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95 pages

English

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pubOne.info thank you for your continued support and wish to present you this new edition. It was in the old Alta-Inyo Club- a warm night for San Francisco- and through the open windows, hushed and far, came the brawl of the streets. The talk had led on from the Graft Prosecution and the latest signs that the town was to be run wide open, down through all the grotesque sordidness and rottenness of man-hate and man-meanness, until the name of O'Brien was mentioned- O'Brien, the promising young pugilist who had been killed in the prize-ring the night before. At once the air had seemed to freshen. O'Brien had been a clean-living young man with ideals. He neither drank, smoked, nor swore, and his had been the body of a beautiful young god. He had even carried his prayer-book to the ringside. They found it in his coat pocket in the dressing-room. . . afterward.

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Publié par	Pub One Info
Date de parution	27 septembre 2010
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9782819922933
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0100€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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THE NIGHT-BORN
By Jack London
THE NIGHT-BORN
It was in the old Alta-Inyo Club— a warm night forSan Francisco— and through the open windows, hushed and far, camethe brawl of the streets. The talk had led on from the GraftProsecution and the latest signs that the town was to be run wideopen, down through all the grotesque sordidness and rottenness ofman-hate and man-meanness, until the name of O'Brien was mentioned—O'Brien, the promising young pugilist who had been killed in theprize-ring the night before. At once the air had seemed to freshen.O'Brien had been a clean-living young man with ideals. He neitherdrank, smoked, nor swore, and his had been the body of a beautifulyoung god. He had even carried his prayer-book to the ringside.They found it in his coat pocket in the dressing-room. . .afterward.
Here was Youth, clean and wholesome, unsullied— thething of glory and wonder for men to conjure with. . . . . after ithas been lost to them and they have turned middle-aged. And so welldid we conjure, that Romance came and for an hour led us far fromthe man-city and its snarling roar. Bardwell, in a way, started itby quoting from Thoreau; but it was old Trefethan, bald-headed anddewlapped, who took up the quotation and for the hour to come wasromance incarnate. At first we wondered how many Scotches he hadconsumed since dinner, but very soon all that was forgotten.
“It was in 1898— I was thirty-five then, ” he said.“Yes, I know you are adding it up. You're right. I'm forty-sevennow; look ten years more; and the doctors say— damn the doctorsanyway! ”
He lifted the long glass to his lips and sipped itslowly to soothe away his irritation.
“But I was young. . . once. I was young twelve yearsago, and I had hair on top of my head, and my stomach was lean as arunner's, and the longest day was none too long for me. I was ahusky back there in '98. You remember me, Milner. You knew me then.Wasn't I a pretty good bit of all right? ”
Milner nodded and agreed. Like Trefethan, he wasanother mining engineer who had cleaned up a fortune in theKlondike.
“You certainly were, old man, ” Milner said. “I'llnever forget when you cleaned out those lumberjacks in the M. &M. that night that little newspaper man started the row. Slavin wasin the country at the time, ”— this to us— “and his manager wantedto get up a match with Trefethan. ”
“Well, look at me now, ” Trefethan commandedangrily. “That's what the Goldstead did to me— God knows how manymillions, but nothing left in my soul. . . . . nor in my veins. Thegood red blood is gone. I am a jellyfish, a huge, gross mass ofoscillating protoplasm, a— a. . . ”
But language failed him, and he drew solace from thelong glass.
“Women looked at me then; and turned their heads tolook a second time. Strange that I never married. But the girl.That's what I started to tell you about. I met her a thousand milesfrom anywhere, and then some. And she quoted to me those very wordsof Thoreau that Bardwell quoted a moment ago— the ones about theday-born gods and the night-born. ”
"It was after I had made my locations on Goldstead—and didn't know what a treasure-pot that that trip creek was goingto prove— that I made that trip east over the Rockies, anglingacross to the Great Up North there the Rockies are something morethan a back-bone. They are a boundary, a dividing line, a wallimpregnable and unscalable. There is no intercourse across them,though, on occasion, from the early days, wandering trappers havecrossed them, though more were lost by the way than ever camethrough. And that was precisely why I tackled the job. It was atraverse any man would be proud to make. I am prouder of it rightnow than anything else I have ever done.
"It is an unknown land. Great stretches of it havenever been explored. There are big valleys there where the whiteman has never set foot, and Indian tribes as primitive as tenthousand years. . . almost, for they have had some contact with thewhites. Parties of them come out once in a while to trade, and thatis all. Even the Hudson Bay Company failed to find them and farmthem.
"And now the girl. I was coming up a stream— you'dcall it a river in California— uncharted— and unnamed. It was anoble valley, now shut in by high canyon walls, and again openingout into beautiful stretches, wide and long, with pastureshoulder-high in the bottoms, meadows dotted with flowers, and withclumps of timberspruce— virgin and magnificent. The dogs werepacking on their backs, and were sore-footed and played out; whileI was looking for any bunch of Indians to get sleds and driversfrom and go on with the first snow. It was late fall, but the waythose flowers persisted surprised me. I was supposed to be insub-arctic America, and high up among the buttresses of theRockies, and yet there was that everlasting spread of flowers. Someday the white settlers will be in there and growing wheat down allthat valley.
"And then I lifted a smoke, and heard the barking ofthe dogs— Indian dogs— and came into camp. There must have beenfive hundred of them, proper Indians at that, and I could see bythe jerking-frames that the fall hunting had been good. And then Imet her— Lucy. That was her name. Sign language— that was all wecould talk with, till they led me to a big fly— you know, half atent, open on the one side where a campfire burned. It was all ofmoose-skins, this fly— moose-skins, smoke-cured, hand-rubbed, andgolden-brown. Under it everything was neat and orderly as no Indiancamp ever was. The bed was laid on fresh spruce boughs. There werefurs galore, and on top of all was a robe of swanskins— whiteswan-skins— I have never seen anything like that robe. And on topof it, sitting cross-legged, was Lucy. She was nut-brown. I havecalled her a girl. But she was not. She was a woman, a nut-brownwoman, an Amazon, a full-blooded, full-bodied woman, and royalripe. And her eyes were blue.
“That's what took me off my feet— her eyes— blue,not China blue, but deep blue, like the sea and sky all melted intoone, and very wise. More than that, they had laughter in them— warmlaughter, sun-warm and human, very human, and. . . shall I sayfeminine? They were. They were a woman's eyes, a proper woman'seyes. You know what that means. Can I say more? Also, in those blueeyes were, at the same time, a wild unrest, a wistful yearning, anda repose, an absolute repose, a sort of all-wise and philosophicalcalm. ”
Trefethan broke off abruptly.
“You fellows think I am screwed. I'm not. This isonly my fifth since dinner. I am dead sober. I am solemn. I sithere now side by side with my sacred youth. It is not I— 'old'Trefethan— that talks; it is my youth, and it is my youth that saysthose were the most wonderful eyes I have ever seen— so very calm,so very restless; so very wise, so very curious; so very old, sovery young; so satisfied and yet yearning so wistfully. Boys, Ican't describe them. When I have told you about her, you may knowbetter for yourselves. ”
“She did not stand up. But she put out her hand.”
"'Stranger, ' she said, 'I'm real glad to see you.'
“I leave it to you— that sharp, frontier, Westerntang of speech. Picture my sensations. It was a woman, a whitewoman, but that tang! It was amazing that it should be a whitewoman, here, beyond the last boundary of the world— but the tang. Itell you, it hurt. It was like the stab of a flatted note. And yet,let me tell you, that woman was a poet. You shall see. ”
"She dismissed the Indians. And, by Jove, they went.They took her orders and followed her blind. She was hi-yu skookamchief. She told the bucks to make a camp for me and to take care ofmy dogs. And they did, too. And they knew enough not to get awaywith as much as a moccasin-lace of my outfit. She was a regularShe-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, and I want to tell you it chilled me to themarrow, sent those little thrills Marathoning up and down my spinalcolumn, meeting a white woman out there at the head of a tribe ofsavages a thousand miles the other side of No Man's Land.
“'Stranger, ” she said, 'I reckon you're sure thefirst white that ever set foot in this valley. Set down an' talk aspell, and then we'll have a bite to eat. Which way might you becomin'? '
"There it was, that tang again. But from now to theend of the yarn I want you to forget it. I tell you I forgot it,sitting there on the edge of that swan-skin robe and listening andlooking at the most wonderful woman that ever stepped out of thepages of Thoreau or of any other man's book.
"I stayed on there a week. It was on her invitation.She promised to fit me out with dogs and sleds and with Indiansthat would put me across the best pass of the Rockies in fivehundred miles. Her fly was pitched apart from the others, on thehigh bank by the river, and a couple of Indian girls did hercooking for her and the camp work. And so we talked and talked,while the first snow fell and continued to fall and make a surfacefor my sleds. And this was her story.
"She was frontier-born, of poor settlers, and youknow what that means— work, work, always work, work in plenty andwithout end.
“'I never seen the glory of the world, ' she said.'I had no time. I knew it was right out there, anywhere, all aroundthe cabin, but there was always the bread to set, the scrubbin' andthe washin' and the work that was never done. I used to be plumbsick at times, jes' to get out into it all, especially in thespring when the songs of the birds drove me most clean crazy. Iwanted to run out through the long pasture grass, wetting my legswith the dew of it, and to climb the rail fence, and keep onthrough the timber and up and up over the divide so as to get alook around. Oh, I had all kinds of hankerings— to follow up thecanyon beds and slosh around from pool to pool, making friends withthe water-dogs and the speckly trout; to peep on the sly and watchthe squirrels and rabbits and small furry things and see what theywas doing and learn the secrets of their ways. Seemed to me,