Autumn, 1904

ON June 30, 1904, still in the ocean aboard the in coming S.S. Korea, from Yokohama, Jack London was served with papers for "separation and maintenance." Moreover, he learned from the inhospitable messenger that an attachment had been levied by the plaintiff upon his personal property, even to his books, "My very tools of trade," as he designated his library. The attachment spread to whatever funds might be due from his publishers, and covered his balance with The Examiner for the war articles—all of it revenue which in his provident integrity he had sought almost solely for the benefit of his dependents.

He was generous until taken advantage of, and then—divinely generous still, even to generosity becoming, in the nature of things, a mere duty. When questioned as to a seemingly short-sighted attitude that might work disadvantage to himself, his philosophy dictated the following:

"If——should sell off everything I possess, I would say, 'cheap at the price.' The dollars do not amount to anything to me where human relations are concerned. I think I am the same way with my neck. I would trust it willingly to a friend, a dear friend, and if that friend should chop off my head, my head, rolling on the ground, would say, I am sure, 'Cheap at the price.' So I shall let

certain powers remain in So-and-So's hands. If such power is misused, why, what of it? The extent of its misuse would be as nothing to the fact that So-and-So had misused it, and I prefer to give the chance."

To Cloudesley he sent a scribbled note: "Am back, rushed to death, and trying to straighten things out. At present all money tied up (earned and unearned) and don't know where I'm at."

And this was not the worst. A dear and wonderful friend had been ruthlessly named as co-respondent in the separation complaint and of course there ensued all the malodorous notoriety which accompanies such attacks. A hue and cry went up from a hypocritical capitalist press, quite as if Jack London were the first youth who ever repented of a marital mistake.

The girl's chief reply to the astonishing accusations, as recorded in the Bay dailies, was that the same were "merely vulgar." Jack, grieved to the heart that his beloved friends should be soiled in his unfortunate affairs, declined to comment upon the latter otherwise than: "I refuse to say a word about my separation. . . . A man's private affairs are his private affairs." And as might be surmised, the "Herbert Wace" of the "Letters" was widely quoted. To the girl herself, Jack wrote, in part:

The original complaint, a lengthy arraignment abounding in curious charges, was eventually withdrawn

and another, this time for complete divorce instead of mere separation and maintenance, and on the ground of simple "desertion," went before the court on August 2, 1904. This was allowed by default, Jack London not appearing. Property interests were adjusted out of court.

Shortening down already insufficient sleep, beating his head with his fist to keep awake, Jack plunged deeper than ever into work. For he must immediately start building the new home for his little girls; and this home, in addition to his other driven obligations, he personally superintended. As if all this were not enough, the death of Mammy Jennie's husband made it incumbent upon him to take over her affairs.

The events of this summer of 1904 threw Jack into a melancholia that he tried to conceal under a carefree manner when with the "The Crowd" picnicking in the hills, or rollicking in the Piedmont swimming baths—his main recreations. A letter to me aired his depression over the minuteness of human generosity and fair play:

So bleak was his spirit for a while, that more than once he considered, though with a terrible cheerlessness, returning to the old order, what of love and sorrow for the babies. In a letter: "Believe me, . . . it has taken all the resolution I could summon to prevent my going back, for the children's sake. I have been sadly shaken during the last

forty-eight hours—so shaken that it almost seemed easier for me to sacrifice myself for the little ones. They are such joys, such perfect little human creatures." But in after years he reviewed his state at that time: "If I had gone back, it would have meant suicide or insanity."

As it was, he was with the children frequently, either in their home or his own.

My people wrote to me, in the east, that he had come to spend a week at Wake Robin Lodge, and his regard for the beautiful mountainside had only extended.

Manyoungi, the brightest Korean in Jack's train with the Japanese First Army, had been brought by him to California, for he needed just such a servitor to relieve him of all domestic friction in the little flat. This boy, resourceful and comely, took prideful charge from kitchen to study, and made entertaining an irresponsible pleasure to "Master, as he continued to designate his employer, to the playful horror of jeering friends, radical and otherwise. Finding it useless, Jack gave up trying to dissuade Manyoungi from his long-time custom with European travelers to Korea, and submitted willingly to the ministrations of the perfect servant who assumed entire care of his wardrobe, even to dressing him in the morning. Jack's attitude upon personal service was to the effect that it saved him priceless minutes for work and reading. "Why tie my own shoes when I can have it done by some one whose business it is, while I am improving my mind or entertaining the fellows who drop in!"

And many were the fellows who dropped in, persons from near and far flocking to look upon the face and hang upon the speech of the young writer. Jack, jealously conserving his every moment, saved hours by meeting them at mealtime:

"Manyoungi, there'll be two to dinner this evening—" or a dozen, or six; and the table blossomed forthwith by virtue of a complete set of exquisite Haviland china, with

silver and crystal and napery as faultless; to all of which beauty Jack, hospitality in his eye, had treated his longing soul upon taking up bachelor life.

"If I had to be a servant," he would muse, "I'd be just such an one as Manyoungi. He possesses what I understand as 'the spirit of service' to the finest degree."

"The spirit of service"—he appeared to love the quality, despite the popular idea of his socialism. Out of his own mouth: "If I were a servant, I'd make myself the finest servant in the world."

"The Faith of Men," another series of Klondike yarns, and ninth volume on the stretching shelf, had been published by Macmillans in the spring, and autumn saw "The Sea Wolf" beside it. The latter was given especially high acclaim by the reviewers. However, they persisted in pigeonholing it as essentially a man's book—a book women would not care for;" and it was with loud glee that Jack later on received word that The Ladies Home Journal had purchased several thousand copies to be used as premiums to subscribers. Meanwhile, he tried his hand at writing a play, based upon his short story "Scorn of Women"—frankly an experiment. This play at various times intrigued the fancy of one and another of "America's foremost actresses," but was never performed. Referring to the comment of one star, Jack wrote me:

And to Anna Strunsky:

Then, in another paragraph, concerning his health:

The "nervous itch" referred to gave Jack much disquietude both mental and physical, and to the skin-and nerve-specialists not a little thought and experimentation. Under the most minute scrutiny, the skin revealed nothing that would lead to a diagnosis. Remained only to go into the question of nerves. The patient's dynamic habits of overwork in every department of his intellectual life, and his relentless limitation of repose, afforded good reason; on the other hand, he had pursued this system for many years, with no such warning as the present.

By a process of elimination common to his drastic fashion, he hit upon an apparently innocent custom indulged for some months past—that of munching salted pecans and almonds while reading in bed. Possibly he had saturated himself with an excess of salt. (Physicians often reduce sodium chloride in the tissues and fluids for remedial purposes, a method known as dechloridation.) He dropped this saline element from his dietary. The itch disappeared. Resuming the nut-refreshment, the affliction took a new lease of his hypersensitive surfaces, which flamed intolerably at the slightest exertion. So acute was the disorder, that even the thought of it precipitated an attack.

After convincing himself that salt was the offending factor, Jack went gaily to the specialists with his findings, and they agreed with his conclusion. His diagnosis was verified to his entire satisfaction when in tropic climes re-

lapses followed long exposure to salt air and water; and even under a bright California sky in long periods of midwinter yachting.

But there was no diminishing of his work; rather, he increased the staggering pace. Having reeled off an article entitled "The Yellow Peril" (now in collection "Revolution"), in which his sage views on the Asiatic situation were presented, he tackled a short novel. This was "The Game," which might be termed a prizefight idyl its overarching motif being man's eternal struggle between woman and career. He wrote me:

He loved the writing of it, for, like Keats, he loved a fair contest between man and man. It was not for the prize nor for brutality s sake, but for the cleanness of a scientific game—Anglo-Saxon sport, square and true, as say against some other national sports like bull-fighting, where as a rule one contestant is doomed through trickery of superior intelligence.

He enjoyed the creating of Genevieve, line for line. "Why, you'd never guess where I got my model for her," he said to me afterward. "She was a candy-girl in a poor little sweet-shop in London. I never saw such a skin—sprayed with color like your Duchesse roses out the window there. I used to hunt up a thirst for gallons of soft drinks just for excuse to go and sit at the dingy little counter and look shyly at her face, as a silly boy might. I did not even want to touch her—and she hadn't a thing in her yellow head to talk about. It was just an abandonment to the prettiness and fragility of her English bloom."

"The Game" was serialized in The Metropolitan Magazine, illustrated by Henry Hutt in water-colors. And Jack

had been right: it was for the most part a failure, so far as concerned the American public. For readers listened to the uncomprehending words of space-writers who totally missed the big motif, and neither knew nor cared to know aught of "the game" itself. Timely to the subject, I quote entire a letter Jack London wrote on August 18, 1905, to the editor of the New York Times:

Jack always remained a champion of this book of his, not only in view of its subject but also of his workmanship. When Great Britain received it with intense appreciation, placing "this cameo of the ring" alongside other favorites like "Cashel Byron's Profession," the author was exultant with vindication. And yet, only the other day in fact, I picked up an American newspaper clipping in which The Game" was tossed aside as "that Jack London novel with out an excuse!"

With reference to some tentative and evidently short sighted criticism I had made of the manuscript, he responded:

"And, by the way, remember that anybody, by hard work, can achieve precision of language, but that very few can achieve strength of style. What knocks E—? Precision. To be precise he has pruned away all strength. What the world wants is strength of utterance, not precision of utterance. Remember that about all the precise ways of saying things have already been said; the person who would be precise is merely an echo of all the precise people who have gone before, and such a person's work is bound to be colorless and insipid. Think it over. Let us talk all these things over."

I remember, when he referred to a rusty pipe as "a streak of rust," wishing that I had thought of it first!

Ere the ink was dry on the packet that inclosed his manuscript of "The Game" to the editor, he was busy upon memoranda for his next novel in mind, "White Fang." On December 6, I received a handful of notes by mail, with the following comments:

By now, I was back from the east and living at Wake Robin Lodge with my Aunt, putting in hours a day at the piano. Meanwhile my services were offered to Jack in the matter of relieving him of typewriting, a suggestion that met with glad response; and I was thus brought into closer touch with his work and aims. My remuneration—and that a treasure—was the possession of his handwritten pages. Except for a few short stories and articles, the play "Scorn of Women" was my first typing for him, and by mail we exchanged some lively discussions of its technique before final completion. One of his letters contains this lamentation:

Here are the last two 1904 communications to Cloudesley Johns:

I have heard Jack London remark that Miss Mary Shaw, whom he met after a San Francisco performance of "Mrs. Warren's Profession," was the most intellectual actress he had ever talked with. And to Cloudesley:

Every moment energy incarnate, he rushed and crowded as if to preclude thinking of aught except the work or recreation of the moment. Speed, speed—and he began saving for a big red motor-car to mend the general pace. He fell ill—another severe attack of grippe that compelled him to ease up ; but the instant his brain cleared of dizziness, his incredible activities were resumed. And he always made it a religious duty personally to answer every letter received. Often I read the following, at the end of hastily scrawled notes to me: "This is the last of 30 [or 40, or 50] letters I have just reeled off."

And this:

"I never had time to bore myself—Do you know I never have a moment with myself—am always doing something

when I am alone—I shall work till midnight to-night, then bed, and read myself to sleep."

To which I, tinged with sorrow and foreboding:

"You make me sad. You haven't time to live; so what's the use of living?"

One of Jack's relaxations, if the word can apply to the tense interest he took in game and sport, and his unquenchable joy in the pard-like beauty of an athlete, was following the monthly boxing bouts at the West Oakland Athletic Club, the scene of the prizefight in "The Game." A characteristic incident has been offered me by a newspaperman, Mr. Fred Goodcell, who made his acquaintance one day when Jack had, for the first time in years, dropped in to see his old friend Johnny Heinold in the First and Last Chance. I give Mr. Goodcell's version of one evening that Jack described to me at the time:

In addition to all else, he dashed off requested "stories" for The Examiner, one of which was "The Great Socialist Vote Explained" a similar article going to Wilshire's Magazine. Many an evening was filled with a reading or a lecture at this club and that. One night he talked at the Home Club of Oakland, on Japan ; on another, he spoke at the Nile Club, in acknowledgment of an honorary membership; he read to the New Era Club, the men's league of the Methodist Church, from "The People of the Abyss"; "The Call of the Wild" of course was often asked for; and whenever Mr. Bamford sent out invitations to a Ruskin Club dinner, Jack was expected to be on the program. At one dinner he gave them "The Class Struggle," and again

"The Scab." Both these papers were later collected in "War of the Classes," proof-sheets of which in the spring he sent me for correction. In among Jack's correspondence with me is laid away a little handwritten sheet from which he made a statement to the Ruskin Club of his Socialistic position:

The Ruskin Club several times mentioned was composed of what might be termed the intellectual aristocracy of the socialists about the Bay. Its father and moving spirit was Professor Frederick Irons Bamford, "the lion-hearted one," Jack lovingly called him, for despite an agonizingly supersensitive nature he was made of the stuff of martyrs. And to Comrade Lyon Jack one evening observed: "Bamford is the only man in the Ruskin Club who makes me feel small." The Club would meet here and there, at irregular intervals, say at Piedmont Park Clubhouse, or the Hotel Metropole of "Martin Eden" fame. Notable were these affairs, often in honor of big men in the movement, as well as in honor of men whom the Club strove to convert to its banner.

He would even go out of the Bay region to lecture, perhaps to San José where, as guest of Professor Henry Meade Bland, he addressed the State Normal; or to Vallejo where ashore from the Spray he had made friends; once or twice to Stockton, making headquarters with Johannes Reimers. One of Mr. Reimers' sons found himself abruptly unpopular with his teachers because of his father's firebrand socialist guest; a circumstance in which Jack's quick natural regret was tempered by the reflection: "That young fellow is the stuff that opposition will make a man of!"

Perhaps I have not mentioned that Jack never attended any lectures except his own. "I do not waste my time listening to lectures," he put it. "I'd rather read. I get more for myself, without the personality of the speaker coming between. And I cover more ground." The following, from another's pen, seems to expess what Jack meant: "To attend a motion picture play is to be primitive; to listen to an orator is to be a cave man; to read is to be civilized!"

In a vast ledger, clipping-book of 1904, pasted by his children's mother and Eliza Shepard, I find several humorous newspaper squibs upon Jack's being made a member of the Bohemian Club despite his soft-collared silk shirt and other ineradicable preferences. Indeed, this was not the first capitulation of clubdom to his apparel. And the press was often the reverse of reliable, as in the case of a certain affair in Jack's honor given by the exclusive feminine Ebell Club of Oakland, when, it is to this day firmly believed by newspaper readers, he lectured in a red flannel shirt. I have Jack's word that outside of those brilliant Klondike undergarments, and possibly while stoking a steamship passage, never in his whole existence did he affect scarlet flannel. When he did don woolens at all, as say at sea, it was of navy-blue. Even his trusty sweater, though as described in my Prologue he early wore it in making social calls on his bicycle, never appeared upon the platform. A white, soft shirt, with flowing tie, worn with a black, sack-coated suit, was his evening dress.

Handling the item of Jack London's entrance into the Bohemian Club, one San Francisco sheet, The Wasp, avoided the humorous note to such a virulent extent as to defeat its ends. Being by all counts the most venomous slam in all the scrapbooks, it is too comical not to quote entire—especially in view of the fact that at about the date of its publication a portion of "The Call of the Wild" had been incorporated into a text-book on English used in the

University of California, forerunner of others of his books to be adjudged "classics" by that institution:

While on the theme, I might say in passing that Jack London was not at any period a zealous clubman. He belonged to no large club bodies otherwise than the Bohemian; and the famous rooms in San Francisco saw him little and at prolonged intervals, when he chanced to be in the neighborhood for some other purpose. After the Great Earth-

quake and Fire, the new clubrooms and the Sultan Turkish Baths were rebuilt in close proximity. We often, Jack and I, finished off a theater night at the Baths, but first he would drop in at the Club for poker or pedro or bridge, and I can still hear his drowsy-happy voice over the Baths telephone from the men's floor, telling me of his luck—for the voice was sure to be happy from his pleasure in the game, be luck good or ill. And whenever feasible, our world-wanderings led homeward in midsummer, that he might spend at least one week of High Jinks at Bohemian Grove, situated but a few miles from the Ranch. For he dreaded foregoing the marvelous annual Grove Play, words and music, acting and staging, all done by members of the Club only.

January, 1905, was an especially full month. The first week saw Jack in Los Angeles, visiting Cloudesley Johns in the quaint rambling home at 500 North Soto Street, where he reveled in the companionship of his friend s family. The grandmother, Mrs. Rebecca Spring, was Jack's particular joy. She was one of California s most remarkable women, friend of Margaret Fuller, Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow; and she subsequently died in dissatisfaction with Life, because Life cheated her by a few short weeks of attaining her centenary.

He also visited the Mathers in Pasadena, for the daughter of the house, Miss Katherine, had been a fellow passenger on the Siberia to Japan. And of course he attended the yearly winter Rose Carnival of her city. This vacation, like his life in Oakland, was without repose of spirit or body—rush, rush from daybreak to even-fall, and for the best hours of the night. While in Los Angeles, he spoke for the Socialists, who rented the Simpson Auditorium for the occasion. Miss Constance L. Skinner, poet and historian, another member of the Johns' fascinating household, who evoked Jack's admiration and regard, ably reported the lecture, which was on the subject of "Rev-

olution," for the Los Angeles Examiner. Strangely enough, the radicals of the "City of Angels," when publishing their favorite picture of Jack, replaced the sweater by a formal suit and collar, drawn quite to order, beneath which Jack scratched a disgusted comment.

His introduction at that meeting was not to his liking, according to his comrade J. B. Osborne, of Oakland: "The Chairman introduced him as a ripe scholar, a profound philosopher, a literary genius and the foremost man of letters in America. . . . When London arose, dressed in good clothes but wearing a soft shirt, he said:

"Comrade Chairman and Fellow Workers: I was not flattered by all the encomiums heaped upon me by the chairman, for the reason that before people had given me any of these titles which the chairman so lavishly credits me, I was working in a cannery, a pickle factory, had my application in with Murray and Ready for common labor, was a sailor before the mast, and worked months at a time looking for work in the ranks of the unemployed; and it is the proletarian side of my life that I revere the most and to which I will cling as long as I live."

Once more in his home town, Jack set others than the County of Alameda by the ears by consenting to an oft-repeated request from the President of the University of California, Dr. Benjamin Ide Wheeler (in 1919, Emeritus), to address the students in Harmon Gymnasium. And "choose your own subject—anything at all," Jack was left to consult his fancy. Now was his big chance to let loose a thunderbolt in the sacred groves, and he armed for the fray.

The day was the 20th of January. Humming across the campus from North Berkeley in the morning sunlight, fresh from an hour with my piano teacher, Mrs. Fred Gutterson, herself pupil of Bauer and Leschetizsky and Carreno, I turned westerly toward the "Gym" where I had

danced so many an evening away. And who should come stepping along with a smile in his eyes but our young friend, who explained that he had come out early in order to think quietly upon what he was going to say and how he was going to say it.

At the entrance we parted, I to become one of the several thousand, students and citizens, who packed the huge elongated octagon, Jack London to take his seat with the faculty convened upon the platform. President Wheeler presented the speaker, and the speaker went into action without preamble, head high, eyes grave and dark, voice challenging as he rapped out the short crisp sentences:

"I received a letter the other day. It was from a man in Arizona, It began, 'Dear Comrade.' It ended, 'Yours for the Revolution.' I replied to the letter, and my letter began, 'Dear Comrade.' It ended 'Yours for the Revolution.'"

The house thereupon settled to listen spellbound to the strangest statement of facts and opinions ever enunciated within the college walls. Dr. Wheeler, conventional embodiment of what by all tradition the head of a great university should be, sat aghast at what he had done. But it must be said that he was game; for when Jack, on the stroke of noon, realizing he was over his time, paused on tiptoe and asked, "Shall I stop?" the President came back hurriedly and with perfect courtesy: "No, go on—go on."

The last words of unequivocal indictment of society's mismanagement of society rang out clear from the upraised young face that had been imperially stern throughout, "The revolution is here, now. Stop it who can!" The audience, from whatever mixture of emotions, resounded in mighty applause. This was followed by a rouse from the Glee Club, composed for the renowned ex-student of the college. Meanwhile the faculty crowded about him, some in protest, some in curiosity, all with keen interest from one motive or another.

One humorous incident crept in: Jack in the course of his indictment had attacked the antiquated methods common to institutions of learning. When he stepped from the rostrum, according to one who stood near, "Professor Charles Mills Gayley greeted him and congratulated him upon his literary success. The author during their conversation reiterated his opinion of the deficiencies in teaching methods. He said:

"'Dr. Gayley, permit me to make the criticism that English is not being taught in the right way. You are giving the students for their textbooks such antiquated authors as Macaulay, Emerson and others of the same school. What you need in your course is a few of the more modern types of literature——.

"Here Dr. Gayley interrupted with a dry smile:

"'Perhaps you are not aware, Mr. London, that we are using your own "Call of the Wild" as a textbook in the University?'"

Jack surrendered, laughing with the others.

The evening papers and their morning associates treated the lecture with unexpected leniency. But when the press in general (Jack meantime repeating the speech at every opportunity) had had time to catch its breath, there was nothing too vicious nor unfair that could be printed of his utterances. There were exceptions, to be sure, the Oakland Tribune being one of those which remained loyal to "our own Jack." But the majority deliberately distorted his words, and robbed of its context the quoted phrase "To Hell with the Constitution"—notorious exclamation made by Sherman Bell, when that capitalistic leader of troops for the employers in Colorado, during the recent scandalous labor war that had raged there, was reproved for riding roughshod over the Constitution. Jack was held up as a dangerous anarchist—the same platitudinous old charge of the capitalist press against the socialist. And carefully editors refrained from embodying in their columns the

statement that the social revolution was, as announced by the speaker, "to be fought, not with bombs, but with votes." Nor did President Wheeler escape his share of criticism for having allowed so incendiary a character to sully the choice air of Berkeley. Again he was game, if a little condescending as befitted the dignity of his years and position, and the closing sentence in this excerpt from his letter to The Argonaut held him inviolate as concerned misapprehension of his own views:

One paper, however, noted that Jack London, socialist, affected illustrious company, naming amongst others, H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw.

Some of the students of the old Oakland High wanted Jack to lecture, but promptly went up against the bars shut by Superintendent of Schools McClymonds and Principal Pond. Also, was he not a divorced man, inimical to the sanctity of hearth and home? How pitifully trivial and pettish all this hullabaloo of little editors squeaks amidst the slashing, smashing events following the World War!

On the 29th of January Jack read "The Tramp"—another "War of the Classes" article, at Socialist Headquarters in Oakland. And a few weeks afterward I wrote him:

This club was the nucleus of the subsequent Intercollegiate Socialist Society, of which Jack London was elected the first President.

Near the end of January, he went one evening to see Blanche Bates at the Macdonough Theatre in Oakland, in "The Darling of the Gods." Turning over in his mind the suitability of Miss Bates to the character of Freda Moloof in his own play "Scorn of Women," he attended three consecutive performances from front-row vantage, the eager-eyed boy studying the young star carefully to this end. And naturally, by the time he had schemed an introduction, called upon her at the Hotel Metropole, and given a dinner in her honor, the papers had blazoned their plighted troth—the vigorous denials of both parties rendering new headlines in the next issues, and causing no end of mirth to the pair as well as the public.

It was not until the first week in February, 1905, that Jack and Cloudesley got the Spray up-river. Just before sailing from Oakland City Wharf, Jack accepted the socialist nomination for Mayor of Oakland. On the same ticket were Austin Lewis for City Attorney, with J. B. Osborne councilman for third ward. And who should be nominee for Mayor on the Independent Ticket, but John London's old friend John L. Davie? On the morning of election, one local sheet had it: "All the nominees for Mayor, with the exception of Jack London, socialist candidate, were conspicuous about the polls. And Jack polled 981 votes at that. Knowing how personally distasteful the holding of public office would be to him, I once asked:

"What would you do if you should accidentally be elected to some of these political positions you let yourself in for?"

"There's not the least chance, my dear," he replied; then realizing he had not answered my question, he laughed, "I wouldn't let my name be used if I thought there was the slightest possibility of winning. If I did by chance get elected, I guess I'd run away to sea or somewhere with you!"

Meantime, I had taken to my room with an abscess in the left ear, made doubly torturing by neuralgia. For it is a nipping winter one may experience on Sonoma Mountain. The trouble was assumably due to long hours swimming and diving in the Oakland baths on cold days, and more especially a certain oft-repeated, twenty-two-foot jump in which Jack had coached me. Such an anomaly as unhealth on the part of "the Cheery One," as he liked to call me, was sufficient to make Jack desert the sloop somewhere along Petaluma Creek, leaving his friend and Manyoungi aboard, and footing it to the nearest railway for Glen Ellen. Reaching Wake Robin Lodge after nightfall, he stood for long contemplative minutes at the low casement of the redwooded living room, gazing in at the unwonted spectacle of said Cheery One supine upon a couch, her head swathed in warm bandages.

Two days he remained, reading aloud to me by the hour; and I can vouch that no one ever knew tenderer nurse. So improved was I that on the second evening I rose hungry for the first time in weeks, and joined my nurse in a stealthy raid upon Auntie's sweet-smelling pantry. Returning to the big fireplace with our spoils of honey and biscuits and sun-dried figs, we feasted and giggled like truant schoolfellows. Truly, in our long years together, so few are the memories of irresponsible tranquil hiatuses in Jack's driven habit, that they stand forth in relief apparently out of all proportion to their importance. Not so, however; they showed him capable of the purest en-

joyment of that sheer nonsense which relaxes a brain ordinarily over-conscious.

I recall an uproarious afternoon a few months later, when we two spent hours in a hammock under the laurels, doing nothing more profitable than manufacturing the most absurdly banal of limericks. Again, years afterward, I see in memory the twain of us, replete with picnic luncheon and good nature, prone upon the green outer declivity of a fern-lined crater in Hawaii euphoniously styled Puuhuuluhulu. We peered over-edge into the giddy emerald cup and planned, in very extravagance of lazy foolishness, all the details of a country home in the pit, even to an adjustable glass roof against tropic showers!

Pain and house-confinement were happily mitigated by Jack's sympathy, both during his visit and thereafter, when such notes as these drifted to me from the Spray's pleasant course up the Sacramento river:

This mention of Brown calls to mind that Jack had become unexpectedly possessed of "twa dogs," one, a valuable lost Chow who presented himself at the front door, and tarried entirely at home for some weeks, when his rightful owner was discovered. The other was an Alaskan wolfdog, a true "husky," brown-and-white of furry coat and fine of brush, with slant, watchful eyes and pointed ears, and a limp in the off hind-leg that was eloquent of sled and trail. His master, an old Klondiker, had lately died; and though strangers to Jack London, the relatives asked him if he would accept "Brown." Jack was willing, but the animal had other views, and sought every loophole to escape from the little yard at the rear of the flat (which sometimes was the ring for spirited bouts with the gloves), or from the front door when he was entertained within, to return to his loved one's house. Jack, after trying every cajolement to win him over, and going himself or sending his nephew or Manyoungi countless times to retrieve the estray, swore roundly that when Brown again ran away he could stay. But the dog had been making his own adjustment, and the next fruitless pilgrimage to the old home was his last. From the second story window Jack saw him cantering cheerfully back, and bounded downstairs to welcome him right comradely. Thenceforth Brown attached himself with the mute adoration of a soul disillusioned of all else in the world. Mute? Why, that dear lonely dog-fellow of our first married year was never heard to bark except upon two occasions when he thought Jack imperilled by a fractious horse. One day in the summer I asked:

"Now, what do you suppose Brown Wolf would do, if his old master should suddenly pop up beside you?"

"A story right there—don't breathe another word for a minute," Jack flashed at me, scribbling like mad on a notepad, his deep mouth-corners turned up pleasedly with the scent of a new motif. The tale "Brown Wolf," in collection "Love of Life," was the sequel of the incident. That pleased expression recalls that always when lost in his morning's work, no matter how reluctantly begun, there was a half-smile lurking about his lips the while he bent concentrated over the broad tablet upon which the inky-wet characters sprawled and sprawled.

« << Table of Contents