The Jacket (Star-Rover)

by Jack London
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