A thousand deaths by Jack London

toothless, with down-turned corners and lips dry and parchment-like, nevertheless lacked the

muscular slackness so usual with age. The lips might have been those of a mummy, save for that

impression of rigid firmness they gave. Not that they were atrophied. On the contrary, they

seemed tense and set with a muscular and spiritual determination. There, and in the eyes, was the

secret of the certitude with which she carried the heavy sacks up the steep steps, with never a

false step or overbalance, and emptied them in the grain-bin.

“You are an old woman to be working like this,” I ventured.

SAMUEL

3

She looked at me with that strange, unblinking gaze, and she thought and spoke with the slow

deliberateness that characterized everything about her, as if well aware of an eternity that was

hers and in which there was no need for haste. Again I was impressed by the enormous certitude

of her. In this eternity that seemed so indubitably hers, there was time and to spare for safefooting

and stable equilibrium – for certitude, in short. No more in her spiritual life than in

carrying the hundredweights of grain was there a possibility of a misstep or an overbalancing.

The feeling produced in me was uncanny. Here was a human soul that, save for the most

glimmering of contacts, was beyond the humanness of me. And the more I learned of Margaret

Henan in the weeks that followed the more mysteriously remote she became. She was as alien as

a far-journeyer from some other star, and no hint could she nor all the countryside give me of

what forms of living, what heats of feeling, or rules of philosophic contemplation actuated her in

all that she had been and was.

“I wull be suvunty-two come Guid Friday a fortnight,” she said in reply to my question.

“But you are an old woman to be doing this man’s work, and a strong man’s work at that,” I

insisted.

Again she seemed to immerse herself in that atmosphere of contemplative eternity, and so

strangely did it affect me that I should not have been surprised to have awaked a century or so

later and found her just beginning to enunciate her reply –

“The work hoz tull be done, an’ I am beholden tull no one.”

“But have you no children, no family, relations?”

“Oh, aye, a-plenty o’ them, but they no see fut tull be helpun’ me.”

She drew out her pipe for a moment, then added, with a nod of her head toward the house, “I luv’

wuth meself.”

I glanced at the house, straw-thatched and commodious, at the large stable, and at the large array

of fields I knew must belong with the place.

“It is a big bit of land for you to farm by yourself.”

“Oh, aye, a bug but, suvunty acres. Ut kept me old mon buzzy, along wuth a son an’ a hired mon,

tull say naught o’ extra honds un the harvest an’ a maid-servant un the house.”

She clambered into the cart, gathered the reins in her hands, and quizzed me with her keen,

shrewd eyes.

“Belike ye hail from over the watter – Ameruky, I’m meanun’?”

“Yes, I’m a Yankee,” I answered.

SAMUEL

4

“Ye wull no be findun’ mony Island McGill folk stoppun’ un Ameruky?”

“No; I don’t remember ever meeting one, in the States.”

She nodded her head.

“They are home-luvun’ bodies, though I wull no be sayin’ they are no fair-travelled. Yet they

come home ot the last, them oz are no lost ot sea or kult by fevers an’ such-like un foreign parts.”

“Then your sons will have gone to sea and come home again?” I queried.

“Oh, aye, all savun’ Samuel oz was drownded.”

At the mention of Samuel I could have sworn to a strange light in her eyes, and it seemed to me,

as by some telepathic flash, that I divined in her a tremendous wistfulness, an immense yearning.

It seemed to me that here was the key to her inscrutableness, the clue that if followed properly

would make all her strangeness plain. It came to me that here was a contact and that for the

moment I was glimpsing into the soul of her. The question was tickling on my tongue, but she

forestalled me.

She tchk’d to the horse, and with a “Guid day tull you, sir,” drove off.

A simple, homely people are the folk of Island McGill, and I doubt if a more sober, thrifty, and

industrious folk is to be found in all the world. Meeting them abroad – and to meet them abroad

one must meet them on the sea, for a hybrid sea-faring and farmer breed are they – one would

never take them to be Irish. Irish they claim to be, speaking of the North of Ireland with pride

and sneering at their Scottish brothers; yet Scotch they undoubtedly are, transplanted Scotch of

long ago, it is true, but none the less Scotch, with a thousand traits, to say nothing of their tricks

of speech and woolly utterance, which nothing less than their Scotch clannishness could have

preserved to this late day.

A narrow loch, scarcely half a mile wide, separates Island McGill from the mainland of Ireland;

and, once across this loch, one finds himself in an entirely different country. The Scotch

impression is strong, and the people, to commence with, are Presbyterians. When it is considered

that there is no public-house in all the island and that seven thousand souls dwell therein, some

idea may be gained of the temperateness of the community. Wedded to old ways, public opinion

and the ministers are powerful influences, while fathers and mothers are revered and obeyed as

in few other places in this modern world. Courting lasts never later than ten at night, and no girl

walks out with her young man without her parents’ knowledge and consent.

The young men go down to the sea and sow their wild oats in the wicked ports, returning

periodically, between voyages, to live the old intensive morality, to court till ten o’clock, to sit

under the minister each Sunday, and to listen at home to the same stern precepts that the elders

preached to them from the time they were laddies. Much they learned of women in the ends of

the earth, these seafaring sons, yet a canny wisdom was theirs and they never brought wives

home with them. The one solitary exception to this had been the schoolmaster, who had been

SAMUEL

5

guilty of bringing a wife from half a mile the other side of the loch. For this he had never been

forgiven, and he rested under a cloud for the remainder of his days. At his death the wife went

back across the loch to her own people, and the blot on the escutcheon of Island McGill was

erased. In the end the sailor-men married girls of their own homeland and settled down to

become exemplars of all the virtues for which the island was noted.

Island McGill was without a history. She boasted none of the events that go to make history.

There had never been any wearing of the green, any Fenian conspiracies, any land disturbances.

There had been but one eviction, and that purely technical – a test case, and on advice of the

tenant’s lawyer. So Island McGill was without annals. History had passed her by. She paid her

taxes, acknowledged her crowned rulers, and left the world alone; all she asked in return was that

the world should leave her alone. The world was composed of two parts – Island McGill and the

rest of it. And whatever was not Island McGill was outlandish and barbarian; and well she knew,

for did not her seafaring sons bring home report of that world and its ungodly ways?

It was from the skipper of a Glasgow tramp, as passenger from Colombo to Rangoon, that I had

first learned of the existence of Island McGill; and it was from him that I had carried the letter

that gave me entrance to the house of Mrs. Ross, widow of a master mariner, with a daughter

living with her and with two sons, master mariners themselves and out upon the sea. Mrs. Ross

did not take in boarders, and it was Captain Ross’s letter alone that had enabled me to get from

her bed and board. In the evening, after my encounter with Margaret Henan, I questioned Mrs.

Ross, and I knew on the instant that I had in truth stumbled upon mystery.

Like all Island McGill folk, as I was soon to discover, Mrs. Ross was at first averse to discussing

Margaret Henan at all. Yet it was from her I learned that evening that Margaret Henan had once

been one of the island belles. Herself the daughter of a well-to-do farmer, she had married

Thomas Henan, equally well-to-do. Beyond the usual housewife’s tasks she had never been