Читать книгу The Woman Who Couldn't Die - Stringer Arthur - Страница 7

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I am not a scholar. What I have to tell must be told plainly, and, I fear, without much art. It will be told as simply and honestly as I am able. Omissions there may be, and at times I shall speak of things which I can not fully understand, for the adventures whereof I write were of themselves mysterious. Since I went through those adventures twenty-seven long years have slipped away, and memory, I find, has the trick of more and more playing me false. But I will say what I have to say as clearly as I can, knowing that the matters I speak of are not always easy of belief, yet heartened by the remembrance that I myself have witnessed them, and coming through them with a whole skin and a sound mind, am now able to tell them to others. And the unkenneling of these curious doings, I pray God, will not only discharge an ancient debt to the honorable dead but will also serve to bring peace to an old heart and rest to an old head.

The beginning of these events dates back to the closing years of the last century, though I must explain that I, David Law, was a Glasgow-born lad sent early to Canada, where for three lonely years I was bookkeeper and under clerk in the trading-post of Andrew McCosh, some forty-odd miles north of Fort Metangami. McCosh, the dourest of dour Scotch-Canadians, was one of the last of the Free Traders along the receding fringe of the wilderness that moves for ever toward the Pole, a man of massive frame and massive appetites who from the first held me and my bookish disposition in small esteem. But my body toughened and my narrow shoulders widened under the rough usage of frontier existence, where I learned things even more varied than the sorting of furs that smelled not unlike the state of Denmark in the régime of Claudius and even more exciting than mushing through the wintry backwoods with a team of huskies, any one of which would take a bite out of your brisket at the first possible chance.

But under Sandy McCosh I encountered neither peace of mind nor comfort of body, though it was not until the end of my third winter of overwork that I found the courage to tell the whiskered tyrant of that frozen little kingdom of solitude what I thought of him, and of his drunkenness, and of his loose conduct with redskin women that a lean season had laid more than ever in his power. For a year, after that, I taught in a mission-school, and beyond an ample supply of books to read got little for my efforts excepting my board and keep. Then, having done a good turn for a Mr. Curran, who injured his leg while moose-hunting in my district, I was eventually taken down to Montreal by that gentleman and given a position in his law-office. I became restive there, however, and before the year was out joined the staff of the Herald as a reporter.

My work with the Herald, I fear, made much greater demand on my legs than on my brain, for it was my duty to cover the police-court, the water-front and shipping, the railways and hotels, the markets and hospitals and music-halls, and incidentally to catch on the wing any story worthy of print. Quite a number of these I picked up from Argonauts bound for the Klondike, since, following the Bonanza Creek strike of ’ninety-six, there had been a steady drift of eastern adventurers toward the Yukon.

One of my few friends in that oddly Old-World city on the St. Lawrence was a drunkard and a derelict scholar named Donald Christie, who in his periods of sobriety was a proof-reader on the Herald, where his lapses of character were condoned because of a scholarship that was unique in newspaper circles and a knowledge that seemed equaled only in the encyclopedias. He was a son of Auld Reekie and claimed to be an honor graduate of the University of Edinburgh. But he had been a drifter, apparently, for the greater part of a long and eventful life, and among his other adventures had sojourned for three monastic years within the walls of Francis Xavier College, where he assisted in the compilation and translation of the Jesuit Relations. He was rather an old man when I first knew him, old enough, indeed, to claim that he had split more than one bottle with Louis Stevenson in his time. And color was laid to this claim by a personal letter from the author of Treasure Island which he on one occasion placed before my rapt and eager eyes, for in those days I was much under the spell of my gifted fellow-countryman who had so recently and so romantically passed away in Samoa.

But as the rubicund and bloated figure of Donald Christie appears only briefly and indirectly in this narrative, I must merely pause to add that the one fantastic ambition of this scholastic derelict was to embark on an exploring trip into the Far North. As, however, he walked with difficulty because of a stroke he had sustained a couple of years before I first knew him, and as he was chronically without funds, I accepted his talk about Arctic expeditions as merely the romancing of a mind already on the eve of dissolution.

That dissolution, however, was much closer than I had anticipated, for a second stroke, following the consumption of more Scotch whisky than I would care to disclose, put Christie on his back and kept him there for the few remaining weeks of his life. He was then unable to talk, but after repeated and pitiful efforts on his part to communicate with me, I realized that he was trying to give me a message in regard to a packet of papers which he took from under his pillow. I thought at first it was a will, and, being young, I promptly sniffed the aroma of romance in the situation. On looking over the parchment pages, however, I found them yellowish with age and inscribed in a cramped hand and a language that was unknown to me. Yet on the night of his death he signified by pantomime that he wished me to keep these papers, together with a Moss-Giel edition of Burns which I valued much more highly.

It was not until two or three weeks after his burial, made possible by a collection taken up among the small circle sufficiently interested to keep his interment from being an ignominious one, that I gave any sustained attention to the dog-eared document thus bequeathed to me. Then, taking it to Anatole Paradis, a friendly old book-dealer in St. Antoine Street, I found it to be written in eighteenth-century French and to deal in part with the career of a certain Father Valiquette, a Jesuit missionary-priest who had been unfrocked for a number of unchurchly acts which I need not here enumerate.

The ex-missionary, it seems, had set out in search of a lost tribe which Indian superstition credited as existing in the land of the midnight sun, and after three years of silence sent out word, by means of a group of Tokakagin gold-diggers who had drifted eastward in a Danish schooner, that he had not only found the lost tribe in question but that he was about to be put to death for violating a tribal sanctuary known as the Temple of the Timeless Virgin. Before meeting with the disfavor which resulted in his death, however, he found this strange tribe credulous enough to accept him as a sort of Messiah, and even with the shadow of death over him proclaimed to his persecutors that a second and greater white prophet would come to them across the unknown mountains and redeem them from their ignorance. Nor was Valiquette so interested in the other world that he overlooked explaining certain physical attributes of his northern Eden, which he described as startlingly tempered in climate, for such a latitude, and as so rich in gold that hunting-weapons and household tools were made of the precious metal, as were the mating-blocks, and even the steps and emblems of the tribal temples.

On the last page of the worn script was a roughly drawn map, of which neither the erudite old book-dealer nor I myself could make much, study it as we might. And, inviting as the document seemed to me, at my first glimpse through the cramped and age-yellowed script, the time soon came when I gave it little actual thought. For in those days, with the Klondike rush still on, there was talk enough all about me of gold and gold-seeking, and week by week I encountered sufficiently fantastic plans for mastering the overland route to the Yukon and sufficiently fantastic dreams of a new El Dorado in the still little-known North. Day by day I saw these Argonauts stream into the city on the St. Lawrence and strike westward across the continent. And it was my duty, not to emulate them, but to write plausibly interesting paragraphs about them for an ever-hungry paper which gave me very little time for day-dreaming.

Too many waves of sensation, I’m afraid, played over me to permit my harried mind to dwell long on poor Christie or his penny-a-liner’s phantasy of polar treasure and unauthenticated arctic wanderers. From time immemorial, I knew, documents such as his had been fabricated by the unscrupulous and palmed off on the unsuspecting. And while, now and then, I would turn over the faded pages with a feeble revival of interest, they became more the memento of a lost companion than the inspiration of a future enterprise. And I had my daily bread to earn.

In the pursuit of that laudable ambition, not long afterward, I came into contact with another of earth’s restless wanderers, with one of the oddest characters, in fact, it had ever been my good or bad fortune to encounter. The person I speak of was a swarthy-skinned Corsican called Ramolino, who later, for reasons best known to himself, changed his name to Pareso and thereafter insisted on being addressed by the latter patronymic. How great a liar Pareso may have been I then had no means of determining, but once, when under the influence of French brandy, he confided to me that he sprang from the same Ramolino family into which Carlo Bonaparte, the father of the great Napoleon, had married. There was that in his appearance, I must acknowledge, which gave a coloring of credibility to this claim, for more times than once the odd swarthiness of the man’s skin, the thickness of his squat shoulders, the flash of fire from the imperial dark eye, the eagle-like profile of the face and the determinedly massive jaw, faintly reminded me of portraits that I had seen of the First Emperor. And in the man’s mental make-up, I was later to find, there was a distorted though persistent touch of the Napoleonic.

Carlo Pareso, as I must hereafter denominate him, first came to my attention as a man of science. What brought him to Montreal I never knew, but he claimed to be on his way from Vienna to the Orient, whither he was bound, eventually, to make a study of beri-beri in Japan. He became an object of press curiosity, however, when he proclaimed the possibility of obviating the annual ice-jam in the river by the use of a heat-producing chemical which he termed Thermidian,^[1] though he somewhat discounted my earlier impression of him as a sober-minded man of science by later outlining a plan for the damming of the Straits of Belle Isle and thereby not only shutting the southerly-drifting icebergs from our busy sea-lanes but altering the entire climate of eastern Canada. He told me himself, during our first interview, that he had recently been experimenting, at Messina, with cold-light and luminescence in sea-fish and that he proposed in my country to carry on his research regarding the hibernation of certain terrestrial mollusca peculiar to northern latitudes. I might have been more impressed by this, had I not also learned that he had once been associated with an Egyptian professional cataleptic named Satahra Bey, an uncanny gentleman who had the habit of going into trances and permitting himself to be coffined and buried in sand for three days at a time.

My interest in Doctor Pareso suffered a natural decline, in fact, until he was once more thrust under my reportorial eye when I learned that the officials of the Royal Victoria Hospital had rather peremptorily refused to permit him the use of their surgery in experimenting with a simplified instrument for blood-transfusion. This instrument, which he later showed me, stood so small that it could be easily carried in the pocket. It was made up of the blood-controller, a small syringe, a stand for holding the syringe and controller, and the rubber tubing and needles. A surgeon, he explained to me, could by himself and quite without help do the most satisfactory transfusion, all that was necessary being to insert one needle in the vein of the donor and the other in the vein of the recipient, and then push back and forth the plunger of the syringe. By means of two valves, acting solely under the force of gravity, the passage of whole blood from donor to recipient was automatically controlled and the danger of air-embolism and coagulation practically removed.

It all sounded convincing enough and I promptly scented drama in the discovery that the hospital authorities were resolutely set against cooperating with a man of genius, although a foreigner, who was fighting for the alleviation of human suffering. When, however, I applied at the hospital for some ponderable reason for this refusal I was dismissed with the somewhat pompous explanation that Doctor Pareso’s papers were not in order and that his European references had not proved altogether satisfactory. This struck me, all things considered, as a somewhat bigoted reversion to red-tapism, and with the fervor of youth I determined to wage journalistic warfare on the enemies of a man who impressed me as a genius and an agent of mercy. But my editor, I soon found, had experienced a sudden change of faith in this particular case, and I was more or less pointedly told that the columns of the Herald were no longer open to medical controversy. There were many rumors, it is true, the most conspicuous being that Pareso was an involuntary exile from Europe because of the death of a fellow-worker in one of his surgical experiments. Still another claimed he was a charlatan hypnotist who had been escorted over the border by the American authorities. Be that as it may, I began to find this mysterious stranger a most interesting man, a most persuasive talker, and the master of enough medical knowledge to astound my layman’s mind.

I need not here go into his many experiments in the matter of suspended animation, such as desanguinating the Columbian ground-squirrel during its hibernation-period when its body-temperature had dropped as low as forty degrees Fahrenheit, freezing it stiff, and then successfully reviving it. But he himself showed me a sleeping frog which he had preserved in vitro for eleven years and boasted that he could bring it to active life in half an hour’s time. And with my own eyes I have seen him freeze fish in solid ice, keep them dormant and apparently dead for weeks, and then release and revive them so that they frisked about a tank as full of life as they were before their wintry sleep. He was also interested, I had reason to know, in cytology and cell-continuity, but I was too little versed in biology either to understand the nature of his experiments or to follow his line of thought when he mouthed about “the chromatin of the oocyte” and “longitudinally divided chromosomes.” I can recall his excitement, however, when he came into possession of a handful of what was called “mummy wheat,” which was wheat reputed to have been disinterred from an Egyptian tomb at least two thousand years old, and the care and patience with which he tested this shriveled grain for some trace of fertility, though I found it hard to understand, at the time, why his failure to find any ghostly sign of life in the parched kernels which Pharaoh’s slaves may have harvested should leave him so depressed in spirit.

But something occurred that midsummer that both drew me closer to this man Pareso and affected all the rest of my life. The event in question was the arrival at the head waters of the St. Lawrence of a weather-beaten yawl from Norway. This odd craft, called the Lief Erickson, manned only by three Norse mariners as weather-beaten as their boat, had set sail from the Norwegian port of Droennoey early in the spring, intent on following the old Viking trail to America. It was my duty as a water-front reporter to harvest the details of this foolhardy venture, and I was duly instructed to make the most of the story.

I had unexpected difficulties, however, in gathering my data, for the Lief Erickson was looked on with obvious suspicion by the harbor authorities, and two days elapsed before the little ketch-rigged yawl of only thirteen tons was permitted to pass quarantine and obtain pratique. And when I finally stumbled aboard, on a sultry August night, I found the three hardy Norsemen very tenuously interested in a public exploitation of their adventure. This odd trio, in fact, were very much in their cups, evidently celebrating their arrival at their journey’s end by the absorption of more Jamaica rum than was good for them. I tried as best I could to explain my business, but their limited knowledge of English must have led them to mistake me for one of the port officials who had been causing them so much trouble, for they bore down on me in a body and with Berserker shouts of recklessness threw me ashore.

I was disappointed but not discouraged by this treatment. I even went back the next day to find the Lief Erickson empty and a battered bronze padlock on the salt-crusted door. When I returned the following night, however, I found my three Norsemen at home. Lodbrog, a sailor, was asleep in his bunk. Wickstram, the skipper, was drinking black coffee and seemed sober enough. He told me in broken English, once he was convinced of my friendliness, the chief events of their voyage: how the three of them had traveled nearly four thousand miles through northern seas, how they had been battered by waves and blocked by ice, how their water had run low and they had refilled their casks by catching rain in a spare sail, how in good weather they had increased the food supply in their lazarette by angling over the side, how they took turns at navigating and keeping watch and had to rig up a sea-anchor, to ride out the Grand Banks gales, and got lost in a fog in the Gulf, and grounded on Anticosti, and were all but run down by a liner, and, in the end, to my way of thinking, were almost justified in celebrating their delivery from the deep by this carousal that had left their wits heavy and their tongues swollen. I was shown the antiquated quadrant they used in making observations, Wickstram assuring me it had been in his family for over three generations and was at least a century old.

What most caught and held my attention, however, was the figure of the third seaman. He answered to the name of Karl Knutsson, and from a hint or two that was dropped, must at one time have been a smuggler along the Scandinavian coast. He was, all told, one of the most extraordinary men I have ever met, a towering Norse giant, a good six feet and three inches in height. I can still see him as he lay sprawled back that night under the swinging oil-lamp in the low-roofed cabin, the light shining on his tawny gold hair and his yellow beard that had glints of copper in it and his huge white-skinned torso where he had thrown open his shirt against the heat of the August night. The throat and forearms of that body, where the North Atlantic sun and wind had played on them for months at a time, were still a golden red, the red of Quebec sunsets over a black fringe of pine-tops. His eyes, although a little bloodshot from the alcohol that still soured in his huge hulk of a body, were the bluest eyes I had ever seen in a man, richer than Antwerp-blue and less opaque than sapphire, a little lighter than the blue you see in the best of the old Dutch plates and a little darker than the luminous azure you see in a rainwashed northern sky in clearing spring water. His teeth were square and white, and his lips were full and red, so full and red that it gave his face a touch of the sensual.

Yet with all his size and strength there was a suggestion of womanishness about Knutsson. I can’t be sure whether it was his passiveness or the soft blue of his eye and the softer gold of his hair or the milk-white skin of the body only half covered by its soiled clothing, but there was something challenging and expository about his beauty. For he was beautiful, in his gigantic Goth way, if you could only forget about his tainted breath and his unclean garments and his half-drunken, guttural, ribald yodeling as he lounged back and showed his disregard for my company by singing some unknown song in his native tongue. He was beautiful enough to make you think of Scandinavian mythology and wonder if Wodin and Thor must not have looked like this vivid, deep-chested, full-blooded giant with the mane of tawny gold and the immemorial blue eyes that made you like the man in spite of his paraded weakness of character. For, oddly enough, I did find myself drawn toward this man Knutsson. I wanted to know him better, to find out more about him, to determine what lay behind that golden mask of indifference.

On that first night, it is true, he made no articulate response to the questions with which I plied him. He did not even deign to observe me. And when I asked the russet-skinned Wickstram if it was one of the old sagas of his people that Knutsson was singing, the skipper of the Lief Erickson merely laughed a raucous laugh.

“That ban a love song,” he said in his groping English. “I dank he sing him so because he wants a woman.”

“What woman?” I asked, eager to feel my way into the inner folds of romance. But Wickstram merely shrugged.

“Any woman,” he said as he held a bottle up to the oil-lamp to see how much liquor remained in it.

Yet I was soon destined to know Knutsson better. It came about, in fact, because of the very impulses of the blood which Wickstram had so crudely hinted at. I had directed my steps, a few nights later, to the Lower Town, where I was hoping a visit to French Annie’s would bring me certain information regarding a Chinese smuggling coup that had met with disaster on the Vermont border. It was very hot that night, and I could sniff the occasional little breaths of cooler air that drifted up from the St. Lawrence, where a liner was noisily coaling by bunch-light. In the narrow little streets of the Lower Town women and children lay out on the curb-stones, gasping for air. A drunkard or two reeled down through the sleeping figures that made one think of a battle-field strewn with its dead, and sometimes one of these staggerers would be followed by painted things in draggled skirts, who tried to stop them. On a corner three street-women started to squabble with a group of English sailors who looked young enough to be their sons, and a cab rumbled past with four drunken Frenchmen inside, and a curb-sleeper awoke and cried in blasphemous patois that a cat had bitten her foot. And that was the midnight city of my young manhood as I remember it, the Montreal of the century-end, a tatter of Marseilles and Montmartre, a shred of Bethnal Green, and a touch of Hell.

It was just under the old Jacques Cartier monument that I met Faubert, a coke-pedler who was a tipster for the police and the source of an occasional newspaper story for any leg-man who could buy his way into the graces of that owl-like wanderer.

“You’re just in time,” he cried as he caught my elbow. “There’s been a murder down on the water-front!”

“Who was it?” I asked as I joined him in scurrying down-hill.

“Tite Papineau knifed a big Swede,” he said as he hobbled along at my side over the rough pavement. And my heart sank as I saw that he was directing me toward the shadowy slip where the Lief Erickson was tied up. For something told me that the victim of that slum-drunkard’s knife was my godlike, big, blond Viking, the man named Knutsson. And it impressed me as an ignominious end for a figure of such lengendary dimensions, a feeble way of going out for an adventurer so throbbing with life.

At the pier-end I could see a group of three women whispering together. On a moldy string-piece I caught sight of yet another woman, white-faced and young, half wailing and half moaning to herself as she sat there alone.

When I got to the cabin, however, I found only Wickstram inside, Wickstram with a great deal of his color gone as he stared helplessly down at the blood that covered his cabin floor. And lying in the center of this pool was Knutsson, half undressed, with a five-inch knife wound in his milk-white body.

My restless big Wodin, it was explained to me, had wandered up into the Street of Revelers and had there taken a young woman away from her duly acknowledged mate of the moment. And that outraged mate, following the light-hearted couple to the then deserted yawl, had crept aboard and after the manner of his kind avenged that affront to his pride and property.

Sickened by the sordid tale and dizzy from what I had to kneel in, I stooped over the inert blond head and studied the Viking face that had already merged from its earlier solar vigor to a sort of lunar shadow of itself. It impressed me as a singularly beautiful face, with all its earlier coarsening animality thus removed. But the thing that sent a curdling of nerves eddying through my stooping body was the discovery that the gold-fringed eyelids had opened and that the eyes of immemorial blue were gazing languidly up into my face.

“This man isn’t dead!” I cried out with more sharpness than I was at the moment aware of.

“He ban dead!” maintained Wickstram, pointing stubbornly to the blood that covered his cabin floor. There was, in truth, a shocking amount of it. But I could get a trace of a heart-throb under the barrel-like blond chest and I could hear a groan when I turned him over to get some sort of temporary bandage clamped on the gaping wound.

“We’ve got to have a doctor here,” I said as I stood up and dried my hands on a bunk-blanket, “and a police-officer!” But the captain of the Lief Erickson, apparently, had so suffered at the hands of interfering officials that the thought of his craft being invaded by others did not add to his peace of mind. He swore that he would cut loose and drop down the river, that he would throw the embarrassing blond body overboard, that he would head for the high seas alone, before he would see his ship invaded by the interfering minions of the law.

It was then that I thought of Pareso, of Pareso and his surgical skill, of his cunning, of the little two-cubic-centimeter syringe with its rubber tubing and its hollow needles. And without further loss of time I went careening up to Pareso’s quarters and routed him from his bed, explaining everything as well as I could while he dressed and threw together the things that might be needed. And in scarcely less time than it takes to tell about it we were once more in our one-horse fiacre raiding down to the wharf-end, where the women had disappeared and where, for a moment, I half feared the lawless Wickstram had indeed cut his pier-ropes and drifted away in the night.

But he was there, pacing his narrow deck and muttering in a language that I could not understand. Nor could I understand all that Pareso did when he stepped into that fetid cabin with the flooded floor. Yet in thirty seconds his coat was off and his sleeves were rolled up and he was hard at work on his patient, whose body he measured with a wondering glance, from time to time, and whose face he stared into, with an unnatural glitter deep in his own studiously narrowed eyes.

From the time of that first strange meeting, in fact, I was not unconscious of some mysterious attraction which the huge blond Norseman had for the swarthy-skinned Corsican. I was amazed at the patience and tenderness with which Pareso nursed the wounded Knutsson, just as I was compelled to marvel at the skill with which he restored the flaccid body to health. Pareso, when his patient could be safely moved, even had the lethargic young Norseman carried up to his own quarters, where he watched him and fed him as carefully as a farmer feeds a prize bullock for a county fair.

It was not odd, accordingly, that a friendship should spring up between this oddly assorted couple, though there were times when Pareso’s admiration for the other’s physical dimensions filled me with a vague distrust. I thought, at first, that it was a common loneliness, a common solitariness of spirit, that had drawn these two men together. Still later I tried to argue that this affinity was based in some way on the appeal of opposites, since the one was so singularly the complement of the other, the huge Norwegian all flesh, muscle and sinew, and the gaunt Corsican all brain, nervous energy and inventiveness. But there was something beyond that, something which I could not at the time quite fathom.

“A magnificent animal, is he not?” Pareso would exclaim as he watched the passive blond giant with the light glimmering on the tawny gold of his hair.

“I suppose so, if you like them stupid,” I grudgingly admitted as I noticed that the pink was once more coming back into Knutsson’s ridiculously smooth skin.

“Sometimes they are better so,” proclaimed Pareso, following his own line of thought. Yet he was as patient as a mother with a child during those days when he was busy tutoring the placid-eyed giant in English. He watched him with a guarded eye, and convoyed him in his wanderings about the city, and exulted on his return of strength. And Knutsson himself was not without gratitude. But it was something more than friendship that existed between them. Pareso seemed to look on his new companion not merely as a man among men but more as an instrument for far-off and obscure ends. And there were even times when the attitude of Knutsson toward his benefactor seemed like that of a well-tamed animal toward his trainer.

[1]	This, I assume, must have borne some resemblance to the Thermite of later discovery.—David Law.