The fact that we couldn't talk with Jim irked me. There were so many questions I wanted to ask him. Just think of it! Here was a man of the old Stone Age who could have told us all about conditions in the Pleistocene, fifty thousand years ago, perhaps; and I couldn't exchange a single thought with him. But we set out to cure that.
As soon as he was strong enough, we commenced to teach him English. At first it was aggravatingly slow work; but Jim proved an apt pupil, and as soon as he had a little foundation he progressed rapidly. He had a marvelous memory. He never forgot anything—once he had a thing, he had it.
No use reviewing the long weeks of his convalescence and education. He recovered fully, and he learned to speak English—excellent English, for Stade was a highly cultured man and a scholar. It was just as well that Jim didn't learn his English from me—barracks and hangars are not the places to acquire academic English.
If Jim was a curiosity to us, imagine what we must have been to him. The little one-room shack we had built and in which he had convalesced was an architectural marvel beyond the limits of his imagining. He told us that his people lived in caves; and he thought that this was a strange cave that we had found, until we explained that we had built it.
Our clothing intrigued him; our weapons were a never ending source of wonderment. The first time I took him hunting with me and shot game, he was astounded. Perhaps he was frightened by the noise and the smoke and the sudden death of the quarry; but if he were, he never let on. Jim never showed fear; perhaps he never felt fear. Alone, armed only with a stone-shod spear and a stone knife, he had been hunting the great red bear when the glacier had claimed him. He told us about it.
"The day before you found me," he said, "I was hunting the great red bear. The wind blew; the snow and sleet drove against me. I could not see. I did not know in which direction I was going. I became very tired. I knew that if I lay down I should sleep and never awaken; but at last I could stand it no longer, and I lay down. If you had not come the next day, I should have died." How could we make him understand that his yesterday was fifty thousand years ago?
Eventually we succeeded in a way, though I doubt if he ever fully appreciated the tremendous lapse of time that had intervened since he started from his father's cave to hunt the great red bear.
When he first realized that he was a long way from that day and that it and his times could never be recalled, he again voiced that single word—lilami. It was almost a sob. I had never dreamed that so much heart-ache, so much longing could be encompassed within a single word.
I asked him what it meant.
He was a long time in answering. He seemed to be trying to control his emotions, which was unusual for Big Jim. Ordinarily he appeared never to have emotions. One day he told me why. A great warrior never let his face betray anger or pain or sorrow. You will notice that he didn't mention fear. Sometimes I think he had never learned what fear is. Before a youth was admitted to the warrior class, he was tortured to make certain that he could control his emotions.
But to get back to lilami:
At last he spoke: "Lilami is a girl—was a girl. She was to have been my mate when I came back with the head of the great red bear. Where is she now, Pat Morgan?"
There was a question! If we hadn't discovered Jim and thawed him out, Lilami wouldn't have been even a memory. "Try not to think about her, old man," I said. "You'll never see Lilami again—not in this world."
"Yes, I will," he replied. "If I am not dead, Lilami is not dead. I shall find her."
IV
The plane was so absolutely beyond Jimber-Jaw's conception that he couldn't even ask questions about it. I think anyone else in the world, under similar circumstances, would have been terrified when we finally took off from that lonely Siberian forest. The whir of the propeller, the roar of the exhaust, the wild careening of the take-off must have had some effect on Jim, but he never showed it by so much as a bat of an eyelid. He had all the appearance of a blasé young man of today.
I had given him an old suit—breeches, field boots, and a leather coat. He was smooth shaven now. After watching us scrape our jowls every day, he had insisted first on being shaved and then learning to shave himself. The transformation had been most astounding—from Man Mountain Dean to Adonis with a few snips of the scissors and a few passes of the safety-razor!
When I looked at him and thought of the civilization that he was about to crash for the first time, I felt sorry for Lilami. Pretty soon she would be scarcely even a memory. But I didn't know Big Jim—then.
Well, we finally got to Moscow; and there was the devil to pay about our unexpected passenger. No one believed our story. I can scarcely blame them. But what got me sore was their insistence that we were all spies and counter-revolutionists and Nazis and Fascists and capitalists and what-have-you that is anathema in Red Russia.
Of course, Jim had no passport. We tried to explain that they weren't issuing passports in the Pleistocene, but we got nowhere. They wanted to shoot us; but the American ambassador came to our rescue, and they compromised by shooing us out of the country and telling us to stay out. That suited me. If I never see a Comrade again, that will be far too soon for Pat Morgan.
After our experience in Russia, Stade and I decided to keep our mouths shut about Jim's genesis and antecedents. This was Stade's suggestion, and I confess I was rather surprised to hear him make it. The good doctor had never been adverse to publicity, and here was the greatest chance in the world for him to beat his own drum. Think of the scientific kudos that would shower down on him!
But Stade wasn't interested in that, he said. He suddenly went coy on me—began to talk of the difficulties of establishing absolute scientific proof and all that rot. Suggested we'd better wait a while—allow our colossus to orient himself. He'd leave Jim in my care for a time, since important business was waiting for him in Chicago.
I shrugged and agreed.
We arrived in America shrouded in a pall of silence. As a matter of fact, we smuggled Jim into the old U.S.A., and after that we had to keep our mouths shut about him. What else could we have done? After all, there is no Pleistocene quota.
When we got home, I took him to my place in Beverly Hills; and told people he was an old friend—Jim Stone from Schenectady.
He had been greatly impressed by the large cities he had seen. He thought skyscrapers were mountains with caves in them. As intelligent as he was, he just couldn't conceive that man had built anything so colossal.
It was a treat taking him around. The movies were as real to him as death and taxes. There was a caveman sequence in one we saw, and Jim really showed signs of life then. I knew he was having difficulty in restraining himself. He was just honing to crawl into one of those prop caves. When the heavy grabbed the leading lady by the hair and started to drag her across the scenery, Big Jim hoisted himself into the aisle and started for the screen. I grabbed him by the coat-tails, but it was a lap dissolve that saved the day.
Yep, Jim and I had fun....
One night I took him to the wrestling matches at the Olympic. We had ring-side seats. The Lone Wolf and Tiny Sawbuck (237 pounds) were committing mayhem on one another inside the ropes. It seemed to get Jim's goat.
"Do you call those great warriors?" he inquired. Then, before I could do anything about it, he vaulted over the ropes and threw them both into the third row.