1905

THE Spray's ramblings were to lead aside into Napa River to the pretty city of the same name that lies in the next inland valley to Sonoma. Here Jack was to visit the Winships, friends made on the voyage to Japan; and he sent me word that he would ride across the hills to spend several days with us at Wake Robin Lodge. He arrived on February 12, a showery Sunday, astride a harassing livery hack, both horse and horseman much the worse for the twenty miles. Jack wore a nerve-racked look, and my Aunt and I were solicitous, although we avoided advertising the same. The boy was in veritable distress, never quiet for a moment. His great-pupiled eyes were haunted with a hopeless weariness, and glassy as from fever. He talked very hard, as if against time, or in fear of silence. In the evening, as we clustered about the fireplace, my Aunt asked:

"Jack, my dear, why don't you get out of the city for a while, bring your work, and Manyoungi to look after your wants, take a little cottage here and rest and work far away from excitement and people?"

The eyes he raised to her face were as of some creature hunted. He shifted uneasily, almost as if embarrassed, and the corners of his mouth drooped like a child's on the verge of tears. Yet when he replied it was with a tinge of impatience, though a pitiful tiredness lay under the tone:

"Oh, Mother Mine—thank you. . . You're kind. . . But. . . but I think that the very quiet would drive me crazy."

It was a wail to be left alone in his impotence, and no further reference was made to the matter until the night before he departed.

The only recurrence of the temperamental joyance that was a large part of his nature was when he related the Spray's experience. For no sadness of soul could ever rob Jack London of his native delight in a boat. In relation to this very trip, I am tempted to quote from "Small-Boat Sailing" (in "The Human Drift"):

Once, during his five-days' stay, I prevailed upon him to walk up the tree-embowered mountain road that skirts Graham Creek; but, to my hidden sorrow, he appeared to have grown blind to the beauty he had so loved. His tongue ran on and on incessantly—we were discussing the English poets. It was an exquisite sunset that bathed us in its waves of colored light, and upon a green eminence I halted Jack and his speech and stretched my arm toward the valley to the east, welling to its rosy wall-summits with a purple tide of shadow from the mountain on which we stood. To an earnest query if the loveliness of the world meant nothing to him any more, he stilled for a moment, then let fall very sadly:

"I don't seem to care for anything—I'm sick, my dear. It's Nietzsche's 'Long Sickness' that is mine, I fear. This doesn't seem to be what I want. I don't know what I want. Oh, I'm sorry—I am, I am; it hurts me to hurt you so. But there's nothing for me to do but go back to the city. I don't know what the end of it will be."

During my late convalescence at Wake Robin, slowly working at the typing and word-counting of his play, "Scorn of Women," and brooding not a little over his mental condition, I had received from Jack several of Nietzsche's books, of which he had written me:

Have been getting hold of some of Nietzsche. I'll turn you loose first on his 'Genealogy of Morals' and after that, something you'll like 'Thus Spake Zarathustra.'"

But I liked them all—"ate them up," as he said; and after digging through "Genealogy of Morals," "The Case of Wagner," "The Antichrist," and others, I polished off with "Zarathustra," which just happened to fill a need and accomplished more than any tonic to clear my own surcharged mental atmosphere and set my feet on the road to recovery. Here is a favorite bit I quoted to Jack: "At the foot of my height I dwell. How high my summits are?

How high, no one hath yet told me. But well I know my valleys.

At Jack's side upon the grassy promontory with the west-wind in our hair, I called attention to the wholesome philosophy of Zarathustra. In return I was reminded by Jack of Nietzsche's ultimate fate. Oh, no—he was not "playing to the gallery," nor inviting sympathy to his spiritual dole. That was not his custom; he was but frankly, soul to soul, letting me know what was true of him at the time, and vouchsafing a glimpse at the worst symptom—his own uncaring attitude concerning it.

On the eve of parting I played my last stake—recurred to my Aunt's suggestion, picturing the sweetness of the spring and summer he might pass there among the redwoods by the brook that once had soothed, and the work we could accomplish. But the warning unrest leaped into his eyes and voice and he implored:

"No, no; it doesn't seem that I can. I could not stand the quiet, I tell you. I could not. It would make me mad."

"Very well, then," I gave up, with my best cheer; "the thing for you is to do what you feel you must, of course.—And we won't say any more about it."

He started, flushed, turned and looked at me. Reaching for my hand, in a hushed, changed tone that meant volumes, he breathed:

"Why—why—you're a woman in a million!"

That night he slept an unbroken eight hours, unprecedented repose for Jack at any time, and for many weeks he had been working on but three or four hours nightly—sufficient alone to account for his sorry plight.

In the morning I offered to pilot him a different way from the one he had come. It was up through Nunn's Canyon, a lovely defile out of Sonoma Valley to the east. Jack appeared pleased; in fact presented a much brighter aspect for his long night of rest, and I hoped vainly that he would

have reconsidered the matter of coming to Wake Robin for the season.

Away we rode together, he and I, one of us with a heavy heart, no inkling of which was allowed to pass eyes and lips. For I felt this was the last of Jack, that he was slipping irrecoverably from us who loved and would have helped him; and, what was more grave, slipping away from himself. Flesh and blood and brain could not support much longer this race he was waging against the sum of his mental and physical vitality.

But a charm was working in him, although I think he did not know it. The morning was one of California's most blessed, a great broken blue-and-white sky showering prismatic jewels and sungold alternately. Even the jaded livery hack responded to the brightness as he vied with my golden Belle over the blossoming floor of that bird-singing vale and up the successive rises of narrow Nunn's Canyon, where, on its rustic bridges, we crossed and recrossed the serpentine torrent a dozen times.

As we forged skyward on the ancient road that lies now against one bank, now another, the fanning ferns sprinkling our faces with rain and dew, wild-flowers nodding in the cool flaws of wind, I could see my dear man quicken and sparkle as if in spite of himself and the powers of darkness. The response to my own mood in the earth's enchantment, which had been so lamentably absent from him in the few days gone by, kept mounting and bubbling and presently was overflowing in the full measure I knew so gloriously of him. Truly, as the summit drew near, I do believe he still did not know that the crisis had been reached and passed in his Long Sickness for which the mad German philosopher had given him a name, and that he had staved off despair and death itself for many a splendid, fruitful year to come.

And now, could I credit my ears?—he was talking quite naturally with his old engaging enthusiasm, as if pursuing

an uninterrupted conversation upon his intention to spend the year at Wake Robin; he would rearrange the interior of the tiny shingled cabin under the laurels and oaks, and ship up this and that piece of furniture, and such and such books, dwelling upon certain of these he wanted to read to me. What fun Manyoungi would have getting settled and keeping house; and could he, Jack, dictate his damned correspondence to me? "And say, can you, do you suppose, find me a good horse? All the riding I've ever done was what my mare Belle taught me in Manchuria, and I know I'd love riding if I had another horse as good. I've got $350.00 for the Black Cat story—could you get me a horse for that? . . . How I wish I'd had that mare sent me from Korea!" and he launched into reminiscence of her virtues.

Not by word nor look did I treat his reviving humor as if it had not been the same throughout his visit. Now was the thing—he had come over and out by some sweet miracle, I cared not what, from his valley of the shadow. Far be it from me to disturb the ferment of the magic. Out of a pleasant, sunny silence as we climbed the grade, Jack suddenly reined in and laid his hand upon my shoulder. It was one of the supreme moments of my life. I met a look deeper than thankfulness, and in my heart for ay will abide his voice from the mouth that was like a child's surprised in emotion:

"You did it all, my Mate Woman. You've pulled me out. You've rested me so. And rest was what I needed—you were right. Something wonderful has happened to me. I am all right now. Dear My Woman, you need not be afraid for me any more."

My face must have answered, for I know I said no word. Solemnly at the green height of the pass, we clasped hands and kissed good-by, solemnly, joyfully, all in one. And there was that in his eyes which brought tears to mine. But it was the happy rain of a new day, for me, for him, and my heart for one ached with the joy of it. Loath to part,

Jack broke out: "Why not come on the rest of the way? No, never mind that you're not fixed up—the Winships are good sports and will welcome you with open arms."

Long we waved and waved until a descending bend into the hinterland buried him from sight, and I turned and retraced the royal road we had come together, hardly able to contain myself. Years thence, the Winships and Cloudesley told me that another man than the Jack who had left them five days, rode in that afternoon on the same dispirited steed. But Cloudesley knew; once they were aboard the Spray he was told of the miracle.

Winding up his voyage mid-March in Oakland, Jack discovered through Dr. Nicholson that he was suffering from a tumor consequent upon an old injury he had thought of little moment, and which should be removed as soon as he could be put in proper condition. The red-cheeked physician had him to bed at the flat, on a diet, and "no cigarettes, young man, for a week." The "young man" compromised, of course—or was it the practitioner who compromised?

I bought a rose-pink lawn frock for his pleasure, and went daily to help a very gay patient with his piled up correspondence, dictated from high pillows. After the operation, when I called at the hospital, Jack told me he was greatly relieved by the report that his tumor had been pronounced non-malignant, and the assurance there would be no relapse—an opinion that time corroborated. "I wonder," the bedridden philosopher speculated with a half-abashed grin, "how much of my intellectual 'Long Sickness' could have been traceable to this damned thing draining my system?" Then suddenly grave, he rejoined: "No, my dear—I won't belittle the real diagnosis. I know, and you know, that when the sudden healing of that malady took place, it was before I even knew I had a physical ailment. . . . My dear, my dear."

Back at the little flat, he resumed his dictations, and

our readings progressed. During these days Jack made the better acquaintance of Tennyson, and, for the first time, "Idylls of the King," never ceasing to mourn that he had not "grown up with them" and their pure glamour of poesy. "And I never knew the gnomes and fairies as you did, either, to my loss," he regretted.

With boyish raptures he looked forward to summer at Wake Robin, and once interrupted himself in the middle of a sentence to say: "Oh, for the days when you can play, play for me!" One warm late afternoon, listening for the end of a pause in his dictation, something caused me to raise my eyes to Jack's face. His thread of thought lost, he had forgotten all else in the world but the wonder of loving:

"I'm quite mad for you, my dear, my dear," he repeated in the rare golden voice that returned in shaken moments. "Indeed, quite mad—with all the old madness of before the Long Sickness. And so we poor humans, weak and fallible, and prone to error, condemn ourselves liars, for I would not have believed I could be so mad twice!"

Then and then only, was I quite assured that he was saved to himself. But perhaps, when all is said, the best influence I had for him was the repose he said I brought—a repose that otherwise life seemed to have denied. Often I was reminded by him of the first story in which he employed any portion of his many-sided love for me. It was "Negore the Coward," last of the "Love of Life" collection, and will be found at the ending in one of Jack London's masterly depictions of death:

"And as even the memories dimmed and died in the darkness that fell upon him, he knew in her arms the fulfilment of all the ease and rest she had promised him. And as black night wrapped around him, his head upon her breast, he felt a great peace steal about him, and he was aware of the hush of many twilights and the mystery of silence."

I have before me the letter of the editor to whom the

author first submitted this manuscript. And he comments with surprise and delight upon the intangible "new touch" in Jack's work.

In the fly-leaf of "Love of Life" stands his inscription, of date November 23, 1909:

My friend recovered rapidly—so rapidly that the surgeon was horrified to hear from the irrepressible's a smilingly-rebellious, smoke-wreathed lips that he intended to ride his new horse as soon as ever he got to Glen Ellen, which would be on the 18th of April. The first time he left the house, was to walk around the corner to look over the beautiful animal which I brought for him to see. For I had bought the horse—Washoe Ban, blue-blooded Thoroughbred, his veins of fire throbbing through a skin of purest chestnut-gold. He was owned by Dr. H. N. Miner of Berkeley, and I had ridden him a number of times in the past. Two hundred and fifty dollars of Jack's Black Cat prize went for Ban, and I rode him from Berkeley to Oakland, thence by ferry to San Francisco, river steamer to Petaluma, where I slept, and next day sat the incomparable, exhaustless creature the twenty-two undulating green miles to Glen Ellen.

Jack further reminded Dr. Nicholson that before he spurned the haunts of men he had given his word to deliver "Revolution" in Shattuck Hall, Berkeley, on the 14th, and at the Alhambra Theatre in San Francisco on the 21st; also a talk at a Ruskin Club dinner to the Social Progress Club of the University of California. It was at one Ruskin dinner that year he "made the members take notice" most unexpectedly. Mr. Bamford had charged each guest to be ready with a definition of "Happiness," To me Jack said:

"What's yours going to be?" And I: "I haven't thought it out yet. What's yours?" "A coöperative commonwealth!" he grinned. "I'd like to speak up with 'Just loving,'" I laughed. "Great!" shouted Jack, "couldn't be better. Tell you what: I'll trade with you." "Done," said I. And at the banquet, upon the heels of Anna Strunsky's "Happiness is adjustment," my borrowed witticism raised the expected applause. "And yours?" Mr. Bamford called upon Jack London:

"Just loving," that wicked person breathed softly, his long-lashed eyelids demurely drooped.

A blank silence was broken by a smothered "Just WHAT?" from Mrs. A. A. Dennison, and Jack, raising his eyes, looked calmly about the company with a charming "What-are-you-going-to-do-about-it" expression as he repeated, "Just loving."

In passing, I want to relate, as nearly as possible in his own words, an occurrence that crystallized Jack London in certain personal habits more than any other self-argument. He put it something this way:

"You remember Dr. Nicholson? He was a magnificent specimen of a man, you will agree? Tall, straight, with the beauty of the athlete—girl's complexion and all that; not a vicious habit—drink, nor tobacco—not an injurious leaning. And he warned me that this and that vice of mine would ruin my health in a short time. Well, listen: Only a few short months after he talked so seriously to me, he died in screaming agony—rheumatism of the heart or some such horribly excruciating thing. Probably he had exposed himself in his practice; I don't know. But what I do know, is, that there are all sorts of bad habits in this world, and he must have landed on one of them peculiar to his way of life, or it landed on him. Cigarettes, or overwork—I tell you it's all one; one's as bad as the other; and I'll bet you even money that cigarettes don't kill me!"

A man's argument, verily, and one that supersedes man's finest logic.

Washoe Ban and my Belle were housed amicably in a little shack-barn on a small property across the road from Wake Robin Lodge. This was the Caroline Kohler Ranch, familiarly known as the Fish Ranch because it had once been the scene of an ambitious failure in fish-hatchery. Jack had painstakingly considered the type of my Australian saddle, but decided upon a McClellan tree that we found in San Francisco, which had been fitted with a horn. Ultimately, however, he adopted my model. And he was almost as good as his challenge to Dr. Nicholson, for it was but a few days after his arrival on the 18th that he actually mounted and took his first lesson in Ban's easy, rocking-horse stride. I had yet to learn the man's giant recuperative power, and was fully as apprehensive as the man of medicine, but made no protest.

Not long afterward, at a request from Oakland, he bought a mare and surrey for his children and their mother. The animal later developed an incorrigible balk, and the family tiring of this kind of recreation, Jack brought the whole outfit up-country, where the mare came eventually to do light work and to negotiate the mountain trails under saddle. I am minded of the day she inconveniently lay down and rolled with her rider, none other than Johannes Reimers, in a pestiferous hornet-nest in the grass, as a means of escape from the stinging.

Jack's abrupt relinquishment of the city occasioned considerable press comment, with which I was connected, but even The Examiner failed to command any statement from either of us relating to matrimonial intentions. Jack informed the paper's representatives that when he had anything to say in the matter, he would give them the "scoop," and with this they had to be content.

As for his new choice of residence he said to reporters: "I have forsaken the cities forever; winter and summer I shall live at Glen Ellen."

Would to heaven-upon-earth that every mating pair of men and women could know the privilege of the illuminating sort of experience which was Jack's and mine this six months before marriage. In the course of strenuous work and play of whatsoever nature, by our wedding date in November there was little of which we did not have a fair inkling as concerned each other's temperament and idiosyncrasies.

For the most part the study was smooth sailing, though at times beset by snags. Once, I shall never forget, it came to light that I had been accused by friends of Jack's, whom I had believed my own, of disloyalty and unveracity. With his invincible courage in seeking and gaging truth, he put even his Love impartially on the stand. To be other than sanely judicial even in so intimate a situation was contrary to his nature and method. True to what he called his "damned arithmetic," he undertook to thresh out the difficulty. Oh, he staked his love and his proudest judgment upon my guiltlessness; and, having satisfied himself, he set his every faculty to demonstrating to my detractors, if he perished in the attempt, that they were wrong on every count. All this not so much for personal gratification as for the pleasure of confounding them with my innocence and his faith. To be sure, he had taken the chance in a million that I prove false to his firm idea of my integrity. I met his infinitely sincere eyes on that, and laid at his disposal all that I had, and was. Amongst other expedients at my hand, a little pocket diary routed the most important charge that had been preferred. Well, indeed; but better still, when Jack, excitedly fishing up his own notebook for the same year, found it tallied with mine. Other evidence dove-tailed to his entire enlightenment of

heart and brain, and I stood unassailable to our mutual joy, and the vindication of his "damned arithmetic."

"If you only knew—you can't possibly know—" he burst out one day near the end of the discussion by mail, "what it means to me to have some one fighting with me shoulder to shoulder, fighting my own fight, in my own way!"

When it was all over and certain apologies demanded by him had been written me by the unhappy complainants:

"Let me tell you something," he said. "This matter was broached to me sometime ago, before I went on the Spray trip. I want to show you a bit of my philosophy, in general as regards mankind, in particular as concerns you alone and in relation to me:

"When friends, ostensibly for my own good, came to me with a tale about you, I told them, first, that it was a pity they should soil their hands in gutter politics; and then I earnestly tried to help them know me a little better, as a matter of pride if you will, by telling them that even were these absurd things true—and I would stake my best judgment and my soul that they were not—they would make no possible difference to me. I said to them: 'I love Charmian, not for anything she may or may not have done, but for what I find her, for what she is to me. I know human beings pretty well—I make my living through my understanding of them—and I know Charmian better than to credit these calumnies. But the point is: Charmian might have murdered her father and mother, and subsisted solely upon little roast orphans—it is what I know of her, now, what she now is, that counts with me.'"

"And really," he once confessed in our married years, "I could almost have wished you'd had a past like my own, or worse, if you'd been just the same as when I knew I loved you. It would have made you seem almost greater to me—I mean, if you could have come up through degrading experiences that did not degrade but left you as I have always seen you!"

Since there was no way of actually manifesting how he would have regarded me in this suppositions premise, the question remained a moot one.

He always pleaded not guilty to the passion of jealousy, despising and deriding it as a low, bestial trait. With an exceptional capacity for tolerance toward almost every human weakness save disloyalty, he could not harbor any sympathy with that calamity of the ages, sheer animal jealousy. "Should you turn from me to another man, if I could not make you happy, I'd give that man to you on a silver platter my dear," he would declare, "and say 'Bless you, my children.'—But I don't believe I could send you on a silver platter to a man—quite!"

What better place than this, further to interpret Jack London's relation toward the element feminine? I, who have known the clasp of his soul, known him at his highest, can yet withdraw from that passionate fellowship and regard his masculinity as a whole. Asking my reader to bear in mind earlier manifestations of his philosophy and emotions toward the little woman of his adolescence, I shall enlarge upon his attitude.

He was not prone to allow women to interfere with the business of life and adventure. He liked to think of himself as in Augustus's class—that women could not make nor mar. In short, he was not a man who lost his head easily. "God's own mad lover dying on a kiss" was an appealing line to his sense of poesy; but Jack preferred to live, rather than die, on that kiss! Love, in brief, should be a warm and normal passion that made for fuller living. At one period, after soaking himself in the vast accumulation of erotic literature, pro and con, he told me, with a shake of his fine shoulders, that he felt himself lucky to have been born so rightly-balanced, that no abnormalities of his early rough days, nor contact with decadences of super-civilization, had touched him to his hurt. The alienists in-

terested him intellectually, but he was nicely avert to perversion of any stripe.

I had supposed that there would be little of the proprietary in the regard of so broad-minded an individualist. One of my most vital surprises was to find that Jack was as delightfully medieval as many another lover in this world when it came, say, to matters financial. Having been myself independent, and believing that he would take this into consideration, I looked for him to make no matter of a separate bank account, or at least the "allowance" loved of wives, that I might not suffer a sense of bondage. But no—like the bulk of men his was the pleasure of spending his own money upon the "one small woman." Any other arrangement was frowned upon—at the suggestion a frost seemed to spread over his face. And, seeing that it was he, I found the bondage sweet.

Jack charmed women of all classes; and while he held a reserved opinion as to the intellectuality of the average female brain, he could not abide a stupid woman. His adventurous mentality had made him pursue women in curiosity, and learn them too well for his own good. He was of two distinct minds about them, and swung from one to the other: their innate goodness and staunchness commanded his worship, while their pitiable frailty and smallness wrung his spirit. "Pussy! Pussy!" I can hear him purr in the ear of any backbiting among his friends. Women, weighed by his biological judgment, represented the Eternal Enemy, and he liked the line:

"Her narrow feet are rooted in the ground,"

from Arthur Symons's "The Dance of the Daughters of Herodias." Yet this very concept, not always voiced without contempt, must have given rise to his pronouncement in "John Barleycorn": "Women are the true conservators of the race."

He has been heard to speak of woman as "the immodest

sex." And "Men are far more modest than women!" he would step into the heated air of argument, bringing down storms upon his unrepentant head. But he considered that he had several blazoned names to bear him out, among them Jean Paul, who said: "Love increases man's delicacy, and lessens woman's" and Bernard Shaw: "If women were as fastidious as men, morally and physically, there would be an end of the race!"

I must admit that I have seen him play down, not always up, to women and their vanity; but to his credit and theirs, he never left them long deceived. And he would not try to deceive those who spoke his own language, though he made it extremely difficult for them to understand his.

He had struggled against misogyny, winning out be cause he had had experience enough with exceptional women of conscience and brain to keep him healthy in viewpoint. Besides, in the last extremity, he was a one-woman man, glorying in the discovery of this. In my copy of "Before Adam," in 1907 he wrote: "I have read Schopenhauer and Weininger, and all the German misogynists, and still I love you. Such is my chemism—our chemism, rather." He showed an actual reverence for the woman who "informed" her beauty, or, better, her lack of beauty, who waged incessant warfare upon her imperfections, who wrought excellently with the material at her hand.

Jack owned to annoyance that the public denied he could write convincingly about women. "And yet," he would say, "I know them too well to write too well about them! I'd never get past the editor and the censor!"

Despite that he would often merely appear to take women at their own valuation and act as if he gave them credit for logic, he was possessed of a fine sense of chivalry. As instance: Once, bound to a foreign country, war-corresponding, a girl friend, who had received a similar commission, informed him that they would be sailing on the same boat. Jack was in despair because he knew, from knowledge

of her want of practicality, that she would be on his already full hands. "What would you have done?" I asked him once. He reflected, working those brows that were like a sea-bird's wings: "I'd have had to marry her before I got through with it, I suppose!" "But," I expostulated, "but you loved another woman!" "Surely," he rejoined; "but what is a man to do? Her reputation would have been shattered so I say, what can a man do in such circumstances, but marry the girl!"

Women have loved Jack London, aye, and died for love of him. And I can imagine, had he been situated so that it would have been possible, that his chivalry and sweet-heartedness could have led him into marrying such, for their own happiness.

Once, I asked him how he had behaved himself toward the girls of yesterday, as he passed beyond them into the world that he was making his—the Lizzie Connollys, the Haydees. "I saw them occasionally," he said. "One must be kind, you know."

Little of love had he bought in his life, except in the course of laying his curiosity. A passion, with him, must be mutual, else worthless.

And so I became conversant with that "swarm of vibrating atoms" which men knew as Jack London, the youthful literary craftsman who had, as one critic put it, "Lived with storms and spaces and sunlight like a kinsman."—That was it; the dominant note of him was spaciousness, for the inflowing and out-giving of all available knowledge and feeling—the blood of adventure, physical and mental, scorching through life's channels.

"Visualization is everything for the teacher," he said, "and I love to teach, to transmit to others the ideas and impressions in my own consciousness."

It always seemed to me, observing, that while others were merely scratching the surface of events, Jack was get-

ting underneath them, deeper and deeper into their significances.

Religion, as the average man knows religion, had no part in him. Spiritualism had been the belief in his childhood homes, a thing of magic and fearsomeness; but his expanding perceptions could not countenance that belief. His hope for bettering human conditions had filled depths of being which might have responded to divine philosophy. Again his norm: Somehow, we must ever build upon the concrete." Again his oft-repeated criticism rings in the ears of memory: "Will it work will you trust your life to it!"

In a little book of Ernest Untermann's, "Science and Revolution," which Jack gave me to read at that time, I come upon a sentence underscored for my benefit: "My method of investigation is that of historical materialism."

It is also to be Her narrow feet are rooted in the ground of my man that had been told and impressed upon me in the past, even by persons who should have known better or who did know better and cruelly misrepresented him. In fact, Jack forever claimed to nurse a small grievance that I should ever have been misled, no matter by whom, from my direct early conclusions upon him. I recall, however, in the old Piedmont days, that while reserving certain few uncomplimentary opinions, so ready was I to stand up to any one who made unjust remarks in his disfavor, that more than once I was accused of taking undue interest in the young celebrity.

To the exclusion of all else, I devoted myself to mastering the open book that he tried to render himself to me. Even the piano was silent except when I played for Jack, and the trips to Berkeley with my music roll became less frequent and eventually ceased, I will say to his unqualified disapproval. (He never could entertain the idea, in the long years of our brimming life, why I could not give more time to music, since he too loved it so.) I

learned the eloquence of his tongue; the fine arrogance of his certitudes; convictions I came to respect for their broad wisdom; and I knew, too, and richly, the eloquence of his silences in the starry moments that come to those who loved as we loved, and, loving, understand mutely. More than once, Jack has broken a comprehending pause, or even interrupted speech to say to me the dearest and finest of all his salutations in my thrilling ears:

"My kin—my very own Twin Brother!"

One thing, in that earlier association with Jack, was almost uncanny: he never seemed to fail of my high expectation. Tremulous, I all but looked for him to fail of making good, to my ideal, in this or that small, fine particular. But in vain: usually he surpassed the tentative demand I made upon his quality. His own failings he had, to be sure; but they were not those ordinarily suspected of lesser men.

The frankness which we continued to practise and exalt, made of our mate ship, through thick and thin, a gorgeous achievement.

So I walked softly that spring and summer and fall, dedicated to discern with my own soul's best all of him that was possible, that I might enlarge and fix this kinship for ever and forever. Upon one star I was intent: Never must our love and its expression sink into commonplace, but it must be kept from out "the ruck of casual and transitory things. "And this was Jack's answer:

"Commonplaceness shall have no part with us unless I myself should become commonplace; and I think that can never be."

And Jack London learned his woman, playing her game as she tried to play his. With his broad sympathies, to his own peculiar interests he subjoined mine; and I, in return, widened my focus to include hobbies for which I had theretofore had no caring, thus creating fresh interests for my own sphere. Jack, for example, loved keenly

a good card game. I had little use for cards; but I applied myself, to the end that before long I could play a fair game of whist, or cribbage, or pinochle. And when Jack found that certain stern methods of instruction distressed and stood in the way of quick absorption on my part, in all gentleness he went right-about in his lifelong tactics, exhibiting due appreciation of the harmony that had come to prevail in his life. He had until then rather prided himself upon an ability to shake knowledge into others, and I credited him with altering his way to favor me. He told me of how he had once, in half an hour, taught a rather moronic young girl to tell time by the clock—all others having failed. But that's no reason, I laughingly contended, "that you can teach me whist by the same rules!"

With regard to our hard work together, and making toward a co-existing love and comradeship, I said: "We can't fail, because everything we do is compensatory life and living. His reply was: "So try to enjoy the fight for its own sake!"

Critics then as now were prone to dispatch the subject of Jack London's personality with words like "primitive," "uncouth," "brutal." He saw the primitiveness in all life, in himself as he saw everything else, and made all things come under the empery of his thought and written language; but he did not live primitiveness, inasmuch as he was delicate, complex, withal simple in the final analyses of him. The chastity of the last analysis is like the chastity of his art that so often showed the last least perfection of chiseling. Robustness of body and mind offset, almost contradicted, the sensitiveness to impressions, that reaction to beauty of every sort—though particularly intellectual beauty—and to sympathy from others in his mood, his aims; and his shrinking from hurt, although only from the very, very few. Yet in himself, in his actions, in his work, there existed a regnant overtone, a cogency. Again I say: there was no paradox in him. Beleaguered ever with the

thousand-thousand connotations, factors, in the chaos he did not falter, but somehow achieved unity, and a great rhythm. He knew himself; and it was a day of rejoicing when one departed guest, Everett Lloyd, sent him Weininger's "Sex and Character," with the author's definition of a genius: "A genius is he who is conscious of most, and of that most acutely."

Jack's writing, his thousand words a day, was done in a little "work-room" established in the two-room cottage, quite without any of that work-fever often necessary to writers. And whensoever art conflicted with substance, he invariably maintained:

"I will sacrifice form every time, when it boils down to a final question of choice between form and matter. The thought is the thing."

As some one has said, "He cared little for writing and a great deal for what he was writing about."

Here is further expression of his unrelenting realism, "brass-tack" reality—although it seems to me, all having been said, that his materialism incarnated his idealism, and his idealism consecrated and transfigured his materialism:

And he always stuck to it that Herbert Spencer's "Philosophy of Style" helped him more in his youth, than any other book—save Ouida's "Signa," his initial impetus—to success in literature. "It taught me," he said, "the subtle and manifold operations necessary to transmute thought, beauty, sensation and emotion into black symbols on white paper; which symbols through the reader's eye, were taken into his brain, and by his brain transmuted into thought, beauty, sensation and emotion that fairly corresponded with mine. Among other things, this taught me to know the brain of my reader, in order to select the symbols that would compel his brain to realize my thought, or vision, or emotion. Also, I learned that the right symbols were the ones that would require the expenditure of the minimum of my reader s brain energy, leaving the maximum of his brain energy to realize and enjoy the content of my mind, as conveyed to his mind."  But "In my grown up years, he surveyed, the writers who have influenced me most are Karl Marx in a particular, and Spencer in a general, way."

So never was I able to wring from him any worship of art for art's sake, although he strove for art with every well-selected instrument of his chosen calling; attained art, high art at times; and, being a potential Teacher, he could explain the means of it—this because he knew so exactly how he produced his effects.

"You're the genius of us two," he flabbergasted me one day when I, who never knew how I did the very few things I did well, had excelled perhaps in a dive, or a passage in music, or the revamping of some sentence that had eluded his own skill. "You don't know at all how you do things,

you see," he went on, "You just do them. And sometimes you fall down and cannot do them again. Now that's genius, or of the nature of genius. Take George Sterling; hand him a problem of almost any sort, something he had probably never thought of before, certainly never studied. And ten to one in a short time he will have given a masterly solution. That's genius—big genius. No, there's no genius in mine—unless it's the Weininger kind. I'm too practical—that's why I'm a good teacher. Now you, my dear," in candidness he offset some of his praise, "make a, rotten teacher!  For instance, that riding lesson to-day,—you ride as if you had ridden into the world in the first place,—but I'm damned if you can show me how to 'post' on a trot as you do!"

The pleasurable course of our companionship had its normal interruptions. I had to become familiar with his man humors. But he never moped, and seldom was taciturn. And his immoderate smoking was a trial; but after once broaching the subject and finding it a tender one with him, I dropped all reference to the matter. Although he admired frankness, courage, the pettish side that women know of the biggest men where their personal comforts are in question, prevented my courage from demanding what I had confidently hoped for. I should have known better; but then, I was learning. At no time did I ever hear him advise against smoking; yet he promised his nephew, Irving Shepard, a thousand dollars if he would refrain from smoking until he was twenty-one. From our conversation on smoking, I gathered that his habit was a rather negligible detail in comparison with the thousand and one larger issues that occupied his mind. How shall I say? . . . that this one habit, a mere habit, which required none of his conscious attention, should not be too seriously considered by him or others. Also, Jack seemed of a mind that the nerve-strain of refraining offset any advantage that might be derived from abstinence from cigarettes.

Long hot afternoons of typewriter dictation under the trees sometimes got on our mutual touchy nerves, and we became cognizant of still more of each other's caprices. Or suddenly, not yet versed in his "brass-tack" reasoning, his "arithmetic, I might unwittingly start disputes in which I had no chance against the assault of his logic, and would struggle with nerves that urged me to weep in sheer feminine bafflement, hating myself the more heartily. But always before me rose an honest warning with which Jack had forearmed us both previously to his coming:

It is a privilege to serve under a great captain; and I sat at his feet and endeavored with all my womanhood to come up to his fine, sane standard of companionship, the thing he had missed even with men, it would seem. His free

confidence and his Grand Passion were my guerdon. And there blossomed in him a new and wonderful patience that his older friends could hardly credit—patience in the little things that, handled rightly, or ignored, make for the day's harmony. And I hastened to discount his harshness in argument, in order to partake of the kernel, realizing that when he called a spade a spade, it was a battle against artificiality, toward soundness of thought and speech upon vital truths—or vital lies.

A woman whom he greatly admired had acquired Christian Science and wanted to argue upon it with Jack. With her enunciated premise, I saw Jack's blood begin to rise: "Can no-being be?" she shot at him, and sat back waiting his verdict. Although they had it hammer and tongs for hours, they actually never got beyond the premise. Jack refused to consider such a posit—his scientific mind revolted from it and the two failed to come together on even the definition of words, without which there could be no reasoning. For days he went about muttering, "Can no-being be! Can no-being be!—"What do you think of it!"

But inasmuch as his arguing was impersonal, I think the following letter to Blanche Partington, written in 1911, after a warm discussion upon Christian Science generally and Christ's Temptation in the Wilderness in particular, is of value as an illustration:

Sometimes, when he had been shockingly literal in language of interpretation in one field or another, with blazing unrepentant eyes he would lash out:

"Am I right? You don't answer! Am I right? If not, show me where I am wrong. I must be shown!"

The intense effort required to "show" where I thought him wrong would keep poor me on tiptoe morning, noon and night—more especially since I nearly always had to own to myself and finally to him that he was right. Slowly I commenced to lean upon his judgment, for time and again I found he could not fail me. In the beginning I have in sheer exhaustion been guilty, though very rarely, of the unworthy ruse of giving in when I was not convinced. But let him suspect the attempted deceit, and the dawning light in his face fell into dark disapprobation. So I came to face every issue with him squarely, no matter what the price in time, inconvenience, nerves, everything.

As if in reassurance, he indited in my copy of "War of the Classes":

This is not a wail—oh, quite the opposite. The education to me was an inestimable treasure. It insured a teeming intellectual life for all my days on earth. Jack so loved, and avowedly, to jar people out of their narrow ruts and their preconceived notions about themselves. The insincere shrinking of smug souls from the onset of argument was sustenance to his missionary mind. He would make

them uncomfortable to sleep with their niggling little petty viewpoints, he would. I can see the flags of battle in his eyes, hark again to the old war-note strike in his fresh young voice. And when he had reduced them to powder without a spark left in it, he was delicious, irresistible, in his expression of contrition:

"Don't mind my harshness," he would plead. "I always raise my voice and talk with my hands; I can't help it.—But don't you see! Don't you see," more often than not he would come back. "Tell me, am I right or wrong? I beg you to show me where I am wrong. It was his intrepid way of expressing the abounding life and thought that were in him. On sentry-go at the gates of observation and conscience, he was the Apostle of the Truth if ever there was one.

Luckless was the victim who could not benefit by the brusk tonic of his argument; and indeed, it was a tonic to himself, until the years when he grew too weary with the hopelessness of leavening the inert mass of humanity. H. G. "Wells's definition of the average mind—"A projection of inherent imperfections"—would have suited Jack.

He was an undisappointing wonder to us all. Despite his boredom with small minds, one would see him completely possessed, enthralled, by the simple goodness of someone in the humblest walk of life. There were in the neighborhood certain characters who had fallen into ways of hopelessness; and Jack's manly tenderness, always augmented by an unostentatious hand in his pocket, was a speechless pleasure to me, one to emulate for his sweet sake. Then there would be his unbounded appreciation of some tiny farm where perhaps a by-gone workman of Jack's with wife and child, lived happily with one cow, one horse, a few chickens. Delight shone all over him if he detected an idea of his own which had been incorporated into the other's agricultural equipment.

One shining example of that manly kindness I shall never forget: Once, at sea on a great square-rigger, the skipper, probably from illness that rendered him otherwise than his usual self, issued an order that all but piled us upon a famous "graveyard of ships." But Jack, jealous of a good seaman's reputation, protected the captain's blunder from the eyes of the world.

He cared almost not at all, except as it might affect his market, or his authority, for public opinion of himself or his books. But I came to find him simply, touchingly sensitive to approval from the exceeding few whom he loved, and another exceeding few whose discrimination he revered.

It is beyond hand of mine to draw with strong and supple strokes a convincing picture of this protean man-boy. To me he stands out simple enough in all his complexity; yet I can scarcely hope to leave this impression with the reader—so numberless were the factors in the sum of his personality. The greatest, perhaps, of all ingredients in his makeup, was the surpassing lovableness that made his very deficiencies appear loveworthy. No matter what the irritability of mental stress from whatsoever source, appeal to him with love and desire of understanding, and the world was yours could he give it to you.

Needing immediate cash, Jack delayed beginning "White Fang," and the young master of the short story went to work spilling upon tales like "Brown Wolf" the warmth and color of rural California that had got into his pounding blood; "Planchette"—the material for this last was founded upon an incident that had once come under my observation, and I passed it on to him; and presently, requiring the frozen spaces once more for scenes of other motifs, he wrote "The Sun Dog Trail," "A Day's Lodging," "Love of Life," and "The Unexpected" all these to be found in "Moon Face" and "Love of Life" collections. In a letter to me during absence in the city, answering my

query if his description of death were founded upon his own late bout with chloroform, he wrote:

"Yes—the death lines of 'All Gold Canyon' came from my experience with the 'little death in life,' 'the drunken dark,' 'the sweet thick mystery of chloroform,'—you remember Henley's 'Hospital Sketches.'"

Meantime "The Sea Wolf" held sway among the "best sellers," and was much discussed. Reviewers especially girded at the details of Humphrey van Weyden's lovemaking to Maud. "I don't think it's silly," Jack considered. "I think it is very natural and sweet. It's the way I make love, and I don't think I am silly!" As for the main motif, I find this:

"Tales of the Fish Patrol" was appearing serially in Youths' Companion, and the critics worried over what they dared commit themselves to about "The War of the Classes" group of articles. Mostly, of course, it was severely slated for its radicalism, as the young evangel of economics had naturally forecast.

Better than all other accomplishment, the boy was so happy, gone the Long Sickness, and now living a new manner of life. It was the first time he had ever "let himself go for long," to relax and rest in the assurance of an atmosphere of eager comprehension. He came to realize the value and practice of the little thing that offsets the strain

of the big thing. To saddle his horse leisurely, to direct its lesser intelligence; to play with Brown Wolf and delve into that reticent comrade's brain-processes; to see that a hammock was properly swung down the mossy streamside under the maples and alders—oh, no, he did not hang it himself, but "bossed" while Manyoungi did the work. Aside from learning to saddle and harness horses, he was in the main faithful in his vow never again to work with his hands. The only exception I recall was when he became interested in cultivating French mushrooms. Spawn was ordered from the east, and he made the bed down by the Graham Creek near where he had once written on "The Sea Wolf," planted and tended and reaped, to the astonishment of all who knew him.

One peculiarity I never could fathom. Despite the smallness of his hands, the taper fingers and delicacy of their touch, he was all thumbs when it came to manipulating small objects—say rigging up fishing gear, buttoning or hooking a garment, tending his stylographic ink-pencils. He might easily have been the original model of the humorists' exasperated husband playing maid to his wife's back-buttoned raiment. He did it willingly enough when no one else was about, but with much unsaintly verbiage of which he gave due heralding. Yet with this clumsiness which was a fount of speculation to Jack, he was able to pride himself that he never destroyed anything—this all the more remarkable when taking into account that he invariably "talked with his hands." Once, waving his arms at table, I saw him sweep a "student" lamp clear, which he caught before it could reach the floor; but he never broke a dish.

Here he gives me proof of my guerdon, written in the fly-leaf of "The Game," which came to Glen Ellen in June:

And in "John Barleycorn," eight years later:

We rode all over the Valley, and explored the sylvan mazes of its embracing ranges and the intricacies of little hills with their little vales, that to the north divide the valley proper. And we visited the hot-springs resorts southerly in the valley, Agua Caliente and Boyes, for the tepid swimming tanks. Once or twice we met Captain H. E. Boyes and Mrs. Boyes, who asked us into their quaint English cottage; and I remember that the Captain showed Jack a letter received from Rudyard Kipling, asking if he had run across Jack London around Sonoma, and in closing a copy of "Mainly About People" containing a flattering criticism of Jack's work.

We boxed, we swam, we did everything under the sun except walk. Jack never walked any distance save when there was no other way to progress. I was in entire accord with this, as with a thousand and one other mutual preferences. I have seen him deprive himself of a pleasure, if walking was the means of getting at it. "You're the only woman I ever walked far to keep an engagement with," he told me; then spoiled the pretty compliment by adding mischievously, "but I rode most of the way on my bicycle—that night, you remember? when I got arrested for speeding inside Oakland's city limits!"

Those who regarded Jack London as physically powerful were quite right; but they would be astonished to find that his big, shapely muscles of arm and shoulder and leg, equal to any emergency whether from momentary call or of endurance, were not of the stone-hard variety, even under tension. Why, I, "small, tender woman," as he liked to say, could flex a firmer bicep than Jack's, to his eternal amusement. But we were as alike as some twins in many characteristics—particularly our supersensitive flesh. I had always been ashamed that in spite of years of horseback riding, let me be away from the saddle for a month or even less, and the first ride would lame my muscles. To my surprise Jack, who became an enthusiastic and excellent horseman, showed the identical weakness to the end of his life.

As the weeks warmed into summer, campers flocked to Wake Robin, and the swimming pool in Sonoma Creek, be low the Fish Ranch's banks, was a place of wild romping every afternoon. Jack taught the young folk to swim and dive, and to live without breathing during exciting tournaments of under- water tag, or searching for hidden objects. Certain shiny white door-knobs and iron rings that were never retrieved, must still be implanted in the bottom of the almost unrecognizable old pool beneath the willows, or else long since have traveled down the valley to the Bay.

There were madder frolics on the sandy beach at the northern edge of the bathing hole, and no child so boisterous or enthusiastic or resourceful as Jack, "joyously noisy with life's arrogance." He trained them to box and to wrestle, and all, instructor and pupils, took on their varying gilds of sun-bronze from the ardent California sky that tanned the whole land to warm russet.

I am suddenly aware of the fact that much as Jack shared his afternoons in sport with the vacation troops of campers, many as were the health-giving things of flesh

and spirit which he taught them, not one learned from him in the sport of killing. Nor can I remember him ever going out hunting in this period. The only times I saw firearms in his hands were at intervals when we all practised shooting with rifle and revolver at a target tacked against the end of an ancient ruined dam across the Sonoma. Once, years afterward, in southwesern Oregon, Jack was taken bear-hunting in the mountains. When he returned to the ranch-house he said:

"Mate, these good men don t know what to make of me. They offered me what the average hunting man would give a year of his life to have—the chance of getting a bear. As it happened, we did not see any bear; but coming into a clearing, there stood the most gorgeous antlered buck you ever want to see, on a little ridge, silhouetted against the sunset. The men whispered to me that now was my chance. They were fairly trembling with anxiety for fear I might miss such a perfect shot. And I didn't even raise my gun. I just couldn't shoot that great, glorious wild thing that had no show against the long arm of my rifle."

So the children at Wake Robin—how little a child will miss—resurrected the old ditty of two summers gone, about "The kindest friend the rabbits ever knew," and loved their big-hearted play-friend the more.

One small Oakland shaver, badly out of sorts with his maternal parent, one afternoon began "shying" pebbles at all and sundry. After every one else had gone to supper, Jack excepted, the little fellow sullenly turned his jaundiced attention to the one live mark remaining—friend or foe it mattered not. Jack admonished him to stop, but instead he selected larger missiles and went on firing them. Furious because Jack laughingly dodged them all, the mite jumped up and down in baffled wrath and shrieked: "You hoodlum! You hoodlum!"

"Now, I wonder," Jack reflected through a cloud of

cigarette smoke after supper, "Where he heard me called a hoodlum?"

Again recurring to Jack's alleged brutality, I smile to think how considerate he usually was. In all the rough-and-tumble play with the children and often young folk of maturer growth, any one who was hurt by him quickly smothered the involuntary "ouch" because all knew it was unintentional.

With the girls and women—I speak from long experience. Yes, I have been hurt—one does not box for cool relaxation, but for the zest of rousing the good red blood and setting it free to race through sluggish veins to clear lungs and brain and give one a new lease on life. To Jack, who loved gameness above all virtues, it was his proudest boast that on two or three occasions gore had been drawn from one or the other of our respective features; but it was of his own undoing he was vainest, because "the Kid-woman squared her valiant little shoulders and stood up with her eyes wide open and unafraid and delivered and took a good straight left."

The point I am leading to is this: I never was even jarred in any part of my feminine anatomy that Jack knew was taboo. Allowing that a woman's head, neck and shoulders are about all it is permissible for her opponent to assail, Jack, with greater surface to cover from her quick gloves, worked out and benefi tted immeasurably by a system of defense that was my despair and that few men could win through.

About the water hole, not one playfellow but would gladly drop the strenuous fun to listen to Jack read aloud; and sometimes at special urging from the charmed ring, he would with secret gratification respond to a request for some story of his own making. Joshua Slocum's "Voyage of the Spray" came in for its turn, and suddenly, one day, Jack laid down the book and said to Uncle Roscoe Eames:

"If Slocum could do it alone in a thirty-five-foot sloop,

with an old tin clock for chronometer, why couldn't we do it in a ten-foot-longer boat with better equipment and more company?"

Uncle Roscoe, devoted yachtsman all his life, and to all appearance as devoted as ever at nearly sixty, beamed with interest. The two fell with vim to comparing models of craft, their audience open-mouthed at the proposition. All at once Jack turned to me, and I am sure there was no misgiving in his heart:

"What do you say, Charmian?—suppose five years from now, after we're married and have built our house somewhere, we start on a voyage around the world in a forty-five foot yacht. It'll take a good while to build her, and we've got a lot of other things to do besides."

"I'm with you, every foot of the way," I coincided, but why wait five years? Why not begin construction in the spring and let the house wait? No use putting up a home and running right away and leaving it! I love a boat, you love a boat; let's call the boat our house until we get ready to stay a little while in one place. We'll never be any younger, nor want to go any more keenly than right now.—You know," I struck home, "you're always reminding me that we are dying, cell by cell, every minute of our lives!"

"Hoist by my own petard," Jack growled facetiously, but inwardly approving.

This was the inception of the Snark voyage idea, most wonderful of all our glittering rosary of adventurings.

Aside from the campers, who did not invade his sanctuary, Jack saw almost no visitors. "One," he told a reporter, "was a Russian Revolutionist; the other I avoided!" We were swinging in his hammock at the far end of "Jack's House" from the road, when we glimpsed the latter unannounced and unwelcome figure on the pathway from my Aunt's home. Undetected, we slipped from the hammock, and kept still invisible as we soft-padded

around the cottage, always keeping on the opposite side from the searching caller, who shortly went away. "I'm going to put up two signs on my entrances, "Jack giggled.
"On the front door will be read:

NO ADMISSION EXCEPT ON BUSINESS;
NO BUSINESS TRANSACTED HERE.

On the back:

PLEASE DO NOT ENTER WITHOUT
KNOCKING. PLEASE DO NOT KNOCK."

He was as good as his word. I lettered the legends, and Manyoungi nailed them up, to the scandal of the neighbors. But this summer was the one and only period of inhospitality of any length in Jack's whole life—an instance when he really wanted to be let alone—a necessity in his development at that phase. A few months later, in Boston, he gave this out to one of the papers:

"No, I do not care for society—much. I haven't the time. And besides, society and I disagree as to how I should dress, and as to how I should do a great many other things. I haven't time for pink teas, nor for pink souls. I find that I can get along now less vexatiously and more happily without very much personal dealing with what I may call general humanity. Yet I am not a hermit; I have simply reduced my visiting list."

Society always had him at bay about his clothing. Once he wrote: "I have been real, and did not cheat reality any step of the way, even in so microscopically small, and comically ludicrous, a detail as the wearing of a starched collar when it would have hurt my neck had I worn it." How he would have bidden to his heart that "Shaw of Tailors," H. Dennis Bradley of London Town, who wishes, amidst other current post-bellum reconstruction, a revolu tion in the matter of starch: "If starch is a food," he

adjures, "for goodness' sake eat it; do not plaster it on your bosom and bend it round your neck. The war has taught the value of soft silken shirts and collars; and we shall not return to the Prussianism and the Militarism of the blind, unreasoning 'boiled' shirt without a murmur."

Now and again Jack tore himself from his happy valley, to lend his voice to the Cause. One of these occasions was on May 22, when he lectured at Maple Hall, at Fourteenth and Webster Streets, Oakland. In the same month we two rode one day to Santa Rosa, to call upon Luther Burbank, who was an old friend of my family. On August 22, together he and I traveled to San Francisco to see the presentation of a one-act play done by Miss Lee Bascom, "The Great Interrogation," based upon Jack's "Story of Jees Uck," from Faith of Men collection.

Jack, as collaborator, was ferreted out from where we had made ourselves as small as possible in the Alcazar's gallery, and appeared before the curtain with Miss Bascom, to whom he gallantly attributed whatever excellence the pleasing drama possessed.

About this time a dramatization of "The Sea Wolf," which was unintentionally farcical in the extreme, was put on at an Oakland playhouse. Catering to the finicky theater-goer, the playwright had introduced a chaperone, who evidently called for company in the shape of an ingenue. This young person was portrayed by no other than the winsome Ola Humphrey, of Oakland, whom later we were to know in Sydney, Australia, as a leading woman, and still in the future as the Princess Ibrahim Hassan.

As in the Alcazar, Jack chose the most inconspicuous position from which to view what had been done to theme of his. On the present occasion he remained undiscovered, and was able to shed his tears of mirth on either shoulder he desired, Sterling's or mine, when the shrieking melodrama became too much for his control. "O Gawd! O Gawd!" he mimicked the Ghost's cook, Muggridge; and

"If they should hunt me out and get me on the stage, what could I say but 'O Gawd! O Gawd!' " The unfortunate Van Weyden, if I remember aright, chose to wear, from rise to fall of curtain, a well polished pair of tan shoes for which the rigors of the salt sea had no terrors.

On September 9, Jack went to Colma, as one of a constellation of The Examiner's star writers, to do the Britt-Nelson prizefight. It was in the course of this writeup he coined another catch-phrase that went into the language of the country, as "the call of the wild," "the white silence," and even "the game" had become almost household words. This time it was "the abysmal brute," to which certain pugilists took exception until they came to realize the author's meaning—the life that refuses to quit and lie down even after consciousness has ceased.

"By 'abysmal brute,' " Jack would extemporize, "I mean the basic life deeper than the brain and the intellect in living things. Intelligence rests upon it; and when intelligence goes, it still remains. The abysmal brute life," he illustrated, "that causes the heart of a gutted dog-fish to beat in one's hand—you've seen them do that when we were fishing off the Key Route pier," I was reminded. "Or the beak of a slain turtle to close and bite off a man's finger; it's the life force that makes a fighter go on fighting even though he is past all direction from his intelligence." So enamored was he of his own phrase that eight years afterward he used it for title of another prize-fight novel.

In addition to his regular work, Jack would find time to review a book, as for instance "The Long Day," which critique occupied a page in an October Examiner; or to contribute an article, like "The Walking Delegate," in the May 28th issue of the same paper.

It was in August of this year that he sent to Collier's Weekly the article entitled "Revolution," based upon the lecture. He had already sent it to The Cosmopolitan, but owing to some disagreement upon the price had with-

drawn the manuscript. This article was published in London in the Contemporary Review. Jack's letter to the Editor of Collier's I give below:

All those bright, vitalizing months, there was growing in his bosom a seed sown two years earlier when he had come to love Sonoma Valley. "The Valley of the Moon," he called it, having nnearthed the fact that Sonoma stood for "moon" in the early Indian tongue of the locality. I have since heard Sonoma defined as "seven moons," because, driving in the crescent of the valley, one may see seven risings of the orb behind the waving contours of the summits.

His eyes roved over the forested mountainside, and yearning heightened to make some part of it his own, for

home when we should be man and wife—his very own while life should last. But it appeared not to be for sale. One prospect above all others filled our eyes whenever we rode side by side up a certain old private road three inexpressibly romantic knolls crowned with fir and redwood, rosy-limbed, blossom-perfumed madroño, and scented tapers of the buckeye—wooded islets rising out of a deep, tossing sea of tree-tops. And one day a neighbor said:

"Why, those knolls there belong to a section of over a hundred acres owned by Robert P. Hill down at Eldridge, yonder, the next station below Glen Ellen. Go and see him, and I bet he'll sell it to you. I'm sure I heard it could be bought."

In no time at all, Jack was possessor of one hundred and twenty-nine acres of the most idyllic spot we were ever to behold—later to be glorified in his novel "Burning Day light." Its irregular diamond-shape was bounded by the magnificently wooded gorge of old Asbury Creek to the southeast, and the whole sweet domain was wilderness of every sort of Californian timber and shrubbery, save some forty acres of cleared land that had once yielded wine-grapes and now waved with grain.

Jack paid $7000.00 for the property, which turned out to be a portion of the original grant of some two hundred square miles from the Mexican Government to General Vallejo. Mr. and Mrs. Hill declare to this day that they fear Jack could probably have beaten their figure if he had stood out. But there is another aspect to the happening. Jack, alas, had no chance; he accused me of precluding any such move on his side, by any unthinking ravings over the land in question. And I meekly refrained from protesting when he excluded me from all business sessions thereafter.

Mrs. Hill, who was President of the California Woman's Federation of Clubs, amongst other engaging customs displayed the one of welcoming a guest with both her

hands clasping the other s one. And after a little acquaintance with our new friends, I noticed that Jack adopted the gracious habit with his own guests quite unknowingly, I am sure, for he was not addicted to copying manners. This reminds me that when I first met Jack London, it was with surprise I noted that he shook hands rather limply. It must have been a reminiscence of childhood diffidence; it could not be coldness, for he radiated warmth and sincerity from head to foot. Later, I had dared tell him of my be-puzzlement, and found that he had no idea his clasp was not a hearty one. He set about remedying the lack of firmness. Looking through his 1905 clipping book, I come upon this from an interviewer in an Iowa town where Jack had lectured:

"The words and hearty clasp were with boy-like frankness, a boy's greeting to another boy."

We called it our Land of Dear Delight, but, to the world, simply The Eanch. What Jack thought of it, and his enthusiasm, taking the place of his old unrest, in all the simplest details of his new farm, is indicated in his letters to George Sterling and Cloudesley Johns. To George he wrote:

What the neighbors thought of the transaction, he words in "The Iron Heel:"

And this fragment from his next, dated July 6, 1905:

Of all books of fiction we read at this period, "The Divine Fire" and Eden Phillpotts's "The Secret Woman" made the deepest mark upon us both.

When laying foundation for a novel, Jack would isolate himself for the forenoon, in a hilly manzanita grove adjoining the Wake Robin acres—the "wine-wooded manzanita" he named it in "All Gold Canyon." But for all short work he made his notes at a table in the redwood-paneled room where he worked and slept. He liked music while he composed, and was never so content as when open windows brought my practising to him from the other house.

One day, returning from San Francisco, he said: "We've got to have a phonograph!" "Awful!" I countered. You don't know what you're saying, he reproved in sparkling tone. "I've been listening for hours to the most wonderful records, and there's a man down in Glen Ellen who has an agency, and we're to come down to-night and hear the thing. No—don't say a word—you'll go perfectly crazy over it!"

I did; and a Victor came to stay at Wake Robin, subsequently sailing with us to the South Seas with one hundred and fifty records presented by the manufacturers. This music Jack also liked while he worked, so long as he could not distinguish the words of songs, which would distract his attention from the words he was juggling with.

At that time he cared far more for orchestral than for

vocal harmonies, especially the Wagnerian operas. In the latter, as well as in qnite a repertory of other operatic work, he had been well coached by his friend Blanche Partington, musical and dramatic critic on the San Francisco Call for seven years, who had taken him with her to many performances. I, on the other hand, favored the voice records above the instrumental. After several years, as one manifestation of his searching into the human, Jack leaned more and more to the voice, until he seldom put on the orchestral disks.

George Serling had affectionately dubbed him "The Wolf," or "The Fierce Wolf," or "The Shaggy Wolf." In the last month of Jack London's life, he gave me an exquisite tiny wrist-watch. "And what shall I have engraved on it!" I asked. "Oh, 'Mate from Wolf,' I guess," he replied. And I: "The same as when we exchanged engagement watches?" "Why, yes, if you don't mind," he admitted. "I have sometimes wished you would call me 'Wolf' more often."

"I wish I had called you 'Wolf,' then," I said remorsefully, "since you would have liked it. But it seemed preciously George's name for you, and that is why I seldom used it." The wee Swiss timepiece was lettered accordingly, this after his light had gone out forever, for I had not been again in town.

Jack was generous about helping his friends out in

time of need, but the following, to one of them in October, shows how closely he was running, and again mentions his intended lecturing trip:

"I'm always in debt," Jack said to Ashton Stevens, who interviewed him for The Examiner. "Look at that hand! See where the light comes through the fingers? That hand leaks. It was explained to me by the Korean boy that took me through Manchuria. All I'd like to do is to be able to get enough money ahead to loaf for a year—that's my little dream."

"And buy some dress shirts and evening clothes?" Mr. Stevens slyly baited.

"Oh, I have them," Jack grinned; "I've got them. But

I'm willing to put 'em on only when I can't get in without them. I loathe the things, but if the worst comes to the worst I've got 'em; I insist I've got 'em."

"Then your dream of rest realized wouldn't be all purple teas?"

"Indeed it would not. At Glen Ellen I've got a farm, and I'm going to build a house and a lot of things; it'll take me about two years to make improvements and settle down. And then I'm going to build a forty-foot sea-going yacht and with two or three others cruise around the world. We'11 be our own crew and cook and everything else, and the first port will be twenty-one hundred miles from San Francisco—Honolulu. Thence on and on. Maybe I'll realize on that trip some of my dream of rest."

In the months before he came to Glen Ellen that year, he would ask musical friends for "The Garden of Sleep," a song by Clement Scott and Isidore de Lara, and for "Sing Me to Sleep," by Clifton Bingham and Edwin Green. As time went on, he called upon me less and less for these restful melodies. When they had at length served his need, in characteristic manner of not looking backward, he was through with the songs.

Concerning the world voyage, he wrote to Anna Strunsky:

Jack's "dream of rest" had more than once, in my hearing, been associated with death itself. Never was he so happy, he who at the same time so exalted life, that he could not descant upon the repose of death. One of my earliest memories of him is such a remark as this:

"To me the idea of death is sweet. Think of it—to lie down and go into the dark out of all the struggle and pain of living—to go to sleep and rest, always to be resting. Oh, I do not want to die now—I'd fight like the devil to keep alive. . . . But when I come to die, it will be smiling at death, I promise you."

Early in our married life I entreated:

"Don't, don't plan so many great things that you will always have to slave for the means. Make your money and loaf for a while. But in all the years we were together, the day of living rest fled before him. His vast plannings widened as widened his fund of knowledge—there was no horizon at any point of his compass. So I came to give up, and cooperate with him wherever his ambition chose to express itself.

Yes, Jack was always in debt; but never to the point of failing to see his way out. Which, after all, is merely good business. He was aware of his augmenting earning power; but timid ones lacking his vision refrained from depending upon him because their prognosis was that he would fail through poor judgment. And yet, after his death, as many as depended upon him in lifetime are still cared for by his foresight—even more than those. Any one who gave voice to the opinion that Jack London was a poor business man was a source of irritation to him, such was his realization his own efficiency.

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