CHAPTER III
The commonest dream of my early childhood was something like this: Itseemed that I was very small and that I lay curled up in a sort of nestof twigs and boughs. Sometimes I was lying on my back. In this positionit seemed that I spent many hours, watching the play of sunlight onthe foliage and the stirring of the leaves by the wind. Often the nestitself moved back and forth when the wind was strong.
But always, while so lying in the nest, I was mastered as of tremendousspace beneath me. I never saw it, I never peered over the edge of thenest to see; but I KNEW and feared that space that lurked just beneathme and that ever threatened me like a maw of some all-devouring monster.
This dream, in which I was quiescent and which was more like acondition than an experience of action, I dreamed very often in my earlychildhood. But suddenly, there would rush into the very midst of itstrange forms and ferocious happenings, the thunder and crashing ofstorm, or unfamiliar landscapes such as in my wake-a-day life I hadnever seen. The result was confusion and nightmare. I could comprehendnothing of it. There was no logic of sequence.
You see, I did not dream consecutively. One moment I was a wee babe ofthe Younger World lying in my tree nest; the next moment I was a grownman of the Younger World locked in combat with the hideous Red-Eye; andthe next moment I was creeping carefully down to the water-hole in theheat of the day. Events, years apart in their occurrence in the YoungerWorld, occurred with me within the space of several minutes, or seconds.
It was all a jumble, but this jumble I shall not inflict upon you. Itwas not until I was a young man and had dreamed many thousand times,that everything straightened out and became clear and plain. Then it wasthat I got the clew of time, and was able to piece together eventsand actions in their proper order. Thus was I able to reconstruct thevanished Younger World as it was at the time I lived in it--or at thetime my other-self lived in it. The distinction does not matter; forI, too, the modern man, have gone back and lived that early life in thecompany of my other-self.
For your convenience, since this is to be no sociological screed, Ishall frame together the different events into a comprehensive story.For there is a certain thread of continuity and happening that runsthrough all the dreams. There is my friendship with Lop-Ear, forinstance. Also, there is the enmity of Red-Eye, and the love of theSwift One. Taking it all in all, a fairly coherent and interesting storyI am sure you will agree.
I do not remember much of my mother. Possibly the earliest recollectionI have of her--and certainly the sharpest--is the following: It seemed Iwas lying on the ground. I was somewhat older than during the nest days,but still helpless. I rolled about in the dry leaves, playing with themand making crooning, rasping noises in my throat. The sun shone warmlyand I was happy, and comfortable. I was in a little open space. Aroundme, on all sides, were bushes and fern-like growths, and overhead andall about were the trunks and branches of forest trees.
Suddenly I heard a sound. I sat upright and listened. I made nomovement. The little noises died down in my throat, and I sat as onepetrified. The sound drew closer. It was like the grunt of a pig. ThenI began to hear the sounds caused by the moving of a body through thebrush. Next I saw the ferns agitated by the passage of the body. Thenthe ferns parted, and I saw gleaming eyes, a long snout, and whitetusks.
It was a wild boar. He peered at me curiously. He grunted once or twiceand shifted his weight from one foreleg to the other, at the same timemoving his head from side to side and swaying the ferns. Still I sat asone petrified, my eyes unblinking as I stared at him, fear eating at myheart.
It seemed that this movelessness and silence on my part was what wasexpected of me. I was not to cry out in the face of fear. It was adictate of instinct. And so I sat there and waited for I knew not what.The boar thrust the ferns aside and stepped into the open. The curiositywent out of his eyes, and they gleamed cruelly. He tossed his head at methreateningly and advanced a step. This he did again, and yet again.
Then I screamed...or shrieked--I cannot describe it, but it was ashrill and terrible cry. And it seems that it, too, at this stage ofthe proceedings, was the thing expected of me. From not far away came ananswering cry. My sounds seemed momentarily to disconcert the boar, andwhile he halted and shifted his weight with indecision, an apparitionburst upon us.
She was like a large orangutan, my mother, or like a chimpanzee, andyet, in sharp and definite ways, quite different. She was heavier ofbuild than they, and had less hair. Her arms were not so long, and herlegs were stouter. She wore no clothes--only her natural hair. And I cantell you she was a fury when she was excited.
And like a fury she dashed upon the scene. She was gritting her teeth,making frightful grimaces, snarling, uttering sharp and continuouscries that sounded like "kh-ah! kh-ah!" So sudden and formidable was herappearance that the boar involuntarily bunched himself together onthe defensive and bristled as she swerved toward him. Then she swervedtoward me. She had quite taken the breath out of him. I knew just whatto do in that moment of time she had gained. I leaped to meet her,catching her about the waist and holding on hand and foot--yes, by myfeet; I could hold on by them as readily as by my hands. I could feelin my tense grip the pull of the hair as her skin and her muscles movedbeneath with her efforts.
As I say, I leaped to meet her, and on the instant she leaped straightup into the air, catching an overhanging branch with her hands. The nextinstant, with clashing tusks, the boar drove past underneath. He hadrecovered from his surprise and sprung forward, emitting a squeal thatwas almost a trumpeting. At any rate it was a call, for it wasfollowed by the rushing of bodies through the ferns and brush from alldirections.
From every side wild hogs dashed into the open space--a score of them.But my mother swung over the top of a thick limb, a dozen feet from theground, and, still holding on to her, we perched there in safety. Shewas very excited. She chattered and screamed, and scolded down at thebristling, tooth-gnashing circle that had gathered beneath. I, too,trembling, peered down at the angry beasts and did my best to imitate mymother's cries.
From the distance came similar cries, only pitched deeper, into a sortof roaring bass. These grew momentarily louder, and soon I saw himapproaching, my father--at least, by all the evidence of the times, I amdriven to conclude that he was my father.
He was not an extremely prepossessing father, as fathers go. He seemedhalf man, and half ape, and yet not ape, and not yet man. I fail todescribe him. There is nothing like him to-day on the earth, under theearth, nor in the earth. He was a large man in his day, and he must haveweighed all of a hundred and thirty pounds. His face was broad and flat,and the eyebrows over-hung the eyes. The eyes themselves were small,deep-set, and close together. He had practically no nose at all. It wassquat and broad, apparently with-out any bridge, while the nostrils werelike two holes in the face, opening outward instead of down.
The forehead slanted back from the eyes, and the hair began right at theeyes and ran up over the head. The head itself was preposterously smalland was supported on an equally preposterous, thick, short neck.
There was an elemental economy about his body--as was there about allour bodies. The chest was deep, it is true, cavernously deep; butthere were no full-swelling muscles, no wide-spreading shoulders,no clean-limbed straightness, no generous symmetry of outline. Itrepresented strength, that body of my father's, strength without beauty;ferocious, primordial strength, made to clutch and gripe and rend anddestroy.
His hips were thin; and the legs, lean and hairy, were crooked andstringy-muscled. In fact, my father's legs were more like arms. Theywere twisted and gnarly, and with scarcely the semblance of the fullmeaty calf such as graces your leg and mine. I remember he could notwalk on the flat of his foot. This was because it was a prehensile foot,more like a hand than a foot. The great toe, instead of being in linewith the other toes, opposed them, like a thumb, and its opposition tothe other toes was what enabled him to get a grip with his foot. Thiswas why he could not walk on the flat of hi
s foot.
But his appearance was no more unusual than the manner of his coming,there to my mother and me as we perched above the angry wild pigs. Hecame through the trees, leaping from limb to limb and from tree to tree;and he came swiftly. I can see him now, in my wake-a-day life, as Iwrite this, swinging along through the trees, a four-handed, hairycreature, howling with rage, pausing now and again to beat his chestwith his clenched fist, leaping ten-and-fifteen-foot gaps, catching abranch with one hand and swinging on across another gap to catch withhis other hand and go on, never hesitating, never at a loss as to how toproceed on his arboreal way.
And as I watched him I felt in my own being, in my very musclesthemselves, the surge and thrill of desire to go leaping from bough tobough; and I felt also the guarantee of the latent power in that beingand in those muscles of mine. And why not? Little boys watch theirfathers swing axes and fell trees, and feel in themselves that some daythey, too, will swing axes and fell trees. And so with me. The life thatwas in me was constituted to do what my father did, and it whispered tome secretly and ambitiously of aerial paths and forest flights.
At last my father joined us. He was extremely angry. I remember theout-thrust of his protruding underlip as he glared down at the wildpigs. He snarled something like a dog, and I remember that his eye-teethwere large, like fangs, and that they impressed me tremendously.
His conduct served only the more to infuriate the pigs. He broke offtwigs and small branches and flung them down upon our enemies. He evenhung by one hand, tantalizingly just beyond reach, and mocked them asthey gnashed their tusks with impotent rage. Not content with this, hebroke off a stout branch, and, holding on with one hand and foot, jabbedthe infuriated beasts in the sides and whacked them across their noses.Needless to state, my mother and I enjoyed the sport.
But one tires of all good things, and in the end, my father, chucklingmaliciously the while, led the way across the trees. Now it was that myambitions ebbed away, and I became timid, holding tightly to my motheras she climbed and swung through space. I remember when the branch brokewith her weight. She had made a wide leap, and with the snap of the woodI was overwhelmed with the sickening consciousness of falling throughspace, the pair of us. The forest and the sunshine on the rustlingleaves vanished from my eyes. I had a fading glimpse of my fatherabruptly arresting his progress to look, and then all was blackness.
The next moment I was awake, in my sheeted bed, sweating, trembling,nauseated. The window was up, and a cool air was blowing through theroom. The night-lamp was burning calmly. And because of this I take itthat the wild pigs did not get us, that we never fetched bottom; elseI should not be here now, a thousand centuries after, to remember theevent.
And now put yourself in my place for a moment. Walk with me a bit in mytender childhood, bed with me a night and imagine yourself dreaming suchincomprehensible horrors. Remember I was an inexperienced child. I hadnever seen a wild boar in my life. For that matter I had never seena domesticated pig. The nearest approach to one that I had seen wasbreakfast bacon sizzling in its fat. And yet here, real as life, wildboars dashed through my dreams, and I, with fantastic parents, swungthrough the lofty tree-spaces.
Do you wonder that I was frightened and oppressed by my nightmare-riddennights? I was accursed. And, worst of all, I was afraid to tell. I donot know why, except that I had a feeling of guilt, though I knew nobetter of what I was guilty. So it was, through long years, that Isuffered in silence, until I came to man's estate and learned the whyand wherefore of my dreams.