1906

CHICAGO, noises and drafts and sifting soot and all, seemed to reach to us east-worn travelers like home and peace, despite the rushing stop-over that had been charted.

On Sunday, January 28, Jack lectured to the Socialists at the West Side Auditorium, introduced by A. M. Simons, editor of the International Socialist Review. Standing-room only, and that all taken, was the situation long before Jack had risen to speak.

On Monday he repeated "The Social Revolution" at the University of Chicago, and the Socialists were more than ever elate that the "magnificent lecture of Comrade London" should be staged in the "intellectual stronghold of Standard Oil." Kent Hall, which had been opened to the Sociological Club, was incapable of holding the mob bent upon seeing and hearing its famous mouth-piece, to say nothing of the students themselves and a horde of citizens.

It was a fine sight to me, the hundreds overflowing on to the stage itself, sidewalks jammed outside, and more coming every second. Things were growing tense. The dissatisfied murmur of the many denied admission floated into the packed playhouse. Then an usher climbed before the foot lights and announced that the meeting would adjourn to Mandel Hall—Mandel Hall! the auditorium consecrated to the most dress-parade functions of the great University, and even known to have been refused to the minor colleges for their commencement exercises.

The galleries had been barred; but when the throng had swept aside the helpless ushers and occupied every foot of space, seat and aisle, fear of infringing fire regulations caused the galleries to be thrown open.

The dailies of Chicago, still smarting under the suppressed wedding news, as well as from Jack's late attacks, from the Atlantic Coast, upon her sweat-shop atrocities, naturally let him have the broadside of their ridicule and enmity. But somehow, so fond were we of the city, it failed to offend.

Before we said good-by, Mr. Simons and his attractive and learned wife had us to the University dissecting rooms aforementioned, as well as to the Armour and Swift stockyards and slaughtering plants. And while we were on the trail of unpleasant but instructive sights of the world in which we live, we spent a night going through one section of Chicago's "red-light" district.

Our last sight-seeing, ere we left on the 31st for St. Paul, was of Hull House, where we made the acquaintance of Miss Jane Addams. It was a treat to listen to a discussion between Miss Addams and Jack London—each approaching the same heartfelt problems from widely divergent angles.

"Well," Jack observed, stretching himself in the Pullman, the Little Woman has added a number of strange experiences to her life. And you don't know," he broke out, "you can't guess, what it means to me, to have you by my side everywhere, in everything I do and see. I am not lonely any more. Wherever I go,—at least, wherever it is possible for me to take you, I want you with me—I want you to know the world as I know it, the good and the bad of it. It means the world to me that you don't flinch from any of it, so far as I can see.—In fact," his tone went grave and his brow severe, before breaking into laughing speech, "the way that you, shameless women that you are, tenderly raised a vegetarian, put away that hearty lunch

after seeing animals slaughtered all forenoon, worries me about your immortal soul!"

"But you will kindly remember," I came back, "that I confined my depredations solely to bivalves and prawns!"

In the little diary of that day's ride I find: "Jack says we two are living in a Land of Love, wherever we are." There is less tender notation to the effect that I was sorely beaten at both casino and cribbage; also mention of our finishing Turgenev's "On the Eve" and beginning Gissing's "The Unclassed," reading aloud, turn about.

At St. Paul, Jack lectured for the Lyceum Bureau. We visited the handsome State Capitol, fashioned throughout, marbles and all, from native American materials. We sat through an exciting wrestling match in the Armory. And nothing would do but Jack must take part in an impromptu "curling" tournament. It was with keen enjoyment he drove the heavy but elusive disks over the constantly swept ice-rink, and the very picture of a Scotch laddie was he, in borrowed tam o'shanter and woolen plaid. We heard later, much to his amusement, that the driver of the automobile that returned us over the hard snow to the hotel, had been arrested for speeding!

Grand Forks, North Dakota, was the next jump, where we were entertained by President Merrifield of the State University, and in this city on February 3 were given Jack's two final lectures. The "first and last tour," so far as the speaking end of it was concerned, had terminated untimely, for Jack was tired and ill from the long siege, and had crossed off a number from the itinerary. On the train he wrote Cloudesley Johns:

The remainder of the journey was without special event, except that our train was delayed above beautiful Dunsmuir, in California, by a freight wreck ahead in a canyon. The passengers made a picnic of it, wandering about the adjacent country; and we twain, being immersed in Selma Lagerlof's "Gosta Berling," reclined upon a grassy slope and read to each other. I think it will be seen, by now, why Jack and I were never bored, no matter how long nor uninteresting, in the estimate of some mortals, our traverse. Life was not long enough in which to read the books we desired, to do the work laid out, to talk of the myriad things suggested by other myriad things; nor to love.

At three o'clock, the last but one morning before we reached Oakland, Jack woke me in my berth. Disturbing my rest being a tacit taboo, I was startled; but his instant whisper, shaken with eagerness, reassured: "Throw on your kimono and come out on the platform with me. I want to show you something—you've got to see it!"

It was indeed "something"—great Shasta, upthrust 14,000 feet, snow-crowned, into the moonlit, night-blue dome of the sky; and the Lassen Buttes, stark and flat in the beams of a setting moon, like peaks cut from heavy dull- gold cardboard. Eight years thereafter, in Mexico, when General Funston remarked that he had read in "El Imparcial's" telegraphic column that Mt. Lassen was in eruption, my mind flew back to that hour before dawn when Jack and I, so airily clad, arm-in-arm on the lurching vestibule platform, gazed out upon the fairy scene, and spoke in hushed tones.

The Oakland reporters flocked to Jack upon his return, and to their queries he repeated that if his marriage had proved invalid in Illinois, he would have remarried in every

state in the Union. Referring to some misreport about himself, I find this from the Oakland Herald:

"Yes, that was another case of being the victim of reporters readjustment of facts. Oh, I know I have been a newspaperman myself—thereby perhaps I know so well how impossible it is for reporters to avoid perverting facts. Oh, heavens, no! I am not trying to demonstrate that reporters are natural-born liars, and yet. . . .

"Why, do you know, while I was in Chicago the other day, I had two reporters struggle with my immortal soul for hours trying to get me to say that I am a believer in free love—which I am not at all. They struggled nobly, but I stood firm to the argument that the family group is the very hub of things.

"But then I rather enjoy this misrepresentation. It is amusing; and besides you know, it's fine advertising! And I don't take myself seriously, so can take all that's said about me as a joke, for I always try to laugh at the inevitable."

Jack had concluded to cease paying rent in Oakland; and shortly after our arrival, as man and wife, at the little flat in Telegraph Avenue, we set about finding a suitable house for his mother and Johnnie, as well as Mammy Jennie. One was purchased on Twenty-Seventh Street, Jack's ultimate decision influenced by the handsome woods of its interior finishing, for he was fond of good lumber. One room in the upper story we reserved for town headquarters.

By mid-month we were on the way to our true home, and were met at the Glen Ellen station by "Werner Wiget, who had long since changed his abode from the Fish Ranch to the farm-house up the mountain, where now he was in charge, under my Aunt's supervision in Jack's absence.

"Jack's House," at Wake Robin, as it has ever since been known, served as formerly for writing quarters and Manyoungi's sleeping place. Other living rooms, added to

Wake Robin Lodge proper, and spoken of as the Annex, were in readiness for our use, and a neat and comely neighbor, Mrs. Grace Parrent, who wanted to swell her own family exchecquer for some special purpose, had engaged to cook and ply her deft French needle in preparing me for the round-world voyage.

It was a sort of sublimated camping. Our winter table was set in a corner of the spotless kitchen that was odorous of new pine; and later on, when spring's caprices had quieted, the table was removed out under the laurels at the brookside, where our crocked butter and cream cooled in the ripples. Mrs. Parrent's excellent repasts were enjoyed to the music of tuneful Korean treebells that Manyoungi knew well how to place to advantage among the bays and oaks. Jack and I had discovered many tastes in common, even to a fondness for olive oil as a culinary lubricator, in preference to the animal fats. He had acquired his among the Greek fishermen, I in my Aunt's vegetarian household.

Jack was not yet looking quite himself, the sunken shadows still lurking about his eyes; and a marked decrease in weight was noticeable. I was aware of an almost painful relief in that he was once more out of the turmoil of urban life and immersed in laying plans for the summer's work and play, the building of his deep-sea, boat, and the modest improvement of the "Blessed Ranch," as he lovingly referred to it. Consequently, it was with positive alarm that I regarded the managing editor of a large eastern monthly, who arrived from New York two days after our return to Wake Robin, his mission to induce Jack immediately to recross the continent, for the purpose of making a first-hand study of the southern cotton-mills in relation to child-labor.

Caring—perhaps sinfully, who shall say?—more for the imminent welfare of this man of mine than for all the serfs of all ages, I sat at the interview silently exerting every

fiber of me against his going. I was certain, from observation of his internal restlessness, that if he went back into the cities so soon, there might be dire consequences. Reasoning back to his state antedating the summer of 1905, I knew he had had enough, for the time being.

The editor was plainly anxious not to find his journey in vain. Eloquently he pleaded. Jack pondered with troubled eyes, and would not give answer until he and I had talked it over. He wanted to do the thing; his conscience pressed him to do it. And though he recognized as well as I the need in which he stood of freedom from what he had only just escaped, he would not have shirked even if his actual life had depended upon it. But balanced against this new work was the work he had already pledged, together with other responsibilities; and there came to aid his ultimatum a slight misstep of the editor, who let drop that if Jack did not undertake the commission, another man, only a little less noted—Socialist—was in view. "Let the other fellow have a chance," often a slogan of Jack London's, was the outweighing grain in the scales.

Jack knew, and why, though I said little and tried not to look too much, that I was dead-set against his going. I never learned precisely what he thought of my attitude—whether he blamed me for being instrumental, by mere woman-mothering possessiveness and solicitude, in with holding him from a duty, or was glad I agreed that he stay west for a while. If there resided in his mind any unflattering criticism, it died with him. It may be that something restrained me from asking; and joy in his augmented well-being—always my religious care—took the place of morbid self-examination. Before I desert the subject, let it be said that the second-choice of author and investigator did a splendid piece of work—"Better than I could have done it, by far!" Jack enunciated his satisfaction; hence the ultimate good was served. Furthermore, one of Jack's finest bits of writing, after our return, was a story

of the making of a hobo by the process of cotton-mill child-slavery. This was "The Apostate," which, following serial publication, came to have wide circulation in pamphlet form through a Socialist publishing house in Chicago. (The book "Revolution" contains this tale.)

How more than busy we were! Aside from regular writing, which was soon resumed, Jack, with eye to homebuilding, ordered fruit-trees of all descriptions suitable to the latitude, and seventy-odd varieties of table-grapes—orchard and vineyard to be planted upon an amphitheater behind a half-circle we had chosen for the house-site. Johannes Reimers tendered the benefit of his professional advice about the trees and vines, and ordered for us a hedge of Japanese hawthorne to flourish between orchard and house-space, which in time grew into a glory of orange and red berries alternating with a season of white blossoming. The plot was on the lip of a deep wooded ravine which was the Ranch's southern boundary, ancient redwood and spruce, lightning-riven and eagle-nested, accenting the less majestic growth. We never wearied of riding Belle and Ban to the spot, in our minds' eyes the vision of a rugged stone house that was to rise like an indigenous growth from the grassy semi-circle.

While occupied upon two Alaskan tales, "A Day's Lodging" and "The Wit of Porportuk" (bound in "Love of Life" and "Lost Face"), Jack arranged the manuscripts for two short-story volumes, "Moon Face" and "Love of Life," published in 1906 and 1907 respectively. Next, Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" was reviewed. Jack, who apositely dubbed it "The Uncle Tom's Cabin of Wage-Slavery," sadly observed thereafter that the most conspicuous result of this expose of labor conditions in the stockyards was only to make the public more careful what it put into its stomach.

While he was working on another story, "When God

Laughs," a letter was received from Mr. E. H. Sothern, asking him to write a socialistic play for himself and Miss Julia Marlowe; but nothing ever came of this.

Before starting upon a new novel, "Before Adam," Jack had, in addition to the above-noted short work, completed an article, "The Somnambulists" (in "Revolution"), also the stories "Created He Them" and "Just Meat" (both in "When God Laughs" collection), and "Finis" (in "The Turtles of Tasman.") Then, by way of relaxation and practice on drama form, he did a curtain-raiser from his story "The Wicked Woman"—this flick of drama going into the volume "The Human Drift," brought out posthumously.

During March, he visited Oakland to deliver a Socialist lecture at Dietz Opera House. Following this event, Jack London was talked of for Socialist Governor at the next elections. While in Oakland, we selected a two-seated rig and a runabout. Jack had set his heart upon a buckboard, such as one in which his neighbor, Judge Carroll Cook, used to meet friends at the railroad station. But we were in urgent need of a vehicle for the same purpose, and snapped up the neat uncovered wagon with yellow wheels, looking forward to a buckboard later on. Jack never acquired that buckboard. Instead, when the Napa Winships went in for gasolene, we bought out their other rolling stock, which came to serve all purposes.

Mrs. Louise Clark, a neighbor, sold us the horse Selim, a black handful of abounding energy. Jack, in the process of subduing Selim and the silly Fleet to gentle uses, waxed in soft-spoken patience unbelievable to his old pals who came to look on. We took much interest, also, informing different spans with our four light horses, harnessed to the new four wheelers.

And oh, yes—the good Brown Wolf, tiny pointed ears flattened ingratiatingly back into his russet ruff, and long pink tongue lolling dumb delight and pride, presented us

to a new family of puppies. One of these went to Jack's children. "I don't think much of the rest," he ruefully surveyed them and their mongrel if excellent mother; so we kept none of the litter.

Presently the astounding booksmith had begun his atavistic "Before Adam," which came out in Everybody's Magazine. Upon its publication a hue and cry went up, originating in a men's club, to the effect that Jack London had plagiarized Stanley Waterloo's "The Story of Ab." Be it said, however, that Mr. Waterloo did not start the trouble. Jack was frank to admit that "The Story of Ab" had been one of his sources of material. "But Waterloo was not scientific," he stoutly defended, "and I have made a scientific book out of my re-creation on the subject." So correct was his assumption, that "Before Adam" went into the universities of the United States as a text-book in Anthropology. To George Sterling, in June, he wrote:

"Have just expressed you MS of 'Before Adam.' It's just a skit, ridiculously true, preposterously real. Jump on it."

England, even that early, in the character of Red Eye saw a "cryptic reference to the German Emperor."

Jack, who derived material from every available source and especially from the newspapers as representing life, was eternally dogged at the heels by small men at home and abroad who charged plagiarism—these having little commerce with one, more generous, who said, "If I could by hook or crook write anything worth Jack London's copying, I should consider it a privilege. As for Jack, he did not try to boycott those who benefited by his creations. Rather was he pleased that he had been first!

That year of 1906, sketchy as was our domestic menage, many visitors came to the Lodge annex, and Auntie let us spill over into the main house. Among the names in my journal I come upon our good friends the Granville-Shueys

—Dr. Shuey was custodian of the welfare of Jack London's troublesome teeth to the end of the patient's life; Mr. Bamford; I. M. Griffin, the artist, a number of whose canvases, painted in the neighborhood, Jack purchased; Henry Meade Bland, of San José, at all times one of Jack's most tireless biographers; Felix Peano, sculptor, in whose house, La Capriccioso, Jack had once lived; young Roy Nash, of whom "The People of the Abyss" had made a Socialist; Ernest Untermann, author, and translator of Karl Marx; the George Sterlings; different members of the talented family of Partingtons; George Wharton James, who charmed with his social qualities and music, and later published most readable articles upon his visit; Elwyn Hoffman, poet; Herman Whitaker; Xavier Martinez, artist and prince of bohemians "Sometimes I think," Jack once remarked, "that George Sterling and Marty are the realest bohemians I have ever known!"; Maud Younger, settlement worker and philanthropist; and a long list beside.

Our amusements consisted in exploring, alone or with our guests, the infinite variety of the one hundred and twenty-nine acres of Jack's "Beauty Ranch"; driving or riding to points in the valley—say Cooper's Grove, a stately group of redwoods; or to Hooker's Falls across in the eastern range; or to Santa Rosa, as when we drove Professor Edgar Larkin, of Mt. Lowe Observatory, to call upon Luther Burbank; or to the valley resorts to swim, for a change from Sonoma Creek, in the warm mineral tanks.

During the Moyer-Haywood trouble in Idaho, Jack was urger by The Examiner to go there and report proceedings in his own way; but he was too involved at home to spare the time. Nevertheless, he managed to sandwich in a rousing article, which was printed by the Socialist Voice, of Oakland.

All of which reads like the crowded year it was; yet it is but a sample of eleven surpassingly full years we were to live out together. In addition to what I have set

down, Jack read numberless books of all sizes and titles, and we still found opportunity to share, aloud, H. G. Wells, de Maupassant, Gertrude Atherton, Sudermann, Phillpotts, Saleeby, Herbert Spencer, and countless others, including plays—among them Bernard Shaw's, Clyde Fitch's, Ibsen's; and, above all, endless poetry. It is a curious jumble, I know; but Jack read rapaciously—both of the meatiest and the trashiest. He must know "what the other fellow is doing."

One day, he received a letter from a bank in Billings, Montana, informing him that two checks bearing his signature had been returned from Chicago marked "No Funds." It was an instance of the "doubles" who were fast coming into being. The nearest Jack had ever been to Billings was when, a few months previous, we had passed through on our westward way. Jack promptly forwarded to the bank his photograph and signature, and also an outside cover of the current Everybody's Magazine, on which under a sort of "footprints-on-the-sands-of-time" illustration for "Before Adam" his autograph was reproduced. The Bank was finally convinced; but from all accounts the imposter had closely resembled Jack London, and the handwriting was not dissimilar.

This was, I think, the only time a "double" passed worthless checks; but several others worked the country incapacities more or less injurious to the original. One of them stirred up revolution in Mexico, long before 1914, at which time Jack London paid his first and last visit to that restless republic, as war correspondent with General Funston. Another winnowed Oklahoma and adjoining territory, and the celebrated "101 Ranch," for all they were worth in board and lodging and information. Still others led girls astray, and many the piteous letters, addressed to places where Jack had never set foot, or when the pair of us were on the other side of the world, begging restitution for anything from stolen virtue to diamonds. Jack tried to get

in touch with these floating impersonators, promising safe departure if they would only come to the Ranch and entertain him with their methods. But even when his letters never returned, there were no replies. While we were honeymooning in Cuba, according to one side of a correspondence that came into Jack's possession, a spurious J. L. was carrying on an affair with a mother of several children in Sacramento, California.

On April 18, 1906, there came, in a sense, the "shock of our lives." One need hardly mention that it was the Great Earthquake, which, most notable of consequences, destroyed the "modern imperial city" of San Francisco as no other modern imperial city has been destroyed. If it had not been for this stunning disaster to the larger place, the ruin of our county seat, Santa Rosa, in which many lives were crushed out, would have commanded the attention and sympathy of the world. As it was, refugees from the Bay metropolis began presently to straggle up-country, only to find the pretty town prone in a scarcely laid dust of brick and mortar and ashes.

Jack's nocturnal habits of reading, writing, smoking, and coughing, or sudden shifts of posture (he could not move his smallest finger without springing alive from head to foot), not being exactly a remedy for my insomnia, we ordinarily occupied beds as far apart as possible. A few minutes before five, on the morning of the 18th, upstairs at Wake Robin, my eyes flew open inexplicably, and I wondered what had stirred me so early. I curled down for a morning nap, when suddenly the earth began to heave, with a sickening onrush of motion for an eternity of seconds. An abrupt pause, and then it seemed as if some great force laid hold of the globe and shook it like a Gargantuan rat. It was the longest half-minute I ever lived through.

Now, I am free to confess, I do not like earthquakes. Never, child and woman, had I liked earthquakes. But my

mind had been made up long since that while I wasted time being afraid of them, less terrified or at any rate more observant persons were able to take in phenomena which I had missed. And, so help me, when the April 18 quake got under way, and though very lonely in the conviction that my end was approaching in leaps and bounds, I lay quite still, watching the tree-tops thrash crazily, as if all the winds of all quarters were at loggerheads. The sharp undulation stopping, Jack and I met our guests, Mr. and Mrs. Reimers, in the living-room, and we all had the same tale to relate—of watching, from our pillows, the possessed antics of the trees; only, all but myself had had a view of the trunks rather than the tops.

When Jack and I ran over to the barn still rented at the Fish Ranch, we found our saddle animals had broken their halters and were still quivering and skittish. Willie, the chore-boy, said the huge madrono tree near by had lain down on the ground and got up again—which was less lurid than many impressions to which we listened that weird day.

In half an hour after the shock, we were in our saddles, riding to the Ranch, from which height could be distinguished a mighty column of smoke in the direction of San Francisco, and another northward where lies Santa Rosa. In the immediate foreground at our feet a prodigious dust obscured the buildings of the State Home for the Feeble minded.

"Why, Mate Woman, " Jack cried, his eyes big with surmise, "I shouldn't wonder if San Francisco had sunk. That was some earthquake. We don't know but the Atlantic may be washing up at the feet of the Rocky Mountains!"

Our beautiful barn—the shake had disrupted its nearly finished two-foot-thick stone walls, and to our horror revealed that the rascally Italian contractor from Sonoma, despite reasonable overseeing, had succeeded in rearing

mere shells of rock, filling in between with debris of the flimsiest. Jack's face was a study.

"Jerry-built," he murmured, hurt in his voice, "and I told him the solid, honest thing I wanted—and did not question his price. What have I done to him, or anybody, that he should do this thing?"

He turned his back upon the swindle, for there were other things to see; and I could almost vouch that his wrecked property did not enter his head for the next several days any more than he would bother about a worrisome letter or problem until the moment came to dispose of it.

"And anyway," he dismissed the subject as we turned down-mountain, "it's lucky the heavy tile roof wasn't already placed, and some poor devil sleeping under it!"

One day, weeks afterward, the Italian had the ill-considered "nerve" to call at "Jack's House." I remember that we were showing the work-room to the Winships. At the knock, Jack turned and recognized the contractor. Facing back to me, he said in a low, vibrating tone: Mate, will you attend to him?—send him away, as quickly as possible!" Never fear that I did not do that same. Once outside, I said to the man: "You must get out of here quick!" And when he started to whine a remonstrance, I repeated, with glance over-shoulder: "Quick! Get out! And don't ever come back!"

Back to breakfast, after reconnoitering the neighborhood as far as the State Home, where, through the perfect discipline, no lives had been sacrificed, we prepared to board the first train to Santa Rosa, hoping to find another to San Francisco in the afternoon. And the trains ran, though not on time, what of twisted rails and litter of fallen water-tanks along the roadway. Reports of the Great Fire and broken water-mains in San Francisco made us long to be in at the incredible disaster, so long as it had to be.

With no luggage except our smallest hand-bag, which

we left with the restaurant cashier of the last ferry-boat permitted to land passengers that night, we started afoot up old Broadway, and all night roamed the city of hills, prey to feelings that cannot be described. That night proved our closest to realizing a dream that came now and again to Jack in sleep, that he and I were in at the finish of all things—standing or moving hand in hand through chaos to its brink, looking upon the rest of mankind in the process of dissolution.

Having located relatives I knew had been overtaken, and found them unharmed, Jack and I were free to follow our own will.

"And I'll never write about this for anybody," he declared, as we looked our last upon one or another familiar haunt, soon to be obliterated by the ravaging flames that drove us ever westward to safer points, on and on, in our ears the muffled detonations of dynamite, as one proud commercial palace after another sank on its steel knees, in the desperate attempt of the city fathers to stay the wholesale conflagration. And no water.

"No," Jack reiterated. "I'll never write a word about it. What use trying? One could only string big words together, and curse the futility of them."

One impinging picture of those fearful hours was where two mounted officers, alone of all the population, sat their high-crested horses at Kearney and Market Streets, equestrian statues facing the oncoming flames along Kearney. Hours earlier, we had walked here, two of many; but now the district was abandoned to destruction that could not be retarded.

In my eyes there abides the face of a stricken man, perhaps a fireman, whom we saw carried into a lofty doorway in Union Square. His back had been broken, and as the stretcher bore him past, out of a handsome, ashen young face, the dreadful darkening eyes looked right into mine. All the world was crashing about him and he, a broken thing,

with death awaiting him inside the granite portals, gazed upon the last woman of his race that he was ever to see. Jack, with tender hand, drew me away.

Oh, the supreme ruth of desolation and pain, that night of fire and devastation! Yet the miracle persists, that one saw nothing but cheerful courtesy of one human to another. And I was to learn more of my mate s cool judgment in crises. Now and again it seemed as if we would surely be trapped in some square, where the fourth side had started to burn. But he had always, and accurately, sensed and chosen the moment and the way out, when we should have seen all we could risk.

Toward morning, finding ourselves in the entryway of a corner house on "Nob Hill" very near the partially-erected and already-ignited Hotel Fairmont, Jack fell into a doze; but I was unable to still the tingling of heart and nerves long enough to drop off even from exhaustion. Presently a man mounted the steps and inserted a key in the lock. Seeing Jack and myself on the top tread—he had had to pick his way through a cluster of Italians and Chinamen on the lower ones—something impelled him to invite us in. It was a luxurious interior, containing the treasures of years. His name was Ferine, the man said, and he did not learn ours. Suddenly, midway of showing us about, he asked me to try the piano, and laid bare the keys. I hesitated—it seemed almost a cruel thing to do, with annihilation of his home so very near. But Jack's whispered "Do it for him—it's the last time he'll ever hear it," sent me to the instrument. The first few touches were enough and too much for Mr. Ferine, however, and he made a restraining gesture. If he ever reads this book, I want him to know that none in poor racked San Francisco that week was more sorry for him than we.

We must have tramped forty miles that night. Jack's feet blistered, my ankles were become almost useless, when

next day we sat on a convenient garbage can at Seventh and Broadway, Oakland, waiting for a street car out Telegraph Avenue. A pretty young woman accosted the dilapidated pair we made, with information that food and shelter would be supplied us refugees at such-and-such address, and laughed pleasedly when we thanked her and said we had an uninjured place of our own. Oakland had suffered comparatively little from the quake, and there were few fires. Jack of course had ascertained, before we went to San Francisco, that his mother and his children were safe and sound, with roofs over their heads.

In Glen Ellen once more, we were met with frantic telegrams from Collier's Weekly, asking for twenty-five hundred words, by wire, descriptive of San Francisco. Jack, still averse to undertake the compressing of his impressions, or, as he had said, writing at all on the subject, yet considered his now aggravated money-need, with the yacht and barn-rebuilding in view. And Collier's had offered him twenty-five cents a word by far the best figure he had yet received. It was, I may as well note here, the highest he ever obtained.

Shaking his bonny shoulders free of all else, that very day he jumped into the twenty-five hundred word article. Hot from his hand I snatched the scribbled sheets, and swiftly typed them. Our team-work soon delivered the story over the wires, and "just for luck" Jack mailed the manuscript simultaneously. Followed wild daily messages from Collier's for a week to come: "Why doesn't your story arrive?" "Must have your story immediately," and, latest, "Holding presses at enormous expense. What is the matter? Must have story for May Fifth number."

It seems that the telegraph companies were able to get service through to the Pacific Coast, but not the reverse. The posted manuscript was received in the nick of time,

while the wired one straggled along subsequently to the other's appearance in the May 5th issue.

Jack, it is only fair to record, entertained the poorest opinion of his description. It's the best stagger I can make at an impossible thing," is the way he put it. And here is an excerpt from a letter to George Sterling, dated May 31:

Fifteen days after the Earthquake, we treated ourselves to a two-weeks' holiday. Jack bestrode Ban. Belle, occupied with maternal prospects, I passed by in favor of the rabbity Fleet. Hatless, with toilet accessories and reading matter stowed in saddle-bags behind our Australian saddles, we set out northerly to see what the quake had wreaked upon rural California. At this and that resort, we would feel one or another of the many lighter temblors that followed the big shake, marking the subsidence of the "Fault" that is supposed to enter from the sea-bed at Fort Bragg, and zigzag southeasterly across the State.

Jack, his rumpled poll sun-burned yellow, was a brave and lovesome sight on his merry steed, whose burnished chestnut coat threw out lilac gleams as the satiny muscles moved in the sunlight. The rider threw himself with vim into our little adventure. He was never tired exploring with me the nooks of Sonoma County, where Belle and I had been familiar figures before he came to dwell with us. And we always found so many common topics to discuss, and parallels in our lives. Why, old man Tarwater, immortalized in one of the very last stories Jack ever wrote ("Like Argus of the Olden Times," published in 1919 in volume entitled "The Red One"), had been the subject of one of my Aunt's newspaper articles. I had accompanied her, years before Jack met Tarwater in Klondike, on a pilgrimage to his mountain cabin, and sketched that abode

self for an illustration. And there were our teachers in Oakland, Mrs. Harriet J. Lee and her daughter Elsie we had both sat under these charming women, Jack in High School, and I in Sunday school at Plymouth Avenue Church on Thirty-fourth Street. It was deliciously preposterous, this lining up of our mutual experiences.

Not a tap of work did we perform on this real vacation. There is ample material in my brain for a readable book, in that idyllic journey through one of California's most attractive regions, unadvertised and undreamed to the casual tourist. Although I may not relate the details, still, for the guidance of any whose interest in Jack London's mazy trail might lead them into these western fastnesses of great beauty and geological interest, I present the route our nimble horses bore us:

From Glen Ellen, by Rincon Valley road, through Petrified Forest, to Calistoga, in Napa Valley. Calistoga to The Geysers. Thence to Lakeport, on Clear Lake—a little Geneva—by way of Highland Springs. We sailed on Clear Lake.

Lakeport to Ukiah, via Laurel Dell, Blue Lakes. Ukiah to Willitts. Through grandeurs of mountain and redwood forest, to logging camp "Alpine." Thence to Fort Bragg, on the Coast.

From Fort Bragg, down the coast, sleeping at lumber villages. Navarro, Albion, Greenwood. Thence to Boonville, with luncheon at Philo. Philo to Cloverdale; thence to Burke's Sanitarium. Thence to Santa Rosa, and on down to Glen Ellen.

Jack, consciously or unconsciously, had studied the brain-processes of animals since the days of his little dog Rollo in Oakland. On this long ride, the difference, which is all the difference in the world, which he noticed between Fleet and Ban on our return, was that one was tired and

it, and the other, Thoroughbred, keyed to the utter most step, was tired and did not know it. But when Jack, after unsaddling, had placed an extra large measure of oats before the splendid creature, the velvet nozzle went down with a great, blowing sigh. Brown Wolf, wriggling prodigiously, came to bury dumb, eloquent head between his idolized master's knees, after which, with a shake of rolling fur hide, he went to poke his nose into Ban's fodder, taking a generous mouthful, to our astonishment and the horse's snorting disapproval. Then, our fingers interlaced, we two dusty wayfarers trudged across to Wake Robin, happier and richer by another united experience.

Near the end of the month, during our absence of two days in Oakland to attend a rousing Euskin Club dinner in Jack's honor, Willie one night left Ban out in the Fish Ranch pasture, where he became entangled in a loose strand of that accursed invention, barbed wire, which had eluded our vigilance. Hour upon hour, the poor, helpless thing sawed one of his beautiful, fleet hind legs to the bone. It was a sad homecoming to us, and in consultation beside our drooping, ruined pet we decided he must die. Jack said, his eyes dark with sorrow:

"Wiget, I'll do it if I have to; but I don't want to. If you don't mind too much . . ." And Wiget had to avert his face as he replied: "I'll do it for you folks."

In a hammock at the Lodge we sat knowing we could not fail to hear the shot that would be the ending of our willing and beloved friend. Jack had carefully instructed his man to deposit the charge in the middle of the forehead, where cross-lines drawn from ears to eyes would intersect. When the sound of the shot rang across the waiting stillness, we wept unrestrained and unabashed in each other's arms. All I could think of to solace Jack was to offer him the gift of my own new filly, Sonoma Maid, granddaughter of the great Morella, which Belle, in the fullness of her time and in our absence, had presented to me.

I remember, once, on a steamer voyage, that a fine horse injured during a rough night had to be killed. A lamentable botch was made of the execution, and I never saw Jack London worse upset than he was over the reports of the animal's inexcusably hard death. "If they'd only learn how to do a thing like that in the right way!" he exclaimed, thrashing about in his chair in a manner he had when suffering mentally.

A preverted order of humaneness, often displayed by unthinking persons, always came in for harsh language from Jack. "Men who brag of being too tender-hearted to kill an aged and suffering animal, or a hopelessly-wounded or sick one," he would rave,"—I don't know anything too bad for them. Why don't people think!" And again: "The only way to kill a cat is to chop off its head," he preached. "Death is instantaneous, when the spinal cord is severed. Drowning, and suffocation by chloroform, are two of the cruelest methods you can use on a cat. The other way means instantaneous death, with no terrors of strangulation. Some people think I'm brutal to advise this, but the thing is self-evident oh,—what's the use!" he would surrender in disgust. In illustration of indirect brutality, he told me of something he had done during a short camping expedition, in 1904, with "The Crowd," on the deserted Kendall Ranch in Grizzly Canyon, near Moraga Valley.

The last tenants had left some time previously, and were too sensitive and kind-hearted to lay away the family dog, a large collie, I think Jack said, who was tottering, from starvation, too old to hunt for himself. "Nobody else wanted the job of shooting him," Jack went on, "and it was up to me. You know how I love to kill things," he interpolated with a wry mouth. "I got the shotgun ready, and went toward that poor dog, and he crouched when he saw me coming. God! no one will ever know how I shrank from that self-imposed task. That dog knew—his poor old eyes looked straight into mine and did not waver but

wledge of death was in them. He'd been out with a gun too much in his life not to know what it meant when one was aimed at a living creature. . . . Oh, yes, I got it done—first charge . . . He never moved after he dropped."

Jack was capable of such adorable ways. One afternoon, that summer of 1906, he and I, with Manyoungi's help were sorting over old possessions, making ready long in advance for our voyage. The Korean came upon my old French doll, an adult-appearing, jointed model with six inches of "real" hair. Lifting it tenderly, reverence in his handsome olive face, the boy carried it to Jack, who was talking to himself amidst a tumbled mountain of dusty books he invariably talked and hummed when doing work of this kind or filing letters. And Jack, with a dewy look in his great eyes, held out both grimy hands for the relic, and kissed it! The act was devoid of affectation—just a spontaneous expression of all the complication of his love. "The little woman's doll!" was all he said, returning to his work with an odd smile deepening the pictured corners" of his mouth. . . . Once, "after long grief and pain, in rare abandon he had pressed those lips to the hem of my garment.

Even from so brief an absence as the riding jaunt, our duties had piled up, and we were rushing all hours except for the swimming, rides to the Ranch, the campfire gatherings, moonlight romps and games, with boxing, fencing, kiting, and what not, in the camps of the Connings, the Selbys, the Brecks, the Reynolds, and my own summering families.

Blowing soap-bubbles was popular for a time, and certain long-stemmed Korean pipes, among Jack's "loot" from the orient, came into novel requisition. There were debates of evenings in the Lodge, to which the older campers were invited, in which the materialist monist, Jack London, was somewhat unwillingly pitted against Mr. Edward B.

Payne, a far older man whom Jack styled "metaphysician." I should have said attempted debate, for the same familiar stumbling-block was encountered that had disrupted earlier discussions whenever Jack and the metaphysicians locked horns: Jack could not and would not accept the premise offered; and after several futile efforts of the instigators of the meetings, to ease him surreptitiously over the first stages of the argument, the debates were discontinued.

"Edward's got a beautiful mind, and he's the most logical rhetorician I ever met in my whole life," Jack would defend himself; "but when, in his reasoning, he comes to the enchanted bridge he has tried to build, on which I am supposed to reject my solid foundation and step across to his metaphysical one, I revolt." Martin Luther's "Here I stand. I can do no otherwise, so help me God! Amen!" was no less firm than Jack London's "I can't help it. I am so made. I can't see it any other way. I've got to keep my feet on the concrete."

I have seen him quite white with distress that he had to spoil a party by depriving guests of the spectacle of himself routed from his materialistic terra firma and driven upon the impalpable ground of the metaphysicians with their, to him, "colossal evasions of mundane interpretations," as our friend Mary Wilshire puts it. "Each of you," he said, "goes into his own consciousness to explain anything and everything." Again, "The metaphysician explains the universe by himself, the scientist explains himself by the universe." Jack believed that the keenest and most irresistible impulses toward self-preservation are shown by what he termed metaphysicians. "Take the earthquake, for instance," he would rail. "You and I, and an infidel artist, remained in our beds until well after the shock. And when we emerged, where did we find the metaphysicians of the household?—Out of doors, in unseemly attire, and unable to tell how they got there, but,

from circumstantial evidence, having arrived on the unstable earth by way of a first-story window!"

There were swimming visits exchanged that year with our neighbors the Kudolf Spreckelses and a bevy of Mrs. Spreckels's sisters, the Misses Joliffe; and once we went to Napa to see the Winships. But Jack, as a rule, was not fond of visiting, and occasionally was heard to remark that the Winships and the Sterlings were practically the only friends to whose houses he went, and these at wide intervals. He preferred, in short, to entertain rather than to be entertained.

At times, but rarely, he would treat himself to a holiday, perhaps to read aloud a book that had claimed him for the moment, or to take some special jaunt. But the fingers of one hand could easily tally the days when he failed to deliver ten pages of hand-written manuscript to my typewriter desk. It was my custom to have his previous day's installment, typed and words counted, in readiness upon his table by nine. He loved to read me his morning's work—and even in the writing of it, if I happened to pass by, would interrupt himself to let me share what he had done. The first writing day, in all our days, that this did not happen, was the first day upon which he wrote no more.

Evidently this life of closely-wedged activities was quite to my taste, for at the end of one date s diary-items I see: "Happy as an angel!" This may, however, have been when I had won from Jack some praise or especial appreciation; but he was wont ruefully to utter that my finest heights of bliss were attained when I had beaten him at cards (which was seldom enough to justify chortling), or won a bet upon the weather ranging anywhere from ten cents to ten dollars.

Another and sweeter source of happiness to me would be when I had played an hour for him while he sat or reclined, one hand over his eyes, dreaming upon a couch in Auntie's

cool living-room. The music he then oftenest asked for was Arthur Footers Rubaiyat Suite, and much of Macdowell—"The Eagle" and "Sea Pieces" remaining favorites. His disposition those days was almost always equable, and I learned to circumvent the blues he had once forewarned he might be subject to upon the day of completing a long manuscript. On June 7, he laid down his ink-pencil for the last time on "Before Adam," first writing in my count of 40,863 words. But there was little or no depression to follow. I had seen to that, by planning a string of overlapping engagements for the day, which left him no moment for relaxing until sleep-time was at hand. Oh, no—never did I cheat myself into believing that he did not see through my machinations; rather, did he coöperate—but no word jarred the moment's harmony.

Have I mentioned that he was fond of ordering advertised articles? "And if one out often proves a real find, I am repaid for my time and money!" was his argument. Many were the packages, great and small, that enlivened our morning mail during preparation for the small-boat voyage; for whether emanating from "ad" or catalogue, Jack meant to leave nothing behind that would contribute to the venture's success. Fishing tackle of the most alluring; numberless strings of beads, and loose beads by the gross, of all sizes and hues to gladden savage hearts that beat under the Southern Cross; gay neckerchiefs and calicoes and ribbons—nothing was omitted. And the fun we, like veriest children, had opening our "Christmas packages" from day to day, can best be imagined.

Early in our comradeship I had noted Jack's habit of looking ahead, not back. "Leave retrospect to old men and women. The world is all before me now," was his pose toward the dead past. While this remained a characteristic, the general normal happiness of his new environment rendered him less averse to dwelling upon his yesterdays. As our united yesterdays lengthened in our

shadow, he became as fondly addicted as I to reminiscence of them.

Before me, as I write with his own pen, lies a clipping referring to "The Iron Heel," which begins: "In one of Jack London's less important works, there was a description of a pitched battle in Chicago, in the near future, by way of quelling what would now be called a Bolshevist revolution." And the commentator adds: "Now the battle is going on in Berlin." Beside the clipping reposes a letter to me from a sociologist, from which I quote as refutation of the other's phrase, "less important works":

"The earlier portion of the book is the most impressive, the most unanswerable impeachment of the capitalist system to be found in all the voluminous sociological literature of our times."

And I feel free to quote Mr. George P. Brett, President of The Macmillan Company, who published the book:

"I consider 'The Iron Heel' the greatest compendium of Socialism ever written."

From week to week, in these stirring days of reconstruction following the World War, there come to me, alone upon Jack London's mountainside, appreciations from all classes concerning "The Iron Heel," once hated and derided and feared by the factions most opposed to one another. Jack had gone to work upon it that midsummer of 1906, placing some of its scenes round-about "the sweet land" in which he had elected to dwell. When the manuscript later failed to find place in any paying magazine, and saw book-covers, in 1907 during the "panic," mainly because the publishers held a blanket contract bearing Jack London's sprawling signature, the poor author said regretfully one day in Hawaii:

"I thought it would be timely, that book; but they're all afraid of it, Mate Woman." He pointed to letters just

received from the States: "See: the socialists, even my own crowd, have thrown me down—they decry it as a lugubrious prophecy; and the other camp, of course, revile it as they revile everything socialistic they possibly can of mine.

"But," he broke in heatedly upon his reverie, "I didn't write the thing as a prophecy at all. I really don't think these things are going to happen in the United States. I believe the increasing socialist vote will prevent—hope for it, anyhow. But I will say that I sent out, in 'The Iron Heel,' a warning of what I think might happen if they don't look to their votes. That's all."

In the copy he gave me is written: "We that have been what we've been. . . . We that have seen what we've seen—we may not see these particular things come to pass, but certain it is that we shall see big things of some sort come to pass."

In the light of present events, the story would seem to have been more than roughly prophetic; and the end, mayhap, is not yet.

The phrase "well-balanced radicals" came to be a pet aversion of Jack's for the rest of his life. For, outside of the capitalist class, it was the self-named "well-balanced radicals," who would have none of his "Iron Heel."

Yet it was one of these, after Jack London's death, who wrote me: "The earlier portion of the book is the most impressive, the most unanswerable impeachment of the capitalist system to be found in all the voluminous socio logical literature of our times. I have read many severe criticisms of capitalist procedure, but this cuts deeper and cleaner than they all."

"The Iron Heel," once finished and started on its round of the magazines, Jack's next contemplated book was a group of tramping episodes, brought out serially as "My Life in the Underworld," and, in book-form, "The Road."

Two paragraphs from Jack's letters to George Sterling,

of dates February 17, 1908, and March 3, 1909, throw illumination upon his open attitude toward his past:

"I can't get a line on why you wish I hadn't written 'The Road,'" he challenges. "It is all true. It is what I am, what I have done, and it is part of the process by which I have become. Is it a lingering taint of the bourgeois in you that makes you object? Is it because of my shamelessness! For having done things in which I saw or see no shame! Do tell me."

And this:

"Your point about "The Road," namely that it 'gave the mob a mop to bang' me with. What of it? I don't care for the mob. It can't hurt me. One word of censure or disapproval from you would hurt me a few million myriads of billions times more than all the sum total the mob would inflict on me in one hundred and forty-seven lifetimes. I thank the Lord I don't live for the mob."

This seems the place to point Jack's intolerance of restricted or anachronistic vision, by quoting further from letters to Sterling. The latter sat between the horns of a dilemma with regard to his two closest friends—Jack London and Ambrose Bierce, who were as far apart as the poles in their philosophies. Because Jack had experienced certain phases of living which were untenable to the satirist's niceties, the latter seemed entirely to discount the younger author as one entitled to consideration in the brotherhood of polite society. In short, after he had read "The Road," Mr. Bierce was emphatic in his opinion concerning what summary disposal should be made of Jack. But Jack, with a generosity and lack of bitterness which would have well become the elder man, wrote Sterling:

"For heaven's sake don't you quarrel with Ambrose about me. He's too splendid a man to be diminished because he has lacked access to a later generation of science. He crystallized before you and I were born, and it is too magnificent a crystallization to quarrel with."

Earlier letters to Sterling amplify Jack's contention, and his own up-to-the-mark step with the marching world:

"If Hillquit and Hunter didn't put it all over Bierce—I'll quit thinking at all. Bierce's clever pessimism was nowhere against their science. He proved himself rudderless, compassless, and chartless. Bierce doesn't shine in a face to face battle with socialists. He's beat at long range slinging ink. He was groggy at the drop of the hat, and before they got done with him was looking anxiously around and wondering why the gong didn't ring. All he did was to back and fill and potter around, dogmatize and contradict himself. When they cornered him, he went off on another tack, wherefore they'd overtake him and lambaste him again. Bierce, with biological and sociological concepts that crystallized in the fervant heat of pessimism a generation ago, was—well, pathetic. And more pathetic still, he doesn't know it."

"I wouldn't care to lock horns with Bierce," is a later reference. "He stopped growing a generation ago. Of course, he keeps up with the newspapers, but his criteria crystallized 30 odd years ago. Had he been born a generation later he'd have been a socialist, and, more likely, an anarchist. He never reads books that aren't something like a hundred years old, and he glories in the fact!"

The latest remarks I find, in the same correspondence, are these written from Hilo, Hawaii, in July of 1907:

The quotes from Ambrose were great. What a pen he wields. Too bad he hasn't a better philosophic foundation."

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