mitten to keep it warm. And sometimes, when the frost bites hard and the thumb is very cold, he must take off the mitten and put the hand between his legs next to the skin so that the thumb may get warm again. We limp into Circle City, and even I, Sitka Charlie, am tired. It is Christmas Eve. I dance, drink, make a good time, for tomorrow is Christmas Day, and we will rest. But no, it is five o'clock in the morning, Christmas morning. I am two hours asleep. The man, stand by my bed. Come, Charlie, he says, harness the dogs. We start.
Have I not said that I ask questions no more? They pay me seven hundred and fifty dollars each month. They are my masters. I am their man. If they say, Charlie, come, let us start for Hell, I will harness the dogs, and snap the whip, and start for Hell. So I harness the dogs, and we start down the Yukon. Where do we go? They do not say. Only do they say, On, on, we will go on. They are very weary. They have traveled many hundreds of miles, and they do not understand the way of the trail. Besides, their cough is very bad, the dry cough that makes strong men swear and weak men cry. But they go on. Every day they go on. Never do they rest the dogs. Always do they buy new dogs. At every camp, at every post, at every Indian village do they cut out the tired dogs and put in fresh dogs.
They have spent much money, money without end, and like water they spend it. They are crazy? Sometimes I think so, for there is a devil in them that drives them on and on, always on. What is it that they try to find? It is not gold. Never do they dig in the ground. I think a long time. Then I think it is a man they try to find. But what man? Never do we see the man. Yet they are like wolves on the trail of the kill. But they are funny wolves, soft wolves, baby wolves who do not understand the way of the trail. They cry aloud in their sleep at night. In their sleep they moan and groan with the pain of their weariness, and in the day, as they stagger along the trail, they cry under their breaths.
They are funny wolves. We pass Fort Yukon. We pass Fort Hamilton. We pass Minook. January has come and nearly gone. The days are very short. At nine o'clock comes daylight, at three o'clock comes night, and it is cold. And even I, Sitka Charlie, am tired. Will we go on forever this way without end? I do not know, but always do I look along the trail for that which they try to find. There are few people on the trail. Sometimes we travel one hundred miles and never see a sign of life. It is very quiet. There is no sound. Sometimes it snows, and we are like wandering ghosts. Sometimes it is clear, and at midday the sun looks at us for a moment over the hills to the south, the northern lights flame in the sky, and the sun-dogs dance, and the air is filled with frost dust.
I am Sitka Charlie, a strong man. I was born on the trail, and all my days have I lived on the trail. And yet have these two baby wolves made me very tired. I am lean like a starving cat, and I am glad of my bed at night, and in the morning I am greatly weary. Yet ever are we hitting the trail in the dark before daylight, and still on the trail does the dark after nightfall find us. These two baby wolves. If I am lean like a starved cat, they are lean like cats that have never eaten and have died. Their eyes are sunk deep in their heads, bright sometimes as with fever. Dim and cloudy sometimes, like the eyes of the dead. Their cheeks are hollow like caves in a cliff. Also are their cheeks black and raw from many freezings.
Sometimes it is the woman in the morning who says, I cannot get up, I cannot move, let me die. And it is the man who stands beside her and says, Come, let us go on, and they go on. And sometimes it is the man who cannot get up, and the woman says, Come. Let us go on. But the one thing they do, and always do, is to go on. Always do they go on.
Sometimes at the trading posts the man and woman get letters. I do not know what is in the letters, but it is the scent that they follow. These letters themselves are the scent. One time an Indian gives them a letter. I talk with him privately. He says it is a man with one eye who gives him the letter. A man who travels fast down the Yukon. That is all. But I know that the baby wolves are after the man with the one eye. It is February, and we have traveled fifteen hundred miles. We are getting near Bering Sea, and there are storms and blizzards. The going is hard. We come to Anvig. I do not know, but I think sure they get a letter at Anvig, for they are much excited, and they say, Come, hurry, let us go on.
But I say we must buy grub, and they say we must travel light and fast. Also they say that we can get grub at Charlie McKeon's cabin. Then do I know that they take the big cut off, for it is there that Charlie McKeon lives where the black rock stands by the trail.
Before we start, I talk maybe two minutes with the priest at Anvig. Yes, there is a man with one eye who has gone by and who travels fast. And I know that for which they look is the man with the one eye. We leave Anvig with little grub, and travel light and fast. There are three fresh dogs bought in Anvig, and we travel very fast. The man and woman are like mad. We start earlier in the morning. We travel later at night. I look sometimes to see them die, these two baby wolves. But they will not die. They go on and on. When the dry cough take hold of them, hard, they hold their hands against their stomach and double up in the snow and cough and cough and cough. They cannot walk. They cannot talk.
Maybe for ten minutes they cough, maybe for half an hour. And then they straighten up, the tears from the coughing frozen on their faces, and the words they say are, Come, let us go on. Even I, Sitka Charlie, am greatly weary. And I think seven hundred and fifty dollars is a cheap price for the labor I do. We take the big cut off, and the trail is fresh. The baby wolves have their noses down to the trail, and they say, Hurry! All the time do they say, Hurry! Faster! Faster! It is hard on the dogs. We have not much food, and we cannot give them enough to eat, and they grow weak. Also, they must work hard. The woman has true sorrow for them, and often because of them the tears are in her eyes, but the devil in her that drives her on will not let her stop and rest the dogs.
And then when we come upon the man with the one eye, he is in the snow by the trail, and his leg is broken. Because of the leg he has made a poor camp, and has been lying on his blankets for three days and keeping a fire going. When we find him he is swearing, he swears like hell, Never have I heard a man swear like that man. I am glad. Now that they have found that for which they look, we will have rest. But the woman says, Let us start. Hurry. I am surprised. But the man with one eye says, Never mind me. Give me your grub. You will get more grub at Macian's cabin tomorrow. Send Macian back for me. But do you go on? Here is another wolf. An old wolf, and he too thinks but the one thought, to go on.
So we give him our grub, which is not much, and we chop wood for his fire, and we take his strongest dogs and go on. We left the man with the one eye there in the snow, and he died there in the snow, for Macian never went back for him. And who that man was, and why he came to be there, I do not know. But I think he was greatly paid by the man and the woman, like me, to do their work for them. That day and the next night we had nothing to eat, and all next day we travelled fast, and we were weak with hunger. Then we came to the black rock, which rose five hundred feet above the trail. It was at the end of the day. Darkness was coming, and we could not find the cabin of Macian. We slept hungry, and in the morning looked for the cabin.
It was not there, which was a strange thing, for everybody knew that Macian lived in a cabin at Black Rock. We were near to the coast, where the wind blows hard and there is much snow. Everywhere there were small hills of snow where the wind had piled it up. I have a thought, and I dig in one and another of the hills of snow. Soon I find the walls of the cabin, and I dig down to the door. I go inside. Macian is dead. Maybe two or three weeks he is dead. A sickness had come upon him so that he could not leave the cabin. The wind and the snow had covered the cabin. He had eaten his grub and died. I looked for his cash, but there was no grub in it. Let us go on, said the woman. Her eyes were hungry, and her hand was upon her heart, as with the hurt of something inside.
She bent back and forth like a tree in the wind as she stood there. Yes, let us go on, said the man. His voice was hollow, like the clonk of an old raven, and he was hunger-mad. His eyes were like live coals of fire, and as his body rocked to and fro, so rocked his soul inside. And I, too, said, let us go on. For that one thought laid upon me like a lash, for every mile of fifteen hundred miles had burned itself into my soul, And I think that I, too, was mad. Besides, we could only go on, for there was no grub, and we went on, giving no thought to the man with the one eye in the snow. There is little travel on the big cut-off. Sometimes two or three months, and nobody goes by. The snow had covered the trail, and there was no sign that men had ever come or gone that way.
All day the wind blew, and the snow fell, and all day we traveled, while our stomachs gnawed their desire, and our bodies grew weaker with every step they took. Then the woman began to fall, then the man. I did not fall, but my feet were heavy, and I caught my toes and stumbled many times. That night is the end of February. I kill three ptarmigan with the woman's revolver, and we are made somewhat strong again. But the dogs have nothing to eat. They try to eat their harness, which is of leather and walrus-hide, and I must fight them off with a club and hang all the harness in a tree, and all night they howl and fight around that tree. But we do not mind. We sleep like dead people, and in the morning we get up like dead people out of their graves and go on along the trail.
That morning is the first of March, and on that morning I see the first sign of that after which the baby wolves are in search. It is clear weather and cold. The sun stay longer in the sky, and there are sun-dogs flashing on either side, and the air is bright with frost dust. The snow falls no more upon the trail, and I see the fresh sign of dogs and sled. There is one man with that outfit, and I see in the snow that he is not strong. He, too, has not enough to eat. The young wolves see the fresh sign, too, and they are much excited. Hurry, they say. All the time they say, hurry. Faster, Charlie, faster. We make hurry very slow. All the time the man and the woman fall down. When they try to ride on the sled, the dogs are too weak, and the dogs fall down.
Besides, it is so cold that if they ride on the sled they will freeze. It is very easy for a hungry man to freeze. When the woman fall down, the man help her up. Sometimes the woman help the man up. By and by. Both fall down and cannot get up, and I must help them up all the time, else they will not get up and will die there in the snow. This is very hard work, for I am greatly weary, and as well I must drive the dogs, and the man and woman are very heavy with no strength in their bodies. So, by and by, I too fall down in the snow, and there is no one to help me up. I must get up by myself. And always do I get up by myself, and help them up, and make the dogs go on. That night I got one ptarmigan, and we are very hungry.
And that night the man says to me, What time start tomorrow, Charlie? It is like the voice of a ghost. I say, All the time you make start at five o'clock. Tomorrow, he says, we will start at three o'clock. I laugh in great bitterness, and I say, You are a dead man, and he says, Tomorrow we will start at three o'clock. And we start at three o'clock, for I am their man, and that which they say is to be done, I do. It is clear and cold, and there is no wind. When the daylight comes, we can see a long way off, and it is very quiet. We can hear no sound but the beat of our hearts, and in the silence that is a very loud sound. We are like sleepwalkers, and we walk in dreams until we fall down, and then we know we must get up, and we see the trail once more and bear the beating of our hearts.
Sometimes, when I am walking in dreams this way, I have strange thoughts. Why does Sitka Charlie live? I ask myself. Why does Sitka Charlie work hard and go hungry and have all this pain? For seven hundred and fifty dollars a month, I make the answer. And I know it is a foolish answer. Also is it a true answer. And after that never again do I care for money. For that day a large wisdom came to me. There was a great light, and I saw clear, and I knew that it was not for money that a man must live, but for a happiness that no man can give, or buy, or sell, and that is beyond all value of all money in the world. In the morning we come upon the last-night camp of the man who is before us. It is a poor camp, the kind a man makes who is hungry and without strength.
On the snow there are pieces of blanket and of canvas, and I know what has happened. His dogs have eaten their harness, and he has made new harness out of his blankets. The man and woman stare hard at what is to be seen. And as I look at them, my back feels the chill as of a cold wind against the skin. Their eyes are toil-mad and hunger-mad, and burn like fire deep in their heads. Their faces are like the faces of people who have died of hunger, and their cheeks are black with the dead flesh of many freezings. "'Let us go on,' says the man. But the woman coughs and falls in the snow. It is the dry cough where the frost has bitten the lungs. For a long time she coughs. Then, like a woman crawling out of her grave, she crawls to her feet.
The tears are ice upon her cheeks, and her breath makes a noise as it comes and goes, and she says, Let us go on.
We go on, and we walk in dreams through the silence, and every time we walk is a dream, and we are without pain, and every time we fall down is an awakening, and we see the snow, and the mountains, and the fresh trail of the man who is before us, and we know all our pain again. We come to where we can see a long way over the snow, and that for which they look is before them. A mile away there are black spots upon the snow. The black spots move. My eyes are dim, and I must stiffen my soul to see. And I see one man, with dogs and a sled. The baby wolves see too. They can no longer talk, but they whisper, On, on, let us hurry. And they fall down, but they go on. The man who is before us, his blanket harness breaks often, and he must stop and mend it.
Our harness is good, for I have hung it in trees each night. At eleven o'clock the man is half a mile away. At one o'clock he is a quarter of a mile away. He is very weak. We see him fall down many times in the snow. One of his dogs can no longer travel, and he cuts it out of the harness. But he does not kill it. I kill it with the axe as I go by, as I kill one of my dogs which loses its legs and can travel no more. Now we are three hundred yards away. We go very slow. Maybe in two, three hours we go one mile. We do not walk. All the time we fall down. We stand up and stagger two steps, maybe three steps, then we fall down again. And all the time I must help up the man and woman. Sometimes they rise to their knees and fall forward, maybe four or five times before they can get to their feet again and stagger two or three steps and fall.
But always do they fall forward. Standing or kneeling, always do they fall forward, gaining on the trail each time by the length of their bodies. Sometimes they crawl on hands and knees like animals that live in the forest. We go like snails, like snails that are dying we go so slow. And yet we go faster than the man who is before us, for he, too, falls all the time. And there is no Sitka Charlie lift him up. Now he is two hundred yards away. After a long time he is one hundred yards away. It is a funny sight. I want to laugh out loud. Ha, ha, ha! Just like that. It is so funny. It is a race of dead men and dead dogs. It is like in a dream when you have a nightmare and run away very fast for your life and go very slow.
The man who is with me is mad. The woman is mad. I am mad. All the world is mad, and I want to laugh. It is so very funny. The stranger man who is before us leaves his dogs behind and goes on alone across the snow. After a long time we come to the dogs. They lie helpless in the snow, their harness of blanket and canvas on them, the sled behind them, and as we pass them they whine to us and cry like babies that are hungry. Then we, too, leave our dogs and go on alone across the snow. The man and woman are nearly gone, and they moan and groan and sob, but they go on. I, too, go on. I have but one thought. It is to come up to the stranger man. Then it is that I shall rest, and not until then shall I rest, and it seems that I must lie down and sleep for a thousand years.
I am so tired. The stranger man is fifty yards away, all alone in the white snow. He falls and crawls, staggers and falls, and crawls again. He is like an animal that is sore wounded and trying to run from the hunter. By and by he crawls on hands and knees. He no longer stands up, and the man and woman no longer stand up. They, too, crawl after him on hands and knees. But I stand up. Sometimes I fall, but always do I stand up again. It is a strange thing to see. All about is the snow and the silence, and through it crawl the man and the woman and the stranger man who goes before. On either side the sun are sun-dogs, so that there are three suns in the sky. The frost dust is like the dust of diamonds, and all the air is filled with it.
Now the woman coughs and lies still in the snow until the fit has passed, when she crawls on again. Now the man looks ahead, and he is bleary-eyed as with old age, and must rub his eyes so that he can see the stranger man. And now the stranger man looks back over his shoulder, and Sitka Charlie, standing upright, maybe falls down and stands upright again. After a long time the stranger man crawls no more. He stands slowly upon his feet and rocks back and forth. Also does he take off one mitten and wait with the revolver in his hand, rocking back and forth as he waits. His face is skin and bones and frozen black. It is a hungry face. The eyes are deep sunk in his head, and the lips are snarling.
The man and woman, too, get upon their feet, and they go toward him very slowly. And all about is the snow and the silence, and in the sky are three suns, and all the air is flashing with the dust of diamonds. And thus it was that I, Sitka Charlie, saw the baby wolves make their kill. No word is spoken. Only does the stranger man snarl with his hungry face. Also does he rock to and fro, his shoulders drooping, his knees bent, and his legs wide apart so that he does not fall down. The man and woman stop maybe fifty feet away. Their legs, too, are wide apart so they do not fall down, and their bodies rock to and fro. The stranger man is very weak. His arms shake so that when he shoots at the man, his bullet strikes in the snow.
The man cannot take off his mitten. The stranger man shoots at him again, and this time the bullet goes by in the air. Then the man takes the mitten in his teeth and pulls it off. But his hand is frozen, and he cannot hold the revolver, and it falls in the snow. I look at the woman. Her mitten is off, and the big colt's revolver is in her hand. Three times she shoot, quick, just like that. The hungry face of the stranger man is still snarling as he falls forward into the snow. They do not look at the dead man. Let us go on, they say, and we go on. But now that they have found that for which they look, they are like dead. The last strength has gone out of them. They can stand no more upon their feet.
They will not crawl, but desire only to close their eyes and sleep. I see not far away a place for camp. I kick them. I have my dog-whip, and I give them the lash of it. They cry aloud, but they must crawl, and they do crawl to the place for camp. I build fire so that they will not freeze. Then I go back for sled. Also I kill the dogs of the stranger man so that we have food and not die. I put the man and woman in blankets, and they sleep. Sometimes I wake them and give them a little bit of food. They are not awake, but they take the food. The woman sleep one day and a half. Then she wake up and go to sleep again. The man sleep two days and wake up and go to sleep again. After that, we go down to the coast at St.
Michael's, and when the ice goes out of Bering Sea, the man and woman go away on a steamship. But first they pay me my seven hundred and fifty dollars a month. Also, they make me a present of one thousand dollars. And that was the year that Sitka Charlie gave much money to the mission at Holy Cross. But why did they kill the man, I asked? Sitka Charlie delayed reply until he had lighted his pipe. He glanced at the Police Gazette illustration, and nodded his head at it familiarly. Then he said, speaking slowly and pondering, "'I have thought much. I do not know. It is something that happened. It is a picture I remember. It is like looking in at the window and seeing the man writing a letter. They came into my life, and they went out of my life, and the picture is, as I have said, without beginning and without understanding.
You have painted many pictures in the telling,' I said. Aye, he nodded his head, but they were without beginning and without end. The last picture of all had an end, I said. Aye, he answered. But what end? It was a piece of life, I said. Aye, he answered. It was a piece of life.
The End of the Sundog Trail by Jack London from Love of Life and Other Stories Read by John Taylor Southeast Missouri. December 2006.
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9 Under the Knife 34:59
Under the Knife by H. G. Wells.
What if I die under it? The thought recurred again and again as I walked home from Haddon's. It was a purely personal question. I was spared the deep anxieties of a married man, and I knew there were few of my intimate friends but would find my death troublesome, chiefly on account of their duty of regret. I was surprised indeed, and perhaps a little humiliated, as I turned the matter over, to think how few could possibly exceed the conventional requirement. Things came before me stripped of glamour in a clear, dry light. during that walk from Haddon's house over Primrose Hill. There were the friends of my youth. I perceived now that our affection was a tradition, which we foregathered rather laboriously to maintain.
There were the rivals and helpers of my later career. I suppose I had been cold-blooded or undemonstrative. One, perhaps, implies the other. It may be that even the capacity for friendship is a question of physique. There had been a time in my own life when I had grieved bitterly enough at the loss of a friend. But as I walked home that afternoon, the emotional side of my imagination was dormant. I could not pity myself, nor feel sorry for my friends, nor conceive of them as grieving for me.
I was interested in this deadness of my emotional nature, no doubt a concomitant of my stagnating physiology. And my thoughts wandered off along the line it suggested. Once before, in my hot youth, I had suffered a sudden loss of blood, and had been within an ace of death. I remembered now that my affections as well as my passions had drained out of me, leaving scarce anything but a tranquil resignation, a drag of self-pity. It had been weeks before the old ambitions and tenderness and all the complex moral interplay of a man had reasserted themselves. It occurred to me that the real meaning of this numbness might be a gradual slipping away from the pleasure-pain guidance of the animal man. It has been proven, I take it, as thoroughly as anything can be proven in this world, that the higher emotions, the moral feelings, even the subtle unselfishness of love, are evolved from the elemental desires and fears of the simple animal.
They are the harness in which man's mental freedom goes. And it may be that as death overshadows us, as our possibility of acting diminishes, this complex growth of balanced impulse, propensity and aversion, whose inner play inspires our acts, goes with it. Leaving what?
I was suddenly brought back to reality by an imminent collision with the butcher boy's tray. I found that I was crossing the bridge over the Regent's Park Canal, which runs parallel with that in the zoological gardens. The boy in blue had been looking over his shoulder at a black barge advancing slowly, towed by a gaunt white horse. In the gardens, a nurse was leading three happy little children over the bridge. The trees were bright green. The spring hopefulness was still unstained by the dusts of summer. The sky in the water was bright and clear, but broken by long waves. by quivering bands of black as the barge drove through. The breeze was stirring, but it did not stir me as the spring breeze used to do.
Was this dullness of feeling in itself an anticipation? It was curious that I could reason and follow out a network of suggestion as clearly as ever, so at least it seemed to me. It was calmness rather than dullness that was coming upon me. Was there any ground for the relief in the presentiment of death? Did a man near to death begin instinctively to withdraw himself from the meshes of matter and sense, even before the cold hand was laid upon his? I felt strangely isolated, isolated without regret, from the life and existence about me. The children playing in the sun and gathering strength and experience from the business of life—the The park-keeper gossiping with a nursemaid. The nursing mother.
The young couple intent upon each other as they passed me. The trees by the wayside spreading new pleating leaves to the sunlight. The stir in their branches. I had been part of it all, but I had nearly done with it now.
Some way down the broad walk, I perceived that I was tired and that my feet were heavy. It was hot that afternoon, and I turned aside and sat down on one of the green chairs that lined the way. In a minute I had dozed into a dream, and the tide of my thoughts washed up a vision of the resurrection. I was still sitting in the chair, but I thought myself actually dead, withered, tattered, dried, one eye I saw pecked out by birds. "'Awake!' cried a voice. and incontinently the dust of the path and the mould under the grass became insurgent. I had never before thought of Regent's Park as a cemetery, but now, through the trees, stretching as far as I could see, I beheld a flat plain of writhing graves and healing tombstones.
There seemed to be some trouble. The rising dead appeared to stifle as they struggled upward. They bled in their struggles. The red flesh was torn away from the white bones. Awake! cried a voice, but I determined I would not rise to such horrors. Awake! They would not let me alone. Wake up! said an angry voice. A cockney angel! The man who sells the tickets was shaking me, demanding my penny. I paid my penny, pocketed my ticket, yawned, stretched my legs, and, feeling now rather less torpid, got up and walked on toward Langham Place. I speedily lost myself again in a shifting maze of thoughts about death. Going across Marlbone Road into that crescent at the end of Langham Place, I had the narrowest escape from the shaft of a cab, and went on my way with a palpitating heart and a bruised shoulder.
It struck me that it would have been curious if my meditations on my death on the morrow had led to my death that day. But I will not weary you with more of my experiences that day and the next. I knew more and more certainly that I should die under the operation. At times I think I was inclined to pose to myself. The doctors were coming at eleven, and I did not get up. It seemed scarce worth while to trouble about washing and dressing, and though I read my newspapers and the letters that came by the first post, I did not find them very interesting. There was a friendly note from Addison, my old school friend, calling my attention to two discrepancies in a printer's error in my new book, with one from Langbridge venting some vexation over Minton.
The rest were business communications. I breakfasted in bed. The glow of pain at my side seemed more massive. I knew it was pain, and yet, if you can understand, I did not find it very painful. I had been awakened hot and thirsty in the night. But in the morning bed felt comfortable. In the night-time I had lain thinking of things that were past. In the morning I dozed over the question of immortality. Haddon came, punctual to the minute, with a neat black bag. And Mowbray soon followed. Their arrival stirred me up a little. I began to take a more personal interest in the proceedings. Haddon moved the little octagonal table close to the bedside, and with his broad back to me began taking things out of his bag.
I heard the light click of steel upon steel. My imagination, I found, was not altogether stagnant. "'Will you hurt me much?' I said in an offhand tone. "'Not a bit,' Haddon answered over his shoulder. "'We shall chloroform you. Your heart's as sound as a bell.' And as he spoke—' I had a whiff of the pungent sweetness of the anesthetic.
They stretched me out with a convenient exposure of my side, and almost before I realized what was happening, the chloroform was being administered. It stings the nostrils, and there is a suffocating sensation at first. I knew I should die, that this was the end of consciousness for me. And suddenly I felt that I was not prepared for death, I had a vague sense of a duty overlooked. I knew not what. What was it I had not done? I could think of nothing more to do, nothing desirable left in life, and yet I had the strangest disinclination to death. And the physical sensation was painfully oppressive. Of course the doctors did not know they were going to kill me. Possibly I struggled. Then I fell motionless, and a great silence.
A monstrous silence, and an impenetrable blackness came upon me.
There must have been an interval of absolute unconsciousness, seconds or minutes. Then, with a chilly, unemotional clearness, I perceived that I was not yet dead. I was still in my body, but all the multitudinous sensations that come sweeping from it to make up the background of consciousness had gone, leaving me free of it all. No, not free of it all, for as yet something still held me to the poor stark flesh upon the bed, held me, yet not so closely that I did not feel myself external to it, independent of it, straining away from it. I do not think I saw, I do not think I heard, but I perceived all that was going on, and it was as if I both heard and saw. Haddon was bending over me, Mowbray beside me.
The scalpel—it was a large scalpel—was cutting my flesh at the side under the flying ribs. It was interesting to see myself cut like cheese, without a pang, without even a qualm. The interest was much a quality with that one might feel in a game of chess between strangers. Haddon's face was firm and his hands steady, but I was surprised to perceive—how, I know not—that that he was feeling the gravest doubt as to his own wisdom in the conduct of the operation.
Mowbray's thoughts, too, I could see. He was thinking that Haddon's manner showed too much of the specialist. New suggestions came up like bubbles through a stream of frothing meditation, and burst one after another in the little bright spot of his consciousness. He could not help noticing and admiring Haddon's swift dexterity, in spite of his envious quality and his disposition to detract. I saw my liver exposed. I was puzzled at my own condition. I did not feel that I was dead, but I was different in some way from my living self. The gray depression that had weighed on me for a year or more and colored all my thoughts was gone. I perceived and thought without any emotional tint at all. I wondered if everyone perceived things in this way under chloroform, and forgot it again when he came out of it.
It would be inconvenient to look into some heads, and not forget.
Although I did not think that I was dead, I still perceived quite clearly that I was soon to die. This brought me back to the consideration of Haddon's proceedings. I looked into his mind, and saw that he was afraid of cutting a branch of the portal vein. My attention was distracted from details by the curious changes going on in his mind, His consciousness was like the quivering little spot of light which is thrown by the mirror of a galvanometer. His thoughts ran under it like a stream, some through the focus bright and distinct, some shadowy in the half-light of the edge. Just now the little glow was steady, but the least movement on Mowbray's part, the slightest sound from outside, even a faint difference in the slow movement of the living flesh he was cutting, set the light spot shivering and spinning.
A new sense impression came rushing up through the flow of thoughts, and lo, the light spot jerked away towards it, swifter than a frightened fish. It was wonderful to think that upon that unstable, fitful thing depended all the complex motions of the man, that for the next five minutes, therefore, my life hung upon its movements. And he was growing more and more nervous in his work. It was as if a little picture of a cut vein grew brighter, and struggled to oust from his brain another picture of a cut falling short of the mark. He was afraid. His dread of cutting too little was battling with his dread of cutting too far.
Then, suddenly, like an escape of water from under a lock-gate, a great uprush of horrible realization set all his thoughts swirling, and simultaneously I perceived that the vein was cut. He started back with a hoarse exclamation, and I saw the brown-purple blood gather in a swift bead and run trickling. He was horrified. He pitched the red-stained scalpel onto the octagonal table, and instantly both doctors flung themselves upon me, making hasty and ill-conceived efforts to remedy the disaster. Ice! said Mowbray, gasping. But I knew that I was killed, though my body still clung to me.
I will not describe their belated endeavors to save me, though I perceived every detail. My perceptions were sharper and swifter than they had ever been in my life. My thoughts rushed through my mind with incredible swiftness, but with perfect definition. I can only compare their crowded clarity to the effects of a reasonable dose of opium. In a moment it would all be over, and I should be free. I knew I was immortal, But what would happen I did not know. Should I drift off presently like a puff of smoke from a gun, in some kind of half-material body, an attenuated version of my material self? Should I find myself suddenly among the innumerable hosts of the dead, and know the world about me for the phantasmagoria it had always seemed?
Should I drift into some spiritualistic seance, and there make foolish and comprehensible attempts to effect a purblind medium?
It was a state of unemotional curiosity, of colorless expectation. And then I realized a growing stress upon me, a feeling as though some huge human magnet was drawing me upward out of my body. The stress grew and grew. I seemed an atom from which monstrous forces were fighting. For one brief, terrible moment sensation came back to me. That feeling of falling headlong which comes in nightmares, that feeling a thousand times intensified, that and a black horror swept across my thoughts in a torrent. Then the two doctors—the naked body with its cut side, the little room—swept away from under me and vanished, as a speck of foam vanishes down an eddy.
I was in mid-air. Far below was the west end of London, receding rapidly, for I seemed to be flying swiftly upward, and as it receded passing westward like a panorama. I could see, through the faint haze of smoke, the innumerable roofs chimneys set, the narrow roadways stippled with people and conveyances, the little specks of squares, and the church steeples like thorns sticking out of the fabric. But it spun away as the earth rotated on its axis. And in a few seconds, as it seemed, I was over the scattered clumps of town about Ealing, the Little Thames a thread of blue to the south, and the Chiltern Hills and the North Downs coming up like the rim of a basin, far away and faint with haze. Up I rushed, and at first I had not the faintest conception what this headlong rush upward could mean.
Every moment the circle of scenery beneath me grew wider and wider, And the details of town and field, of hill and valley, got more and more hazy and pale and indistinct. A luminous gray was mingled more and more with the blue of the hills and the green of the open meadows. And a little patch of cloud, low and far to the west, shone ever more dazzlingly white. Above, as the veil of atmosphere between myself and outer space grew thinner, the sky, which had been a fair springtime blue at first, grew deeper and richer in color, passing steadily through the intervening shades until presently it was as dark as the blue sky of midnight, and presently as black as the blackness of a frosty starlight, and at last as black as no blackness I had ever beheld.
And first one star, and then many, and at last an innumerable host broke out upon the sky, More stars than anyone has ever seen from the face of the earth. For the blueness of the sky and the light of the sun and stars sifted and spread abroad blindingly. There is diffused light even in the darkest skies of winter, and we do not see the stars by day only because of the dazzling irradiation of the sun. But now I saw things, I know not how, assuredly with no mortal eyes. And that defect of bedazzlement blinded me no longer. The sun was incredibly strange and wonderful. The body of it was a disk of blinding white light, not yellowish as it seems to those who live upon the earth, but livid white, all streaked with scarlet streaks and rimmed about with a fringe of writhing tongues of red fire.
And shooting halfway across the heavens from either side of it, and brighter than the Milky Way, were two pinions of silver-white, Making it more like those winged globes I have seen in Egyptian sculpture than anything else I can remember upon earth. These I knew for the solar corona, though I had never seen anything of it but a picture during the days of my earthly life.
When my attention came back to the earth again, I saw that it had fallen very far from me. Field and town were long since indistinguishable, and all the varied hues of the country were merging into a uniform bright gray, broken only by the brilliant white of the clouds that lay scattered in flocculent masses over Ireland and the west of England. For now I could see the outlines of the north of France and Ireland, and all this island of Britain, save where Scotland passed over the horizon to the north, or where the coast was blurred or obliterated by cloud. The sea was a dull gray and darker than the land, and the whole panorama was rotating slowly towards the east.
All this happened so swiftly that until I was some thousand miles or so from the earth I had no thought for myself. But now I perceived I had neither hands nor feet, neither parts nor organs, and that I felt neither alarm nor pain. All about me I perceived that the vacancy, for I had already left the air behind, was cold beyond the imagination of man. But it troubled me not, the sun's rays shot through the void, Powerless to light or heat until they should strike on matter for their course. I saw things with a serene self-forgetfulness, even as if I were God. And down below there, rushing away from me countless miles in a second, where a little dark spot on the grey marked the position of London, two doctors were struggling to restore life to the poor hacked and outworn shell I had abandoned.
I felt then such release. Such serenity as I can compare to no mortal delight I have ever known. It was only after I had perceived all these things that the meaning of that headlong rush of the earth grew into comprehension. Yet it was so simple, so obvious, that I was amazed at my never anticipating the thing that was happening to me. I had suddenly been cut adrift from matter. All that was material of me was there upon earth, whirling away through space, Held to the earth by gravitation, partaking of earth inertia, moving in its wreath of epicycles round the sun, and with the sun and the planets on their vast march through space. But the immaterial has no inertia, feels nothing of the pull of matter for matter.
Where it parts from its garment of flesh, there it remains, so far as space concerns it any longer, immovable in space. I was not leaving the earth. The earth was leaving me. And not only the earth, but the whole solar system was streaming past. And about me in space, invisible to me, scattered in the wake of the earth upon its journey, there must be an innumerable multitude of souls, stripped like myself of the material, stripped like myself of the passions of the individual and the generous emotions of the gregarious brute. Naked intelligences, things of new-born wonder and thought, marveling at the strange release that had suddenly come on them. As I receded faster and faster from the strange white sun in the black heavens, and from the broad and shining earth upon which my being had begun, I seemed to grow in some incredible manner vast, vast as regards the world I had left, vast as regards the moments and periods of a human life.
Very soon I saw the full circle of the earth, slightly gibbous, like the moon when she nears her full, but very large, And the silvery shape of America was now in the noonday blaze, wherein, as it seemed, little England had been basking but a few minutes ago. At first the earth was large, and shone in the heavens, filling a great part of them. But every moment she grew smaller and more distant. As she shrank, the broad moon in its third quarter crept into view over the rim of her disk. I looked for the constellations. Only that part of Ares, directly behind the sun and the lion, which the earth covered, were hidden. I recognized the tortuous, tattered band of the Milky Way with Vega very bright between Sun and Earth, and Sirius and Orion shone splendid against the unfathomable blackness in the opposite quarter of the heavens.
The pole-star was overhead, and the great bear hung over the circle of the Earth, and the way beneath and beyond the shining corona of the Sun were strange groupings of stars I had never seen in my life. Notably a dagger-shaped group, that I knew for the Southern Cross. All these were no larger than when they had shone on Earth, but the little stars that one scarce sees shone now against the setting of black vacancy as brightly as the first magnitudes had done. While the larger worlds were points of indescribable glory and color, Aldebaran was a spot of blood-red fire, and Sirius condensed to one point the light of innumerable sapphires. And they shone steadily. They did not scintillate. They were calmly glorious.
My impressions had an edamantine hardness and brightness. There was no blurring softness, no atmosphere, nothing but infinite darkness set with the myriads of these acute and brilliant points and specks of light. Presently, when I looked again, the little earth seemed no bigger than the sun, and it dwindled and turned as I looked, until in a second space, as it seemed to me, it was halved, and so it went on swiftly dwindling. Far away in the opposite direction, a little pinkish pin's head of light shining steadily, was the planet Mars. I swam motionless in vacancy, and, without a trace of terror or astonishment, watched the speck of cosmic dust we call the world fall away from me.
Presently it dawned upon me that my sense of duration had changed, that my mind was moving not faster, but infinitely slower. that between each separate impression there was a period of many days. The moon spun once around the earth as I noted this, and I perceived clearly the motion of Mars in his orbit. Moreover, it appeared as if the time between thought and thought grew steadily greater, until at last a thousand years was but a moment in my perception.
At first the constellations had shone motionless against the black background of infinite space. But presently it seemed as though the group of stars about Hercules and the Scorpion was contracting, while Orion and Naldebaron and their neighbors were scattering apart. Flashing suddenly out of the darkness there came a flying multitude of particles of rock, glittering like dust specks in a sunbeam, and encompassed in a faintly luminous cloud. They swirled all about me and vanished again in a twinkling far behind. And then I saw that a bright spot of light, that shone a little to one side of my path, was growing very rapidly larger, and perceived that it was the planet Saturn rushing towards me.
Larger and larger it grew, swallowing up the heavens behind it and hiding every moment a fresh multitude of stars. I perceived its flattened, whirling body, its disk-like belt, and seven of its little satellites. It grew and grew till it towered enormous, and then I plunged amid a streaming multitude of clashing stones and dancing dust particles and gas eddies, and saw for a moment the mighty triple belt like three concentric arches of moonlight above me, its shadow black on the boiling tumult below. These things happened in one-tenth of the time it takes to tell them. The planet went by like a flash of lightning. For a few seconds it blotted out the sun, and there and then became a mere black, dwindling, winged patch against the light.
The earth, the mother-modes of my being, I could no longer see. So with a stately swiftness, in the profoundest silence, the solar system fell from me as it had been a garment, until the sun was a mere star amid the multitude of stars, with its eddy of planet-specks lost in the confused glittering of the remoter light. I was no longer a denizen of the solar system. I had come to the outer universe. I seemed to grasp and comprehend the whole world of matter, Ever more swiftly the stars closed in about the spot where Antares and Vega had vanished in a phosphorescent haze, until that part of the sky had the semblance of a whirling mass of nebulae, and ever before me yawned vaster gaps of vacant blackness, and the stars shone fewer and fewer.
It seemed as if I moved towards a point between Orion's belt and sword, and the void about that region opened vaster and vaster every second, An incredible gulf of nothingness into which I was falling. Faster and ever faster the universe rushed by, a hurry of whirling motes at last, speeding silently into the void. Stars glowing brighter and brighter, with their circling planets catching the light in a ghostly fashion as I neared them, shone out and vanished again into inexistence. Faint comets, clusters of meteorites, winking specks of matter, eddying light points, Whizzed past, some perhaps a hundred millions of miles or so from me at most, few nearer, traveling with unimaginable rapidity, shooting constellations, momentary darts of fire, through that black enormous night.
More than anything else it was like a dusty draught, sunbeam-lit. Broader and wider and deeper grew the starless space, the vacant beyond, into which I was being drawn. At last a quarter of the heavens was black and blank. The whole headlong rush of stellar universe closed in behind me like a veil of light that has gathered together. It drove away from me like a monstrous jack-o'-lantern driven by the wind. I had come out into the wilderness of space. Ever the vacant blackness grew broader until the hosts of the stars seemed only like a swarm of fiery specks hurrying away from me, inconceivably remote, and the darkness, the nothingness and emptiness was about me on every side. Soon the little universe of matter, the cage of points in which I had begun to be, was dwindling, now to a whirling disk of luminous glittering, and now to one minute disk of hazy light.
In a little while it would shrink to a point, and at last would vanish altogether.
Suddenly feeling came back to me, feeling in the shape of overwhelming terror, such a dread of those dark vastitudes as no words can describe, A passionate resurgence of sympathy and social desire. Were there other souls invisible to me as I to them, about me in the blackness? Or was I, indeed, even as I felt, alone? Had I passed out of being into something that was neither being nor not being? The covering of the body, the covering of matter, had been torn from me in the hallucinations of companionship and security. Everything was black and silent. I had ceased to be. I was nothing. There was nothing save only that infinitesimal dot of light that dwindled in the gulf. I strained myself to hear and see, and for a while there was naught but infinite silence, intolerable darkness, horror, and despair.
Then I saw that about the spot of light into which the whole world of matter had shrunk there was a faint glow, And in a band on either side of that the darkness was not absolute. I watched it for ages as it seemed to me, and through the long waiting the haze grew imperceptibly more distinct. And then about the band appeared an irregular cloud of the faintest, palest brown. I felt a passionate impatience, but the things grew brighter so slowly that they scarcely seemed to change. What was unfolding itself What was this strange reddish dawn in the interminable night of space? The cloud's shape was grotesque. It seemed to be looped along its lower side into four projecting masses, and above it ended in a straight line.
What phantom was this? I felt assured I had seen that figure before, but I could not think what, nor where, nor when it was. Then the realization rushed upon me. It was a clenched hand. I was alone in space, alone with this huge, shadowy hand, upon which the whole universe of matter lay like an unconsidered speck of dust. It seemed as though I watched it through vast periods of time. On the forefinger glittered a ring, and the universe from which I had come was but a spot of light upon the ring's curvature. And the thing that the hand gripped had the lightness of a black rod. Through a long eternity I watched this hand, with the ring and the rod, marvelling and fearing and waiting helplessly on what might follow.
It seemed as though nothing could follow, that I should watch for ever, seeing only the hand and the thing it held, and understanding nothing of its import. Was the whole universe but a refracting speck upon some greater being? Were our worlds but the atoms of another universe, and those again of another, and so on through an endless progression. And what was I? Was I indeed immaterial? A vague persuasion of a body gathering about me came into my suspense, the abysmal darkness about the hand filled with impalpable suggestions, with uncertain, fluctuating shapes. Then suddenly came a sound, like the sound of a tolling bell, faint, as if infinitely far, muffled, as though heard through thick swathings of darkness, a deep, vibrating resonance with vast gulfs of silence between each stroke.
And the hand appeared to tighten on the rod. And I saw far above the hand toward the apex of the darkness a circle of dim phosphorescence, a ghostly sphere whence these sounds came throbbing. And at the last stroke the hand vanished, for the hour had come, and I heard a noise of many waters, but the black rod remained as a great band across the sky, and then a voice, which seemed to run to the uttermost parts of space, spoke, saying, There will be no more pain. At that an almost intolerable gladness and radiance rushed in upon me, and I saw the circle shining white and bright, and the rod black and shining, and many things else distinct and clear. And the circle was the face of the clock, and the rod the rail of my bed.
Haddon was standing at the foot, against the rail, with a small pair of scissors on his fingers, and the hands of my clock on the mantle over his shoulder were clasped together over the hour of twelve. Mowbray was washing something in a basin at the octagonal table. And at my side I felt a subdued feeling that could scarce be spoken of as pain. The operation had not killed me, and I perceived, suddenly, that the dull melancholy of half a year was lifted from my mind.
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10 A White Heron 30:17
A White Heron by Sarah Orne-Druett.
The woods were already filled with shadows one June evening, just before eight o'clock. Though a bright sunset still glimmered faintly among the trunks of the trees. A little girl was driving home her cow, a plodding, dilatory, provoking creature in her behavior, but a valued companion for all that. They were going away from whatever light there was, and striking deep into the woods, but their feet were familiar with the path, and it was no matter whether their eyes could see it or not. There was hardly a night this summer, through when the old cow could be found waiting in the pasture bars. On the contrary, it was her greatest pleasure to hide herself away among the huckleberry bushes, and though she wore a loud bell, she had made the discovery that if one stood perfectly still, it would not ring.
So Sylvia had to hunt for her until she found her, and call, Co! Co! with never an answering moo! Till her childish patience was quite spent. If the creature had not given good milk and plenty of it, the case would have seemed very different to her owners. Besides, Sylvia had all the time there was, and very little use to make of it. Sometimes, in pleasant weather, it was a consolation to look upon the cows' pranks as an intelligent attempt to play hide-and-seek. And as the child had no playmate, she lent herself to this amusement with a good deal of zest. Though this chase had been so long that the wary animal herself had given an unusual signal of her whereabouts, Sylvia had only laughed when she came upon Mistress Mouly at the swampside, and urged her affectionately homeward with a twig of birch-leaves.
The old cow was not inclined to wander farther, She even turned in the right direction for once as they left the pasture and stepped along the road at a good pace. She was quite ready to be milked now, and seldom stopped her brows. Sylvia wondered what her grandmother would say because they were so late. It was a great while since she had left home at half-past five o'clock, but everybody knew the difficulty of making this errand a short one. Mrs. Tilly had To chase the horn-tornment too many summer evenings herself, to blame anyone else for lingering, and was only thankful as she waited that she had Sylvia, nowadays, to give such valuable assistance. The good woman suspected that Sylvia had lorded occasionally on her own account.
There never was such a child for straying about out of doors since the world was made. Everybody said that it was a good change for a little maid who had tried to grow for eight years in a crowded manufacturing town. But as for Sylvia herself, it seemed as if she had never been alive at all before she came to live at the farm. She thought often with the wistful compassion of a wretched geranium that belonged to a town neighbor.
Afraid of folks! Old Mrs. Tilly said to herself, with a smile, after she had made the unlikely choice of Sylvia from her daughter's houseful of children, and was returning to the farm, "'Afraid of folks,' they said. "'I guess you won't be troubled no great with them of the old place.' When they reached the door of the lonely house and stopped to unlock it, the cat came to purr loudly and grub against them. A deserted pussy, indeed, but fat with young robins. Sylvia whispered that this was a beautiful place to live in, and she never should wish to go home.
The companions followed the shady wood road, the cow taking slow steps and the child very fast ones. The cows stopped long at the brook to drink, as if the pasture were not half a swanth. And Sylvia stood still and waited, letting her bare feet cool themselves in the shoal water, while the great twilight moth struck softly against her. She waded on through the brook as the cow moved away, and listened to the thrushes with a heart that beat fast with pleasure. There was a stirring in the great boughs overhead. They were full of little birds and beasts that seemed to be wide awake, and going about their world, or else saying good-night to each other in sleepy twitters. Sylvia herself felt sleepy as she walked along.
However, it was not much farther to the house, and the air was soft and sweet. She was not often in the woods so late as this, and it made her feel as if she were part of the gray shadows in the moving leaves. She was just thinking how long it seemed since she first came to the farm a year ago, and wondering if everything went on in the noisy town just the same as when she was there. The thought of the great red-faced boy who used to chase and frighten her made her hurry along the path to escape from the shadows of the trees.
Suddenly this little wits girl is horror-stricken. to hear a clear whistle not very far away. Not a bird's whistle, which would have a sort of friendliness, but a boy's whistle, determined and somewhat aggressive. Sylvia left the cow to whatever sad fate might await her, and stepped discreetly aside into the bushes, but she was just too late. The enemy had discovered her, and called out in a very cheerful and persuasive tone. Hello, little girl. How far is it to the road? And trembling Sylvia answered, almost inaudibly, "'A good ways.'" She did not dare to look boldly at the tall young man who carried a gun over his shoulder, but she came out of her bush and again followed the cow while he walked alongside.
"'I have been hunting for some birds,' the stranger said kindly. "'And I have lost my way, and need a friend very much.' "'Don't be afraid,' he added gallantly. "'Speak up and tell me what your name is, and whether you think I can spend the night at your house, and go out gunning early in the morning.' Sylvia was more alarmed than before. Would not her grandmother consider her much to blame? But who could have foreseen such an accident as this? It did not seem to be her fault, and she hung her head as if the stem of it were broken, but managed to answer, Sylvie, with much effort, when her companion again asked her name.
Mrs. Tilly was standing in the doorway when the trial came into view. The cow could have a loud moo by way of explanation.
Yes, you'd better speak up for yourself, you old trial. Where'd she tucked herself away this time, Sylvie? But Sylvia kept an odd silence. She knew by instinct that her grandmother did not comprehend the gravity of the situation. She must be mistaking the stranger for one of the farmer lads of the region.
The young man stood his gun beside the door. and dropped a lumpy game bag beside it. Then he bade Mrs. Tilly good evening, and repeated his wayfarer's story, and asked if he could have a night's lodging. "'Put me anywhere you like,' he said. "'I must be off early in the morning, before day, but I am very hungry indeed. You can give me some milk at any rate. That's plain.' "'Deer sakes, yes!' Responded the hostess, whose long, slumbering hospitality seemed to be easily awakened. "'You might fare better if you went out to the main road a mile or so, but you're welcome to what we've got. I'll milk right off, and you make yourself at home.' "'You can sleep on husks or feathers,' she proffered graciously.
"'I raise them all myself. There's good pasturing for geese to just blow here towards the marsh.' Now step round and set a plate for the gentleman, Sylvie. And Sylvia promptly stepped. She was glad to have something to do. She was hungry herself.
It was a surprise to find so clean and comfortable a little dwelling in this New England wilderness. The young man had known the horrors of its most primitive housekeeping, and the dreary squalor of that level of society which does not rebel at the companionship of hens. This was the best thrift of an old-fashioned farmstead, though on such a small scale that it seemed like a hermitage. He listened eagerly to the old woman's quaint talk. He watched Sylvia's pale face and shining gray eyes with ever-growing enthusiasm, and insisted that this was the best supper he had eaten for a month. And afterward the new-made friends sat down in the doorway together while the moon came up.
Soon it would be berry time, and Sylvia was a great help at picking. The cow was a good milker, though a plaguey thing to keep track of, post-discussive frankly, adding presently that she had buried four children. So Sylvia's mother and a son, who might be dead, in California were all the children she had left. "'Dan, my boy, was a great hand to go gutting,' she explained sadly. "'I never wondered for partridges or grey squirrels while he was to home. He's been a great wanderer, I expect, and he's no hand to write letters. There, I don't blame him. I'd have seen the world myself if it had been so I could.' "'Sylvie takes after him,' the grandmother continued affectionately. Terminus paused. There ain't a foot o'ground she don't know her way over, and the wild creatures counter one o'er themselves.
Squirrels she'll t'ame to come and feed right out o'er hens, and all sorts o'er birds. Last winter she got the jaybirds to banging here, and I believe she'd have scanted herself of her own meals to have plenty to throw out amongst them, if I hadn't kept watch. Anything but crows, I tell her, I'm willing to help support. Though Dan, he had a tamed one of them that did seem to have reason same as folks. Was round you a good spell after you went away. Dan and his father, they didn't hitch, but he never held up his head again after Dan had dared him and gone off.
The guests did not notice this hint of family sorrows and his eager interest in something else. "'So Sylvie knows all about birds, does she?' he exclaimed as he looked round to the little girl who sat, very demure but increasingly sleepy, in the moonlight. "'I am making a collection of birds myself. I have been at it ever since I was a boy,' Miss Tilly smiled. "'There are two or three very rare ones I have been hunting for these five years. I mean to get them on my own ground if they can be found.' "'Do you cage him up?' asked Mrs. Tilly doubtfully, in response to this enthusiastic announcement. "'Oh, no, they're stuffed and preserved, dozens and dozens of them,' said the ornithologist. "'And I have shot or snared every one myself.
I caught a glimpse of a white heron a few miles from here on Saturday, and I have followed it in this direction.' They have never been found in this district at all. The little white Huron, it is. And he turned again to look at Sylvia, with the hope of discovering that the Garibird was one of her acquaintances.
But Sylvia was watching a hop-toad in the narrow footpath. "'You wouldn't know the Huron if you saw it,' the stranger continued eagerly. A queer, tall white bird, with soft feathers and long, thin legs. And it would have a nest, perhaps, in the top of a high tree, made of sticks, something like a hawk's nest.
Sylvia's heart gave a wild beat. She knew that strange white bird, and had once stolen softly near where it stood in some bright green swamp grass. Away over the other side of the woods. There was an open place, where the sunshine always seemed strangely yellow and hot, where tall, nodding rushes grew, and her grandmother had warned her that she might sink in the soft black mud underneath and never be heard of more. Not far beyond were the salt marshes, just beside the sea itself, which Sylvia wondered and dreamed much about, but never had seen, whose great voice could sometimes be heard above the noise of the woods on stormy nights.
"'I can't think of anything I should like so much as to find that heron's nest,' the handsome stranger was saying. "'I would give ten dollars to anybody who could show it to me,' he added desperately. "'And I mean to spend my whole vacation hunting for it, if need be.' Perhaps it was only migrating, or had been chased out of its own region by some bird of prey.
Mrs. Tilly gave amazed attention to all this, but Sylvia still watched the toad, not divining she might have done in some calmer time that the creature wished to get to its hole under the doorstep, and was much hindered by the unusual spectators at that hour of the evening. No amount of thought that night could decide how many wished-for treasures the Ten Dollars, so lightly spoken of, would buy.
The next day, the young sportsman hovered about the woods, and Sylvia kept him company, Having lost her first fear of the friendly lad, who proved to be most kind and sympathetic, he told her many things about the birds, and what they knew, and where they lived, and what they did with themselves. And he gave her a jackknife, which he thought as great a treasure as if she were a desert islander. All day long he did not once make her troubled or afraid, Except when he brought down some unsuspecting singing creature from its ball. Sylvia would have liked him vastly better without his gun. She could not understand why he killed the very birds he seemed to like so much.
But as the day wan, Sylvia still watched the young man with loving admiration. She had never seen anybody so charming and delightful. The woman's heart, asleep in the child, was vaguely thrilled by a dream of love. Some premonition of that great power stirred and swayed these young creatures, who traversed the Somme woodlands with soft-footed, silent care. They stopped to listen to a bird's song. They pressed forward again eagerly, parting the branches. Speaking to each other rarely and in whispers, The young man going first, and Sylvia following, fascinated, a few steps behind, with her grey eyes dark with excitement.
She grieved because the longed-for white heron was elusive, but she did not lead the guest. She only followed, and there was no such thing as speaking first. The sound of her own unquestioned voice would have terrified her. It was hard enough to answer yes or no when there was need of that.
At last evening began to fall, and they drove the cow home together, and Sylvia smiled with pleasure when they came to the place where she heard the whistle and was afraid only the night before. Half a mile from home, the farther edge of the woods, where the land was highest, a great pine-tree stood. The last of his generation. Whether it was left for a boundary mark, or for what reason, no one could say. The woodchoppers who had felled its mates were dead and gone long ago, and a whole forest of sturdy trees, pines and oaks and maples, had grown again. But the stately head of this old pine towered above them all, and made a landmark for sea and shore. Miles and miles away. Sylvia knew it well.
She had always believed that whoever climbed to the top of it could see the ocean, and the little girl had often laid her hand on the great rough trunk and looked up wistfully. The stark boughs of the wind always stirred, no matter how hot and still the air might be below. Now she thought of the tree with a new excitement. For why, if one climbed it at break of day, could not one see all the world, and easily discover from whence the white heron flew, and mark the place, and find the hidden nest? What a spirit of adventure! What wild ambition! What fancy triumph and delight and glory for the later morning when she could make known the secret! It was almost too real and too great! for the childish heart to bear.
All night the door of the little house stood open, and the whippoorwills came and sang upon the very step. The young sportsman and his old hostess were sound asleep, but Sylvia's great design kept her broad awake and watching. She forgot to think of sleep. The short summer night seemed as long as the winter darkness, and at last, when the whippoorwill ceased, and she was afraid the morning would after all come too soon, she stole out of the house and followed the pasture path through the woods, hastening toward the open ground beyond, listening with a sense of comfort and companionship to the drowsy twitter of a half-awakened bird, whose perch she had jarred in passing. Alas, if the great wave of human interest, which flooded for the first time in this dull little life, should sweep away the satisfactions of an existence heart to heart with nature and the dumb life of the forest.
There was the huge tree asleep yet in the paling moonlight, and small and silly Sylvia began with utmost bravery to mount the top of it, With tingling, eager blood coursing the channels of her whole frame, with her bare feet and fingers, they pinched and held like birds' claws, with a monstrous ladder reaching up, up, almost to the sky itself. First she must mount the white oak that grew alongside. Where she was almost lost among the dark branches and the green leaves heavy and wet with dew, a bird flooded off its nest, A red squirrel ran to and fro, and scolded pettishly at the harmless housebreaker. Sylvia felt her way easily. She had often climbed there, and knew that higher still one of the oak's upper branches chapped against the pine tree, just where its lower boughs were set close together.
There, when she made the dangerous pass from one tree to the other, The great enterprise would really begin. She crept out along the swaying oak limb at last, took the daring step across the old pine tree. The way was harder than she thought. She must reach far and hold fast. The sharp, dry twigs caught and held her and scratched her like angry talons. The pitch made her thin little fingers clumsy and stiff. She went round and round the tree's great stem, higher and higher upward. The sparrows and robins in the woods below were beginning to wake and twitter to the dawn. It had seemed much lighter there aloft in the pine tree, and the child knew she must hurry if her project were to be of any use.
The tree seemed to lengthen itself out as she went up, And to reach farther and farther upward. It was like a great mainmast to the voyaging earth. You must truly have been amazed that morning, through all its ponderous frame, as it felt its determined spark of human spirit wending its way from higher branch to branch. Who knows how steadily the least twigs held themselves to advantage this light, weak creature on her way? The old pine must have loved its new dependent. More than all the hawks and bats and moths, and even the sweet voice of the gracious, was the brave, beating heart of the solitary gray-eyed child. And the tree stood still and frowned away the winds that June morning, while the dawn grew bright in the East.
Sylvia's face was like a pale star, for one had seen it from the ground. When the last thorny ball was passed, she stood trembling and tired, but wholly triumphant, high in the tree-top. Yes, there was the sea with the dawning sun making a golden dazzle over it, and toward that glorious east flew two hawks with slow-moving pinions. How low they looked in the air from that height when one had only seen them from before far up and against the blue sky. Their gray feathers were as soft as moths. They seemed only a little way from the tree. Sylvia felt as if she, too, could go flying away among the clouds. Westward, the woodlands and farms reached miles and miles into the distance. Here and there were church steeples and white villages.
Truly it was a vast and awesome world.
The birds sang louder and louder. Alas, the sun came up, bewilderingly bright. Sylvia could see the white cells of ships out at sea, and the clouds that were purple and rose-colored and yellow at first began to fade away. Where was the white heron's nest in a sea of green branches? And was this wonderful sight and pageant of the world the only reward for having climbed to such a giddy height?
Now look down again, Sylvia, where the green marshes set among the shining birches and dark hemlocks. There, where you saw the white heron once you will see him again. Look, look! A white spot of him, like a single floating feather, comes up from the dead hemlock and goes larger in her guises, comes close at last, and goes by the landmark pine with a steady sweep of wing and outstretched slender neck and crested head. And wait, wait! Do not move a foot or a finger, little girl. Do not send an arrow of light and consciousness from your too eager eyes. For the heron is perched in a pine-barn not far beyond yours, and cries back to his mate on the nest and plums his feathers for the new day.
The child gives a long sigh a minute later, when a company of shouting cat-birds comes also to the tree, and, vexed by their fluttering unlawlessness, the solemn heron goes away. She knows his secret now, the wild light, slender bird that floats and wavers, and goes back like an arrow presently to his home in the green world beneath. Then Sylvia, well satisfied, makes her perilous way down again, not daring to look far below the branch she stares on, ready to cry sometimes because her fingers ache and her lamed feet slip. Wondering over and over again what the stranger would say to her, and what he would think when she told him how to find his way straight to the heron's nest. "'Sylvie! Sylvie!' called the busy old grandmother again and again, but nobody answered.
The small husk bed was empty. Sylvia had disappeared.
The guest, waked from a dream, and, remembering his day's pleasure, hurried to dress himself that it might sooner began. He was sure from the way the shy little girl looked once or twice yesterday that she had at least seen the white hair on, and now she must really be made to tell. Here she comes now, paler than ever, in her worn old frock, is torn and tattered, and smeared with pine pitch. The grandmother and the sportsman stand at the door together and question her, and the splendid moment has come to speak of the dead hemlock tree by the green marsh.
But Sylvia does not speak after all, though the old grandmother fretfully rebukes her, and the young man's kind, appealing eyes are looking straight on her own. He can make them rich with money. He has promised it. And they are poor now. He is so well worth making happy, and he waits to hear the story she can tell.
No, she must keep silence. What is it that suddenly forbids her and makes her dumb? Has she been nine years growing, and now, when the great world for the first time put out a hand to her, was she thrust it aside for a bird's sake? The murmur of the pine's green branches is in her ears. She remembers how the white huron came flying through the golden air, and how they watched the sea in the morning together. And Sylvia cannot speak. She cannot tell the huron's secret and give its life away.
Dear Loyalty suffered a sharp pang as the guest went away disappointed later in the day. I could have served and followed him and loved him as a dog loves. Many a night Sylvia heard the echo of his whistle haunting the pasture path as she came home with the lardy ring cow. She forgot even her sorrow at the sharp report of his gun and the sight of thrushes and sparrows dropping silent to the ground, their songs hushed and their pretty feathers stained and wet with blood. Were the birds better friends than their hunter might have been? Who can tell? Whatever treasures were lost to her, woodlands and summertime, remember. Bring your gifts and graces, and tell your secrets to this lonely country child.
End of A White Huron by Sarah Orange-Rouette