The Jacket | Page 4

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