17-18 years

SOMETHING was wrong, very wrong. There was a sense of confusion, and he could not see the light. Here he was, man-strong with mighty shoulders and chest and biceps developed in fair competition with veteran seamen. He had measured up in work and endurance with the best, and felt entitled to all the arrogance of individuality that welled up at thought of his "hard-won place of equality" with the professionally able-bodied; he had experience of the world—a being far removed from the mere boy of less than a year before who had worked in a cannery for ten cents an hour. And yet, the best job that offered to him, big sailor with a rolling gait, was at "hum-drum machine toil" in a jute-mill—at the same old ten cents an hour for the same old ten hours and more a day. He was thoroughly persuaded by his mother that he had roamed enough; that his allotment of dreaming and blond-beasting had ended; that he must acquire a trade and settle down. But for the accident of a restless intellect which could not tolerate unrelieved routine, Jack London might have lived and died an artisan instead of artist and greatly more.

No outrage was so ill-entertained by him as outrage to his common-sense. And this thing was ridiculous. Like Kipling's tramp-royal, "Me that have been what I ve been"—and still ten cents an hour, "me!" Notwithstanding, he must get to work, and immediately, for his parents needed his strength to lean upon. So he dismissed the unresolved

and confused issues, and buckled to in that single-minded way he could assume which made him such an exemplary asset to employers of unskilled labor. Once going straight in the shafts, being an artist he took pride in his work, and became quite a conventional member of the proletariat, pleased with his own capability. "As for the unfortunates, the sick . . . and old and maimed," he reviewed his position, "I vaguely felt that they, barring accidents, could be as good as I if they wanted to real hard. . . . Further, the optimism bred of a stomach which could digest scrap iron, and a body which flourished on hardships, did not permit me to consider accidents as even remotely related to my glorious personality.

He has also declared that to him at that time the dignity of labor came to be the most impressive thing in the world, and he evolved a "gospel of work" that put Kipling's and Carlyle's in the shade, though he knew it not. "The pride I took in a hard day's work," he marveled, "would be inconceivable to you. It is almost inconceivable to me now as I look back upon it." For him to shirk on the man who paid him wages was a sin second only to that greatest sin, disloyalty; indeed, it was a disloyalty. In short, as he says in an essay, "my joyous individuality was dominated by the orthodox bourgeois ethics. I read the bourgeois papers, listened to the bourgeois preachers, and shouted at the sonorous platitudes of the bourgeois politicians." Such a virtuous conformist did he become that he could not understand his old infatuation for the water-front. "I didn't care for the drinking, nor the vagrancy of it," he affirms.

Back he wandered to the Free Library, and read and reread the books, with eyes made wide by experience. Boyish enthusiasm had been satiated for a time and he felt superior, steadied. He had done some of these slashing and romantic things himself—and could tell a few more that were not in the books if he were so minded.

This several months interval between the sealing voyage and his next abrupt break-away from Oakland is notable especially for producing his first literary effort viewed as such. In a letter to a friend he says: "When I was working in the jute-mills, I received forty dollars pay and at the same time twenty-five dollars from a prize in a literary contest. I bought a ten dollar suit of clothes and got my watch out of hock. That was all I spent. Two days afterward, I had to soak my watch to get money for tobacco."

It was his mother who noticed the prize-offer from the San Francisco Call for the best descriptive article submitted within a given time. Jack was slaving for thirteen hours a day, finding it difficult to get enough rest as it was. Finally he gave in to her urge that he try for the prize. "Only, what shall I write about?" he complained. It was evening, and in his wearied eye was the prospect of rising at half-past five. "Oh, why not tell about something you did or saw in Japan, or at sea," Flora pricked his memory. This he mulled with knit brows. All at once, with a grin, he swooped down upon the kitchen table with an old school tablet, where he wrote furiously without note of the clock until breakfast. Two thousand words was the limit fixed by the Call, and he had already exceeded this, with his idea but half worked out.

"The next night, under the same conditions," he says, "I continued, adding another two thousand." And the third night, in a wakeful trance from exhaustion, he revised his story into the proper length. The manuscript, signed "John London," published in The Morning Call, Sunday, November 12, 1893, and entitled "Typhoon Off the Coast of Japan," to his amazement, carried off the first prize, probably because it had been whipped out hot from the mind of one who possessed exceptional powers of observation and instinct for beauty. Still more amazing, the contestants who took second and third awards were stu-

dents of Stanford and the University of California respectively. Jack's father was so elated that he bought up every copy he could lay his hands on, to distribute to friends.

Jack himself, greatly excited, harking back to dreams in the days when he had pored over "Signa," could hardly wait to catch up with sleep before putting his hand again to such fascinating and lucrative work, which had been mere amusement so far. But what he next sent to the Call editor he designates as "gush." It was promptly rejected, and he contented himself with his regular employment.

But some sort of recreation beside reading did the subdued and amiable young factory hand naturally crave. He did not drink. He did not want to drink. He never in his whole life wanted to drink for drink's sake. He devoutly wished, from beginning to end, that drinking never had been invented as a social function. "I wish there had never been any alcohol in the world." I have heard him say, "it is all to the bad."

And here lies the pity of his preceding youthful experience. It had for the most part unfitted him for the healthful, normal youngness of fellows of his own age. He knew of the opportunities for athletics as well as education in the Young Men's Christian Association. All his future, in deed, he spoke warmly in appreciation of the work and scope of this organization.

The Y. M. C. A. was all right, he conceded; it was he who was at fault, or, more concisely, so unfortunate as to be too worldly-wise to find its atmosphere congenial. To him, the sophisticated, it proved juvenile to boredom. It had come too late, even though he was for the moment the perfect conformist in a bourgeois environment. "I had bucked big with men," was his regret. "I knew mysterious and violent things. I was from the other side of life so far as concerned the young men I encountered in the Y. M. C. A. I spoke another language, possessed a sadder and more terrible wisdom"—although it seemed far from "terrible"

to him then. And he "got more out of the books than they.  . . . Their meager physical experiences, plus their meager intellectual experiences, made a negative sum so vast that it overbalanced their wholesome normality and healthful sports."

Still, though he could not command social advantages that would have helped, these months formed a clean and pleasing period, singularly innocent and satisfying to one so lately roughing his way over the world. He always recalled the purity of his first love and the idyllic way of its pursuit, idyllic despite its setting; and his companionship with Louis Shattuck, who led him into its sweet paths.

Louis Shattuck, blacksmith's apprentice and dandy, considered himself quite a devil of a Lothario. Nevertheless it was through his tutelage in town ways of their class that Jack happily regressed to boyhood's simple consciousness, and overtook somewhat of the pristine ecstasy which had not come to him in the usual order of adolescence.

Remember, in their stratum, there were no chaperoned calls in cozy parlors of the working class homes, no formality of any sort in the mode of getting acquainted, no dancing schools other than the dubious and expensive public dance-halls and picnic-park Sunday whirls. And neither Louis nor Jack could afford these. At sunset and twilight of Sunday afternoon, in linked pairs the young girls strolled the sidewalks, the boys likewise. The head-gear of the boys tilted at angles esteemed smart: the smarter the angle of "tile" and glance, the greater impression upon the demure or tittering female of the species in her "fresh print gown."

Jack was suddenly devastated of the pride he had nourished in his manhood's prowess toward man and woman. He discovered himself without knowledge of the guileless methods of boys like Louis, who was "without one vicious trait . . . handsome, and graceful, and filled with love for the girls." In Louis's manner, alas, Jack did not know

girls at all. He "had been too busy being a man" in all departments of his buccaneering life. "And when I saw Louis say good-bye to me, raise his hat to a girl of his acquaintance, and walk by her side down the sidewalk, I was made excited and envious. I, too, wanted to play this game.

Recalling personal ways of my husband, it seems to me I often lingered pleasantly upon the movement with which he lifted his cap or hat—almost diffidently, with an expression as if it were a practice newly sweet and consciously lovable. When he was Louis s chum, of course he already knew that hats were "tipped" to ladies, but with him it was far from having become an involuntary gesture. Louis, modestly charmed that he could teach anything whatsoever to such a traveled hero, planned how Jack should "get a girl." Which was more difficult than it sounded, Jack found: "We both lived at home and paid our way. When we had done this, and bought our cigarettes" (Jack had smoked steadily since his newsboy days) "and . . . clothes and shoes, there remained to each of us . . . a sum that varied between seventy cents and a dollar for the week. We whacked this up, shared it, and sometimes loaned all of what was left when one of us needed it for some more gorgeous girl-adventure, such as carfare out to Blair's Park and back—twenty cents, bang, just like that; and ice cream for two—thirty cents; or tamales, which came cheaper and which for two cost only twenty cents." He, who as pirate had squandered nearly two hundred dollars in one night! And right here he reiterates that disdain of his for money; but characteristically, in his philosophy he completed the circle, finding himself "as equable with the lack of a ten-cent piece" as he had been in the lurid months passed by.

Listen how they went about it: "Louis's several girls he wanted for himself.  . . . He did persuade them to bring girl-friends for me; but I found them weak sisters, pale and

ineffectual alongside the choice specimens he had." So Louis had to initiate Jack, who was bordering on panic worthy of a lad of thirteen, in the accepted manner of getting acquainted with some one whose looks did appeal to him. All spruced up, the two boys met of evenings in a little candy shop, where they bought their smokes and sometimes a nickel's worth of " red-hots." Louis was as frankly fond of sweets as Jack.

Consider this quondam lover of cannery maidens; Prince of the Queen of the Oyster Pirates; gay reveler of red-lanterned barges on the winding rivers; squire of more than one lowly Madame Chrysanthéme on her native heath: it would seem that he was yet undespoiled of delicacy and virginity of imagination. Struggling with diffidence, he entered into what he has termed the "Arcadian phase" of his career, and learned how to overtake with a jaunty lift of his hat the pretty young things who did not look unapproachable; and how to walk and joke lightly and make speeches that commanded approving glances and laughter. But the infatuation he craved, as he saw it working in Louis, did not immediately descend upon him, although he "pursued the quest," Looking back upon it all, he wrote: "Some of Louis's and my adventures have since given me serious pause when casting sociological generalizations. But it was all good and innocently youthful."

At length it came, "All the dear fond deliciousness of it, all the glory and the wonder" of boy-love and girl-love. I almost think it was the most wonderful, beautiful, uplifting thing in his whole life of learning how the world was made. One evening he had found himself, out of curiosity, at a Salvation Army meeting, and the little woman of under sixteen, there for the same reason, sat next to him beside her aunt.

He has called her Haydee, and never divulged her true name. She was somehow different from the other good little girls he had flirted with; and he caught himself think-

ing the shape of her face and delicate coloring, her brown sweet eyes and tip-tilted nose, her pretty brown hair and petulant rosy mouth, were the loveliest he had ever seen. I can see now why he always favored a tam o' shanter. Haydee wore a tam o'shanter. It must have been about this time that he bought for a nickel, at a rummage sale, an old brown "tam" which made an item of his wardrobe aboard the Snark into the South Seas, from Australia to Ecuador in the tramp collier Tymeric, up-river in California on the Roamer, and around Cape Horn on the Dirigo; the which I darned, darn upon darn, and which finally with regret he pronounced too far gone for further service, and had laid away in the attic with other beloved old "gear."

To this blond, awkward-bashful sailor, already tanned for life, face and hands, it was a "great half-hour" they spent in the Salvation tent, the while they "glanced shyly at each other, and shyly avoided or as shyly returned and met each other's glances more than several times." Indeed, so great was that half-hour that he was solemnly ever afterward "convinced of the reality of love at first sight."

As stern fate would have it, when he followed the girl and her aunt from the tent, that he might learn where they lived, he in turn was followed by quite another sort of woman, and accosted by her. She was not unknown to him—I wonder if it was the Queen herself?—and wished to tell him of young Nelson, who when he was shot had died in her arms. But when he had listened to all she had to relate, he pulled himself back from a host of undesired memories of his rampaging past, bade her farewell and hurried on after his love. Although he lost her that evening, Louis was able to tell him something of Haydee: she was a Lafayette School pupil, he knew girl friends of hers, and an introduction would be easy. Jack could not wait, and begged one of the girls to carry a note to her from him.

His experience with regard to Haydee is almost incred-

ible. That he, "who could sail boats, lay aloft in black and storm, or go into the toughest hang-outs in sailor town" and be quite at home, "didn't know the first thing I might say or do with this slender little chit of a girl-woman whose scant skirt just reached her shoe-tops and who was as abysmally ignorant of life, as I was, or thought I was, profoundly wise"! He came to know, in brief meetings, sitting on a bench under the stars, with "fully a foot of space" between them, "all the sweet madness of boy's love and girl's love." He goes on to record that "so far as it goes it is not the biggest love in the world, but I do dare to assert that it is the sweetest.  . . . Never did girl have a more innocent boy-lover than I who had been so wicked-wise and violent beyond my years."

He could not believe, as in all ages, first-lovers have failed to believe, that so exquisite a creature as his worship made her could be merely human; that she really had to eat to live—though once she daintily shared with him a nickel's worth of red-hots; that she could be similar in any mere human way to other humans. I have heard him tell it! He did not know how to act. Should he kiss her? She, the chrysalis Eve, tapped his lips with her glove. Hear this: "I was like to swoon with delight. It was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me." Then followed an "agony of apprehension and doubt." Should he imprison that little hand along with the glove? "Should I dare to kiss her there and then, or slip my arm around her waist? Or dared I even sit closer?" But he dared nothing. I merely continued to sit there and love with all my soul.

They never met more than a dozen stolen half-hours, and "kissed perhaps a dozen times—as boys and girls kiss, briefly and innocently, and wonderingly." The quality of his adoration was so mysteriously holy, passionless, clean—as if for an angel or a bird. This is the way he closes the incident:

I have always fondly believed that she loved me. I know I loved her; and I dreamed day dreams of her for a year and more, and the memory of her is very dear."

When winter came on, social recreation perforce terminated. It was too wet and shivery to promenade, and Louis and Jack, unable to buy overcoats, were driven to search for the most quiet saloon where they could keep warm whilst playing cards—they were deep in the intricacies of two-handed euchre. They did not want to drink, but self-respect pressed them each evening to indulge in a small beer apiece, as tacit rent for the table and the boon of the big stove. Sorely they grudged the two nickel pieces, wishing they could be spent on red-hots. But Louis's girl friends who waited on customers in the little candy shop were not allowed to entertain in the sitting room where their idle moments between customers were lived.

The saloon least distasteful in its crowd was the old National, at Tenth and Franklin Streets, where the two young men met some of their childhood schoolmates. But the inevitable consequent treating " skinned" them of forty to fifty cents a "clatter," and the two were "broke" until next pay-day. The National was too speedy for them; and meantime their thin coats were buttoned higher at the necks while they played euchre and casino in a livery stable. Sometimes discomfort made them cast tentative glances at the Y. M. C. A. reading and social rooms, and their speculations even strayed as far as Sunday-school socials, where girls whom they knew told of jolly good times. But Jack for one felt distressedly alien, the very delicacies of his diffidences standing in the way.

Unskilled labor, reason presently unfolded to Jack, was getting him nowhere—in a favorite phrase, "buying him nothing"; even a promised increase to $1.25 a day was not made good. He looked about, and with his usual deliberation selected a trade he believed would give him the chance

to rise. As an electrician he could go far; and ambition, which never was denied for long, swelled afresh.

"He saw me coming, all right," Jack reminisced a bit grimly, telling the story of his call upon the superintendent of the power plant of an Oakland street railway. This man, by name Grimm, was of a towering patriarchal presence, his face winged with huge, snowy burnside whiskers. "How could I know he was mad that morning at the quitting of two coal-passers who didn't like their pay, and that I looked good to him merely from the standpoint of coal-passing! I, young fool, intent on learning electrical engineering from the ground up, listened entranced to his suave elucidation of the necessity of beginning on the lowest floor, literally, in this case; and I calculated I could shovel coal with anybody. I could, too, it seems, for until I learned through an admiringly compassionate fireman that I, a youth of eighteen, was doing by day, for thirty a month, with only one day off, what two horny-handed laborers, working day-and-night shifts and getting eighty, had thrown down as too stiff for them—well, until I found out this, under binding seal not to give the fireman away, I staid with it though it nearly laid me out."

I have listened to his account of how he had to strap the swelling of those small-boned, sprained wrists that were so ill-suited to obey the driving muscles of his over-developed sailor shoulders; of how he would eat his daily-larger packet of lunch ere the forenoon was half over, and be famished and almost done before quitting-time; how he would fall asleep on the car going home, and when the conductor shook him at his corner he had already stiffened so that other passengers helped him to the ground, where he almost fell; and how, struggling in a dual nightmare agony of hunger and drowsiness, he would drop asleep "wolfing" bread and butter while his mother put the hot dinner on the table, rouse to partake of it, and almost immediately fall into slumber so profound that Flora and John carried

him to his room, night after night, undressed him and put him to bed.

"He would have told me sooner, the fireman said, except that he thought I would soon get enough of it and clear out. I was just about killing myself, I admitted; and he pointed out that I was keeping two men out of a job anyway, and cheapening the price of labor. This sounded reasonable; but I was proud of my ancestors who had fought in all the wars of the U. S. A., and I wasn t going to give up the job till I showed I could hold it down without breaking. So one day, when I had concluded my purpose was accomplished, I spread myself getting in the last of the night coal (you see I'd already got in the day-coal!) and resigned. And I did some thinking, too, after I had slept for twenty-four hours without waking."

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