The Red One
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Jack London >> The Red One
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9 Transcribed from the 1919 Mills and Boon edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
THE RED ONE
Contents:
The Red One
The Hussy
Like Argus of the Ancient Times
The Princess
STORY: THE RED ONE
There it was! The abrupt liberation of sound! As he timed it with
his watch, Bassett likened it to the trump of an archangel. Walls
of cities, he meditated, might well fall down before so vast and
compelling a summons. For the thousandth time vainly he tried to
analyse the tone-quality of that enormous peal that dominated the
land far into the strong-holds of the surrounding tribes. The
mountain gorge which was its source rang to the rising tide of it
until it brimmed over and flooded earth and sky and air. With the
wantonness of a sick man's fancy, he likened it to the mighty cry
of some Titan of the Elder World vexed with misery or wrath.
Higher and higher it arose, challenging and demanding in such
profounds of volume that it seemed intended for ears beyond the
narrow confines of the solar system. There was in it, too, the
clamour of protest in that there were no ears to hear and
comprehend its utterance.
- Such the sick man's fancy. Still he strove to analyse the sound.
Sonorous as thunder was it, mellow as a golden bell, thin and sweet
as a thrummed taut cord of silver--no; it was none of these, nor a
blend of these. There were no words nor semblances in his
vocabulary and experience with which to describe the totality of
that sound.
Time passed. Minutes merged into quarters of hours, and quarters
of hours into half-hours, and still the sound persisted, ever
changing from its initial vocal impulse yet never receiving fresh
impulse--fading, dimming, dying as enormously as it had sprung into
being. It became a confusion of troubled mutterings and babblings
and colossal whisperings. Slowly it withdrew, sob by sob, into
whatever great bosom had birthed it, until it whimpered deadly
whispers of wrath and as equally seductive whispers of delight,
striving still to be heard, to convey some cosmic secret, some
understanding of infinite import and value. It dwindled to a ghost
of sound that had lost its menace and promise, and became a thing
that pulsed on in the sick man's consciousness for minutes after it
had ceased. When he could hear it no longer, Bassett glanced at
his watch. An hour had elapsed ere that archangel's trump had
subsided into tonal nothingness.
Was this, then, HIS dark tower?--Bassett pondered, remembering his
Browning and gazing at his skeleton-like and fever-wasted hands.
And the fancy made him smile--of Childe Roland bearing a slug-horn
to his lips with an arm as feeble as his was. Was it months, or
years, he asked himself, since he first heard that mysterious call
on the beach at Ringmanu? To save himself he could not tell. The
long sickness had been most long. In conscious count of time he
knew of months, many of them; but he had no way of estimating the
long intervals of delirium and stupor. And how fared Captain
Bateman of the blackbirder Nari? he wondered; and had Captain
Bateman's drunken mate died of delirium tremens yet?
From which vain speculations, Bassett turned idly to review all
that had occurred since that day on the beach of Ringmanu when he
first heard the sound and plunged into the jungle after it. Sagawa
had protested. He could see him yet, his queer little monkeyish
face eloquent with fear, his back burdened with specimen cases, in
his hands Bassett's butterfly net and naturalist's shot-gun, as he
quavered, in Beche-de-mer English: "Me fella too much fright along
bush. Bad fella boy, too much stop'm along bush."
Bassett smiled sadly at the recollection. The little New Hanover
boy had been frightened, but had proved faithful, following him
without hesitancy into the bush in the quest after the source of
the wonderful sound. No fire-hollowed tree-trunk, that, throbbing
war through the jungle depths, had been Bassett's conclusion.
Erroneous had been his next conclusion, namely, that the source or
cause could not be more distant than an hour's walk, and that he
would easily be back by mid-afternoon to be picked up by the Nari's
whale-boat.
"That big fella noise no good, all the same devil-devil," Sagawa
had adjudged. And Sagawa had been right. Had he not had his head
hacked off within the day? Bassett shuddered. Without doubt
Sagawa had been eaten as well by the "bad fella boys too much" that
stopped along the bush. He could see him, as he had last seen him,
stripped of the shot-gun and all the naturalist's gear of his
master, lying on the narrow trail where he had been decapitated
barely the moment before. Yes, within a minute the thing had
happened. Within a minute, looking back, Bassett had seen him
trudging patiently along under his burdens. Then Bassett's own
trouble had come upon him. He looked at the cruelly healed stumps
of the first and second fingers of his left hand, then rubbed them
softly into the indentation in the back of his skull. Quick as had
been the flash of the long handled tomahawk, he had been quick
enough to duck away his head and partially to deflect the stroke
with his up-flung hand. Two fingers and a hasty scalp-wound had
been the price he paid for his life. With one barrel of his ten-
gauge shot-gun he had blown the life out of the bushman who had so
nearly got him; with the other barrel he had peppered the bushmen
bending over Sagawa, and had the pleasure of knowing that the major
portion of the charge had gone into the one who leaped away with
Sagawa's head. Everything had occurred in a flash. Only himself,
the slain bushman, and what remained of Sagawa, were in the narrow,
wild-pig run of a path. From the dark jungle on either side came
no rustle of movement or sound of life. And he had suffered
distinct and dreadful shock. For the first time in his life he had
killed a human being, and he knew nausea as he contemplated the
mess of his handiwork.
Then had begun the chase. He retreated up the pig-run before his
hunters, who were between him and the beach. How many there were,
he could not guess. There might have been one, or a hundred, for
aught he saw of them. That some of them took to the trees and
travelled along through the jungle roof he was certain; but at the
most he never glimpsed more than an occasional flitting of shadows.
No bow-strings twanged that he could hear; but every little while,
whence discharged he knew not, tiny arrows whispered past him or
struck tree-boles and fluttered to the ground beside him. They
were bone-tipped and feather shafted, and the feathers, torn from
the breasts of humming-birds, iridesced like jewels.
Once--and now, after the long lapse of time, he chuckled gleefully
at the recollection--he had detected a shadow above him that came
to instant rest as he turned his gaze upward. He could make out
nothing, but, deciding to chance it, had fired at it a heavy charge
of number five shot. Squalling like an infuriated cat, the shadow
crashed down through tree-ferns and orchids and thudded upon the
earth at his feet, and, still squalling its rage and pain, had sunk
its human teeth into the ankle of his stout tramping boot. He, on
the other hand, was not idle, and with his free foot had done what
reduced the squalling to silence. So inured to savagery has
Bassett since become, that he chuckled again with the glee of the
recollection.
What a night had followed! Small wonder that he had accumulated
such a virulence and variety of fevers, he thought, as he recalled
that sleepless night of torment, when the throb of his wounds was
as nothing compared with the myriad stings of the mosquitoes.
There had been no escaping them, and he had not dared to light a
fire. They had literally pumped his body full of poison, so that,
with the coming of day, eyes swollen almost shut, he had stumbled
blindly on, not caring much when his head should be hacked off and
his carcass started on the way of Sagawa's to the cooking fire.
Twenty-four hours had made a wreck of him--of mind as well as body.
He had scarcely retained his wits at all, so maddened was he by the
tremendous inoculation of poison he had received. Several times he
fired his shot-gun with effect into the shadows that dogged him.
Stinging day insects and gnats added to his torment, while his
bloody wounds attracted hosts of loathsome flies that clung
sluggishly to his flesh and had to be brushed off and crushed off.
Once, in that day, he heard again the wonderful sound, seemingly
more distant, but rising imperiously above the nearer war-drums in
the bush. Right there was where he had made his mistake. Thinking
that he had passed beyond it and that, therefore, it was between
him and the beach of Ringmanu, he had worked back toward it when in
reality he was penetrating deeper and deeper into the mysterious
heart of the unexplored island. That night, crawling in among the
twisted roots of a banyan tree, he had slept from exhaustion while
the mosquitoes had had their will of him.
Followed days and nights that were vague as nightmares in his
memory. One clear vision he remembered was of suddenly finding
himself in the midst of a bush village and watching the old men and
children fleeing into the jungle. All had fled but one. From
close at hand and above him, a whimpering as of some animal in pain
and terror had startled him. And looking up he had seen her--a
girl, or young woman rather, suspended by one arm in the cooking
sun. Perhaps for days she had so hung. Her swollen, protruding
tongue spoke as much. Still alive, she gazed at him with eyes of
terror. Past help, he decided, as he noted the swellings of her
legs which advertised that the joints had been crushed and the
great bones broken. He resolved to shoot her, and there the vision
terminated. He could not remember whether he had or not, any more
than could he remember how he chanced to be in that village, or how
he succeeded in getting away from it.
Many pictures, unrelated, came and went in Bassett's mind as he
reviewed that period of his terrible wanderings. He remembered
invading another village of a dozen houses and driving all before
him with his shot-gun save, for one old man, too feeble to flee,
who spat at him and whined and snarled as he dug open a ground-oven
and from amid the hot stones dragged forth a roasted pig that
steamed its essence deliciously through its green-leaf wrappings.
It was at this place that a wantonness of savagery had seized upon
him. Having feasted, ready to depart with a hind-quarter of the
pig in his hand, he deliberately fired the grass thatch of a house
with his burning glass.
But seared deepest of all in Bassett's brain, was the dank and
noisome jungle. It actually stank with evil, and it was always
twilight. Rarely did a shaft of sunlight penetrate its matted roof
a hundred feet overhead. And beneath that roof was an aerial ooze
of vegetation, a monstrous, parasitic dripping of decadent life-
forms that rooted in death and lived on death. And through all
this he drifted, ever pursued by the flitting shadows of the
anthropophagi, themselves ghosts of evil that dared not face him in
battle but that knew that, soon or late, they would feed on him.
Bassett remembered that at the time, in lucid moments, he had
likened himself to a wounded bull pursued by plains' coyotes too
cowardly to battle with him for the meat of him, yet certain of the
inevitable end of him when they would be full gorged. As the
bull's horns and stamping hoofs kept off the coyotes, so his shot-
gun kept off these Solomon Islanders, these twilight shades of
bushmen of the island of Guadalcanal.
Came the day of the grass lands. Abruptly, as if cloven by the
sword of God in the hand of God, the jungle terminated. The edge
of it, perpendicular and as black as the infamy of it, was a
hundred feet up and down. And, beginning at the edge of it, grew
the grass--sweet, soft, tender, pasture grass that would have
delighted the eyes and beasts of any husbandman and that extended,
on and on, for leagues and leagues of velvet verdure, to the
backbone of the great island, the towering mountain range flung up
by some ancient earth-cataclysm, serrated and gullied but not yet
erased by the erosive tropic rains. But the grass! He had crawled
into it a dozen yards, buried his face in it, smelled it, and
broken down in a fit of involuntary weeping.
And, while he wept, the wonderful sound had pealed forth--if by
PEAL, he had often thought since, an adequate description could be
given of the enunciation of so vast a sound melting sweet. Sweet
it was, as no sound ever heard. Vast it was, of so mighty a
resonance that it might have proceeded from some brazen-throated
monster. And yet it called to him across that leagues-wide
savannah, and was like a benediction to his long-suffering, pain
racked spirit.
He remembered how he lay there in the grass, wet-cheeked but no
longer sobbing, listening to the sound and wondering that he had
been able to hear it on the beach of Ringmanu. Some freak of air
pressures and air currents, he reflected, had made it possible for
the sound to carry so far. Such conditions might not happen again
in a thousand days or ten thousand days, but the one day it had
happened had been the day he landed from the Nari for several
hours' collecting. Especially had he been in quest of the famed
jungle butterfly, a foot across from wing-tip to wing-tip, as
velvet-dusky of lack of colour as was the gloom of the roof, of
such lofty arboreal habits that it resorted only to the jungle roof
and could be brought down only by a dose of shot. It was for this
purpose that Sagawa had carried the ten-gauge shot-gun.
Two days and nights he had spent crawling across that belt of grass
land. He had suffered much, but pursuit had ceased at the jungle-
edge. And he would have died of thirst had not a heavy
thunderstorm revived him on the second day.
And then had come Balatta. In the first shade, where the savannah
yielded to the dense mountain jungle, he had collapsed to die. At
first she had squealed with delight at sight of his helplessness,
and was for beating his brain out with a stout forest branch.
Perhaps it was his very utter helplessness that had appealed to
her, and perhaps it was her human curiosity that made her refrain.
At any rate, she had refrained, for he opened his eyes again under
the impending blow, and saw her studying him intently. What
especially struck her about him were his blue eyes and white skin.
Coolly she had squatted on her hams, spat on his arm, and with her
finger-tips scrubbed away the dirt of days and nights of muck and
jungle that sullied the pristine whiteness of his skin.
And everything about her had struck him especially, although there
was nothing conventional about her at all. He laughed weakly at
the recollection, for she had been as innocent of garb as Eve
before the fig-leaf adventure. Squat and lean at the same time,
asymmetrically limbed, string-muscled as if with lengths of
cordage, dirt-caked from infancy save for casual showers, she was
as unbeautiful a prototype of woman as he, with a scientist's eye,
had ever gazed upon. Her breasts advertised at the one time her
maturity and youth; and, if by nothing else, her sex was advertised
by the one article of finery with which she was adorned, namely a
pig's tail, thrust though a hole in her left ear-lobe. So lately
had the tail been severed, that its raw end still oozed blood that
dried upon her shoulder like so much candle-droppings. And her
face! A twisted and wizened complex of apish features, perforated
by upturned, sky-open, Mongolian nostrils, by a mouth that sagged
from a huge upper-lip and faded precipitately into a retreating
chin, by peering querulous eyes that blinked as blink the eyes of
denizens of monkey-cages.
Not even the water she brought him in a forest-leaf, and the
ancient and half-putrid chunk of roast pig, could redeem in the
slightest the grotesque hideousness of her. When he had eaten
weakly for a space, he closed his eyes in order not to see her,
although again and again she poked them open to peer at the blue of
them. Then had come the sound. Nearer, much nearer, he knew it to
be; and he knew equally well, despite the weary way he had come,
that it was still many hours distant. The effect of it on her had
been startling. She cringed under it, with averted face, moaning
and chattering with fear. But after it had lived its full life of
an hour, he closed his eyes and fell asleep with Balatta brushing
the flies from him.
When he awoke it was night, and she was gone. But he was aware of
renewed strength, and, by then too thoroughly inoculated by the
mosquito poison to suffer further inflammation, he closed his eyes
and slept an unbroken stretch till sun-up. A little later Balatta
had returned, bringing with her a half-dozen women who, unbeautiful
as they were, were patently not so unbeautiful as she. She
evidenced by her conduct that she considered him her find, her
property, and the pride she took in showing him off would have been
ludicrous had his situation not been so desperate.
Later, after what had been to him a terrible journey of miles, when
he collapsed in front of the devil-devil house in the shadow of the
breadfruit tree, she had shown very lively ideas on the matter of
retaining possession of him. Ngurn, whom Bassett was to know
afterward as the devil-devil doctor, priest, or medicine man of the
village, had wanted his head. Others of the grinning and
chattering monkey-men, all as stark of clothes and bestial of
appearance as Balatta, had wanted his body for the roasting oven.
At that time he had not understood their language, if by LANGUAGE
might be dignified the uncouth sounds they made to represent ideas.
But Bassett had thoroughly understood the matter of debate,
especially when the men pressed and prodded and felt of the flesh
of him as if he were so much commodity in a butcher's stall.
Balatta had been losing the debate rapidly, when the accident
happened. One of the men, curiously examining Bassett's shot-gun,
managed to cock and pull a trigger. The recoil of the butt into
the pit of the man's stomach had not been the most sanguinary
result, for the charge of shot, at a distance of a yard, had blown
the head of one of the debaters into nothingness.
Even Balatta joined the others in flight, and, ere they returned,
his senses already reeling from the oncoming fever-attack, Bassett
had regained possession of the gun. Whereupon, although his teeth
chattered with the ague and his swimming eyes could scarcely see,
he held on to his fading consciousness until he could intimidate
the bushmen with the simple magics of compass, watch, burning
glass, and matches. At the last, with due emphasis, of solemnity
and awfulness, he had killed a young pig with his shot-gun and
promptly fainted.
Bassett flexed his arm-muscles in quest of what possible strength
might reside in such weakness, and dragged himself slowly and
totteringly to his feet. He was shockingly emaciated; yet, during
the various convalescences of the many months of his long sickness,
he had never regained quite the same degree of strength as this
time. What he feared was another relapse such as he had already
frequently experienced. Without drugs, without even quinine, he
had managed so far to live through a combination of the most
pernicious and most malignant of malarial and black-water fevers.
But could he continue to endure? Such was his everlasting query.
For, like the genuine scientist he was, he would not be content to
die until he had solved the secret of the sound.
Supported by a staff, he staggered the few steps to the devil-devil
house where death and Ngurn reigned in gloom. Almost as infamously
dark and evil-stinking as the jungle was the devil-devil house--in
Bassett's opinion. Yet therein was usually to be found his
favourite crony and gossip, Ngurn, always willing for a yarn or a
discussion, the while he sat in the ashes of death and in a slow
smoke shrewdly revolved curing human heads suspended from the
rafters. For, through the months' interval of consciousness of his
long sickness, Bassett had mastered the psychological simplicities
and lingual difficulties of the language of the tribe of Ngurn and
Balatta and Vngngn--the latter the addle-headed young chief who was
ruled by Ngurn, and who, whispered intrigue had it, was the son of
Ngurn.
"Will the Red One speak to-day?" Bassett asked, by this time so
accustomed to the old man's gruesome occupation as to take even an
interest in the progress of the smoke-curing.
With the eye of an expert Ngurn examined the particular head he was
at work upon.
"It will be ten days before I can say 'finish,'" he said. "Never
has any man fixed heads like these."
Bassett smiled inwardly at the old fellow's reluctance to talk with
him of the Red One. It had always been so. Never, by any chance,
had Ngurn or any other member of the weird tribe divulged the
slightest hint of any physical characteristic of the Red One.
Physical the Red One must be, to emit the wonderful sound, and
though it was called the Red One, Bassett could not be sure that
red represented the colour of it. Red enough were the deeds and
powers of it, from what abstract clues he had gleaned. Not alone,
had Ngurn informed him, was the Red One more bestial powerful than
the neighbour tribal gods, ever athirst for the red blood of living
human sacrifices, but the neighbour gods themselves were sacrificed
and tormented before him. He was the god of a dozen allied
villages similar to this one, which was the central and commanding
village of the federation. By virtue of the Red One many alien
villages had been devastated and even wiped out, the prisoners
sacrificed to the Red One. This was true to-day, and it extended
back into old history carried down by word of mouth through the
generations. When he, Ngurn, had been a young man, the tribes
beyond the grass lands had made a war raid. In the counter raid,
Ngurn and his fighting folk had made many prisoners. Of children
alone over five score living had been bled white before the Red
One, and many, many more men and women.
The Thunderer was another of Ngurn's names for the mysterious
deity. Also at times was he called The Loud Shouter, The God-
Voiced, The Bird-Throated, The One with the Throat Sweet as the
Throat of the Honey-Bird, The Sun Singer, and The Star-Born.
Why The Star-Born? In vain Bassett interrogated Ngurn. According
to that old devil-devil doctor, the Red One had always been, just
where he was at present, for ever singing and thundering his will
over men. But Ngurn's father, wrapped in decaying grass-matting
and hanging even then over their heads among the smoky rafters of
the devil-devil house, had held otherwise. That departed wise one
had believed that the Red One came from out of the starry night,
else why--so his argument had run--had the old and forgotten ones
passed his name down as the Star-Born? Bassett could not but
recognize something cogent in such argument. But Ngurn affirmed
the long years of his long life, wherein he had gazed upon many
starry nights, yet never had he found a star on grass land or in
jungle depth--and he had looked for them. True, he had beheld
shooting stars (this in reply to Bassett's contention); but
likewise had he beheld the phosphorescence of fungoid growths and
rotten meat and fireflies on dark nights, and the flames of wood-
fires and of blazing candle-nuts; yet what were flame and blaze and
glow when they had flamed and blazed and glowed? Answer:
memories, memories only, of things which had ceased to be, like
memories of matings accomplished, of feasts forgotten, of desires
that were the ghosts of desires, flaring, flaming, burning, yet
unrealized in achievement of easement and satisfaction. Where was
the appetite of yesterday? the roasted flesh of the wild pig the
hunter's arrow failed to slay? the maid, unwed and dead ere the
young man knew her?
A memory was not a star, was Ngurn's contention. How could a
memory be a star? Further, after all his long life he still
observed the starry night-sky unaltered. Never had he noted the
absence of a single star from its accustomed place. Besides, stars
were fire, and the Red One was not fire--which last involuntary
betrayal told Bassett nothing.
"Will the Red One speak to-morrow?" he queried.
Ngurn shrugged his shoulders as who should say.
"And the day after?--and the day after that?" Bassett persisted.
"I would like to have the curing of your head," Ngurn changed the
subject. "It is different from any other head. No devil-devil has
a head like it. Besides, I would cure it well. I would take
months and months. The moons would come and the moons would go,
and the smoke would be very slow, and I should myself gather the
materials for the curing smoke. The skin would not wrinkle. It
would be as smooth as your skin now."
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