_ Warden Atherton, when he thinks of me, must feel anything but pride.
I have taught him what spirit is, humbled him with my own spirit
that rose invulnerable, triumphant, above all his tortures. I sit
here in Folsom, in Murderers' Row, awaiting my execution; Warden
Atherton still holds his political job and is king over San Quentin
and all the damned within its walls; and yet, in his heart of
hearts, he knows that I am greater than he.
In vain Warden Atherton tried to break my spirit. And there were
times, beyond any shadow of doubt, when he would have been glad had
I died in the jacket. So the long inquisition went on. As he had
told me, and as he told me repeatedly, it was dynamite or curtains.
Captain Jamie was a veteran in dungeon horrors, yet the time came
when he broke down under the strain I put on him and on the rest of
my torturers. So desperate did he become that he dared words with
the Warden and washed his hands of the affair. From that day until
the end of my torturing he never set foot in solitary.
Yes, and the time came when Warden Atherton grew afraid, although he
still persisted in trying to wring from me the hiding-place of the
non-existent dynamite. Toward the last he was badly shaken by Jake
Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was fearless and outspoken. He had passed
unbroken through all their prison hells, and out of superior will
could beard them to their teeth. Morrell rapped me a full account
of the incident. I was unconscious in the jacket at the time.
"Warden," Oppenheimer had said, "you've bitten off more than you can
chew. It ain't a case of killing Standing. It's a case of killing
three men, for as sure as you kill him, sooner or later Morrell and
I will get the word out and what you have done will be known from
one end of California to the other. You've got your choice. You've
either got to let up on Standing or kill all three of us.
Standing's got your goat. So have I. So has Morrell. You are a
stinking coward, and you haven't got the back-bone and guts to carry
out the dirty butcher's work you'd like to do."
Oppenheimer got a hundred hours in the jacket for it, and, when he
was unlaced, spat in the Warden's face and received a second hundred
hours on end. When he was unlaced this time, the Warden was careful
not to be in solitary. That he was shaken by Oppenheimer's words
there is no doubt.
But it was Doctor Jackson who was the arch-fiend. To him I was a
novelty, and he was ever eager to see how much more I could stand
before I broke.
"He can stand twenty days off the bat," he bragged to the Warden in
my presence.
"You are conservative," I broke in. "I can stand forty days.
Pshaw! I can stand a hundred when such as you administer it." And,
remembering my sea-cuny's patience of forty years' waiting ere I got
my hands on Chong Mong-ju's gullet, I added: "You prison curs, you
don't know what a man is. You think a man is made in your own
cowardly images. Behold, I am a man. You are feeblings. I am your
master. You can't bring a squeal out of me. You think it
remarkable, for you know how easily you would squeal."
Oh, I abused them, called them sons of toads, hell's scullions,
slime of the pit. For I was above them, beyond them. They were
slaves. I was free spirit. My flesh only lay pent there in
solitary. I was not pent. I had mastered the flesh, and the
spaciousness of time was mine to wander in, while my poor flesh, not
even suffering, lay in the little death in the jacket.
Much of my adventures I rapped to my two comrades. Morrell
believed, for he had himself tasted the little death. But
Oppenheimer, enraptured with my tales, remained a sceptic to the
end. His regret was naive, and at times really pathetic, in that I
had devoted my life to the science of agriculture instead of to
fiction writing.
"But, man," I reasoned with him, "what do I know of myself about
this Cho-Sen? I am able to identify it with what is to-day called
Korea, and that is about all. That is as far as my reading goes.
For instance, how possibly, out of my present life's experience,
could I know anything about kimchi? Yet I know kimchi. It is a
sort of sauerkraut. When it is spoiled it stinks to heaven. I tell
you, when I was Adam Strang, I ate kimchi thousands of times. I
know good kimchi, bad kimchi, rotten kimchi. I know the best kimchi
is made by the women of Wosan. Now how do I know that? It is not
in the content of my mind, Darrell Standing's mind. It is in the
content of Adam Strang's mind, who, through various births and
deaths, bequeathed his experiences to me, Darrell Standing, along
with the rest of the experiences of those various other lives that
intervened. Don't you see, Jake? That is how men come to be, to
grow, how spirit develops."
"Aw, come off," he rapped back with the quick imperative knuckles I
knew so well. "Listen to your uncle talk now. I am Jake
Oppenheimer. I always have been Jake Oppenheimer. No other guy is
in my makings. What I know I know as Jake Oppenheimer. Now what do
I know? I'll tell you one thing. I know kimchi. Kimchi is a sort
of sauerkraut made in a country that used to be called Cho-Sen. The
women of Wosan make the best kimchi, and when kimchi is spoiled it
stinks to heaven. You keep out of this, Ed. Wait till I tie the
professor up.
"Now, professor, how do I know all this stuff about kimchi? It is
not in the content of my mind."
"But it is," I exulted. "I put it there."
"All right, old boss. Then who put it into your mind?"
"Adam Strang."
"Not on your tintype. Adam Strang is a pipe-dream. You read it
somewhere."
"Never," I averred. "The little I read of Korea was the war
correspondence at the time of the Japanese-Russian War."
"Do you remember all you read?" Oppenheimer queried.
"No."
"Some you forget?"
"Yes, but--"
"That's all, thank you," he interrupted, in the manner of a lawyer
abruptly concluding a cross-examination after having extracted a
fatal admission from a witness.
It was impossible to convince Oppenheimer of my sincerity. He
insisted that I was making it up as I went along, although he
applauded what he called my "to-be-continued-in-our-next," and, at
the times they were resting me up from the jacket, was continually
begging and urging me to run off a few more chapters.
"Now, professor, cut out that high-brow stuff," he would interrupt
Ed Morrell's and my metaphysical discussions, "and tell us more
about the ki-sang and the cunies. And, say, while you're about it,
tell us what happened to the Lady Om when that rough-neck husband of
hers choked the old geezer and croaked."
How often have I said that form perishes. Let me repeat. Form
perishes. Matter has no memory. Spirit only remembers, as here, in
prison cells, after the centuries, knowledge of the Lady Om and
Chong Mong-ju persisted in my mind, was conveyed by me into Jake
Oppenheimer's mind, and by him was reconveyed into my mind in the
argot and jargon of the West. And now I have conveyed it into your
mind, my reader. Try to eliminate it from your mind. You cannot.
As long as you live what I have told will tenant your mind. Mind?
There is nothing permanent but mind. Matter fluxes, crystallizes,
and fluxes again, and forms are never repeated. Forms disintegrate
into the eternal nothingness from which there is no return. Form is
apparitional and passes, as passed the physical forms of the Lady Om
and Chong Mong-ju. But the memory of them remains, shall always
remain as long as spirit endures, and spirit is indestructible.
"One thing sticks out as big as a house," was Oppenheimer's final
criticism of my Adam Strang adventure. "And that is that you've
done more hanging around Chinatown dumps and hop-joints than was
good for a respectable college professor. Evil communications, you
know. I guess that's what brought you here."
Before I return to my adventures I am compelled to tell one
remarkable incident that occurred in solitary. It is remarkable in
two ways. It shows the astounding mental power of that child of the
gutters, Jake Oppenheimer; and it is in itself convincing proof of
the verity of my experiences when in the jacket coma.
"Say, professor," Oppenheimer tapped to me one day. "When you was
spieling that Adam Strang yarn, I remember you mentioned playing
chess with that royal souse of an emperor's brother. Now is that
chess like our kind of chess?"
Of course I had to reply that I did not know, that I did not
remember the details after I returned to my normal state. And of
course he laughed good-naturedly at what he called my foolery. Yet
I could distinctly remember that in my Adam Strang adventure I had
frequently played chess. The trouble was that whenever I came back
to consciousness in solitary, unessential and intricate details
faded from my memory.
It must be remembered that for convenience I have assembled my
intermittent and repetitional jacket experiences into coherent and
consecutive narratives. I never knew in advance where my journeys
in time would take me. For instance, I have a score of different
times returned to Jesse Fancher in the wagon-circle at Mountain
Meadows. In a single ten-days' bout in the jacket I have gone back
and back, from life to life, and often skipping whole series of
lives that at other times I have covered, back to prehistoric time,
and back of that to days ere civilization began.
So I resolved, on my next return from Adam Strang's experiences,
whenever it might be, that I should, immediately, I on resuming
consciousness, concentrate upon what visions and memories. I had
brought back of chess playing. As luck would have it, I had to
endure Oppenheimer's chaffing for a full month ere it happened. And
then, no sooner out of jacket and circulation restored, than I
started knuckle-rapping the information.
Further, I taught Oppenheimer the chess Adam Strang had played in
Cho-Sen centuries agone. It was different from Western chess, and
yet could not but be fundamentally the same, tracing back to a
common origin, probably India. In place of our sixty-four squares
there are eighty-one squares. We have eight pawns on a side; they
have nine; and though limited similarly, the principle of moving is
different.
Also, in the Cho-Sen game, there are twenty pieces and pawns against
our sixteen, and they are arrayed in three rows instead of two.
Thus, the nine pawns are in the front row; in the middle row are two
pieces resembling our castles; and in the back row, midway, stands
the king, flanked in order on either side by "gold money," "silver
money," "knight," and "spear." It will be observed that in the Cho-
Sen game there is no queen. A further radical variation is that a
captured piece or pawn is not removed from the board. It becomes
the property of the captor and is thereafter played by him.
Well, I taught Oppenheimer this game--a far more difficult
achievement than our own game, as will be admitted, when the
capturing and recapturing and continued playing of pawns and pieces
is considered. Solitary is not heated. It would be a wickedness to
ease a convict from any spite of the elements. And many a dreary
day of biting cold did Oppenheimer and I forget that and the
following winter in the absorption of Cho-Sen chess.
But there was no convincing him that I had in truth brought this
game back to San Quentin across the centuries. He insisted that I
had read about it somewhere, and, though I had forgotten the
reading, the stuff of the reading was nevertheless in the content of
my mind, ripe to be brought out in any pipe-dream. Thus he turned
the tenets and jargon of psychology back on me.
"What's to prevent your inventing it right here in solitary?" was
his next hypothesis. "Didn't Ed invent the knuckle-talk? And ain't
you and me improving on it right along? I got you, bo. You
invented it. Say, get it patented. I remember when I was night-
messenger some guy invented a fool thing called Pigs in Clover and
made millions out of it."
"There's no patenting this," I replied. "Doubtlessly the Asiatics
have been playing it for thousands of years. Won't you believe me
when I tell you I didn't invent it?"
"Then you must have read about it, or seen the Chinks playing it in
some of those hop-joints you was always hanging around," was his
last word.
But I have a last word. There is a Japanese murderer here in
Folsom--or was, for he was executed last week. I talked the matter
over with him; and the game Adam Strang played, and which I taught
Oppenheimer, proved quite similar to the Japanese game. They are
far more alike than is either of them like the Western game. _