Lost Face | Page 3

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This etext was prepared by David Price, email [email protected]
from the 1919 Mills and Boon edition.

LOST FACE
by Jack London

Contents:
Lost Face Trust To Build a Fire That Spot Flush of Gold The Passing
of Marcus O'Brien The Wit of Porportuk

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