The Jacket (The Star Rover)

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At any rate, being a lifer, and the penalty in California for battery by
a lifer being death, I was so found guilty by a jury which could not
ignore the asseverations of the guard Thurston and the rest of the prison
hang-dogs that testified, and I was so sentenced by a judge who could not
ignore the law as spread plainly on the statute book.

I was well pummelled by Thurston, and all the way back up that prodigious
stairway I was roundly kicked, punched, and cuffed by the horde of
trusties and guards who got in one another's way in their zeal to assist
him. Heavens, if his nose did bleed, the probability is that some of his
own kind were guilty of causing it in the confusion of the scuffle. I
shouldn't care if I were responsible for it myself, save that it is so
pitiful a thing for which to hang a man. . . .

* * * * *

I have just had a talk with the man on shift of my death-watch. A little
less than a year ago, Jake Oppenheimer occupied this same death-cell on
the road to the gallows which I will tread to-morrow. This man was one
of the death-watch on Jake. He is an old soldier. He chews tobacco
constantly, and untidily, for his gray beard and moustache are stained
yellow. He is a widower, with fourteen living children, all married, and
is the grandfather of thirty-one living grandchildren, and the
great-grandfather of four younglings, all girls. It was like pulling
teeth to extract such information. He is a queer old codger, of a low
order of intelligence. That is why, I fancy, he has lived so long and
fathered so numerous a progeny. His mind must have crystallized thirty
years ago. His ideas are none of them later than that vintage. He
rarely says more than yes and no to me. It is not because he is surly.
He has no ideas to utter. I don't know, when I live again, but what one
incarnation such as his would be a nice vegetative existence in which to
rest up ere I go star-roving again. . . .

But to go back. I must take a line in which to tell, after I was hustled
and bustled, kicked and punched, up that terrible stairway by Thurston
and the rest of the prison-dogs, of the infinite relief of my narrow cell
when I found myself back in solitary. It was all so safe, so secure. I
felt like a lost child returned home again. I loved those very walls
that I had so hated for five years. All that kept the vastness of space,
like a monster, from pouncing upon me were those good stout walls of
mine, close to hand on every side. Agoraphobia is a terrible affliction.
I have had little opportunity to experience it, but from that little I
can only conclude that hanging is a far easier matter. . . .

I have just had a hearty laugh. The prison doctor, a likable chap, has
just been in to have a yarn with me, incidentally to proffer me his good
offices in the matter of dope. Of course I declined his proposition to
"shoot me" so full of morphine through the night that to-morrow I would
not know, when I marched to the gallows, whether I was "coming or going."

But the laugh. It was just like Jake Oppenheimer. I can see the lean
keenness of the man as he strung the reporters with his deliberate bull
which they thought involuntary. It seems, his last morning, breakfast
finished, incased in the shirt without a collar, that the reporters,
assembled for his last word in his cell, asked him for his views on
capital punishment.

--Who says we have more than the slightest veneer of civilization coated
over our raw savagery when a group of living men can ask such a question
of a man about to die and whom they are to see die?

But Jake was ever game. "Gentlemen," he said, "I hope to live to see the
day when capital punishment is abolished."

I have lived many lives through the long ages. Man, the individual, has
made no moral progress in the past ten thousand years. I affirm this
absolutely. The difference between an unbroken colt and the patient
draught-horse is purely a difference of training. Training is the only
moral difference between the man of to-day and the man of ten thousand
years ago. Under his thin skin of morality which he has had polished
onto him, he is the same savage that he was ten thousand years ago.
Morality is a social fund, an accretion through the painful ages. The
new-born child will become a savage unless it is trained, polished, by
the abstract morality that has been so long accumulating.

"Thou shalt not kill"--piffle! They are going to kill me to-morrow
morning. "Thou shalt not kill"--piffle! In the shipyards of all
civilized countries they are laying to-day the keels of Dreadnoughts and
of Superdreadnoughts. Dear friends, I who am about to die, salute you
with--"Piffle!"

I ask you, what finer morality is preached to-day than was preached by
Christ, by Buddha, by Socrates and Plato, by Confucius and whoever was
the author of the "Mahabharata"? Good Lord, fifty thousand years ago, in
our totem-families, our women were cleaner, our family and group
relations more rigidly right.

I must say that the morality we practised in those old days was a finer
morality than is practised to-day. Don't dismiss this thought hastily.
Think of our child labour, of our police graft and our political
corruption, of our food adulteration and of our slavery of the daughters
of the poor. When I was a Son of the Mountain and a Son of the Bull,
prostitution had no meaning. We were clean, I tell you. We did not
dream such depths of depravity. Yea, so are all the lesser animals of to-
day clean. It required man, with his imagination, aided by his mastery
of matter, to invent the deadly sins. The lesser animals, the other
animals, are incapable of sin.

I read hastily back through the many lives of many times and many places.
I have never known cruelty more terrible, nor so terrible, as the cruelty
of our prison system of to-day. I have told you what I have endured in
the jacket and in solitary in the first decade of this twentieth century
after Christ. In the old days we punished drastically and killed
quickly. We did it because we so desired, because of whim, if you so
please. But we were not hypocrites. We did not call upon press, and
pulpit, and university to sanction us in our wilfulness of savagery. What
we wanted to do we went and did, on our legs upstanding, and we faced all
reproof and censure on our legs upstanding, and did not hide behind the
skirts of classical economists and bourgeois philosophers, nor behind the
skirts of subsidized preachers, professors, and editors.

Why, goodness me, a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, five years ago,
in these United States, assault and battery was not a civil capital
crime. But this year, the year of Our Lord 1913, in the State of
California, they hanged Jake Oppenheimer for such an offence, and
to-morrow, for the civil capital crime of punching a man on the nose,
they are going to take me out and hang me. Query: Doesn't it require a
long time for the ape and the tiger to die when such statutes are spread
on the statute book of California in the nineteen-hundred-and-thirteenth
year after Christ? Lord, Lord, they only crucified Christ. They have
done far worse to Jake Oppenheimer and me. . . .

* * * * *

As Ed Morrell once rapped to me with his knuckles: "The worst possible
use you can put a man to is to hang him." No, I have little respect for
capital punishment. Not only is it a dirty game, degrading to the hang-
dogs who personally perpetrate it for a wage, but it is degrading to the
commonwealth that tolerates it, votes for it, and pays the taxes for its
maintenance. Capital punishment is so _silly_, so stupid, so horribly
unscientific. "To be hanged by the neck until dead" is society's quaint
phraseology . . .

* * * * *

Morning is come--my last morning. I slept like a babe throughout the
night. I slept so peacefully that once the death-watch got a fright. He
thought I had suffocated myself in my blankets. The poor man's alarm was
pitiful. His bread and butter was at stake. Had it truly been so, it
would have meant a black mark against him, perhaps discharge and the
outlook for an unemployed man is bitter just at present. They tell me
that Europe began liquidating two years ago, and that now the United
States has begun. That means either a business crisis or a quiet panic
and that the armies of the unemployed will be large next winter, the
bread-lines long. . . .

I have had my breakfast. It seemed a silly thing to do, but I ate it
heartily. The Warden came with a quart of whiskey. I presented it to
Murderers Row with my compliments. The Warden, poor man, is afraid, if I
be not drunk, that I shall make a mess of the function and cast
reflection on his management . . .

They have put on me the shirt without a collar. . .

It seems I am a very important man this day. Quite a lot of people are
suddenly interested in me. . . .

The doctor has just gone. He has taken my pulse. I asked him to. It is
normal. . . .

I write these random thoughts, and, a sheet at a time, they start on
their secret way out beyond the walls. . . .

I am the calmest man in the prison. I am like a child about to start on
a journey. I am eager to be gone, curious for the new places I shall
see. This fear of the lesser death is ridiculous to one who has gone
into the dark so often and lived again. . . .

The Warden with a quart of champagne. I have dispatched it down
Murderers Row. Queer, isn't it, that I am so considered this last day.
It must be that these men who are to kill me are themselves afraid of
death. To quote Jake Oppenheimer: I, who am about to die, must seem to
them something God-awful. . . .

Ed Morrell has just sent word in to me. They tell me he has paced up and
down all night outside the prison wall. Being an ex-convict, they have
red-taped him out of seeing me to say good-bye. Savages? I don't know.
Possibly just children. I'll wager most of them will be afraid to be
alone in the dark to-night after stretching my neck.

But Ed Morrell's message: "My hand is in yours, old pal. I know you'll
swing off game." . . .

* * * * *

The reporters have just left. I'll see them next, and last time, from
the scaffold, ere the hangman hides my face in the black cap. They will
be looking curiously sick. Queer young fellows. Some show that they
have been drinking. Two or three look sick with foreknowledge of what
they have to witness. It seems easier to be hanged than to look on. . . .

* * * * *

My last lines. It seems I am delaying the procession. My cell is quite
crowded with officials and dignitaries. They are all nervous. They want
it over. Without a doubt, some of them have dinner engagements. I am
really offending them by writing these few words. The priest has again
preferred his request to be with me to the end. The poor man--why should
I deny him that solace? I have consented, and he now appears quite
cheerful. Such small things make some men happy! I could stop and laugh
for a hearty five minutes, if they were not in such a hurry.

Here I close. I can only repeat myself. There is no death. Life is
spirit, and spirit cannot die. Only the flesh dies and passes, ever a-
crawl with the chemic ferment that informs it, ever plastic, ever
crystallizing, only to melt into the flux and to crystallize into fresh
and diverse forms that are ephemeral and that melt back into the flux.
Spirit alone endures and continues to build upon itself through
successive and endless incarnations as it works upward toward the light.
What shall I be when I live again? I wonder. I wonder. . . .




FOOTNOTES


{1} Since the execution of Professor Darrell Standing, at which time the
manuscript of his memoirs came into our hands, we have written to Mr.
Hosea Salsburty, Curator of the Philadelphia Museum, and, in reply, have
received confirmation of the existence of the oar and the pamphlet.--THE
EDITOR.