The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World

by Brian Doyle

  “I do not know if the Dayak way with chess is never to concede a game, or if that was his personal creed or custom, but the chieftain would not or could not cede the battle before its appointed end; but finally that moment approached, and he laid himself open for what he knew was the final blow. I remember that he then sat back, and looked me full in the face for a long moment, and I him, before I reached out to finish things. It is a subtle pleasure of chess that the pain of loss, in a well-played game, is essentially shared by both players, for he who is to win has been inside the mind of his counterpart for an hour or more, and feels the sigh, if not the sting, of defeat; there is almost a sadness, at the conclusion of a fine game, that one must win and the other lose, for there has been a curious intimacy of mind, an exploration and appreciation of each other’s style of thought, and creativity, and resilience, and when the game ends it is almost the case that each man must struggle back up to the surface of the quotidian.

  “I made my move, and finished the game, and we sat there silent for a moment, over that scarred old chessboard of unimaginable provenance; and then the chieftain gestured with his hand, and the guards went to retrieve the boy. Lang Labang then led me outside, and very soon I found myself outside the settlement with Adil, myself still adorned with a multitude of flowers, and the boy harrowed and drawn from his travails. As we made our way through the forest over the next day he told me haltingly of his capture, and how he had been rushed through the forest, twice being carried bodily when his captors felt that he was deliberately slowing their progress, and how he had hoped and prayed I would see and understand his messages, and how, when the guards had come to release him, they had ceremonially “killed” him with their swords, and then restored him to life with water poured from their shields, so that his two captors would be reimbursed properly for the loss of their property, but himself freed to return to his own people, under my protection, by command of the Pale Hawk, whose authority in this part of Sarawak was unquestioned.

  “Curiously I saw Adil only once after this adventure, and that from a distance, as I took ship to leave Sarawak some weeks later; he was on the beach, and our eyes met for an instant, but then he was obscured by passersby, and I saw him no more, though I have often thought of him over the years, and wondered at the shape of his life, and what he tells his own children of his brief sojourn among the forest-Dayak, and how it may be said that the ancient game of chess saved him from being enslaved. But I have not seen him since nor do I expect to, though I wish him well, and sometimes think with pleasure of the look on his face that day, when he saw me in the Dayak village, standing with the chieftain, and realized that he was free, and walked with me through the pillars of the stockade and into the jungle.

  “I did stay in correspondence with Mr Wallace, however, and you being a learned man will know of his subsequent achievements and feats. A most remarkable man, Mr Wallace—famous for his thinking along evolutionary lines, and for a general acuity of scholarship and authorial excellence; but to me the measure of the man is his curiosity—you never met a man more genuinely interested in people and animals and plants and humor and spirituality and life than Mr Wallace, and without the slightest condescension or high and mighty attitude about his intellect and his tremendous learning. Also the sheer animal energy of the man was amazing, and him not what you would call a prepossessing physical specimen; yet he could walk all day through the forest, and climb any crag or alp, and indeed he rattled up the tallest trees as quick as a leopard, chasing after his beloved butterflies and flying-frogs; many was the time we would be walking along, Mr Wallace and Adil and me, and I would be terrifying Adil with a story about the fifty-foot snake seen in this vicinity, and suddenly Mr Wallace would be galloping up a tree as quick as can be, having seen a certain beetle, or an unknown orchid, or the huge black butterfly he subsequently named for his friend the rajah. A wonderful man, always kind and generous. We stay in touch yet, with the occasional letter, and he sends me copies of his books—Mrs Carson and I particularly cherish his book about the Malay archipelago, though much of it concerns his work there after we parted company. We persist in hoping that someday he will, in his travels giving lectures, see fit to visit San Francisco; this is a clear possibility, he says, for he has a brother in California whom he has not seen for years, and he says he would be delighted to walk with us in the hills, as we did in the old days. I would not be surprised, though he must be nearly sixty years of age now, to see him scramble up one of our redwoods or sequoias, and there discover four new species of insects in four minutes, and then produce a small owl wholly new to science.”

  He paused, and cocked an ear toward the kitchen, and smiled, and offered to bet me a dime that Mrs Carson would be calling us in to dinner in one minute exactly, for he had heard a certain signature rattle of crockery indicating the imminence of sustenance; and I realized with a start that here we were sitting by the fire in the rooming house, and that darkness had fallen outside, and we were not, as every iota of my being had thought we were, in the sweltering jungles of Sarawak, gaping as Mr Alfred Wallace ran up a tree with the grace of a cat, having seen an orang-utang, and wishing to procure it for close study of its tremendous upper musculature, thrice that of the strongest man!

  Mrs Carson did call us in to dine, and Mr Carson preceded me to the table, but I lingered for a moment by the fire, savoring the wonderful feeling of having been absolutely and completely transported by his story. Now, I have heard many fine storytellers at work in my travels, in many corners of the Old World and New, and I count myself fairly well read, and so apprised of magical tellers of tales on paper, but never could I recall such an immediacy of story as this, in which I was genuinely startled to be called back to the present, from being so plunged into an adventure. Mr Carson, using only his voice emerging from the darkness, had composed a whole and complete world, and populated it with people I could see and hear and touch, and had drawn me in with such skill and depth that I felt the oppressive tropical heat of Borneo, and the rough handling by Dayak guards, and the fearful tension of that shadowy chess match, on which hung the life of a terrified boy cowering in a hut; indeed I thought I could faintly smell the suit of fragrant flowers he had worn as he walked out of the forest. That such a level of tale-telling was possible! But my moment of contemplation was here truncated by the scent of roasted chickens and fresh-baked bread; and as I am twice as hungry as there are hours in the day, and Mrs Carson a cook of surpassing and capacious talents, in I went to table, to enjoy the weekly feast to which I am entitled as a boarder, and which I would not miss for all the kings in Christendom. But all the rest of that night I reveled in what I had learned was possible in this bruised and tumultuous world; that a man could tell a tale so riveting that time and space fell away altogether, so that when the story paused or ended, the listener—or the reader!—would be snapped awake as if from the most delicious dream, and would have to shake himself or herself for a few minutes, as you shake away the bright fading threads of dreams. And in both cases there is a subtle sadness, that you have been called back to this life from a most alluring voyage, as well as a subtle pleasure for which we do not yet have good words, that you were so riveted and absorbed by the tale; and I vowed that night, back upstairs at my writing desk, to aim in future for this very thing that John Carson showed to me, one day by the fire, in San Francisco, on the feast of Saint Nachlan of Aberdeenshire, beloved of Scots.

  3

  MY SITUATION WITH MISS FRANCES MATILDA VANDEGRIFT Osbourne, originally of Indianapolis but now resident in Oakland, across the bay from my tower on Bush Street, was loving and painful at once, during those opening months of the year. While we were very much in love, and in full and delighted agreement as to our future together, and in my readiness to share the care of her two children (Lloyd, aged eleven, and Isobel, aged twenty-one, and just married to a painter), we were also wholly at sea financially. Her wastrel husband Samuel, lieutenant in the United States Army but a renowned gener
al among the philanderers of the world, had finally agreed to be divorced in December, but had not yet legally granted Fanny the house in which she lived, nor a shilling of any other assets or support, so that she was essentially penniless, and depended upon the alacrity of my pen for her sustenance and that of the children.

  As for myself I was recovering from a long illness in Monterey, from which I had finally fled to San Francisco; I was at odds with my parents in Scotland, who did not wish me to marry Fanny, and so withheld any and all financial assistance; I was dependent upon my friends in England and Scotland to sell such essays and stories as I could provide, to periodicals and publishers there, as I knew nothing of the American market, or if there even was such a thing, for such slight ephemera as I could hastily compose; Fanny’s family in Indiana had not been apprised of her divorce, nor of the lewd and egregious cause of it, for fear that an emotionally fragile sister or two would dissolve wholly at the news, and evanesce on the spot; therefore her family did not know of her impending marriage to a penniless Scottish wraith, who sometimes seems more composed of cough than flesh, and appears to subsist on a diet of sunlight and cigarette smoke, the latter wrapped in two fat slices of the former.

  Yet we were eager and fervid to be married, Fanny and I, in those months, and I would meet her once or twice a week at the ferry dock, and welcome her to my hilly abode with open arms, and we would walk to dinner with such a warmth of feeling that I had never experienced before, nor had she; for she had married the dashing Lieutenant Osbourne when she was all of seventeen years old, and had cause to regret her rash action within a month, she said—by which time she was carrying the infant Isobel, and could not, in good conscience, leave even a detestable marriage, if it would render her daughter fatherless—though the lieutenant proved to be as poor a father as he was a husband, having no time for wife or daughter, but all the time in the world for whiskey and women, and not in that order.

  Usually Fanny and I repaired to Bush Street; not to Mrs Carson’s house—I would not stain the reputation of either admirable woman with rumor—but to a restaurant I knew between Dupont and Kearny streets, where two frugal diners could eat as one, and share half a bottle of wine, and linger over their coffee, before the lady must be back on her bay boat, and home to her children, soon to be my children also; and then back up the steep streets I went, from the ferry pier through the shadow and swirl of the old city, to my seaman’s berth in the timbered tower, and so back to work, writing as fast and furious as the muse would allow.

  It was no sort of life, that life, but I had no choice in it, for Fanny had to wait for legal title to her house before we could marry, and I waited desperately for the daily mail, in which there might be ten pounds, if fate had smiled on me—or dunnage, if fate was grim; and I could not in good conscience have offered to marry her if I had nothing with which to support wife and children. I calculated that particular cost again and again, at my meager desk, and concluded that even with a wholesale trimming of our sails I would need two hundred pounds a year to float a family. Thus in my first weeks on Bush Street I worked on a book about my travels in America; I worked on a potboiler about swordsmen and thieves and mountebanks in old France; I worked on three or five or seven essays and articles at once, all designed for instant sale upon completion; but the latter briefer pieces stole time from the former substantive ones, and the books could not earn me a farthing until they were finished and away in flight toward amenable editors; and so I sat in my tower every morning, noon, and night, writing and writing on both sorts of things alternately; except for the hours that I sat with Mr John Carson, hearing his adventures in several quarters of the world.

  There are times now, when I think of those hours by the fire with John Carson, that I believe I was saved by his stories; that what kept me from a real and deep and perhaps irretrievable despair was the daily prospect of tales from a master teller. I had little money, and little food, and little prospects of more of those necessaries; the woman I loved with all my heart lived away across the water, never knowing when she would be free to marry me; the children I would come to love as my own were away in the mist too, neither knowing when they would for the first time welcome a father who loved and esteemed and attended to them, like their first father had never done; and my own family and friends were even further away, and their efforts on my behalf either fruitless or frustrated. Many was the morning I awoke weary and dark, and many the night I fell asleep wearier and darker; but I did have one sort of wonderful food in prospect, a source of light, a beacon of hope and pleasure almost always available. So that when I tell you that I would break from my work late in the afternoon, as the winter sun declined and the wind freshened, and go downstairs for a cup of tea by the fire, and find Mr Carson there, having just added fresh logs to the blaze, my heart veritably leapt, for I knew I would instantly be plunged into an expedition unlike any I had ever known, and be kept from the hounds of worry and despair by this most discerning and witty fox.

  It was in just this way in which Mr Carson began the story of his adventures off the wild west coast of Ireland; I remember the opening of this story particularly, for I had asked him again how he met Mrs Carson, and he leaned back in his chair, and was silent awhile—it seemed to me he was overcome by some powerful emotion—and then he began.

  * * *

  “I was twenty-two years of age,” said Mr Carson, “and again had been aboard a ship for a time, this time in the wild Atlantic, and it came into my head to be ashore for a while, and savor good sturdy rock beneath my feet—not farmland or woodland or beach or bog, but crags and peaks, pillars and moraines, cliff faces and empty places. Why such a whim should possess me then I cannot remember, and perhaps did not know even then; your twenties are the years when a man wends and wanders, searching for who knows what—we say money or love or adventure, but I think those are words we invent to drape reason on the unreasonable. Suffice it to say that I departed my ship in a busy Irish port, but found that city in the throes of smoke and riot, and so I wandered west, until I came to an island so craggy and windy and lonely that I remember laughing aloud with the pleasure of it; I had found exactly where I wished to be, though I had not the faintest idea why I should so wish to visit.

  “Now, I knew nothing of this island, or of the surrounding country, and so I had no idea why it was so empty, and seemingly brooding with sadness; I was there some days before I discovered that the island, and the county, and indeed the whole country had been crushed with famine for twelve long years, with no end in sight. So there were very few people on the island at all, and those few weary and bedraggled, and in no mood to befriend or even talk much to a foreigner, Celtic cousin though he be. A few dozens lived along the shores here and there, in protected coves, collecting seaweed and shellfish, and setting out hurriedly to fish in their small black boats when there was the rare break in the weather; you never saw a wilder weather than that island endured, for even on bright clear days there was wind enough to knock a man over and send him tumbling, as I more than once saw for myself.

  “I had wanted rock, and rock I found there, for while some of the island seemed to be bog or beach or what the natives called machair, or grass-pasture, the rest was stark crag with hardly a path or trail anywhere. The whole western end was one tremendous mountain, made of a hundred hills, all shouldered up against the sea, and thoroughly lashed day and night by the wind, which was so strong there that the few trees were small and bent and crouched and huddled in the most amazing fashion in crevices and cracks. The greatest of these massive hills were Cruachán and Mionnán, but it was the third mountain on the island, called Sliabh Mór, that began to fascinate me, for on its south flank there was a village built wholly of stone, with nary a soul in it. The islanders would go nowhere near it on any grounds, for reasons they would not tell; and after I had been on the island a couple of weeks I knew enough not to inquire further, for these were people concerned only with keeping life in their children, after the ho
rrors of their recent past and uneasy present—for their potatoes still would not grow in the diseased plots, the sheep and cattle that had once been common were terribly reduced, the oats and rye formerly grown wherever decent soil was sheltered by the wind were hardly to be found, and even the uncountable fish in the profligate sea were very often saved from capture by the savagery of the sea.

  “I had come to the island on a whim, to salve a personal sore, but young and selfish as I was, even I soon saw that I must be of assistance where I could; so I worked here and there in the villages, or what remained of them, and I lent my small marine expertise to the fishing boats when the sea was calm enough to venture out after silvery food; and I can say that I was of some help in the fishing, for I was young and strong and knew what I was about, in pursuit of cod and salmon and herring and even seals, and the tremendous placid sharks there, who were easily caught and did not fight, being of some peaceable species I did not know.

  “It was fishing with one family in the westernmost village, called Dumha Acha, or ‘sand-bank,’ that led me finally to the stone village I had often wondered at from afar. The old man of that family, whom I had thought to be a grandfather or older but had turned out to be the father, only forty years old but withered and worn by the awful years, told me about the stone village one night. It had once been a vigorous settlement, made by men gifted with stone, who built in the old ways, small round cottages that fended off the wind; but then after the hunger struck, the village was abandoned, and the people in it moved together down to the shore, where they might find fish and weed to eat. There were those who might tell me that the stone village was then used as a ‘booley,’ or summer camp for people bringing their animals up onto the mountain for the grass, but this was not so, and the truth was that no one would go near it now for any reason; it was a place of sadness, without even a name; one story he had heard was that the name had been buried there too, along with the dead from the hunger, and now no one called it anything but the village on the mountain, when they referred to it at all.