The Best of Robert E. Howard, Volume 1 (73 page)

As for them other fellers which happened to git knocked down and run over by the stage, I didn’t have nothing personal agen ’em. I was jest rescuing Joshua and Bill which was outnumbered about twenty to one. I was doing them Chawed Ear idjits a favor, if they only knowed it, because in about another minute Bill would of started using the front ends of his sixshooters instead of the butts and the fight would of turnt into a massacre. Bill has got a awful temper.

Him and Joshua had did the enemy considerable damage but the battle was going agen ’em when I arriv on the field of carnage. As the stage crashed through the mob I reched down and got Joshua by the neck and pulled him out from under about fifteen men which was beating him to death with their gun butts and pulling out his whiskers by the handfulls and I slung him up on top of the other luggage. About that time we was rushing past the dogpile which Bill was the center of and I reched down and snared him as we went by, but three of the men which had holt of him wouldn’t let go, so I hauled all four of ’em up onto the stage. I then handled the team with one hand and used the other’n to pull them idjits loose from Bill like pulling ticks off ’n a cow’s hide, and then throwed ’em at the mob which was chasing us.

Men and hosses piled up in a stack on the road which was further messed up by Cap’n Kidd plowing through it as he come busting along after the stage, and by the time we sighted Chawed Ear again, our enemies was far behind us, though still rambunctious.

We tore through Chawed Ear in a fog of dust and the women and chillern which had ventured out of their shacks squalled and run back again, though they warn’t in no danger. But Chawed Ear folks is pecooliar that way.

When we was out of sight of Chawed Ear I give the lines to Bill and swung down on the side of the stage and stuck my head in. They was one of the purtiest gals I ever seen in there, all huddled up in a corner and looking so pale and scairt I was afraid she was going to faint, which I’d heard Eastern gals has a habit of doing.

“Oh, spare me!” she begged. “Please don’t scalp me!”

“Be at ease, Miss Devon,” I reassured her. “I ain’t no Injun, nor no wild man neither. Neither is my friends here. We wouldn’t none of us hurt a flea. We’re that refined and soft-hearted you wouldn’t believe it–” At that instant a wheel hit a stump and the stage jumped into the air and I bit my tongue and roared in some irritation, “Bill, you condemned son of a striped polecat, stop this stage before I comes up there and breaks yore cussed neck!”

“Try, you beef headed lummox,” he invites, but he pulled up the hosses and I taken off my hat and opened the door. Bill and Joshua clumb down and peered over my shoulder. Miss Devon looked tolerable sick. Maybe it was something she et.

“Miss Devon,” I says, “I begs yore pardon for this here informal welcome. But you sees before you a man whose heart bleeds for the benighted state of his native community. I’m Breckinridge Elkins, of Bear Creek, where hearts is pure and motives is lofty, but culture is weak.

“You sees before you,” says I, growing more enthusiastic about education the longer I looked at them big brown eyes of her’n, “a man which has growed up in ignorance. I cain’t neither read nor write. Joshua here, in the painter skin, he cain’t neither, and neither can Bill”

“That’s a lie,” says Bill. “I can read and–
ooomp!
” I’d kind of stuck my elbow in his stummick. I didn’t want him to spile the effeck of my speech. Miss Devon was gitting some of her color back.

“Miss Devon,” I says, “will you please ma’m come up to Bear Creek and be our schoolteacher?”

“Why,” says she bewilderedly, “I came West expecting to teach at Chewed Ear, but I haven’t signed any contract, and–”

“How much was them snake-hunters goin’ to pay you?” I ast.

“Ninety dollars a month,” says she.

“We pays you a hundred,” I says. “Board and lodgin’ free.”

“Hell’s fire,” says Bill. “They never was that much hard cash money on Bear Creek.”

“We all donates coon hides and corn licker,” I snapped. “I sells the stuff in War Paint and hands the dough to Miss Devon. Will you keep yore snout out of my business?”

“But what will the people of Chewed Ear say?” she wonders.

“Nothin’,” I told her heartily. “I’ll tend to
them!
”

“It seems so strange and irregular,” says she weakly. “I don’t know.”

“Then it’s all settled!” I says. “Great! Le’s go!”

“Where?” she gasped, grabbing holt of the stage as I clumb onto the seat.

“Bear Creek!” I says. “Varmints and hoss-thieves, hunt the bresh! Culture is on her way to Bear Creek!” And we went fogging it down the road as fast as the hosses could hump it. Onst I looked back at Miss Devon and seen her getting pale again, so I yelled above the clatter of the wheels, “Don’t be scairt, Miss Devon! Ain’t nothin’ goin’ to hurt you. B. Elkins is on the job to perteck you, and I aim to be at yore side from now on!”

At this she said something I didn’t understand. In fack, it sounded like a low moan. And then I heard Joshua say to Bill, hollering to make hisself heard, “Eddication my eye! The big chump’s lookin’ for a wife, that’s what! Ten to one she gives him the mitten!”

“I takes that,” bawled Bill, and I bellered, “Shet up that noise! Quit discussin’ my private business so dern public! I–what’s that?”

It sounded like firecrackers popping back down the road. Bill yelled, “Holy smoke, it’s them Chawed Ear maniacs! They’re still on our trail and they’re gainin’ on us!”

Cussing heartily I poured leather into them fool hosses, and jest then we hit the mouth of the Bear Creek trail and I swung into it. They’d never been a wheel on that trail before, and the going was tolerable rough. It was all Bill and Joshua could do to keep from gitting throwed off, and they was seldom more’n one wheel on the ground at a time. Naturally the mob gained on us and when we roared up into Bowie Knife Pass they warn’t more’n a quarter mile behind us, whooping bodacious.

I pulled up the hosses beside the tree where Jack Sprague was still tied up to. He gawped at Miss Devon and she gawped back at him.

“Listen,” I says, “here’s a lady in distress which we’re rescuin’ from teachin’ school in Chawed Ear. A mob’s right behind us. This ain’t no time to think about yoreself. Will you postpone yore sooicide if I turn you loose, and git onto this stage and take the young lady up the trail whilst the rest of us turns back the mob?”

“I will!” says he with more enthusiasm than he’d showed since we stopped him from hanging hisself. So I cut him loose and he clumb onto the stage.

“Drive on to Kiowa Canyon,” I told him as he picked up the lines. “Wait for us there. Don’t be scairt, Miss Devon! I’ll soon be with you! B. Elkins never fails a lady fair!”

“Gup!” says Jack, and the stage went clattering and banging up the trail and me and Joshua and Bill taken cover amongst the big rocks that was on each side of the trail. The pass was jest a narrer gorge, and a lovely place for a ambush as I remarked.

Well, here they come howling up the steep slope yelling and spurring and shooting wild, and me and Bill give ’em a salute with our pistols. The charge halted plumb sudden. They knowed they was licked. They couldn’t git at us because they couldn’t climb the cliffs. So after firing a volley which damaged nothing but the atmosphere, they turnt around and hightailed it back towards Chawed Ear.

“I hope that’s a lesson to ’em,” says I as I riz. “Come! I cain’t wait to git culture started on Bear Creek!”

“You cain’t wait to git to sparkin’ that gal,” snorted Joshua. But I ignored him and forked Cap’n Kidd and headed up the trail, and him and Bill follered, riding double on Jack Sprague’s hoss.

“Why should I deny my honorable intentions?” I says presently. “Anybody can see Miss Devon is already learnin’ to love me! If Jack had
my
attraction for the fair sex, he wouldn’t be luggin’ around a ruint life. Hey, where’s the stage?” Because we’d reched Kiowa Canyon and they warn’t no stage.

“Here’s a note stuck on a tree,” says Bill. “I’ll read it–well, for Lord’s sake!” he yelped,
“Lissen to this.”

Dere boys: I’ve desided I ain’t going to hang myself, and Miss Devon has desided she don’t want to teach school at Bear Creek. Breck gives her the willies. She ain’t altogther shore he’s human. With me it’s love at first site and she’s scairt if she don’t marry somebody Breck will marry her, and she says I’m the best looking prospeck she’s saw so far. So we’re heading for War Paint to git married.

Yores trooly, Jack Sprague.

“Aw, don’t take it like that,” says Bill as I give a maddened howl and impulsively commenced to rip up all the saplings in rech. “You’ve saved his life and brung him happiness!”

“And what have I brung me?” I yelled, tearing the limbs off a oak in a effort to relieve my feelings. “Culture on Bear Creek is shot to hell and my honest love has been betrayed! Bill Glanton, the next ranny you chase up into the Humbolts to commit sooicide he don’t have to worry about gittin’ bumped off–I attends to it myself, personal!”

Lines Written in the Realization That I Must Die

The Black Door gapes and the Black Wall rises;

Twilight gasps in the grip of Night.

Paper and dust are the gems man prizes–

Torches toss in my waning sight.

Drums of glory are lost in the ages,

Bare feet fail on a broken trail–

Let my name fade from the printed pages;

Dreams and visions are growing pale.

Twilight gathers and none can save me.

Well and well, for I would not stay:

Let me speak through the stone you grave me:

He never could say what he wished to say.

Why should I shrink from the sign of leaving?

My brain is wrapped in a darkened cloud;

Now in the Night are the Sisters weaving

For me a shroud.

Towers shake and the stars reel under,

Skulls are heaped in the Devil’s fane;

My feet are wrapped in a rolling thunder,

Jets of agony lance my brain.

What of the world that I leave for ever?

Phantom forms in a fading sight–

Carry me out on the ebon river

Into the Night.

Appendices

R
OBERT
E. H
OWARD

Twentieth-Century Mythmaker by Charles Hoffman

Robert E. Howard’s most famous creation, the indomitable barbarian warrior Conan, was introduced in the December 1932 issue of the pulp magazine
Weird Tales
. For the first story in the series, Howard provided a brief preface that served to set the stage for Conan’s debut:

Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars–Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.

Earlier, the editor of
Weird Tales
had requested some biographical information about the young author himself. Howard’s response painted a very different picture:

Like the average man, the tale of my life would merely be a dull narration of drab monotony and toil, a grinding struggle against poverty. I have spent most of my life in the hard, barren semi-waste lands of Western Texas, and since infancy my memory holds a continuous grinding round of crop failures–sandstorms–drouths–floods–hot winds that withered the corn–hailstorms that ripped the grain to pieces–late blizzards that froze the fruit in the bud–plagues of grasshoppers and boll weevils…

I’ve picked cotton, helped brand a few yearlings, hauled a little garbage, worked in a grocery store, ditto a dry-goods store, worked in a law office, jerked soda, worked up in a gas office, tried to be a public stenographer, packed a surveyor’s rod, worked up oil field news for some Texas and Oklahoma papers, etc., etc., and also etc…

Finally, Howard was moved to conclude, “And there I believe is about all the information I can give about a very humdrum and commonplace life.”

Many years later Mark Schultz, illustrator of
The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian
, recalled:

I discovered Robert E. Howard’s Conan in 1969, when I was thirteen years old. I read the stories then for their incomparable high adventure and mind-blasting horror. It wasn’t until much later that I realized they hit so hard and stayed so timeless because Howard’s feverish, passionate writing was a crystal clear reflection of a young mind in turmoil, fighting to be free of his physical surroundings.

Howard often discussed his writing with a young schoolteacher named Novalyne Price, who had literary ambitions of her own. Late in life, Price wrote a memoir of Howard entitled
One Who Walked Alone
(subsequently adapted into a touching motion picture,
The Whole Wide World
). Price recalls mentioning to Howard that she wanted to write about “real people with real problems.” Howard, however, had little interest in writing about the world he saw around him, which he once characterized as “a dreary expanse of sand drifts and post-oak thickets, checkered with sterile fields where tenant farmers toil out their hideously barren lives in fruitless labor and bitter want.” In defense of his own fiction, he asserted:

The people who read my stuff want to get away from this modern, complicated world with its hypocrisy, its cruelty, its dog-eat-dog life…The civilization we live in is a lot more sinister than the time I write about. In those days, girl, men were men and women were women. They struggled to stay alive, but the struggle was worth it.

H. P. Lovecraft, with whom Howard corresponded regularly, once noted a curious paradox. Lovecraft observed that a great deal of fiction that purports to be about everyday life is actually quite often rife with sentimental distortions. Howard himself expressed a similar view: “Nobody writes realistic realism, and if they did, nobody would read it. The writers that think they write it just give their own ideas about things they think they see. The sort of man who could write realism is the fellow who never reads or writes anything.”

By way of contrast, Lovecraft defined fantasy as “an art based on the imaginative life of the human mind,
frankly recognized as such
; & in its own way as natural & scientific–as truly related to natural (even if uncommon & delicate) psychological processes as the starkest of photographic realism.” In other words, fantasy fiction makes no pretense of presenting the physical world as it actually is. However, in the right hands it can vividly delineate the most intensely felt yearnings of the human heart and soul, from the deepest longings and most dreadful anxieties to the loftiest aspirations. Therefore, it could be said that fantasy need have little to do with
reality
, yet have a great deal to do with
truth,
since these are not precisely the same thing.

This is, of course, not to say that realistic fiction cannot portray weighty abstractions such as spiritual damnation and redemption, just that fantasy can often do so more excitingly and entertainingly. The
Star Wars
saga of Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader is a perfect example: for better or worse, more people have seen the
Star Wars
movies than have read
Crime and Punishment
. Most people are more familiar with the story of
Faust
than of
A Tale of Two Cities
. Fantasy is an uncannily suitable vehicle for conveying powerful themes to a mass audience.

Novalyne Price recalled a subsequent conversation with Howard: “Bob began to talk about good and evil in life. He said that life was always a struggle between good and evil, and people like to read about that struggle…He wrote for readers who wanted evil to be something big, horrible, but still something a barbarian like Conan could overcome.”

Howard’s remarks to Novalyne strongly suggest that he felt that his readers benefited in some way from seeing their struggles reflected on a higher level. To that end, Robert E. Howard took the oldest type of story–the tale of heroes, gods, and monsters–and reinvented it as jolting pulp fiction. His prose, not unlike that of Raymond Chandler, was direct and hard-edged, yet lyrical. The content of his stories was edgier as well. The horrific elements, owing in part to his association with Lovecraft, were more visceral than anything found in the European fantasy of Morris and Dunsany. Well in advance of writers like Mickey Spillane and Ian Fleming, Howard was crafting sexy, violent entertainment. Unusual situations, intense moods, and heightened emotional states, prominent features of Romanticism and its Gothic subgenre, were also boldly displayed in his writing. All of which indicate that Howard understood clearly that consumers of narrative art have an innate hunger to identify with characters placed in extreme circumstances.

Howard’s modern brand of fantasy has often been characterized as “sword and sorcery,” but Lovecraft may have been more insightful when he deemed it “artificial legendry.” Howard wrote for the American working class of the early twentieth century. His readers were widely separated by time, distance, and upheaval from the myths and legends that had enthralled their ancestors in the Old World. They lived in a world rocked by cataclysm, no less than the fictional Hyborian Age of Conan had been. In 1906, the year Howard was born, the world was ruled by kings, dukes, emperors, sultans, kaisers, and czars. Twenty years later, they were all gone. The slaughter of the First World War and the lawlessness of the Roaring Twenties were followed by the malaise of the Great Depression. The Depression was a humiliating ordeal for many Americans, and Howard’s rousing tales of Conan helped to empower readers with flagging spirits. In a larger sense, however, Howard sought to resurrect the heroic saga where it had long been lost.

When America declared its independence from the Mother Country, it was also bidding farewell to Saint George and King Arthur. No comparable myths grew up to take their place. The new folk legends that appeared in the wake of the Industrial Revolution celebrated laborers and producers of goods. Today everyone has heard of Paul Bunyan, John Henry, and Casey Jones, and yet no one really cares about them. One needn’t marvel that no nineteenth century publisher ever attempted to use such characters to sell dime novels. Instead, stories of gunfighters and bank robbers were dime novel mainstays. “Tall tales” of how hard some guy worked were presumably less inspiring. After all, how popular would Horatio Alger’s novels have been had his protagonists simply worked but remained poor?

The dime novel was followed in the early twentieth century by the pulp magazine. At this time, radio and motion pictures were in their infancies, television yet unborn. As astonishing as it may seem today, print was the primary entertainment medium for the masses. Publishing empires were built on pulp fiction magazines that usually sold for ten cents. By the late twenties, scores of different titles were on sale at any given time. The pulp jungle proved fertile ground for a new crop of homegrown heroes: cowboys, sailors, detectives, aviators, and soldiers of fortune. Interestingly, however, such pre-eminent pulp heroes as The Shadow and Doc Savage were essentially supercops, maintainers of the status quo.

Robert E. Howard had something different in mind when he conceived of Conan. His giant barbarian is an outlaw, a sword-for-hire, basically out for himself, yet still retaining a certain knack for doing the right thing. Conan is not a preserver of order; he is a mover and shaker, the whirlwind at the center of momentous events. And though his author endowed him with a very modern hard-boiled edge, Conan remains that most immemorial of heroes, the warrior. Writing before Carl Jung was well known in America, before Joseph Campbell’s work had appeared, Howard possessed an instinctive grasp of mythic, archetypal figures–king, warrior, magician,
femme fatale
. He knew that the ancient figure of the warrior would resonate on a deeper, more subconscious level than, for example, the detective, a figure in some ways emblematic of the Age of Reason.

Howard’s vivid “artificial legendry” has often been dismissed as “escapism.” Yet if the lot of the average man is truly one of “drab monotony and toil,” as Howard believed, it falls to the
skald
and the storyteller to furnish refreshment for tired minds and nourishment for the soul. Critics like Robert McKee have theorized that it is the structure of “the story” that enables a person to see his own life as something other than a chaotic jumble of trivial incidents. In the heroic saga, scintillating vistas of human potential are glimpsed. The blinders fall away; shades of gray sharpen into vibrant color. One comes away from such visions with a sense of one’s own stature enhanced. This is not escape, but liberation. Howard brought a renewed vigor and freshness to the heroic saga, making it more vital and relevant to the sort of modern reader most in need of a widened vista.

In truth, the average working adult does endure his or her fair share of drudgery. The majority of people earn a living by means of tedious jobs, not rewarding careers. Herein lies a clue to Howard’s well-known resentment of “civilization,” for which the author has taken so much flak. Youngsters are told they can become anything they want if they try hard enough; they are never told how many waiters the world needs for every archeologist it can support. Viewed from this perspective, civilized society is like a big lottery in which most people have to lose. Countless individuals are relegated to inane tasks that oppress the spirit, ruin the body, and dull the mind. Consider the doorman stationed in front of a luxury hotel, or the low-level office clerk hunched over paperwork for long hours in a sterile cubicle. To Howard, such individuals would be better off, spiritually if not materially, wearing loincloths and carrying spears, battling openly against man and nature.

Safe and secure but unfulfilled within the folds of civilization, the adventurous among us grow restless. Bold individuals seek out ways to test and challenge themselves. Examples of this can be found at every level of society, from the mountaineer scaling a peak “because it is there” to the teenage street racer. Howard once told Lovecraft:

Despite the tinsel and show, the artificial adjuncts, and the sometimes disgusting advertisements, ballyhoo and exploitation attendant upon such sports as boxing and football, there is, in the actual contests, something vital and real and deep-rooted in the very life-springs of the race…Football, for instance, is nothing less than war in miniature, and provides an excellent way of working off pugnacious and combative instincts, without bloodshed.

One can experience a fleeting taste of glory through some form of athletic striving, either first hand or vicariously as a spectator. One can also experience a heightened sense of meaning, purpose, and fulfillment vicariously through art. Whatever the case, a transcendental experience is sought. There is a yearning to transcend the coarseness and banality of everyday life. Championship football and soccer games are often followed by raucous partying and even rioting, owing to the fact that most of the spectators lead exceedingly humdrum lives. Ordinary day-to-day existence all too often consists largely of slogging through a morass of inane tasks, stifling worries, and petty squabbles.

Howard endeavored to offer his readers a loftier perspective. He understood that selling window blinds, or drilling holes in sheet metal all week, or working at the rent-a-car counter at the airport is not enough to fill a man’s heart. That is one reason he so excelled at depicting struggles that were epic, against evils that were truly horrific. Such is the essence of adventure, and Howard has widely been lauded as a great adventure writer. The path of the adventurer leads to glory or doom, but it skirts commonplace tedium and the gradual grinding down of the human spirit by the weight of the world. In its way, the adventure story is a subversive art form in the sense that it carries within it the implicit suggestion that
everyday life is inadequate
.