End—1909-1910

HOMECOMING, after twenty-seven months of absence, was not the least of our enviable experiences. There was so much to see and do. The great stone barn was completed, roofed with red Spanish tile, and sheltered, besides horses and vehicles, all of our magnificent collection of South Sea curios. Concerning this small museum, much mirth had escaped from the Custom House into the press as to its value in dollars and cents. Jack's "declaration" had perforce been couched entirely in terms of stick-tobacco, which had been the sole medium of exchange with the savages of Melanesia.

Then Ranch improvements were to be inspected, together with the modest increase in stock—colts and calves, chickens, ducks, and pigeons. Most exciting of all, my Aunt, as Jack's agent, had added to our possessions the tiny "Fish Ranch" and the La Motte hundred and thirty acres adjoining Wake Robin, as well as a broad strip connecting the same with the Hill property—Jack's "Beauty Ranch." There was but one fly in the ointment as regarded the new acquisition. Certain men had so conducted negotiations as to leave Jack's agent in ignorance of a serious drawback to ownership of the land: upon it rested a thirteen-year lease of a valuable pit which furnished clay for the Glen Ellen brickyard. This was not so bad in itself, but the lease also covered standing timber, which might be cut at any time by the lessees for use in the brick-kiln furnaces.

Jack, in the face of unalterable circumstances, naturally made the most of the fact that he was entitled to "ten cents a yard" for all clay hauled down hill, and in course of time netted a tidy sum which, I must insert, did not compensate him for the annoyance of a dusty, rutted right-of-way over his land, to say nothing of the constant reminder, whenever plodding teams and creaking loads in clouds of dust crossed his vision, of the dishonest dealings of his fellow men. The nuisance was before long abated, and finally ceased altogether, for the brickyard went out of business previous to its requirement of any firewood from the La Motte land. It may interest travelers to know that the hollow brick used in the beautiful Hotel Oakland, in Jack's home town, was made at Glen Ellen from material mined on the Jack London Ranch.

Meanwhile, nothing daunted, Jack, with fabulous forests in his far-seeing eye, had hesitated not to set out 15,000 baby eucalyptus trees, bought from Stratton's in Petaluma, trying out their vitality on the most impoverished section of the La Motte holding.

My perspective of the latter months of 1909, from our return in mid-July on into the winter, is not one of unalloyed pleasure. For exuberance in our general happy estate was sorely tempered by anemia and sporadic attacks of the vicious malaria that so impaired my usefulness, as well as any fair qualities I may have possessed as hostess. And from the first week, Jack and I were not for a day without guests. Hospitality is a beautiful thing in itself; but I leave to the reader my frame of mind, when time and again I was obliged to lie up for days, my work going behind, and, not the least of my troubles, the pitiable effect this helplessness worked in Jack. Whenever anything interfered with "the Cheery One's" cheeriness, Jack, under no matter what merry dissembling, was lamentably at outs with existence.

Despair seemed to reach its height when during the duck season, I had to remain home from a long-contem-

plated yachting trip up-river which was to include a house-guest, Louis Augustin, from Canada, and the Sterlings. Only at the last moment did I give in, and keep to my bed. This cruise was made in a rented sloop, Phyllis, and lasted for several weeks. Jack was not well, and returned quite ill, but was soon himself. In the interim, I had patronized Burke's Sanitarium for a week—a lovely Mecca in our own county, administered by a noble man, Mr. J. P. Burke—and felt greatly improved. Burke's, by the way, had formerly been Altruria, a coöperative colony of charming idealists, where I had spent more than one vacation, going about the country on horseback for a month at a time.

But far be it from me to draw a veil of gloom over that summer and autumn. There was ample joie du vivre sprinkled throughout. Jack's work was as always the sustaining anchor for us both. "Burning Daylight," the novel commenced in Quito, Ecuador, was duly "signed, sealed, and delivered" unto the New York Herald, where it appeared serially, and was published by Macmillans in the fall of 1910. And Jack wrote one short manuscript beside, on a request to describe the most dramatic moment of his life. This is entitled "That Dead Men Rise Up Never" (in "The Human Drift"), a ghost-story founded upon his experience aboard the Sophie Sutherland, from which I have made quotation in an early chapter.

A short-story collection, "Lost Face," and the novel "Martin Eden," which has helped shape the purposes of so many, were the two volumes brought out in 1909. There was almost universal protest from readers of this novel as to its author's wisdom in killing off the hero. Jack held that Martin, robbed both of love and of pleasure in his too-hard-won fame, and finding no faith in his fellow man to sustain him in his loneliness, had nothing left to do, logically and artistically, but terminate a life that had become a burden. "Which is where Martin Eden and I differed," Jack smiled contentedly. "To be sure, when my own battle

was won, I had little use for the spoils, so far as fame went; but I did not become self-centered. I solaced myself with warm interest in my kind, and I did find love—which is better than all." Whereupon, he presented his wife with the first copy in hand, in which he had generously written:

"You see, Martin Eden did not have you!"

Here is a letter, dated April 26, 1910, to one Lillian Collins who, neglecting to leave a forwarding address, never came into possession of Jack's argument in answer to her protest:

To one who had interpreted Martin Eden as a Socialist, Jack wrote:

As for public appearances in 1909, Jack read "The Amateur M. D.," (from "The Cruise of the Snark") in Oakland, before the Rice Institute in Old Reliance Hall; and he spoke a number of times, here and there, on other phases of the Snark voyage. Once he lectured in San Francisco for the Socialists in Dreamland Rink.

"Among those present" at Wake Robin Lodge that fall were the Sterlings; Jack's old friend Frank Atherton; Cloudesley Johns and his bride; "Lem" Parton, author and editor; Mrs. Lucy Parsons, a plucky widow of the Hay- market tragedy in Chicago; "A No. 1," the engaging gentleman-tramp who left his picturesque "monaker" carved on the Lodge veranda as well as along the railroad route to Glen Ellen, on which he "beat" his passage; and Emma Goldman and Dr. Ben Reitman, who, with friendly naivete, tried to divert Jack from his socialism, which they derided, toward their unconstructive anarchism, at which he jeered, while not depreciating their martyr-sincerity and courageous, if (to him) misguided sacrifices. Of these and some others he later said: "The anarchists whom I know are dear, big souls whom I like and admire immensely. But they are dreamers, idealists. I believe in law . . . you can see it in my books—all down in black and white." I have more to say about this when presently drawing together the threads of Jack's life near its close.

And in his two or three days' entertainment of this woman and man, one of whom during the Great War fell into such evil fortune, he argued seriously as little as possible, devoting himself to laughing at and with them, and playing juvenile pranks. One of these was the placing at Dr. Reitman's plate of an attractive little red book, bearing the title "Four Weeks, a Loud Book." The guest, somewhat of a joker himself, met his Waterloo at Jack's hands. For when, the book opened, it exploded with loud report, "Never," Jack would laugh in retrospect, "did any one jump so high as that red anarchist! He must have thought it was a bomb, for he went positively green. He has the soul of a child—they're such soft people, anarchists, when it comes to actual violence—and when they do try it, they usually make a mess of it because they're dreamers and haven't learned practical brass-tack ways of doing the very things they so vehemently preach."

The ordinary camp recreations prevailed; and Jack, upon which tenderfoot, during the establishing of himself as a farmer, certain unreliable or unsound horseflesh was palmed off by traders for substantial returns, spent much time, that year and the next, subduing the creatures to his will. I was often worried when he failed to report for the evening meal and for hours afterward. After I had satisfied myself, from repeated successes, of his prudence and wisdom in forestalling the scant and often addled gray-matter of our equine friends, I said, perhaps carelessly:

"I don't worry about you any more when you are out with your incorrigible horses!"

For once our mental lines were crossed. Jack looked as puzzled and grieved as an abandoned child. I hastened to explain the reason for my lightened emotions—confidence in his methods; whereupon he was as proud as he had been taken aback and hurt. It was not wholly true—my flat statement that I had ceased to worry. There could not fail to be an undercurrent of apprehension, while an occasional minor accident, that left its scar upon my man, or further disqualified delicate ankle or wrist, prevented my nerves from becoming unresponsive.

How he gloried in it all—how he beamed and fairly quivered with achievement when, say, he had, with months of patient "staying with it," beguiled spidery little Fleet from her custom of bolting downhill with nose high in air to the detriment of all control; or his excusable bragging when, for fifteen hundred miles, he drove the notorious outlaw, Gert, as wheeler in our four-in-hand—she who had broken the spirit of every owner who had tried to hang harness upon her rebellious frame.

When, by Christmas of 1909, there was no doubt that, barring mishap, June should crown our enduring love with parenthood, our happiness was boundless. Jack was a new man—all himself and something ineffably more. It showed

in his every look, the touch of his hands, the vibration of his voice. When the latest volume, "Revolution," came in the spring, this is what he wrote in the fly-leaf:

Always I shall cherish, I think above all others, the memories of those months. Never had I been so joyful, nor so strong. It seems as if all nature with lavish hands contributed to the making of the perfect child I desired and bore. "How the birds do sing and shout!" raves my diary. "—meadow-larks, blue-jays, orioles, linnets and wild canaries bickering at bath and play; gentle mourning-doves at twilight; chattering, whirring quail in the warm woods, and quaint little owls calling by night." And "Such flowered fields I never saw!" Not the least of our blisses was wandering in the eucalyptus "forest," not yet knee-high, dreaming of when they should some day be over our heads on horse-back. "They'll only be a few months older than our boy!" Jack would say.

We did not stay strictly at home, but harnessed young Maid and Ben in our light, yellow-wheeled run-about, packed writing materials and toilet articles, and drove for a week at a time about the country, stopping over wherever it looked good to us. "We three," Jack, at this sweetest height of living, would breathe leaning to my willing ear as the bays forged up mountainsides or dropped into the exquisite valleys. I have set down these words of his on an April morning: "Wife, little mother, sweetheart—I cannot express the love I feel for you these days!"

One night we spent in Petaluma, and attended a performance by an all but stranded company of itinerant players. "Tell you what, Mate Woman—if you're game for it," Jack whispered, "let me send word behind for them all to join us at supper."

It was done. The affair came off. The troupe looked hungry, but partook sparingly of a very good repast, as if hesitating to divulge their chronic emptiness. Jack was all keyed up to order cocktails, wine, champagne, anything to put them at their ease; but one spoke for light beer, and the rest, every soul of them, insisted upon milk.

Another journey was to Carmel-by-the-Sea, where we were guests of the George Sterlings.

There is a remark in the diary concerning lack of excitement in passing through the tail of Halley's Comet.

Ernest Untermann, socialist, author, painter, and perhaps best known as translator of Karl Marx, spent sometime at Wake Robin, while other friends came and went. Eliza, Shepard, with her boy Irving, had come to live in the little Fish Ranch house, under what, we always maintained, was the biggest madroño in California; and Eliza shortly began to assist Jack in the business of the ranch, attending to accounts and "overhead." For in May we had swelled our estate by the seven hundred acres of the Kohler property, and Jack needed such aid in carrying out his headful of ambitions. "He's burgeoning with all sorts of happiness," my journal recalls, "with love of the land, with his new mare, Gert the Outlaw—why, his eyes glisten when he speaks of her; and with life and its promises." In my copy of "Theft," a play he wrote for Olga Nethersole that spring, but which was never acted, he inscribed:

Speaking of "Theft," this time Jack considered he had written a fairly good play; but it went the rounds of the dramatic agencies in New York without being placed—this after Miss Nethersole had decided against it. Besides "Theft," in the first half of 1910, Jack commenced a fantastic piece of long fiction, "The Assassination Bureau." This, interrupted by the death of the baby, he never finished. Only death itself, it would seem, could compel that man to stay his hand. It is noteworthy that his only uncompleted work is this "The Assassination Bureau," and the novel left less than half finished when he himself went "into the dark."

A short Klondike story, "The Night-Born," was also written that spring, and "The Human Drift," a synthesis of years of research into the great developing forces in human history.

How much one can live through—physically, mentally—and splendidly recover from! The baby was born upon high noon of Sunday, June 19, in an Oakland hospital. In my little old record I read: "Then came on the terrible hours, when Jack helped me, breathed with me, loved me and praised me—" "We named her Joy, Mate and I." She was a beautiful baby, they told me, all who saw her. I was so near to fading out that I feared my strength would fail through sheer emotion if I looked at the little soul until I had had time to gather my forces; so they carried her away. When Eliza had come from Glen Ellen at Jack's bidding, she found him so radiant with relief after his own sharp strain, so excited telling her of the small one's fair skin and gray eyes, "Just like Mate's and mine. Anglo-Saxon through and through!" that she had difficulty in learning whether he was father to a son or a daughter. The fact that he had prayed for a boy was forgotten in the larger matter of a living, breathing child of whichever sex.

What he said was: "Boy or girl, it does n't matter—so long as it's Charmian's!"

Poor little Joy! The severity of her birth, coupled with certain unwisdom, or ignorance, in the handling of the same, within thirty-eight hours had cost her life. "A perfect child," they said, after those perfect months that went into the creation of her. I go on from some notes headed "First Thoughts": "He came to me, and Eliza, and, one on either side my bed, Mate told me with a brave, bright face. And I did not make it harder for him than I could help. But oh! the pity of it! Our own baby, our little daughter, ours, our Joy-Baby, only thirty-eight hours old—gone in the twilight of the morning."

The New York Herald had long ahead engaged Jack to write up the Jeffries-Johnson prizefight, wherever it should be staged, together with ten days' observation, previous to the big event, of the contestants camps. Jack was no more loath to break his pledge than I to have him; and it was with great satisfaction to me, for one, that I was pronounced out of danger from a slight operation, and that Jack could go away without apprehension. The prospective scene of the fight had been moved over California several times, and finally settled upon Reno, Nevada, so I could not see my husband for the best part of two weks. He departed June 22, and sent me daily "Lettergrams." On the morning of the fight, he wired: "I wish you were by my side to-day."

It was reported, I am reminded by news clippings of that month, that "Jack London lost heavily on the Reno fight. But this could not be, since he laid but a few dollars at most, and a hat, a dinner, and so forth.

And now, an episode, further to make clear Jack London's reactions to the corrupt injustices that may surround such a man:

Having fortified myself against shock by determining not to be shocked by anything, if I would live, on the third

morning after the baby came I received in quiet the spectacle of my handsome husband with one large optic neatly closed and plastered with what appeared to be pink paint.

To my studiedly calm and interested inquiry, he frankly told me "all about it." I give the facts as he related them:

Leaving me the day before, after breaking the baby's death, he had gone into Oakland's business center to attend to final arrangements for his Reno journey. Winding up at the barber's, he then strolled, miserable and grieving, down Broadway.

"You know how I hate walking," he broke in. "And I usually seem to get into trouble when I do walk! I swear I'll never walk again. Listen to what happened:"

Noticing, in the windows of the Oakland Tribune office, a display of an "Autobiography of Jeffries," he bought several copies, thinking to pass them along to other correspondents at Reno. Continuing, absorbed in the morning's disaster to our hopes, he became aware that he had strayed into old haunts, down around Webster and Eighth and Ninth streets—in his boyhood a respectable residential neighborhood, but now infested with Chinese gambling houses.

As he went along, pondering the great change, he saw an American saloon, and near its main entrance a smaller door that suggested ingress to its lavatory. Entering, he found himself in a narrow passage-way, terminating in a large room behind the barroom proper, and evidently a night resort, judging from the tables and chairs. What appeared to be two lavatory doors were at the farther end, opening out of a short hall that led into still another apart ment, where a lowering figure sat eating alone.

Jack, with a salutation to which the other growled something he did not hear, opened a door and passed through. Before he had time to shut it behind him, the man had thrust his foot inside, threateningly ordering him out.

"I believe he thought I was there to post on his walls some of the gaudy literature I had under my arm," Jack told me. At any rate, I was not in the mood for trouble, especially in such cramped space, and spoke in a conciliatory way while I got into the big room and made for the passage out, intending to escape as quick as God would let me. I knew his kind, and wanted none of him. And I thought of you, and of my promise to the New York Herald."

What next took place—the man's unprovoked attack, Jack's scientific stalling, never striking a blow, the appearance from the barroom of an audience of pasty-faced night-birds who came to look on, and his difficulty, once he had worked his way to the street, of getting an officer to consent to arrest the dive-keeper—all this he has graphically described in a short story, "The Benefit of the Doubt" (in volume "The Night Born").

What he did not include in the story was that it turned out that the Hebrew police judge who dared to sit on the case, was in truth owner of the resort. Jack learned of this through a letter from a well-wishing stranger, who suggested he look up the records. When Eliza went to do this, every obstacle was put in her way; but she prevailed, and her homecoming with the notes she had made was an occasion for triumphant celebration in the London household.

The reporters, as always paid to "give Jack London the worst of it wherever possible," hinted at the vilest construction upon his presence in the low resort. The San Francisco Bulletin account was the most decent—because, according to Joseph Noel, in charge of the Oakland office, he offered to throw up his position rather than distort his friend's account of the one-sided scrimmage.

Jack was keen for the trial, but got it postponed until after the Reno prizefight. Never have I seen him so cut up as when the Judge dismissed the case, giving both complainants "the benefit of the doubt," as faithfully told in the story of that name. And the exasperating newspaper

lie as to his shaking hands with the dive-proprietor and their "departing for the nearest saloon," is as accurately recorded.

Jack worked off, in the fiction, a fantastic revenge. The eastern weekly's editor, before accepting the yarn, made sure through the author that he would not be liable for libel. Quite different from his usual eventual tolerance, Jack never forgave the Hebrew Judge. "Some day, some where, I am going to 'get' him," he would say at long intervals. "I shall watch him all years, and some time, when he least looks for it, I shall get him. I don't know just how—perhaps it will be in thwarting his dearest ambition; but mark my words, I intend to get him." Jack's countenance, no matter how one sympathized with his viewpoint, was not good to look upon at such a time. But his cards were played squarely, as always, face up on the table. He sent the following open letter (I typed it for him during convalescence) to the newspapers of San Francisco and Oakland, the same post carrying a copy to the magistrate that he might be prepared for the writer's deadly interest in him:

"Some day, somewhere, somehow, I am going to get you legally, never fear. I shall not lay myself open to the law. I know nothing about your past. Only now do I begin to interest myself in your past, and to keep an eye on your future. But get you I will, some day, somehow, and I shall get you to the full hilt of the law and the legal procedure that obtains among allegedly civilized men."

One day, long afterward, out of a sudden whimsey, Jack had his sister telephone to arrange an interview for him in the office of that grafting judicator. "Oh, I intend no violence, he allayed my start; "I just want to tell him a few." But the other had hastily pleaded an imminent and important engagement elsewhere. Jack died unavenged, unless the Judge's conscience, or fear of his enemy, were punishment enough.

It was mainly grit that carried Jack through the Reno

period. He was miserably ill, probably from the effects of the Muldowney struggle, and coughed exhaustingly.

The fiasco of the fight did not improve his spirits—"It wasn't a fight," he wrote me, "It was awful."

Once back in Oakland, and the afternoons with me in hospital resumed, he told me he was having his sputum examined for traces of tuberculosis, for he was thoroughly alarmed at the obstinacy of the racking cough and soreness in his chest. With our customary rebound from carking care, the battered pair of us lost no time making tentative arrangements for a lengthy sojourn in high, dry Arizona, and presently were all alive with the details of equipment, saddles, clothing, books—and work! The analysis of the sputum brought to light no evidence of active "T.B.," although a scar that was located in Jack's bronchial tissue proved his own diagnosis not without foundation.

"Well, that settles our Arizona vacation," he smiled over a momentary regret.

Another hospital memory is the day Jack said to me:

"I went last night to the Macdonough to see the De Mille-Belasco production of 'The Woman.' And take it from me, my dear—that play never would have been written if I had not written 'Theft.'

I made him return to his Ranch and his writing, while I devoted every atom of energy to recuperating. In a letter of July 24, he begs me to "Come home right away; I'll cut out the Jinks this year if you will . . . I read your 'First Thoughts' and two of your later letters, to Eliza last night; and both she and I were in tears."

But it was more than six weeks from June 19, before I was fit to travel. It was a deep obligation I put upon myself, then as ever, to take the best care of my health, that I might be "on deck" as much as possible. Jack's content depended so vitally upon the brightness of his household.

The first day that I was able to mount a docile horse, Jack, bestriding his cheerful outlaw, led me from the idyllic

site on the Beauty Banch where we had decided to build, into the forested ravine of Asbury Creek. To my astonished exclamation at sight of a new bridle trail engineered upon its precipitous sides, he answered:

"It's the 'Charmian Trail,' Sweetheart, and I saved it for a surprise."

From that time on, similar trail-making was continually in progress, until there came to be miles of these green zig zags within the boundaries of the Jack London Ranch, opening up breath-taking views of the surrounding valleys and mountains.

In addition to "The Benefit of the Doubt," the author, not yet in humor, from his aggregation of past troubles, to settle down to sustained effort, turned out some light stuff—an airplane story, "Winged Blackmail"; "Bunches of Knuckles," containing a conversation, with a skipper, just as I had heard it aboard the Snark; "When the World Was Young," with a double-personality motif. Then he penned what he called a picture, or, rather, two successive pictures, entitled "War," which he deemed one of his gems; and the story "To Kill a Man," which he also greatly liked. All the foregoing are bound in "The Night Born."

"Told in the Drooling Ward," a delightful study of the amiable egotism of a high-class idiot's psychology, but which Jack had difficulty in selling, was another 1910 production; also "The Hobo and the Fairy," a dainty and wholesome tale, both of which will be found in "The Turtles of Tasman."

While in Oakland, Jack had been called upon by "Bob" Fitzsimmons and his wife, Julia, and for their use in vaudeville he wrote a rather inconsequential skit, "The Birth Mark," which appears in "The Human Drift." The Fitzsimmonses visited us the first week in September, and "Bob," to the joy of Glen Ellen, forged a mighty horseshoe in the village smithy, which adorns a door frame of our cottage.

Next was begun "The Abysmal Brute," hardly more than a long-short story, but subsequently published as a novelette—a cleanly conceived bit of propaganda for the purifying of the prize-ring. Before the year was out, Jack had made a start on a series of a dozen Alaskan yarns, which are built around the central figure of "Smoke Bellew."

Very little public speaking was heard from him that year—a Memorial Day address in Sonoma, a lecture in Oakland, and another, in December, in the Auditorium Annex at Page and Fillmore Streets, San Francisco, in protest at the current murders of educators and reformers in Russia, in Japan, and, in particular, Spain's inexcusable execution of Francisco Ferrer.

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