When God Laughs, Jack London [most read books in the world of all time .txt] 📗

been ground and crunched beneath the wheels of an electric car.

As many will remember, the case of Semper Idem aroused a vast deal of unseemly yet highly natural curiosity. He had been found in a slum lodging, with throat cut as aforementioned, and blood dripping down upon the inmates of the room below and disturbing their festivities. He had evidently done the deed standing, with head bowed forward that he might gaze his last upon a photograph which stood on the table propped against a candlestick. It was this attitude which had made it possible for Doctor Bicknell to save him. So terrific had been the sweep of the razor that had he had his head thrown back, as he should have done to have accomplished the act properly, with his neck stretched and the elastic vascular walls distended, he would have of a certainty well-nigh decapitated himself.

At the hospital, during all the time he travelled the repugnant road back to life, not a word had left his lips. Nor could anything be learned of him by the sleuths detailed by the chief of police. Nobody knew him, nor had ever seen or heard of him before. He was strictly, uniquely, of the present. His clothes and surroundings were those of the lowest labourer, his hands the hands of a gentleman. But not a shred of writing was discovered, nothing, save in one particular, which would serve to indicate his past or his position in life.

And that one particular was the photograph. If it were at all a likeness, the woman who gazed frankly out upon the onlooker from the card-mount must have been a striking creature indeed. It was an amateur production, for the detectives were baffled in that no professional photographer’s signature or studio was appended. Across a corner of the mount, in delicate feminine tracery, was written: “Semper idem; semper fidelis.” And she looked it. As many recollect, it was a face one could never forget. Clever halftones, remarkably like, were published in all the leading papers at the time; but such procedure gave rise to nothing but the uncontrollable public curiosity and interminable copy to the space-writers.

For want of a better name, the rescued suicide was known to the hospital attendants, and to the world, as Semper Idem. And Semper Idem he remained. Reporters, detectives, and nurses gave him up in despair. Not one word could he be persuaded to utter; yet the flitting conscious light of his eyes showed that his ears heard and his brain grasped every question put to him.

But this mystery and romance played no part in Doctor Bicknell’s interest when he paused in the office to have a parting word with his patient. He, the Doctor, had performed a prodigy in the matter of this man, done what was virtually unprecedented in the annals of surgery. He did not care who or what the man was, and it was highly improbable that he should ever see him again; but, like the artist gazing upon a finished creation, he wished to look for the last time upon the work of his hand and brain.

Semper Idem still remained mute. He seemed anxious to be gone. Not a word could the Doctor extract from him, and little the Doctor cared. He examined the throat of the convalescent carefully, idling over the hideous scar with the lingering, half-caressing fondness of a parent. It was not a particularly pleasing sight. An angry line circled the throat⁠—for all the world as though the man had just escaped the hangman’s noose⁠—and, disappearing below the ear on either side, had the appearance of completing the fiery periphery at the nape of the neck.

Maintaining his dogged silence, yielding to the other’s examination in much the manner of a leashed lion, Semper Idem betrayed only his desire to drop from out of the public eye.

“Well, I’ll not keep you,” Doctor Bicknell finally said, laying a hand on the man’s shoulder and stealing a last glance at his own handiwork. “But let me give you a bit of advice. Next time you try it on, hold your chin up, so. Don’t snuggle it down and butcher yourself like a cow. Neatness and despatch, you know. Neatness and despatch.”

Semper Idem’s eyes flashed in token that he heard, and a moment later the hospital door swung to on his heel.

It was a busy day for Doctor Bicknell, and the afternoon was well along when he lighted a cigar preparatory to leaving the table upon which it seemed the sufferers almost clamoured to be laid. But the last one, an old ragpicker with a broken shoulder-blade, had been disposed of, and the first fragrant smoke wreaths had begun to curl about his head, when the gong of a hurrying ambulance came through the open window from the street, followed by the inevitable entry of the stretcher with its ghastly freight.

“Lay it on the table,” the Doctor directed, turning for a moment to place his cigar in safety. “What is it?”

“Suicide⁠—throat cut,” responded one of the stretcher bearers. “Down on Morgan Alley. Little hope, I think, sir. He’s ’most gone.”

“Eh? Well, I’ll give him a look, anyway.” He leaned over the man at the moment when the quick made its last faint flutter and succumbed.

“It’s Semper Idem come back again,” the steward said.

“Ay,” replied Doctor Bicknell, “and gone again. No bungling this time. Properly done, upon my life, sir, properly done. Took my advice to the letter. I’m not required here. Take it along to the morgue.”

Doctor Bicknell secured his cigar and relighted it. “That,” he said between the puffs, looking at the steward, “that evens up for the one you lost last night. We’re quits now.”

A Nose for the King

In the morning calm of Korea, when its peace and tranquillity truly merited its ancient name, “Cho-sen,” there lived a politician by name Yi Chin Ho. He was a man of parts, and⁠—who shall say?⁠—perhaps in no wise worse than politicians