conclusions were unquestionable. And the premises were a selfishness so
tranquil, so ingenuous, so fresh, I might say, that I couldn't work up
the proper indignation. It was something so perfect as to challenge
admiration. On the whole, however, it afforded a poor subject for
conversation; so we remained there, taciturn, I on my door,
half-submerged in the tepid water, my heels flung up over my back, he in
his dugout, rigid, his hands clutching the sides as if he were trying to
hold up the craft out of the liquid abyss beneath.
[Illustration: "NOT TWENTY FEET FROM ME MILLER SAT UPRIGHT IN HIS CANOE
AS IF PETRIFIED." FROM A PAINTING BY MERLE JOHNSON.]
"And thus we were still when, just as the sun was setting somberly, a
velos full of chattering natives
picked us up. They landed us at Bacolod, and Miller left me to report to
the Sup. I departed before sun-up the next morning for my station. I
didn't want to see Miller again.
"But I did. One night he came floundering through my pueblo. It was in
the middle of the rainy season. He wasn't exactly caked with mud;
rather, he seemed to ooze it out of every pore. He had been assigned to
Binalbagan, ten miles further down. I stared when he told me this.
Binalbagan was the worst post on the island, a musty, pestilential hole
with a sullenly hostile population, and he--well, inefficiency was
branded all over him in six-foot letters. I tried to stop him overnight,
but he would not do it, and I saw him splash off in the darkness, gaunt,
yellow, mournful.
"I saw little of him after that. I was busy establishing new
barrio-schools, which were to give me excuses for long horseback rides
of inspection. I felt his presence down there in that vague way by which
you are aware of a person behind your back without turning around.
Rumors of his doings reached me. He was having a horrible time. On the
night of his arrival he had been invited to dinner by the Presidente, a
kind old primitive soul, but when he found that he was expected to sit
at the table with the family, he had stamped off, indignant, saying that
he didn't eat with no niggers. As I've said before, the town was
hostile, and this attitude did not help matters much. He couldn't get
the school moneys out of the Tesorero--an unmitigated rascal--but that
did not make much difference, for he had no pupils anyhow. He couldn't
speak a word of Spanish; no one in the town, of course, knew any
English--he must have been horribly lonely. He began to wear _camisas_,
like the natives. That's always a bad sign. It shows that the man has
discovered that there is no one to care how he dresses--that is, that
there is no longer any public opinion. It indicates something subtly
worse--that the man has ceased looking at himself, that the _I_ has
ceased criticising, judging, stiffening up the _me_,--in other words,
that there is no longer any conscience. That white suit, I tell you, is
a wonderful moral force; the white suit, put on fresh every morning,
heavily starched, buttoned up to the chin, is like an armor,
ironcladding you against the germ of decay buzzing about you,
ceaselessly vigilant for the little vulnerable spot. Miller wore
_camisas_, and then he began to go without shoes. I saw that myself. I
was riding through his pueblo on my way to Dent's, and I passed his
school. I looked into the open door as my head bobbed by at the height
of the stilt-raised floor. He was in his _camisa_ and barefooted; his
long neck stretched out of the collarless garment with a mournful,
stork-like expression. Squatting on the floor were three trouserless,
dirt-incrusted boys; he was pointing at a chart standing before their
eyes, and all together they were shouting some word that exploded away
down in their throats in tremendous effort and never seemed to reach
their lips. I called out and waved my hand as I went by, and when I
looked back, a hundred yards farther, I saw that he had come out upon
the bamboo platform outside of the door, gaping after me with his chin
thrown forward in that mournful, stork-like way--I should have gone
back.
"With him, I must say, the _camisa_ did not mean all that I have
suggested, not the sort of degradation of which it is the symbol in
other men. The most extravagant imagination could not have linked him
with anything that smacked of romance, romance however sordid. His
vices, I had sized it, would come rather from an excess of calculation
than from a lack of it. No, that _camisa_ was just a sign of his
meanness, his prodigious meanness. And of that I was soon given an
extraordinary example.
"I had with me a young fellow named Ledesma, whom I was training to be
assistant _maestro_. He was very bright, thirsty to learn, and extremely
curious of us white men. I don't believe that the actions of one of
them, for fifty miles around, ever escaped him, and every day he came to
me with some talk, some rumor, some gossip about my fellow-exiles which
he would relate to me with those strange interrogative inflections that
he had brought from his native dialect into English--as if perpetually
he were seeking explanation, confirmation. One morning he said to me:
'The _maestro_ Miller, he does not eat.'
"'No?' I answered, absent-mindedly.
"'No, he never eats,' he reiterated authoritatively, although that
peculiar Visayan inflection of which I have spoken gave him the air of
asking a question.
"'Oh, I suppose he does,' I said, carelessly.
"'He does not eat,' he repeated. 'Every one in Binalbagan say so. Since
he there, he has not bought anything at the store.'
"'His _muchachos_ bring him chicken,' I suggested.
"No, señor; he very funny; he has no _muchachos_; not one _muchacho_ has
he.'
"'Well, he probably has canned provisions sent him.'
"'No, señor; the _cargadores_ they say that never never have they
carried anything for him. He does not eat.'
"'Very well,' I concluded, somewhat amused; 'he does not eat.'
"The boy was silent for a minute, then, 'Señor Maestro,' he asked with
suspicious ingenuousness 'can Americans live without eating?'
"So that I was not able to drop the subject as easily as I wished. And
coming to a forced consideration of it, I found that my anxiety to do so
was not very beautiful after all. A picture came to me--that of Miller
on his bamboo platform before his door, gazing mournfully after me, his
chin thrown forward. It did not leave me the day long, and at sundown I
saddled up and trotted off toward Binalbagan.
"I didn't reach the pueblo that night, however. Only a mile from it I
plunged out of the moonlight into the pitch darkness of a hollow lane
cutting through Don Jaime's hacienda. Banana palms were growing thick to
right and left; the way was narrow and deep--it was a fine place for
cutthroats, but that avocation had lost much of its romantic charm from
the fact that, not three weeks before, an actual cutthroating had taken
place, a Chinese merchant having been boloed by _tusilanes_. Well, I was
trotting through, my right hand somewhat close to my holster, when from
the right, close, there came a soft, reiterated chopping noise. I pulled
up my pony. The sound kept up--a discreet, persistent chopping; then I
saw, up above, the moonlit top of a palm shuddering, though all about it
the others remained motionless, petrified as if of solid silver. It was
a very simple thing after all: some one in there was cutting down a palm
to get bananas, an occupation very common in the Philippines, and very
pacific, in spite of the ominous air given to it by the gigantic bolo
used. However, something prompted me to draw the midnight harvester out.
"'Heh, _ladron_, what are you doing there?' I shouted in dialect.
"'There was a most sudden silence. The chopping ceased, the palm stopped
vibrating. A vague form bounded down the lane, right up against my
horse's nose, rolled over, straightened up again, and vanished into the
darkness ahead. Unconsciously I spurred on after it. For a hundred yards
I galloped with nothing in sight. Then I caught a rapid view of the
thing as it burst through a shaft of moonlight piercing the glade, and
it showed as a man, a grotesque figure of a man in loose white
pantaloons. He was frightened, horribly frightened, all hunched up with
the frenzy to escape. An indistinct bundle was on his right shoulder.
Like a curtain the dark snapped shut behind him again, but I urged on
with a wild hallo, my blood all a-tingle with the exultation of the
chase. I gained--he must have been a lamentable runner, for my poor
little pony was staggering under my tumultuous weight. I could hear him
pant and sob a few yards in advance; then he came into sight, a dim,
loping whiteness ahead. Suddenly the bundle left his shoulder; something
rolled along the ground under my horse's hoofs--and I was standing on
my head in a soft, oozy place. I was mad, furiously mad. I picked myself
up, went back a few yards, and taking my pony by the nose picked _him_
up. A touch of his throbbing flanks, however, warned me as I was putting
my foot into the stirrup. I left him there and thundered on foot down
the lane. I have said I was mad. 'Yip-yip-yah-ah, yip-yip-yah-ah!' I
yelled as I dashed on--a yell I had heard among California cattlemen. It
must have paralyzed that flying personage, for I gained upon him
shockingly. I could hear him pant, a queer, patient panting, a sigh
rather, a gentle, lamenting sighing, and the white _camisa_ flapped
ghostily in the darkness. Suddenly he burst out of obscurity, past the
plantation, into the glaring moonlight. And I--I stopped short, went
down on my hands and knees, and crouched back into the shadow. For the
man running was Miller; Miller, wild, sobbing, disheveled, his shoulders
drawn up to his ears in terrible weariness, his whole body taut with
fear, and scudding, scudding away, low along the ground, his chin
forward, mournful as a stork. Soon he was across the luminous space, and
then he disappeared into the darkness on the other side, flopped head
first into it as if hiding his face in a pillow.
"I returned slowly to my horse. He was standing where I had left him,
his four legs far apart in a wide base. Between them was the thing cast
off by Miller which had thrown us. I examined it by the light of a box
of matches. It was a bunch of bananas, one of those gigantic clusters
which can be cut from the palms. I got on my horse and rode back home.
"I didn't go to see him any more. A man who will steal bananas in a
country where they can be bought a dozen for one cent is too mean to be
worth visiting. I had another reason, too. It had dawned on me that
Miller probably did not care to see any of us, that he had come down to
a mode of life which would not leave him appreciative of confrontations
with past standards. It was almost charity to leave him to himself.
"So I left him to himself, and he lived on in his pestilential little
hole, alone--lived a life more squalid every day. It wasn't at all a
healthy life, you can understand, no healthier physically than morally.
After a while I heard that he was looking bad, yellow as a lemon, and
the dengue cracking at his bones. I began to think of going to him after
all, of jerking him out of his rut by force, if necessary, making him
respect the traditions of his race. But just then came that Nichols
affair, and flaring, his other bad side--his abject
cowardice--reappeared to me. You remember the Nichols thing--boloed in
the dark between my town and Himamaylan. His _muchacho_ had jumped into
the ditch. Afterward he got out and ran back the whole way, fifteen
miles, to my place. I started down there. My idea was to pick up Miller
as I passed, then Dent a little further down, find the body, and perhaps
indications for White of the constabulary, to whom I had sent a
messenger and who could not reach the place till morning. Well, Miller
refused to go. He had caught hold of some rumor of the happening; he was
barricaded in his hut and was sitting on his bed, a big Colt's revolver
across his knees. He would not go, he said it plainly. 'No, seh; Ah
cain't take chances; Ah cain't affawd it.' He said this without much
fire, almost tranquilly, exactly as he had, you remember, at the time of
our shipwreck. It was not so amusing now, however. Here, on land, amid
this swarming, mysterious hostility, at this crisis, it seemed a
shocking betrayal of the solidarity that bound all us white men. A red
rage took possession of me. I stood there above him and poured out
vituperation for five good minutes. I found the most extraordinary
epithets; I lowered my voice and pierced him with venomous thrusts. He
took it all. He remained seated on his bed, his revolver across his
knees, looking straight at some spot on the floor; whenever I'd become
particularly effective he'd merely look harder at the spot, as if for
him it contained something of higher significance--a command, a rule, a
precept--I don't know what, and then he'd say, 'No, Ah cain't; Ah cain't
affawd it.'
"I burst out of there, a-roar like a bombshell. I rode down to Dent; we
rode down to the place and did--what there was to be done. Miller I
never wanted to see again.
"But I did. Some three weeks later a carrier came to me with a note--a
penciled scrawl upon a torn piece of paper. It read:
"'I think I am dying. Can you come see me? 'MILLER.'
"I went down right away. He was dead. He had died there, alone, in his
filthy little hut, in that God-forsaken pueblo, ten miles from the
nearest white man, ten thousand miles from his home.
"I'll always remember our coming in. It was night. It had been raining
for thirty-six hours, and as we stepped into the unlighted hut, my
_muchacho_ and I, right away the floor grew sticky and slimy with the
mud on our feet, and as we groped about blindly, we seemed ankle-deep in
something greasy and abominable like gore. After a while the boy got a
torch outside, and as he flared it I caught sight of Miller on his cot,
backed up into one corner. He was sitting upright, staring straight
ahead and a little down, as if in careful consideration. As I stepped
toward him the pliable bamboo floor undulated; the movement was carried
to him and he began to nod, very gently and gravely. He seemed to be
saying: 'No, Ah cain't affawd it.' It was atrocious. Finally I was by
his side and he was again motionless, staring thoughtfully. Then I saw
he was considering. In his hands, which lay twined on his knees, were a
lot of little metallic oblongs. I disengaged them. The _muchacho_ drew
nearer, and with the torch over my shoulder I examined them. They were
photographs, cheap tintypes. The first was of a woman, a poor being,
sagging with overwork, a lamentable baby in her arms. The other pictures
were of children--six of them, boys and girls, of all ages from twelve
to three, and under each, in painful chirography, a name was
written--Lee Miller, Amy Miller, Geraldine Miller, and so on.
"You don't understand, do you? For a moment I didn't. I stared stupidly
at those tintypes, shuffled and reshuffled them; the torch roared in my
ear. Then, suddenly, understanding came to me, sharp as a pang. He had a
wife and seven children.
"A simple fact, wasn't it, a commonplace one, almost vulgar, you might
say. And yet what a change of view produced by it, what a dislocation of
judgment! I was like a man riding through a strange country, in a storm,
at night. It is dark, he cannot see, he has never seen the country, yet
as he rides on he begins to picture to himself the surroundings, his
imagination builds for him a landscape--a mountain there, a river here,
wind-streaming trees over there--and right away it exists, it _is_, it
has solidity, mass, life. Then suddenly comes a flash of lightning, a
second of light, and he is astounded, absolutely astounded to see the
real landscape different from that indestructible thing that his mind
had built. Thus it was with me. I had judged, oh, I had judged him
thoroughly, sized him up to a certainty, and bang, came the flare of
this new fact, this extremely commonplace fact, and I was all off. I
must begin to judge again, only it would never do that man any good.
"A hundred memories came back to me, glared at me in the illumination of
that new fact. I remember the _camisa_, the bare feet. I saw him running
down the lane with his bunch of stolen bananas. I recalled that absurd
scene on the waters; I heard him say: 'No, seh; Ah cain't affawd to take
chances; Ah cain't affawd it.'
"Of course he couldn't afford it. Think--a wife and seven children!
"That night I went through his papers, putting things in order, and from
every leaf, every scrap, came corroboration of the new fact. He was one
of those pitiful pedagogues of the rural South, shiftless,
half-educated, inefficient. He had never been able to earn much, and
his family had always gently starved. Then had come the chance--the
golden chance--the Philippines and a thousand a year. He had taken the
bait, had come ten thousand miles to the spot of his maximum value.
Only, things had not gone quite right. Thanks to the beautiful red-tape
of the department, three months had gone before he had received his
first month's pay. Then it had come in Mex., and when he had succeeded
in changing it into gold it had dwindled to sixty dollars. Of course, he
had sent it all back, for even then it would take it six more weeks to
reach its destination, and sixty dollars is hardly too much to tide over
five months for a family of eight. These five months had to be caught up
in some way, so every month his salary, depreciated ten per cent by the
change, had gone across the waters. He wore _camisas_ and no shoes, he
stole bananas. And his value, shoeless, _camisa_-clothed, was sixty
dollars a month. He was just so much capital. He had to be careful of
that capital.
"'Ah cain't affawd to take chances; Ah cain't affawd it.' Of course he
couldn't.
"And so he had fought on blindly, stubbornly, and, at last, with that
pitiful faculty we have, all of us, of defeating our own plans, he had
killed himself, he had killed the capital, the golden goose.
"Yes, I found confirmation, but, after all, I did not need it. I had
learned it all; understanding had come to me, swift, sharp, vital as a
pang, when in the roaring light of the torch I had looked upon the pale
little tintypes, the tintypes of Lee and Amy and Jackson and
Geraldine."
THE LEAGUE OF THE OLD MEN
BY
JACK LONDON
_Copyright_, 1902, by the Macmillan Company Reprinted from CHILDREN OF
THE FROST by permission
AT THE Barracks a man was being tried for his life. He was an old man, a
native from the Whitefish River, which empties into the Yukon below Lake
Le Barge. All Dawson was wrought up over the affair, and likewise the
Yukon-dwellers for a thousand miles up and down. It has been the custom
of the land-robbing and sea-robbing Anglo-Saxon to give the law to
conquered peoples, and ofttimes this law is harsh. But in the case of
Imber the law for once seemed inadequate and weak. In the mathematical
nature of things, equity did not reside in the punishment to be accorded
him. The punishment was a foregone conclusion, there could be no doubt
of that; and though it was capital, Imber had but one life, while the
tale against him was one of scores.
In fact, the blood of so many was upon his hands that the killings
attributed to him did not permit of precise enumeration. Smoking a pipe
by the trail-side or lounging around the stove, men made rough estimates
of the numbers that had perished at his hand. They had been whites, all
of them, these poor murdered people, and they had been slain singly, in
pairs, and in parties. And so purposeless and wanton had been these
killings, that they had long been a mystery to the mounted police, even
in the time of the captains, and later, when the creeks realized, and a
governor came from the Dominion to make the land pay for its prosperity.
But more mysterious still was the coming of Imber to Dawson to give
himself up. It was in the late spring, when the Yukon was growling and
writhing under its ice, that the old Indian climbed painfully up the
bank from the river trail and stood blinking on the main street. Men who
had witnessed his advent, noted that he was weak and tottery, and that
he staggered over to a heap of cabin-logs and sat down. He sat there a
full day, staring straight before him at the unceasing tide of white men
that flooded past. Many a head jerked curiously to the side to meet his
stare, and more than one remark was dropped anent the old Siwash with so
strange a look upon his face. No end of men remembered afterward that
they had been struck by his extraordinary figure, and forever afterward
prided themselves upon their swift discernment of the unusual.
But it remained for Dickensen, Little Dickensen, to be the hero of the
occasion. Little Dickensen had come into the land with great dreams and
a pocketful of cash; but with the cash the dreams vanished, and to earn
his passage back to the States he had accepted a clerical position with
the brokerage firm of Holbrook and Mason. Across the street from the
office of Holbrook and Mason was the heap of cabin-logs upon which Imber
sat. Dickensen looked out of the window at him before he went to lunch;
and when he came back from lunch he looked out of the window, and the
old Siwash was still there.
Dickensen continued to look out of the window, and he, too, forever
afterward prided himself upon his swiftness of discernment. He was a
romantic little chap, and he likened the immobile old heathen the genius
of the Siwash race, gazing calm-eyed upon the hosts of the invading
Saxon. The hours swept along, but Imber did not vary his posture, did
not by a hair's-breadth move a muscle; and Dickensen remembered the man
who once sat upright on a sled in the main street where men passed to
and fro. They thought the man was resting, but later, when they touched
him, they found him stiff and cold, frozen to death in the midst of the
busy street. To undouble him, that he might fit into a coffin, they had
been forced to lug him to a fire and thaw him out a bit. Dickensen
shivered at the recollection.
Later on, Dickensen went out on the sidewalk to smoke a cigar and cool
off; and a little later Emily Travis happened along. Emily Travis was
dainty and delicate and rare, and whether in London or Klondike, she
gowned herself as befitted the daughter of a millionaire mining
engineer. Little Dickensen deposited his cigar on an outside window
ledge where he could find it again, and lifted his hat.
They chatted for ten minutes or so, when Emily Travis, glancing past
Dickensen's shoulder, gave a startled little scream. Dickensen turned
about to see, and was startled, too. Imber had crossed the street and
was standing there, a gaunt and hungry-looking shadow, his gaze riveted
upon the girl.
"What do you want?" Little Dickensen demanded, tremulously plucky.
Imber grunted and stalked up to Emily Travis. He looked her over, keenly
and carefully, every square inch of her. Especially did he appear
interested in her silky brown hair, and in the color of her cheek,
faintly sprayed and soft, like the downy bloom of a butterfly wing. He
walked around her, surveying her with the calculating eye of a man who
studies the lines upon which a horse or a boat is builded. In the course
of his circuit the pink shell of her ear came between his eye and the
westering sun, and he stopped to contemplate its rosy transparency. Then
he returned to her face and looked long and intently into her blue eyes.
He grunted and laid a hand on her arm midway between the shoulder and
elbow. With his other hand he lifted her forearm and doubled it back.
Disgust and wonder showed in his face, and he dropped her arm with a
contemptuous grunt. Then he muttered a few guttural syllables, turned
his back upon her, and addressed himself to Dickensen.
Dickensen could not understand his speech, and Emily Travis laughed.
Imber turned from one to the other, frowning, but both shook their
heads. He was about to go away, when she called out:
"Oh, Jimmy! Come here!"
Jimmy came from the other side of the street. He was a big, hulking
Indian clad in approved white-man style, with an Eldorado king's
sombrero on his head. He talked with Imber, haltingly, with throaty
spasms. Jimmy was a Sitkan, possessed of no more than a passing
knowledge of the interior dialects.
"Him Whitefish man," he said to Emily Travis. "Me savve um talk no very
much. Him want to look see chief white man."
"The Governor," suggested Dickensen.
Jimmy talked some more with the Whitefish man, and his face went grave
and puzzled.
"I t'ink um want Cap'n Alexander," he explained. "Him say um kill white
man, white woman, white boy, plenty kill um white people. Him want to
die."
"'Insane, I guess," said Dickensen.
"What you call dat?" queried Jimmy.