Books: Moon Face and Other Stories
J >>
Jack London >> Moon Face and Other Stories
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 This etext was prepared by Espen Ore, Espen.Ore@hd.uib.no
Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities
MOON-FACE AND OTHER STORIES
BY JACK LONDON
CONTENTS
MOON-FACE
THE LEOPARD MAN'S STORY
LOCAL COLOR
AMATEUR NIGHT
THE MINIONS OF MIDAS
THE SHADOW AND THE FLASH
ALL GOLD CANYON
PLANCHETTE
MOON-FACE
John Claverhouse was a moon-faced man. You know the kind,
cheek-bones wide apart, chin and forehead melting into the cheeks
to complete the perfect round, and the nose, broad and pudgy,
equidistant from the circumference, flattened against the very
centre of the face like a dough-ball upon the ceiling. Perhaps that
is why I hated him, for truly he had become an offense to my eyes,
and I believed the earth to be cumbered with his presence. Perhaps
my mother may have been superstitious of the moon and looked upon
it over the wrong shoulder at the wrong time.
Be that as it may, I hated John Claverhouse. Not that he had done me
what society would consider a wrong or an ill turn. Far from it. The
evil was of a deeper, subtler sort; so elusive, so intangible, as
to defy clear, definite analysis in words. We all experience such
things at some period in our lives. For the first time we see a
certain individual, one who the very instant before we did not dream
existed; and yet, at the first moment of meeting, we say: "I do not
like that man." Why do we not like him? Ah, we do not know why; we
know only that we do not. We have taken a dislike, that is all. And
so I with John Claverhouse.
What right had such a man to be happy? Yet he was an optimist. He
was always gleeful and laughing. All things were always all right,
curse him! Ah I how it grated on my soul that he should be so happy!
Other men could laugh, and it did not bother me. I even used to
laugh myself--before I met John Claverhouse.
But his laugh! It irritated me, maddened me, as nothing else under
the sun could irritate or madden me. It haunted me, gripped hold of
me, and would not let me go. It was a huge, Gargantuan laugh. Waking
or sleeping it was always with me, whirring and jarring across my
heart-strings like an enormous rasp. At break of day it came
whooping across the fields to spoil my pleasant morning revery.
Under the aching noonday glare, when the green things drooped and
the birds withdrew to the depths of the forest, and all nature
drowsed, his great "Ha! ha!" and "Ho! ho!" rose up to the sky and
challenged the sun. And at black midnight, from the lonely
cross-roads where he turned from town into his own place, came his
plaguey cachinnations to rouse me from my sleep and make me writhe
and clench my nails into my palms.
I went forth privily in the night-time, and turned his cattle into
his fields, and in the morning heard his whooping laugh as he drove
them out again. "It is nothing," he said; "the poor, dumb beasties
are not to be blamed for straying into fatter pastures."
He had a dog he called "Mars," a big, splendid brute, part
deer-hound and part blood-hound, and resembling both. Mars was a
great delight to him, and they were always together. But I bided
my time, and one day, when opportunity was ripe, lured the animal
away and settled for him with strychnine and beefsteak. It made
positively no impression on John Claverhouse. His laugh was as
hearty and frequent as ever, and his face as much like the full
moon as it always had been.
Then I set fire to his haystacks and his barn. But the next morning,
being Sunday, he went forth blithe and cheerful.
"Where are you going?" I asked him, as he went by the cross-roads.
"Trout," he said, and his face beamed like a full moon. "I just dote
on trout."
Was there ever such an impossible man! His whole harvest had gone up
in his haystacks and barn. It was uninsured, I knew. And yet, in the
face of famine and the rigorous winter, he went out gayly in quest
of a mess of trout, forsooth, because he "doted" on them! Had gloom
but rested, no matter how lightly, on his brow, or had his bovine
countenance grown long and serious and less like the moon, or had he
removed that smile but once from off his face, I am sure I could
have forgiven him for existing. But no, he grew only more cheerful
under misfortune.
I insulted him. He looked at me in slow and smiling surprise.
"I fight you? Why?" he asked slowly. And then he laughed. "You are so
funny! Ho! ho! You'll be the death of me! He! he! he! Oh! Ho! ho! ho!"
What would you? It was past endurance. By the blood of Judas, how
I hated him! Then there was that name--Claverhouse! What a name!
Wasn't it absurd? Claverhouse! Merciful heaven, WHY Claverhouse?
Again and again I asked myself that question. I should not have
minded Smith, or Brown, or Jones--but CLAVERHOUSE! I leave it to
you. Repeat it to yourself--Claverhouse. Just listen to the
ridiculous sound of it--Claverhouse! Should a man live with such
a name? I ask of you. "No," you say. And "No" said I.
But I bethought me of his mortgage. What of his crops and barn
destroyed, I knew he would be unable to meet it. So I got a shrewd,
close-mouthed, tight-fisted money-lender to get the mortgage
transferred to him. I did not appear but through this agent I forced
the foreclosure, and but few days (no more, believe me, than the
law allowed) were given John Claverhouse to remove his goods and
chattels from the premises. Then I strolled down to see how he took
it, for he had lived there upward of twenty years. But he met me
with his saucer-eyes twinkling, and the light glowing and spreading
in his face till it was as a full-risen moon.
"Ha! ha! ha!" he laughed. "The funniest tike, that youngster of
mine! Did you ever hear the like? Let me tell you. He was down
playing by the edge of the river when a piece of the bank caved in
and splashed him. 'O papa!' he cried; 'a great big puddle flewed
up and hit me.'"
He stopped and waited for me to join him in his infernal glee.
"I don't see any laugh in it," I said shortly, and I know my face
went sour.
He regarded me with wonderment, and then came the damnable light,
glowing and spreading, as I have described it, till his face shone
soft and warm, like the summer moon, and then the laugh--"Ha! ha!
That's funny! You don't see it, eh? He! he! Ho! ho! ho! He doesn't
see it! Why, look here. You know a puddle--"
But I turned on my heel and left him. That was the last. I could
stand it no longer. The thing must end right there, I thought, curse
him! The earth should be quit of him. And as I went over the hill, I
could hear his monstrous laugh reverberating against the sky.
Now, I pride myself on doing things neatly, and when I resolved to
kill John Claverhouse I had it in mind to do so in such fashion that
I should not look back upon it and feel ashamed. I hate bungling,
and I hate brutality. To me there is something repugnant in merely
striking a man with one's naked fist--faugh! it is sickening! So, to
shoot, or stab, or club John Claverhouse (oh, that name!) did not
appeal to me. And not only was I impelled to do it neatly and
artistically, but also in such manner that not the slightest
possible suspicion could be directed against me.
To this end I bent my intellect, and, after a week of profound
incubation, I hatched the scheme. Then I set to work. I bought a
water spaniel bitch, five months old, and devoted my whole attention
to her training. Had any one spied upon me, they would have remarked
that this training consisted entirely of one thing--RETRIEVING. I
taught the dog, which I called "Bellona," to fetch sticks I threw
into the water, and not only to fetch, but to fetch at once, without
mouthing or playing with them. The point was that she was to stop
for nothing, but to deliver the stick in all haste. I made a
practice of running away and leaving her to chase me, with the stick
in her mouth, till she caught me. She was a bright animal, and took
to the game with such eagerness that I was soon content.
After that, at the first casual opportunity, I presented Bellona to
John Claverhouse. I knew what I was about, for I was aware of a
little weakness of his, and of a little private sinning of which he
was regularly and inveterately guilty.
"No," he said, when I placed the end of the rope in his hand. "No,
you don't mean it." And his mouth opened wide and he grinned all
over his damnable moon-face.
"I--I kind of thought, somehow, you didn't like me," he explained.
"Wasn't it funny for me to make such a mistake?" And at the thought
he held his sides with laughter.
"What is her name?" he managed to ask between paroxysms.
"Bellona," I said.
"He! he!" he tittered. "What a funny name."
I gritted my teeth, for his mirth put them on edge, and snapped out
between them, "She was the wife of Mars, you know."
Then the light of the full moon began to suffuse his face, until he
exploded with: "That was my other dog. Well, I guess she's a widow
now. Oh! Ho! ho! E! he! he! Ho!" he whooped after me, and I turned
and fled swiftly over the hill.
The week passed by, and on Saturday evening I said to him, "You go
away Monday, don't you?"
He nodded his head and grinned.
"Then you won't have another chance to get a mess of those trout you
just 'dote' on."
But he did not notice the sneer. "Oh, I don't know," he chuckled.
"I'm going up to-morrow to try pretty hard."
Thus was assurance made doubly sure, and I went back to my house
hugging myself with rapture.
Early next morning I saw him go by with a dip-net and gunnysack, and
Bellona trotting at his heels. I knew where he was bound, and cut
out by the back pasture and climbed through the underbrush to the
top of the mountain. Keeping carefully out of sight, I followed the
crest along for a couple of miles to a natural amphitheatre in the
hills, where the little river raced down out of a gorge and stopped
for breath in a large and placid rock-bound pool. That was the spot!
I sat down on the croup of the mountain, where I could see all that
occurred, and lighted my pipe.
Ere many minutes had passed, John Claverhouse came plodding up the
bed of the stream. Bellona was ambling about him, and they were in
high feather, her short, snappy barks mingling with his deeper
chest-notes. Arrived at the pool, he threw down the dip-net and
sack, and drew from his hip-pocket what looked like a large, fat
candle. But I knew it to be a stick of "giant"; for such was his
method of catching trout. He dynamited them. He attached the fuse by
wrapping the "giant" tightly in a piece of cotton. Then he ignited
the fuse and tossed the explosive into the pool.
Like a flash, Bellona was into the pool after it. I could have
shrieked aloud for joy. Claverhouse yelled at her, but without
avail. He pelted her with clods and rocks, but she swam steadily on
till she got the stick of "giant" in her mouth, when she whirled
about and headed for shore. Then, for the first time, he realized
his danger, and started to run. As foreseen and planned by me, she
made the bank and took out after him. Oh, I tell you, it was great!
As I have said, the pool lay in a sort of amphitheatre. Above and
below, the stream could be crossed on stepping-stones. And around
and around, up and down and across the stones, raced Claverhouse and
Bellona. I could never have believed that such an ungainly man could
run so fast. But run he did, Bellona hot-footed after him, and
gaining. And then, just as she caught up, he in full stride, and she
leaping with nose at his knee, there was a sudden flash, a burst of
smoke, a terrific detonation, and where man and dog had been the
instant before there was naught to be seen but a big hole in the
ground.
"Death from accident while engaged in illegal fishing." That was the
verdict of the coroner's jury; and that is why I pride myself on the
neat and artistic way in which I finished off John Claverhouse.
There was no bungling, no brutality; nothing of which to be ashamed
in the whole transaction, as I am sure you will agree. No more does
his infernal laugh go echoing among the hills, and no more does his
fat moon-face rise up to vex me. My days are peaceful now, and my
night's sleep deep.
THE LEOPARD MAN'S STORY
He had a dreamy, far-away look in his eyes, and his sad, insistent
voice, gentle-spoken as a maid's, seemed the placid embodiment of
some deep-seated melancholy. He was the Leopard Man, but he did not
look it. His business in life, whereby he lived, was to appear in a
cage of performing leopards before vast audiences, and to thrill
those audiences by certain exhibitions of nerve for which his
employers rewarded him on a scale commensurate with the thrills
he produced.
As I say, he did not look it. He was narrow-hipped, narrow-shouldered,
and anaemic, while he seemed not so much oppressed by gloom as by a
sweet and gentle sadness, the weight of which was as sweetly and
gently borne. For an hour I had been trying to get a story out of
him, but he appeared to lack imagination. To him there was no romance
in his gorgeous career, no deeds of daring, no thrills--nothing but
a gray sameness and infinite boredom.
Lions? Oh, yes! he had fought with them. It was nothing. All you had
to do was to stay sober. Anybody could whip a lion to a standstill
with an ordinary stick. He had fought one for half an hour once.
Just hit him on the nose every time he rushed, and when he got
artful and rushed with his head down, why, the thing to do was to
stick out your leg. When he grabbed at the leg you drew it back and
hit hint on the nose again. That was all.
With the far-away look in his eyes and his soft flow of words he
showed me his scars. There were many of them, and one recent one
where a tigress had reached for his shoulder and gone down to the
bone. I could see the neatly mended rents in the coat he had on. His
right arm, from the elbow down, looked as though it had gone through
a threshing machine, what of the ravage wrought by claws and fangs.
But it was nothing, he said, only the old wounds bothered him
somewhat when rainy weather came on.
Suddenly his face brightened with a recollection, for he was really
as anxious to give me a story as I was to get it.
"I suppose you've heard of the lion-tamer who was hated by another
man?" he asked.
He paused and looked pensively at a sick lion in the cage opposite.
"Got the toothache," he explained. "Well, the lion-tamer's big play
to the audience was putting his head in a lion's mouth. The man who
hated him attended every performance in the hope sometime of seeing
that lion crunch down. He followed the show about all over the
country. The years went by and he grew old, and the lion-tamer grew
old, and the lion grew old. And at last one day, sitting in a front
seat, he saw what he had waited for. The lion crunched down, and
there wasn't any need to call a doctor."
The Leopard Man glanced casually over his finger nails in a manner
which would have been critical had it not been so sad.
"Now, that's what I call patience," he continued, "and it's my
style. But it was not the style of a fellow I knew. He was a little,
thin, sawed-off, sword-swallowing and juggling Frenchman. De Ville,
he called himself, and he had a nice wife. She did trapeze work and
used to dive from under the roof into a net, turning over once on
the way as nice as you please.
"De Ville had a quick temper, as quick as his hand, and his hand was
as quick as the paw of a tiger. One day, because the ring-master
called him a frog-eater, or something like that and maybe a little
worse, he shoved him against the soft pine background he used in
his knife-throwing act, so quick the ring-master didn't have time
to think, and there, before the audience, De Ville kept the air
on fire with his knives, sinking them into the wood all around the
ring-master so close that they passed through his clothes and most
of them bit into his skin.
"The clowns had to pull the knives out to get him loose, for he was
pinned fast. So the word went around to watch out for De Ville, and
no one dared be more than barely civil to his wife. And she was a
sly bit of baggage, too, only all hands were afraid of De Ville.
"But there was one man, Wallace, who was afraid of nothing. He was
the lion-tamer, and he had the self-same trick of putting his head
into the lion's mouth. He'd put it into the mouths of any of them,
though he preferred Augustus, a big, good-natured beast who could
always be depended upon.
"As I was saying, Wallace--'King' Wallace we called him--was afraid
of nothing alive or dead. He was a king and no mistake. I've seen
him drunk, and on a wager go into the cage of a lion that'd turned
nasty, and without a stick beat him to a finish. Just did it with
his fist on the nose.
"Madame de Ville--"
At an uproar behind us the Leopard Man turned quietly around. It was
a divided cage, and a monkey, poking through the bars and around the
partition, had had its paw seized by a big gray wolf who was trying
to pull it off by main strength. The arm seemed stretching out
longer end longer like a thick elastic, and the unfortunate monkey's
mates were raising a terrible din. No keeper was at hand, so the
Leopard Man stepped over a couple of paces, dealt the wolf a sharp
blow on the nose with the light cane he carried, and returned with a
sadly apologetic smile to take up his unfinished sentence as though
there had been no interruption.
"--looked at King Wallace and King Wallace looked at her, while De
Ville looked black. We warned Wallace, but it was no use. He laughed
at us, as he laughed at De Ville one day when he shoved De Ville's
head into a bucket of paste because he wanted to fight.
"De Ville was in a pretty mess--I helped to scrape him off; but he
was cool as a cucumber and made no threats at all. But I saw a
glitter in his eyes which I had seen often in the eyes of wild
beasts, and I went out of my way to give Wallace a final warning. He
laughed, but he did not look so much in Madame de Ville's direction
after that.
"Several months passed by. Nothing had happened and I was beginning
to think it all a scare over nothing. We were West by that time,
showing in 'Frisco. It was during the afternoon performance, and the
big tent was filled with women and children, when I went looking for
Red Denny, the head canvas-man, who had walked off with my
pocket-knife.
"Passing by one of the dressing tents I glanced in through a hole
in the canvas to see if I could locate him. He wasn't there, but
directly in front of me was King Wallace, in tights, waiting for his
turn to go on with his cage of performing lions. He was watching
with much amusement a quarrel between a couple of trapeze artists.
All the rest of the people in the dressing tent were watching the
same thing, with the exception of De Ville whom I noticed staring at
Wallace with undisguised hatred. Wallace and the rest were all too
busy following the quarrel to notice this or what followed.
"But I saw it through the hole in the canvas. De Ville drew his
handkerchief from his pocket, made as though to mop the sweat from
his face with it (it was a hot day), and at the same time walked
past Wallace's back. The look troubled me at the time, for not
only did I see hatred in it, but I saw triumph as well.
"'De Ville will bear watching,' I said to myself, and I really
breathed easier when I saw him go out the entrance to the circus
grounds and board an electric car for down town. A few minutes
later I was in the big tent, where I had overhauled Red Denny. King
Wallace was doing his turn and holding the audience spellbound. He
was in a particularly vicious mood, and he kept the lions stirred
up till they were all snarling, that is, all of them except old
Augustus, and he was just too fat and lazy and old to get stirred
up over anything.
"Finally Wallace cracked the old lion's knees with his whip and got
him into position. Old Augustus, blinking good-naturedly, opened his
mouth and in popped Wallace's head. Then the jaws came together,
CRUNCH, just like that."
The Leopard Man smiled in a sweetly wistful fashion, and the
far-away look came into his eyes.
"And that was the end of King Wallace," he went on in his sad, low
voice. "After the excitement cooled down I watched my chance and
bent over and smelled Wallace's head. Then I sneezed."
"It . . . it was . . .?" I queried with halting eagerness.
"Snuff--that De Ville dropped on his hair in the dressing tent. Old
Augustus never meant to do it. He only sneezed."
LOCAL COLOR
"I do not see why you should not turn this immense amount of unusual
information to account," I told him. "Unlike most men equipped with
similar knowledge, YOU have expression. Your style is--"
"Is sufficiently--er--journalese?" he interrupted suavely.
"Precisely! You could turn a pretty penny."
But he interlocked his fingers meditatively, shrugged his shoulders,
and dismissed the subject.
"I have tried it. It does not pay."
"It was paid for and published," he added, after a pause. "And I was
also honored with sixty days in the Hobo."
"The Hobo?" I ventured.
"The Hobo--" He fixed his eyes on my Spencer and ran along the
titles while he cast his definition. "The Hobo, my dear fellow, is
the name for that particular place of detention in city and county
jails wherein are assembled tramps, drunks, beggars, and the
riff-raff of petty offenders. The word itself is a pretty one, and
it has a history. Hautbois--there's the French of it. Haut, meaning
high, and bois, wood. In English it becomes hautboy, a wooden
musical instrument of two-foot tone, I believe, played with a double
reed, an oboe, in fact. You remember in 'Henry IV'--
"'The case of a treble hautboy
Was a mansion for him, a court.'
"From this to ho-boy is but a step, and for that matter the English
used the terms interchangeably. But--and mark you, the leap
paralyzes one--crossing the Western Ocean, in New York City,
hautboy, or ho-boy, becomes the name by which the night-scavenger is
known. In a way one understands its being born of the contempt for
wandering players and musical fellows. But see the beauty of it! the
burn and the brand! The night-scavenger, the pariah, the miserable,
the despised, the man without caste! And in its next incarnation,
consistently and logically, it attaches itself to the American
outcast, namely, the tramp. Then, as others have mutilated its
sense, the tramp mutilates its form, and ho-boy becomes exultantly
hobo. Wherefore, the large stone and brick cells, lined with double
and triple-tiered bunks, in which the Law is wont to incarcerate
him, he calls the Hobo. Interesting, isn't it?"
And I sat back and marvelled secretly at this encyclopaedic-minded
man, this Leith Clay-Randolph, this common tramp who made himself at
home in my den, charmed such friends as gathered at my small table,
outshone me with his brilliance and his manners, spent my spending
money, smoked my best cigars, and selected from my ties and studs
with a cultivated and discriminating eye.
He absently walked over to the shelves and looked into Loria's
"Economic Foundation of Society."
"I like to talk with you," he remarked. "You are not indifferently
schooled. You've read the books, and your economic interpretation of
history, as you choose to call it" (this with a sneer), "eminently
fits you for an intellectual outlook on life. But your sociologic
judgments are vitiated by your lack of practical knowledge. Now I,
who know the books, pardon me, somewhat better than you, know life,
too. I have lived it, naked, taken it up in both my hands and looked
at it, and tasted it, the flesh and the blood of it, and, being
purely an intellectual, I have been biased by neither passion nor
prejudice. All of which is necessary for clear concepts, and all of
which you lack. Ah! a really clever passage. Listen!"
And he read aloud to me in his remarkable style, paralleling the
text with a running criticism and commentary, lucidly wording
involved and lumbering periods, casting side and cross lights upon
the subject, introducing points the author had blundered past and
objections he had ignored, catching up lost ends, flinging a
contrast into a paradox and reducing it to a coherent and succinctly
stated truth--in short, flashing his luminous genius in a blaze of
fire over pages erstwhile dull and heavy and lifeless.
It is long since that Leith Clay-Randolph (note the hyphenated
surname) knocked at the back door of Idlewild and melted the heart
of Gunda. Now Gunda was cold as her Norway hills, though in her
least frigid moods she was capable of permitting especially
nice-looking tramps to sit on the back stoop and devour lone crusts
and forlorn and forsaken chops. But that a tatterdemalion out of the
night should invade the sanctity of her kitchen-kingdom and delay
dinner while she set a place for him in the warmest corner, was a
matter of such moment that the Sunflower went to see. Ah, the
Sunflower, of the soft heart and swift sympathy! Leith Clay-Randolph
threw his glamour over her for fifteen long minutes, whilst I
brooded with my cigar, and then she fluttered back with vague words
and the suggestion of a cast-off suit I would never miss.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11