Chapter XX

The time came when I forced Warden Atherton to surrender. He had to admit that he could not kill me by a strait-jacket. He had had men die after several hours in the jacket. He had had men die after several days in the jacket, although they were unlaced and taken to the hospital where they received a death certificate from the doctor of pneumonia, or disease of the heart.

But Warden Atherton could not kill me. Yet I will say that Warden Atherton tried his best. There was the time when he double-jacketed me.

It happened that the politicians at Sacramento appointed a senatorial committee of investigation of the state prisons. This State Senate committee investigated San Quentin. Of course, every convict testified to the humaneness of Warden Atherton’s administration. The Senate Committee even investigated solitary, where the three of us had nothing to lose and nothing to gain. Jake Oppenheimer spat in its faces and told its members to go to hell. Ed Morrell told them what a noisome den the place was and insulted the Warden.

I was careful not to insult the Warden. As a scientist, step by step, by tiny steps, I was telling the senatorial auditors about the prison. Alas! No whisper of what I divulged ever went outside the prison walls. The San Francisco newspaper assured its readers that San Quentin was whiter than snow, and further, that the strait-jacket was never used.

After the dinner, warm with wine, Warden Atherton himself came to see how we were. Me, as usual, they found in coma. I was brought back across the dark to consciousness. I smiled into the faces bent over me.

“He is shamming,” snorted the Warden, and I knew that he had been drinking.

“You are an ass,” I at last managed to say. “You are an ass, a coward, a cur. Even spittle would be wasted on your face. In such matter Jake Oppenheimer is over-generous with you.”

“I will kill you, Standing!” he bellowed.

“You’ve been drinking,” I retorted. “And I would advise you, if you want to say such things, do not take so your prison curs with you. They will snitch on you some day, and you will lose your job.”

“Put another jacket on him,” he commanded. “You are a dead man, Standing. But you’ll not die in the jacket. We’ll bury you from the hospital.”

This time, over the previous jacket, the second jacket was put on from behind and laced up in front.

“Lord, Lord, Warden, it is cold,” I sneered. “The frost is sharp. I am indeed grateful for your giving me two jackets.”

“Tighter!” he urged to Al Hutchins, who was drawing the lacing. “Break his ribs.”

I must admit that Hutchins did his best.

“You lie about me!” the Warden raved. “Now see what you get for it. This is your finish. Do you hear? This is your finish.”

“A favour, Warden,” I whispered faintly. I was nearly unconscious from the fearful constriction. “Make it a triple jacketing. Another jacket… Warden… It… will… be… so… much… warmer.”

And my whisper faded away as I ebbed down into the little death.

I was never the same man after that double-jacketing. I suffered internal injuries to an extent I never investigated. But my poor, maltreated body has served its purpose. It has enabled me to live thus far.

But the double-jacketing was the last straw. Warden Atherton admitted that I was unkillable. It was really an offence to me when the jacketing ceased. I missed that dream world of mine. But not for long. I found that I could repeat the experience by constricting my chest and abdomen with the blanket. Thus I induced physiological and psychological states similar to those caused by the jacket. So, at will, and without the torment, I was free to roam through time.

Ed Morrell believed all my adventures, but Jake Oppenheimer remained sceptical. It was during my third year in solitary that I paid Oppenheimer a visit.

It was merely after unconsciousness had come to me that I found myself in his cell. My body, I knew, lay in the jacket back in my own cell. Although never before had I seen him, I knew that this man was Jake Oppenheimer. It was summer weather, and he lay without clothes on his blanket. I was shocked by his cadaverous face and skeleton-like body.

I realized that just as was Jake Oppenheimer, so was Ed Morrell, so was I. And I glimpsed the vastitude of spirit that inhabited these frail, perishing carcasses of us. Flesh is a cheap, but the spirit abides and survives.

Oppenheimer’s body was like a corpse shrivelled by desert heat. The skin that covered it was of the colour of dry mud. His sharp, yellow-gray eyes seemed the only part of him that was alive. He lay on his back, and the eyes darted hither and thither, following the flight of the several flies. I noted, too, a scar, just above his right elbow, and another scar on his right ankle.

After a time he yawned, rolled over on his side, and inspected a sore just above his hip. This sore was caused by the strait-jacket. On my body, at this moment of writing, are hundreds of scars of the jacket.

Next, Oppenheimer rolled on his back. Again he yawned, stretched his arms, rolled over, and knocked the call to Ed Morrell.

“I thought you might be awake,” Oppenheimer tapped. “How is the Professor?”

Then, dim and far, I could hear Morrell’s taps enunciating that they had put me in the jacket an hour before, and I was already deaf to all knuckle talk.

“He is a good guy,” Oppenheimer rapped on. “I always was suspicious of educated guys, but he hasn’t been hurt by his education.”

Ed Morrell agreed.

Afterwards, recuperating from the jacket, I told them about my visit to Jake’s cell as a proof that my spirit left my body. But Jake was unshakable.

“It is guessing,” was his reply, when I had described to him everything. “It is figuring. Professor, you can figure what any guy will do to kill time. Don’t take it hard, Professor, I am not saying you lied. I know you believe what you say, and that you think it happened. You figure it, but you don’t know you figure it.”

“But, Jake,” I tapped. “You know I have never seen you with my own eyes. Is that right?”

“You might have seen me and not known it was me.”

“The point is,” I continued, “I can tell you about that scar above your right elbow, and that scar on your right ankle.”

“Oh,” was his reply. “You’ll find all that in my prison description. Thousands of policemen and detectives know all that.”

“I never heard of it,” I assured him.

“You don’t remember that you ever heard of it,” he corrected. “Though you have forgotten about it, the information is in your brain, stored away for reference, only you’ve forgot where it is stored. You just remember it.”

Chapter XXI

The human embryo, in its brief ten lunar months, in myriad forms, rehearses the entire history of organic life from vegetable to man. I, Darrell Standing, have rehearsed and relived all that primitive man was, and did, and became until he became even you and me and the rest of our kind in a twentieth century civilization.

We carry in us the incorruptible history of life from life’s beginning. This history is written in our tissues and our bones, in our functions and our organs, in our brain cells and in our spirits. Once we were fish-like, you and I, my reader, and crawled up out of the sea. The marks of the sea are still on us. Once we flew in the air and were afraid of the dark. The vestiges remain. I have lain in the long trances and saw the history of the human race.

I have died of frost and famine, fight and flood. I have picked berries, and I have dug roots. I have scratched the picture of the hairy mammoth on the rock walls.

I have lived through the ages known today among the scientists as the Paleolithic, the Neolithic, and the Bronze. I remember our domesticated wolves. But I remember that and you, my reader, do not.

All religions abide in me. If only I could describe everything that I had seen before our present written history began!

Oh, I see myself as the blonde, ferocious man, a killer and a lover, a meat-eater and a root-digger, a gypsy and a robber, who wandered the world around seeking meat to devour and nests for his children. I am that man. I was that man in all his births and endeavours. I am that man today.

Sometimes I think that the story of man is the story of the love of woman. In the ten thousand lives and guises, I loved her. I love her now. I can’t escape her, that eternal, splendid woman. Woman has made me laugh at death and distance, scorn fatigue and sleep. I have slain men, many men, for love of woman, for woman’s sake—for my sake, rather, I desired her so. For woman is beautiful to man. She is fire in his blood, and a thunder of trumpets; her voice is beyond all music in his ears; and she can shake his soul.

I have died of love. I have died for love. In a little while they will take me out, me, Darrell Standing, and make me die. And that death shall be for love. I slew Professor Haskell in the laboratory at the University of California. He was a man. I was a man. And there was a woman between us. Do you understand? She was a woman and I was a man and a lover! Had man not been the lover, the royal lover, he could never have become the fighter. We fight best, and die best, and live best, for what we love.

I see the woman, the many women, who have brought me happiness and destruction, who have loved me and whom I have loved.

I remember, oh, long ago when human race was very young, that I made me a snare and a pit with a pointed stake in the middle, for the taking of Sabre-Tooth. Sabre-Tooth, long-fanged and long-haired, was the greatest enemy of our tribe.

And when the roar and the squall of Sabre-Tooth roused us, it was the woman, who fought with me and restrained me not to go out through the dark. Beating in her heart withheld me, while Sabre-Tooth squalled his wrath and his agony.

Once I wan Ushu, the archer. I remember it well. For I was lost from my own people, through the great forest, and was taken in by a strange people. And she was Igar. These people did not know the wisdom of my people: they snared and pitted their meat and were unaware of the arrows. Only she, Igar, believed and had faith in me. I took her alone to the hunting, and the deer fell fast-stricken, and the warm meat was sweet to us, and she was mine there by the water-hole.

And because of Igar I remained with the strange men. And I taught them the making of bows. I was Ushu, the archer, and Igar was my woman. We laughed under the sun in the morning, when our children sprawled and rolled in the dust, and at night she lay close in my arms, and loved me.

And in my old age, when our sons were fathers and our daughters were mothers, Igar, like my women far before and long after, strove to hold me aloof from the battle. But I went out to the battle. And as I died at the end of the fighting, there were death songs and singing about me.

Once we lived beside great swamps, and our women gathered berries and roots, and there were herds of deer, of wild horses, of antelope, and of elk. I was a man, eager and curious as the antelope, ever restless, ever questing, wondering always what lay beyond the hills and beyond the swamps.

Meat was good to eat. But all meat came from grass. The meat of the duck and of the blackbird came from the seed of the swamp rice. I thought it out in camp, silent, morose, while Arunga, my woman, vainly scolded me and urged me to go hunting for more meat.

Arunga was the woman I had stolen from the hill-tribes. She squalled like a cat, she fought me and bit me. But I held her and mastered her, and forced her to travel with me.

We had eaten the raw rice and not been pleased with it. And we parched it over our fire. After that we became known among men as the Rice-Eaters and as the Sons of the Rice.

She was Arunga, the eternal woman. She has lived in all times and places. She will always live. She is immortal. Once, in a far land, her name was Ruth. Also has her name been Iseult, and Helen, Pocahontas, and Unga. I remember many women who have become one woman.

I would like to tell more of those far days, but time in the present is short. Soon I shall pass. Also, I would like to tell of Mystery. For always were we curious to solve the secrets of life, death, and decay. Unlike the other animals, man was always gazing at the stars. Many gods he created in his own image and in the images of his fancy. In those old times I have worshipped the sun and the dark. I have worshipped Sar, the Corn Goddess. And I have worshipped sea gods, and river gods, and fish gods.

Yes, and I remember Ishtar, was stolen from us by the Babylonians, and Ea, too, who enabled Ishtar to conquer death.

Worships and worships! Ever the pursuit of the Mystery! I remember many gods. And I conclude that the greatest thing in life, in all lives, to me and to all men, has been woman, is woman, and will be woman. Greater than our toil and endeavour, the play of invention and fancy, battle and star-gazing and mystery—greatest of all has been woman. Even mystery have I imaged in the form of her, and in my star-charting have I placed her figure in the sky.

All my toils and devices led to her; all my far visions saw her at the end. For her I harvested the wild rice, tamed the barley, the wheat, and the corn. For her I have died and have lived. For her I put the twelve signs in the sky. For her I scaled mountains, crossed deserts; for her I led the hunt and was forward in battle; and for her and to her I sang my songs of the things I had done. And here, at the end, I can say that I have known no sweeter, deeper madness of being than to drown in the fragrant glory and forgetfulness of her hair.

One word more. I remember Dorothy, when I lectured on agronomy to students. She was eleven years old. Her father was dean of the college. She was a child, and a woman, and she conceived that she loved me. And I smiled to myself, for in the child’s eyes I saw the eternal woman, the woman of all times and appearances. In her eyes I saw the eyes of my woman of the jungle, of the cave and the swamp. In her eyes I saw the eyes of Igar when I was Ushu the archer, the eyes of Arunga when I was the rice-harvester, the eyes of Selpa, Nuhila and others. The eyes of Lei-Lei whom I left with a laugh on my lips, the eyes of the Lady Om who was my beggar-mate on highways, the eyes of Philippa for whom I was slain on the grass in old France, the eyes of my mother when I was the lad Jesse in the circle of our forty wagons.

She was a woman-child, but she was daughter of all women, as her mother before her, and she was the mother of all women to come after her. She was Sar, the corn-goddess. She was Isthar who conquered death. She was Sheba and Cleopatra; she was Esther and Herodias. She was Mary the Madonna, and Mary the Magdalene, and Mary the sister of Martha, also she was Martha. And she was Brunnhilde and Guinevere, Iseult and Juliet, Heloise and Nicolette. Yes, and she was Eve, she was Lilith, she was Astarte. She was eleven years old, and she was all women that had been, all women to be.

I sit in my cell now, while the flies hum in the summer afternoon, and I know that my time is short. Soon they will apparel me in the shirt without a collar.... But the spirit is immortal. After the dark I shall live again, and there will be women. The future holds the women for me in the lives I am yet to live. And ever remains woman, resplendent, eternal, the one woman, and I am her man.