CHAPTER I.

All my life I have had an awareness of other times and places. I have

been aware of other persons in me.—Oh, and trust me, so have you, my

reader that is to be. Read back into your childhood, and this sense of

awareness I speak of will be remembered as an experience of your

childhood. You were then not fixed, not crystallized. You were plastic,

a soul in flux, a consciousness and an identity in the process of

forming—ay, of forming and forgetting.

You have forgotten much, my reader, and yet, as you read these lines,

you remember dimly the hazy vistas of other times and places into which

your child eyes peered. They seem dreams to you to-day. Yet, if they

were dreams, dreamed then, whence the substance of them? Our dreams are

grotesquely compounded of the things we know. The stuff of our sheerest

dreams is the stuff of our experience. As a child, a wee child, you

dreamed you fell great heights; you dreamed you flew through the air as

things of the air fly; you were vexed by crawling spiders and

many-legged creatures of the slime; you heard other voices, saw other

faces nightmarishly familiar, and gazed upon sunrises and sunsets other

than you know now, looking back, you ever looked upon.

Very well. These child glimpses are of other-worldness, of

other-lifeness, of things that you had never seen in this particular

world of your particular life. Then whence? Other lives? Other worlds?

Perhaps, when you have read all that I shall write, you will have

received answers to the perplexities I have propounded to you, and that

you yourself, ere you came to read me, propounded to yourself.

Wordsworth knew. He was neither seer nor prophet, but just ordinary man

like you or any man. What he knew, you know, any man knows. But he most

aptly stated it in his passage that begins “Not in utter nakedness, not

in entire forgetfulness. . .”

Ah, truly, shades of the prison-house close about us, the new-born

things, and all too soon do we forget. And yet, when we were new-born

we did remember other times and places. We, helpless infants in arms or

creeping quadruped-like on the floor, dreamed our dreams of air-flight.

Yes; and we endured the torment and torture of nightmare fears of dim

and monstrous things. We new-born infants, without experience, were

born with fear, with memory of fear; and _memory is experience_.

As for myself, at the beginnings of my vocabulary, at so tender a

period that I still made hunger noises and sleep noises, yet even then

did I know that I had been a star-rover. Yes, I, whose lips had never

lisped the word “king,” remembered that I had once been the son of a

king. More—I remembered that once I had been a slave and a son of a

slave, and worn an iron collar round my neck.

Still more. When I was three, and four, and five years of age, I was

not yet I. I was a mere becoming, a flux of spirit not yet cooled solid

in the mould of my particular flesh and time and place. In that period

all that I had ever been in ten thousand lives before strove in me, and

troubled the flux of me, in the effort to incorporate itself in me and

become me.

Silly, isn’t it? But remember, my reader, whom I hope to have travel

far with me through time and space—remember, please, my reader, that I

have thought much on these matters, that through bloody nights and

sweats of dark that lasted years-long, I have been alone with my many

selves to consult and contemplate my many selves. I have gone through

the hells of all existences to bring you news which you will share with

me in a casual comfortable hour over my printed page.

So, to return, I say, during the ages of three and four and five, I was

not yet I. I was merely becoming as I took form in the mould of my

body, and all the mighty, indestructible past wrought in the mixture of

me to determine what the form of that becoming would be. It was not my

voice that cried out in the night in fear of things known, which I,

forsooth, did not and could not know. The same with my childish angers,

my loves, and my laughters. Other voices screamed through my voice, the

voices of men and women aforetime, of all shadowy hosts of progenitors.

And the snarl of my anger was blended with the snarls of beasts more

ancient than the mountains, and the vocal madness of my child hysteria,

with all the red of its wrath, was chorded with the insensate, stupid

cries of beasts pre-Adamic and progeologic in time.

And there the secret is out. The red wrath! It has undone me in this,

my present life. Because of it, a few short weeks hence, I shall be led

from this cell to a high place with unstable flooring, graced above by

a well-stretched rope; and there they will hang me by the neck until I

am dead. The red wrath always has undone me in all my lives; for the

red wrath is my disastrous catastrophic heritage from the time of the

slimy things ere the world was prime.

It is time that I introduce myself. I am neither fool nor lunatic. I

want you to know that, in order that you will believe the things I

shall tell you. I am Darrell Standing. Some few of you who read this

will know me immediately. But to the majority, who are bound to be

strangers, let me exposit myself. Eight years ago I was Professor of

Agronomics in the College of Agriculture of the University of

California. Eight years ago the sleepy little university town of

Berkeley was shocked by the murder of Professor Haskell in one of the

laboratories of the Mining Building. Darrell Standing was the murderer.

I am Darrell Standing. I was caught red-handed. Now the right and the

wrong of this affair with Professor Haskell I shall not discuss. It was

purely a private matter. The point is, that in a surge of anger,

obsessed by that catastrophic red wrath that has cursed me down the

ages, I killed my fellow professor. The court records show that I did;

and, for once, I agree with the court records.

No; I am not to be hanged for his murder. I received a life-sentence

for my punishment. I was thirty-six years of age at the time. I am now

forty-four years old. I have spent the eight intervening years in the

California State Prison of San Quentin. Five of these years I spent in

the dark. Solitary confinement, they call it. Men who endure it, call

it living death. But through these five years of death-in-life I

managed to attain freedom such as few men have ever known.

Closest-confined of prisoners, not only did I range the world, but I

ranged time. They who immured me for petty years gave to me, all

unwittingly, the largess of centuries. Truly, thanks to Ed Morrell, I

have had five years of star-roving. But Ed Morrell is another story. I

shall tell you about him a little later. I have so much to tell I

scarce know how to begin.

Well, a beginning. I was born on a quarter-section in Minnesota. My

mother was the daughter of an immigrant Swede. Her name was Hilda

Tonnesson. My father was Chauncey Standing, of old American stock. He

traced back to Alfred Standing, an indentured servant, or slave if you

please, who was transported from England to the Virginia plantations in

the days that were even old when the youthful Washington went

a-surveying in the Pennsylvania wilderness.

A son of Alfred Standing fought in the War of the Revolution; a

grandson, in the War of 1812. There have been no wars since in which

the Standings have not been represented. I, the last of the Standings,

dying soon without issue, fought as a common soldier in the

Philippines, in our latest war, and to do so I resigned, in the full

early ripeness of career, my professorship in the University of

Nebraska. Good heavens, when I so resigned I was headed for the

Deanship of the College of Agriculture in that university—I, the

star-rover, the red-blooded adventurer, the vagabondish Cain of the

centuries, the militant priest of remotest times, the moon-dreaming

poet of ages forgotten and to-day unrecorded in man’s history of man!

And here I am, my hands dyed red in Murderers’ Row, in the State Prison

of Folsom, awaiting the day decreed by the machinery of state when the

servants of the state will lead me away into what they fondly believe

is the dark—the dark they fear; the dark that gives them fearsome and

superstitious fancies; the dark that drives them, drivelling and

yammering, to the altars of their fear-created, anthropomorphic gods.

No; I shall never be Dean of any college of agriculture. And yet I knew

agriculture. It was my profession. I was born to it, reared to it,

trained to it; and I was a master of it. It was my genius. I can pick

the high-percentage butter-fat cow with my eye and let the Babcock

Tester prove the wisdom of my eye. I can look, not at land, but at

landscape, and pronounce the virtues and the shortcomings of the soil.

Litmus paper is not necessary when I determine a soil to be acid or

alkali. I repeat, farm-husbandry, in its highest scientific terms, was

my genius, and is my genius. And yet the state, which includes all the

citizens of the state, believes that it can blot out this wisdom of

mine in the final dark by means of a rope about my neck and the

abruptive jerk of gravitation—this wisdom of mine that was incubated

through the millenniums, and that was well-hatched ere the farmed

fields of Troy were ever pastured by the flocks of nomad shepherds!

Corn? Who else knows corn? There is my demonstration at Wistar, whereby

I increased the annual corn-yield of every county in Iowa by half a

million dollars. This is history. Many a farmer, riding in his

motor-car to-day, knows who made possible that motor-car. Many a

sweet-bosomed girl and bright-browed boy, poring over high-school

text-books, little dreams that I made that higher education possible by

my corn demonstration at Wistar.

And farm management! I know the waste of superfluous motion without

studying a moving picture record of it, whether it be farm or

farm-hand, the layout of buildings or the layout of the farm-hands’

labour. There is my handbook and tables on the subject. Beyond the

shadow of any doubt, at this present moment, a hundred thousand farmers

are knotting their brows over its spread pages ere they tap out their

final pipe and go to bed. And yet, so far was I beyond my tables, that

all I needed was a mere look at a man to know his predispositions, his

co-ordinations, and the index fraction of his motion-wastage.

And here I must close this first chapter of my narrative. It is nine

o’clock, and in Murderers’ Row that means lights out. Even now, I hear

the soft tread of the gum-shoed guard as he comes to censure me for my

coal-oil lamp still burning. As if the mere living could censure the

doomed to die!