Странник по звездам / The Star-Rover

Chapter V

It was very lonely at first, in solitary, and the hours were long. Time was marked by the regular changing of the guards, and by the alternation of day and night. Day was only a little light, but it was better than the all-dark of the night.

Never was the light strong enough to read by. Besides, there was nothing to read. One could only lie and think and think. And I was a lifer, and it seemed certain, that all the years of my life would be spent in the silent dark.

My bed was a thin and rotten tick of straw spread on the cell floor. And a thin and filthy blanket. There was no chair, no table—nothing but the tick of straw and the thin, aged blanket. For years I had slept five hours a night. But I became able to sleep ten hours, then twelve hours, and, at last, as high as fourteen and fifteen hours out of the twenty-four. But beyond that I could not go, and, perforce, was compelled to lie awake and think and think.

I was trying to do something. I counted numbers, I imagined chess-boards and played both sides of long games. I tried, and tried vainly, to split my personality into two personalities and to play one against the other. But ever I remained the one player.

And time was very heavy and very long. I played games with flies, with ordinary house-flies; and learned that they possessed a sense of play. For instance, lying on the cell floor, I established an arbitrary and imaginary line along the wall some three feet above the floor. When they rested on the wall above this line they were left in peace. When they passed that line I tried to catch them.

Of the dozen or more flies that lived with me, there was only one who did not care for the game. He refused steadfastly to play, and very carefully avoided the unsafe territory. He never played with the other flies either. He was strong and healthy.

Believe me, I knew all my flies. Oh, each was distinctly an individual—not merely in size and markings, strength, and speed of flight. They were differentiated in the mentality and temperament.

I knew the nervous ones, the phlegmatic ones. Moreover, I could tell in advance when any particular fly was beginning to play.

But the hours were very long in solitary. I could not sleep them all away. House-flies are house-flies, and I was a man, with a man’s brain; and my brain was trained and active. And there was nothing to do, and my thoughts ran abominably on in vain speculations.

The world was dead to me. No news of it filtered in. The history of science was making fast, and I was interested in a thousand subjects. The very thought of science just beyond the prison walls and in which I could take no part, was maddening. And in the meantime I lay there on my cell floor and played games with house-flies.

And yet all was not silence in solitary. One day I heard, at irregular intervals, faint, low tappings. Continually these tappings were interrupted by the snarling of the guard.

The matter was easy of explanation. I had known, as every prisoner in San Quentin knew, that the two men in solitary were Ed Morrell and Jake Oppenheimer. And I knew that these were the two men who tapped to each other and were punished for doing so.

The code they used was simple. There came a day when I listened to two clear sentences of conversation!

“Say—Ed—what—would—you—give—right—now—for—the—paper—and—tobacco” asked the one who tapped from farther away.

I nearly cried out in my joy. Here was communication! Here was companionship! I listened eagerly, and I heard Ed Morrell’s reply:

“I—would—give—twenty—hours—of—staying—in—the—jacket—for—that.”

Then came the snarling interruption of the guard: “Stop it, Morrell!”

The tapping ceased, and that night I tapped,

“Hello.”

“Hello, stranger,” Morrell tapped back; and, from Oppenheimer, “Welcome to our city.”

They were curious to know who I was, how long I was condemned to solitary, and why I had been so condemned. It was a great day, for the two lifers had become three.

To my surprise—yes, to my elation—both my fellow-prisoners knew me as an incorrigible. I had much to tell them of prison events and of the outside world. As they told me, news occasionally dribbled into solitary by way of the guards, but they had had nothing for a couple of months. The present guards on duty in solitary were particularly stupid.

How we talked that night! Sleep was very far from our eyes. In the morning the guards reported much tapping during the night, and we paid for it; for, at nine, came Captain Jamie with several guards to lace us into the torment of the jacket. Until nine the following morning, for twenty-four straight hours, laced and helpless on the floor, without food or water, we paid the price for speech.

Oh, our guards were brutes! Hard guards make hard prisoners. We continued to talk, and, on occasion, to be jacketed for punishment. Night was the best time: we often talked all night long.

Night and day were one with us who lived in the dark. We could sleep any time. We told one another much of the history of our lives, and for long hours Morrell and I have lain silently, while Oppenheimer slowly spelled out his life-story. They called Jake Oppenheimer the “Human Tiger.” But I found in Jake Oppenheimer all the cardinal traits of right humanness. He was faithful and loyal. He was brave. He was patient. He was capable of self-sacrifice. And he had a splendid mind. A lifetime in prison, ten years of it in solitary, had not dimmed his brain.

Morrell, a true comrade, too had a splendid brain. And here at the end of my days, reviewing all that I have known of life, I think that strong minds are never docile. The stupid men, the fearful men—these are the men who make model prisoners. I thank all gods that Jake Oppenheimer, Ed Morrell, and I were not model prisoners.

Chapter VI

To be able to forget means sanity. To remember everything means obsession, lunacy. So the problem I faced in solitary was the problem of forgetting. When I gamed with flies, or played chess with myself, or talked with my knuckles, I partially forgot. What I desired was entirely to forget.

There were the boyhood memories of other times and places. Sometimes solitary life-prisoners resurrected and looked upon the sun again. Then why could not these other-world memories of the boy resurrect?

But how? Hypnotism should do it. But first I must tell how, as a boy, I had had these other-world memories.

Let me narrate just one incident. It was up in Minnesota on the old farm. I was nearly six years old. A missionary, returned from China to the United States, spent the night in our house. It was in the kitchen just after supper, as my mother was helping me undress for bed, and the missionary was showing photographs of the Holy Land.

I cried out at sight of one of the photographs and looked at it, first with eagerness, and then with disappointment. It seemed most familiar. Then it seemed strange.

“The Tower of David,” the missionary said to my mother.

“No!” I cried with great positiveness.

“You mean that isn’t its name?” the missionary asked.

I nodded.

“Then what is its name, my boy?”

“Its name is…” I began, then concluded lamely, “I forget.”

“It doesn’t look the same now,” I went on after a pause.

Here the missionary handed to my mother another photograph.

“I was there myself six months ago, Mrs. Standing.” He pointed with his finger. “That is the—”

But here I broke in again, pointing on the left edge of the photograph.

“That name you just spoke,” I said, ”was what the Jews called it. But we called it something else. We called it… I forget.”

“Listen to the youngster,” my father chuckled. “You’d think he’d been there.”

I nodded my head, for in that moment I knew I had been there, though all seemed strangely different. My father laughed, but the missionary handed me another photograph.

“Now, my boy, where is that?” the missionary quizzed.

And the name came to me!

“Samaria^[24],” I said instantly.

“The boy is right,” the missionary said. “It is a village in Samaria. I passed through it. That is why I bought it. And it seems that the boy has seen similar photographs before.”

This my father and mother denied.

“But it’s different in the picture,” I said, while my memory was busy reconstructing the photograph. The differences I noted aloud and pointed out with my finger.

“The houses were about right here, and there were more trees, lots of trees, and lots of grass, and lots of goats. I can see them now. And right here are lots of men walking behind one man. And over there”—I pointed to where I had placed my village—“lots of tramps. And they’re sick. Their faces, and hands, and legs is all sores.”

“He’s heard the story in church or somewhere—you remember, the healing of the lepers,” the missionary said with a smile of satisfaction. “How many sick tramps are there, my boy?”

I announced:

“Ten. They’re all waving their arms and yelling at the other men.”

“But they don’t come near them?” was the query.

I shook my head.

“They just stand right there and yell like they’re in trouble.”

“Go on,” urged the missionary. “What next? What’s the man doing in the front of the other crowd you said was walking along?”

“They’ve all stopped, and he’s saying something to the sick men. And the boys with the goats have stopped to look. Everybody’s looking.”

“And then?”

“That’s all. The sick men are heading for the houses. They aren’t yelling any more, and they don’t look sick any more.”

At this all three of my listeners broke into laughter.

“And I’m a big man!” I cried out angrily. “And I have a big sword!”

“Christ healed those ten lepers,” the missionary explained to my parents. “The boy has seen some famous paintings.”

But neither father nor mother could remember that I had ever seen famous paintings.

“He will certainly become a good Bible scholar,” the missionary told father and mother after I had kissed them good-night and departed for bed. “Or else, with that imagination, he’ll become a successful fiction-writer.”

Well, back to solitary. By self-hypnosis, which I began successfully to practise, I became able to put my conscious mind to sleep and to awaken and loose my subconscious mind. My method of mechanical hypnosis was simple. Sitting with folded legs on my straw-mattress, I gazed fixedly at a straw which I had attached to the wall of my cell near the door where the most light was. I gazed at the bright point. At the same time I relaxed all my will and gave myself to the swaying dizziness that always eventually came to me. And then I closed my eyes and fell unconscious on the mattress.

And then, for half-an-hour, ten minutes, or as long as an hour or so, I was wandering erratically and foolishly through the stored memories of my eternal recurrence on earth. But that was all. I could never live out completely one full experience. My dreams, if dreams they may be called, were reasonless.

Oh, what a fluttering of luminous images and actions! I have sat in the halls of kings, been a fool and jester, soldier, clerk and monk. I have worn the iron collar about my neck; and I have loved princesses of royal houses. I have been a scholar and recluse. And again, I have been little Darrell Standing, bare-footed on the Minnesota farm, I fed the cattle in their stalls.

Such things are not of Darrell Standing’s experience. Yet I, Darrell Standing, found these things within myself in solitary in San Quentin by means of mechanical self-hypnosis. One cannot make anything out of nothing. These things were in the content of my mind, and in my mind I was just beginning to learn my way about.