art my man, Negore.”
And in that moment he lived all the life of gladness of which she
had told him, and the laughter and the song, and as the sun went
out of the sky above him, as in his old age, he knew the memory of
her was sweet. And as even the memories dimmed and died in the
darkness that fell upon him, he knew in her arms the fulfilment of
all the ease and rest she had promised him. And as black night
wrapped around him, his head upon her breast, he felt a great peace
steal about him, and he was aware of the hush of many twilights and
the mystery of silence.
LOST FACE
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LOST FACE (1910)
By Jack London
LOST FACE
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Contents
· Lost Face
· Trust
· To Build a Fire
· That Spot
· Flush of Gold
· The Passing of Marcus O’Brien
· The Wit of Porportuk
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LOST FACE
IT was the end. Subienkow had travelled a long trail of bitterness and
horror, homing like a dove for the capitals of Europe, and here, farther
away than ever, in Russian America, the trail ceased. He sat in the snow,
arms tied behind him, waiting the torture. He stared curiously before him
at a huge Cossack, prone in the snow, moaning in his pain. The men had
finished handling the giant and turned him over to the women. That they
exceeded the fiendishness of the men, the man’s cries attested.
Subienkow looked on, and shuddered. He was not afraid to die. He had
carried his life too long in his hands, on that weary trail from Warsaw to
Nulato, to shudder at mere dying. But he objected to the torture. It
offended his soul. And this offence, in turn, was not due to the mere pain
he must endure, but to the sorry spectacle the pain would make of him. He
knew that he would pray, and beg, and entreat, even as Big Ivan and the
others that had gone before. This would not be nice. To pass out bravely
and cleanly, with a smile and a jest–ah! that would have been the way.
But to lose control, to have his soul upset by the pangs of the flesh, to
screech and gibber like an ape, to become the veriest beastÄ ah, that was
what was so terrible.
There had been no chance to escape. From the beginning, when he
dreamed the fiery dream of Poland’s independence, he had become a
puppet in the hands of Fate. From the beginning, at Warsaw, at St.
Petersburg, in the Siberian mines, in Kamtchatka, on the crazy boats of the
fur-thieves, Fate had been driving him to this end. Without doubt, in the
foundations of the world was graved this end for him–for him, who was
so fine and sensitive, whose nerves scarcely sheltered under his skin, who
was a dreamer, and a poet, and an artist. Before he was dreamed of, it had
been determined that the quivering bundle of sensitiveness that constituted
him should be doomed to live in raw and howling savagery, and to die in
this far land of night, in this dark place beyond the last boundaries of the
world.
He sighed. So that thing before him was Big Ivan–Big Ivan the giant, the
man without nerves, the man of iron, the Cossack turned freebooter of the
seas, who was as phlegmatic as an ox, with a nervous system so low that
what was pain to ordinary men was scarcely a tickle to him. Well, well,
trust these Nulato Indians to find Big Ivan’s nerves and trace them to the
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roots of his quivering soul. They were certainly doing it. It was
inconceivable that a man could suffer so much and yet live. Big Ivan was
paying for his low order of nerves. Already he had lasted twice as long as
any of the others.
Subienkow felt that he could not stand the Cossack’s sufferings much
longer. Why didn’t Ivan die? He would go mad if that screaming did not
cease. But when it did cease, his turn would come. And there was Yakaga
awaiting him, too, grinning at him even now in anticipation–Yakaga,
whom only last week he had kicked out of the fort, and upon whose face
he had laid the lash of his dog-whip. Yakaga would attend to him.
Doubtlessly Yakaga was saving for him more refined tortures, more
exquisite nerve-racking. Ah! that must have been a good one, from the
way Ivan screamed. The squaws bending over him stepped back with
laughter and clapping of hands. Subienkow saw the monstrous thing that
had been perpetrated, and began to laugh hysterically. The Indians looked
at him in wonderment that he should laugh. But Subienkow could not stop.
This would never do. He controlled himself, the spasmodic twitchings
slowly dying away. He strove to think of other things, and began reading
back in his own life. He remembered his mother and his father, and the
little spotted pony, and the French tutor who had taught him dancing and
sneaked him an old worn copy of Voltaire. Once more he saw Paris, and
dreary London, and gay Vienna, and Rome. And once more he saw that
wild group of youths who had dreamed, even as he, the dream of an
independent Poland with a king of Poland on the throne at Warsaw. Ah,
there it was that the long trail began. Well, he had lasted longest. One by
one, beginning with the two executed at St. Petersburg, he took up the
count of the passing of those brave spirits. Here one had been beaten to
death by a jailer, and there, on that blood-stained highway of the exiles,
where they had marched for endless months, beaten and maltreated by
their Cossack guards, another had dropped by the way. Always it had been
savagery–brutal, bestial savagery. They had died–of fever, in the mines,
under the knout. The last two had died after the escape, in the battle with
the Cossacks, and he alone had won to Kamtchatka with the stolen papers
and the money of a traveller he had left Iying in the snow.
It had been nothing but savagery. All the years, with his heart in studios,
and theatres, and courts, he had been hemmed in by savagery. He had
purchased his life with blood. Everybody had killed. He had killed that
traveller for his passports. He had proved that he was a man of parts by
duelling with two Russian officers on a single day. He had had to prove
himself in order to win to a place among the fur-thieves. He had had to
win to that place. Behind him lay the thousand-years-long road across all
Siberia and Russia. He could not escape that way. The only way was
ahead, across the dark and icy sea of Bering to Alaska. The way had led
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from savagery to deeper savagery. On the scurvy-rotten ships of the furthieves,
out of food and out of water, buffeted by the interminable storms
of that stormy sea, men had become animals. Thrice he had sailed east
from Kamtchatka. And thrice, after all manner of hardship and suffering,
the survivors had come back to Kamtchatka. There had been no outlet for
escape, and he could not go back the way he had come, for the mines and
the knout awaited him.
Again, the fourth and last time, he had sailed east. He had been with those
who first found the fabled Seal Islands; but he had not returned with them
to share the wealth of furs in the mad orgies of Kamtchatka. He had sworn
never to go back. He knew that to win to those dear capitals of Europe he
must go on. So he had changed ships and remained in the dark new land.
His comrades were Slavonian hunters and Russian adventurers, Mongols
and Tartars and Siberian aborigines; and through the savages of the new
world they had cut a path of blood. They had massacred whole villages
that refused to furnish the fur-tribute; and they, in turn, had been
massacred by ships’ companies. He, with one Finn, had been the sole
survivors of such a company. They had spent a winter of solitude and
starvation on a lonely Aleutian isle, and their rescue in the spring by
another fur-ship had been one chance in a thousand.
But always the terrible savagery had hemmed him in. Passing from ship to
ship, and ever refusing to return, he had come to the ship that explored
south All down the Alaska coast they h ad encountered nothing but hosts
of savages. Every anchorage among the beetling islands or under the
frowning cliffs of the mainland had meant a battle or a storm. Either the
gales blew, threatening destruction, or the war canoes came off, manned
by howling natives with the war-paint on their faces, who came to learn