THE RED ONE(红色的那人)

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THE RED ONE

by Jack London

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.

THE RED ONE

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

THE RED ONE

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

THE RED ONE

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

THE RED ONE

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,

THE RED ONE

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

THE RED ONE

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

THE RED ONE

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

THE RED ONE

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

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THEREDONE1THEREDONEbyJackLondonTHEREDONE2THEREDONETHEREitwas!Theabruptliberationofsound!Ashetimeditwithhiswatch,Bassettlikenedittothetrumpofanarchangel.Wallsofcities,hemeditated,mightwellfalldownbeforesovastandcompellingasummons.Forthethousandthtimevainlyhetriedtoanalysethetone-qualityofthatenormous...

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