The Sailor on Foot and Rod—1894
19th Year

MANY become tramps, not through a reasoned mental attitude, but because their bodies rebel against the maiming from overwork that precludes natural gladness of being. Not so with Jack London. When hard toil was a game, winning its own delights, as he found it on the water, all was fair enough. But long-continued and under-paid grind that left neither time nor strength for recreation, not even for reading, held no reward that he could see, no matter how earnestly he had gone in for "settling down." The coöperation of logic and adventurousness worked a revolt in thought, which went hand in hand with revolt in action. He was intelligently resentful toward what he felt was merciless exploitation of his manifest and enviable muscle. As far back as the cannery episode, despite the pretty picture he had been struck unpleasantly by the luxury of the carriage in which a daughter of one of the cannery-owners rolled about the city. It had almost seemed that his own muscle had something to do with the pulling of her elegant equipage.

The revulsion was now more portentous than ever before, coming as it did near the end of that state of flux which precedes full growth, when youth's beliefs are likely to crystallize for bad or good, and what he did or did not do exerted an increasingly grave bearing upon his ultimate manhood. For the time being he cared little if he never

"settled down." It was an irritating phrase, now he came to think of it. Settling down did not look good to him. "Learning a trade" could go hang. He would break loose, at least until rested in body and spirit, and that would be a long way off. After all, he owed a little something to himself. So even duty went by the board for once. The result of his orgy of work, brief though it had been, was to sicken him of toil. The memory of the overdose of hard graft he had let himself in for was actually nauseating. When he presently ran across, and approved, Milton's "Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven," more firmly than ever was he persuaded, as in the case of Washington Irving and others, that great minds ran in the same channels.

Probably this was the most critical juncture in his life. Only that magnificent balance preserved him from ruin. He had had sense enough to stop before any vital physical deformity had been wrought. Even at that, when he shook those unharmed shoulders defiantly once more, his very liberty was tainted with disgust at his inadequate wrists, bandaged with tight straps that for a year he was never without.

He strolled along the waterfront and considered going to sea. He was not tired of the water. Never did he tire of going down to the sea in ships; "the savor of the salt" could not stale. And here he might from sheer bleakness of soul have slid along the weakest line of resistance that stretched before his uncaring vision. As it was, out of a complex of temporarily dulled desires there glimmered the undying one that had influenced him to decline another sealing expedition. He had only one life: there were more varied experiences than he could ever get around to in that one life; therefore no hour was too soon to get about the business of pursuit. Anyhow, as he said of himself, "I was so made that I couldn t work all my life on one same shift."

In his final decision there was no intention other than for adventure and surcease from deathly routine, no notion of gathering data for sociological conclusions. In all the vivid plannings of his adult years, adventure was the prime factor. The fact of his office being located under his hat was a secondary, if important, consideration. Any port would incidentally provide grist for his lucrative literature-mill; but the port, in relation to personal enjoyment—the port was the thing. That his present unmitigated lark of loafing across the continent made him into a socialist philosopher was but an inevitable sequence in a passionately adventuring intellect. As he put it: "Sociology was merely incidental. It came afterward, in the same manner that a wet skin follows a ducking."

What Jack's next move might have been if the notorious "Kelly's Army" had not just then been forming in his home town, one can only speculate. It was shortly before Easter, in the year of 1894. "Industrial Army" he heard it called, and this unvarnished phraseology would not have enticed one in his irritated mood toward industrial connotations; but certain sneering remarks that accompanied the words in connection with the unique organization had fixed in him the picture of a tatterdemalion crew of bums and hoboes and other wearied rebels like himself. He would join the thing and have whatever fun there was to be got out of it, and Coxey's Army farther east. He would "just as leave" wind up at Washington, D. C., as any other city; besides, once that far on the way, he stood a chance to see other big Eastern centers.

When he went to bid Eliza farewell, it took her but a moment to find out that he had only a few cents in his pocket. Concealing under a bright demeanor any disapproval she may have harbored for this new wild-goose chase, briskly she stepped to the bureau, and lifted her snowy pile of best handkerchiefs from the top drawer, beneath which reposed a ten-dollar gold piece.

"Run out and get this changed," she said, "and I'll give you half. I'm afraid, if you have it all, some of the bunch of do-nothings will get it away from you." But when he came back with the change, conscience smote her that he should depart with only five dollars, and she pressed the entire sum upon him. And I have not a doubt that when upon Easter Sunday she put on the last Easter's retrimmed straw, it made her twice as happy as would the coveted new one she had set her heart on previous to her brother's leave-taking.

On a Friday morning—to be accurate, April 6, 1894—Oakland's city fathers were to forward the "Army" by free-rail conveyance to the unappreciative capital, Sacramento; but when Jack arrived at the stated hour of seven, to make one with the "push," he found they had been packed incontinently off two hours earlier. The only thing to do was to spend part of his precious ten dollars in following by fast passenger-train.

According to his penciled diary, he and a companion he calls Frank arrived in Sacramento at eight P. M., and supped at the Mississippi Kitchen. On the trip from Oakland, whirring by the old scenes of wild times he had known on land and boat, his somber mantle of discouragement had fallen from him as it had fallen when he boarded the Sophie Sutherland on that morning of dawning world-adventure. Again he felt "the prod and stir of life," not to go back into the debilitating commercial treadmill—heaven forbid; but to conquer life in the open once more, to "royster and frolic" over the face of the earth.

Sacramento had been too quick for him; she had not delayed in passing the hungry hundreds on to an unreceptive Nevada. Jack and Frank drifted to the arks and fishing-boats on Sacramento's river-front, where they came upon a scanty remnant of indigent young riffraff left be hind for lack of rolling-stock.

"The water was fine," Jack remembered, "and we spent

most of our time in swimming. " The men "talked differently from the fellows I had been used to herding with, . . . and with every word they uttered the lure of the road laid hold of me more imperiously."

Every moment, with alert ear and eye, this latest recruit was absorbing each scrap of information that would instruct him in the idiom of the road. No, not the idiom, but the language; for a language it surely is, living, picturesque and foreign. And this he had to do while learning the fine art of dodging horrid accident to body and limb on stolen rides by way of the whirling, clanking machinery underneath "limited" railway coaches.

The wanderlust had returned to flame as fresh as on that day he sat in the Idler's cabin with Scotty and the alleged harpooner; as lawlessly as the evening he took the Queen with him aboard his own Razzle Dazzle, broke out anchor, and hoisted sail for the oyster flats. Although the learning amassed when he had been one with hoodlum and pirate and common sailor stood him in good stead in the present emergency, it was only to a quickly reached and limited degree. The "road-kids," by misfortune of birth or later mischance, seemed a lower sort of human animal, unemployed by choice or physical inability, on their backs and in their pockets only such clothing and money as they could beg or pilfer.

These reckless ones regarded life from a contrary angle to the independent, carelessly free-handed spenders he had known, who made a generous, if sometimes haphazard, livelihood upon the waters. Revolutionary that he was, Jack slammed the brakes upon previous norms, took a square look at himself and the eccentric crowd, then eased into their rate of going. The road-kids did not like his hat. Neither did he. So they showed him, just off K Street that night, how to remedy matters.

"But you did not join that raid years before when the

Oakland gang destroyed the poor Chinaman's laundry," I demurred to his confession of the hat.

"The laundry," he declared, "was not that Chinaman's property; he had to pay his customers for their lost raiment. The Chinaman from whom I lifted the hat owned the hat, and he was not a poor 'Chink,' for the hat was a beauty, and he was otherwise well dressed. You will admit there is a difference, no? Yes?" And to me, I having meekly admitted the difference, he melted.

"It was not nice; it was wrong and wilful. Yet I did not do it in sheer viciousness. It was part of the new game that I must learn in a hurry. I'd like this very minute to pay that frantic, jabbering Chinaman the five dollars he must have spent for that beautiful Stetson." He giggled at the comical fracas that had ensued. "What? Wearing a Chinaman's hat? Oh, it was never my habit to let squeamishness stand in the way when expediency was sufficiently pressing. And I've worn more suspicious articles than Chinaman's hats! A tramp cannot be an exquisite, my dear. I washed my face and took a bath of some sort whenever there was opportunity, which wasn't every day, because chances for swimming were scarce. Don't forget, I'm pretty much of a savage when amongst savages. Yes, I've slept with them and eaten with them and begged with them and loused with them, which was the awfullest. And you, thank God!" he broke in with beaming eyes,—"you, tender woman in your pretty gown, you don't blanch in my face at the raw facts. What a lot most women miss by shuddering from playing some part of their men's adventure-game or even from trying to understand it. Wait a minute—where did I say it?" He reached for his shelf of first editions. "Here it is; listen, 'It is not given to woman to live in sweet-scented narrow rooms and at the same time be a little sister to all the world.' You, Mate Woman, he concluded, "I don't ever want you to know real hardship at first hand, and you have never known it yet;

but I do want you to know and face facts as they exist. Shrink your closest from the thing itself, and no blame to you; but not from the fact that the thing exists."

Still, he himself was never physically inured to the hardships youth put upon him. Irritation of burning cinders, grit, exposure, strains on wrists, jarrings of unexpected long jumps on slender ankles—all such hardships showed a rare endowment of beautiful elasticity. What I mean to make clear is that wherever he excelled in this and that arduous game, the price he paid was greater than that of the average man.

On the river-front that April day he was very busy under an amiably nonchalant exterior, acquiring the qualifications of a proper "blowed-in-the-glass" hobo. Since he had elected the road, nothing less than tramp-royal would he aim to be, and by the shortest cut possible.

What he did not take to himself of the tramps' oblique psychology would make very small additions to the literature of America's mighty army of Weary Willies as the country knew it before the Great War.

So well did he listen and apply that under his own "monaker," Sailor Jack, presented by his mates, he, the absolute tyro, was the only one of the crowd except Frank, who acted upon his example, to make a clean get-away on the late Overland Limited train of the Central Pacific. The "shacks" (brakemen) accounted for all the rest, and one luckless road-kid lost both legs in the scuffle. Of course, Jack registered automatic brain-notes upon the incompetence of the poor dubs at their own calling.

Sailor Jack had been warned beforehand to stay on the mail-car's deck—this being its roof,—to which he had clawed like the seaman he was, until a certain junction had been passed where the constables were especially unpopular with the "stiffs." Afterward he would descend to a less unsheltered nook on the platform of a blind-baggage. But this particular stiff made security from shacks doubly sure

by holding down his precarious up-ended bed clear over the "hill," as the Sierra Nevada summits were styled by the "profesh," all through those smoke-stifling miles of snow-sheds. These somehow reminded him of the beamed ceiling of the Sophie Sutherland when he had bestridden Red John's heaving shoulders. He let himself down, almost congealed Avith cold, gritty, and scarred with hot cinders, only when Truckee was reached. Having beaten the railroad "over the hill," he had won his spurs as a proper road-kid, and he never owned up to the "bunch" when they overtook him at Reno, watching some Piute Indians gambling, that he had spent the night on the "deck." He arrived at Reno in a "side-door Pullman," which is a box car, and was thrown off a passenger-coach he tried to ride out.

"It was no time at all," he told me, "before I was riding the rods on a 'ticket.' Oh, no, not a pasteboard one; but a little bit of a piece of wood, with a groove across the middle to hold it on the rod." One day he came across the old "ticket" that had been part of his slender equipment, and at my request labeled it. How different from most lavendered mementoes a widow may cherish! I step to his huge fire-proof safe and take it out—a weather-grayed section of four-inch board less than an inch thick, irregularly six inches long, with the shallow crosswise groove hacked out by his jack-knife long ago. And how eloquent is the high polish on the originally unplaned surface! The tag reads, in his own hand:

My "Ticket" used by me, in 1894, when tramping.
The notch rested on the rod inside the truck of
the four-wheel passenger coaches.

Jack London, Aug. 12, 1914.

His agility in ducking under rapidly moving cars and invading the internal mechanism of four-wheel trucks always remained a matter of pride to him, calling as it did

for the smoothest coordination of nerve and muscle. This meant the grasping of a gunnel and swinging his feet under to the brake-beam, thence crawling over the top of the truck to let his body down inside to a seat on the cross-rod, made somewhat easier by sitting on the "ticket"—all this in darkness and deafening noise of grinding, revolving wheels. How he, or any tramp, could dare even drowse in what one may be excused for calling an extreme predicament, is an enigma. Yet I have Jack's word that he was able so to drowse, although many a time he "burned" his boots or trousers-legs, and even his flesh, on a whizzing steel periphery.

I have heard him swear with exasperation at the in correct descriptions of this nimble feat—an exasperation which reached its just climax when his own description, in "The Koad," was wrongly illustrated by photograph.

Together with his big sincerity, sometimes of the bluntest, in Jack London there dwelt a prominent trait of the play-actor, and this served him well in beating his way across the States. Unwilling cooks and housewives, loath to part with "hand-out" or "set-down," burly policemen, temporary employers, with all classes he practiced his wits to see how far this play-acting gift would carry him into their hearts for the attainment of his ends.

Owing to his natural penchant for independence, how ever, one sharp disinclination he had to overcome was this very begging, whether on the street for a "light-piece" or from door to door for the "hand-out" or "set-down." His first lesson in the gentle art was undergone even before he saw the last of Eliza's ten dollars, and it was almost beyond him to bend to the humble posture. But very shortly he adjusted his focus, and thereafter encouraged that latent histrionic talent, much to his own amusement. Time and again he nearly landed into trouble when a glib use of invention led him too far into piteous fiction that unfolded the circumstances which had reduced his estate. Or else his

originality was too much for the gravity of some appreciative, if less talented, companion whom Jack was also bent upon victualing. Having cast himself for this purposeful mummery, he hesitated not to make capital of all the seraphic facial advantages he was heir to. Still, he never ceased to feel a half-serious guilt regarding certain kind-souled women who, as reward for the best their larders afforded, fed up&n; the almost unbelievable misadventures that had brought this guileless child, with the innocent mouth, to the dire strait of begging food. However, he was able to offset this uneasiness by considering that there had been no palpable harm.

"If those ladies had been less trustful . . . they could have tangled me up beautifully in my chronology. Well, well, and what of it? It was fair exchange. For their many cups of coffee and eggs and bites of toast I gave full value. Eight royally I gave them entertainment. My coming to sit at their table was their adventure, and adventure is beyond price, anyway."

Many editors and publishers have wondered how they came to sign certain contracts which, to his own enrichment, Jack London had defaced with initialed amendments on their margins. During one of our visits in New York I said that I would give anything to hear him talk business with these men when he was discussing new contracts or renewing expiring ones. But he would never consent.

"I will confess to you that I do a good deal of play-acting at such times," he said, salving my disappointment. "It's a game or a play. We're all acting. The best actor wins most. If I were under your scrutiny, it would spoil my play-acting, and thereby lose money for us both, you and me. You know me too well. And once, referring to the subject, he said: "Somehow, I don't know exactly why, but I don't seem to want you to see me in this rôle. Maybe I'm not especially proud of it."

Many were his chances to learn what it really meant

to go hungry, but in his case even clawing emptiness of stomach did not discourage. It was part of the big play in which he was more or less a puppet; and, too, his was the consciousness of stored efficiency so lacking in the bulk of his associates, which kept him atop the heap of the more dispirited and the hopeless ones. While it still made him curiously uneasy to contemplate steady work or routine of any sort, he was highly enjoying this great picnic of irresponsibility. Occasionally, too, he was in funds of a few dollars that dribbled along his lengthening trail from the hand of Sister Eliza; while several times his mother, terrified lest vagrancy land him in jail, spared him small sums.

No loveliness of mountain or desert or prairie-land, morning, noonday or night, escaped his ranging eyes. No morning too cold, no aching muscles too painful after a night on the unprotected blind-baggage, no headache too violent from sleeping over a round-house boiler, to deprive him of the beauty of the new day that was the herald of unguessed variety.

"Sweet plains of Nebraska" they were to him, and it was not until he had made his way across them as far as Council Bluffs that he came up with the elusive, more or less orderly mob under command of General Kelly. That undisappointing figure on "a magnificent black charger" fired Jack's imagination with the human romance of the exploit of this man who had marshaled an augmenting force of the dissatisfied clear from the Pacific coast. Nor had they walked, but proceeded upon captured trains to the double-intentioned cheerings of citizens of a West only too anxious to see the shape of their backs. Jack's, by the way, was adorned by a huge blackened rent caused by fire from a cinder that had caught his overcoat one night of ride-stealing.

The Eastern railroads took a sterner view, and the Army hung up at Council Bluffs. Jack dropped into the

last rank of the rear-guard as the procession, stepping to martial music, swung out on the several miles of road to the town of Weston. There its advent tied up two important railway lines that declined on principle to operate any trains whatsoever rather than oblige the invaders. A state of mild anarchy prevailed, for Council Bluffs, to obviate a return of the divisions, prepared to commandeer a train and run it to Weston for General Kelly's use. In the end the Army arrived at Des Moines on foot, and never rode again, except when it lifted its feet on river boats. Jack's dislike for "hiking" increased rapidly, for the soles of his shoes wore into holes until, I find in his diary, he was walking on "eight blisters and more coming." No shoes were to be had from the commissary, and finally his feet were in so "horrible a condition" that he dropped out and waited for a chance to ride with some farmer. The process of reducing the Army to the pass of tramping by foot cost the railroad companies "slathers" of money; but they established what they knew was an important precedent. In the end the Army arrived in Des Moines, and on Monday, April 30, I read in Jack's faded penciling, he "walked 15 miles into Des Moines, arriving in time for supper." That diary, incidentally, is absorbing reading, and his boyishly conventional comments on the good people who came to camp are delicious, though it is too long to quote entire.

Jack forever nursed a soft spot in his heart for the Iowans, who, though not wholly with disinterest, welcomed, banqueted, and bade God-speed to the "two thousands stiffs" that composed General Kelly's following. Jack voted it the time of his young life.

"It was a circus day when we came to town, and every day was circus day, for there were many towns. Sure; they enjoyed it as much as we. We played their local nines with our picked baseball team; and we gave them better vaudeville than they'd often had, for there was good talent left in some of the decayed artists in the Army." Years

afterward, from our drawing-room on the Limited, pulling out of Des Moines, Jack pointed out to me the old stove-works where he with the Army had camped and invited the city either to furnish six thousand meals a day or to make the railroads come across with unremunerated accommodation. They continuing to decline, the riddle was solved by General Weaver's brilliant idea of building, at the city's expense, enough ten-foot flatboats to float the whole two thousand "soldiers" down the Des Moines River to Keokuk, on the Mississippi, and good riddance at the rice.

Sailor Jack selected nine of the likeliest fellows from Company L, of which he was a member, known as the "Nevada Push," and contrived to get his boat out first of the string. Thence on, the ten graceless scamps proceeded to raise Cain for everybody along three hundred miles of the shallow stream, helping themselves to the cream of the provisions collected by farmers in advance of the main Army's descent. In the diary I note a recurrent phrase, "living fine." Jack was not impressed with the dignity of the Army's management, looking upon the whole scheme as bound directly toward failure, which it eventually reached.

Meanwhile, having been outwitted by General Kelly in the continuance of their high-handed methods of preceding the main body, Jack and his contingent returned and disbanded one division, reorganizing it pretty much to suit themselves; after which they resumed and enlarged upon the scope of their cussedness. It is to be hoped that General Kelly and his sorely tried officers, for the sake of their own remembered youth, reaped a little fun out of the in corrigible pranks of these prodigals, whose ringleader was the irrepressible and resourceful John Drake, an alias under which Jack received some of his mail. As for the latter's own sober retrospect, he wrote:

"I want to say to General Kelly and Colonel Speed that here's my hand. You were heroes, both of you, and

you were men. And I'm sorry for at least ten per cent of the trouble that was given you."

From Quincy, Illinois, to Hannibal, Missouri, Jack had opportunity to become acquainted with twenty-odd miles of the Mississippi of Tom Sawyer, and enjoyed it as much as was possible from the questionable vantage of an enormous raft formed by lashing together all the flat-boats. Somewhere along the way there caught up with him a letter from his mother, addressed to John Drake, Quincy, Illinois, and variously forwarded, as the scrawled envelop attests, to St. Louis, Cairo and Louisville.

—161—

On Thursday, May 24, arriving at Hannibal, Jack remarks:

"We went supperless to bed. Am going to pull out in the morning. I can't stand starvation." Truth to tell, he and several others had gleaned all they wanted of this particular class of adventure. So they hit out in a borrowed skiff, thence by hand-car and blind-baggage, with many vicissitudes, for Jacksonville. Jack was the only one of the party who was successful in staying aboard a "K. C. Passenger" to Mason City. On the twenty-ninth, at seven in the morning, he slipped circumspectly off a cattle-train in Chicago. First, at the general delivery window of the post-office he was handed the letters referred to by his mother, and the five dollars in greenbacks which he found therein were partly spent "amongst the Jews of South Clark Street," where, "after a great deal of wrangling," he fitted himself out with "shoes, overcoat, hat, pants and shirt." Thus equipped, "with a shave and a good dinner," he started out to "see the sights. Went to the theater in the evening, and then to bed," the first bed, he records, that he had lain in since leaving home nearly two months before. The next day he passed at the White City of the World's Fair, and "in the evening went to the Salvation Army and then to another fifteen cent bed."

"Your mother's people" had always been a familiar phrase to Jack's ears, enunciated by Flora London; also "my sister Susie," or "your Aunt Mary." So he had been specially exhorted to make a side-trip to "St. Joe," Michigan, that Aunt Mary Everhard and her sons might have a look at Flora's shoot of the family oak. Mrs. London must have lived in some trepidation as to the appearance he would present after tattering weeks on the road. Evidently

Jack's shopping in South Clark Street had only slightly improved his appearance, for I have it from one of Aunt Mary's sons, Mr. P. H. "Harry" Everhard, that his cousin Jack "landed in St. Joe in somewhat ragged condition, but in good health and spirits, having enjoyed his experiences. . . . Mother," he goes on, "was greatly pleased at his coming. Took him down town and rigged him out in a suit of store clothes, and gave little parties for him, inviting those of his age or a little older."

Somehow the spectacle of this world-wise, weather-seasoned sapling sunning himself in the mild social atmosphere of Mrs. Everhard's carefully selected companions of his years or even "a little older," is delightfully comical. Chances are, however, that her not ungrateful nephew's deportment toward her and her friends was above reproach, for his instinctive manner, from earliest childhood, had been one of responsive gentleness. While he was hail-fellow-well-met in all sympathy of understanding when the going was rough, refined surroundings, with affection in the balance, always saw him sympathetic, even anticipatory of well meaning and courteousness. Hence, far from being shocked by what she may have learned or guessed of his bold past, in Aunt Mary's eye he was, according to her son, "a 'hero,' and she just worshiped him."

Undoubtedly owing to the quality of her love for Jack, which was responsible for certain unintentional injustices that she wreaked upon her own affronted offspring, he did not make any hit at all with my brother or myself," Harry Everhard recalls. He adds that this want of appreciation by himself and Ernest was repaid in kind and with interest by their guest. Jack was enjoying his bespoiling for all there was in it as a brand-new sensation, save for his life long indulgence from Eliza. It is easily possible, too, that he had let loose upon these well-raised cousins a few salient sketches of his tour, and that their mother would not listen to not nice reports of surreptitious introductions into vari-

ous sorts of "blind-pigs" in prohibition Iowa, accessible to any wide-awake male of any tender age; nor unthinkably loathsome camp-fire meetings of "alki-stiffs" (those dregs of tramphood who imbibe druggists alcohol undiluted, "stuff that would take the bark off your throat.") And Jack, even allowing for the latent artistry in him, probably did not greatly exaggerate his doings with the outcasts he had, in passing, made good with.

One incident alone told me by Harry Everhard will absolve the wrathful brothers from the onus of inhospitality.

"There was a good-sized lawn or yard of possibly an acre of ground with big elm trees, well covered with timothy and clover. With the exception of the grass close to the house it was allowed to grow high enough to make hay.  . . . My brother on the day covered by this incident had the hay all cut and in small stacks and called to Jack to help him load it on the wagon.

"It was a pretty hot day and with a rain in sight that would have spoiled the hay. Jack jumped to the work and was pitching hay like an old hand when mother got sight of him and called, 'Ernest, don't you know better than to expose Jack to that hot sun?' And she forthwith made Jack go in the shade and protect himself. Now he had been sleeping in box-cars and had crossed the desert where the sun roasted one as if in an oven, but according to Mother's view of it our summer sun of St. Joe was too strong for his literary habits. Anyhow, I had to finish out helping to get in the hay and Jack got a shady place under the trees."

The beautiful name of Ernest Everhard always dwelt in Jack's memory, and he used it for one of his own favorite characters—hero of "The Iron Heel." It is not to be marveled at, however, that his cousin, inoffensively pursuing a serener pathway in life, was not markedly pleased with this bestowment of his name upon even the noblest conceivable of labor agitators and revolutionists, no matter how much a pet of his creator.

Little wonder that Jack lingered several weeks in the easeful environment of the roomy, vine-trailed brick home; and it would seem that he had not entirely abandoned thought of writing, which made decided impression upon his fond aunt. Mr. Everhard remembers him "sorting up notes he had taken during his trip," and that he "had a sort of ledger and journal system of keeping his data. He did not call these books by that name, but they had the same relation to keeping account of his thoughts as a bookkeeper uses in keeping account of business transactions." This was an outcropping of a future relentless system with his myriad notes, and further pointed an ingrained brain-saving executiveness that goes side by side with government.

Two strong motives appear to have been struggling for possession of the genius that was in Jack. One, of art-expression, was controlled by a conventionality he had not yet been impelled to pluck from out his consciousness, as shown by his diary, as well as a number of amateurish stories he wrote of knights and ladies and such hackneyed themes, submitted the following months to Aunt Mary for her criticism. The other motive, quite apart, was based upon his expansive lore of the under-world of down-and- outs. It was, still unrealized, his desire to coalesce ideal and reality into tangible art.

« << Table of Contents