The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World

by Brian Doyle

  “I found a pawn, and then another, and then a third, and considered that Adil was trying to leave me a chess piece at roughly the same intervals. Then I found a castle, or rook; and this one caused me pause, for it was very hurriedly made, much more so than the others, and it seemed to me there was a splash of blood in the well of the castle. Perhaps Adil had cut himself, in his haste, or perhaps it was just a splash of rusty rain; in any event I took the message to be that he was arriving at a camp or stronghold of some sort, and I would be well advised to double my caution. A few moments later I came to the edge of a clearing in the forest, and discovered exactly such an encampment, roughly fortified by logs and poles. Though I could see no sentinel or patrollers, I could hear the bustle of it, and see campfire smoke rising against the first straggle of dawn; and I sat down there in the fringe of the forest to consider what to do.”

  Just then Mrs Carson entered the sitting room, and called us to dinner, and John Carson immediately rose to go; he laughed aloud at me sitting gaping in my chair, feeling abandoned, so to speak, and teetering on the precipitous peak of the story. “When Mrs Carson invites you to dinner,” he said with a smile, “you are wise to accept her invitation with alacrity, for her gifts in the kitchen are as legion as the rest of her virtues, and I can report from sad experience that the other guests in the house will not wait for the table-tardy, nor leave a scrap of savory for anyone who lingers by the fire. Plus it would not do to be anything but instant when Mrs Carson has offered a gift, which is what you have to call her wonderful productions. As for the story it can wait for us to return to it; stories are patient, as you know better than I do, having written books, and the story will be right here when we return to it apace.” And away he strode to dinner, with me a step behind, marveling at the subtle pleasure of a story paused in full flow, the delicious tension of waiting; and after dinner I was happily inundated by memories of my beloved childhood nurse Cummy telling me stories in stages, a bit every night, as you would parcel out the most delicious candy.

  2

  SAN FRANCISCO IN WINTER IS A CITY of lashing rain and swirling mist, the two often interchangeable and indistinguishable; but sometimes after a day of rain the sun would beam forth so generously that it almost seemed to stack itself in drifts in the street. On those days especially I walked the city with a most sincere pleasure and curiosity, for never was there a city so precipitously hilly, so graced with odd and unusual domiciles, and so bravely lax in the basic principles of architectural engineering. I saw houses built into the most alarmingly unsuitable and unstable places, fitted into their peculiar footprints with far more hope than cement, it seemed to me; and there were rickety houses built on pillars thin as stilts, and rooms built over sheds already grossly overburdened, and houses built at such fearsome angles on hilltops and cliff faces that one epic sneeze inside would topple all and sundry in an instant; yet only once did I see the ruins of a fallen house, and that one caused by a political explosion rather than structural sin, or so it was reported in the newspapers.

  Up and up I went, always up, it seemed to me, and many times I wondered how this could be possible, that I would always be climbing up, always be rising, as it were, and never in decline; yet this seemed so, and some days I would return to Bush Street happily weary and exhilarated from several hours of uphill work, and stop to think that somewhere in the world a man surely had done the other part of my walk, his perambulation being all down the steep stones of his city, so that we had accomplished several miles, myself on the rise and himself in descent, together enjoying a most bracing afternoon.

  My favorite walk was up Telegraph Hill, which had been called Signal Hill in years past, for from it a man could easily spy all the ships coming into port, and signal their arrival to interested parties, so as to advance their commercial chances. This seemed to me the steepest of all San Franciscan hills, so much so that grass grew in the streets, because no horse or cart could climb such a pitch; residents and visitors alike maneuvered on wooden stairs and steps, which wandered in such profusion that it seemed a very heaven for carpenters and woodworkers, who must be always at work here, given the debilitating effect of the winter rains. Perhaps because it was so hard to climb, the hill seemed populated largely by immigrants from Italy and Spain and Portugal, and their musical languages were everywhere to be heard, reminding me of certain neighborhoods in London; and here too, more than anywhere else in the city that I knew, were the tiny balconies of crowded cities in the Old World, where men sat and smoked and chaffed their neighbors, and women hung their washing and called to their friends on balconies above and below. I never wearied of walking those precipitous streets, which always seemed filled with cheerful banter and the faint redolence of newly sawn wood; to me it seemed like a village unto itself, the top of Telegraph Hill, with its own culture and mosaic of languages, and its residents instantly out on their balconies to bask, if the sun should appear shyly after rain.

  January 5, 1880, Oakland

  Dearest Louis,

  I snatch a moment to write a letter even though you will be here tomorrow, for I am sunshine after rain, I am dawn after dark, I am spring born of winter! Free of him and open to you, free to love, free to plunge into a life that will take us who knows where … I cannot find the words, Louis. I cannot find the words! I sit and smile in the garden and sweet little Lloyd comes to sit with me and feel my brow to see if I am sick, for he has rarely seen me smile, poor boy.

  Free of him, free of him!—three weeks I am free of him now, after the final decree on December 15, and I confess, Louis, that I take the document out of its pine box sometimes, the tiny coffin of that terrible marriage, and stare at it in disbelief, in awe, in amazement, in relief, incredulous. A piece of paper that frees me forever from his oily smile and easy lie, the scents of a hundred women, his utter lack of care for his own children! He did not weep, he did not weep, when poor Hervey died, only six years old, my poor baby coughing his life away into a towel, a blood-soaked towel, I washed so many towels, Louis, I washed so many towels!—if I could get all the blood out of the towel then Hervey would recover, he would be healed!—but I couldn’t get them clean, I couldn’t, though I tried so hard, and he died, poor little Hervey. Isobel washed his body and combed his hair and dressed him in his best suit. She was seventeen. The same age I was when I married the dashing lieutenant. Lucifer! It was a blue suit with narrow lapels and Lloyd gave him his own best boots. Lloyd was just eight years old then. He loved those boots. You know how a child loves his things and hoards them and talks to them. Hervey was always asking to wear those boots and Lloyd would say no and they would argue like shrill jays but I watched Lloyd tiptoe in and put the boots onto Hervey’s feet that night before the funeral. I saw that happen. As you say there are more stories of power and grace available than we could see and hear were we given a thousand more eyes and ears and years. I miss you so. I will make the finest dinner anyone ever made, tomorrow—and there will be flowers, though it is January—and Lloyd wants to start a newspaper with you—you will be the wise and freehanded publisher and he will be the brilliant editor and reporter and pressman all rolled into one—we will be by the cottage door waiting with open arms when we hear the ferry coming tomorrow—my life, my very heart!

  Your loving,

  Fanny

  I was in Oakland for the next two days, and missed my hours with John Carson telling stories by the fire, but on the eighth of January, the feast day of our Scots compatriot Saint Nachlan of Aberdeenshire, we sat down again to the sitting room, in the afternoon, and I begged him to tell me what had happened to Adil, and what manner of people had carried him off, and why.

  “You will remember that I arrived at the village before dawn,” said Mr Carson, “so that I had some time to formulate a plan, and to contemplate the village as it awakened. As the sun rose I realized that here before me was a settlement of the Dayak people, famed for their warlike nature and for their ancient custom of collecting and preserving the h
eads of their enemies. While most of the other residents of the island regarded the Dayak with terror, those who fought them could admire their courage and tenacity in, as the rajah said, essentially defending their ancestral lands, just as we would, confronted by people who would take away our land and our ancient means of life; and while it was Brooke who was famous for defeating them at sea, and reducing their piratical assaults nearly completely, it was also Brooke who could be most eloquent and passionate about their qualities and virtues, as he understood them to be.

  “I stood there in the fringe of the forest for a long time, trying to envision how I might approach the village without being captured or killed, or slip into it unannounced to find Adil, but it was a knotty problem, for the place was well fortified, and I could see the outlines of sentinels here and there. But then in a sense the forest whispered an idea to me, and wild as it sounded, the sheer brass of it made it appealing, and just possible as a means of pacific entry to the Dayak village.

  “I have not explained sufficiently the extraordinary lushness of the flowers in the deep jungles of Sarawak; and all around me, as I stood there behind a tree, I realized there were flowers of every conceivable sort and shape—orchids of a dozen colors, rhododendrons of many shades of rose and lilac, flowers of the vinous plant Ixora, which seem to stretch for miles sometimes amid the halls of the trees. In a trice I was adorned with flowers from head to foot, with only my eyes and mouth undisguised; and, screwing up my nerve, for I was well aware that this was either a brilliant stroke or my final steps upon this earth, I walked out of the forest and toward what I took to be the main entrance to the village.

  “In many cultures there is an exception made from the norm for the holy fool, the peaceable jester, the solitary clown, the harmless soul who capers and japes, and is looked upon with a gentle eye by the populace, as you would look upon a small child, innocent and incapable of danger; indeed perhaps some of our general latitude with hermits and tinkers and street prophets and wandering minstrels is a reverence and affection for the child so patent in them and so reduced in us; I have often thought, watching people offer alms to buskers, that perhaps the urge is not so much generosity as it is a subtle melancholy for the time when they too rambled as airy and unworried as birds; the years when you were young, and not yet absorbed by business and battle, and able to be footloose and improvident, and hope for occasional kindness like a beam of sunlight in an otherwise dreary day.

  “I was in luck; the sentinels, while suspicious and rough, did not run me through, or remove my head to be boiled, but brought me to their chief. This man was a most remarkable fellow, in several ways. First was his appearance, which was unlike anyone I had ever seen. He was tattooed from the crown of his head to his waist, in fantastic images of animals and birds and divine beings; even his face was thoroughly tattooed with astonishing attention to detail, so that if you stood closely you could see intricate details of leopard claws, the mottled leopard of the remote hills being his particular patron and divine companion, as I was to discover later.

  “Second was his dwelling place, which was raised high above the forest floor by poles as thick as mature trees, and covered everywhere by a jacket of the most exquisitely overlapped and woven leaves, so that his tree house, or airy castle, was proof against the constant rain and mist. Inside were the skins of bears and buffalo in wild profusion, hung from the walls and laid out on the floor, so that anywhere you sat was dense and warm. All along the walls was a collection of swords and knives and spears as numerous and bristling as the weapon-room of any warrior in the world; and he could wield a sword with skill and ferocity, too, as he showed me several times, slicing apart fat chunks of wood with ease, and once reducing a small deer carcass to pieces for the pot with several lightning strokes, almost faster than my eye could follow.

  “Third, and most surprising, he had snippets of several languages, and could even distinguish among Australian and Scottish and English accents; he also knew bits of Chinese and Hollandish, and apparently much of the other native dialects of the island; how he came by all this linguistic facility I never knew, though I would give much even today to hear that story; now there would be one of the novels you so wish to write.

  “I will call him Lang Labang, the Pale Hawk in his language, for that was his nickname or walking-name, as the phrase was among those people; to use a person’s true name was not permitted, and only your confessor and most intimate loved ones even knew your inner name, which could be spoken only in moments of the greatest need, when a door needed to be opened between this world and the next. Names had great power among those people, and even to this day I find that I pay much more attention to their use and dignity, and never myself mouth them casually anymore, preferring to use honorifics in the daily ramble, where possible; thus you will hear Mrs Carson and me refer to each other that way in public, and that is why it is more comfortable for me to call you Mr Stevenson than anything else you would prefer, given our growing friendship. Perhaps someday we will use our deeper names. Sometimes I wonder if we all do not have not two or three names but ten or twenty, depending on who we are by the hour; for we are many different men during the day, let alone a year, or a life. Dark and light, wry and bitter, generous and mean, gracious and violent; we might even go so far as to say that we are good and evil by turns, the two battling constantly in our souls, and the face a man presents the world is only the placid surface of a pool all a-swirl in ways even he cannot fully understand.

  “But to return to the story: Lang Labang did indeed hold sway over Adil’s fate, for the boy had been taken as a captive, the Dayaks disliking the Malays intensely, over many ancient feuds, and attacking them wherever and whenever they had the chance; this was the reason for their sea-piracy, against which Rajah Brooke had fought so fiercely, and now had much reduced, with a ferocity equivalent or surpassing theirs. However the Dayaks had continued their war against the Malays in other ways, and would capture and enslave any Malay they could. Thus two men of the village, noticing a Malay boy deep in the forest, determined to capture him, and did so silently when we were asleep. Adil was safe for the moment, I was informed, but his fate was set, for the Dayak had no concept of ransom or exchange of prisoners, or returning a captive for future considerations.

  “But Lang Labang was a very perceptive fellow, and it is his sharp eye and quick intelligence that Adil can thank for his freedom. In interviewing me about my tracking of Adil, and my work for Mr Wallace, and Mr Wallace’s close friendship with the rajah, he had pieced together the story of the chess pieces left as signals for me along the trail; and with a great roar of pleasure he produced a chessboard from a vault behind the furs, and set it up on what appeared to be a large jar, or drum of some sort. Soon enough I was given to understand that he knew and loved the ancient game, had learned it who knows how, and was always in search of opponents against whom to try his steel; it was one of his ambitions in life to someday play a game of chess with Rajah Brooke himself, for whom he seemed to bear no ill will, saying that the rajah’s war against the Dayaks was against the sea-Dayaks, not the people of the deep forest, and as he well knew himself the sea-Dayaks were in general a scurrilous and untrustworthy people, and not the sort of clansmen he would be at pains to defend.

  “The good Lord alone knows what fancy possessed Lang Labang that day, but it was a lucky day for young Adil, for the chieftain’s proposal to me was a chess game for the life of the boy, one game to determine his fate: freedom if I won, slavery and early death if he won. For a moment I hesitated, wondering if I should propose best two of three, considering that I knew nothing of my opponent’s skill, or if I should plead another case, considering the lunacy of betting a child’s life on the outcome of a game; but, looking around at the glowering guards, and realizing that the peculiar offer might be withdrawn at any moment and the boy and perhaps myself imprisoned or worse, I accepted the challenge, and we commenced to play.

  “I do not think I could explain the str
ange tension of the next hour, if I had a week to try to tell it. The grim stalwart guards brooding in their corners, alert to my every gesture, ready to run me through without a second thought, did they think me a danger to their chief. The silent man across from me, his tattooed face sunk in his tattooed hands as his mind ranged the battered chessboard, his earrings and bracelets glinting in the shafts of sunlight from the door, his heavy necklaces slacking gently when he leaned in to contemplate the board more closely. The ever-so-slight rippling of the furs on the walls, and the creaking of the vegetative structure itself, and faintly the voices and sounds of the villagers at their daily labors; the sudden yelp of a dog, a happy shout to a friend, the tart snap of a mother admonishing a child. During the game there was a sudden shower of rain, all of a minute long, rattling against the tree house; and once I thought I heard a piercing scream in the distance; an animal being slain, it seemed to me, or the cry of the legendary orang-utang of these forests, but I could not be sure.

  “I never played more slowly and thoughtfully than I did that day. I hesitated over every move, and stared long at the patterns and possibilities before I committed my hand, as did my opponent; it was almost like the boy Adil sat there between us, mesmerized by the game also, and more than once I thought I could nearly see his face in the air over the board; a most unsettling feeling, and not one that eased my mind or sharpened my play.

  “I do not know who it was who taught that man to play the game of kings, but howsoever he learned it he had learned it well, and he played with startling confidence and command. Within the first few moves he had me on my heels, and it took nearly an hour for me to battle back to a position of strength, from which I could try to pin his king into a corner prison. He fought wonderfully, constantly sending his horsemen in particular on spectacular sallies, essentially alone; and while I could not but admire the singular vision and energy of these adventures, and myself expend much effort fending them away, still, they did not advance his cause, and after another hour his king and courtiers were forced to the wall, with their stubborn foot soldiers falling one by one to slow but relentless assault.