Джек Лондон
Странник по звездам / The Star-Rover

Chapter VII

I knew that within myself were memories of other lives, yet I was unable to use them. My bright bit of straw did not allow me to achieve any definiteness of previous personality. I became convinced, through the failure of my experiments, that only through death could I clearly resurrect the memories of my previous selves. But I, Darrell Standing, was so strongly disinclined to die that I refused to let Warden Atherton and Captain Jamie kill me. I was always urged to live, that is why I am still here, eating and sleeping, thinking and dreaming, writing this narrative and awaiting the rope that will finish my existence.

And then came death in life. Ed Morrell taught it me, as you will see. Warden Atherton and Captain Jamie came to me in my dark cell, and they told me plainly that they would jacket me to death. And they assured me that they would do it officially. My death would appear on the prison register as due to natural causes.

Oh, please believe me when I tell you that men are killed in prisons today as they have always been killed since the first prisons were built by men.

I well knew the terror, the agony, and the danger of the jacket. I have seen men, strong men, men so strong that their physical stamina resisted all attacks of prison tuberculosis, after a prolonged bout with the jacket, their resistance broken down, fade away, and die of tuberculosis within six months.

I had had my own experiences. At the present moment half a thousand scars mark my body. They go to the scaffold with me.

Perhaps, dear citizen, you are unacquainted with the jacket. Let me describe, it, so that you will understand the method by which I achieved death in life, became a temporary master of time and space, and vaulted the prison walls to rove among the stars.

Imagine a piece of stout canvas, some four and one-half feet in length, with large and heavy brass eyelets running down both edges. The width of this canvas is never the full girth of the human body it is to surround. The width is also irregular—broadest at the shoulders, next broadest at the hips, and narrowest at the waist.

The jacket is spread on the floor. The man is told to lie face-downward on the flat canvas. If he refuses, he is beaten. After that he lays himself down with a will.

So, the man lies face-downward. The edges of the jacket are brought as nearly together as possible along the centre of the man’s back. Then a rope is run through the eyelets, and on the principle of a shoe-lacing the man is laced in the canvas. Only he is laced more severely than any person ever laces his shoe. In order to insure the severity of the lacing, the guards press with their feet into the man’s back as they draw the lacing tight.

Try to imagine your whole body laced very tightly, and the squeeze is on your entire trunk, compressing your heart, your lungs, and all the rest of your vital and essential organs.

I remember the first time they gave me the jacket down in the dungeons. It was at the beginning of my incorrigibility, shortly after my entrance to prison, when I was weaving my loom-task of a hundred yards a day in the jute-mill and finishing two hours ahead of the average day. I was sent to the jacket that first time, according to the prison books, because of “skips” and “breaks” in the cloth, in short, because my work was defective. Of course this was ridiculous. In truth, I was sent to the jacket because I, a new convict, told the stupid head weaver a few things he did not know about his business. And my punishment was twenty-four hours in the jacket.

They took me down into the dungeons. I was ordered to lie face-downward on the canvas spread flat upon the floor. I refused. They began to beat me. In the end I lay down. And they laced me extra tight. Then they rolled me over like a log upon my back.

When they closed my door, with clang and clash, and left me in the utter dark, it was eleven o’clock in the morning. My heart began to thump and my lungs seemed unable to draw sufficient air for my blood. This sense of suffocation was terrorizing.

I began to cry out, to yell, to scream, to howl, in a very madness of dying. The trouble was the pain that had arisen in my heart. It was a sharp, definite pain, similar to that of pleurisy.

To die is not a difficult thing, but to die in such slow and horrible fashion was maddening. I experienced ecstasies of fear, and yelled and howled until I realized that such vocal exercise merely consumed much of the little air in my lungs.

I lay quiet for a long time—an eternity it seemed then, though now I am confident that it could have been no longer than a quarter of an hour. Again I lost control of myself and set up a mad howling for help.

In the midst of this I heard a voice from the next dungeon.

“Shut up^[25],” it shouted. “Shut up. You make me tired.”

“I’m dying,” I cried out.

“Forget it,” was the reply.

“But I am dying,” I insisted.

“Then why worry?” came the voice. “Go ahead, but don’t make so much noise about it. You’re interrupting my beauty sleep.”

I recovered self-control and was only groaning.

“How am I going to get some sleep?” my neighbour complained. “I’m not happier than you. My jacket’s just as tight as yours, and I want to sleep and forget it.”

“How long have you been in?” I asked, thinking him a new-comer compared to the centuries I had already suffered.

“Since day before yesterday,” was his answer.

“I mean in the jacket,” I amended.

“Since day before yesterday, brother.”

“My God!” I screamed.

“Yes, brother, fifty straight hours, and I don’t complain about it. They cinched me with their feet in my back. I am some tight, believe me. You haven’t been in an hour yet.”

“I’ve been in hours and hours,” I protested.

“Brother, you may think so, but it’s not true. I heard them lacing you.”

This was incredible. Already, in less than an hour, I had died a thousand deaths. And yet this neighbour, balanced and equable and calm-voiced had been in the jacket fifty hours!

“How much longer are they going to keep you in?” I asked.

“The Lord only knows. Captain Jamie won’t let me out until I’m about to die. Now, brother, I’m going to give you the tip. The only way is to forget it. Just remember every girl you ever knew.”

That man was a robber from Philadelphia. I lived through my twenty-four hours, and I have never been the same man since. Oh, I don’t mean physically, although next morning, when they unlaced me, I was semi-paralyzed. I was a changed man mentally, morally. The brute physical torture was humiliation and affront to my spirit and to my sense of justice. My God—when I think of the things men have done to me! Twenty-four hours in the jacket!

I write these lines today in 1913, and today men are lying in the jacket in the dungeons of San Quentin. I shall never forget my friend from Philadelphia. He had then been seventy-four hours in the jacket.

“Well, brother, you’re still alive,” he called to me, as I was dragged from my cell into the corridor of dungeons.

“Shut up, you,” the sergeant snarled at him.

“Forget it,” was the retort.

“I’ll get you^[26],” the sergeant threatened.

“Think so?” the robber queried sweetly. “Why, you couldn’t get anything. You couldn’t get a free lunch, if it wasn’t your brother’s help.”

It was admirable—the spirit of man rising above the hurt.

“Well, so long, brother,” he told me. “So long. Be good, and love the Warden.”

Chapter VIII

In solitary, Warden Atherton and Captain Jamie began to ask me. Warden Atherton said to me:

“Standing, we know that the prisoners hide dynamite somewhere. Tell me everything that you know about it, or I’ll kill you in the jacket. You’ve got your choice—dynamite or a coffin.”

“Then I guess it is the coffin,” I answered, “because I don’t know of any dynamite.”

This irritated the Warden. “Lie down,” he commanded.

I obeyed. They laced me tightly, and gave me a hundred hours. Once each twenty-four hours they gave me some water. I had no desire for food, nor was food offered me. Toward the end of the hundred hours the prison doctor examined my physical condition several times.

But I got used to the jacket during my days. Naturally, it weakened me, took the life out of me; but I had learned muscular tricks for stealing a little space while they were lacing me. At the end of the first hundred hours’ bout I was worn and tired, but that was all. Then they gave one hundred and fifty hours. Much of this time I was physically numb and mentally delirious. Also, by an effort of will, I managed to sleep away long hours.

Then I was given irregular intervals of jacket and recuperation. I never knew when I was to go into the jacket.

And ever the eternal question was propounded to me: Where was the dynamite? Sometimes Warden Atherton was furious with me.

“These lean college guys would fool the devil,” Warden grumbled. “Standing, you hear me. I’m a man of my word. You’ve heard me say dynamite or a coffin. Well, take your choice.”

“Surely you don’t think I enjoy it?” I gasped. “There is nothing to confess. I don’t know about any dynamite.”

One compensation I learned. As one grows weaker one suffers less. The man already well weakened grows weaker more slowly. Unusually strong men suffer more severely from ordinary sicknesses than do women or invalids.

Morrell and Oppenheimer were sorry for me. Oppenheimer told me he had gone through it, and worse, and still lived.

“Don’t let them kill you,” he spelled with his knuckles. “Don’t let them kill you, for that would suit them. And don’t tell them anything.”

“But I don’t know anything,” I answered. “I don’t know anything about the damned dynamite.”

“That’s right,” Oppenheimer praised. “He’s the man, isn’t he, Ed?”

Jake Oppenheimer could only admire me for my fortitude.

During this first period of the jacket-inquisition I managed to sleep. My dreams were remarkable. Of course they were vivid and real, as most dreams are. What made them remarkable was their coherence and continuity. Often I was reading aloud to scientists carefully prepared papers on my researches. When I awakened my voice was still ringing in my ears.

Then there was a great farm, extending north and south for hundreds of miles, with a climate and flora and fauna largely resembling those of California. Not once, nor twice, but thousands of different times I journeyed through this dream-region.

In my dreams, I often got off the little train where the straggly village stood beside the big dry creek, and drove hour by hour past meadows. I watched my men engaged in the harvest, while beyond my goats were walking in the fields.

But these were dreams born by my deductive subconscious mind. Quite unlike them, as you will see, were my other adventures when I passed through the gates of the living death and relived the reality of the other lives.

In the long hours of waking in the jacket I was thinking about Cecil Winwood, the poet-forger who had put all this torment on me, and who was even then at liberty out in the free world again. No; I did not hate him. This word is too weak. There is no word in the language strong enough to describe my feelings. I shall not tell you of the hours I devoted to plans of torture on him, nor of the diabolical means and devices of torture that I invented for him. Just one example. There was an ancient trick whereby an iron basin, containing a rat, was fastened to a man’s body. The only way out for the rat is through the man himself. Many of my pain-maddening waking hours were devoted to dreams of vengeance on Cecil Winwood.