1896-7

AND here he was, in the fall of 1896, after all his struggling, two years ahead of his High School classmates, at last "a college man," fellow to the Lily Maid's brother, and James Hopper, and a Henry Clay Club friend, Fred Jacobs, with others he had known previously, albeit they were Juniors and he but a verdant "Freshie." High time, too, for in January he would be twenty-one, though to save his soul he could not figure how the four years were to be managed on the slim and uncertain income he had little leisure to pick up outside of study and lecture and reading hours. But he was a-thrill with having won to a paramount desire. It was worth all the striving and scrimping.

James Hopper, '98, and Jack met one day on the Campus, for the first time, knowingly, since they had played marbles, and scrapped together in the Cole Grammar. Mr. Hopper's notes on the meeting, written the day after his friend's death, compose one of the most sympathetic pictures I know upon the radiant subject; and from them I draw a few lights:

He possessed already then a certain vague reputation among us boys as one who had done man things and wild things and romantic things.  . . . His latest exploit that of passing the University entrance examinations after three months vigorous cramming while stoking the furnace of the Oakland High School—was in many mouths. His already was a colorful personality, and when the boy who had been telling me about him said suddenly: 'There he is,

see? Coming down the steps,' I moved up and braced him.

"But—but—well, I hate to say it. Perhaps if I explain carefully people will understand. You see, he was a newly-entered freshman . . . and I was a full-fledged junior, and on the football team and editor of the Occident, also holding a well-defined place in a very regular organization a bit of a bourgeois prig, in fact. So that when I went to Jack London, I did so—God forgive me—thinking consciously how nice and democratic this was of me!

"If he felt my condescension—and he must have, for under his sturdiness ran a fine net of fine nerves—he did not show it. I may say right here that the dominating quality of Jack London's character was bigness. 'Attend to the big things and let the little things go'—if he ever made for himself a motto it must have been that. He let the little things go that time, and met my advance with an open frankness that was like a flood of sunshine.

"Sunshine—the word leaps of itself to the end of my pen.  . . . He had a curly mop of hair which seemed spun of its gold; his strong neck, with a loose, low, soft shirt, was bronzed with it; and his eyes were like a sunlit sea. His clothes were flappy and careless; the forecastle had left a suspicion of a roll in his broad shoulders;"—and here Mr. Hopper appreciates the notable beauty of the man: "he was a strange combination of Scandinavian sailor and Greek god, made altogether boyish and lovable by the lack of two front teeth, lost cheerfully somewhere in a fight."

As for Jack's irrepressible enthusiasm: "He was full of gigantic plans—just as, indeed, I was to find him always whenever I came upon him later in life.  . . . He was going to take all the courses in English, all of them, nothing less. Also, of course, he meant to take most of the courses in the natural sciences, many in history, and bite a respectable chunk out of the philosophies.

"And as he unfolded his intentions to me, there in the

sun in front of North Hall, radiating himself at least as much light and warmth as the sun, I, all of twenty years old and hence disillusioned, frozen (lightly frozen) in a gentle pessimism, polished with a worldly skepticism, I listened to him and smiled, and tried to make my smile just a bit ironical and withal kindly. You see, I had taken some of the courses of which he was going to take all, and I found there—well, not all I had sought. Three or four times I came near telling him that. But his enthusiasm was so in trepid, so young and touching, so pure and vibrant—that I didn't have the heart."

Jack concentrated especially upon the English branches and biological sciences, and took other things by the way, one of them French; but I retain the impression from a reference he made to me that for some reason he did not continue long with the latter "extra." Probably, in the super-urgency of his state, he weeded it as a non-essential if graceful perquisite toward the English literature he felt he was to father into being. In fact, he never seems to have laid stress upon the value of etymological intricacies. Rather the reverse, it strikes me, as I recall uncompromising utterances on the wisdom of eliminating Latin and Greek and Sanskrit and what not, made to his own offspring and to other youth of both sexes who flocked in quest of advice for the shortest cut to a career of letters. This is the more surprising because of his strong predisposition toward investigating basic components of whatsoever interested him—from subduing to saddle or harness an incorrigible "outlaw," to overcoming on the high sea loftier mathematics of navigation seldom disturbed from musty repose by professional masters, or in possessing himself of the colorful why and wherefore of opals bought in the Antipodes for his wife.

For all it had absorbed, his brain was as a perpetual dry sponge—impossible of saturation in its myriad folds. The instruction he sat under, far from appeasing, impelled

him to the library, where he read volume after volume, each leading indefinitely on to other volumes over and above recommended collateral reading. "I can do the work quicker than they can teach me, he once put into the mouth of an autobiographical character; and I have heard him seriously hold forth that the method and content of university education were of slight benefit to him. This estimate and library cramming were the chiefest bestowments of the university upon his particular ego. His abiding belief was that he could have done as well without those months of attendance. To be sure, he did not always try to discourage others from seeking their training in this way; but in his own case he claimed he had "succeeded in spite of it, rather than because of it," what of the to him untenable formalizing process upon "the wheel of university subservience to the ruling class," as he wrote his daughter. And of course he came to respect Experience as the Teacher of Teachers.

The following exploit has been told, as instance of Jack's clear-headedness and daring: The college advertised for a steeplejack to furbish up the flagpole which stood midcenter of the campus. Weeks elapsed, and none volunteered. Then, one morning, students on the way to early classes were amazed to behold their curly-headed freshman slowly working his way earthward from the lofty golden ball, meanwhile plying a paintbrush dipped in the pail on his left arm. He had grown impatient at the sight of the weather-soiled eyesore on his campus, and with the breed of youth that had not learned to "shinny" heights. There was a norther blowing, but his experience as sailor made the work real play—it felt good to wrap his long-unaccustomed legs about the swaying land-mast that had once been a storm-swept living pine, like the sturdy stick of the Sophie Sutherland, and to feel the high breeze humming through his hair. When the thing was done to his taste,

he rolled his paint-soaked overalls in a bundle, and unlimbered his cramped legs quick-stepping to classrooms.

In the month of his twenty-first birthday, the first half of the freshman year at his back, despite the growing if grudged apprehension that college was not yielding quite all he had hoped of it, Jack went about preparation for the second term. And if it had not been that he was unable to spare enough time from study to coin the where withal for a living, he would doubtless have seen through at least the one year of university work before finally discarding it as to him a telic non-essential.

Hunched over the inky, ashy table in his den, with might and main he cut loose and embarked upon the career of fiction he had chosen. I have heard him laugh to recall the madness of desire to arrive at a style that would serve his ends. "Never was there such a creative fever as mine from which the patient escaped fatal results.  . . . I wrote everything—ponderous essays, scientific and sociological, short stories, humorous verse,"—and all other metrical and irregular poetic matter from triolet to lugubrious blank verse and "elephantine epic in Spenserian stanza." Steadily day by day he composed at the rate of fifteen hours out of the twenty-four.

During these weeks of nerve-wracking application, in his brief family contacts Jack was about as soothing a house-mate as a ruffled porcupine, and irascible at the racket of his sister Ida's two-year-old boy, whom Flora was tending for a consideration while its mother, now separated from her husband, went out to work. But at last, neat sheaves of manuscript were mailed with importance by the expectant author to eastern editors, who made use of Jack's return stamps with a celerity that modified his hot confidence to a not uncheerful hope. Not one single line of all the output of devoted days and nights elicted one single line of approbation from the stony-hearted men who, tilted in swivel chairs back in New York, Boston, and Philadel-

phia, controlled the food supply of literary aspirants. It was incredible. He wondered what an editor really was like. He had never seen one and felt a colossal awe that was in inverse ratio to the regard with which only too soon he began to favor the phenomena of their own disappointed intellects.

Almost his only recreation was an occasional game of chess at the Lily Maid's house. Although he continued resolutely to pluck his deportment and tongue of roughnesses in her presence, he could not be "good" all the time, and out of immediate earshot relaxed vigilance. For example, one afternoon, he was deep in a game with her brother in the garden. Oversure, Jack suddenly realized as the other quietly reached for the next move, that he had tripped in his calculation, and faced disaster. Tipping back in his chair, he coolly and dispassionately gave unhurried vent to a selection of eight words, choice, succinct, most unsaintliest of his unsaintly sea-and-road expletive.

As the last syllable issued close-clipped but deliberate from betwixt his teeth, a horrible certainty overtook him that the two men of them were not alone. A queer smother ing look spread upon his opponent's face, in which embarrassment struggled with mirth. Then all doubt vanished as a stray zephyr from behind Jack wafted a wisp of white mull within eye-tail vision. Let us drop the curtain as the balancing front-legs of his chair come slowly to the grass.

What really hurt most, though, in this blank failure of immediate victory over grateful magazine staffs, was the associated failure to shower upon his father the shining gold returns; for he had allowed this beloved and patient friend of all his singular fortunes to feed him, which had been done with a willingness that John could ill afford, and in natural expectation of the needed reimbursement.

One ray of light that always struck athwart Jack's darkest hours, was his father's quiet, persistent faith in

him. "Don't you worry about Jack, mama," he would say to his wife. "He'll win out, I tell you—he was built to win, and nothing can stop him from winning, nothing at all," firmly he met Jack's own dependence upon his ability to pull through in the big way.

At first appalled by untempered condemnation from every invaded sanctum on the Atlantic coast, coldly expressed by prompt rejection slips, the author then reëxamined his prolific pages. This was not done alone in appraisal of their quaint appearance resulting from his brother-in-law's old "boiler factory" that typed only in capital letters, but from the severest critical standpoint of rhetorical construction; and finally, and what should be of gravest importance, thought and subject matter that would be acceptable to panderers of a misguided public. He could not help laughing at the first consideration—the unrelieved capitals were weird enough to put the most amiable editor in panic fear of losing his eyes and reason. As for the other two, Jack suddenly came to see a lengthening road of endeavor to be traversed ere he could hope to command attention. He thought of the easy money earned from that prize-story in the San Francisco Call, but realized that he had won out then by an unvarnished narrative of events eye-witnessed; whereas, in his present difficulty, he had tried to be erudite, to infuse his own subjective processes, without sufficient preparation. He was fair and modest enough to feel shame that he had ever had the nerve to try putting over such amateurish practice-stuff upon men old in the game. He would not again be so hasty in his judgment of them.

On the other hand, no acknowledged rawness could shake a divine trust in himself, for he knew his thinking and his writing were not all worthless. He refused to be discouraged. Success was merely delayed for further preparation, and he went about it, reading and studying mightily. But all too soon there was no blinking that things

could not go on this way. John London, while uncomplaining, was not well—that war-ravaged lung gave increasing trouble; and the mother was oppressed by temperamental foreboding. Jack surrendered to pressure of necessity and innate affection, and capitulated to manual labor, little as he favored it since he had harnessed his wagon to a star. He must eventually make his brain pay, and pay well. Others did it; he must and would do it. Therefore it was an aching distress to waste precious, fleeting time for the small wages to be gleaned by bodily strain—all for the want of a few niggardly dollars that the predatory rich could so easily spare and never miss. Notwithstanding, he asked no alms of them. Fair field and no favor for him no—matter how unfair he esteemed the race to be.

A young man of his acquaintance, an expert launderer who needed an assistant, opened the way to a job in the country—oddly enough, down on the "Peninsula," not many miles from the old San Mateo County ranch. This unfamiliar work was in the model steam laundry of a military school—Belmont Academy; and for "long sizzling weeks," all day and part of many a night of rest for all the institution except these two, Jack sweated as laundryman for the munificent sum of thirty dollars per month. Just the same, it was a sort of vicarious pleasure to work hard, when the prize hung high, at even so uncongenial a shift as cleansing other people's dirty linen. Indeed, for all that his ideal of university value had been partially undermined, it was of the laundry experience that he wrote: "This was the only time that I worked because I loved it," in view of continuing at college. When he should have earned enough money to go on, he would have to shorten time in making up what he had lost by enforced absence from the classes of 1900.

As summer came on, the space in eternity consumed ironing the white ducks of the students nearly broke him body and spirit. So heavy was the work that even the up-to-date appointments of the laundry and the combined

expertness of the two boys in cutting out waste motion scarce made possible the handling of it. "What I don't know about mangling, and handwork, bluing and 'fancy starch'—which was what we called the faculty's wives' thin waists and fine embroidered and lace-trimmed linen—would make you weep," Jack told me; "and so help me God, no circumstances could ever make me touch an iron again if I died for it! The only ray of fun we two sweating fools got out of the whole brutal toil was a silly vengeance we took on all creatures of unearned luxury. This was by starching stiff the dainty linen of the women—and of course the comicalest appeal of the naughty prank was that we could securely depend upon their hide-bound conventional modesties to seal their lips from complaint against us. Lord, Lord, when I think of the boards we made of those garments . . . " he exploded into a wicked giggle.

The worst of this work-orgy, as with former harmful outlay of strength for an insufficient living-wage, was that no snap was left in him to respond to the trunkful of books he had begged and borrowed, and which formed his main luggage. By the deferred bedtime he was so played out that try as he might his eyelids would not stay propped open. He would drop asleep from exhaustion, cigarette on relaxed lips, until some profound falling sensation, or singeing forelock or insistence of the electric light burning through closed lids, jumped him awake. Then he bestirred to fasten again upon the blurring print, and repeated the performance of falling unconscious a couple of times—habit of long-enforced concentration—until finally, with a swearing sigh, he laid down the futile volume, turned off the irritating bulb, plumped into the air with the loosened covers wrapped about him, and sank into dream-driven slumber which was interrupted for the new day's steaming task that began under artificial lighting.

He gave over trying to cram the heavier subjects—biology, jurisprudence, political economy—and substituted

history as lighter and more arresting to a drowning attentiveness he could not fix. No use—he would just read the novels; they would hold him awake longer and at the same time guide to what was expected of an author in the manufacture of fiction. This method failing, in blue disgust he threw the books back into the trunk. I know the deep dented "picture corners " of his mouth that sagged with a pathos he could not hide from his own soul and the smolder of hurt and disillusion that darkened the depths of his tired eyes. Why were things made so difficult for a fellow who really wanted to get ahead?

Damn it all! It was the same old fight over again—the slippery rock wall that reared before a man who submitted everlastingly to manual labor. It was a long time since he had coal-shoveled himself into a state of cool irresponsibility on the Road. Meanwhile money and time had been spent upon equipping himself for a profession . . . but now look at him!—once more a stupid human animal bound to longer hours than any horse, too wearied to exert his superior intelligence for compensations much above those of the horse.

But he was no quitter. His time would come. Better and better socialist all this made him. And there should be no more vagabondage, he thought, though the rosy hands of adventure waved temptingly toward the wide free highway that he knew slanted ever downward. He must stick it out, earn enough to tide over another period of writing-practice and digging which would fit him to produce that which should make editors sit up and take notice.

Then one day it occurred to him that no alleged perfection of labor-saving apparatus but could be questioned and improved upon. Here was tonic for one's inventive ideas that might lighten the back-breaking, torrid afternoons of ironing or running articles through the revolving mangle. I wish I had made notes at the time he explained to me his device to relieve some of the more arduous laun-

dry tasks. It was so simple he laughed to think he had not sooner happened upon it. When attached to whatever mechanism it was intended to control, he could regulate it by one foot from the chair where he rested and read, with an occasional eye to the accelerated progress of work theretofore done by hand.

A tyrannical ancestor of my own, no shirker himself and a rabid dissuader of leisure for others, whenever a child of his made bid for praise in the quick accomplishment of a set duty, would sardonically grin: "Well, that's fine, now; and I guess, since you're so smart in saving time, you can do about twice as much to-morrow in the time saved."

Which is by way of illustrating how Jack lost his place, or at least declined to lapse into time-squandering methods. Vaguely I recall his intimating that his superior in the laundry, though rendering a grudged appreciation of the invention, got word of it to whosoever had upper charge of the department, but who seldom meddled so long as there was no complaint about the work turned out.

Either Jack was "fired," or else his logic was too outraged by the demand that he forego this progressive social contribution to mechanics. At any rate, incontinently he left, rode his neglected "bike" to San Jose before wheeling northward for Oakland, and in a large bottle drank confusion to all sightless subservience to stupid custom. The bottle furnished a relaxation that was indulged in by choice—as others take drugs for their ills—before he should bury himself in another sober stretch of hard graft whatever it be. He acknowledged no harmfulness in this day's mellow forgetting, alone under a grand old oak in a pasture with the China-blue valley sky over-arching, where he was not even setting an example to weaker brethren. And of course he did not for a moment reckon with any insidious foe that might lurk behind this unusual desire to recuperate in solitude. He hated to think what that bottle had cost; but a man must "pay for his

fancies," and he had denied himself fancies of all sorts for a long, long time. Indeed, that altogether delightful, comradely jingle in Charley's ark was the sole instance when he had punished the booze since he could clearly remember.

He scorched up to Oakland, and dug himself once more into the den, writing furiously.

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