1905-1906

IT is of record, in the files of every American newspaper, that the final decree in the Jack London divorce was granted on November 18, 1905—this after a separation of two and a half years between the parties thereto. Jack had once said to me:

"If a divorce had not been allowed me, I would not have given you up—that would be unthinkable. We would have gone somewhere, if you would, and I think you would—on the other side of the world, and dignifiedly lived out our lives, 'on the square, like a true married pair.'"

But this was thought of by him only as an extreme. For, as in most considerations, Jack supported law, holding that society rested upon monogamy; though that all-round mind of his as firmly stood behind his biology with regard to man s polygamous place in the animal kingdom. "And anyway, our love and mateship is of the stamp that bonds cannot tire, thank God, he would rejoin. Then, in a note: "We will respect the world and the way of the world."

Once, out of a spell of despondency before he came to Glen Ellen, Jack wrote me a letter which I give below, so that all may have access to the solid foundation upon which reason stood, upholding romantic love:

But he was also the mad lover, gloriously, boundlessly so. As witness this, written three weeks before our wedding, after he had gone East:

Editors have repeatedly approached me on the subject of publishing Jack London's letters to myself. All argu-

ments were barren of result, save one: that Jack London's love nature is little known or reckoned with in the average estimate of him; or, worse, misunderstood. This slant of argument of course had not been unthought of by me. And because no just study of the man can otherwise be made, I present, throughout this book, the letters I have chosen from the uncounted ones in my possession. Below I quote the very first in which he mentions his regard, something that had theretofore been undreamed of by me. We had been discussing something about my own make-up which he said had always eluded him—and I had gathered that it was not especially complimentary. My curiosity being aroused, I wrote and asked him if he could not definitely word his feeling. Here is the reply:

When, so shortly afterward, we had discovered, almost as with love-at-first-sight, the great glory that was rising in us, this was his next message—a burst of sunshine after dark days:

The next letter gives a deathless picturing of Jack London's loneliness of old and his new-found happiness:

Let himself say what Love meant to him:

Before even dreaming of coming into the country to live, Jack had pledged himself to lecture in the east and middle west. He had never really enjoyed public speaking, but was bent upon hunting a protracted session of it—a first and last tour. Moreover, and very important, here was opportunity to spread propaganda for the Cause, and it was stipulated with the Lyceum Bureau that he should be at liberty to expound Socialism wherever and whenever it did not conflict with his regular dates.

As our Indian Summer drew on, however, more and more he fretted that he must pull up stakes and tear himself from the happy camp that had wrought so marvelously upon him. But the third week in October saw him on his strenuous way, having demanded expenses for two, that Manyoungi might relieve him of all distracting personal details. My face laughed into his from the inside cover of that thin gold watch I had given him; and one unforgotten item of luggage was an exquisite miniature of his two little girls which he had had painted by Miss Wishaar months before.

Shortly after his departure, I, too, did some packing—of a simple trousseau in the pretty bureau-trunk Jack had presented me. This trunk was the result of one of his advertisement-answering hazards, as was one of the early models of wardrobe-trunk. The latter was so tall that, after expending more than its original cost in excess-length charges, he had the thing cut down to regulation size.

In Newton, Iowa, I visited my friend Mrs. Will Mc-

Murray, for a November 25 lecture had been scheduled for the college town of Grinnell, but a short distance from Newton; and it was our intention to be married at the McMurrays' and spend with them an idle week occurring in the tour. But the lecturer, fulfilling an engagement with the People's Institute in Elyria, Ohio, upon receiving a telegram from California that he was entirely free, decided on the spur of the moment not to delay until the Grinnell date.

On the eve of the 19th, I had his wire in hand for me to be in Chicago the next night, since he was to pass through on the way to lecture in Wisconsin. Being Sunday, he was obliged to arrange a special license with the County Clerk of Cook County. And when in obedience to his summons I stepped off my train in the Windy City at nine of the evening, three hours behind-time, a very weary but happily patient bridegroom elect was pacing the station pavement. In his pocket was the license, in mine my mother's wedding-ring; and at the curb waited two hansom cabs, one containing an interested and beaming Manyoungi, who wanted to see an American wedding.

The informal suddenness and speed of this termination to our courtship savored of the age of chivalry, when knight-errant with doughty right arm slung his lady love across the saddle bow on a foaming black charger. Let none say that ours was less romantic. What mattered it that our vows were spoken in a civil ceremony! After Notary Public J. J. Grant had made us one, we drove to the old Victoria Hotel where Jack interlined 'Mrs. Jack London" between his and Manyoungi's signatures registered the previous day. I meanwhile, by another entrance, slipped upstairs.

No one connected intimately with this "most advertised writer in America" could hope to escape the more or less notorious consequences. By me it had to be regarded as part of the game, if I were to observe my responsibilities. Therefore my philosophy of life had fortified me against

the worst. Before Jack could procure his key, he was way laid by three newspapermen—but they chanced to be merely in search of items about his trip and his books. But a fourth had discovered the hardly-dry interpolation on the register, and hovered anxiously about the quartette to learn if he was the only sleuth who had made the find. Jack sensed the situation, and presently excused himself and ran upstairs. In three minutes the four reporters were at our door, imploring an interview. Reënforcements began to arrive, and into the small hours besieged by knocks, notes, telegrams, cards, telephone calls from the hotel office—streams of entreaties in every guise flowing under the door and over wire and transom. To all of which my husband remained deaf and dumb, for he must scrupulously redeem his promise made months before, to give the Hearst papers the "scoop" in return for their discretion. This he had done on Saturday, and the Chicago American city editor, Mr. Harstone, was instrumental in obtaining the special license; also, with a reporter, Mr. Harstone had served as witness to the ceremony.

The appeal which came nearest to stirring Jack was the whispered and written: "Come on through with the news, old man—be merciful; we've got to get it. You're a newspaperman yourself, you know. Come across and help us out."

When the Chicago American had appeared Monday morning with the heavily leaded item, the disappointed dailies sent representatives to call upon the bride and groom; and I must take occasion to congratulate those gentlemen upon the good-natured courtesy which cloaked their chagrin. Nevertheless, the end was not yet. Vengeance was theirs. On Tuesday morning, coming back into Chicago from Geneva Falls, Wisconsin, on the business-men s train, we had slipped into a rearmost seat. What was our horror to behold, upthrust before the greedy eyes of "commuters" the entire length of the car, full-page photo-

graphs of ourselves with large headlines announcing Jack London's marriage "Invalid."

"What the hell!" spluttered Jack, laughing in spite of himself. "The other sheets are getting even. We're in for it!" and thereupon delivered himself: "A fellow's got to pay through the nose for being loyal to his own crowd!" They won't stop to consider that I'd have done the same for them, if most of my newspaper work had been for them!"

The "other sheets" had merely endeavored to tangle the divorce laws of California and Illinois; but a noted Judge pronounced all straight. The Chicago American gave due space to the refutation, and we went on our path rejoicing. But for weeks we could not pick up a paper, great or small, that did not contain publicity of one sort or another concerning the most advertised writer in America whether reviews of his books, of our marriage, of the lectures, the round-the-world yacht voyage, the Ranch, and what not.

Jack maintained to all interviewers, "If my marriage is not legal in Illinois, I shall re-marry my wife in every state in the Union!"

A comical thing happened in California, when one of Jack's little-girl swimming pupils hurriedly scanned the title, "Jack London's Marriage Invalid." Hastening to her mother, in accents of distress she cried:

"Oh, mama, mama, how awful! Mr. London did not marry Miss Kittredge after all! This paper says he's married an invalid!"

One day, from Lynette McMurray's parlor, there issued Jack's irrepressible snicker, increasing to a wild call for me:

"Oh, I've got you now, Mate Woman! You can never look me in the face again after you hear this!" And proceeded to read aloud a libelous squib from a Washington, Iowa, weekly paper. It was to the effect that the "ugly-faced girl from California, so ugly that the children on the streets of Newton ran screaming to their mothers when-

ever she passed by, had married Jack London. That it was reported the pair were soon to go to sea in a small boat, to be gone for years. That it would be a mercy to everybody if they were drowned at sea and never came back.

"You think I'm making it up, don't you!" Jack read my scornful face. "But here—look at it!—why, the old sour-ball—the wretched old slob! I wonder what he'd had for breakfast!"

But it was I who first happened upon a reference to Jack London as being possessed of a "bilaterally asymetrical countenance," and it may correctly be assumed that I pressed the same home with all dispatch.

"I'm NOT bilaterally asymetrical, though," indignantly he defended; "and anyway, I don't know what bilaterally asymetrical means. Take a look at me," studying himself in my hand-mirror. "I'd say my features are fairly straight . . . The man that said bilaterally asymetrical was looking for a chance to work off the expression!"

The time Jack was really sorry for his wife was in 1909, in Hobart, Tasmania, when another reporter with something funny to work off, wrote: "Jack London's speech is as that of an American with an Oxford education; but as for Mrs. London, hers is Americanese, undefiled, and unfiled." What irritated Jack in this instance was: "But you didn't open your head; and the man scarcely saw you, there in the dark of the carriage!"

From November 26 until December 7, on which latter day Jack spoke at Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, we shared the journey, and a unique one it was for me. Seldom was I so tired from travel that I missed a lecture, whether upon Socialism, or his experiences as tramp, Klondiker, War Correspondent, Sailor, or Writer. I never wearied of seeing Jack step out upon stage or platform, with that modest-seeming, almost bashful boyishness which so charmed his audiences, and yet which so quickly, when he

raised his splendid head and launched into any serious theme, changed to the imperiousness of certitude. Once, well appreciative though I was of his beauty in this one of his myriad phases, I remonstrated:

"I wonder if you realize how forbidding you look when you walk out of the wings. Your expression is positively haughty!—as if you considered your audience mere dust under your feet!"

He laughed outright.

"Why, I don't feel that way at all, of course. Don't forget—I'm making up my mind what I'm going to say, and really not thinking of my hearers busy with my thought. And then, too, he figured it out, "it may be a left-over of the system by which I first overcame stage-fright. It was something like this: I've got something to say. I've got to say it. I'm going to say it the best way I can, even if it's not oratory. If I try to make a good speech and fail—well, I shall have failed, that's all. I very soon had decided not to take too seriously any failure to speak graciously. What of it? I said. I won't be the only one; others have fallen down and why should I be proud! And anyway, diffidence arises from conceit, I don't care who disagrees with me . . . So remember, Mate, when I assume what you are pleased to call my imperial pose, it is done quite unconsciously, being an outgrowth of my early search after a shield for backwardness. I am not consciously thinking of myself at all; I am busy with my thought and the imminent business of putting my thought in the best way possible."

At the next lecture, when he moved out upon the boards he looked over at my box, his face breaking into that unstudied morning smile that wrought lovers out of enemies, and a little rustle passed through the house as if wings were ruffling and stretching. But in a flash the smile had fled behind the lordly mask of his concentration, and I knew I had ceased to exist for him.

But never, in any presentment of himself, was he so

splendid, so noble, as when, with starry eyes, he flamed out the vision of his conversion to the only religion he was ever to know: "All about me were nobleness of purpose and heroism and effort, and my days were sunshine and starshine, all fire and dew, with before my eyes, ever burning and blazing, the Holy Grail, Christ's Own Grail, the warm, human, long-suffering and maltreated but to be rescued and saved at the last."

Jack swore he was getting enough train-travel to last all his life, and loathed it ever after. But very merrily, whether in Pullman or jerky day-coach, we put in hours that might otherwise have been irksome, reading aloud, playing casino and cribbage, writing letters, and altogether enjoying our companionship. Moreover, and blessed assurance of its continuance undimmed, we respected each other's solitude and independence—Jack at intervals spending hours in the smoker, listening profitably to the conversation of his own sex, or napping to make up for broken nights of travel. The all-around "good time" we invariably found together is best pointed by an incident several years later, when we were returning home from South America by way of the Gulf and New Orleans. As usual, we were bound up in each other and the interest of our occupations, at cards, sharing in books, the scenery, or in speculation upon the passengers. During one of Jack's absences, I was resting with closed eyes, when a beautiful matron in the section ahead, whom we had noticed with two younger women, came and sat beside me:

"I hope you'll not think me too rude," she opened, "but I want to ask a very personal question. Are you really Mrs. Jack London?"

There was such entire absence of offense in her eager, frank address that I could only laugh delightedly while assuring her this bliss had been mine for four years. But again she pressed:

"Are you really she?" and before I could protest in sur-

prise, she hurried on, "My daughters and I have been discussing you two with the greatest curiosity, and said we were sure there must be some mistake—the thing is incredible; married people don't act as you do. Never have we seen a married couple, except possibly on their honeymoon, have such a good time together!"

All I could do, in return, was to assure her that we were on our honeymoon.

From Brunswick, where Jack averred to President Hyde that if his college days could come again he would attend Bowdoin, we filled another lecture-blank week with my father's people in Ellsworth and Mt. Desert Island, Maine. A day here, a day there, in the dear homesteads that had once been my homes for a long free year, we spent with this and that aunt or cousin—solid hearts of the very granite of old "State o' Maine," with their own glow and sparkle that renders them instantly aware of sham of any kind. One and all they pronounced the captivating boy I had wedded, with his irradiation of sweetness and sympathy and the open boyish face and heart of him, "Just one of us!" and called him their own forever and ever. Jack in turn dubbed them "salt of the earth," and gave them of his best.

Around Bar Harbor ("Somesville"), West Eden and Northeast Harbor, in an ideal "Down East" winter, we drove over the snow-packed, glinting roads that skirt the toothed coast of this isle of seafarers. Oddly enough to those who think of Jack London in terms of icy Alaska with its white ways of transportation, Jack had never before driven in a sleigh. So varied had been his adventures, that it was a prize of life for me to participate with him in an unknown one. Smothered to the ears in a borrowed coon-coat, head and hands snug in sealskin cap and gloves he had bought in Boston, he took keen interest in managing a span of spirited blacks harnessed to a smart "cutter,"

their red-flaring nostrils tossing white plumes of steam in the crackling, sun-gilt air.

Again in Boston, we became the guests of Mr. and Mrs. Frank Merritt Sheldon, in their handsome colonial home at Newton—with whom I had gone to Europe. Jack's advent must, have been an illuminating if not disturbing one to them, for many and ofttimes weird characters found their way up the driveway to the pillared portico of the lofty white house on a hillock. And of course newspapermen came and went. One of those my husband hoped to meet again some time, preferably in a dark alley where a nose might be tweaked unseen by the police; for, in reply to this man's question as to how it seemed to be the wife of a celebrity, he had made me deliver the ecstatic cry, "It's just grand!"

It was nothing unusual for some inebriated derelict to press the button upon the stroke of midnight; and once an indubitably insane crank perturbed the early hours and the housemaid. But our host and hostess were ideal, sparing no pains to place their home and themselves at their guests' disposal in every finest sense and detail, and apparently enjoying it all thoroughly.

Jack was driven nearly to the limit of endurance in the week before the twenty-seventh, when, with a holiday month in store, we sailed for Jamaica. Boston cameras pictured him hollow-eyed; but be he driven or not driven, I came to learn that he was wont to look other than his fresh, virile self whenever cities laid clutch upon him. Never did he thrive in a great metropolis.

In Tremont Temple, and in historic Faneuil Hall, under the noted Gilbert Stuart of the Father of His Country, to packed audiences Jack London sent forth his voice for the Cause. In the latter auditorium, that sweet and unvan- quished fighter, "Mother Jones," marched up the central aisle to the rostrum, and greeted the young protagonist

of her holy mission with a sounding kiss on either cheek. He spoke also at Socialist Headquarters.

The Intercollegiate Socialist Society had been organized for a month or two, and the Harvard members got together and saw to it that the first President, Jack London, should be heard in Harvard Union.

Aside from Mrs. Sheldon, myself, and one or two others, there were no women present in Harvard Union that night. We sat with Frank Sheldon and Gelett Burgess in a tiny gallery hung upon the rear wall of the high hall. A thrilling sight it was, that throng of collegians, not only those crowded both seated and standing on the floor below, but the scores hanging by their eyebrows to window casements, welcoming Jack with round upon round of ringing shouts and cheers—an ovation, the papers did not hesitate to call it.

He gave them, unsparingly, all and more than they had bargained for, straight from the shoulder, jolting " Revolution" into them. Once, when a statement of starvation facts, concerning the Chicago slums, was so awful as to strike a number of the chesty young bloods as a bit melodramatic, a laugh started. Jack's face set like a vise, and he hung over the edge of the platform, a challenge to their better part flaming from black-blue eyes and ready, merciless tongue. Be it said that the response was instantaneous and whole-hearted, the house rising as one man and echoing to the applause until I, for one onlooker, choked and filled with emotion at the human fellowship of it. At the close of the lecture, Jack and Mr. Sheldon were carried off to the fraternity houses and royally entertained the rest of the night.

One afternoon, at the request of the Boston American, Jack attended and wrote up a performance of the Holy Jumpers, whose breezy antics, I dare opine, he did not regard as any more outlandish than certain metaphysical

gymnastics he wotted of—and thought them far more whole somely cheerful.

Still another afternoon, we put in three breathless hours in Thomas W. Lawson's private office at Young's Hotel, entirely absorbed (in a room peopled with replicas of elephants of every size, breed, and composition), in that brilliant and energetic gentleman s proposed "cure" for the ills and shams of modern society. Be it known, that the assertive and vehement conversationalist Jack London was also a prince of listeners. His was the perfection of attention to any speaker who was worth while. True, he seldom squandered precious time upon one who was not, but would proceed to harry unrelentingly until he had routed the other; after which he would try to make up in various ways for his aggressiveness.

One of our most interesting acquaintances in Boston was Dr. George W. Galvin, staunch Socialist and clever surgeon; and one day he arranged to take us through the Massachusetts General Hospital. Once inside, would we care to see an operation? Dr. Eichardson was in the theater and about to remove an appendix. While my lips formed Yes, swiftly I roved my adventurously promising career beside the bright comet I had taken unto myself for better or worse, a future wherein I might be required to reckon with singular emergencies in war or travel by sea and land. I must never fail my man who despised a coward beneath all things under the sun. Here was chance for a certain kind of prepa ration. Nerves I confessed in abundance: had I nerve also?

And so, curious concomitant of a honeymoon, I witnessed the masterly elimination of an appendix from a patient who bore startling facial resemblance to my own husband; thence to a second operating theater where we were present at the sanguinary trepanning, for tumor of the brain, of a woman's skull—"a Sea-Wolf operation, eh!" Dr. Galvin chuckled.

Through all of which, placing myself in a rigidly scientific frame of mind, I emerged with flying colors, to Jack's congratulation. Two months later, never having viewed a corpse in my life, except when too young to remember, I was introduced to such for the first time—when they ushered me into the dissecting chamber of the University of Chicago, where some dozen or so cadavers stiffly bade greeting to my unaccustomed gaze. These two trials, trials in a number of senses, reënforced by a day among the bleeding horrors of the stockyards in the same City, graduated Jack London's wife forever out of apprehension as to similar tests that might overtake her.

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