WHEN GOD LAUGHS AND OTHER STORIES(当上帝发笑时)

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WHEN GOD LAUGHS, AND OTHER STORIES

WHEN GOD LAUGHS,

AND OTHER STORIES

By Jack London

WHEN GOD LAUGHS, AND OTHER STORIES

WHEN GOD LAUGHS (with

compliments to Harry Cowell)

"The gods, the gods are stronger; time Falls down before them, all

men's knees Bow, all men's prayers and sorrows climb Like incense

toward them; yea, for these Are gods, Felise."

Carquinez had relaxed finally. He stole a glance at the rattling

windows, looked upward at the beamed roof, and listened for a moment to

the savage roar of the south-easter as it caught the bungalow in its

bellowing jaws. Then he held his glass between him and the fire and

laughed for joy through the golden wine.

"It is beautiful," he said. "It is sweetly sweet. It is a woman's wine,

and it was made for gray-robed saints to drink."

"We grow it on our own warm hills," I said, with pardonable

California pride. "You rode up yesterday through the vines from which it

was made."

It was worth while to get Carquinez to loosen up. Nor was he ever

really himself until he felt the mellow warmth of the vine singing in his

blood. He was an artist, it is true, always an artist; but somehow, sober, the

high pitch and lilt went out of his thought-processes and he was prone to

be as deadly dull as a British Sunday--not dull as other men are dull, but

dull when measured by the sprightly wight that Monte Carquinez was

when he was really himself.

From all this it must not be inferred that Carquinez, who is my dear

friend and dearer comrade, was a sot. Far from it. He rarely erred. As

I have said, he was an artist. He knew when he had enough, and enough,

with him, was equilibrium--the equilibrium that is yours and mine when

we are sober.

His was a wise and instinctive temperateness that savoured of the

Greek. Yet he was far from Greek. "I am Aztec, I am Inca, I am

Spaniard," I have heard him say. And in truth he looked it, a compound

WHEN GOD LAUGHS, AND OTHER STORIES

of strange and ancient races, what with his swarthy skin and the

asymmetry and primitiveness of his features. His eyes, under massively

arched brows, were wide apart and black with the blackness that is

barbaric, while before them was perpetually falling down a great black

mop of hair through which he gazed like a roguish satyr from a thicket.

He invariably wore a soft flannel shirt under his velvet-corduroy jacket,

and his necktie was red. This latter stood for the red flag (he had once

lived with the socialists of Paris), and it symbolized the blood and

brotherhood of man. Also, he had never been known to wear anything on

his head save a leather-banded sombrero. It was even rumoured that he

had been born with this particular piece of headgear. And in my

experience it was provocative of nothing short of sheer delight to see that

Mexican sombrero hailing a cab in Piccadilly or storm-tossed in the crush

for the New York Elevated.

As I have said, Carquinez was made quick by wine--"as the clay was

made quick when God breathed the breath of life into it," was his way of

saying it. I confess that he was blasphemously intimate with God; and I

must add that there was no blasphemy in him. He was at all times honest,

and, because he was compounded of paradoxes, greatly misunderstood by

those who did not know him. He could be as elementally raw at times as

a screaming savage; and at other times as delicate as a maid, as subtle as a

Spaniard. And--well, was he not Aztec? Inca? Spaniard?

And now I must ask pardon for the space I have given him. (He is

my friend, and I love him.) The house was shaking to the storm, as he

drew closer to the fire and laughed at it through his wine. He looked at

me, and by the added lustre of his eye, and by the alertness of it, I knew

that at last he was pitched in his proper key.

"And so you think you've won out against the gods?" he demanded.

"Why the gods?"

"Whose will but theirs has put satiety upon man?" he cried.

"And whence the will in me to escape satiety?" I asked triumphantly.

"Again the gods," he laughed. "It is their game we play. They deal

and shuffle all the cards . . . and take the stakes. Think not that you have

escaped by fleeing from the mad cities. You with your vine-clad hills,

WHEN GOD LAUGHS, AND OTHER STORIES

your sunsets and your sunrises, your homely fare and simple round of

living!

"I've watched you ever since I came. You have not won. You have

surrendered. You have made terms with the enemy. You have made

confession that you are tired. You have flown the white flag of fatigue.

You have nailed up a notice to the effect that life is ebbing down in you.

You have run away from life. You have played a trick, shabby trick.

You have balked at the game. You refuse to play. You have thrown

your cards under the table and run away to hide, here amongst your hills."

He tossed his straight hair back from his flashing eyes, and scarcely

interrupted to roll a long, brown, Mexican cigarette.

"But the gods know. It is an old trick. All the generations of man

have tried it . . . and lost. The gods know how to deal with such as you.

To pursue is to possess, and to possess is to be sated. And so you, in your

wisdom, have refused any longer to pursue. You have elected surcease.

Very well. You will become sated with surcease. You say you have

escaped satiety! You have merely bartered it for senility. And senility

is another name for satiety. It is satiety's masquerade. Bah!"

"But look at me!" I cried.

Carquinez was ever a demon for haling ones soul out and making rags

and tatters of it.

He looked me witheringly up and down.

"You see no signs," I challenged.

"Decay is insidious," he retorted. "You are rotten ripe."

I laughed and forgave him for his very deviltry. But he refused to be

forgiven.

"Do I not know?" he asked. "The gods always win. I have watched

men play for years what seemed a winning game. In the end they lost."

"Don't you ever make mistakes?" I asked.

He blew many meditative rings of smoke before replying.

"Yes, I was nearly fooled, once. Let me tell you. There was Marvin

Fiske. You remember him? And his Dantesque face and poet's soul,

singing his chant of the flesh, the very priest of Love? And there was

Ethel Baird, whom also you must remember."

WHEN GOD LAUGHS, AND OTHER STORIES

"A warm saint," I said.

"That is she! Holy as Love, and sweeter! Just a woman, made for

love; and yet--how shall I say?--drenched through with holiness as your

own air here is with the perfume of flowers. Well, they married. They

played a hand with the gods--"

"And they won, they gloriously won!" I broke in.

Carquinez looked at me pityingly, and his voice was like a funeral bell.

"They lost. They supremely, colossally lost."

"But the world believes otherwise," I ventured coldly.

"The world conjectures. The world sees only the face of things.

But I know. Has it ever entered your mind to wonder why she took the

veil, buried herself in that dolorous convent of the living dead?"

"Because she loved him so, and when he died . . ."

Speech was frozen on my lips by Carquinez's sneer.

"A pat answer," he said, "machine-made like a piece of cotton-drill.

The world's judgment! And much the world knows about it. Like you,

she fled from life. She was beaten. She flung out the white flag of

fatigue. And no beleaguered city ever flew that flag in such bitterness

and tears.

"Now I shall tell you the whole tale, and you must believe me, for I

know. They had pondered the problem of satiety. They loved Love.

They knew to the uttermost farthing the value of Love. They loved him

so well that they were fain to keep him always, warm and a-thrill in their

hearts. They welcomed his coming; they feared to have him depart.

"Love was desire, they held, a delicious pain. He was ever seeking

easement, and when he found that for which he sought, he died. Love

denied was Love alive; Love granted was Love deceased. Do you follow

me? They saw it was not the way of life to be hungry for what it has.

To eat and still be hungry--man has never accomplished that feat. The

problem of satiety. That is it. To have and to keep the sharp famine-

edge of appetite at the groaning board. This was their problem, for they

loved Love. Often did they discuss it, with all Love's sweet ardours

brimming in their eyes; his ruddy blood spraying their cheeks; his voice

playing in and out with their voices, now hiding as a tremolo in their

WHEN GOD LAUGHS, AND OTHER STORIES

throats, and again shading a tone with that ineffable tenderness which he

alone can utter.

"How do I know all this? I saw--much. More I learned from her

diary. This I found in it, from Fiona Macleod: 'For, truly, that wandering

voice, that twilight-whisper, that breath so dewy-sweet, that flame-winged

lute- player whom none sees but for a moment, in a rainbow-shimmer of

joy, or a sudden lightning-flare of passion, this exquisite mystery we call

Amor, comes, to some rapt visionaries at least, not with a song upon the

lips that all may hear, or with blithe viol of public music, but as one

wrought by ecstasy, dumbly eloquent with desire.'

"How to keep the flame-winged lute-player with his dumb eloquence

of desire? To feast him was to lose him. Their love for each other was

a great love. Their granaries were overflowing with plenitude; yet they

wanted to keep the sharp famine-edge of their love undulled.

"Nor were they lean little fledglings theorizing on the threshold of

Love. They were robust and realized souls. They had loved before, with

others, in the days before they met; and in those days they had throttled

Love with caresses, and killed him with kisses, and buried him in the pit of

satiety.

"They were not cold wraiths, this man and woman. They were warm

human. They had no Saxon soberness in their blood. The colour of it

was sunset- red. They glowed with it. Temperamentally theirs was the

French joy in the flesh. They were idealists, but their idealism was

Gallic. It was not tempered by the chill and sombre fluid that for the

English serves as blood. There was no stoicism about them. They were

Americans, descended out of the English, and yet the refraining and self-

denying of the English spirit-groping were not theirs.

"They were all this that I have said, and they were made for joy, only

they achieved a concept. A curse on concepts! They played with logic,

and this was their logic.--But first let me tell you of a talk we had one

night. It was of Gautier's Madeline de Maupin. You remember the

maid? She kissed once, and once only, and kisses she would have no

more. Not that she found kisses were not sweet, but that she feared with

repetition they would cloy. Satiety again! She tried to play without

WHEN GOD LAUGHS, AND OTHER STORIES

stakes against the gods. Now this is contrary to a rule of the game the

gods themselves have made. Only the rules are not posted over the table.

Mortals must play in order to learn the rules.

"Well, to the logic. The man and the woman argued thus: Why kiss

once only? If to kiss once were wise, was it not wiser to kiss not at all?

Thus could they keep Love alive. Fasting, he would knock forever at

their hearts.

"Perhaps it was out of their heredity that they achieved this unholy

concept. The breed will out and sometimes most fantastically. Thus in

them did cursed Albion array herself a scheming wanton, a bold, cold-

calculating, and artful hussy. After all, I do not know. But this I know:

it was out of their inordinate desire for joy that they forewent joy.

"As he said (I read it long afterward in one of his letters to her): 'To

hold you in my arms, close, and yet not close. To yearn for you, and

never to have you, and so always to have you.' And she: 'For you to be

always just beyond my reach. To be ever attaining you, and yet never

attaining you, and for this to last forever, always fresh and new, and

always with the first flush upon us.

"That is not the way they said it. On my lips their love-philosophy is

mangled. And who am I to delve into their soul-stuff? I am a frog, on

the dank edge of a great darkness, gazing goggle-eyed at the mystery and

wonder of their flaming souls.

"And they were right, as far as they went. Everything is good . . . as

long as it is unpossessed. Satiety and possession are Death's horses; they

run in span.

"'And time could only tutor us to eke Our rapture's warmth with

custom's afterglow.'

"They got that from a sonnet of Alfred Austin's. It was called 'Love's

Wisdom.' It was the one kiss of Madeline de Maupin. How did it run?

"'Kiss we and part; no further can we go; And better death than we

from high to low Should dwindle, or decline from strong to weak.'

"But they were wiser. They would not kiss and part. They would

not kiss at all, and thus they planned to stay at Love's topmost peak.

They married. You were in England at the time. And never was there

WHEN GOD LAUGHS, AND OTHER STORIES

such a marriage. They kept their secret to themselves. I did not know,

then. Their rapture's warmth did not cool. Their love burned with

increasing brightness. Never was there anything like it. The time

passed, the months, the years, and ever the flame-winged lute-player grew

more resplendent.

"Everybody marvelled. They became the wonderful lovers, and they

were greatly envied. Sometimes women pitied her because she was

childless; it is the form the envy of such creatures takes.

"And I did not know their secret. I pondered and I marvelled. As

first I had expected, subconsciously I imagine, the passing of their love.

Then I became aware that it was Time that passed and Love that remained.

Then I became curious. What was their secret? What were the magic

fetters with which they bound Love to them? How did they hold the

graceless elf? What elixir of eternal love had they drunk together as had

Tristram and Iseult of old time? And whose hand had brewed the fairy

drink?

"As I say, I was curious, and I watched them. They were love-mad.

They lived in an unending revel of Love. They made a pomp and

ceremonial of it. They saturated themselves in the art and poetry of Love.

No, they were not neurotics. They were sane and healthy, and they were

artists. But they had accomplished the impossible. They had achieved

deathless desire.

"And I? I saw much of them and their everlasting miracle of Love.

I puzzled and wondered, and then one day--"

Carquinez broke off abruptly and asked, "Have you ever read, 'Love's

Waiting Time'?"

I shook my head.

"Page wrote it--Curtis Hidden Page, I think. Well, it was that bit of

verse that gave me the clue. One day, in the window-seat near the big

piano--you remember how she could play? She used to laugh, sometimes,

and doubt whether it was for them I came, or for the music. She called

me a 'music-sot' once, a 'sound-debauchee.' What a voice he had!

When he sang I believed in immortality, my regard for the gods grew

almost patronizing and I devised ways and means whereby I surely could

WHEN GOD LAUGHS, AND OTHER STORIES

outwit them and their tricks.

"It was a spectacle for God, that man and woman, years married, and

singing love-songs with a freshness virginal as new-born Love himself,

with a ripeness and wealth of ardour that young lovers can never know.

Young lovers were pale and anaemic beside that long-married pair. To

see them, all fire and flame and tenderness, at a trembling distance,

lavishing caresses of eye and voice with every action, through every

silence--their love driving them toward each other, and they withholding

like fluttering moths, each to the other a candle-flame, and revolving each

about the other in the mad gyrations of an amazing orbit-flight! It

seemed, in obedience to some great law of physics, more potent than

gravitation and more subtle, that they must corporeally melt each into each

there before my very eyes. Small wonder they were called the wonderful

lovers.

"I have wandered. Now to the clue. One day in the window-seat I

found a book of verse. It opened of itself, betraying long habit, to 'Love's

Waiting Time.' The page was thumbed and limp with overhandling, and

there I read:--

"'So sweet it is to stand but just apart, To know each other better,

and to keep The soft, delicious sense of two that touch . . .

O love, not yet! . . . Sweet, let us keep our love Wrapped round

with sacred mystery awhile, Waiting the secret of the coming years,

That come not yet, not yet . . . sometime . . . not yet . . .

Oh, yet a little while our love may grow! When it has blossomed

it will haply die. Feed it with lipless kisses, let it sleep, Bedded in

dead denial yet some while . . . Oh, yet a little while, a little while.'

"I folded the book on my thumb and sat there silent and without

moving for a long time. I was stunned by the clearness of vision the

verse had imparted to me. It was illumination. It was like a bolt of

God's lightning in the Pit. They would keep Love, the fickle sprite, the

forerunner of young life--young life that is imperative to be born!

"I conned the lines over in my mind--'Not yet, sometime'--'O Love, not

yet'--'Feed it with lipless kisses, let it sleep.' And I laughed aloud, ha, ha!

I saw with white vision their blameless souls. They were children.

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WHENGODLAUGHS,ANDOTHERSTORIES1WHENGODLAUGHS,ANDOTHERSTORIESByJackLondonWHENGODLAUGHS,ANDOTHERSTORIES2WHENGODLAUGHS,ANDOTHERSTORIES3WHENGODLAUGHS(withcomplimentstoHarryCowell)"Thegods,thegodsarestronger;timeFallsdownbeforethem,allmen'skneesBow,allmen'sprayersandsorrowsclimbLikeincensetowardthem;yea,f...

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