The Jacket (The Star-Rover). Джек Лондон

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      I nodded my head, for in that moment I knew I had been there, though all seemed strangely different. My father laughed the harder, but the missionary thought I was making game of him. He handed me another photograph. It was just a bleak waste of a landscape, barren of trees and vegetation, a shallow canyon with easy-sloping walls of rubble. In the middle distance was a cluster of wretched, flat-roofed hovels.

      “Now, my boy, where is that?” the missionary quizzed.

      And the name came to me!

      “Samaria,” I said instantly.

      My father clapped his hands with glee, my mother was perplexed at my antic conduct, while the missionary evinced irritation.

      “The boy is right,” he said. “It is a village in Samaria. I passed through it. That is why I bought it. And it goes to show that the boy has seen similar photographs before.”

      This my father and mother denied.

      “But it’s different in the picture,” I volunteered, while all the time my memory was busy reconstructing the photograph. The general trend of the landscape and the line of the distant hills were the same. The differences I noted aloud and pointed out with my finger.

      “The houses was about right here, and there was more trees, lots of trees, and lots of grass, and lots of goats. I can see ’em now, an’ two boys drivin’ ’em. An’ right here is a lot of men walkin’ behind one man. An’ over there”—I pointed to where I had placed my village—“is a lot of tramps. They ain’t got nothin’ on exceptin’ rags. An’ they’re sick. Their faces, an’ hands, an’ legs is all sores.”

      “He’s heard the story in church or somewhere—you remember, the healing of the lepers in Luke,” the missionary said with a smile of satisfaction. “How many sick tramps are there, my boy?”

      I had learned to count to a hundred when I was five years old, so I went over the group carefully and announced:

      “Ten of ’em. They’re all wavin’ their arms an’ yellin’ at the other men.”

      “But they don’t come near them?” was the query.

      I shook my head. “They just stand right there an’ keep a-yellin’ like they was in trouble.”

      “Go on,” urged the missionary. “What next? What’s the man doing in the front of the other crowd you said was walking along?”

      “They’ve all stopped, an’ he’s sayin’ something to the sick men. An’ the boys with the goats ’s stopped to look. Everybody’s lookin’.”

      “And then?”

      “That’s all. The sick men are headin’ for the houses. They ain’t yellin’ any more, an’ they don’t look sick any more. An’ I just keep settin’ on my horse a-lookin’ on.”

      At this all three of my listeners broke into laughter.

      “An’ I’m a big man!” I cried out angrily. “An’ I got a big sword!”

      “The ten lepers Christ healed before he passed through Jericho on his way to Jerusalem,” the missionary explained to my parents. “The boy has seen slides of famous paintings in some magic lantern exhibition.”

      But neither father nor mother could remember that I had ever seen a magic lantern.

      “Try him with another picture,” father suggested.

      “It’s all different,” I complained as I studied the photograph the missionary handed me. “Ain’t nothin’ here except that hill and them other hills. This ought to be a country road along here. An’ over there ought to be gardens, an’ trees, an’ houses behind big stone walls. An’ over there, on the other side, in holes in the rocks ought to be where they buried dead folks. You see this place?—they used to throw stones at people there until they killed ’m. I never seen ’m do it. They just told me about it.”

      “And the hill?” the missionary asked, pointing to the central part of the print, for which the photograph seemed to have been taken. “Can you tell us the name of the hill?”

      I shook my head.

      “Never had no name. They killed folks there. I’ve seem ’m more ’n once.”

      “This time he agrees with the majority of the authorities,” announced the missionary with huge satisfaction. “The hill is Golgotha, the Place of Skulls, or, as you please, so named because it resembles a skull. Notice the resemblance. That is where they crucified—” He broke off and turned to me. “Whom did they crucify there, young scholar? Tell us what else you see.”

      Oh, I saw—my father reported that my eyes were bulging; but I shook my head stubbornly and said:

      “I ain’t a-goin’ to tell you because you’re laughin’ at me. I seen lots an’ lots of men killed there. They nailed ’em up, an’ it took a long time. I seen—but I ain’t a-goin’ to tell. I don’t tell lies. You ask dad an’ ma if I tell lies. He’d whale the stuffin’ out of me if I did. Ask ’m.”

      And thereat not another word could the missionary get from me, even though he baited me with more photographs that sent my head whirling with a rush of memory-pictures and that urged and tickled my tongue with spates of speech which I sullenly resisted and overcame.

      “He will certainly make a good Bible scholar,” the missionary told father and mother after I had kissed them good-night and departed for bed. “Or else, with that imagination, he’ll become a successful fiction-writer.”

      Which shows how prophecy can go agley. I sit here in Murderers’ Row, writing these lines in my last days, or, rather, in Darrell Standing’s last days ere they take him out and try to thrust him into the dark at the end of a rope, and I smile to myself. I became neither Bible scholar nor novelist. On the contrary, until they buried me in the cells of silence for half a decade, I was everything that the missionary forecasted not—an agricultural expert, a professor of agronomy, a specialist in the science of the elimination of waste motion, a master of farm efficiency, a precise laboratory scientist where precision and adherence to microscopic fact are absolute requirements.

      And I sit here in the warm afternoon, in Murderers’ Row, and cease from the writing of my memoirs to listen to the soothing buzz of flies in the drowsy air, and catch phrases of a low-voiced conversation between Josephus Jackson, the negro murderer on my right, and Bambeccio, the Italian murderer on my left, who are discussing, through grated door to grated door, back and forth past my grated door, the antiseptic virtues and excellences of chewing tobacco for flesh wounds.

      And in my suspended hand I hold my fountain pen, and as I remember that other hands of me, in long gone ages, wielded ink-brush, and quill, and stylus, I also find thought-space in time to wonder if that missionary, when he was a little lad, ever trailed clouds of glory and glimpsed the brightness of old star-roving days.

      Well, back to solitary, after I had learned the code of knuckle-talk and still found the hours of consciousness too long to endure. By self-hypnosis, which I began successfully to practise, I became able to put my conscious mind to sleep and to awaken and loose my subconscious mind. But the latter was an undisciplined СКАЧАТЬ