The Star Rover. Jack London

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СКАЧАТЬ in San Quentin, had flown with Haasfurther over the Pacific at Santa Monica. Awake, I did not remember the crawling and the bellowing in the ancient slime. Nevertheless, awake, I reasoned that somehow I had remembered that early adventure in the slime, and that it was a verity of long-previous experience, when I was not yet Darrell Standing but somebody else, or something else that crawled and bellowed. One experience was merely more remote than the other. Both experiences were equally real-or else how did I remember them?

      Oh, what a fluttering of luminous images and actions! In a few short minutes of loosed subconsciousness, I have sat in the halls of kings, above the salt and below the salt, been fool and jester, man-at-arms, clerk and monk; and I have been ruler above all at the head of the table—temporal power in my own sword arm, in the thickness of my castle walls, and the numbers of my finshing* men; spiritual power likewise mine by token of the fact that cowled priests and fat abbots sat beneath me and swigged my wine and swined my meat

      I have worn the iron collar of the serf about my neck in cold climes; and I have loved princesses of royal houses in the tropic- warmed and sun-scented night, where black slaves fanned the sultry air with fans of peacock plumes, while from afar, across the palms and fountains, drifted the roaring of lions and the cries of jackals. I have crouched in chill desert places warming my hands at fires built of camel's dung; and I have lain in the meager shade of sun-parched sagebrush by dry waterholes and yearned dry- tongued for water, while about me, dismembered and scattered in the alkali, were the bones of men and beasts who had yearned and died.

      I have been sea-cunie and bravo, scholar and recluse. I have pored over handwritten pages of huge and musty tomes in the scholastic quietude and twilight of cliff-perched monasteries while beneath, on the lesser slopes peasants still toiled beyond the end of day among the vines and olives and drove in from pastures the blatting goats and lowing kine; yes, and I have led shouting rabbles down the wheel- worn, chariot-rutted paves of ancient and forgotten cities; and, solemn-voiced and grave as death, I have enunciated the law, stated the gravity of the infraction, and imposed the due death on men, who, like Darrell Standing in Folsom Prison, had broken the law.

      Aloft, at giddy mastheads oscillating above the decks of ships, I have gazed on sun-flashed water where coral growths iridesced from profounds of turquoise deeps, and conned the ships into the safety of mirrored lagoons where the anchors rumbled down close to palm-fronded beaches of sea-pounded coral rock; and I have striven on forgotten battlefields of the elder days, when the sun went down on slaughter that did not cease and that continued through the night hours with the stars shining down and with a cool night wind blowing from distant peaks of snow that failed to chill the sweat of battle; and again, I have been little Darrell Standing, barefooted in the dew-lush grass of spring on the Minnesota farm, chilblained when of frosty mornings I fed the cattle in their breath-steaming stalls, sobered to fear and awe of the splendor and terror of God when I sat of Sundays under the rant and preachment of the New Jerusalem and the agonies of hell-fire.

      Now, the foregoing were the glimpses and glimmerings that came to me when, in Cell One of Solitary in San Quentin, I stared myself unconscious by means of a particle of bright, light- radiating straw. How did these things come to me? Surely I could not have manufactured them out of nothing inside my pent walls any more than could I have manufactured out of nothing the thirty-five pounds of dynamite so ruthlessly demanded of me by Captain Jamie, Warden Atherton, and the Prison Board of Directors.

      I am Darrell Standing, born and raised on a quarter section of land in Minnesota, erstwhile professor of agronomy, a prison incorrigible in San Quentin, and at present a death-sentenced man in Folsom. I do not know, of Darrell Standing's experience, these things of which I write and which I have dug from out my storehouses of subconsciousness. I, Darrell Standing, born in Minnesota and soon to die by the rope in California, surely never loved daughters of kings in the courts of kings; nor fought cutlass to cutlass on the swaying decks of ships; nor drowned in the spirit rooms of ships, guzzling raw liquor to the wassail-shouting and death-singing of seamen, while the ship lifted and crashed on the black-toothed rocks and the water bubbled overhead, beneath, and all about.

      Such things are not of Darrell Standing's experience in the world. Yet I, Darrell Standing, found these things within myself in solitary in San Quentin by means of mechanical self-hypnosis. No more were these experiences Darrell Standing's, than was the word "Samaria" Darrell Standing's when it leaped to his child lips at sight of a photograph.

      One cannot make anything out of nothing. In solitary I could not so make thirty-five pounds of dynamite. Nor in solitary, out of nothing in Darrell Standing's experience, could I make these wide, far visions of time and space. These things were in the content of my mind, and in my mind I was just beginning to learn my way about.

       This is a word coined by Jack London for which there is no known meaning.

Chapter 7

       Table of Contents

      So here was my predicament: I knew that within myself was a Golconda of memories of other lives, yet I was unable to do more than flit like a madman through those memories. I had my Golconda but could not mine it.

      I remembered the case of Stainton Moses, the clergyman who had been possessed by the personalities of St. Hippolytus, Plotinus Athenodorus, and of that friend of Erasmus named Grocyn. And, when I considered the experiments of Colonel de Rochas, which I had read in tyro fashion in other and busier days, I was convinced that Stainton Moses had, in previous lives, been those personalities that on occasion seemed to possess him. In truth, they were he, they were the links of the chain of recurrence.

      But more especially did I dwell upon the experiments of Colonel de Rochas. By means of suitable hypnotic subjects he claimed that he had penetrated backward through time to the ancestors of his subjects. Thus, the case of Josephine which he describes. She was eighteen years old and she lived at Voiron, the department of the Isere. Under hypnotism, Colonel de Rochas sent her adventuring back through her adolescence, her girlhood, her childhood, her breast-infancy, and the silent dark of her mother's womb, and, still back, through the silence and the dark of the time when she, Josephine, was not yet born, to the light and life of a previous living, when she had been a churlish, suspicious, and embittered old man, by name Jean-Claude Bourdon. who had served his time in the Seventh Artillery at Besancon, and who died at the age of seventy, long bed-ridden. Yes, and did not Colonel de Rochas in turn hypnotize this shade of Jean-Claude Bourdon, so that he adventured further back into time, through infancy and birth and the dark of the unborn, until he found again light and life when as a wicked old woman he had been Philomene Carteron?

      But try as I would with my bright bit of straw in the oozement of light into solitary, I failed to achieve any such definiteness of previous personality. I became convinced, through the failure of my experiments, that only through death could I clearly and coherently resurrect the memories of my previous selves.

      But the tides of life ran strong in me. I, Darrell Standing, was so strongly disinclined to die that I refused to let Warden Atherton and Captain Jamie kill me. I was always so innately urged to live that sometimes I think that is why I am still here, eating and sleeping, thinking and dreaming, writing this narrative of my various me's, and awaiting the incontestable rope that will put an ephemeral period in my long-linked existence.

      And then came death in life. I learned the trick. Ed Morrell taught it to me, as you shall see. It began through Warden Atherton and Captain Jamie. They must have experienced a recrudescence of panic at the thought of the dynamite they believed hidden. They came to me in my dark cell, and they told me plainly that they would jacket me to death if I did not confess where the dynamite was hidden. And they assured me that they would do it officially, without any hurt to their own official skins My death would appear on the prison register as due to natural causes.

      Oh, СКАЧАТЬ