IN MEMOIFOAM

John Galen Howard

1864-1931

THE BOOK

OF

JACK LONDON

VOLUME I

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'A KIND OF NAPOLEON OF THE PEN" Anna Strunsky

THE BOOK

OF

JACK LONDON

BY

CHAHMIAN LONDON

ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS

VOLUME I

NEW YOU THE (

1921

THE BOOK

OF

JACK LONDON

BY

CHARMIAN LONDON

ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS

VOLUME I

NEW YORK

THE CENTURY CO.

1921

Copyright. 1921, by THE CENTURY Co.

Add'l GIFT

Printed in U. S. A.

•

v.l

TO ELIZA LONDON SHEPAED

M842874

PREFACE

Here in his own workroom, at his own work-table, which, like himself, is deep-grained, beautiful, unshamming even to its rugged knots and imperfections, I write of the Jack London whom I knew.

"That one of us should go before the other is unthink able/' he often said. Or, "It is beyond my imagining that I should be without you. . . . By rights we should go out together in some bright hazard, gallant shipwreck in a shouting, white gale, or shoulder to shoulder in some for gotten out-land where the red gods have called us." And again, " If I should go first, Mate Woman, it would be for you to write of me — if you dare be honest," always he challenged.

"But you could hardly do it," he would consider. "I fear you'd not want to write of my shortcomings, which you know only too well, and your work would be valueless without them. — Also, neither you nor I, unless it should be when I am very old, and when others are gone past wound ing, can write without restraint of the very circumstances and characters that helped to make or mar me. And, any way, my dear," was his familiar conclusion, "I'm going to live a hundred years, because I want to; and I'm going to beat you to it some day and write my own book of myself, and call it * Jack Liverpool' — and it's going to make every body sit up!"

In some such fashion we would speculate, summer after noons, perhaps riding over the Beauty Ranch, or lying on the slant deck of a ship in the Trades, or tooling our alert four-in-hand across a mountain range.

I warn, therefore, that this book is written only for those

vii

viii PEEFACE

sincere and open-minded folk who want to know the real and living facts that I can tell. So unusual a man should be honored with an unusual biography, and mine is bound to be frank beyond the ordinary, since I must approach it with frankness or do a spurious piece of work. I do not minimize the criticism to which I subject myself, but my philosophy is of a sort that transcends fear on this score. For Jack London was my man of men, and because I have answered these many years to his call of "my woman ", I am unafraid. I am privileged to speak my mind about him, what of his own desire ; and I can but feel that I knew him somewhat, if only because he said so. I am forever en slaved to him for his love, for his teaching, for his infinitely manifested charity and sweetness, and this enslavement is guerdon of my existence, in that it has taught me freedom, and led to where, within my capacity, I might view and ex plore the wide spaces of life and thinking.

But only name him, — and forthwith a thousand vivid, trenchant thoughts clamor for delivery. Even more sharply than during his life I now realize how he was eternally whelmed by surging ideas, whenever his embracing mind laid hold of a theme. Often and often I have seen him near despair at the impossibility of capturing and holding, for presentment to his listener, the myriad related thoughts that crowded hard under a single impelling one.

The material at my hand is manifold and priceless. Much of it I shall forego, lest I wound where he hesitated to wound. But, within limitations dictated by like consider ation for those he spared, I must in simple justice to him bring to bear all possible illumination. That is my pas sionate committal of myself and what of himself he lavished upon me.

One book of mine, "Our Hawaii, " has been termed by some readers as "too personal," whatever that may signify. But in my sense of the word, " personal " is precisely what that narrative set out to be. And now, suppose that I, of

PKEFACE ix

all biographers, assume a conservative, too-proud-to- explain pose concerning this intimate man-soul, who of his admirers misled, or at best puzzled by popular misreport, and desiring more light upon his gripping personality, is to acquire what only I have to offer? Would a woman court happiness with such as Jack London, she needs must learn to regard life broadly. Her reward, if she be wise enough to claim reward, is obvious. What I absorbed of Jack London was by means of throwing wide a willing in telligence toward his nature and mental attitude. And since he went out in the midday of his brave years, I have sensed him in still subtler ways.

I summon the dear ghosts of all he has meant to me, in the largess of his sharing, and always he shared ;, all herit age from him of unclouded vision, purpose, straightness of speech; whatever I have meant to him; all these I beg to help me in my loving and difficult task. For at the outset I am appalled by what is ahead of me. Almost it looks a vain endeavor, one I would far better abandon, and confine my revelation to the commonplace, if commonplace can be found in such a life, lest I invite failure by reaching too wide and deep.

None but a fool dwells upon the small irks of a journey that has been undertaken all the way and back, [' jr love and service and adventure. It is the long, long run that mat ters. The big basic considerations, the rudimental integri ties, these are the saving things that buoy up life and per suade from us at the end that we " liked it all." And so, in reviewing what was in our long run a rainbow trail round the curve of the world, though I shall try to write from the height of my head, making honest this document, as he would have it, without sainting his humanness, I know I shall find myself most often directed from the depth of my heart toward a bountiful estimate of his abounding lovableness, charm, and variety.

I should be glad if I could believe that he, friend, lover,

x PEEFACE

husband, for a dozen rich years, were now consciously standing over me guiding my pen — his pen, with which I begin his portrait ; glad for my own sake, at the same time decrying the selfishness to stay him one moment from that Field of Ardath that ever, to him, in his fairest hours, meant dreamless rest. But since I cannot even in his loss find hope and faith in what he did not believe for himself, for me, for any one, I can yet know that what of his gift there resides in my being from those long, comprehending years together drives brain and hand to lay what I may of him "cards up on the table," as he fearlessly played his own game of living.

Shortly after his death my already awakened mettle to write of him was spurred by the remark of an American author to a common friend, "Jack London was a far greater man than some of his intimates may let us know." I, at least, shall not merit this curious implication. Jack Lon don gave so greatly to all who could see and hear and feel. Those who gained worse than nothing from the privilege of association with him, neighbor, sharer, young patriarch whose burdens were so nobly borne, I can only designate as the deaf, the dumb, the blind.

This, then, is my goal : to strive to expound him through the evaluations he placed upon himself which untiringly he strove to make clear to me. And to my everlasting joy and benefit, my lamps were always lit that I might less and less blindly gaze into the unfailing wonder which I found him. The vision I cherish rises undimmed, definite, appeal ing to be revealed as he would declare himself.

Once more, as in other prefaces, I crave indulgence for that I must appear somewhat profusely in my own pages. Verily, in order to make a book about Jack London, I should have to make a book about myself — which indeed would be all about Jack London.

Here I give to the world my Jack London — a virile crea ture compounded of curiosity and fearlessness, the very

PEEFACE xi

texture of fine sensibility, the loving heart and discerning intuitions of a woman, an ardent brain, and a divine belief in himself. And since he was first and foremost his own man, I render, as nearly as may be in the premises, also his own Jack London. If I prove candid to a degree, let it be remembered that he would be first to have it so.

CHABMIAN LONDON Jack London Ranch,

Glen Ellen, Sonoma County, California

CONTENTS

PAGE

PROLOGUE AND A MEETING 3

CHAPTER

I THE STUFF OF STARS 15

II BIRTH 25

III BOYHOOD 29

IV LIVERMORE VALLEY 45

V BOYHOOD TO YOUTH: OAKLAND ESTUARY, SAILOR- ING, ETC 62

VI CANNERY, BUYS SLOOP "RAZZLE DAZZLE" QUEEN

OF THE OYSTER PIRATES 73

VII OYSTER PIRATING < 83

VIII FISH-PATROL 99

IX " SOPHIE SUTHERLAND," SEALING 110

X AUTUMN INTO SPRING, 1893-1894 — JUTE MILL;

COAL SHOVELING ; BOY-AND-GIRL LOVE . . . 135

XI TRAMPING— " THE ROAD" 147

XII TRAMPING 165

XIII HIGH SCHOOL 187

XIV AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA .... 210 XV INTO KLONDIKE 222

XVI OUT OF KLONDIKE 247

XVII RETURN FROM KLONDIKE — LILY MAID LETTERS . 258

XVIII THE CLOUDESLEY JOHNS CORRESPONDENCE . . 277

xiii

xiv CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

XIX INTRODUCING ANNA STRUNSKY, AND JACK'S LET TERS TO HER; ALSO FURTHER CLOUDESLET

JOHNS LETTERS 318

XX MARRIAGE TO ELIZABETH MADDERN ; MORE LETTERS 338

XXI LETTERS : CLOUDESLEY JOHNS AND ANNA STRUNSKY 349

XXII 1902— PIEDMONT 361

XXIII HOME FROM EUROPE ; SEPARATION . .... 385

XXIV JAPANESE-RUSSIAN WAR 401

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

A Kind of Napoleon of the Pen Frontispiece

FACING PAGE

Mother of Jack London — Flora Wellman 16

Jack London's Father — John London 16

Jack London at About 9 Years — with His Dog, Hollo . . 33

"Pig Palace" 80

The Great Gate of Redwood Logs Into the "Beauty

Ranch" 97

Jack and Chairman London 144

1894. Picture of Encampment of Kelly's Industrial Army 161

Jack London 192

Captain Larsen Wonders About Things 209

"The Lake That Jack Built" 224

1909. Peggy "The Beloved." The "Super Dog" in

Jack's Life 241

1905. "Brown Wolf" of Story of That Name. Jack's

Alaskan Husky 241

1914. Letter from Jack London Stating His Materialistic

Belief 304

1904. Jack London, in Korea on His Australian Barb- Mare, "Belle" 321

1905. Jack London on "Washoe Ban"— "Brown Wolf" Beside 321

1904. Jack London , 336

xv

xvi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PAGE

1903. Jack London at 27 * . . 384

1904. Sailor Jack of Sloop " Spray " ....... 384

1906. Jack London in Boston ........ M . . 384

1909. Jack London in Melbourne, Australia .... 384

1904. War Correspondents En Route to Japan . . . 401

Horoscope of Jack London, Cast in 1905 423

Horoscope of Jack London, Cast after His Death . . . 424

THE BOOK

OF

JACK LONDON

THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

PROLOGUE

AND A MEETING

1WISH you'd meet this remarkable boy of mine, this Jack London, " my aunt remarked one morning in the spring of 1900, with a laugh in her earnest blue eyes. "I should like to have your opinion of him. The fact is, I have only talked with him once, myself, but already I feel as if he belonged to me."

"Very well," I replied rather absently, pinning on my straw sailor before a diminutive silver-trinketed dress ing-table that was my especial pride. For my mind was bent on other matters than this vague young writer whose stories in the Overland Monthly I had heard the family discussing with fervor for months past. "Very well," I repeated, "when shall it be?"

"He's coming here to-morrow afternoon," she consid ered, "though too early for you. But in a few days I'm to meet him at the museum in the Ferry Building, to pose him for a picture in Alaskan furs, to illustrate my article. How would this do? — I'll take you to lunch!"

"Why should you take him to lunch!" I cried, stung to protest.

' ' My dear child — I know he hasn 't an extra cent to spend. No, I will entertain the pair of you, at half past twelve."

"I don't know what you will think of him," she called after me, in a doubtful tone, as I hurried off for Dwight Way station, which was near our home in Berkeley. "He is not a bit like your college and society friends!"

3

4 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

But their afternoon's interview lasted until six o'clock. My latch-key was already clicking in the lock as Auntie turned the knob for the egress of a rather odd caller, clad in shabby bicycle trousers and dark gray woolen shirt. A nondescript tie, soft bicycle shoes, and a worn cap in one hand, completed his outfit, while the other held fast a copy of Boyd's Composition, borrowed from his hostess. There was a hasty introduction in the dim hall rainbowed by the sunset through a stained glass window. Then the apparently abashed young fellow ran lightly down the steps, pulling the dingy cap over a mop of brown curls, and rode away on his wheel.

"So that's your wonderful Jack London," I chaffed. "You will admit he is not a very elegant afternoon caller!"

" Granted," Auntie concurred; but added swiftly, "I do not think he missed your hardly concealed critical look, my dear. Nothing escapes that boy. And you must remem ber," she admonished gently, "with genius, clothing doesn't matter. Besides, I doubt if he can afford better."

"Well," I retorted, a trifle guiltily, "he is not the only genius amongst your friends, but certainly none of them ever came to our house looking like this one. ' '

Seeing me really contrite, she told me laughingly how Hannah had come to her with puzzled brow, after answer ing the door bell :

" 'I do not think this can be the gentleman Mrs. Eames expects. He is only a boy, in rough clothes, and walks like a sailor.' " Whereupon Hannah had flushingly received a rebuke similar to mine.

On the day set for the lunch, I exchanged noon hours with my pretty assistant. For, in a big San Francisco shipping and commission firm, my shorthand and type writing earned bed and board, party gowns, the services of Hannah, the immaculate Swedish maid, not to mention fodder and stabling for my beautiful saddle mare. For we were not in opulent circumstances. My aunt and foster

PBOLOGUE 5

mother, Ninetta Eames, wrote for the magazines, while her husband acted as business manager of the beloved old Overland Monthly, whose funds were notoriously meager — no one better than Jack London knew how meager. As for myself, I had taken a hand in my own maintenance from my fourteenth year, when I had mastered Uncle Roscoe Eames 's Light Line Shorthand and assisted him with his classes, on to the year at Mills College, where I worked my way as secretary to its President, Mrs. Susan L. Mills. '

Promptly at twelve-thirty I reached the entrance of the restaurant my aunt had named — Young 's, I think it was, on Montgomery, not far from Market Street. If I am a shade misty, it must be borne in mind that this was almost six years before the time when the Great Fire, following upon the Great Earthquake, destroyed landmarks in this section of incomparable old San Francisco.

Already they were on the spot, my small, blue-eyed, dark-haired aunt, and beside her the boyish figure of me dium height in a sack-coated gray suit, patently ready-made and almost pathetically new. He wore a small black tie, low-cut shoes, and a neat visored gray cap that did not hide a wavy brown forelock. And this was the first and last time we ever saw Jack London arrayed in waistcoat and starched collar.

My clearest vision of this moment when I first looked fairly upon the man who was destined to play such mo mentous part in my life, is of the cheerful-gray aspect of him; for, under the meeting low line of his brows, the wide-set, very large, direct eyes were as gray as the soft gray cloth, but more blue for the tan of his blond skin.

Another unclouded mental impression that persists across the years, is of the modest quiet of his manner, and, still more distinctly, the beauty of his mouth, full-lipped, not small, with deep, upturned ends that my aunt happily described as " pictured corners " — a designation too lovely

6 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

for analysis. And there was about this feature a chastity, an untried virginity of expression, that seemed greatly at odds with recalled rumors of the romantic if rather dubious career of this sailor-shouldered, light-stepping man of twenty-four, as gamin, redoubtable member of dread hood lum gangs in Oakland, bay pirate, vagrant, adventurer in' Alaskan gold fields — not to emphasize a smear of actual jail-birding, if truth prevailed. That he was moreover an exceedingly active member of the Socialist Labor Party was no shock to my propriety, albeit his Socialism was of a ruggeder, more militant sort than that with which I was familiar in my own home.

Ever my initial picture of that baffling mouth must hold its own with the great gray eyes, in their almost appealing candor a similar unbelievable childlikeness. " Looking for something he has never known, ' ' was the fancy that drifted through my brain, as my own eyes fell from his to the small hand he extended — half -timorously it seemed to me, as I noted an absence of grip.

" Jack London is the gentlest man I have ever known, " I once heard an old woman say. And that is what also comes down to me from this early contact with a personality that made its thoroughgoing masculinity only slightly felt through an alight repose of demeanor, an expectant passiv ity, which very little advertised vibrant nerves and quick underlying dominance. That is it — sitting across the table in the buzzing, bustling cafe, I seemed to sense that he was expecting something, something we two women had for him of our personalities, our ideas, our good will. In those long-lashed eyes that had mirrored much of life's most unbeautiful presentments, there was a waiting, a con tinual asking, and their own response was swift and sweet toward any gift of frank idea or fellowship. He displayed interest in the fact that I was self-supporting; and once, when my Aunt had addressed me, he raised that full gray

PEOLOGUE 7

look to mine and slowly pronounced, as if listening to the sound of his own pleased voice :

"Charmian . . . Charmian . . .What a beautiful name! " I have little recollection of the conversation that lasted out the meal, nor of what Jack London ordered. It is safe to say that, "barring his half -fed tramp days, or some out landish delicacy temporarily in favor, few privileged to contact with him rememher him for his appetite. The morning's visit to the museum came up, along with his de light in once more seeing the familiar Klondike habili ments. Then, while my Aunt drew him out concerning himself, Eudyard Kipling's name was mentioned, and Jack's whole face lighted as he exclaimed: "Oh, have you read 'The Brushwood Boy'? — There is no end to Kip ling, simply no end. ' ' Gone was that half -deferential diffi dence ; remained only his kindling enthusiasm for the work of his British idol, treasured possession of which without delay he would share with responsive companions.

It had proved inevitable, upon the appearance of young London's "Odyssey of the North" in the Atlantic Monthly for January just past, that this new writer's revolutionary method of presenting the primal, raw, frigid life of the savage North should call forth comparison with Kipling. I felt at a disadvantage in that I had missed reading this tale and the other eight that had been running in the Overland, beginning with "To the Man on Trail" in the January 1899 issue, and ending with "The Wisdom of the Trail" in December. The entire nine I learned were by now in the hands of Houghton, Mifflin & Company for book publication, under the title of "The Son of the Wolf" — the Arctic Indian's name for the conquering white man. Simultaneously with the Atlantic Monthly, he had broken into two other eastern publications, with an article, "The Economics of the Klondike," in The Review of Re views, and a story, "Pluck and Pertinacity," in The Youth's Companion.

8 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

"Charmian," Mrs. Eames was suddenly struck with the idea, "why can't you review 'The Son of the "Wolf — per haps in the same number of the Overland with my article on Mr. London 1"

For as has been seen, at this period we were closely associated with the old magazine of the Golden West, that had cradled the first born of Bret Harte's genius; even I, urged on by my family, had dabbled sporadically and un- ambitiously at certain unimportant book reviewings. Be sides, had not my maiden position, after leaving Mills Col lege, been as assistant sub-scissors in the Overland sanc tum? But far more than with literary leanings was I oc cupied, outside my office hours, with University of Cali fornia "hops," and " proms, " and "senior balls," to say nothing of week-end yachting on San Francisco Bay, horse back rides, and youth's joy of living generally.

Jack beamed upon me from under his marked, mobile brows that just touched over the square bridge of a pre cisely not-too-short nose:

"Is it a go, Miss Kittredge? — I'll hold you to that! And I'll send you my duplicate proof-sheets soon, so you won't have to wait for the book."

When we parted he asked, meanwhile rolling and light ing a cigarette with quick, definite motions of his tapering fingers :

"Mrs. Eames, may I bring a friend to see you! His name is Herman Whitaker, 'Jim' we call him, and he can give you lots of points about me that I can't think of, for your article."

An early night was determined upon, and the engage ment was fulfilled, shortly followed by a second. While my aunt's interviews with Mr. Whitaker were in progress, it devolved upon me to entertain their subject.

Of these occasions, nothing consecutive lives in memory, and only two incidents stand out: one, that I com plied with my aunt's request to play on the piano for

PROLOGUE 9

Mr. London, she having discovered his intense1 fondness for music; the other, that I introduced him to my "den" where, among other cherished objects, were my books, re productions of my favorite marbles and paintings, and an absurdly elaborate little tea-table. I had the feeling that he was brightly aware of the feminine individuality of the room; and he showed interest in my various girlish activ ities, whether in music, or drawing, riding, even dancing. Years afterward that rosy little apartment, Venus Crouched and all, figured as Dede Mason's, in "Burning Daylight." "I never danced a step in my life," he regretted bashfully. "Never seemed to have time to learn those soft, lovely ways of young people. But I like to see danc ing. "

For the music and the books he was almost equally hungry. Fled beyond recall is the memory of what I played, except that he asked if I had the de Koven "Re cessional" — Kipling's verses; and he told me he some times bicycled to San Jose to visit friends, and there he had heard the song. It happened that I was able to gratify him, since I possessed quite a repertory of vocal music; for although no singer, I played accompaniments unprofes- sionally in the Bay region concerts.

Together we several times hummed through the stately invocation, and Jack was all alight with emotion, his great eyes shining, while he begged for it over and over. He had no apparent singing voice, although to a pleasanter, more expressive speaking tone I had never listened, es pecially when he descanted upon Kipling.

But more vividly than any other picture of him at that time, he rises standing by my side at the tall book-case in my ' ' den. ' ' His glowing eyes ranged rapidly over the vol umes, and he seemed in a fine fervor, murmuring titles and authors or touching the backs with his small hands. Soon we were talking very fast, discussing works we had both read, and he urged me not to neglect Thomas Hardy's

10 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

"Jude the Obscure. " "Tess of the D 'Urbervilles " had not come his way. This I lent him, together with Maurice Hewlett's "The Forest Lovers" and "Flood Tide," by Sallie P. McLean Green.

And once, turning toward him, I met a pair of fathom less sea-blue eyes, and experienced a sudden and unexpected impact of his mental and physical vitality ; felt at-one with him for a high instant, knew his spiritual dignity, rec ognized him for the warm, human creature that he was. The moment passed quickly, and he was assuring me, un asked, that he had ' i a conscience about books, ' ' and would take the best care of mine. Through the irony of chance, some one spilled a bottle of ink over the cover of "Flood Tide," to Jack London's undying indignation and remorse. To this day I treasure the stained thing.

Often in later years, he and I wondered, had we been further thrown together, if we should have come to care the whole way for each other. And we usually agreed that the hour was not then. "You came in my great need," he would muse. ' ' That early my great need had not developed, or else I did not recognize it."

The second of these calls occurred, I think, in the week of March 26. I aim to be thus explicit, because of headlong happenings in the succeeding week. Of what led to our making an appointment I am not sure ; most likely he was sketching his college career for me, which, owing to re sponsibilities and lack of money, had been limited to half his Freshman year. Be this as it may, there was to me some unfamiliar purlieu of the staid university town that he thought would be of interest. With mutual amuse ment over the gaiety that would be added to the academic precincts by spectacle of man a-wheel and woman a-horse, we decided upon Saturday afternoon, April the seventh.

Meanwhile, one Saturday there had arrived the prom ised proof-sheets of "The Son of the Wolf," and when I returned home early for my long ride, on the tiny dresser

PEOLOGUB 11

I found waiting the long, printed slips. While unpinning my hat I started to read. I neither rose nor finished re moving the sailor, until my streaming eyes had lifted from the last word of the last tale.

For before the first few sheets had been turned down, I had become thrall to the wonder and wisdom and artistry of "The White Silence," profoundly aware of the aware ness of this young protagonist of nature's primordial forces, his apperception of the world in which he lived, and of the heart of man and beast, aye, and of woman — all hu man and fallible, but shot through with the fineness and courage of the spirit of nobility. This story, one of his first, contains some of the most masterly of the passages which set him amongst the young lords of language. In Mason 's parting words are shown Jack's love of his own race, and for children. Indeed, he let us in upon nearly all of himself in that story. In most of the stories I noticed that he never seemed to be far from the consideration of death. His artistry lingered caressingly about the final destiny of man and animal.

Throughout the long afternoon, thrilled alike with the splendid repose and the crackling action of the work, shaken with its power, there blended with spiritual emotion the conviction that I had no business with the reviewing or criticizing of such brain-stuff as Jack London's. For asmuch as I was intellectually indolent, I even felt no in citement to bestir myself. I would not touch the thing, I declared first to the four walls of the den, later to my aunt, who stood petrified before this breakdown of my accustomed certitude.

In after years, many were the times Jack London half seriously if laughingly charged that my unalterable de cision was due, in the last analysis, to occurrences of the ensuing week. But I plead, now as always, complete in nocence. Aside from my being more or less absorbed in another and very different person, the man Jack London

12 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

dwelt in my consciousness little more tenaciously than an unusual book or play.

On Wednesday evening, April fourth, I found a type written note awaiting me at home. This must have been tossed into the waste basket, for I have not seen it since. But it was worded something like this — he never lost many hours weeding out formal titles: "Dear Charmian:

"It will be impossible for me to keep that engagement next Saturday. My letter to your aunt by this mail will explain. Some time in the future, maybe.

"Sincerely yours,

"Jack London. "

As I finished reading, Auntie came in, real distress in her face, for she had grown truly fond of her lovable friend, an affection which he reciprocated. In her hand was a similarly typed missive, covering a page and a half. "Listen to this," she said in a dead voice, and read to me the unexpected contents, which were Jack's vindication for the suddenness of his proceeding. I copy:

"1130 East 15th St., "Oakland, Calif.,

"April 3, 1900. "My dear Mrs. Eames:

"Must confess you have the advantage of me. I have not yet seen my book, nor can I possibly imagine what it looks like. Nor can you possibly imagine why I am going to beg off from going out to your place next Saturday. You know I do things quickly. Sunday morning, last, I had not the slightest in tention of doing what I am going to do. I came down and looked over the house I was to move into — that fathered the thought. I made up my mind. Sunday evening I opened transactions for a wife ; by Monday evening had the affair well under way ; and next Saturday morning I shall marry — a Bessie Maddern, cousin to Minnie Maddern Fiske. Also, on said Saturday, as soon as the thing is over with we jump out on our wheels for a three days' trip, and then back and to work.

PROLOGUE 13

" 'The rash boy,' I hear you say. Divers deep considerations have led me to do this thing; but I shall over-ride just one objec tion — that of being tied. I am already tied. Though single, I have had to support a household just the same. Should I wish to go to China the household would have to be provided for whether I had a wife or not.

"As it is, I shall be steadied, and can be able to devote more time to my work. One only has one life, you know, after all, and why not live it? Besides, my heart is large, and I shall be a cleaner, wholesomer man because of a restraint being laid upon me in place of being free to drift wheresoever I listed. I am sure you will understand.

"I thank you for your kind word concerning the appearance of ' The Son of the Wolf. ' I shall let you know when I am coming out, and now, being located, want you and yours to come and see me and mine. Will settle that when I get back. Wedding is to be private.

"Send announcement later.

"Very sincerely yours,

"Jack London. "

"Heavens and earth !" wailed my aunt. " Think what the boy is doing! A sensible, considered marriage for a love-man like that! 'Only one life . . . and why not live it?' — The boy must be crazy to dream that marrying in cold blood is living life !"

"No, not crazy, but perhaps super-sane — or thinks he is, " I commented, and went down to dinner, probably mar veling how "God's own mad lover" may sometimes direct his madness into quite practical channels.

One bitter cold morning in New York City, in the winter of 1918, I was called over the telephone by Jack's long time friend, Cloudesley Johns:

"Oh, Charmian — I've been looking over those 1899 and 1900 letters of Jack's I promised for your use, and find this, dated March 10, 1900. Listen:

" 'Have just finished reading "Forest Lovers" by Maurice Hewlett. Bead it by all means. . . . Have made

14 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

the acquaintance of Charmian Kittredge, a charming girl who writes book reviews, and who possesses a pretty little library wherein I have found all these late books which the public libraries are afraid to have circulated.' "

Thus, Jack London, who always decried puns on my given name, was himself not guiltless in this reference to our passing acquaintance of 1900.

Except for one occasion, when he brought his wife, the pair on bicycles, to call upon us, Jack London dropped out of my sphere of interest, save insofar as I desultorily followed his work. My aunt's article duly appeared in the 1900 May Overland, while their friendship grew apace, until he came to address her in letters as Mother Mine. Later in the year I sold a piece of Berkeley land in which she had long since wisely overborne me to invest my sav ings, and a portion of the sum realized I spent on a fifteen months' vacation in the eastern states and Europe. One icy morning, away up in Mt. Desert Island, opening an Oakland, California, paper, I stumbled upon this item :

" LONDON— In this city, January 15, 1901, to the wife of Jack London, a daughter. "

A comment read :

"Jack London, the brilliant young author and essayist, is re ceiving congratulations upon the advent of a daughter. Mr. Lon don is satisfied that he has a real live subject for the study of psychology and other phenomena in which he is so much inter ested. "

In this wise the young adventurer, who has been dubbed "the most picturesque figure in American litera ture," pursued the law-abiding domesticity he had calcu lated so nicely as his duty to himself, his work, and society ; while I, like Masefield's "Young April on a bloodhorse with a roving eye," rode merrily upon my own dutiful, dancing, musical way that seemed all-sufficient to my needs, unheed- ful of the future.

CHAPTER I

THE STUFF OF STABS

ALL in all, it is a happy fate that places in one's keeping the mdimental material, blood-drift and magical spirit-stuff, that went into the syntheses of this resultant entity whom men knew as Jack London; who in his time was loved or hated as they reacted to his spacious nature with its varying levels of humannesses, its winging heights, its drowning depths.

In sifting and assembling the details bearing upon Jack London's origin, the keen enjoyment of serving his readers joins with a keener zest in singing his pride of race; in sounding the pean, manifest throughout his work, of his very own Anglo-Saxon breed, upon which he gambled his faith. And the pleasure increases as additional verifica tion is uncovered bearing upon his direct British ancestry.

From the heart of the city of London there sprang two large families that bore the city's name, one of which branches was from Semitic seed, as witness Meyer London, erstwhile Socialist congressman at Washington, D. C., and many another in America; while in England one of my correspondents is a Jewess whom I address as "Mrs. Jack London."

The Gentile group, it seems, owned the land of which Chatham Square is now part. One of the early Londons had a sister Elizabeth, who married a Wellington, and lived at Chatham. When Jack London's sister Eliza was a child, she heard her father say, referring to politics in his part of Pennsylvania: "If the Wellingtons and McLough- lins stood together, they'd carry the elections!" In Jack's

15

16 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

direct ancestry, the first person in my available record is Sir William London, who foreswore allegiance to Great Britain and betook himself to America. Here, under Gen eral George Washington, he fought valiantly for his ideals, thereby sacrificing no mean estates in the tight little island ; for these were promptly confiscated by the jealous Crown, and thereafter figured in the mill of Chancery. I can remember Jack London saying: "One of my childhood recollections is of mysterious sessions held by my mother and father, from which I gathered that he had been ap proached across the water by the London heirs to lend a hand in fighting for his great-grandfather's seized prop erties."

But a letter from one Mary London Wilson, seventy years old, writing from Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, in 1904, gives the following: That nearly thirty years be fore, an advertisement had been run in the papers, calling for information of London heirs in America. For Lord Eussell London had died in England, the last of his line, leaving a half million for the American heirs if they could be located. From this letter one learns that none of the Londons knew of this advertisement for nearly two years ; when a Charley London, with a lawyer, voyaged overseas, only to find that the estate had gone from Chancery to the Crown.

Sir William London's son William named his son Man- ley. Manley London married Sarah Hess, and became the sire of eight : Mary, Sarah, Rebecca, George, Martha, Eliza, Joseph, and John London, with whom the direct life-story of Jack London begins. And these Londons, one and all, from the redoubtable knight down to and including his great-grandson John, took part in each and every warlike uprising for American liberty. It would not be out of place here to add that the last of the paternal line, nephews of Jack London, namely, Irving Shepard and John Miller,

THE STUFF OF STAES 17

did their part on sea and land in this twentieth century greatest of all struggles.

John London, great-grandson of Sir William, first saw the light in Springfield County, Pennsylvania, on January 11, 1828. He grew up on a farm, receiving the education attainable in small rural schools nearly a century ago, while he learned the hard, empirical way of agriculture at that early date.

He comes next into view at the age of nineteen, as boss of a section gang in the construction of a great railroad system through Pennsylvania. One day, John reported at the big farm residence of an official of the road, one Hugh Cavett, The latter being absent, his daughter Anna Jane took the message. Eyes and hands struck fire, and in two weeks the pair were married ; for John London was a bonnie lad, six feet in his homespun socks, square-shoul dered, well-limbed, fine-skinned, with comely hands and feet, and a wealth of soft, wavy brown hair — one of Jack Lon don's own physical characteristics. "Finest head of hair I ever barbered ! ' ' old Barber Smith of San Francisco de clared of John's luxuriant mane thirty years later. And, like Jack's, John's wide-set, gray-blue, dancing eyes and sweeping ways were not to be resisted by mortal woman. What mattered it to him, when kind called to kind, that Anna Jane's father was his employer and a rich man! He was the owner of profitable farmlands, not only in West- morel, but in Township Patton, Alleghany County; a stockholder in the Wheeling Bridge property in Virginia, and an investor in various other lucrative schemes that were bringing fortunes to foreseeing men of Hugh Cavett 's type. Besides, over and above the love that drew the man and maid so quickly together, was not the comely girl John's very ideal of a capable country-house mistress?

After the wedding John London came to live for a time in the big house, where he began the founding of his own line — a generous contribution of eleven olive branches,

18 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

some sprouting twin-buds, to the family tree. He was absent frequently, sent out, I gather, by his father-in-law on business connected with the railroad. If the other man was at all put out by the forthright methods of the young couple in matters matrimonial, evidently he made the best of the situation and advanced the unexpected son-in-law in line with his abilities. Moreover, the sedately arriving yearly babies, beginning with Tom and Mary, could not have failed to erase any last vestige of their grandfather 's pique.

John London's life-long gallantry is illustrated by a lit tle incident that took place upon his homecoming from one of these trips. Finding his bride over-strained by the housewifely labor of entertaining for weeks a full com plement of relatives, he expressed his solicitude by dismiss ing the whole tribe, stating his reasons. He then turned to and helped Anna Jane clear up after them. In quite another setting, half a century later, Jack London said to me:

"When we are married, much as I love an open house, if I cannot afford servants, we'll live in tents so there can't be any entertaining! No domestic drudgery for wife of mine. It's your life and my life, first. Our need of each other lies in different ways than circumscribed domes ticity."

Very congenial seem to have been John and Anna Jane. "No one ever saw Jane angry or disagreeable," reads the yellowed fragment of a letter, "nor John London cross or harsh. He was always protecting some one." A roving spirit characterized the London strain, and Anna Jane ap pears to have been in no wise backward in aiding and abetting its development in her spouse. From the fact that she is not mentioned in Hugh Cavett's will, and by other data, one is led to conclude that he had settled her portion upon her before she and John presently went adventuring up through Wisconsin, with an eye for an abiding-place,

THE STUFF OF STABS 19

thence drifting down to Illinois, where John's mother, a remarkable woman, managed her own stockfarm. Five sons she gave to the Civil War, meanwhile she continued to develop her holdings.

When John London enlisted in the War of the Bebel- lion, it was from a Missouri farm, and he left behind Anna Jane with seven children. At the close of the war, with one lung out of action as the result of a combined siege of pneumonia and smallpox, he lived with his family in the town of Moscow, Muscatine County, Iowa, in a two- story white house on the town square. Here Eliza was born. On the opposite side of the square stood the flour- mill, and John, among other building work, superintended the construction of a bridge across Cedar Eiver, the stream that furnished power to the mill. Eliza remembers well the close proximity of the watercourse. Priscilla was washing and getting dinner, and asked her wee sister to run and see if papa was coming. Eliza toddled to the bench on which she was wont to climb to the window, and pulled over upon herself the steaming tub of clothing big sister had set there. She never forgot how quickly papa, returning from his bridge-building, answered the sum mons to aid his scalded baby. Later, they migrated to a quarter section of government land outside of Moscow. When his wife was discovered with consumption, John arranged affairs so that he could devote himself to her, and it fell in with their mutual dreams to play at gipsy- ing. For two years they moved over the prairies in a "schooner," and during this time John came into pleasant contact with the Pawnees, by whom he swore stoutly to his dying day. "Play fair with an Indian," he held, "and you can trust him with anything, anywhere. It's wrong treatment that's made sly devils of 'em."

With the redskins this born out-doors man hunted and trapped raccoons and other prairie game ; and, in bee-hunt ing, proved of keener sight than the aborigines in following

20 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

to its honey store the flight of a homing worker. Later, when the Indians were camping near the farm, John branded his stock, and, unlike some of his neighbors, never lost a single head to any marauder. Play the game squarely, was his philosophy, and you stand to win.

That Anna Jane did not entirely subscribe to this whole sale confidence in the original American crops out in an amusing anecdote, often told by her husband. He, despite the railing of his familiars, had blithely loaned to an old brave fifty cents and a musket, but forgot to mention the little transaction to his wife. It happened that she was alone when the chief came to redeem his obligations, and being very ill, she was badly frightened when his gaunt frame filled the doorway. In round terms she ordered him away; but the Indian, when she refused to touch the fifty cents, strode furiously ina grandly threw the coins into the middle of the floor, and stood the well-cleaned gun carefully in its corner. Stalking as furiously forth, he met his bene factor coming home, to whom he clipped out that the white- face squaw was no good — too foolish even to take money or guns offered her.

Early in the seventies, John London found himself be reft of his mate, and with an exceptionally large family to consider. One of the sons, Charles, had been injured playing our national game, a ball catching him in the chest. His father conceived a plan whereby he might leave the remaining youngest folk — three of the eleven had died — temporarily with the older sisters and willing neighbors, while he struck out farther West in the hope of benefiting the ailing boy. All was satisfactorily worked out, when John weakened to the wailing of Eliza and Ida, hardly more than babies. At the last moment a rearrangement was effected that included the pair, as well as two friends, Mr. and Mrs. Chase. They, in return for their expenses to Cali fornia, were to assume the care of Charles and his two little sisters.

THE STUFF OF STABS 21

John never again saw Iowa. Charles grew rapidly worse, and died eleven days after he looked upon his first ocean. The widower disposed of the farm, and with the proceeds established himself in a contracting business in San Francisco. Meantime he placed Eliza and Ida in the Protestant Orphan Asylum on Haight Street, paying for their living and tuition. Eliza London has always averred that the period spent in the quaint, moss-grown stone home was the happiest of her life, and with the tenaciousness of a devoted nature, she had soon fastened her shy affection upon one of the teachers. Next she came to nourish a fond hope that her beloved papa would share her own adoration for teacher, and bring to his girls a new mother. But she was doomed to secret sorrow and tears, for papa, although never blind to a pretty face and womanly traits, was even then under the influence of wholly a different person.

Many a smart beau of that winsome light-opera star of the long ago, Kate Castleton, will smile with awakened mem ories to learn that a sweet friendship existed between the lovable young singer and the big, quiet, long-bearded man from the Middle West who had such a way with him. But it was not she — and another ardent desire of the wee Eliza, who still wore a ring her idol had sent her, went glimmering with the first. For the lady of her father's second choice in life was not beautiful. And Eliza, who did not consider lovely her own small, expressive face with its deep-blue, black-lashed London eyes, worshiped beauty, and little considered other possible attractiveness in herself or those about her.

Now the widower, ever alert to new impressions from the world's limitless abundance, never convinced but there was something better for him just over the mutely sum moning horizon, and with the death of two dear ones still quick in his consciousness, had strayed from his more or less strict Methodist outlook and observances and had become enamored of the doctrines of a spiritualistic cult.

22 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

Amongst the devout sisters of this group of seekers after truth he met Flora Wellman, a tiny, fair woman in her early thirties, hailing from Massillon, Ohio. Once more in the London fashion, John wasted no moment in binding to him his desire.

The next visiting day at the orphanage, on which he had planned to escort the betrothed to meet his daughters, found him ill; and when the unsuspecting Eliza and Ida were bidden to the stiff reception-room, imagine their astonish ment to see an unknown woman, hardly above their own height, rise and announce that she was to be their new mother.

In Jack London's inheritance through his mother, again the blood of Great Britain predominates, for Flora Well- man's ancestry leads back to England and Wales, and in cludes strains of French and Dutch. The family traces its American residence to pre-Bevolution days. Flora's father, Marshall Daniel Wellman, was born in Augusta, Oneida County, New York, in 1800, son of Betsy Baker and Joel Wellman, both of British stock. Joel was a cooper, plying his trade in the Syracuse District Salt Wells. When Betsy died, he married a second wife who in turn left him a widower. Whereupon, while Marshall and a brother were yet boys, Joel journeyed to the headwaters of the Allegheny Eiver, where the three built and launched a wondrous house boat, called a bateau, and made the voyage to Pittsburgh. Thence the bateau floated them on down to old Beavertown, where Joel had heard there was a demand for pork- and whisky-barrels. In his palmy days, Marshall Wellman loved to boast that he had earned a reputation of turning out the best tight oaken barrels ever seen in the region of Beavertown.

A year afterward they moved farther West, this time to Wooster, Ohio. There, from the ashes of timber burned in clearing this new country, Joel and his sons manufac tured "pot ash," which they had learned was one of the

THE STUFF OF STAES 23

few products that sold for cash in Pittsburgh. When he was an old man, Marshall ' ' remembered well the mountain of stacked ash we piled up south of the town, Wooster, near the Eobinson place. " Once a sister came all the way from New York to see their land of promise; but she be came homesick and Marshall escorted her, the couple on horses, back to New York. While still under twenty-one, he took a contract for building a section of the Allegheny Canal in Pennsylvania; and subsequently Marshall Well- man rose to be the wealthiest citizen of Massillon, Ohio, as wealth was accounted in those days.

Flora Wellman, born August 17, 1843, was the youngest child of Marshall Wellman 's family of five, the others being Mary Marcia, Hiram B., Susan, and Louisa. Her mother, Eleanor Garrett Jones, born in 1810 at Brookfield, Trumbull County, Ohio, had married Marshall in 1852. Her father, a devout circuit-rider of Welsh extraction, called "Priest" Jones, well beloved and valued adviser to the countryside, had been a pioneer settler and upbuilder of Ohio when that state was thought of as the whole West. He passed away an honored member of Wooster 's society, full of good works, and incidentally leaving a comfortable fortune to his heirs.

The mother died shortly following Flora's birth, and Wellman remarried when she was four years of age. His bride was Julia Frederica Hurxthal, the Hurxthals being another of the pioneer Massillon families that had amassed riches.

The little girl was nurtured in an atmosphere of luxury and culture, her clothes and her hats and her boots, her books, and her teachers, all especially ordered and deliv ered from New York City; and she has told me that she possessed distinct talents in music and elocution. That no due family observance might be neglected, Marshall Wellman even summoned a portrait painter from New

24 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

York, who immortalized all the members of the household on his canvases.

"Few mothers of great men have been happy women, " some one has written, and Flora Wellman seems to have been no exception. Capacity for happiness may have been a part of her heritage, but fate was extraordinarily cruel. Somewhere around her thirteenth year, I have it from her, she fell victim to a fever that physically stunted her, and probably accounted for her short sparse hair and for certain melancholic tendencies. "I cannot remember the day when my mother was not old," Jack London more than once declared, while relatives, and friends of long standing, have asserted in her advanced years, "She has always been very much as you see her now." It would seem that the fever almost entirely robbed the unfortunate young soul of youth and gladness. Her eyes were ever fixed upon decline and dissolution, or peering into the hereafter of her spir itualistic faith.

CHAPTER II

BIRTH

JACK LONDON was born in San Francisco, California, on January 12, 1876. At two o'clock of the afternoon came her woman's hour, that is the most lonely of all hours known to the human, and Flora London's voice was joined by the cry of her first and only child. He weighed nine pounds, which was one-tenth of his mother's weight. She called him John Griffith, — the middle name being in memory of Griffith Everhard, a favorite nephew. Flora and John London, having no formal church affiliations, the infant was never christened, and answered to " Johnnie" until the day when deliberately he selected, and made splen didly his own, the terse British name that has girdled the world wherever books and adventure, and abundant life are known.

The house in which he first expanded his fine young chest and made himself audible, was at Third and Bryant streets, occupied by the Slocums, friends of Flora, the master of the home being a prosperous member of a well- known printing establishment. Contrary to the more or less general belief that Jack London was born in a shanty on a sand-lot, the dwelling was a large and not inelegant one. For this had been a fashionable neighborhood in the changing fortunes of the gay western metropolis, and had not yet lapsed into the subsequent " south of Market" social disfavor.

Unluckily, Flora was unable long to nourish her lusty babe, and he speedily grew thin and blue. John London looked about and discovered among the men working for him

25

26 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

one whose wife had lost her latest born and who was willing to become wet-nurse to the white child. Mrs. Prentiss was a full-blooded negress, and proud of it. Many a time Jack London has told how she was bartered on the block for a high price, while her mother was sold down the river. Now she became " Mammy Jenny" to an appreciative foster-son whose faithful and affectionate care years afterward she was until his death ; since then, I have as naturally assumed the trust, over and above the provisions of his last will and testament.

It was a veritable cherub that the black woman under took to mother in her essential capacity, white as snow, exquisitely modeled, with dimpled hands and feet surpris ingly small for his firm, plump torso. He soon became pink-cheeked, with eyes of violet, his seraphic face haloed in white-gold ringlets too fragile-fine to seem real to the worshiping African, the devotion of whose deprived heart was instant and abiding toward the "teenty, helpless an gel." In the Cloudesley Johns correspondence I find this from Jack : "Hair was black when I was born, then came out during an infantile sickness and returned positively white — so white that my negress nurse called me ' cotton ball.' "

When the baby was returned to his family they had moved to a cottage on Bernal Heights. And now upon the maternal Eliza devolved most of the rearing of her half-brother, indoors and out, in the energetic year spent in the cottage. The perambulator containing the baby boy, wheeled by a no less azure-eyed girl-child, became a familiar object of an afternoon on the hilly streets.

John London, man of the open field, with clinging con servative principles in money matters, was no match for the swift Western commercial spirit. But he recognized his inability in time to avert disaster, closed his contract ing office, and accepted a position with the J. M. Flaven Company's famous IXL Emporium. In his canvassing about the spreading city, built upon its many hills, he was

BIETH 27

further enlightened of this Farthest West expansive atmos phere. His bubbling sense of humor unavoidably entered into many a conflict with a fading Methodist viewpoint — as one day, on a steep cobbled declivity of Telegraph Hill, when he paused to rest his benevolent, well-shaped hand upon the towseled pate of the handsomest of a group of urchins playing in the street. ' l What 's your name, sonny ! ' ' he asked kindly. In later years, one of the best yarns of this indefatigable story-teller wound up with the shock he had sustained from this pure, sweet little child: " 'What t'e hell business is it of youm what's my name? — an' I ain't your sonny, neither!' "

The next on the list of baby Johnnie's unremembered homes was a new six-room flat opposite the old Plaza on Folsom Street, owned by a family of Cohens who dwelt in the lower apartments. John London had steadily bettered his income, and was now employed by the Singer Sewing Machine Company, as general agent and collector. To this day one might find a few of the decayed mansions of the section's past grandeur. In one of these, even then long since converted into a boarding house, I once went to take piano lessons. My teacher dwelt in the inexhaustible fragrance of old cedar paneling, and once surreptitiously led me down a maze of marble staircases into the nether regions of the imposing pile. There my ravished eyes roved about dismantled dining halls of maple and gilt, and a fabulous, echoing ballroom walled in mirrors like Ver sailles; and the ceiling, I verily believe, was a copy of Kubens' plump charmers and cherubs in Queen Wilhel- mina's House in the Wood, near the Hague.

But Flora, never content for long in any spot, found a home she liked better, this time at the blind end of Natoma Street. Here it seemed as if they had come upon the nearest that San Francisco ever conceded to their desire. For the two-storied roomy house was set in a sort of court shaped by the abrupt, vine-fenced termination of the thor-

28 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

oughfare. It was a blossomy oasis in the engulfing metro politan life of the ambitious city, through tacit agreement kept neat by the dwellers therein, who carefully tended their window pots and flowering strips of garden soil.

Not to restlessness, however, but to an epidemic of diphtheria was due the subsequent exodus of the Londons from San Francisco. The baby fell a victim, followed by his shadow, Eliza, agonizing doubly on his account. The terrified mother turned to and heroically nursed the pair of them — as when a girl she had with deathly fear courage ously brought through smallpox her sister Mary's son, Harry Everhard. To this day Eliza holds that a certain mortuary suggestion from her stepmother whipped her to consciousness and a winning fight for life. Both she and Johnnie were lying in what the doctor pronounced a condition bordering upon dissolution. The exhausted but thrifty Flora asked him if it would be feasible to bury them in the same coffin, when the aroused girl opened hor rified eyes and feebly, but unmistakably, protested.

The physician, having proved a poor judge of their re sistance, dropped back upon the time-honored recommenda tions of a sojourn in the country. But business had to be business to the paternal provider, and with his agricultural intentions dear as ever to his heart, this change was re garded from the viewpoint of an enduring rural residence. The first lap toward this end was merely to the large San Francisco suburb of Oakland, to the east across the bay, that wide expanse of capricious waters that set in Jack London's eyes the far away look of the Argonaut. Thus Oakland, in the County of Alameda, for him came to be the center to which he always referred as his home town, from which he fared forth to the adventures in which he recap tured the spirit of romance for a growingly blase civiliza tion.

CHAPTER III

BOYHOOD (Oakland, Alameda, San Mateo)

MY father was the best man I have ever known, " Jack London was wont to say, "too intrinsically good to get ahead in the soulless scramble for a living that a man must cope with if he would survive in our anarchical capitalist system."

John London once more plunged into business for him self, working toward his pastoral goal. His savings were applied to the leasing and cultivating of a tract of land adjoining the race track at Emeryville, suburb of Oakland near the eastern bay shore, and hard by Shell Mound Park, described in ' ' Martin Eden. ' ' "With the produce, a green- goods store was opened at Seventh and Campbell Streets. This junction was known as The Point by Oaklanders of that day. Here the local and main line trains left terra firma and proceeded out upon a fearsome, teredo-incrusted trestle far into the bay to where the largest ferry steamers in the world conveyed passengers to and from San Fran cisco. I recall an occasion, in girlhood, when I paddled in the tiny gray-green surf at The Point, and then went indoors for a salt tubbing in water pumped from the bay and heated.

Into this fresh venture John put his savings and his faith, and, despite a rigorous honesty that ranged the most luscious of his justly famed tomatoes at the lowest tiers of the boxes — the "culls" went to less fortunate neighbors — he might have prospered had he let well enough alone. But to his bosom he took a shifty partner, one Stowell, in

29

30 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

whose slippery hands he placed the thriving little shop while he traveled in outlying districts. These absences were for the purpose of taking orders and introducing his fruit and vegetables, which were the best Oakland ever en joyed; and also for buying, at the Stone and the Meek orchards between San Leandro and Haywards, to fill the demand of his own enlarging trade.

One week-end, arriving back unsuspecting from a trip, he discovered that he had been figuratively thrown out, sold out, cleaned out, by his partner. Stowell must have been a clever crook and known his man well, for John was quite unequal to the tangle in which he found himself when he appealed to the law. Fight he did, and manfully; only a pitiful few dollars remained to him at the end of a legal battle.

But with the recurrent youthful optimism that was his chiefest personal charm, he shook those broad spare shoul ders free of the sordid morass, threw back his curly poll, and turned toward the race track garden, from which he began supplying the firm of Porter Brothers, commission merchants, who sold his fast augmenting product.

Four successive homes the family occupied during this phase in their fortunes — one at Twelfth and Wood Streets, another on Seventh near Center and Peralta, And then they essayed to cheer the premises known as the Haunted House, the rumor being that a man had hanged himself from a beam therein. Nothing daunted, Mrs. London pitched in and established a kindergarten, in business rela tions with a Mrs. Kegler. Flora's knowledge of music assisted capitally in this connection, and she taught a few outside pupils as well. Although Eliza and Jack both re ceived piano instructions from her in childhood, they have always united in declaring that they never saw her play. Her method seemed based upon the mechanics of the process, with no attempt to induce the harmonies by per sonal example.

BOYHOOD 31

Jack's own memories reached to this house, mainly be cause it was the stage of his debut in trousers — albeit hidden by a jumper. But his infantile pride for once soared above shrinking self -consciousness, and rebelled at the ignominy of this concealment. He was wont, in the most public places, to lift said jumper, that all men might bear witness to the uniform of his sturdy sex. An adorable little man he must have been. Eliza found there was hardly any possession her schoolgirl friends would not part with or lend in exchange for the privilege of taking care of him, or having him sit with them at their desks. He went to the highest bidder, of course ; and his sister munched many an otherwise unattainable apple or bun, or pleasured in a borrowed ring or bracelet.

Matters began to mend, and from a subsequent home on Twelfth Street near Castro, they moved upon fifteen acres of the Davenport property in Alameda, where now looms the Clark Pottery Company's factory. So full of strange happenings are our lives, it was in this selfsame Pottery the red Spanish tiling was fashioned to crown Jack Lon don's "Wolf House" on Sonoma Mountain — futile dream- house, three years' building, that in a single midnight puffed out in flame and smoke !

John's success led him to spread operations to other convenient locations, one of which was the later site of the Smith Borax Works. Still other fruitful acres branched out from both sides of the old " Narrow Gauge" trans-bay railway on the Alameda flats. Through commission mer chants his produce, ever maintaining its standard of super- excellence, now found ready market in San Francisco. Long after his death, Eliza's ear one day was caught by a familiar note, caroled by a street hawker. She asked if the words he was singing, "J. L. Corn," meant anything to him. Needless to say, to his bucolic intelligence, they signified nothing more nor less than mere corn. And it

32 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

pleased Eliza to inform the man that her father had been, so to speak, the father of his wares.

Like a bad dream, the little Jack always remembered his first intoxication, which took place, at the tender age of five, just after he came to Alameda. It was his task to toddle at noonday with a tin lard-pail of beer out into the fields where John London mopped his brow amidst his springing green creations. One day, the frothy contents overrunning and biting into the scratches on his chubby legs, the small man was seized with a desire to taste the stuff that so refreshed his elders. It was not the first time that out of a vast latent curiosity he had fallen for the temptation to test forbidden choice morsels intended for older folk, which up to now he had found good. Also, the pail was too full, and his calves smarted. Into the crackly foam he buried his hot little face to the eyes, hoping the taste would improve when he reached the yellow liquid. It did not improve; but driven by that persistence that all through his career forced him to complete what he had begun, the doughty youngling drained what was to his tiny paunch a mighty draught. Sorely that same thirsty organ must have been crowded, for alarm spread in him to see how the beer had receded. With a stick, remembering how stale brew was made to effervesce, he stirred what was left, and was rewarded by a crop of white bubbles that would deceive the onlooker. John London, sweating prodigiously and eager to complete his furrow, unnoticing poured the liquor down his dry throat and started up the team, his small son trotting alongside.

The next the inebriated baby knew, he was coming to in the shade of a tree, in his fuzzy brain a crushing terror of flashing steel blades and great shining hooves of plung ing horses. Then his eyes, dark with fear, looked up into a reassuring bearded face that bent over him, its solicitude and relief struggling with a mirth it could not quite control. Poor little wayfarer in the fields of chance — he had reeled

JACK LONDON AT ABOUT 9 YEARS— WITH HIS DOG KOLLO

BOYHOOD 33

and fallen between a plowshare and the hind feet of the beasts, and only the plowman's instant halting of the out fit had preserved the baby from being cloven and turned under with the soil.

Another vividly remembered if lesser childish tragedy on Alameda ground was connected with his building in stincts, and it came about in this way: Myself a contem porary child in Oakland, transplanted from the indolent Spanish air of Southern California, I remember my aunt and uncle and the neighbors on Thirty-fifth Street dis cussing the wonder-operetta Satanella which they had at tended in the Tivoli Opera House, forbidden pleasure to one so young as I. A magical performance it was, if my excited imagining was correct, of inexplicable appearings and vanishings of sulphurous deities, with all the glamour of intermixed Fairyland and Heaven arrayed against black- and-red but enchanting Sin. Whilst I was drinking in my elders ' reminiscent snatches of libretto and score, Johnnie London actually, with his own rounded orbs, beheld the ab sorbing spectacle. Incited thereby, after a night of fire-illu mined nightmare, he undertook to build a little hell of his own under the apple tree by the side of the house. He was as-1 sisted wonderingly by his chum, Theodore Crittenden, who, as co-creator, was to be constituted only second in impor tance to his superior's own Satanic Majesty. But swifter hell than had been anticipated broke loose when the Vice- DeviPs assiduous spade accidentally split open the prospec tive Majesty's chubby nose, and Johnnie's lurid dream collapsed in gore and tears on sister Eliza's clean pinafore.

When Jack London turned sadly from the disappointing soil of human society at large, to solve some of its economic problems in the undis appointing if wearied land that he so patiently reclaimed, he sorrowed from year to year, while his terraced hillsides increased their yield, that John Lon don could not be there to behold and rejoice :

"My one greatest regret, always, is that my father could

34 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

not live to share my prosperity, ' ' he would say. ' ' Think of the lasting joy if the two dear old soldiers, your father and mine, could have lived here on the Kanch and watched my blades of grass come up out of the rejuvenated soil — two blades or more where but one grew when I came upon it ! " Alas — the years are many since that pair of stalwart, child- hearted real Americans, born in the same year, laid them selves down untimely.

The three London young folk, Eliza, Ida, and Johnnie, attended the West End School, Alameda, on Pacific Avenue below Webster Street. Eliza was just being gradu ated from grammar grades when Johnnie entered his first schoolroom to study. Here the bashful but trusting little chap recited his first "piece" when he was about six, and with no more liking for public speaking than was his in adult life :

"Christmas is coming, it soon will be here, The very best time in all of the year. I am counting each day on my fingers and thumbs The weeks that must pass before Santa Claus comes. No hard words to spell, no writing, no sums; There's nothing but playtime when Santa Claus comes."

To employ his own words, he had "no recollection of being taught to read or write, ' ' and ' ' could do both at the age of five." Eliza remembers him as forever with a book in his hands ; and, it not being a bookish household, he must have read and reread from the days when she had "read the pictures" to him out of a printed linen Mother Goose. In this manner she had beguiled him to slumber on lonely evenings in San Francisco, when Mr. and Mrs. London were out, probably with their spiritualist friends. In the ten years that the girl constantly companioned her half- brother, she found him intensely alive to impressions, quick to grasp meanings but half explained, and early to make use of his available vocabulary. Of large words

BOYHOOD 35

he heard few; but out of his simple store he sought and applied the precise best ones adapted to express his thought.

But his glorious endowment of normality was pervaded by a sensitiveness that comported with the delicate skin, the aristocratic hands and feet and small-boned frame that never, in adolescence, bore up unharmed under the de mands of contradictory sturdy muscles of shoulder and trunk and limb. This timidity, or shyness, that masked a hunger for sympathy and understanding from moment to moment, was more often expressed by the laying of a dimpled fist into Eliza's ever-receptive clasp. Deep feelings were not habitually demonstrated in the house hold. "I do not remember ever receiving a caress from my mother when I was young, " Jack has said; "but I was at long intervals cheered by my father's comprehending hand laid upon my head, and his kind, ' There, there, sonny ! ' when things went wrong. " Thus Eliza and the boy, both of intensely loving nature, were impelled together in a lasting relation of confidence.

One grateful spot in Alameda memories was the spio and span cottage of Mammy Jenny Prentiss near Willow Street Station. Her bright-eyed foster-baby often ran away to the crooning embrace of the colored woman whose greatest pride was her own untarnished blood, and who always was tastefully and pridefully dressed. There her spoiled white child was sure of welcome and wondrous pastry, dispensed with adoration and a lavish hand, and there "Will and Annie were like cousins." Flora Well- man's own stiff pride of race had already made its mark on Johnnie's subjective operations; but that it had not be come a recognized form is shown by his ignorance of the fact that his half -white playmates were other than like him self. One day, Will Prentiss, aged six, was at the house, getting some of the "culls" of fruit and vegetables with which John London so generously favored his friends. Little Johnnie in an uproarious tomato-fight plastered a

36 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

ripe red one upon the perfect nose Will had inherited from his mother, and cried out with innocent cruelty, to Will's weeping shame: "Oh, gee! Willy! I've made your nose as flat as a nigger's!"

As the savings accumulated, Flora's ambition for the Just Beyond urged her husband toward his unforgotten mecca, and they presently returned to the other side of the Bay. This time they leased a seventy-five acre farm, likely the Tobin Ranch, on the "Peninsula" south of San Fran cisco, in San Mateo County, and near what now shows on the map as Moss Beach. In level sandy loam not far from the ocean, John concentrated upon the perfecting of the finest potatoes in the San Francisco market — his principal triumph on that farm.

Where the money went, over and above necessities, after the expenses of moving had been squared, was a lifelong puzzle to Jack and Eliza. Jack designated himself as a "meat-eater." While there was always enough to eat in the house, flesh-food may at times have been scarce, or delayed in delivery, and he craved it perhaps out of pro portion to his need, as children will. Note the following quotation from a letter, written in a fit of blank' despon dency, to the sweetheart of his early twenties. In view of a possible future with him, she had urged him to for sake writing and cease not from hunting a steady salary.

"Why, as you have laid down my duty in your letter, if I had followed it what would I have been to-day ? I would be a laborer, and by that I mean I would be fitted for nothing else than labor. Do you know my childhood? When I was seven years old at the country school of San Pedro, this happened. Meat, I was that hungry for it I once opened a girl's basket and stole a piece of meat — a little piece the size of my two fingers. I ate it but I never repeated it. In those days, like Esau, I would have literally sold my birthright for a mess of pottage, a piece of meat. Great God ! when those youngsters threw chunks of meat on the ground because of surfeit, I could have dragged it from the dirt and eaten it ; but

BOYHOOD 37

I did not. Just imagine the development of my mind, my soul, under such material conditions. This meat incident is an epitome of my whole life."

Now, from the foregoing and some other quotations, the reader is likely to gather that Jack was at times given to hyperbole when, driven and discouraged, he reviewed his thorny path. I may be forgiven, considering many years of intimate observation, if I comment upon a tendency he evinced toward self-concentration when overdone by thinking, or work, or trouble. This is a delicate matter upon which to disagree, since he is not here to argue the point. But as I see it, his excessive sensibilities, despite formidable endurance, caused him to suffer more acutely, mentally and physically, than the average run of human beings. Since his increasing ambitions to do and be, goaded him ever to superactivity, his case was hopeless, in that he must undergo weariness of heart and brain. He could not rest, therefore he did not rest. Hence, I occasionally found him prone to exaggerate, not the thing itself, but the enormity of the thing treated. Take that matter of going hungry in childhood. Once, looking up from a volume she was reading, I overheard his mother say to Eliza:

"Here Jack has written that he didn't have enough to eat. And I've heard him say the only time he ever took anything that didn't belong to him, was some meat out of another boy's lunch basket at school. Do you remem ber any time when we did not set a good table? I can't. He didn't go hungry in our house! He surely must mean when he was off goose-chasing on the creek, or out all night on the streets, or something of that sort. Why, you know, his father always had vegetables, and if meat was ever scarce, there were plenty of chickens."

And Eliza was equally put to it to recall slim fare.

From Jack London's recollection of this phase in his

38 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

peripatetic life, he drew the rather bleak and depressing coast line, too often muffled in dreary fogs, the scarcity of English-speaking society, his mother 's vaunt that she and hers were "old American stock " and not " dagoes " nor immigrant Irish — and the red brand on his gray substance of a second bout with alcohol. It would seem that from his earliest conscious observation of a beckoning world, turn where he would, alcohol appeared as playing a mys terious part in the pleasures of the god-like, enviably un shackled grown-up, and in the romance, pleasant and other wise, but still the romance, of manly, reckless, invincible youth. His father, in no wise a ' i drinking-man, M found smacking satisfaction in a quart-pail of mild beer; nor was his mother averse to the cooling cup. Even the incompetent who reigned supreme in the little box of a schoolhouse enjoyed ill-hidden libations behind his desk, and afterward a one-sided thrill in "licking" the pupils who were too small to retaliate, as the larger sometimes did.

At the long desk with his class, Johnnie had not sat without meditating, no matter to how little purpose, over the very evident pleasurable action upon the grown-ups of beverages other than water. For so precocious a child in book-learning, he was peculiarly and adorably a hero-wor shiper of those in authority, whose opinions he accepted as inspired. Until partial disillusionment in late boy hood, this open-souled trustfulness was always a-battle with an intellectual development out of keeping with his age.

And now, the guileless little man came to grips with hitherto unknown breeds of humans upon a temperamental day of mingled Italian and Irish joviality, largely induced by heavy red grape of California, there was literally thrust upon him his second stunning brush with an am bushed enemy he had no wisdom nor preparation for with standing.

The Week of the Holy Ghost was nigh, and an in vitation to unlimited hospitality for seven days and nights

BOYHOOD 39

to the countryside dwellers of whatsoever nationality or religion, was sent out by an Italian ranchman, "old man Margo. ' ' Now, the Signor Margo had married an English woman who had given him a fair-haired, blue-eyed son, Dominic, whom it was the father's fond ambition to waste no time in marrying to the right American girl. The trim looks and competent ways of Eliza London, in her earliest teens, had attracted many an approving glance from the old man, and an exceptionally pressing bid was made for the company of her family at his house. The elders de clined, but allowed the children to go.

So it came about that on Sunday the three young Lon- dons trudged six miles to the Margo ranch, where a typical Irish-Italian merrymaking was in full blast. By this time the small brother's searching mind had begun to lead him out of his timorousness, and the tanned little fists were more often by his sides or occupied otherwise than in feeling for his elder sister's protecting hand. Life was commencing to wave her royal-colored emblems before his awakening eyes, and more and more was he lost in con templation of her pageantry, to a growing oblivion of the old self-consciousness. But he was an infant at heart, unknowing of evil, and the occurrences of this Sabbath day were burned inerasably on the malleable stuff of his reactive brain.

From the Margo kitchen the strange clamor of a cul minating situation, begun with the free drinking of the previous night, only whetted the half-fearful inquisitive- ness of our trio, which drew them irresistibly into the reek ing dim room. Small Johnnie's big eyes must have nearly burst their expansive spheres at this sudden introduction into a scene where the gamut of human passions was either sounded or indicated. To woman's hysteria he was no stranger — his adult aversion to such uncontrol amounted almost to a hysteria in itself ; but the girls ' screams, fright ened or loudly skittish, at the rough or drink-addled per-

40 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

formances of the men with them or with one another, cur dled his tender blood and nerves. He sat in a daze. His sense of proportion was all awry. Never, even under tantrums, had he beheld humans acting so illogically — flying tooth and nail at one another's throats one minute, the next clumping to ungainly embraces of forgiveness and reeling good fellowship; while yet others, too sodden to fight, mouthed their tongue-tangled approval or criticism of the changing humors of stronger-headed brethren.

The seven-year-old child, soon fascinated beyond vestige of alarm, sensed the increasing tide of lawlessness as the men poured an incessant stream of liquid down their straightened necks. He saw the now worried girls melt out of the doorways, as the clumsy brawling doubled and trebled among the rough aliens of hot and unruly bloods, until some impetus sent the whole mad company lurching down the sandy road to another ranch.

And the diminutive Jack London here put into practice the first evidence of that tactful sixth sense of fitness that early rendered him, the indomitable, fine one, into the very genius of Mixers. In a few years this intuitive faculty was to earn him the proudest title ever bestowed upon him by the sycophant earth — Prince of the Oyster Pirates. For now a wee Irish lassie, only other child of his age in the maudlin crowd, walked by his side. Like many another gay blade, he never was able to recall the name of his sweet maiden ; but the favor in her blue, blue eyes commanded a chivalrous instinct to emulate her older sister's swain, walking just ahead, in all but his gait. Around her plump waist went his dutiful, sympathetic if timid arm, and they bumped along in blissful discomfort for the half of an uneven sandy mile — after which, guided by her consenting eyes, they clasped hands instead.

Turn about, the Irish ranch hilariously welcomed the partially sobered pilgrims, who "tanked up" afresh, till afresh swelled and roared the fun. A hospitable Italian

BOYHOOD 41

offered Johnnie wine. He declined with thanks, and later a second proffer. And here renewed apprehension quickened his heart-beats, for there loomed suddenly the oft-voiced prejudice of his blonde mother toward all black-eyed men and women, as being actuated by deceitful motives, if nothing more deadly. As for Latins, "dagoes" as they were known to her confiding offspring, their ways were associated in 'his mind with keen-flashing knives called daggers.

When Italian Pete, with humorous diablerie unguessed by the alarmed boy, clouded his black brows over the lightning of blacker, snapping eyes, in fiery disapproval of this insult to red, red wine, Johnnie 's nerves already made him feel the thrusted two-edged metal turning be tween his ribs. In that semi-autobiography * ' John Barley corn, " thirty years later he wrote: "I have faced real death since in my life, but never have I known the fear of death as I knew it then/' Nevertheless he steeled him self and put his dimpled hands about the !heavy glass, which he lifted and drained to the nauseating bitter dregs — and dregs they were, for this was the cheap "red paint" made from the leavings of great vats after the best vintage had been casked.

Poor little lad! One's heart wells and there is a catch in the throat to picture him sitting there in his linen jumper, dusty small feet dangling above the floor he could not reach, and, for once alone and unadvised, facing with wide, brave eyes the very certainty of violent extinction from an existence he had but lately begun to appraise and value. "One will do anything to live," he goes on in what he called his "alcoholic memoirs." The little chap downed a second and what seemed countless succeeding draughts of liquid fire to his unaccustomed membranes, for the loudly amused Pete had called his friends one and all to witness the valiant infant. Little the boy recked that he was invit ing strangling death otherwise than from the assassin's

42 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

knife. That he did not smother, then or in the follow ing hours, is the everlasting marvel. Out of the house and on the heavy gray road again, with his own girl like the other sweethearts soher and solicitous of him, in a tottering haze he solemnly imitated the antics of the wild Irish and Italians in the zigzagging procession that wound among the sandhills. And finally, still imitating, he brought up in a roadside ditch, although he had not intended to overstep its dizzy edge. Out of what might have been his open grave, his sisters and several badly scared older girls fished him, and like one roused from his last sleep in the snow, they tried to keep him walking, walking, those in terminable miles home. But when Mrs. London opened the door, it was from their arms she received her raving, un conscious son.

" It is a wonder that I did not burst my heart or brain that night/' he says in "John Barleycorn, " detailing the experience in such way as the searing horror made pos sible at so long range of time. And in spite of the heroic reputation his prowess gave him amongst the aliens roundabout, very clear was his " resolution never to touch alcohol again. " "No mad dog was ever more afraid of water, " and "I didn't like the damned stuff, " he recalls his subsequent childish perspective, for there was not much living language in the neighborhood that did not enter into the processes of his pliant, growing brain.

Before he was eight, this sweetly gullible boy with his remarkable contrasting outlook had somehow come into possession of an incomplete copy of Ouida's "Signa," which his mind absorbed like an unspotted, depthless blot ter. In the spring of 1912, Jack London, one day brow sing in a dingy second-hand shop in Harlem for books to add to our traveling library on a voyage around Cape Horn, came across a cheap reprint of "Signa." Home to our Morningside apartment he carried the small-typed story which, he had all his life declared, had had more in-

BOYHOOD 43

fluence in the shaping of his carrer than any other, not even excepting Herbert Spencer's "Philosophy of Style. " Upon the lurching poop-deck of the big four-master ' * Diri- go," off the unseen coast of Brazil, I listened, not always with dry eyes, to the rhythmic, caressing voice as Jack reread the loved romance which had opened to his groping intelligence the gates to unsurmised beauty.

"He was only a little lad," was Signa, the warm-souled Italian peasant child who attained to heights of fame. With these very words the roseate tale commenced. And so was he, schoolboy Johnnie London, only a little lad. Therefore he speedily constituted himself a peasant like wise, in whom there might reside untold marvel of genius, even if imprisoned within a gray landscape that required closed eyes and concentration to clothe with the splendor that was Signa 's Italy.

"Beading the story," the grown man gazed down his years, "my narrow hill-horizon was pushed back, and all the world made possible if I would dare it. ' ' And he dared, at least to contemplate greatness for himself. Like the tawny, golden-eyed bambino, he would become a musician, and a superlative one; only, his mother's unforgotten les sons led him to think music in terms of ivory keys and cer tain not unpleasing harmonies he had stumbled upon. There was no piano in the farm house, and the breathy strains in dance-measure, from accordions manipulated by tipsy vol unteers on that shuddering Sunday of Holy Week, were the sole music he had heard for nearly two years.

Eliza's budding practical foresight had not hitherto made toward planning artistic achievement for her dreamy half-brother. But when he had coaxed her to read his book, with mutual infatuation they discussed it upon every pos sible occasion — while he dried the dishes, or they helped papa sack his smooth-coated, regularly symmetrical pota- tpes, or in quiet corners where she helped him with his

44 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

examples. Ouida herself would doubtlessly have regretted the established denouement of her own novel, could she have listened to the hazards these two made concerning the miss ing last quarter of it. However, they did come to share it in the long run of their futures.

CHAPTER IV

LIVERMORE VALLEY Ages 8 to 10

LIVERMORE VALLEY, where lay the last of the string of farms in John London 's diminishing fate, never glowed in Jack London's memory any more rosily than the preceding San Mateo countryside. A fertile enough dis trict it was, and undeniably torrid in midsummer, as I can attest ; for here, again, our paths crossed when I as a child camped in the low hills not far from this same farm. ' * Livermore Valley was very flat, ' ' was his retrospect, * * and even the hills around were then, to me, devoid of interest. . . . They and their valleys were eyesores and aching pits, and I never loved them till I left them. ' '

"Signa," pored over for numberless hours here, from his eighth to tenth year, and still lacking the forty tragic final pages, had ruined him for the commonplace. "Even then there were whispers, art-promptings; my mind in clined to things beautiful." Life on a ranch became to his awakened ambition "the dullest possible existence, " while every day he "thought of going out beyond the skyline to see the world." He was on his bright way to a soaring idealism, which later, combined with an enduring practi cality, made of him an extraordinary entity both as Doer and Thinker.

Despite the dreary image of it which he henceforth car ried, the eighty-acre Livermore holding was really the liveliest and most promising of all — and further distin guished as the first California land John London had been able to call his own. As a grown citizen, Jack would

45

46 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

have been charmed by the fact that it was portion of an old Spanish estate, and thus bound indissolubly with the glamorous 'forties. As it was, the farm could not have been actually unattractive. There was a nine-acre orchard in full bearing, and what boy does not welcome an orchard ? And pigs there were, chickens, and cooing pigeons galore — to say nothing of remunerative rabbits, fluffy, snow- white, pink jewel-eyed bunnies that could not but stir the boy's animal loving bosom as well as his innate sense of beauty; while the proud cocks and their harems were of no mean breeds. The farm house was comfortably large for all needs of family and the extra men hired in harvest time. To be sure, everybody worked — Flora and her husband here and there and everywhere. Eliza, barely fifteen, cooked for the whole hungry establishment, and besides aided her papa with the rabbits and pigeons and the three incubators in the brooding houses — John was right up to the minute in modern appliances, — not to speak of her work in the vegetable areas. As with Jack London, there was never anything small or restricted in John's projection of an ultimate achievement. It was in judg ment of character, and of investments for his hard-gained money, that he seemed wanting. He had failed to discover in civilized society the undeviating honor shown to honor by the otherwise crafty aborigine of the Middle States. Per haps, too, he was leniently weak in the matter of capitu lating to counsel even less prudent than his own. Just when he might be considering a halt in expenditures, his wife's vehemently expressed insights would make appeal, or, listening to her exposition of the way out of a difficulty, he would be overborne. Thus a mortgage was laid upon the Livermore land in order to erect a twenty-five-hundred dollar barn for his Blackhawk and Morgan horses; and proud as he was of this handsome feature of the farm, he was not content under the burden of debt. And yet, just as he had gambled on new scenes in his youth, this

LIVERMORE VALLEY 47

fresh risk was not without its allurement; and the pair of them took other long chances — poorly handled investments, irresistible lottery tickets, and God knows what else.

John's aspirations were far-seeing and clean. It was more than a decade after the good man was laid to rest that Jack London 's own agricultural experimentation began to open out. And he grieved for the broken dream and endeavor of this honorable, straight-aiming spirit. John's best satisfaction, even at toll of grinding labor, lay in pur suing an ideal which the younger man, guided by his cumula tive data, came to regard as unerring and incalculable in its economic benefit toward humanity.

Sometimes their mysterious affairs caused Mr. and Mrs. London to drive up to San Francisco. And he, reins taut over the polished backs of the best trotting-blood in Amer ica, probably was happier then than at any other time in his middle life. Later, the beautiful Blackhawk stallion, with his mares as well as the Morgans, went to liquidate the liv ery stable bills incurred on these trips. Once they had re mained away for two months, leaving Eliza in sole charge. She must have pondered, young thing that she was, while she worked indoors and in field, grasping what little social fun there was to be had in the sparse neighborhood, if life were all of a workaday piece. Her half-brother pon dered, too, when he trudged home from school and found her hard at it, in season and out, and himself called to help at chores. Yes, everybody had to labor, it seemed, women and all. There must be some way out. And while he per formed his day-long task of watching for the bees to swarm, he registered the vow that when he became a man, no women-folk of his should toil like this.

How they got into the house he never knew, but one day he came upon a "Life of Garfield," also a worn copy of "Paul du Chaillu's African Travels, " in which he retained belief and admiration all his life. The school teacher lent him Washington Irving 'a "Alhambra," which he proceeded

48 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

to bolt whole, and reread and digest for the period spent on the Livermore farm. Once again, always the Builder, he started to build, not a little Inferno as in Ala- meda, but an Alhambra on the plans of Washington Irving. From the mellow-red bricks of a fallen chimney he reared its towers and laid out terraces and arcades, labeling with his school chalk its various sections. All the while he existed in a world of his own making, that outstripped the humdrum existence of the hot little ranch — a world so real that he could not comprehend why every one, at home or in school, did not share in the wonder of his creation. He seemed set aloof from the beginning, by means of the un common knowledge he acquired.

"My other reading matter," he surveyed that portion of his childhood, " consisted mainly of dime novels, bor rowed from the hired man, and newspapers in which they gloated over the adventures of poor but virtuous shop girls." Through reading such trash, he goes on, his out look became ridiculously conventional; and so, when a stranger arrived from the city, very proper as to manner and boots, with fine clothes and stylish hat, the famished idealist conceived this to be the manner of man who would know all about the Alhambra and be able to discuss the en chanting subject. He possessed himself of the visitor's unwilling hand, led him to where the little red-brick Al hambra lifted its proud turrets, then stood looking up with shining expectation of an oracular approval. None was forthcoming — nothing but a laughing sneer; and the pitiful small seeker, abashed and comfortless, fell back upon the inevitable if perplexing conclusion that there must be but two clever persons in the whole desolate scheme of things — himself and Washington Irving. This "gentleman" guest from the city, heaven knows why, deliberately and with malice stole and hid the hallowed volume far under neath the house, in company with a cherished rubber ball. I have seen Jack almost weep when reviewing the tragedy

LIVERMORE VALLEY 49

it was to his trusting little self, puzzled, blameless of of fense — for he was not a boisterous or troublesome child. None but a creature of distorted impulses could have tortured a young thing for days and nights as this one was tortured. Superacute as pain always was to his body, never did he suffer as keenly from physical as from mental hurt. Only an inherent normality preserved him from spiritual ruination by his non-understanding en vironment. I cannot recall distinctly how he recovered the book, but have a dim impression that he told me the tormenter finally guided him to the point whence he had thrown it under the house, and laughed mockingly at the scrambling bare legs of the youngster as he dived unafraid among cobwebs and ordinarily dreaded crawly things, in eagerness to clasp his treasure.

Johnnie 's first acquaintance with death came dur ing this phase in his undirected development, and fur nished matter for exercise of his speculative trend. He was helping his father reset some pasture fence posts that the cows had bent down. Digging deep, John London un earthed a corpse that had not altogether returned to dust. The boy remembered it as a fearsome mess that had lain a long time. They never learned how it came there.

That he was beginning to formulate some sort of logical sequence out of the chaotic mass of observations which bivouacked in his brain, and suspect a different and im proved existence, is evidenced by a well-ordered plan he outlined to Eliza for their common future. They were to live in a large dwelling almost entirely filled with books. He would not marry until he was forty and his mind stored with the knowledge he craved ; for matrimony did not pre sent itself as conducive to studious repose. Meantime Eliza would make a home for them both, and more especially stand between him and the annoying people he yearned to avoid.

It may be that I have Eliza to thank that this became

50 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

my own devoted task, instead of hers. At the age of sixteen she exchanged one life of unrelieved care for an other, by uniting herself to a widowed veteran of the Civil War, one Captain James H. Shepard, nearly thirty years her senior and with several children, the eldest about Johnnie's age. Captain Shepard, desiring to place his motherless brood in a country home, had written to a friend in San Francisco, who in turn inquired of Flora London if she could accommodate them. Some correspondence passed, and through misunderstanding Captain Shepard arrived at the farm with the children when John and Flora were away. Eliza drove to the station to meet the guests, and entertained them to the best of her conspicuous ability, captivating the middle-aged ex-soldier as much as any thing else by her maternal ways. In three months her little brother's dream was smashed and he left deso late, for she married and went to live in Oakland. Her devotion to the stepchildren was provocative of much good- natured raillery amongst the neighbors, to the effect that she had fallen in love with and married the children.

Through a combination of disastrous investments, and poor management, things had been going from bad to worse. A few months after Eliza's departure the farm was abandoned and as much realized as possible from the sacri fice of improvements. John and his wife with their boy and Ida removed to Oakland, where they put what was left from the farm proceeds into an eight-roomed house at East Seventeenth Street between Twenty-second and Twenty- third Avenues, near where Eliza lived. Not far off dwelt Mammy Jenny Prentiss, whose joy it was to spoil more passionately than ever her " white child," for his foster- sister and -brother were both underground by now. When Prentiss died some years later, Jenny sustained herself a long time by nursing and a slight income from a bit of inherited " property" she always proudly referred to. Chided for working so hard, when she might rest upon her

LIVERMORE VALLEY 51

foster-son's bounty, she would indignantly snap: "They think I'm in my dotey (dotage), and can't take care of my self alone ! ' ' This pride cost the adult Jack more trouble than her "property" was ever worth, for she looked to him to make it pay. He often advised her to sell her lots and spend the money on herself — "Buy silk dresses and theater tickets with it, Mammy Jenny," he would implore. "You know I'm never going to see you in need, now and forever, whether I live or die ; and I want you to quit worry ing and have a good time with your money while you can" — all the while appreciating her desire for economic inde pendence.

In his eleventh year, the dreaming lad awaken ing to the gripping, harsh realties, began to perceive the under side of things. He was enrolled as one of the first pupils of the four-roomed Garfield School on Twenty- third Avenue, between Sixteenth and Seventeenth Streets, and soon progressed to the Franklin School at Eleventh Avenue and Fifteenth, where he came abruptly upon his first radical clash with another's personality. The teacher did not understand him nor even try. He, phenomenally quick in mastering lessons, which gave him more time for the ever-handy story book, could not learn from her, and failed of promotion. More than once his perturbed mother was obliged to call at the schoolhouse to straighten out al leged insubordination. He was 'an eminently teachable creature, but from the very first he seemed to gather that teachers were not placed on a rostrum to thwik, but merely to teach. Whenever he tried to elicit reasoned opinions upon his vivid ideas and their relations one to another, he faced a stone wall, and was thrown, as in the Alhambra inci dent, back upon himself and his lonely particular ego. Evi dently the system was such that a child could not learn to the extent he was able, but must limit his most divine search- ings to a gray curriculum that was, for him, only too readily compassed. He did not represent the difficulty in just this

52 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

way, but clearly grasped that he was embarrassingly differ ent from the patterned children around him, and that his gropings and probings were interpreted as impertinences. He had not yet happened upon the felicitous word "mush" to describe the interior substance of certain persons pos sessed or unpossessed of teachers' certificates.

But what he did or did not gain from association with so blind a treatment, drove him, as did his first and very brief university education, to the ramshackle public library that leaned against the old City Hall on Fourteenth Street, for collateral reading. The little boy, hunched over the worn library table, so long deprived of all literature except the four books at Livermore, devoured print until his eye- muscles twitched and burned and he saw black spots every where ; while his almost prostrated nerves jumped into the preliminary stages of St. Vitus' dance. He became so irascible and rickety that he would cry out when spoken to or touched, " Don't bother me — go away, you make me nervous ! ' ' Somewhere he writes : "I filled an application blank [with "The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle"], and the librarian handed me the collected and entirely unex- purgated works of Smollett in one huge volume. I read everything, but principally history and adventure, and all the old travels and voyages. I read mornings, afternoons, and nights. I read in bed, I read at table, I read as I walked to and from school, and I read at recess while the other boys were playing." It was at the ripe age of twelve that he came to read Wilkie Collins 's "The New Magdalen," and greatly shocked a nice young lady by trying to discuss it.

Presently he attracted the notice of the head librarian, Miss Ina Coolbrith, and fell shyly in love with this to him new type of womanhood — so lady-fine, and a true poetess. Hers was the first intellectual guidance under which he benefited, and he never ceased from his loving gratitude and admiration.

Straightway the boy's two families, his mother's and

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Eliza Shepard's, must apply for library cards, which he kept so busy that he crossed and recrossed the library threshold more often than any other subscriber. It was from this same public library that, when he joined the Klondike Rush, he calmly walked off with two volumes, upon Eliza's pledge that she would reimburse the library — a pledge which she kept, whether or not she approved of the somewhat irregular transaction. ' ' The fact that he wanted it done, was enough, " she tersely comments upon the incident.

Luckily for physical well-being, Johnnie soon realized that he must bestir himself toward his own up-keep, and the first move was on the street, selling newspapers. Home life was soon a thing forgotten, if ever it had been a normal one for this spiritually lonely creature. His mother had now determined that a boarding-house for the Scotch women-workers at the California Cotton Mills near by would recover her shrunken fortunes. At times when a cook was unobtainable, Eliza came over and helped out as a matter of course. With the boarding-house earnings in hand, Flora's project spread into a lot next door, which she mortgaged so that she might erect a rooming-house upon it. Her idea was Utopian, for was it not a fine thing for these factory women each to have her own private apartment? But her altruism did not go hand in hand with ability to see it through, and scheme as she and her good husband might, in the end both properties were forfeited to the mortgage.

Jack London's tenderest and most sympathetic mem ories of his father centered about occasions when the two went boating and fishing on the " Creek," an estu ary lying between Oakland and Alameda. His unchained, mobile imagination had begun to take hold upon the dull tragedy of this man with the merciful lips and hands who had asked so little of a perverse destiny which had withheld success from him in even that little. He made no outcry;

54 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

but from under the thoughtful heavy brows the kind gray eyes gazed forlornly enough across the green water-way to the low ground that was once blessed with his rows of corn and potato hills and succulent resetted lettuces, and the coral stalks of rhubarb that had been Eliza 's especial care and pride. The minds of John London 's few acquaint ances who still live, are tinged by the lifeless impression carried from those years when the merry-hearted one had become a broken thing, hiding an aching sense of failure beneath his fine reticence. It is but a spiritless image of the warm and lovable character that they can reconstruct.

The average man or woman does not easily learn to search beneath the restrained exterior, the bearded visage, for the tender mouth; or behind the quiet, retrospective eye, for the gentle strength and humor — qualities that were more and more hidden as the elder London bowed to dis illusionment. But Jack, being Jack, was by now able to extract more knowledge of his goodness and personal charm than at any time in their years of daily intercourse. This was enhanced by the semi-adventurous experiences they shared on that attractive body of tide water which washed the keels of idle whalers and the ornate sterns of vessels of all rigs and builds from all the world, laid up at the edge of the Alameda flats. Most of them never budged until the Great War required them. Whether digging clams in the oily, cool blue mud, or fishing for flounders and rock cod and " shiners " from wharves or anchored skiff or the old sea-wall that bounded the Creek on the north, or rowing and sailing curiously amongst those painted hulls that had thrilled to the onslaught of the Seven Seas — it was all of a fabric of romance with the books. And in those rare days of quiet communion or interesting hap and mishap, the two came to love each other in true comradely, unquestioning fashion, as they had never before loved any one. Only their eyes, blue to blue under Cali fornia's blue sky, spoke the deep and holy sentiment that

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stirred them. Each was better and happier, back in the clattering boarding-house, for these comprehending hours out upon the waters.

Here, tugging at anchor in flood or ebb, or at the oars plunging bow-on to the glossy gray -green rollers cast by John L. Davie 's big side-wheel ferry steamers, or yet learning the why and wherefore of eating into the wind under a tiny sail, the little born seaman 's heart was claimed by the wave. In all his vivid life, never was he so at rest in spirit as upon the water — be it deep sea or inland stretch.

A railroad accident to John at about this juncture, which laid him up with several fractured ribs, did not improve the prospect ; and the succeeding house where the growing boy passed his sleeping hours — for home to him had become a place where one slept and ate — was a small one in the "West End," on Pine Street below Seventh, near the familiar " Point. " This man Davie, who had established the new five-cent ferry route to San Francisco from where Broadway ended in the estuary, cutting the octopean South ern Pacific's rate two-thirds, gave the recuperating John London a job as night watchman. In the daytime he added to his slender means by canvassing and collecting. Pres ently, when John L. Davie rose in Oakland politics, he appointed his dependable friend as a special officer on the Police Force. It was the same Davie, at this writing, Mayor of Oakland for the third time, who, backed by the City Council, in 1917 transplanted from Mosswood Park a sev enteen-year-old oak, twenty-four feet high, to the City Hall Park, where it was dedicated to the memory of Jack Lon don, son of his old friend. Only a few yards from this thriving young denizen of the open, now towers the impressive building that superseded the old City Hall and public library where Jack London ' ' opened the books ' ' and began the omniverous reading he pursued unabated for the thirty years that followed.

56 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

Under Officer London 's protection the newsboy was con voyed about in the ' 'tenderloin ' ' night life of the town, and new and lurid were the reflections that flitted across his expansile mental mirror. In such conditions the two resumed their ever sweet if fragmentary companionship. Squeezed behind the door-keepers of public dance-halls, or of dives, the boy strained his eyes upon the curious per formances of the under-world, as well as those of the re laxing working classes. Here again, he could not but be struck by the fool-making effects of too much alcohol ; and when these effects exceeded foolishness, and drinkers were jangled off to jail in "hurry-up wagons, " he was confused by the fact that drinking was a licensed pastime for the young as well as the matured, and not frowned upon by the men who sat in the high places. On the contrary, in saloons he actually beheld such exalted personages also imbibing the potent drafts, little recking that their joviality was often but a cloak for ills that drove them to the inhibitions of alcohol.

Another circumstance that throws light upon his mental strife was the recurrent enigma as to where the dollars went that his father and mother earned. He knew roughly what constituted living expenses ; but where disappeared the sur plus, and his own little hoardings? For Jack's inner hurt, at the time, I have recourse again to his letter to the sweet heart of his early twenties :

4 ' I was eight years old when I put on my first undershirt made at or bought at a store. Duty !— at ten years I was on the street selling newspapers. Every cent was turned over to my people, and I went to school in constant shame of the hats, shoes, clothes I wore. Duty — from then on, I had no childhood. Up at three o'clock in the morning to carry papers. When that was finished I did not go home but continued on to school. School over, my even ing papers. Saturday I worked on an ice wagon ; Sunday I went to a bowling alley and set up pins for drunken Dutchmen. Duty — I turned over every cent and went dressed like a scarecrow. ' '

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Delivering the afternoon paper led him into queer places and deeper bewilderment. In Temescal, at that time the "tough" northern boundary of the city, when he handed the " Enquirer •" to Josie Harper, mistress of a road house at Thirty-ninth Street and Telegraph Avenue, he marveled that so immense and unladylike a female should be less forbidding in her manner than certain more refined sub scribers. He could not help liking her rough-and-ready jollity, and one day when she asked the barkeeper to pour a glass of wine for him, he was powerless to refuse the honor. But it tasted no better than the "red paint" of Italian Pete, and in future he tried to pass the paper to the barkeeper rather than to that dignitary's hospitable em ployer.

One happening in his news -purveying always stood forth sharply if laughably in memory, an additional item that gave him pause with regard to the strangeness of human destiny. An appetizing odor of coffee drifted through the doorway of a squalid hallway where he had just shot the hard-folded morning sheet out of his dexterous hand. Now Jack was at all times a lover of coffee, and nothing would do but he must follow his twitching nose the length of the narrow passage, and stick that same nose into a kitchen to the right.

1 i Good morning, ' ' he remarked pleasantly, with no idea that his friendly mood would be met otherwise than friendlily; for there was about him a naturally engaging expectancy of fair treatment that neither the buffeting of childhood nor maturity could quench from his spirit.

A grizzled slattern, prey of God knows what ill-usage and despair, whirled from the hot stove, butcher-knife in hand, and made one leap for him as his foot was raised to step inside. Only the genius for keeping one jump ahead of all sentient life on his familiar planet saved his face, literally speaking, not to mention his skull. But one correlation deserted him — or was it that she beat him to

58 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

the outer egress ? He found himself blocked from the street entrance, with no avenue but an uninviting stairway at the rear of the hall. Up this he tore three steps at a time, barely escaping the slashing blade wielded by the crazed, panting harridan.

Doubling back along the parallel upper hallway, he broke through the door in which it ended, into a room where an unoffending elderly couple flew awake at his abrupt entry. Before they could protest, he had swept off their entire bedcovering, and faced right-about to meet the onrush of the raging bedlamite, who had been halted but an instant by the door he had not forgotten to shut. Fling ing over her head the smother of blankets, he tripped and laid her impotently struggling on the floor, and made good his escape; and sweet music to his ears were her muffled shrieks.

Ida London had married. From this union was born Jack's nephew, John Miller. So, Jack's family had dwin dled to three. In the little Pine Street cottage, for some cause that was justified in his mother's mind, he received his first, and last, whipping from her reluctant husband. John rebelled, but finally submitted. He and Jack, the latter far more concerned for his father than for himself, went where they could earnestly discuss the punishment from every angle. Each tried to hide from the other his own belief in the joint disaster that was to befall them, but agreed that in all the circumstances it would better be gone through and done with. And when the onerous duty had been performed, man and boy, they abolished habitual re serve and wept unashamed in each other's arms.

"But what possessed her, do you suppose?" he wound up. "Whom do you think I must have reminded her of — what dark vengeance did I suggest? — I'll never be satisfied until I know, and I '11 never know ! ' '

Jack London always retained the conviction that his original impetus toward literary leanings was supplied by

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a teacher under whom he sat during the last of his grammar school education, in the Cole School at Twelfth and Alice Streets. Jack had the gift of a pure and musical voice, and the spinster in authority "flatted" abominably. Ergo, Jack presently demonstrated his mettle by firmly declining to join in the offending discord, stating his reasons when asked. The lady, by nature incapable of admitting her failure, wrestled with the obdurate pupil, but was finally obliged to send him to the principal. Mr. Garlick, instead of thrashing the lad, and so trying to force him toward the destruction of a notably true sense of pitch, listened atten tively to his reasoning, and talked over the question at some length. Being what he proved during many years in the Oakland halls of learning, both judicial and commendably politic, Mr. Garlick delved into the predispositions of the young brain, informed himself where the student stood highest, and returned him with a note to the school mistress. Therein she was tactfully instructed, under the guise of advice, to command Jack to occupy the vocal peri ods in writing compositions. And thus he, who dearly loved music and singing, was deprived of one outlet only to pour another talent upon paper, which he did with con siderable gusto and resultant good, if grudged, marks.

It was upon his entry into the Cole School that he made his stand for the simple and effective name of Jack Lon don. i i Your name V ' the teacher asked. ' ' Jack London. ' ' "No," she admonished, "you mean John London." "No, ma'am," respectfully but with finality, "my name is Jack London." Some further discussion ensued, but the name Jack London went upon the roll intact, as it has stood upon a greater roll this many a year.

There were other boys in the Cole School at the same time with Jack London, who made successful names for themselves — James Hopper, first as foot-ball * ' giant ' ' at the University of California, later story-writer and war cor respondent; Elmer Harris, well known playwright; and

60 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

Ed Boreen, since illustrator and artist. But, as " Jimmie" Hopper once said, they were " pretty tough kids, I think, who would have shied a brick at any long-nose who might have suggested we write or draw."

Another situation Mr. Garlick worked out in this man ner : Jack and a classmate, balked mid-battle in a soaring ex hibition of fisticuffs, were called upon the carpet. An in terrogation satisfied the Principal that Jack had had cause for starting the row, but he fancied chancing an experiment. He left it to the pair of flushed and itching combatants to continue the engagement to a finish, then and there in his office, or, calmly, like "little gentlemen," to consider all sides, and kiss and make up. "I will," promptly of fered the other boy, who had tasted the bitter impact of Jack's small, agile fists. The latter, not wholly unscarred, though not relishing such caress from one whom he was sure he could ' ' lick ' ' in fair fight, hesitated but a moment. Then, with heaven knows what correlations of pride, defeat, con sideration for his admired superior, and his latent sense of humor, all flashing across his subjectivity, with a half- abashed grin he stuck out a grimy paw and met his late enemy's lips.

John London, once summoned to stop a fray in which his son was successively taking on the members of an entire family of brothers, each one taller than the latest van quished, inquired as he strode to the scene: "Is my boy fighting fair? — if he is, I guess there ain't any call for me to interfere." And he puffed his pipe with earnest ap preciation sitting in his eyes, until the biggest of all the brothers of the smitten line tried to deliver a foul blow to the infuriated bantam, when John called a halt. He insisted only that his boy, playing the game in clean sporting fashion, should be met by sporting methods, even by one twice his adversary's size.

Who can overestimate the blessing of the influence upon Jack London, exerted in their different fields by men like

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Mr. Garlick and John London f It endured as a prominent factor in the youth 's wisely- timed emergence from the vicious environment that presently claimed him, and that would in short order have destroyed him as it destroyed many of his companions. The effect of these two was price less in the expanding mental operations of the boy, as he evolved a working philosophy that enabled him to deal in telligently with boys and men of strange breeds and out landish practices. And terribly soon it was to be almost solely from associates physically his seniors that he was to learn "the worst too young."

CHAPTER V

BOYHOOD TO YOUTH I OAKLAND ESTUARY, SAILOEING, ETC.

WITH an inherent aristocracy of both mental and physical being, sometimes Jack London indulged in speculation upon the effect, had this significant term been passed under cultured and leisured conditions.

"I should most likely have become a poet," he would reflect, "or a composer. As it was, an equal urge came to me later from both poetry and music. Somewhat of an exquisite, I 'm afraid, if only from my excessive physical sensibilities — but I am surely not a sissy ! " with a whimsical look at me. "If I had turned to sociology at all, it would have been merely in an intellectual, impersonal way, not because I felt kinship with the submerged. Curiosity, rather than sympathy, would have led me to investigate here and there out of my elect caste. You know how I love to prowl anyway — no interval is long enough to make me for get the lure of it." And to Cloudesley Johns in March, 1899. he wrote: "It is well you appreciate the virtue in lack of wealth, and you seem to be all the better for it. Here's what wealth would have done for me : it would have turned me into a prince of good fellows, and, barring acci dent, would have killed me of strong drink before I was thirty."

By nature a leader, a master, Jack would probably have grown up elegantly autocratic, even despotic in a benevolent way, had the conditions during his adolescence been more sympathetic. As it was, there was implanted in him a second nature of protest and rebellion. However, except in so far as he bludgeoned with that puissant intellect, there

62

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was no cruelty in him. Once, and once only, in childhood, he had tortured an animal, a frog — the only assignable mo tive being curiosity. He never forgot this, nor ever forgave himself. In the year of his death, I happened to be present when a young fellow related humorously, and with apparent relish, how in boyhood he had suspended a puppy by its paws and enjoyed its yapping when he struck it. From the phenomenon of his face I glanced at Jack's, which moved no muscle, yet recoiled with every nerve, while his eyes became welling pools of darkness. He had liked this man. By land and variant waterways I have travelled with Jack London: by steamer — tramp and liner; windjammer, sampan, pleasure craft of all sorts; in railroad trains of many countries; by automobile, bicycle, saddle, and horse- drawn vehicle, from cart to tallyho ; even on foot, which was least to our mutual liking ; and we but awaited opportunity to take to the blue together — this chance coming to me alone after he had gone beyond that blue. But it was upon the liquid two-thirds of earth's surface that I saw him the most blissfully content. Dawn or twilight, he loved the way of a boat upon the sea. His bright inquisitive spirit might have sailed to its human birthing, so native was he to the world's watery spaces. The sea nurtured a gallant and adventurous spirit that made us all watch his banner. His influence was felt like a great vitalizing breath from the West — wide land of red-veined men — in which he lived and died. "Seamen have at all times been a people apart," curiously so, from the rest of their kind ; and the sailor Jack London was a man apart from the rest of himself. Imagination, nerves, work, pleasure, all ran in smoother grooves when his feet stood between the moving surface and the blowing sky, his own intelligence the equalizing force amidst unstable elements. Seldom in waking hours without books or spoken argument exerting upon his wheeling brain, yet at the helm of his boat, braced for day-long hours, he would stand rapt in healthful ecstasy of sheer being, lord of life and the harnessed powers

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of nature, unheedful of physical strain, his own hand direct ing fate.

Graduation from grammar school came at about his thirteenth year. Pathetically enough, the poor boy did not appear at the graduation exercises, because he was ashamed of his shabby clothes. It may interest the harsh critic of Jack London 's chosen careless attire, to learn that he was once slave of convention in the matter of clothing. I have heard him laugh softly, with a dimness in his eyes, at the pathos of the shrinking little figure he had cut in earliest schooling days, when his mother resolutely clad him in some garment he thought different from his schoolmates' clothes, and he died a thousand deaths of shame.

It had come to the ears of busy Eliza that her brother intended to forego being class historian at the ceremonial, to which honor he had been elected. She made an effort to locate him, that she might buy him a new outfit, and left word for him to come to her. But for some cause her plans miscarried.

School finished, what play-time remained after "hus tling" newspapers and performing odd jobs was spent in a fourteen-foot, decked-over skiff, equipped with center- board and flimsy sail. Questing a new world beyond the tide- ripped mouth of the estuary, out upon the treacherous water of the bay proper he ventured to Goat Island, more formally Yerba Buena, now conspicuous in all the array of a naval training station. The fish he bore home gave him economic sanction for his favorite recreation. Very important he felt with those still dimpled fists closed about the rickety little tiller — captain of his ship and soul, salt spray upon his parted lips, and the free west wind sweeping through his young lungs, that came, unlike other blessings, without price. Sitting high on the windward rail, sheet in hand, feeling out the strength of the breeze, with wistful eyes he watched great vessels tow Golden Gateward, breaking out their gleaming canvas, and longed to run away to sea. Or,

BOYHOOD TO YOUTH: OAKLAND ESTUARY 65

slipping along with slack sheet before a light zephyr, one eye on the sail, one hand at the helm, he devoured countless tales of voyagers, the covers of which he first protected with newspaper against injury by dampness or salt spray.

In this wise he applied himself to master the manners of little craft until their management should become automatic to hand and brain. Here he laid foundation for the con summate small-boat sailor to whom I, yachtswoman long in advance of our meeting, entrusted my life seventeen years later in ocean voyaging on a forty-five-foot ketch. "The small-boat sailor is the real sailor," was his opinion, al though he courteously prefaces the remark with "barring captains and mates of big ships. ' ' And he goes on : " He knows — he must know — how to make the wind carry his craft from one given point to another given point. He must know about tides and rips and eddies, bar and channel markings, and day and night signals; he must be wise in weather-lore ; and he must be sympathetically familiar with the peculiar qualities of his boat which differentiate it from every other boat that was ever built and rigged. He must know how to gentle her about, as one instance of a myriad, and to fill her on the other tack without deadening her way or allowing her to fall off too far." As for the captains of liners as well as officers and able seamen, I have heard them frankly admit : "No, I can't swim ; and I don't know the first thing about handling small sailing vessels." It is an art by itself, and Jack London became a past master of it during his early teens.

Never did he forget his astonishment upon encountering his first modern deep-water sailor — runaway from an Eng lish merchantman. He sat in breathless wonder-worship of this sea-god who discoursed lightly of hair-raising hur ricanes and violent deeds in strange lands and oceans. One day the superior being consented to sail with him. "With all the trepidation of the veriest little amateur I hoisted

66 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

sail and got under way. Here was a man, looking on critically, I was sure, who knew more in one second about boats and the water than I could ever know. After an interval in which I exceeded myself he took the tiller and the sheet. I sat on the little thwart amidships open- mouthed, prepared to learn what real sailing was. My mouth remained open, for I learned what a real sailor was in a small boat.

"He couldn't trim the sheet to save himself, he nearly capsized several times in squalls, and once again by blunder ingly jibing over. He did n't know what a centerboard was for, nor did he know that in running a boat before the wind one must sit in the middle instead of on the side; and, finally, when we came back to the wharf, he ran the skiff in full tilt, shattering her nose and carrying away the mast- step. ... A man can sail in the forecastle of big ships all his life and never know what real sailing is."

Sometimes a boy companion was his on the thrilling traverse to Goat Island, athwart the churning wakes of leviathan ferry steamers. But most often he occupied un shared his domain of free fair solitude, milling out his own problems, empirical or spiritual — the former rooted in one sure test, "Will it work — will you trust your life to it?" — the latter resolving into an equal conviction that the exist ence he escaped on shore was sordid and meaningless com pared with this. Unaided by man, he was engaged in iden tifying himself with the miiverse as it unfolded to his unboyish perspective, establishing his separate ego, and making toward the polymorphic entity he was to become.

And here, fleeing from the crowded turmoil ashore, thrill ing with beauty and wonder of sea and sky, in the "vast indifference of heaven and sea," he fell into a cool gravity of contemplation that few realized of him in his manhood. I knew; for with him, speeding away from cities, in peace and truth I was

BOYHOOD TO YOUTH: OAKLAND ESTUARY 67

" ... as one that leaves The heat and babble of a crowded room And steps into the great, cool, silent night. ' '

"No one has helped me vitally — name me one," he has challenged in bald moments when the struggling past arose. Indeed, in reviewing what I know from him and of him, it does seem that after eliminating all who tried to help, one finds the history of a success that was won almost in spite of proffered assistance, which was for the most part mis directed. This because in the main the effort, through mis conception of his superb free quality, made toward conven tionalizing, holding him back and down. The only souls who rnay rest in joy of having helped are those (to whom my gratitude!) who gave him moments of happiness.

Dreamer though he was, and dream though he did, the boy learned withal that a boat would capsize and he be brine-soaked, or worse, if he did not apply practical system in handling her. While his ardent boyish heart was con scious of beauty and pleasure, he respected the means of their attainment. ' 1 1 have been real, ' 9 he adjudged his men tal method, "and did not cheat reality any step of the way. ' '

Those who choose for the foundation of their judgments the sensational aspects of his career, are surprised that his approach by water was not heralded by much noise of steam or gasolene-driven enginery, or, upon terra firma, by dust- rimed, red devil touring-car. Once, indeed, during a period of dangerous depression, he had contemplated the big red devil, biggest and reddest, for the outrunning of his blue fiends. But he never owned an automobile, although, when in 1916 we planned a world-around voyage after the War, the finest purchasable car was to be an item of dun nage in a remodeled three-topmast schooner such as we had seen in the Alameda Basin.

' We shall be anachronisms, you and I, Mate Woman, J ' he would prophesy gleefully, "for when we are seventy and

68 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

beyond, still shall we be riding and driving horses on the highways, still shall we be sailing boats. I do believe that boat sailing is a finer, more difficult art than running a motor. It would n't be right to insist that any one can run the newest fool-proof gasolene machinery, but most of us can. This is not true of sailing a boat. It takes more skill and intelligence, and certainly more training. "

Picturing the embryo sailor steering the frail fabric of wood and cotton, clinging almost a part of this workable thing of his dreams, curls blown back from the uplifted face with its marveling smile, I am reminded of what Edwin Markham wrote me in the shadows:

"I think of him as part of the heroic youth and courage of the world. "

One fails to discern where he passed from boyhood into youth. Paradoxically, we might say, as he so often said, that there never was a boyhood for him. Hardly did he experience even a youth. From first to last it was as boy- man and man-boy that he came face to face with life. "I never had a boyhood, " were his own words, "and I seem to be hunting for that lost boyhood/' One passion of my wife- hood, was, that to son of his and mine, I might have part in making up for that ineffable treasure of childhood that Jack London had missed.

Now see how, in physical immaturity, striving as always for fuller scope, he foregathered in all lawlessness with youths and men. With a rare apperception of their for- eignness, soon he was able so to coordinate with it as to bridge incongruity of years and step forth indistinguish able, — to them, — from their own essential quality. Not with foreign bloods, however, was his initiation into the man-game. It took place in the familiar " creek, M aboard the large sloop yacht, Idler, lying not far from the wide- waisted unused whalers. To the romancing eye of the youngster, head crammed with enticing stories of seafar-

BOYHOOD TO YOUTH: OAKLAND ESTUARY 69

ing, she was shrouded in fabulous mist. Rumor had it that she was interned for a questionable but dare-devil trans action known as opium smuggling in savage isles on the western sea-rim, none other than the Sandwich Islands of glib geography recitation. On more than one occasion his skiff had tacked at respectful distance about the slim white hull and raking scraped mast, and he had vaguely envied the husky, bronzed caretaker, who kept the elegant craft shipshape.

One day came the golden opportunity to meet with this brawny man of nineteen, who was reputed to be a har- pooner, waiting his chance to put to sea in professional capacity on one of the whalers, the Bonanza. Her tumble down sides even now resounded to the tinkering incident to outfitting for a new voyage. It was the before men tioned runaway English sailor who made possible the event, by asking Jack to put him aboard the Idler for a "gam" with the harpooner. The boy, inwardly trembling with delight, hoisted his tiny sail and directly they were zipping across the estuary. He and the sailor were bidden hos pitably on deck by the caretaker. Jack, before going below, in precise seamanlike method dropped his boat astern on a long painter, "with two nonchalant half-hitches, " that there might be no scratching of the yacht 's shining white paint. Then he followed with bated breath down the brassy companionway, and filled his lungs with the musty, damp odor of the first sea-interior he had ever entered.

If we may trace any definite line betwixt his youth and manhood, it leads to this cabin of the opium smuggler, Idler, where, though he lapsed for a time thereafter, he became indissolubly bound with the affairs of men. And such men! "At last I was living. Here I sat, inside my first ship, a smuggler, accepted as comrade by a harpooner and a runaway English sailor who said his name was Scotty." Preserving discreet silence, that he might dis play no jarring immaturity, he was taken for granted.

70 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

Newly conscious of his uncouth land-lubberly garments, he regarded the clothing that gently swayed on the cabin walls to the roll left by passing tugs: ". . . leather jackets lined with corduroy, blue coats of pilot cloth, sou 'westers, sea boots, oilskins.'' It all gave out a musty smell, "but what of that? Was it not the seagear of men?" And the cabin — it and its appointments were photographed on his retina for all time, and their like registered as the dearest and most desirable of surroundings; ". . . everywhere was in evidence the economy of space — the narrow bunks, the swinging tables, the blue-backed charts carelessly rolled and tucked away, the signal-flags in alphabetical order, and a mariner's dividers jammed into the woodwork to hold a calendar. ' '

The swift-evolving lad of fourteen, shrewdly observing by aid of the usual allotment of senses and that extra one of fitness which was the flower of the other five, renewed acquaintance with the oblique concomitant of manhood's prowess and comradery. Where could they get something to drink! Nothing aboard, and no licensed saloons any where near. The harpooner knew ; and with flask in pocket disappeared overside. The flask was full when again the click of his rowlocks was heard, and the smallest member of the law-scoffing company was deeply mystified concern ing the relation between "rot-gut" — euphonious name by which the adulterated fire-water was known by these swag ger adventurers — and certain sightless swine. But it was not many moments before the significance of "blind pig" burst upon him.

Vinegar and gall the liquor was to his lips and throat ; but he "drank with them, drink by drink, raw and straight, though the damned stuff could n 't compare with a stick of chewing taffy or a delectable i cannon-ball. ' And to spend fortunes of cents on such debatable nectar ! He car ried twenty in his man-length jeans, and could not do less than contribute them with offhand smile toward the many

BOYHOOD TO YOUTH: OAKLAND ESTUAEY 71

refillings of the square-face bottle, "though with regret at the enormous store of candy " they represented.

As the hours flew, and the fumes rose and worked within his hard young skull, he became aware of the virtue of the potion that unbound diffidences and true modesties. Ab sorbing the unloosed confidences of these suddenly estab lished cronies, his ego began to loom like a genii within its narrow house, realizing an unsuspected stature side by side with taller egos. All attention to a self-glorying tale of valor from Scotty, and its lurid fellow from the harpooner, he came to think that he had not done so badly either, in his solitary wanderings. Waiting for a pause, he launched into bold narrative of how he had sailed his skiff across the bay in a big south-easter that held deep-water tonnage at none too safe anchorage in port. Spurred by the respect he seemed to command, a step further he dared, charging Scotty with being a "bum" hand in a small sailboat. Only another round of whisky disengaged the inflamed pair, who, now outside of all reticence, vowed in maudlin embrace, that, inseparable, they would navigate the round world around. Jack beheld himself one of the Bonanza's crew in the North Pacific, thence in other keels to Far Ind. They all three roared sea chanteys, and boasted to the pitying skies.

i l The fortunate man is he who cannot take a couple of drinks without becoming intoxicated," was Jack London's opinion. "The unfortunate wight is the one who can take many glasses without betraying a sign." Though the young Jack had betrayed signs a-many on this day of infinite consequence, it was he, the virgin carouser, full to the guards, who put the two seasoned sinners to bed. Yearning to lose consciousness in another of the tempting mattressed bunks, he yet felt called upon to demonstrate, new-made giant that he was, that no tottering weakness moved within him. Again at his tiller, sail set, he plunged the skiff 's bow into the crisping channel and angled, madly

72 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

careering, across to the Oakland shore. "I was now at the pinnacle of exaltation. I sang 'Blow the Man Down1 as I sailed. I was no boy of fourteen, living the mediocre ways of a town. ... I was a man, a god, and the very elements rendered me allegiance as I bitted them to my will. ' '

The water was at lowest mark, and hundreds of feet of greasy grey mud intervened between its lapping edge and the boat landing. With centerboard lifted, he drove full speed into the ooze, and when the skiff lost headway, stood up in the sternsheets and punted with an oar. And here outraged mind and flesh refused to function in common. As tho one gave in to the poison, the other crumpled over board into the unspeakable slime ; and the poor little man- of-the-world knew painfully, as his skin tore against the barnacles of a broken pile, that he was nauseatingly drunk. But not as the others were drunk, he still contended as he scrambled to his feet, for in the sinuous maze of his struggling wits there stirred a lofty satisfaction that he had beaten two strong men at their own game.

Once more, as in San Mateo six years before, he swore "never again. " Not even the limitless vision he had been vouchsafed, in addled ecstasy, of the glories of a conquered world, could compensate for the come-back of miserable days of sickness and depression. Purple as had been the dream, it and the means of it he repudiated, spent his next savings on taffy and "all-day suckers, " and returned to his odd jobs and life on the streets. The inexhaustible trove of the library seemed ample foreign adventuring for the nonce.

CHAPTER VI

CANNERY. BUYS SLOOP ' ' RAZZLE DAZZLE. ' ' QUEEN OF THE OYSTER PIRATES

15 to 16 years

A LTHOUGH the hero of this book more than once ran £JL away bodily from manual labor, before final deser- cion of it through conviction of its conflict with his remote onds, a sense of responsibility never released him for long, if at all. He was destined to become a sort of patriarch to a group of dependents.

Barely fifteen, shore life for him had begun to reveal itself as a serious and manacling thing, and from the needs of the household there were left but few cents of his slender earnings, and fewer hours of leisure, for amusements and taffy. His first steady servitude was in an Oakland can nery, established in an insanitary old stable which was ventilated by drafty interstices in its ramshackle frame. Here he became an unconscious example of child-exploita tion — that most incredible of all the shames of civilized society. His broadening shoulders that had shaken free under the open sky, or braced squarely against the shock of brave west wind and drenching southeaster, were now rounded above dangerous machinery for an average of ten hours a day, with as many cents compensation per hour. Eoofed from their divine right of sunshine, boys and girls alike they sat and stood before their unprotected machines, the safety of tender young hands and fingers depending solely upon deft mental correlation. Some, slower by na ture than others, were beaten in the unfair contest, acci dents were frequent, and the victims went mutilated for

73

74 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

the rest of their lives; the girls more sadly in proportion than their male companions.

"We could not spare a look or a qualm from our own wariness of the machinery, when one of us was hurt," Jack has visualized the scene for me. "A frightened look aside, a moment's let-down of tensest attention to the thing in hand, and slap! off would go your own finger. I guess I was just lucky,'' he disclaimed credit for his own keen correlations.

Those fittest to cope with the work could talk back and forth down the bowed rows, boys and girls chaffing one another and making " dates " for noon-hour and street-cor ner trysts; but even this intermittent social chatter was confined to the forenoon and for a short time after lunch. The later of the ten actual working hours were passed under almost unendurable strain of taut nerves.

Even if in spirit of blindly humorous yet grim reprisal against fate in general, one sort of revenge for their toil and pain seems to have been taken by the overdriven em ployees. From Jack's reminiscences to me, I have gathered that other extraneous matter than tears of weariness and rebellion was often closed and soldered into the shiny tin cans of tomatoes and peaches, berries and corn; and none felt called upon, in absence of the overseer, to skim off dust blown into the toothsome contents by streams of wind that forced through the apertures of the old barn. One of the filth-collecting ledges on the wall that faced the workers was almost on a level with their eyes, and now and again contributed its quota of menace to the health of others than the cannery's workers. And thus the public, also, was ill served by the masters of labor — all valuable mental pabu lum for the fiery reformer Jack London was soon to become.

To him perhaps alone of these slaves of the old cannery was given a capacity to react in good time, and make him self heard in no uncertain voice, for the education of the mole-minded workers toward protest and demand for pro-

QUEEN OF THE OYSTER PIRATES 75

tection and adequate compensation, even to the seizing of the very machinery of production. That his mind was set astir even in the thick of the gruelling experience, one reads from his own view of that drab period :

"I asked myself if this were the meaning of life — to be a work- beast? I knew no horse in the City of Oakland that worked the hours I worked. If this were living, I was entirely unenamored of it."

And the girls : here again, those beings he heard referred to as the "weaker" sex, and therefore to be cherished, were being despoiled by the same iron lot that befell their brothers. At the same time, for some reason which he had not fathomed, they were denied the relaxations and robust recreations allowed these brothers ; else they were not con sidered "nice" girls. Maintaining pace with awakening sex-consciousness, curiosity urged him to speculate widely concerning these pretty, fun-loving creatures of more deli cate frame than himself. More marvelous became contem plation and reality of his trysts with the little maids of the cannery whose lash-veiled affirmative glances in stolen in stants from work answered the questioning lift of his own brows. Whatever knowledge his curiosity and their com placence yielded in time, he never forgot the exquisite spiritual quality of the aura that surrounded his first love, a couple of years later.

The while he remained a slave, an irreproachable slave he was. None could criticize his faithfulness nor the product of his effort. But when his moment struck, through he was with restraint and all its works. Insurrec tionary he stood forth ; though along with a radical shift ing of viewpoint, an amazingly careful estimate of values coordinated with the flinging off of bonds. Up to a certain stage, the marshalling of values must have been uncon scious; but his bursts of action in any premise were as if well-considered from every angle. That he did not func-

76 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

tion without some measure of deliberate thought, there is ample evidence from his own reminiscences.

What I am trying to present is this : Out of a free range of conscious or unconscious thought-material, garnered as consciously or unconsciously from his already varied ex perience, he abruptly formed concepts that led him as abruptly to rise and throw off any complication that proved unendurable and unprofitable to his logic. Back in his small but independent flat-bottomed shallop on the wicked cur rents of one of the greatest and most treacherous of har bors, he suddenly came to reckon with the absurdity of the groveling, destructive existence he had let himself sink into. Which held the meaning of life? — the turbulent waters with their "careless captains," alcohol and all, or a " viewless, hueless deep" of dehumanizing labor? Per haps his thrilling heritage of physical ardor determined the issue. At all events, selfhood asserted overnight, and heaved the burden from off his spirit. And the only outlet that was shown to him was the water-way he so loved. Money he must bring home — there was no discussion about that, and no idea of evading responsibility crossed his mind. But why not combine his heart 's-desire with bread-getting?

He "remembered the wind that blew every day on the bay ... all the beauty and wonder and the sense-delights of the world denied . . . the bite of the salt air . . . the bite of the salt water " when he plunged overside. The pulsing colors of forgotten sunrises and sunsets flushed in his jaded brain.

Still again, I draw on that "duty" letter to his later sweetheart :

". . . worked in the cannery for a short summer vacation — the reward was to be a term at college. I worked in the same can nery, not for a vacation but for a year. . . . My wages were small, but I worked such long hours that I sometimes made as high as fifty dollars a month. Duty — I turned every cent over. Duty — I have worked in that hell hole for thirty-six straight hours, at a

QUEEN OF THE OYSTER PIEATES 77

machine, and I was only a child. I remember how I was trying to save the money to buy a skiff — eight dollars. All that summer I saved and scraped. In the fall I had five dollars as a result of absolutely doing without all pleasure. My mother had to have the monev — she came to the machine where I worked and asked me for it. I could have killed myself that night. . . . Duty — had I followed your conception of duty, I should never have gone to High School, never to the University, never — I should have remained a laborer. "

Once more at the sun-warped tiller of his barnacled skiff, leg o' mutton sail trimmed, frayed sheet slipping de- liciously through his fingers as he blew down the ebb tide before the wind, tremulous with joy of returning to what appealed as his natural habitat, the clear-eyed young viking of the West expanded long-cramped lungs and gave himself over to taking inventory of his assets : One good, average think-box, he calmly flattered himself, and one good average body that could, at need, surpass in resistance others of its age and size, not to mention certain older and bulkier physiques. And his priceless asset, of which he was then ignorant, was the cogency of that brain which enabled him to focus swiftly and surely upon an aggregation of data and set each item where it best would serve his ends.

I think it must have been right here, aligning his equip ment for immediate benefit of all concerned in his province, that the budding philosopher forever renounced idle dreaming. Henceforward he appeared to range his conclu sions with more or less logical application to practical solutions.

Reviewing the months just past, during which he had availed himself of law-abiding means of making, not his way in the world, but mere bread and butter, he was "un- enamored" of the process. Body and soul had been out raged by the sodden, bestial dullness, and he was ripe to swerve into an equally pernicious if more attractive abyss. The Seabreeze bore him tidings of incommunicable lure, and

78 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

his would have been the bliss of blindly answering the call, had he not felt the cords of duty. It was not in him to flee from the failing ones at home. A sturdy, law-respecting quality that ran in his composition would best have been sustained if the water had offered some honest method of livelihood. Plainly he could not contribute his share to ward family expenses by mere angling from a skiff.

What wonder, if his reading had limned the charmed word "pirate" in illuminated characters! Suppressed boyhood and adventure-lusting youth rose to the word and all its glamor. Why not! What boy is withheld from "playing pirates," or "burglars," or Indian or white-man atrocities, with their lurid imagery ! The fancied evil of it leaves no more mark on the playing-child's perceptions than did the actual evil cling to this working-child. Besides, drudgery had not impressed him as innocent and unharrn- ful. The sin of filching oysters at the risk of limb and liberty, enmeshed as it was with exaltation of adventure, appeared a lesser harm. Besides, were there not plenty of oysters for everybody. Again, that threshing mind flayed out the "irrefragable fact" that lurked in all seeming con tradiction, and went on finding itself through agency of empirical research. Who was to tell him what was right and what wrong! He must discover for himself — and the exploration promised delight in its manful hazard.

"I wanted to be where the winds of adventure blew," his desire ran. "And the winds of adventure blew the oyster pirate sloops up and down San Francisco Bay, from raided oyster-beds and fights at night on shoal and flat, to markets in the morning against city wharves, where peddlers and saloon-keepers came down to buy. Every raid . . . was a felony. The penalty was state imprison ment, the stripes and the lockstep. And what of that! The men in stripes worked a shorter day than I at my machine. And there was vastly more romance in being an oyster pirate than in being a machine slave. And behind it all,

QUEEN OF THE OYSTER PIRATES 79

behind all of me with youth a-bubble, whispered Romance, Adventure. "

"French Frank, " a man of fifty, a notorious " oyster- pirate, " had stirred Jack's interest in the water-front circle. Slight, graceful, debonair, a dandy with the brave ladies of his hot-headed class, French Frank's very foreign- ness surrounded him with romance. Young Jack heard that French Frank had a boat to sell, a nifty sloop with the dizzy name of Razzle Dazzle zigzagged across her saucy stern. Three hundred dollars was her price — three hun dred cart-wheels! But he did not take time to gasp, for his ramping fancy entertained no obstacle. Upon his vision. roving for possibilities, impinged Mammy Jenny's thrifty purse, that purse which ever sagged open-mouth toward her "white child." What of the social exigencies of his new profession of swashbuckling, he was a long time pay ing back that three hundred dollars of her wages for nurs ing the sick ; and it was a happy day when at last he laid the final instalment in her soft, dark hand.

The Sunday when he dropped his skiff on a long painter astern of the Razzle Dazzle, and stood on his "two hind- legs like a man" talking business with a real pirate, albeit of defenseless bivalves, carried Jack across the moat into man's estate. A twenty-dollar gold piece ratified the agree ment, which was to be drawn up on the morrow. Then the prospective owner, treading almost reverently the deck of his first boat worthy of the name, moved in a dream down into the stuffy little cabin that reeked of tobacco and the flowing "red paint" of abhorrent memory.

In "John Barleycorn" is given an euphemistic account of the affair and how it terminated. The sloop was anchored near the Alameda bank of the Creek, not far from Webster Street Bridge. French Frank, scintillating with joy of much wine and feminine companionship, made Jack acquainted with his friends — "Whiskey" Bob, a hardened character only a year older than himself,

80 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

"Spider" Healey, "black- whiskered wharf -rat of twenty, " and, for the most approved piratical garnishing, though not the spoils of sea-raiding, two young and attractive females whom Jack has named Mamie and Tess. Mamie, unbeknown to the boy, was the object of a frantic French passion; but the honorable offer of wifehood from the elderly if dapper Frank had not proved sufficient prize to make her forswear free-lancing as Queen of the Oyster Pirates.

When the bulgy demijohn of red wine tipped to another tumbler, Jack, with the eye of the gay Queen upon him, all his childish bridges crashing, swallowed first his rising gorge and then with befitting sang-froid the tum blerful — and kept it down with a set smile that he hoped was natural in its seeming. The others had been drinking for hours and, with the exception of the Queen, were soon paying all their attention to the singing of popular ditties, at first in uninterrupted solos and presently in discordant medley, each singing on his or her own account.

Jack found himself "able to miss drinks without being noticed or called to account." Also, "standing in the com- panionway, head and shoulders out and glass in hand," he could cool his head and fling the wine overboard. "My manhood," he reasoned, "must compel me to appear to like this wine ... I shall so appear. But I shall drink no more than is unavoidable . . . And we sat there, glasses in hand, and sang, while the demijohn went around ; and I was the only strictly sober one . . . And I enjoyed it as no one of them was able to enjoy it," he illustrates his growing wisdom and observation. "Here, in this atmos phere of bohemianism, I could not but contrast the scene with my scene of the day before, sitting at my machine, in the stifling, shut-in air, repeating, endlessly repeating, at top speed, my series of mechanical motions. And here I sat now, glass in hand, in warm-glowing camaraderie, with the oyster pirates, adventurers who refused to be slaves to

QUEEN OF THE OYSTER PIRATES 81

petty routine, who flouted restrictions and the law, who carried their lives and their liberties in their hands."

He did not try to resist the Queen, wise beyond her years. Before the native pentration of this girl, who was less commonplace than the average run of her sisterhood, well as he succeeded in merging with her social stratum, he could not altogether dissemble his almost pristine fresh ness. Disregarding any peril to him from her hot-headed suitor of nearly four times Jack's age, she swept the hand some boy into her train. Oh, no — he did not lose his head ; show him the petticoat who could bring about such lament able disaster, indeed ! No Mark Antony he, but an Augustus capable of taking feminine wiles at their proper worth in his career. He knew his history books, and Augustus had earned his distinct approval.

As always, a woman 's-man, still women never interfered with his playing the man's game. I do not think any woman ever made him miss an engagement with a man. In short, passionate lover though he might be, he was no follower of petticoats to the extent of clouding his manly attitude toward his own sex. It might be said, reviewing his rise to prominence, that he succeeded in spite of petticoats.

The Queen abstracted him from the maudlin crew, and more especially from her not uninterested sister, and made love to him where they sat on the cabin roof; while the boy, entirely unaware that he was poaching upon Frank's preserve, added the charm of her presence into the crucible of his perfect hour. Even at that, her charm was negligible in comparison with the thrill he knew at prospect of endless days that had no business with routine, but were concerned with life, more life. That was it — too long he had made one with the unburied dead; and the renascent desire for life, boundless life, bore him out beyond the reef of old clock-watching, whistle-obeying standards.

His capacity for happiness had no horizon on that day of days. Faultless was the round blue universe, he was its

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conscious center, and his princely ego paced out upon its conquering way. "The afternoon breeze blew its tang into my lungs, and curled the waves in mid-channel. Be fore it came the scow schooners, wing-and-wing, blowing their horns for the drawbridges to open. Bed-stacked tugs tore by, rocking the Razzle Dazzle in the waves of their wake. A sugar bark towed from the 'boneyard' to sea. The sunwash was on the crisping water, and life was big. . . . There it was, the smack and slap of the spirit of revolt, of adventure, of romance, of the things forbidden and done defiantly and grandly. . . . To-morrow I would be an oyster pirate, as free a freebooter as the century and the waters of San Francisco Bay would permit. Spider had already agreed to sail with me as my crew of one, and, also, as cook while I did the deck work. We would outfit our grub and water in the morning, hoist the big mainsail, and beat our way out the estuary on the last of the ebb. Then we would slack sheets, and on the first of the flood run down the bay to the Asparagus Islands, where we would anchor miles off shore. And at last my dream would be realized : I would sleep upon the water. And next morning I would wake upon the water; and thereafter all my days and nights would be on the water."

CHAPTER VII

OYSTER-PIRATING

1 NEVER told you, did I, Mate Woman, the essential reason for my title ' Prince of the Oyster Pirates '!" This from Jack London to me twenty years thereafter. And here I warn that the story may seem unpretty to those who pharisaically shrink from the facts of life.

"Why, you see when I, the youngest of the pirates, commanded my own Razzle Dazzle, the Queen went along with me ! I was the only skipper in the fleet sailing with a woman aboard, and it made a sensation. Spider had told me French Frank was ' crazy jealous* the night she asked me to row her ashore from his boat; but I could n't believe that a man of his age could be jealous of a boy like myself. So I dismissed the matter from mind until one night he tried to run me down in a black squall on the oyster-flats.

"Spider I paid to do the cooking and help me generally, and I did the deck-work and sailorizing — I had already learned pride in a boat. I guess the Queen had an easy time enough. — Why did I take her! It would be hard to say it all," he retrospected, an odd bashful expression flitting across his face. "I was making a career for myself, after a picture I had created out of the books I always kept on exchanging at the old library. I was in revolt from the beastly hopelessness of the labor I had been performing, and had not yet seen ahead to the other kinds of beastly consequences of the life I was entering — inescapable to any one who stayed in it. All I saw was glamor of con quest, of scarlet adventure and yellow gold — which latter I

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needed badly. — Men did these reckless things ; only, I would do them better than I saw them done around me : I would preserve the romance and leave out the brutality if pos sible.

"The Queen again? — you'll never know her real name, my dear. ... It was largely a hard-headed manifestation of myself as a man among men. And she wanted to go with me. But in all my life, in its roughest, toughest aspects, surrounded by brutal men and brutal acts, I never laid my hand on a woman except in gentleness — I hardly need tell you this. But my personal feeling — why, I liked the girl. She was good-looking, and warm and kind, and best of all she made a real home in that little bit of a cabin. It stirred my imagination — I glimpsed, beyond adventure, dim visions of a future in which wife and children and home figured. Besides, she was a sort of waif herself and we had that unspoken sympathy between us. Then, too, I could not help admiring a certain pluck she had about her, good fellow all through, unafraid of God or man or devil. But along with a prestige that obtained from holding my own woman against all comers, I knew the handicap of being considered tied by apron-strings; and there were times when the Queen knew better than to show her head above deck. — And then you must take into account," he referred to the human passion of a body that ever remained incorruptibly normal, ' ' I was a husky man at sixteen, and already knew girls — my first wondering knowledge had been presented to me by one much older than myself; and the Queen met more than one need I had come to recognize. "

The real comradeship that existed between them par tially redeemed the precocity of the affair. There was noth ing of the moral imbecile about the Queen. In her make-up was no weakness of " squealing " at danger, nor for hurt feelings nor even the desertions incident to her chosen ad- venturings. She took the world as it came, and this re markable new friend's very unsentimentality appealed to

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her along with his vital charm. That he did not spill over nor deceive her as to the shallowness of his ultimate regard, was to her in his favor. She asked no more than he gave, and she appreciated his humanity.

As one wise woman has remembered him: "Sincerity was the greatest trait of his character. He never made pre tensions and he built neither his work nor his life on sophisms and evasions. "

"I'm a funny sort of fellow, I guess, " he pursued the self -revelation. "Because I have sung the paean of the strong, and despite the whole heart I threw into showing the weak how to become strong, as I saw it, the world has given me the personal reputation of a cave-man! How much of a cave-man have you, or has any one, found me? . . . Sometimes I almost wonder if even you would not have more respect for me, love me more if I'd beat you up soundly once in a while" — laughingly whirling me into an embrace. "You know my opinion of woman in general, and that it's not all flattering by any means; but even in my ' violent youth' a woman was always to me something to handle tenderly. Oh, I'll rough-house with a bunch of romping boy-girls and give as good as I take, and then some. But that's different." And once he mused: "I cannot understand the type of man who, having held a woman in his arms, thinks less of her. Girls have told me of such 'lovers,' and I was aghast. To you I say solemnly that no woman, howsoever little dear to me, whom I have ever held in my arms, but has been dearer to me for it."

And so, the Queen of the Oyster Pirates, now herself long dead, clasped the shadow of the lover he was in ripe ness of time to discover himself. Indeed, she clasped but the shadow of what he then was, for he gave her no more of himself than was expedient, not even yet having been touched with the shy madness of first love.

The maturing philosopher would perform no uncon-

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genial work, so long as there were others willing to receive his pay for the same ; yet he would rupture a blood-vessel or rip off his sensitive nail-quick, jumping into a breach or doing what appealed to a whim, or to accomplish an end. And he asked no man to do what he could not himself do. That he did not break his neck or cripple himself for life, was due to his exquisite balance. Waste motion was a crime against common sense. Master of life that he in tended to become, he would eliminate every effort that did not bear directly upon his success. And success in what! Merely living to the full while he earned something over and above his bread and butter. The cannery masters worked with their heads — why not he? Seven years later, and a year before his precipitate first marriage, he wrote to Cloudesley Johns :

"I, too, have worked like a horse, and eaten like an ox; but as to work — while no comrade can ever say Jack London shirked in the slightest, I hate the very thought of thus wasting my time. It's so deadening — I mean hard labor. . . . While I have a strong will, I deliberately withhold it when it happens to clash with de sire. I simply refuse to draw the curb. When I was just sixteen I broke loose and went off on my own hook. Took unto myself a mistress of the same age, lived a year of wildest risk in which I made more money in one week than I do in a year now, and then, to escape the inevitable downward drift, broke away from every thing and went to sea."

During school days and afterward, he had been an in defatigable trader and collector of everything under the sun. There were his painstakingly hunted and labeled bird- eggs ; a treasure of marbles — finest collection of agates he had even seen, won by skill in schoolyard or street games ; and his cigarette-pictures and posters and albums had been the envy of associates. Not having had the spending of his own money, he had made use of duplicate papers in trading with the newsboys. Foreshadowing what was to become a perfect system in larger matters, he amassed a

OYSTEK-PIKATING 87

series of pictures complete from every cigarette manu facturer, * ' such as the Great Eacehorses, Parisian Beauties, Women of All Nations, Flags of All Nations, Noted Actors, Champion Prizefighters.'' And each series he had in three different ways: "in the card from the cigarette package, in the poster, and in the album." After which, he set out to gather sets for trading purposes. In addition, through barter he had accumulated an excellent album of postage stamps, a fair shelf of minerals, and some good curios that whetted his instinct to rove in far countries.

Because this hoarding depended, not upon money, but upon his wits, he achieved a name as a sharp trader, and trading became to him a game. * ' I could make even a junk man weep when I had dealings with him, ' ' he refers to one branch of operations that lasted into his pirate days. "Other boys called me in to sell for them their collections of bottles, rags, old iron, grain and gunny sacks, and five- gallon oil-cans — aye, and gave me a commission for doing it."

And now, determined fledgling in a cutthroat crowd who sneered at boyish sports which to some of them were in deed unknown, he steadily strengthened his pinions among "birds" vain of titles like "Whiskey" Bob, Joe Goose, Nicky the Greek, "Scratch" Nelson, "Soup" and "Stew" Kennedy, "Clam" Bart, "Irish" and "Oyster" Kelly, Patsy Haggerty, "Harmonica" Joe, "Hell and Blazes." He wrote to his dumbfounded mother to distribute his wealth according to the choices of his erstwhile cronies. Here it must have been that he commenced to foster that dis taste for looking behind him with which I came to reckon early in our friendship. "We are now concerned with to day," was his familiar adjuration. "Forget the mistakes of yesterday, except as warning against making the same mistake twice." He would have no commerce with what he termed "the rule of the dead. " The living present was the thing.

88 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

Inimical he knew this new world to be: therefore he would concentrate upon becoming one with it only insofar as it gave him pleasure and profit. Oh, he did not reason it in so many words ; but his cerebration was to that effect. The old shackling sense of poverty he resolutely disowned, and with free fist spent all of eighty cents upon detested liquor when it served the purpose of educating himself in mastership of the human elements that surrounded him. Abandoning a measure of caution, drink for drink he tossed them down. And he marveled and gloated upon the patent fact that he could as before win laurels from the well pickled villains with whom he had cast lot. If the whiskey route was the only one by which he, the rank tyro, could overtake his book-heroes, the whiskey route for him — on the surface at any rate. But there were stolen occasions when the Razzle Dazzle 's snug cabin, locked from the inside, was the scene of blissful secret orgies of reading and sucking * l can non-balls" and taffy. For "dollars and dollars, across the bar, couldn't buy the satisfaction that twenty-five cents did in a candy store."

"I was aware that I was making a grave decision," he declared. "I was deciding between money and men, be tween niggardliness and romance. Either I must throw overboard all my old values of money and look upon it as something to be flung about wastefully, or I must throw overboard ray comradeship with those men whose peculiar quirks made them care for strong drink."

The very embodiment of the thrilling baresark of the boy's Norse mythology was "Young Scratch" Nelson — one day to be the mightiest-shouldered cadaver that the Benicia undertaker ever laid out. That he could neither read nor write, far from diminishing, rather en hanced the figure he was to Jack. What had his Viking ancestral drift to do with type and ink T " Squarehead ' ' did not suit the younger boy as a just or beautiful appellation for this blond beast of unconsidered rages that flared in

OYSTER-PIRATING 89

terrible, admiration-compelling deeds. The first of these which came under Jack's observation was a mad freak in a nasty blow one starless night, when the Scandinavian sailed his piratical sloop Reindeer, dredging a record burglary of oysters, around and around the other boats that fearfully clung at anchor in the pounding shallow waves.

As for "Old Scratch, " young Nelson's sire, blue- eyed and yellow-maned, owner and master of the great scow schooner Annie Mine — what wonder Jack's most ex alted pinnacle seemed reached on the day when Old Scratch accepted quite as a matter of course his shyly-dared invita tion to have a drink! Treat by treat, mere " beer-bust " though it was, the session was protracted until the dis tended brace of salts succumbed. But what of that? Old Scratch was as helpless as he, the novice — more helpless than he, was the one thing of which the latter felt sure. And before the hops and the heat of the summer afternoon had reduced him to slumbrous defeat, out of his book-lore and the connivance of his and the bartender's combined tact in supplying beers large and small, he had led the old sea dog into unbelievable reminiscence of his youth in northern seas. The telling sobriquet of " Scratch," by the way, had been won by virtue of a tigerish mode of clawing off the faces of opponents in his Berserker brawls. And when the rumor came to Jack's ravished ears that he had been "soused all afternoon with Old Scratch," his cup of self- esteem brimmed.

Little had he dreamed, that day aboard the Idler, filled as he was with idolatry of the runaway sailor Scotty and the harpooner and the whole neighborhood, that he would so soon be his own fearless buccaneer. But here he was, causing the water-front of his home town, that once had been his awe, in turn to feel the shock of his dare-devil exploits, and beholding his one-time hero, Scotty, and the impish "Irish," and "Spider," successively taking orders aboard his own ship. For government was in his veins,

90 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

unguessed by the very ones who submitted to his vital charm and admirable ability to make good in the matter of their wages. The very air whispered deviltry, and the whimsy of his altered relation must have shaken thoughtful mo ments with silent mirth. Gone were parsimonious days, flung to the four winds. I can see the glint of eye and firm clutch of jaw, when he ranged the sloop alongside the wharf with the biggest load of stolen oysters of any two- man craft in the raffish fleet. I can see him with a cocked double-barreled shotgun in his small salt-grimed hands, crouched feet-on-wheel holding the plunging Razzle Dazzle on her course under a racing dark sky, that exciting night French Frank failed to ram him.

"And there was the time when we raided far down in Lower Bay," he recounts, "and mine was the only craft back at daylight to the anchorage off Asparagus Island. . . . And the Thursday night we raced for market and I brought the Razzle Dazzle in without a rudder, first of the fleet, and skimmed the cream of the Friday morning trade. . . . And the time I brought her in from Upper Bay under jib, when Scotty burned my mainsail." (In 1909, among those seeing us off on the steamer Loongana from Mel bourne to Launceston, Tasmania, was Scotty of the Razzle Dazzle days. Jack, grinning at the recollection, could not forbear a reference to the burned mainsail. "But you burned the mainsail," Mr. Scott disputed stoutly, where upon argument waxed. But after we had waved our last to the receding quay, my ex-oyster-pirate smiled, "Well, after all, if it makes him happy to think I burned that main sail, why shouldn't I let him have it that way!")

As for fear of the law and its enforcement, read this : " . . . lying at the wharf disposing of my oysters, there were dusky twilights when big policemen and plainclothes men stole on board. And because we lived in the shadow of the police, we opened oysters and fed them to them with squirts of pepper sauce, and rushed the growler or got

OYSTEB-PIRATING 91

stronger stuff in bottles. " Jack would ruffle with pride at remembrance of the "A. No. 1" oyster-cocktails he had mixed.

"Mayn't I meet Johnny Heinold some time?" I once asked Jack, learning that he had been into the " First and Last Chance" Saloon on Webster Street, to see his old friend. The stamping-ground of the water-front habitues, where the boy's intrepid foot had rested upon the brass rail, bore this two-faced pseudonym by reason of its ac commodating relation to comers as well as goers across the drawbridge. "Why, I'd like you to see Johnny," he acknowledged pleasedly. "I'll ask him up to the Eanch some time. It would be pretty difficult to manage so you could meet him in the old place," he hesitated at my sug gestion. "It's a rough crowd that congregates there — • though I might slip you in at a slack hour. ' ' But the time never was decided upon in our busy lives, and Heinold never found his way up to Glen Ellen ; so that I have yet to shake his hand.

Jack first crossed Johnny's threshold on that fateful Monday morning he turned up missing at the cannery. French Frank, dissembling his choler toward the lad for the unwitting theft of his inamorata, had met him here by appointment to receive the price of the Razzle Dazzle in exchange for a bill of sale. The transaction completed, the new-made skipper of the tidy sloop underwent initiation, unsuspected save by the proprietor of the bar, into public- house etiquette. French Frank, once with Jack's funds in pocket, proceeded to demonstrate the wastrel progress of camaraderie amongst men of his loose profession. Beadily could Jack grasp the logic of the seller, which caused him "to wet a piece of it [the money] in the estab lishment where the trade was consummated." But on top of this, Frank * ' treated the house. ' ' The boy speedily con cluded that the saloonkeeper made a profit on the drink he accepted — which reasoning was upset when Johnny treated

92 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

in return. He could also see why Spider and Whiskey Bob were included in the invitation, along with Pat, the Queen 's brother. But why in the name of sense should every one else standing about the sawdusted floor be bidden to help squander the Frenchman's money — Mammy Jenny's hard-won savings?

Although it was early morning, the entire company or dered whiskey. So "whiskey for mine," the freshman out law registered indifference. But his soul sickened that he must make of himself a martyr to this silly custom of pouring a nauseous and expensive draught down his throat, when his desire was to be off to his new command.

With his thoughts upon the sloop, he failed to notice an awkwardness that crept into the manner of the others, though he did vaguely sense a growing antagonism in French Frank, which also seemed to tincture the Queen's brother. All waited for him, the boat-buyer, to treat as the seller had treated. And here Johnny Heinold rendered the first of many kind services to the youth, whom he alone of the foolish gang understood in his ignorance of drinking usages. "Watch out for French Frank," Heinold breathed, bending close as he reached for the soiled glasses. On many another occasion, closely follow ing the amateur drinker's unwilling matriculation into the brotherhood of the saloon, Johnny took it upon his elastic conscience to save Jack from himself by warning when he had had enough small beers or other liquor, by which magic potions the student of raw human nature beguiled its tradi tions from this same human nature.

Whiskey Bob, and Spider, too, softly articulated, "Keep your eye peeled for Frenchy," or "Frank's ugly, take my tip and look out." To their friendly signals he nodded comprehension where comprehension was not, and perhaps this very bepuzzlement preserved him, what of his apparent cool poise in a tense and vibrant situation. How was he, hardly sixteen, who had worked sordidly for his

OYSTER-PIRATING 93

living and gleaned his romance from the books, "who had not dreamed of giving the Queen of the Oyster Pirates a second thought, and who did not know that French Frank

was madly and Latinly in love with her " how was he

to know? "And how was I to guess that the story of how the Queen had thrown him down on his own boat, the mo ment I hove in sight, was already the gleeful gossip of the water-front ? " When he presently learned the inward ness of his celebrity as a bold gallant, he could not help feeling elation "that French Frank, the adventurer of fifty, the sailor of all the seas of all the world, was jealous . . . and jealous over a girl most romantically named the Queen of the Oyster Pirates. I had read of such things in books, and regarded them as personal proba bilities of a distant maturity. Oh, I felt a rare young devil, as we hoisted the big mainsail that morning, broke out anchor, and filled away close-hauled on the three-mile beat to windward out into the bay. . . . Such was my escape from the killing machine-toil, and my introduction to the oyster-pirates. True, the introduction had begun with drink. But was I to stay away from it for such reason? Wherever life ran free and great, there men drank. Ro mance and adventure seemed always to go down the street locked arm in arm with John Barleycorn. To know the two, I must know the third. Or else I must go back to my free- library books and read of the deeds of other men and do no deeds of my own save to slave for ten cents an hour at a machine in a cannery/'

Even after losing one hundred and eighty dollars in one glorious night of inchoate induction, ashore with Nelson, his sobered aching head still deduced: "Bet ter to reign among booze-fighters, a prince, than to toil twelve hours a day at a machine for ten cents an hour. There are no purple passages in machine toil. But if the spending of one hundred and eighty dollars in twelve hours isn't a purple passage, then I'd like to know what is. " But

94 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

he would avoid over-drinking when drink was thrust upon him, he forewarned himself, and there should be no alco holic beverage of whatsoever description aboard his own sloop except in port at anchor when it devolved upon him to entertain. Alcohol and his austere ideal of seamanship had nothing in common.

Ashore, however, one of his proudest moments after he had adjusted to the necessity of " boozing " with those whose temper he must discern, was when Johnny Heinold, quite as a matter of course, reached down his book and opened a charge account for the young reveler's con venience, his name at the top of a clean page. A trusted cus tomer he was established, as behooved one in this man- world wherein he had elected to distinguish himself.

The vicissitudes of several months' living, earning, spending, landed him metaphorically high and dry one com fortless foggy dawn after a wild orgy on the sand-flats, with empty pockets, a burned mainsail, and a breach with Scotty resulting from an overnight fistic engagement. Young Nelson in similar fashion had forfeited his crew, and bore one wounded hand in a sling to boot. Their mutual plight and a consultation terminated in a pact whereby Jack and Nelson cast together their fortunes as partners in rakish crime on the smart Reindeer, and forth with departed for the oyster-beds. But first Johnny Hein old was approached for a loan with which to buy stores, and he, knowing their ethics in such matters, trusted them without misgiving. Eeviewing that night, Jack London makes an appeal for sympathy of understanding of the unsatisfied boy-soul that was his :

"And now, of all this that is squalid, and ridiculous, and bestial, try to think what it meant to me, a youth not yet sixteen, burning with the spirit of adventure, fancy- filled with tales of buccaneers and sea-rovers, sacks of cities and conflicts of armed men, and imagination-mad dened by the stuff I had drunk. It was life raw and naked,

OYSTEK-PIRATING 95

wild and free — the only life of that sort which my birth in time and space permitted me to attain. And more than that. It carried a promise. It was the beginning. From the sand-pit the way led out through the Golden Gate to the vastness of adventure of all the world, where battles would be fought, not for old shirts and over stolen salmon boats, but high purposes and romantic ends."

His own boat was raided by a rival gang of pirates, dismantled and set adrift. By the time Jack found the battered hulk, she was hardly worth the twenty dollars he got for her.

" Never have I regretted those months of mad deviltry I put in with Nelson," Jack always averred. The Norse man was a blind genius in affairs nautical, and luck played its part in that the pair escaped with their lives. "To steer to miss destruction was his joy. . . . Never to reef down was his mania, and in all the time I spent with him, blow high or low, the Reindeer was never reefed. Nor was she ever dry. We strained her open and sailed her open continually. "

The odd thing is that far from the making of Jack a reckless sailor, he became an exceptionally cautious one. The only tangible harm that seemed wrought by associa tion with Nelson was the ruination of his vocal cords and his ear, and by the same process that had been worked on him by the teacher in East Oakland. Nelson had no sense of pitch, and bawled endless rowdy songs and sea chanteys regardless of key. Jack, doing his val orous best toward augmenting the unmelodious din, be reft himself of what he has told me was a "golden voice. " (His speaking tone remained pleasant, even mu sical; but the mellow timbre was gone, to return wholly, but once. When he was about twenty-five, on the lecture platform one evening he discovered himself listening to a voice that had been asleep for nearly a decade. "It was the ' golden voice/ Mate — I'd give anything if you could

96 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

have heard it," he said long afterward. "I don't believe it — but I heard it, I'm telling you. I reveled in it, turned it over on my tongue, sounded its clarion for all I was worth. When I stopped speaking — just to show you this is no fairy tale — people came up the hall and told me what a beautiful voice I had! And that was the one and only time, since Nelson finished the spoiling of my ear. It's the only thing I've got against Nelson!")

To the mad-cap masters of the Reindeer the lower-bay haunts soon became inadequate. In the opposite direction they ranged over the vast and devious waters behind the Golden Gate, and eastward into the terrific narrowed tides of the tributary San Pablo and Suisun Bays. Well Jack fixed in mind the Forbidden Anchorages of the traffic routes of the main harbor, and the violent habits of Rac coon Straits, between Angel Island and Tiburon. And high and quiet his happiness, the time they first voyaged north west across the big waters of the inland sea, Golden Gate and Angel Island sliding by on the left ; on past that sunset cabochon jewel, Bed Eock, so long coveted from afar; northerly skirting The Brothers, with Marin Islands to port; thence entering San Pablo Bay. Then the joy of running into anchorage in the purpling dusk on the flats; heaving over the sturdy hook; watching the vessel swing to the proper length of cable that slipped through his meas uring hands; while the heavenly odor of frizzling bacon and strong, rich coffee floated up the companionway from the hot little galley stove, and the wild geese honked over head. Life was sweeter than honey on his tongue, and he dreamed dreams of seeing the whole wide world some day, in a boat of his very own. How well I know it all — ah, do I not? who have done it with him in that very boat of his own!

Steadily, through the muck and ruck that mixed with the healthier material of his experience at this time, there burned the pure flame of adventure's passionate en-

THE GREAT GATE OF REDWOOD LOGS INTO THE "BEAUTY RANCH"

1905. "JACK'S HOUSE" AT WAKE ROBIN LOIXJE

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chantment : the falling asleep peacefully to the rocking of the sloop to the rippled ebb and flow of tides along her sleek sides ; the opening of happy eyes each morning upon a dif ferent spaciousness of sky and water; the adjusting and stabilizing of himself in relation to undependable mankind and the rolling planet, victory resting upon his acuity in gauging the capriciousness of all things.

Intermittently within this succession of months between the ages of a little under sixteen and up to say twenty- one, the incipient sage, adding to his knowledge of man kind and its singular way upon the earth, must have com mitted nearly every natural crime in the calendar, save dis loyalty and murder. Nothing, in his view or temperament in any period, was meet to invite him to the taking of life, little as he came to respect life; and even when it was merely the question of honor among thieves, his in stinctive ethic, if an ethic may be instinctive, was that dis loyalty was the only real sin. And he died reverencing this self-made axiom. To me he has confessed :

"If I should serve sentences on end for pranks I did in sheer pursuit of the tang of living, from time to time dur ing the scattered months I was busy ' finding myself on the Bay, or tramping, or ashore with the 'Boo Gang' and the ' Sporting Life Gang' that terrorized Oakland,, I'd languish behind prison bars for a hundred years!"

As for unnatural crimes, these were not admissible in his magnificently balanced body and mind. No inbred fastidiousness was weak enough to unfit him for eating and sleeping, playing or working, with the unmoral and the unwashed, to their complete befoolment as to his in trinsic difference from them. He could love with them, and fight with them; for he had "kissed his woman and struck his man," although he did not know the lusty old phrase. But in all his days, let the unnatural, the ab normal, creep near, and his trigger-like recoil of sense and perception and swift reaction left no uncertain impact upon

98 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

the aggressor, be he brutal or subtle. Except in one or two defensive incidents, such as when French Frank was out hunting for him on the oyster-beds, either with the pirates or the subsequent fish-patrol contingent, Jack went unpro tected by other arms than an ordinary table-fork. The sole provocation under which this ridiculous but effective weapon was drawn, was in the case of a degenerate Greek fisherman he had aboard in capacity of sailor. The hap pening does not lend itself to polite literature, and should be treated by some one compounded of a Balzac and a Havelock Ellis.

CHAPTER VIH

FISH-PATBOLi 17th Tear

WHERE Jack London differed most essentially from his rough-neck associates was in the divine unrest that forever withheld him from content with any static condition. One thing or a group of things mastered, he was done with it so far as it represented an end, and hot on the trail of the unexplored. Each experience, or succession of experiences of a kind, was automatically retired to its due niche in a mind that had become surfeited with that particu lar phase, laid by for reference when needed. With him, only in minor details did habit replace definite thought; whereas his comrades, as time passed, reflected less and functioned more through blind habit.

Vital in his phychology was that law-respecting ten dency which drew him to realize, under all paint of ro mance, the unsavoriness, the rotten structure of this "pirate" society. It had looked so bright on the sur face. Even Nelson, through blood if not brain the truest, maddest adventurer of all whom Jack had overtaken and passed in their own game, even he, young Scratch, urged by his eager partner to new fields of exploit up country, wavered. He was unenthusiastic from sheer lack of ca pacity, and melted back into the Oakland water-front life that was now outworn of value to the superior youth. Jack had touched at all points upon its restrictedness — ex hausted the most intricate processes of its once mysterious denizens, as well as become familiar to boredom with the hundreds of miles of indented shore line of the lower and

100 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

main harbor and the peculiar currents thereof. Wider activities were calling to be shared, and far-stretching water lanes to be investigated, some of which he and Nelson had sailed but not lingered upon.

And so, the two parted in all friendliness.

Almost a foreign port seemed the quaint interior town of Benicia. From its great wharf the Solano, the largest ferry steamer in the world, conveyed transcontinental trains of imposing railway carriages, with their leviathan locomotives, to and from the main-line tracks at Port Costa across the risky Carquinez Straits. On the voyage from Oakland, nearing Benicia, Jack had passed Vallejo, and Mare Island Navy Yard with its fascinating old training-ship that was none other than the historic, many- decked hull of the 1812 battleship Independence.

Once at Benicia, he proceeded to become at one with the fisherman element which housed in a floating suburb of little arks moored or half -grounded in the rustling tules. And never far from this bachelor purlieu flickered the scarlet night lights of one or another of the pleasure barges that swung to anchor on the fringes of such communities. Sometimes, as in his initiation with the lower-bay people, he was struck afresh with the belief that he, newest in their midst, was having a much better time than these older, more experienced men, whether workers or vagabonds. Their obtuse sensibilities were in greater or less degree numb to the very romance of which they were part. Sheer animal spirits might be theirs; but to Jack's glorious and contagious animal spirits that brought to him admiration and affection from the most unlit of the roystering inhab itants, was added comprehension. Not only did he envision the romance of the present, but further romance for which the day at hand was a preparation, a stepping-stone.

Missing no smallest sheaf of joy-gleaning by the way, he still must keep a circumspect eye to business chance ; and surely it tickled his fancy that the most lucrative employ-

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ment in sight should be with the Fish Patrol service. Combing for possibilities, he had fallen in with a trio of deputy patrolmen, one Charley Le Grant, Billy Murphy, and Joe Boyd, who put the idea into his head. The patrol man proper, under whose orders they worked, was a sal aried employee, while the deputies depended for their pay upon a certain percentage of the fines collected from vio lators of Fish Patrol rules.

Knowing so well the illicit side of the shield, Jack nat urally found the other face of it keenly interesting; and being anything but retrogressive in his bent, the restraining of a felony was more to his liking and logic than the com mitting. His all-round nature at the same time re sponded warmly to a pity for even the most insubordinate Italian and Greek and Chinese desperadoes he must assist in holding down. To these, who had to abstract their living from the waters, the half -understood Fish Patrol laws and the drastic punishments for trifling with them seemed captious and unjust. To Jack this eternal strife for existence, by land or sea, often appeared a dog-eat-dog matter at best. As he says: "We menaced their lives, or their living, which is the same thing. . . . We confiscated illegal traps and nets, the materials of which had cost them considerable sums and the making of which required weeks of labor. We prevented them from catching fish at many times and seasons, which was equivalent to preventing them from making as good a living as they might have made had we not been in existence. ... As a result, they hated us vindictively. . . . They looked upon the men of the Fish Patrol as their natural enemies. "

Following his calling, he knew hazards many and hair breadth. Sometimes it was a perilous contest outmaneuver- ing a clever Greek or Italian or vicious oriental fisherman whom he was trying to apprehend ; sometimes it was a battle with the shouting waves when terrific Northers from across the illimitable valleys whipped the frenzied incoming and

102 THE BOOK OP JACK LONDON

outgoing ocean tides into mighty upstanding tide-rips; sometimes it was all together. Pitting his seamanship against enemies and elements was to him the acme of high living, and he won praise for both that seamanship and his cunning from the smartest of his companions as well as from the outwitted law-breakers. His capacity for enjoy ment is expressed in a tale of that time :

"I was as wildly excited as the water. The boat was behaving splendidly, leaping and lurching through the welter like a racehorse. I could hardly contain myself with the joy of it. The huge sail, the plunging boat — I, a pygmy, a mere speck in the midst of it, was mastering the elemental strife, flying through it and over it, triumphant and victorious. . . . Conflicting currents tore about in all directions, colliding, forming whirlpools, sucks, and boils, and shooting up spitefully into hollow waves which fell aboard as often from leeward as from windward. And through it all, confused, driven into a madness of motion, thundered the great smoking seas from San Pablo Bay," through which he " roared like a conquering hero." He knew of deep-sea vessels that had confidently made their way here and ignominiously capsized, drowning their as tounded captains. There would be no capsizing for him.

Leaving out the factors of his robustness, luck, and common sense, Jack's survival of this taxing period in his growth is due to two things : out-door, active days, and his unconquerable aversion to the taste of alcohol, which pre vented him from being a regular tippler. Even so, it is a marvel that the quantities of whiskey consumed at intervals did not wreck him beyond nature 's repairing. He had not glimpsed the delicate esthetic of imbibing artistically for the sake of stimulating wit and other social graces, nor yet for the purpose of inhibiting sorrow and the disillusion of merciless truth. He cast off from his moorings of cau tion for a time and, in the frequent leisure spaces between raids on the fishermen, abandoned himself to becoming

FISH-PATROL 103

congenial to the men with whom he made headquarters. Gradually he "developed the misconception that the secret of John Barleycorn lay in going on mad drunks, rising through the successive stages that only an iron constitu tion could endure to final stupefaction and swinish uncon sciousness. " Wherever he walked, saloon doors swung open to him, the "poor man's clubs" that drew together those who knew no higher amusement and relaxation. On the way home to ark or sloop, the youngster would accumu late enough ' ' snake poison J ' to deprive his bed of its occu pant ; and when, of a morning, his ' l unconscious carcass was disentangled from the nets of the drying frames " whither he had "stupidly, blindly crawled," and when the water front buzzed over it "with many a giggle and laugh and another drink, ' ' he quite excusably regarded his inebriation as something to be vain of.

An eminent American writer who, desiring to be a realist, yet recoiled temperamently from observing realism at first hand, once appealed to Jack London in this strain : "Must I, in order to describe a saloon, myself become fa miliar with saloon life?" Jack, true apostle of the real, was uncompromising in his counsel. ' ' But, ' ' quavered the would-be realist, "do you mean to say that you ever have been actually drunk?"

"Man, I have not only been drunk, beastly, hopelessly drunk unnumbered times," Jack assured him, with inward cheer at the jolt he was delivering, "but once I was drunk for three weeks on end. I mean, literally, that I did not draw one single, sober breath for twenty-one days and nights."

It was this very debauch, coupled with a fearful inci dent which grew out of it, which first, if not permanently, aroused the decision that he was making little progress toward the fair ideals he had set for himself. He dis covered, when it was almost too late, "abysses of intoxi cation hitherto undreamed." His was too fine an

104 THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON

organism to trifle, unscathed, with this insidious destruc tion of mental as well as physical fiber. He, who loved life so vitally, to whom the idea of suicide had always appeared an abnormal ferment in the cowardly and unfit, suddenly came to consider death. Poisoned through and through, it seemed to his undermined vision that he had lived life to