Lost Face by Jack London


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Page 1

He sighed. So that thing before him was Big Ivan--Big Ivan the giant,
the man without nerves, the man of iron, the Cossack turned freebooter of
the seas, who was as phlegmatic as an ox, with a nervous system so low
that what was pain to ordinary men was scarcely a tickle to him. Well,
well, trust these Nulato Indians to find Big Ivan's nerves and trace them
to the roots of his quivering soul. They were certainly doing it. It
was inconceivable that a man could suffer so much and yet live. Big Ivan
was paying for his low order of nerves. Already he had lasted twice as
long as any of the others.

Subienkow felt that he could not stand the Cossack's sufferings much
longer. Why didn't Ivan die? He would go mad if that screaming did not
cease. But when it did cease, his turn would come. And there was Yakaga
awaiting him, too, grinning at him even now in anticipation--Yakaga, whom
only last week he had kicked out of the fort, and upon whose face he had
laid the lash of his dog-whip. Yakaga would attend to him. Doubtlessly
Yakaga was saving for him more refined tortures, more exquisite nerve-
racking. Ah! that must have been a good one, from the way Ivan screamed.
The squaws bending over him stepped back with laughter and clapping of
hands. Subienkow saw the monstrous thing that had been perpetrated, and
began to laugh hysterically. The Indians looked at him in wonderment
that he should laugh. But Subienkow could not stop.

This would never do. He controlled himself, the spasmodic twitchings
slowly dying away. He strove to think of other things, and began reading
back in his own life. He remembered his mother and his father, and the
little spotted pony, and the French tutor who had taught him dancing and
sneaked him an old worn copy of Voltaire. Once more he saw Paris, and
dreary London, and gay Vienna, and Rome. And once more he saw that wild
group of youths who had dreamed, even as he, the dream of an independent
Poland with a king of Poland on the throne at Warsaw. Ah, there it was
that the long trail began. Well, he had lasted longest. One by one,
beginning with the two executed at St. Petersburg, he took up the count
of the passing of those brave spirits. Here one had been beaten to death
by a jailer, and there, on that bloodstained highway of the exiles, where
they had marched for endless months, beaten and maltreated by their
Cossack guards, another had dropped by the way. Always it had been
savagery--brutal, bestial savagery. They had died--of fever, in the
mines, under the knout. The last two had died after the escape, in the
battle with the Cossacks, and he alone had won to Kamtchatka with the
stolen papers and the money of a traveller he had left lying in the snow.

It had been nothing but savagery. All the years, with his heart in
studios, and theatres, and courts, he had been hemmed in by savagery. He
had purchased his life with blood. Everybody had killed. He had killed
that traveller for his passports. He had proved that he was a man of
parts by duelling with two Russian officers on a single day. He had had
to prove himself in order to win to a place among the fur-thieves. He
had had to win to that place. Behind him lay the thousand-years-long
road across all Siberia and Russia. He could not escape that way. The
only way was ahead, across the dark and icy sea of Bering to Alaska. The
way had led from savagery to deeper savagery. On the scurvy-rotten ships
of the fur-thieves, out of food and out of water, buffeted by the
interminable storms of that stormy sea, men had become animals. Thrice
he had sailed east from Kamtchatka. And thrice, after all manner of
hardship and suffering, the survivors had come back to Kamtchatka. There
had been no outlet for escape, and he could not go back the way he had
come, for the mines and the knout awaited him.

Again, the fourth and last time, he had sailed east. He had been with
those who first found the fabled Seal Islands; but he had not returned
with them to share the wealth of furs in the mad orgies of Kamtchatka. He
had sworn never to go back. He knew that to win to those dear capitals
of Europe he must go on. So he had changed ships and remained in the
dark new land. His comrades were Slavonian hunters and Russian
adventurers, Mongols and Tartars and Siberian aborigines; and through the
savages of the new world they had cut a path of blood. They had
massacred whole villages that refused to furnish the fur-tribute; and
they, in turn, had been massacred by ships' companies. He, with one
Finn, had been the sole survivor of such a company. They had spent a
winter of solitude and starvation on a lonely Aleutian isle, and their
rescue in the spring by another fur-ship had been one chance in a
thousand.

But always the terrible savagery had hemmed him in. Passing from ship to
ship, and ever refusing to return, he had come to the ship that explored
south. All down the Alaska coast they had encountered nothing but hosts
of savages. Every anchorage among the beetling islands or under the
frowning cliffs of the mainland had meant a battle or a storm. Either
the gales blew, threatening destruction, or the war canoes came off,
manned by howling natives with the war-paint on their faces, who came to
learn the bloody virtues of the sea-rovers' gunpowder. South, south they
had coasted, clear to the myth-land of California. Here, it was said,
were Spanish adventurers who had fought their way up from Mexico. He had
had hopes of those Spanish adventurers. Escaping to them, the rest would
have been easy--a year or two, what did it matter more or less--and he
would win to Mexico, then a ship, and Europe would be his. But they had
met no Spaniards. Only had they encountered the same impregnable wall of
savagery. The denizens of the confines of the world, painted for war,
had driven them back from the shores. At last, when one boat was cut off
and every man killed, the commander had abandoned the quest and sailed
back to the north.

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Books | Photos | Paul Mutton | Tue 19th Mar 2024, 9:05