The Jacket (The Star-Rover)

of my transient carcasses in pond bottoms, and glacial gravels, and asphaltum lakes.

I have lived through the ages known to-day among the scientists as the Paleolithic, the Neolithic, and the Bronze.  I remember when with our domesticated wolves we herded our reindeer to pasture on the north shore of the Mediterranean where now are France and Italy and Spain .  This was before the ice-sheet melted backward toward the pole.  Many processions of the equinoxes have I lived through and died in, my reader . . . only that I remember and that you do not.

I have been a Son of the Plough, a Son of the Fish, a Son of the Tree.  All religions from the beginnings of man’s religious time abide in me.  And when the Dominie, in the chapel, here in Folsom of a Sunday, worships God in his own good modern way, I know that in him, the Dominie, still abide the worships of the Plough, the Fish, the Tree—ay, and also all worships of Astarte and the Night.

I have been an Aryan master in old Egypt , when my soldiers scrawled obscenities on the carven tombs of kings dead and gone and forgotten aforetime.  And I, the Aryan master in old Egypt, have myself builded my two burial places—the one a false and mighty pyramid to which a generation of slaves could attest; the other humble, meagre, secret, rock-hewn in a desert valley by slaves who died immediately their work was done. . . . And I wonder me here in Folsom, while democracy dreams its enchantments o’er the twentieth century world, whether there, in the rock-hewn crypt of that secret, desert valley, the bones still abide that once were mine and that stiffened my animated body when I was an Aryan master high-stomached to command.

And on the great drift, southward and eastward under the burning sun that perished all descendants of the houses of Asgard and Vanaheim, I have been a king in Ceylon , a builder of Aryan monuments under Aryan kings in old Java and old Sumatra .  And I have died a hundred deaths on the great South Sea drift ere ever the rebirth of me came to plant monuments, that only Aryans plant, on volcanic tropic islands that I, Darrell Standing, cannot name, being too little versed to-day in that far sea geography.

If only I were articulate to paint in the frail medium of words what I see and know and possess incorporated in my consciousness of the mighty driftage of the races in the times before our present written history began!  Yes, we had our history even then.  Our old men, our priests, our wise ones, told our history into tales and wrote those tales in the stars so that our seed after us should not forget.  From the sky came the life-giving rain and the sunlight.  And we studied the sky, learned from the stars to calculate time and apportion the seasons; and we named the stars after our heroes and our foods and our devices for getting food; and after our wanderings, and drifts, and adventures; and after our functions and our furies of impulse and desire.

And, alas! we thought the heavens unchanging on which we wrote all our humble yearnings and all the humble things we did or dreamed of doing.  When I was a Son of the Bull, I remember me a lifetime I spent at star-gazing.  And, later and earlier, there were other lives in which I sang with the priests and bards the taboo- songs of the stars wherein we believed was written our imperishable record.  And here, at the end of it all, I pore over books of astronomy from the prison library, such as they allow condemned men to read, and learn that even the heavens are passing fluxes, vexed with star-driftage as the earth is by the drifts of men.

Equipped with this modern knowledge, I have, returning through the little death from my earlier lives, been able to compare the heavens then and now.  And the stars do change.  I have seen pole stars and pole stars and dynasties of pole stars.  The pole star to-day is in Ursa Minor.  Yet, in those far days I have seen the pole star in Draco, in Hercules, in Vega, in Cygnus, and in Cepheus.  No; not even the stars abide, and yet the memory and the knowledge of them abides in me, in the spirit of me that is memory and that is eternal.  Only spirit abides.  All else, being mere matter, passes, and must pass.

Oh, I do see myself to-day that one man who appeared in the elder world, blonde, ferocious, a killer and a lover, a meat-eater and a root-digger, a gypsy and a robber, who, club in hand, through millenniums of years wandered the world around seeking meat to devour and sheltered nests for his younglings and sucklings.

I am that man, the sum of him, the all of him, the hairless biped who struggled upward from the slime and created love and law out of the anarchy of fecund life that screamed and squalled in the jungle.  I am all that that man was and did become.  I see myself, through the painful generations, snaring and killing the game and the fish, clearing the first fields from the forest, making rude tools of stone and bone, building houses of wood, thatching the roofs with leaves and straw, domesticating the wild grasses and meadow-roots, fathering them to become the progenitors of rice and millet and wheat and barley and all manner of succulent edibles, learning to scratch the soil, to sow, to reap, to store, beating out the fibres of plants to spin into thread and to weave into cloth, devising systems of irrigation, working in metals, making markets and trade-routes, building boats, and founding navigation—ay, and organizing village life, welding villages to villages till they became tribes, welding tribes together till they became nations, ever seeking the laws of things, ever making the laws of humans so that humans might live together in amity and by united effort beat down and destroy all manner of creeping, crawling, squalling things that might else destroy them.

I was that man in all his births and endeavours.  I am that man to-day, waiting my due death by the law that I helped to devise many a thousand years ago, and by which I have died many times before this, many times.  And as I contemplate this vast past history of me, I find several great and splendid influences, and, chiefest of these, the love of woman, man’s love for the woman of his kind.  I see myself, the one man, the lover, always the lover.  Yes, also was I the great fighter, but somehow it seems to me as I sit here and evenly balance it all, that I was, more than aught else, the great lover.  It was because I loved greatly that I was the great fighter.

Sometimes I think that the story of man is the story of the love of woman.  This memory of all my past that I write now is the memory of my love of woman.  Ever, in the ten thousand lives and guises, I loved her.  I love her now.  My sleep is fraught with her; my waking fancies, no matter whence they start, lead me always to her.  There is no escaping her, that eternal, splendid, ever-resplendent figure of woman.

Oh, make no mistake.  I am no callow, ardent youth.  I am an elderly man, broken in health and body, and soon to die.  I am a scientist and a philosopher.  I, as all the generations of philosophers before me, know woman for what she is—her weaknesses, and meannesses, and immodesties, and ignobilities, her earth-bound feet, and her eyes that have never seen the stars.  But—and the everlasting, irrefragable fact remains: Her feet are beautiful, her eyes are beautiful, her arms and breasts are paradise, her charm is potent beyond all charm that has ever dazzled men; and, as the pole willy-nilly draws the needle, just so, willy-nilly, does she draw men .

Woman has made me laugh at death and distance, scorn fatigue and sleep.  I have slain men, many men, for love of woman, or in warm blood have baptized our nuptials or washed away the stain of her favour to another.  I have gone down to death and dishonour, my betrayal of my comrades and of the stars black upon me, for woman’s sake—for my sake, rather, I desired her so.  And I have lain in the barley, sick with yearning for her, just to see her pass and glut my eyes with the swaying wonder of her and of her hair, black with the night, or brown or flaxen, or all golden-dusty with the sun.

For woman is beautiful . . . to man.  She is sweet to his tongue, and fragrance in his nostrils.  She is fire in his blood, and a thunder of trumpets; her voice is beyond all music in his ears; and she can shake his soul that else stands steadfast in the draughty presence of the Titans of the Light and of the Dark.  And beyond his star-gazing, in his far-imagined heavens, Valkyrie or houri, man has fain made place for her, for he could see no heaven without her.  And the sword, in battle, singing, sings not so sweet a song as the woman sings to man merely by her laugh in the moonlight, or her love-sob in the dark, or by her swaying on her way under the sun while he lies dizzy with longing in the grass.

I have died of love.  I have died for love, as you shall see.  In a little while they will take me out, me, Darrell Standing, and make me die.  And that death shall be for love.  Oh, not lightly was I stirred when I slew Professor Haskell in the laboratory at the University of California .  He was a man.  I was a man.  And there was a woman beautiful.  Do you understand?  She was a woman and I was a man and a lover, and all the heredity of love was mine up from the black and squalling jungle ere love was love and man was man.

Oh, ay, it is nothing new.  Often, often, in that long past have I given life and honour, place and power for love.  Man is different from woman.  She is close to the immediate and knows only the need of instant things.  We know honour above her honour, and pride beyond her wildest guess of pride.  Our eyes are far-visioned for star- gazing, while her eyes see no farther than the solid earth beneath her feet, the lover’s breast upon her breast, the infant lusty in the hollow of her arm.  And yet, such is our alchemy compounded of the ages, woman works magic in our dreams and in our veins, so that more than dreams and far visions and the blood of life itself is woman to us, who, as lovers truly say, is more than all the world.  Yet is this just, else would man not be man, the fighter and the conqueror, treading his red way on the face of all other and lesser life—for, had man not been the lover, the royal