Lost Face
It was the end. Subienkow had travelled a long trail of bitterness
and horror, homing like a dove for the capitals of Europe, and here,
farther away than ever, in Russian America, the trail ceased. He sat
in the snow, arms tied behind him, waiting the torture. He stared
curiously before him at a huge Cossack, prone in the snow, moaning in
his pain. The men had finished handling the giant and turned him
over to the women. That they exceeded the fiendishness of the men,
the man's cries attested.
Subienkow looked on, and shuddered. He was not afraid to die. He
had carried his life too long in his hands, on that weary trail from
Warsaw to Nulato, to shudder at mere dying. But he objected to the
torture. It offended his soul. And this offence, in turn, was not
due to the mere pain he must endure, but to the sorry spectacle the
pain would make of him. He knew that he would pray, and beg, and
entreat, even as Big Ivan and the others that had gone before. This
would not be nice. To pass out bravely and cleanly, with a smile and
a jest--ah! that would have been the way. But to lose control, to
have his soul upset by the pangs of the flesh, to screech and gibber
like an ape, to become the veriest beast--ah, that was what was so
terrible.
There had been no chance to escape. From the beginning, when he
dreamed the fiery dream of Poland's independence, he had become a
puppet in the hands of Fate. From the beginning, at Warsaw, at St.
Petersburg, in the Siberian mines, in Kamtchatka, on the crazy boats
of the fur-thieves, Fate had been driving him to this end. Without
doubt, in the foundations of the world was graved this end for him--
for him, who was so fine and sensitive, whose nerves scarcely
sheltered under his skin, who was a dreamer, and a poet, and an
artist. Before he was dreamed of, it had been determined that the
quivering bundle of sensitiveness that constituted him should be
doomed to live in raw and howling savagery, and to die in this far
land of night, in this dark place beyond the last boundaries of the
world.
He sighed. So that thing before him was Big Ivan--Big Ivan the
giant, the man without nerves, the man of iron, the Cossack turned
freebooter of the seas, who was as phlegmatic as an ox, with a
nervous system so low that what was pain to ordinary men was scarcely
a tickle to him. Well, well, trust these Nulato Indians to find Big
Ivan's nerves and trace them to the roots of his quivering soul.
They were certainly doing it. It was inconceivable that a man could
suffer so much and yet live. Big Ivan was paying for his low order
of nerves. Already he had lasted twice as long as any of the others.
Subienkow felt that he could not stand the Cossack's sufferings much
longer. Why didn't Ivan die? He would go mad if that screaming did
not cease. But when it did cease, his turn would come. And there
was Yakaga awaiting him, too, grinning at him even now in
anticipation--Yakaga, whom only last week he had kicked out of the
fort, and upon whose face he had laid the lash of his dog-whip.
Yakaga would attend to him. Doubtlessly Yakaga was saving for him
more refined tortures, more exquisite nerve-racking. Ah! that must
have been a good one, from the way Ivan screamed. The squaws bending
over him stepped back with laughter and clapping of hands. Subienkow
saw the monstrous thing that had been perpetrated, and began to laugh
hysterically. The Indians looked at him in wonderment that he should
laugh. But Subienkow could not stop.
This would never do. He controlled himself, the spasmodic twitchings
slowly dying away. He strove to think of other things, and began
reading back in his own life. He remembered his mother and his
father, and the little spotted pony, and the French tutor who had
taught him dancing and sneaked him an old worn copy of Voltaire.
Once more he saw Paris, and dreary London, and gay Vienna, and Rome.
And once more he saw that wild group of youths who had dreamed, even
as he, the dream of an independent Poland with a king of Poland on
the throne at Warsaw. Ah, there it was that the long trail began.
Well, he had lasted longest. One by one, beginning with the two
executed at St. Petersburg, he took up the count of the passing of
those brave spirits. Here one had been beaten to death by a jailer,
and there, on that bloodstained highway of the exiles, where they had
marched for endless months, beaten and maltreated by their Cossack
guards, another had dropped by the way. Always it had been savagery-
-brutal, bestial savagery. They had died--of fever, in the mines,
under the knout. The last two had died after the escape, in the
battle with the Cossacks, and he alone had won to Kamtchatka with the
stolen papers and the money of a traveller he had left lying in the
snow.
It had been nothing but savagery. All the years, with his heart in
studios, and theatres, and courts, he had been hemmed in by savagery.
He had purchased his life with blood. Everybody had killed. He had
killed that traveller for his passports. He had proved that he was a
man of parts by duelling with two Russian officers on a single day.
He had had to prove himself in order to win to a place among the fur-
thieves. He had had to win to that place. Behind him lay the
thousand-years-long road across all Siberia and Russia. He could not
escape that way. The only way was ahead, across the dark and icy sea
of Bering to Alaska. The way had led from savagery to deeper
savagery. On the scurvy-rotten ships of the fur-thieves, out of food
and out of water, buffeted by the interminable storms of that stormy
sea, men had become animals. Thrice he had sailed east from
Kamtchatka. And thrice, after all manner of hardship and suffering,
the survivors had come back to Kamtchatka. There had been no outlet
for escape, and he could not go back the way he had come, for the
mines and the knout awaited him.
Again, the fourth and last time, he had sailed east. He had been
with those who first found the fabled Seal Islands; but he had not
returned with them to share the wealth of furs in the mad orgies of
Kamtchatka. He had sworn never to go back. He knew that to win to
those dear capitals of Europe he must go on. So he had changed ships
and remained in the dark new land. His comrades were Slavonian
hunters and Russian adventurers, Mongols and Tartars and Siberian
aborigines; and through the savages of the new world they had cut a
path of blood. They had massacred whole villages that refused to
furnish the fur-tribute; and they, in turn, had been massacred by
ships' companies. He, with one Finn, had been the sole survivor of
such a company. They had spent a winter of solitude and starvation
on a lonely Aleutian isle, and their rescue in the spring by another
fur-ship had been one chance in a thousand.
But always the terrible savagery had hemmed him in. Passing from
ship to ship, and ever refusing to return, he had come to the ship
that explored south. All down the Alaska coast they had encountered
nothing but hosts of savages. Every anchorage among the beetling
islands or under the frowning cliffs of the mainland had meant a
battle or a storm. Either the gales blew, threatening destruction,
or the war canoes came off, manned by howling natives with the war-
paint on their faces, who came to learn the bloody virtues of the
sea-rovers' gunpowder. South, south they had coasted, clear to the
myth-land of California. Here, it was said, were Spanish adventurers
who had fought their way up from Mexico. He had had hopes of those
Spanish adventurers. Escaping to them, the rest would have been
easy--a year or two, what did it matter more or less--and he would
win to Mexico, then a ship, and Europe would be his. But they had
met no Spaniards. Only had they encountered the same impregnable
wall of savagery. The denizens of the confines of the world, painted
for war, had driven them back from the shores. At last, when one
boat was cut off and every man killed, the commander had abandoned
the quest and sailed back to the north.
The years had passed. He had served under Tebenkoff when
Michaelovski Redoubt was built. He had spent two years in the
Kuskokwim country. Two summers, in the month of June, he had managed
to be at the head of Kotzebue Sound. Here, at this time, the tribes
assembled for barter; here were to be found spotted deerskins from
Siberia, ivory from the Diomedes, walrus skins from the shores of the
Arctic, strange stone lamps, passing in trade from tribe to tribe, no
one knew whence, and, once, a hunting-knife of English make; and
here, Subienkow knew, was the school in which to learn geography.
For he met Eskimos from Norton Sound, from King Island and St.
Lawrence Island, from Cape Prince of Wales, and Point Barrow. Such
places had other names, and their distances were measured in days.
It was a vast region these trading savages came from, and a vaster
region from which, by repeated trade, their stone lamps and that
steel knife had come. Subienkow bullied, and cajoled, and bribed.
Every far-journeyer or strange tribesman was brought before him.
Perils unaccountable and unthinkable were mentioned, as well as wild
beasts, hostile tribes, impenetrable forests, and mighty mountain
ranges; but always from beyond came the rumour and the tale of white-
skinned men, blue of eye and fair of hair, who fought like devils and
who sought always for furs. They were to the east--far, far to the
east. No one had seen them. It was the word that had been passed
along.
It was a hard school. One could not learn geography very well
through the medium of strange dialects, from dark minds that mingled
fact and fable and that measured distances by "sleeps" that varied
according to the difficulty of the going. But at last came the
whisper that gave Subienkow courage. In the east lay a great river
where were these blue-eyed men. The river was called the Yukon.
South of Michaelovski Redoubt emptied another great river which the
Russians knew as the Kwikpak. These two rivers were one, ran the
whisper.
Subienkow returned to Michaelovski. For a year he urged an
expedition up the Kwikpak. Then arose Malakoff, the Russian half-
breed, to lead the wildest and most ferocious of the hell's broth of
mongrel adventurers who had crossed from Kamtchatka. Subienkow was
his lieutenant. They threaded the mazes of the great delta of the
Kwikpak, picked up the first low hills on the northern bank, and for
half a thousand miles, in skin canoes loaded to the gunwales with
trade-goods and ammunition, fought their way against the five-knot
current of a river that ran from two to ten miles wide in a channel
many fathoms deep. Malakoff decided to build the fort at Nulato.
Subienkow urged to go farther. But he quickly reconciled himself to
Nulato. The long winter was coming on. It would be better to wait.
Early the following summer, when the ice was gone, he would disappear
up the Kwikpak and work his way to the Hudson Bay Company's posts.
Malakoff had never heard the whisper that the Kwikpak was the Yukon,
and Subienkow did not tell him.
Came the building of the fort. It was enforced labour. The tiered
walls of logs arose to the sighs and groans of the Nulato Indians.
The lash was laid upon their backs, and it was the iron hand of the
freebooters of the sea that laid on the lash. There were Indians
that ran away, and when they were caught they were brought back and
spread-eagled before the fort, where they and their tribe learned the
efficacy of the knout. Two died under it; others were injured for
life; and the rest took the lesson to heart and ran away no more.
The snow was flying ere the fort was finished, and then it was the
time for furs. A heavy tribute was laid upon the tribe. Blows and
lashings continued, and that the tribute should be paid, the women
and children were held as hostages and treated with the barbarity
that only the fur-thieves knew.
Well, it had been a sowing of blood, and now was come the harvest.
The fort was gone. In the light of its burning, half the fur-thieves
had been cut down. The other half had passed under the torture.
Only Subienkow remained, or Subienkow and Big Ivan, if that
whimpering, moaning thing in the snow could be called Big Ivan.
Subienkow caught Yakaga grinning at him. There was no gainsaying
Yakaga. The mark of the lash was still on his face. After all,
Subienkow could not blame him, but he disliked the thought of what
Yakaga would do to him. He thought of appealing to Makamuk, the
head-chief; but his judgment told him that such appeal was useless.
Then, too, he thought of bursting his bonds and dying fighting. Such
an end would be quick. But he could not break his bonds. Caribou
thongs were stronger than he. Still devising, another thought came
to him. He signed for Makamuk, and that an interpreter who knew the
coast dialect should be brought.
"Oh, Makamuk," he said, "I am not minded to die. I am a great man,
and it were foolishness for me to die. In truth, I shall not die. I
am not like these other carrion."
He looked at the moaning thing that had once been Big Ivan, and
stirred it contemptuously with his toe.
"I am too wise to die. Behold, I have a great medicine. I alone
know this medicine. Since I am not going to die, I shall exchange
this medicine with you."
"What is this medicine?" Makamuk demanded.
"It is a strange medicine."
Subienkow debated with himself for a moment, as if loth to part with
the secret.
"I will tell you. A little bit of this medicine rubbed on the skin
makes the skin hard like a rock, hard like iron, so that no cutting
weapon can cut it. The strongest blow of a cutting weapon is a vain
thing against it. A bone knife becomes like a piece of mud; and it
will turn the edge of the iron knives we have brought among you.
What will you give me for the secret of the medicine?"
"I will give you your life," Makamuk made answer through the
interpreter.
Subienkow laughed scornfully.
"And you shall be a slave in my house until you die."
The Pole laughed more scornfully.
"Untie my hands and feet and let us talk," he said.
The chief made the sign; and when he was loosed Subienkow rolled a
cigarette and lighted it.
"This is foolish talk," said Makamuk. "There is no such medicine.
It cannot be. A cutting edge is stronger than any medicine."
The chief was incredulous, and yet he wavered. He had seen too many
deviltries of fur-thieves that worked. He could not wholly doubt.
"I will give you your life; but you shall not be a slave," he
announced.
"More than that."
Subienkow played his game as coolly as if he were bartering for a
foxskin.
"It is a very great medicine. It has saved my life many times. I
want a sled and dogs, and six of your hunters to travel with me down
the river and give me safety to one day's sleep from Michaelovski
Redoubt."
"You must live here, and teach us all of your deviltries," was the
reply.
Subienkow shrugged his shoulders and remained silent. He blew
cigarette smoke out on the icy air, and curiously regarded what
remained of the big Cossack.
"That scar!" Makamuk said suddenly, pointing to the Pole's neck,
where a livid mark advertised the slash of a knife in a Kamtchatkan
brawl. "The medicine is not good. The cutting edge was stronger
than the medicine."
"It was a strong man that drove the stroke." (Subienkow considered.)
"Stronger than you, stronger than your strongest hunter, stronger
than he."
Again, with the toe of his moccasin, he touched the Cossack--a grisly
spectacle, no longer conscious--yet in whose dismembered body the
pain-racked life clung and was loth to go.
"Also, the medicine was weak. For at that place there were no
berries of a certain kind, of which I see you have plenty in this
country. The medicine here will be strong."
"I will let you go down river," said Makamuk; "and the sled and the
dogs and the six hunters to give you safety shall be yours."
"You are slow," was the cool rejoinder. "You have committed an
offence against my medicine in that you did not at once accept my
terms. Behold, I now demand more. I want one hundred beaver skins."
(Makamuk sneered.)
"I want one hundred pounds of dried fish." (Makamuk nodded, for fish
were plentiful and cheap.) "I want two sleds--one for me and one for
my furs and fish. And my rifle must be returned to me. If you do
not like the price, in a little while the price will grow."
Yakaga whispered to the chief.
"But how can I know your medicine is true medicine?" Makamuk asked.
"It is very easy. First, I shall go into the woods--"
Again Yakaga whispered to Makamuk, who made a suspicious dissent.
"You can send twenty hunters with me," Subienkow went on. "You see,
I must get the berries and the roots with which to make the medicine.
Then, when you have brought the two sleds and loaded on them the fish
and the beaver skins and the rifle, and when you have told off the
six hunters who will go with me--then, when all is ready, I will rub
the medicine on my neck, so, and lay my neck there on that log. Then
can your strongest hunter take the axe and strike three times on my
neck. You yourself can strike the three times."
Makamuk stood with gaping mouth, drinking in this latest and most
wonderful magic of the fur-thieves.
"But first," the Pole added hastily, "between each blow I must put on
fresh medicine. The axe is heavy and sharp, and I want no mistakes."
"All that you have asked shall be yours," Makamuk cried in a rush of
acceptance. "Proceed to make your medicine."
Subienkow concealed his elation. He was playing a desperate game,
and there must be no slips. He spoke arrogantly.
"You have been slow. My medicine is offended. To make the offence
clean you must give me your daughter."
He pointed to the girl, an unwholesome creature, with a cast in one
eye and a bristling wolf-tooth. Makamuk was angry, but the Pole
remained imperturbable, rolling and lighting another cigarette.
"Make haste," he threatened. "If you are not quick, I shall demand
yet more."
In the silence that followed, the dreary northland scene faded before
him, and he saw once more his native land, and France, and, once, as
he glanced at the wolf-toothed girl, he remembered another girl, a
singer and a dancer, whom he had known when first as a youth he came
to Paris.
"What do you want with the girl?" Makamuk asked.
"To go down the river with me." Subienkow glanced over her
critically. "She will make a good wife, and it is an honour worthy
of my medicine to be married to your blood."
Again he remembered the singer and dancer and hummed aloud a song she
had taught him. He lived the old life over, but in a detached,
impersonal sort of way, looking at the memory-pictures of his own
life as if they were pictures in a book of anybody's life. The
chief's voice, abruptly breaking the silence, startled him
"It shall be done," said Makamuk. "The girl shall go down the river
with you. But be it understood that I myself strike the three blows
with the axe on your neck."
"But each time I shall put on the medicine," Subienkow answered, with
a show of ill-concealed anxiety.
"You shall put the medicine on between each blow. Here are the
hunters who shall see you do not escape. Go into the forest and
gather your medicine."
Makamuk had been convinced of the worth of the medicine by the Pole's
rapacity. Surely nothing less than the greatest of medicines could
enable a man in the shadow of death to stand up and drive an old-
woman's bargain.
"Besides," whispered Yakaga, when the Pole, with his guard, had
disappeared among the spruce trees, "when you have learned the
medicine you can easily destroy him."
"But how can I destroy him?" Makamuk argued. "His medicine will not
let me destroy him."
"There will be some part where he has not rubbed the medicine," was
Yakaga's reply. "We will destroy him through that part. It may be
his ears. Very well; we will thrust a spear in one ear and out the
other. Or it may be his eyes. Surely the medicine will be much too
strong to rub on his eyes."
The chief nodded. "You are wise, Yakaga. If he possesses no other
devil-things, we will then destroy him."
Subienkow did not waste time in gathering the ingredients for his
medicine, he selected whatsoever came to hand such as spruce needles,
the inner bark of the willow, a strip of birch bark, and a quantity
of moss-berries, which he made the hunters dig up for him from
beneath the snow. A few frozen roots completed his supply, and he
led the way back to camp.
Makamuk and Yakaga crouched beside him, noting the quantities and
kinds of the ingredients he dropped into the pot of boiling water.
"You must be careful that the moss-berries go in first," he
explained.
"And--oh, yes, one other thing--the finger of a man. Here, Yakaga,
let me cut off your finger."
But Yakaga put his hands behind him and scowled.
"Just a small finger," Subienkow pleaded.
"Yakaga, give him your finger," Makamuk commanded.
"There be plenty of fingers lying around," Yakaga grunted, indicating
the human wreckage in the snow of the score of persons who had been
tortured to death.
"It must be the finger of a live man," the Pole objected.
"Then shall you have the finger of a live man." Yakaga strode over
to the Cossack and sliced off a finger.
"He is not yet dead," he announced, flinging the bloody trophy in the
snow at the Pole's feet. "Also, it is a good finger, because it is
large."
Subienkow dropped it into the fire under the pot and began to sing.
It was a French love-song that with great solemnity he sang into the
brew.
"Without these words I utter into it, the medicine is worthless," he
explained. "The words are the chiefest strength of it. Behold, it
is ready."
"Name the words slowly, that I may know them," Makamuk commanded.
"Not until after the test. When the axe flies back three times from
my neck, then will I give you the secret of the words."
"But if the medicine is not good medicine?" Makamuk queried
anxiously.
Subienkow turned upon him wrathfully.
"My medicine is always good. However, if it is not good, then do by
me as you have done to the others. Cut me up a bit at a time, even
as you have cut him up." He pointed to the Cossack. "The medicine
is now cool. Thus, I rub it on my neck, saying this further
medicine."
With great gravity he slowly intoned a line of the "Marseillaise," at
the same time rubbing the villainous brew thoroughly into his neck.
An outcry interrupted his play-acting. The giant Cossack, with a
last resurgence of his tremendous vitality, had arisen to his knees.
Laughter and cries of surprise and applause arose from the Nulatos,
as Big Ivan began flinging himself about in the snow with mighty
spasms.
Subienkow was made sick by the sight, but he mastered his qualms and
made believe to be angry.
"This will not do," he said. "Finish him, and then we will make the
test. Here, you, Yakaga, see that his noise ceases."
While this was being done, Subienkow turned to Makamuk.
"And remember, you are to strike hard. This is not baby-work. Here,
take the axe and strike the log, so that I can see you strike like a
man."
Makamuk obeyed, striking twice, precisely and with vigour, cutting
out a large chip.
"It is well." Subienkow looked about him at the circle of savage
faces that somehow seemed to symbolize the wall of savagery that had
hemmed him about ever since the Czar's police had first arrested him
in Warsaw. "Take your axe, Makamuk, and stand so. I shall lie down.
When I raise my hand, strike, and strike with all your might. And be
careful that no one stands behind you. The medicine is good, and the
axe may bounce from off my neck and right out of your hands."
He looked at the two sleds, with the dogs in harness, loaded with
furs and fish. His rifle lay on top of the beaver skins. The six
hunters who were to act as his guard stood by the sleds."
"Where is the girl?" the Pole demanded. "Bring her up to the sleds
before the test goes on."
When this had been carried out, Subienkow lay down in the snow,
resting his head on the log like a tired child about to sleep. He
had lived so many dreary years that he was indeed tired.
"I laugh at you and your strength, O Makamuk," he said. "Strike, and
strike hard."
He lifted his hand. Makamuk swung the axe, a broadaxe for the
squaring of logs. The bright steel flashed through the frosty air,
poised for a perceptible instant above Makamuk's head, then descended
upon Subienkow's bare neck. Clear through flesh and bone it cut its
way, biting deeply into the log beneath. The amazed savages saw the
head bounce a yard away from the blood-spouting trunk.
There was a great bewilderment and silence, while slowly it began to
dawn in their minds that there had been no medicine. The fur-thief
had outwitted them. Alone, of all their prisoners, he had escaped
the torture. That had been the stake for which he played. A great
roar of laughter went up. Makamuk bowed his head in shame. The fur-
thief had fooled him. He had lost face before all his people. Still
they continued to roar out their laughter. Makamuk turned, and with
bowed head stalked away. He knew that thenceforth he would be no
longer known as Makamuk. He would be Lost Face; the record of his
shame would be with him until he died; and whenever the tribes
gathered in the spring for the salmon, or in the summer for the
trading, the story would pass back and forth across the camp-fires of
how the fur-thief died peaceably, at a single stroke, by the hand of
Lost Face.
"Who was Lost Face?" he could hear, in anticipation, some insolent
young buck demand, "Oh, Lost Face," would be the answer, "he who once
was Makamuk in the days before he cut off the fur-thief's head."
-THE END-
Jack London's short story: Lost Face
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