The End of 1910

AT last, at last, Jack's search for a suitable inland yacht ended in mid-October, when a friend discovered for sale the thirty-foot yawl, Roamer, once the fast sloop Iris. A personal try-out convinced us of her eminent qualifications, despite her ripe years which were rumored to be at least forty. We schemed a better galley for'ard, installed a little coal-stove for winter warmth and cooking, and had the hull and rigging overhauled.

For it was meant that I, from my salt heredity, and practice both before and after marriage, should be Jack's true shipmate. None so keenly as I, perhaps, can appreciate his own words, written on board the Roamer in Sonoma Creek, the next spring:

With Nakata and the cook, Yamamoto (an intellectual socialist later abstracted back to his native islands by the long arm of the Mikado), we set sail on October 17, from Oakland, across the Bay of San Francisco, "than which," to quote my captain, "no lustier, tougher sheet of water can be found for small boat sailing," for an up-river cruise.

Two days earlier I had found upon my desk a fresh, skyblue volume entitled "Burning Daylight," into which. Jack had woven so much of our daily blessedness. This is the inscription:

My old, old dream come true—to see with Jack this stage of his youthful performances! He looked much like his piratical early self, I fancy, in blue dungaree and the time-honored "tam" pulled down, with a handful of curls, over his sailor-blue eyes that roved incessantly for changes and found comparatively few. I had the privilege, at Vallejo near the yacht club, of seeing the meeting between Jack and an old crony or two—as Charley Le Grant, so often mentioned in "Tales of the Fish Patrol"; and another time, threading Sonoma Creek's delta of sloughs to the tuneful sound of blackbirds' throats, into our own valley within eye-reach of our own mountain fastnesses, to Jack's unbounded delight we came upon a venerable, rickety little French Frank of Idler memory, keeper of a duck-hunting club shack. Debonair and gallant Frank still was, though all his jealous fires and furies had long since been drawn. And ludicrously tactful was he, before "Jack's lady," in references to the wild '90s he and the lady's husband had shared

in common. Having convinced him I was no ogress his tongue loosened in spicy reminiscence, abetted by a bottle of red wine.

What a blissful passage it was, this first Roamer voyage, only to be surpassed by the second and the third, and so on. "Snarking once more," Jack named it; honeymooning upon the face of the winding waters; fanning into Benicia to the sunset melody of birds in the rushes; running across that "large, draughty, variegated piece of water," Suisun Bay, where the great scows we had both learned to respect came charging down, grain-laden; picking our way in the "Middle Ground" channels, and gliding close-hauled into Black Diamond "in the fires of sunset, where the Sacramento and the San Joaquin tumble their muddy floods together"—to port the hazy, Aztec unreality of the tawny-rose Montezuma Hills palpitating in the westering sunlight; to starboard the low brown banks with green upstanding fringes of rustling tules; all about red-sailed fishing boats homing for the night; and old Black Diamond's lazy water-front and lazier streets sloping upward toward the Contra Costa Hills; and, in the morning, Diablo crumpled against an azure dome.

Once, off a tree-plumed island in the pictureful delta, a gay "red-light" barge, with its painted ladies, anchored within hailing distance of the Roamer. " I'll take you aboard to-morrow evening early, if you'd like," Jack volunteered; and I was glad enough for a new experience with him. But the next day he was invited by the principal, Professor Vickers, to speak to the school children of the town across river, which he consented to do, in a brief talk on "The Call of the Wild"; and when we were once more aboard, he said soberly:

"I guess we won't go adventuring next-door to-night, Mate—it might offend the good people ashore if they found it out. They wouldn't understand how you and I go about together. Also, there might possibly be folks on the barge

whom you've seen about and who wouldn't want you to see them there. So we'll just give it up and wait for a better chance.

I think it was about this time Jack illustrated his belief in the innate goodness of even very low unfortunates, by telling me how, when he was a mere stripling, his pockets had been rifled by one of the women companions of his associates up-river. "But do you know—she only took exactly half of what I had," he said. "I never forgot that. It was bad, of course, but it was only half-bad at worst, and showed she had some heart of softness left in her toward a mere boy like me."

It was while we lay off the town of Antioch, in this region, that Jack recounted to me the laughable story of how he and his mates netted a score of illicit fishermen; but that is for all to read—"Charley's Coup," in "The Fish Patrol" group.

Together we came to know the rivers and serpentine sloughs, with their foreign inhabitants, as Jack had known them aforetime; only, now, the dwellers upon and behind the willowed dykes had become increasingly foreign. This gave rise to many "human drift" speculations upon my skipper's part, later used in "The Valley of the Moon." I am reminded in passing, the young hero and his comrade wife run across a pseudo Roamer and its master and mate.

Among other features new to Jack, was the growth of the Japanese-Chinese village of Walnut Grove. Here we poked about among tortuous roofed streets lined with gambling dens, stores, geisha houses and tea-shops, entertained in these latter by the pretty toy-like women, with saki, and raw bonita soaked in soyu sauce, to the debatable harmony of samisens.

Jack, snugly at anchor, his work punctually disposed of, read intensively upon agriculture, devoured a plunder of countless old books he had been collecting upon western

Plains migration, and laid deep and deeper foundation for Ranch development and stock-raising. "I devoted two solid years," he has written, "to the study of the migrations toward the West of America, being moved to it perhaps by the fact that my people came from the Middle West."

Everywhere he used his eyes, bent upon seeing what the other fellow was doing in the vast fields of California, making me the willing repository of his plans as he worked them out. Often, while I shopped or walked or rowed in the skiff for exercise, he drifted about the towns, meeting men, going to their farms, inspecting cattle and horses. He bought a draft-mare, June, a striking creature, black and proud, who came to live on the Ranch and become the mother of several colts.

Jack was living so fully—a life balanced with essential interests and endeavor and simplest of amusements. The test, I am sure, he undertook deliberately. To him relaxation consisted not in cessation but in change of thought and occupation. The vessel all in order, laid against a river-bank for the night, he would sit, placidly smoking in the blue dungarees and old tam, humped comfortably on deck, his soft-shod feet hanging over the rail, line overboard for cat-fish or black bass. Meanwhile he would argue for long with Nakata or the cook, in all the ardent simplicity of a sailor in the fo'c's'le, some trifling point—say relative sizes of fish each had hooked the day before; or there would be a jokingly heated disagreement as to the payment of a penny wager a week old; or the three, stopping to catch laughing breath, feverishly laid new bets against the evening's basket. Jack was always ready to chuckle over it all, should I remind him of his reversion to fo'c's'le methods.

To a Sacramento reporter at this time, Jack said: "I am a Westerner, despite my English name. I realise that much of California's romance is passing away, and I intend to see

to it that I, at least, shall preserve as much of that romance as is possible for me. I am making of 'The Valley of the Moon' a purely Californian novel it starts with Oakland and ends in Sonoma."

He was an unfailing wonder to me, my Jack London—my mentor—his continuous cerebration to every impact, mental, physical, awake, and asleep; always young, always old, always wise, with "a bigness of heart that kept conscience with itself"; efficient dreamer, harnessed to his work for the sake of Heart's Desire, which included the discharge of so many responsibilities—penalties of patriarchy. How vivid he rises, standing on his handsome legs at the wheel, those robust, muscle-rounded shoulders leaning back upon a howling norther before which we fled, tense, caution on hair-trigger, uncapturable thoughts behind his deep, wide eyes, lips parted, and that great chest expanding to breeze and effort. One man has written me: "I remember Jack London above all by his beautiful chest. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen."

December saw us home at Wake Robin, trying to come abreast with work that had piled up during the cruise. "Poor little woman! She has to pay for her fun!" Jack turned from his desk to where I was filing letters and notes. "But it's worth it!" Again, suddenly wheeling around, "How good it is to have a satisfying love. Mate, I love you more than I ever did in my first days of madness. It's different but I love you more." And he had a way of blowing involuntary kisses in the air when I spoke to him. How good it all was! I am reminded of Browning's:

While we spent hours poring over the Wolf House drawings, twenty men were setting out twenty thousand addi-

tional eucalyptus. And Jack's funds, despite our boundless plans, were sinking low.

"Well, I've got five hundred dollars in bank, and an eight-hundred-dollar life-insurance premium due," he announced. "Doesn't balance up very well, does it? But never fear—'Smoke Bellew' will pull us even with the bills. Guess we'll accept that invitation from Felix Peano to move into his Los Angeles house for a month. It'll be a nice winter change, and I can forget my creditors easier at a distance, while I'm slaving to pay them!"

He always referred to "Smoke Bellew" as "hack-work," strictly excluding the last story, "Love of Woman," which he strove to make one of his best. The "hack" turned out to be a great favorite with the male readers of his average public. It would seem that Jack London's work, third-best, or worse, could never be bad. Light it might sometimes be, comparatively unimportant; but it was impossible—reservoir of learning, and imagination, and emotion that he was—that he should ever turn out trash.

The Cosmopolitan later asked for a continuation of "Smoke Bellew," and the while Jack considered its popularity in light of means to keep up the enormous expense of house-building, I suggested sailing Smoke and Shorty into the South Seas for a series of adventurings, for he had been longing again to dip his pen into tropic colors. This he considered; but all at once he threw up the whole thing:

"I'm tired writing pot-boilers! I won't do another one unless I have to!" And in March, the twelve off his hands, he went at the David Grief series, these romances, cracker jacks," Jack referred to them, being issued as "A Son of the Sun."

So January, 1911, was spent in the Westlake District of Los Angeles, while "Smoke Bellew" went forward, and chance visitors were regaled with readings from the manuscript. We took along our two Japanese, and had my

Aunt, now Mrs. Edward B. Payne, and her husband, as house-guests. It was a very jolly arrangement—we, accepting our sculptor-friend's roomy house, he, our hospitality of table and service. Jack's thirty-fifth birthday was celebrated in this pleasant cottage. Besides entertaining, our amusements numbered much attendance at the theaters, swimming in the city's salt tanks, a captive balloon ascension, canoeing on Westlake hard by, feeding the swans and reading aloud, and a run to Santa Catalina Island. On this last excursion Jack said my Aunt and her husband must go with us she having visited the big island with my own mother long before I was born.

One of my commissions while south was to look up a suitable four-in-hand of light horses for a summer trip to northern California and Oregon. I succeeded in obtaining a trio, more or less ill-assorted, which was shipped home. Upon our own return, Jack had up from Glen Ellen his old friend "Bill" Ping—mentioned in more than one of his—books to consult about reinforcing the Winship two-seated "cut-under," for the heavy going, and the proper harness. Mr. Ping, one of the splendid passing type of old-time stage-drivers, who in his day had tooled his six on the Overland Trail, was sent to San Francisco to order harness; also a whip with an eleven-foot lash which Jack, after a surprisingly short trial, learned to crack with a brave report, but seldom used.

Mr. Ping being busy with his own affairs, another stage driver, of a younger generation, was hired to put the team in shape and instruct us in the gentle art of guiding its four mouths and sixteen wayward feet. Jack, as always, mastered the thing perfectly, knowing, move by move, precisely how he did it; while I, to his laughing, almost mocking admiration, "got the hang of it" by way of emulation and my "horse instinct," doing it well one day and not so well the next.

The Lily Maid was one of our guests in March, and Jack never appeared to better advantage than in his kindness to her, still pleasuring in her mantle of yellow English hair. For her health was but poorly, and when she could not come to table, with Jack's own hands Nakata's nicely appointed trays were carried to one of the little woodsy guest-cabins we had built.

We had formulated a printed slip that frequently went into Jack's correspondence along with socialist and agricultural folders, reading as follows:

I have come across a verse by Foss, which so expresses Jack's deep heart of hospitality that I steal space to quote:

"Let me live in a house by the side of the road,
Where the race of men goes by——
The men who are good and the men who are bad,
As good and as bad as I. I would not sit in the scorner's seat,
Or hurl the cynic's ban——
Let me live in a house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man."

He was always buying blankets; never so happy as when all the beds were full. His heart was soft, and all were treated alike—friend, stranger, of whatsoever estate. I remember the pleased look that crossed his face when I related how, while I was buying a riding suit in a San Francisco shop, the fitter said to me:

"Mrs. Jack London?—Oh, I heard something so lovely about your place—that no one, even when you people are not home, is ever allowed to go away without being entertained!"

It was in October Jack placed in my hands the story of his wayward flight across the continent, "The Road." The inscription is one of his most generous:

Of course many calls were made upon Jack's time and purse. And "purse" reminds me that he never carried other than the slender chamois gold-dust sack that he had learned to use in the Klondike. He was obliged to work out circular letters to cover such exigencies as he was unable to comply with. Here is an example in a copy of a letter written to a young writer:

The next letter here appended, he used to send out before he came to decide to read every manuscript that came his way, and encourage the sending to him. He found that in refusing to avail of such opportunities, he was depriving himself of just so many chances to study the wayward seed of man:

In extreme cases, I have known him to send out copies of Richard Le Gallienne's "Letter to an Unsuccessful Literary Man," a document that leaves little to be said.

Requests for money usually found his responsive. He used some discernment, however, declining to be " touched " too often by certain men who took him more freely for granted than he liked; with some others, he blithely kissed hand to his dollars when telling me of his gifts and "loans." And—

"Oh, well, Mate—money's only good for what it can buy. It buys me happiness to buy happiness for others. Don't hoard money. You can't take it with you when you go into the dark"—that was a concept he had inculcated for all time into the rapidly simplifying philosophy that had

followed his "opening of the books." The disadvantageous, soul-belittling influence of poverty had been practically banished for the span of his existence on this competitive planet. I smile as I handle the cancelled checks of many dates, to hear that husky, half-apologetic: "They've all dreamed their dream. Who am I not to help, now that I can. And these have realized their dream only a little less, after all, than the rest of mankind.  . . . But it does give me joy," with a smile into my eyes, "when what my money does for others receives some little appreciation of the pleasure or comfort it buys!"

In mid-April the Roamer all "ship-shape and Bristol fashion" from Nakata's deft brown hands, sailed on a month's cruise, while Eliza superintended architect and house construction, and colts and calves increased, and orchard and house-vineyard took root in the gentle terraced amphitheater behind the rising red-stone pile that was to be our castle.

During this absence, Eliza saw her chance to buy, at a price her brother had been waiting for, a section of some twelve acres right in the heart of the big Kohler ranch already ours, on which stood the buildings large and small of the old Kohler and Frohling winery of other days, all in sad but picturesque disrepair from neglect topped with the Great Earthquake.

This out-door life was the best thing that could happen to Jack, who had been suffering from one severe cold after another, coupled with repeated sties on his eyelids, and much nerve-rack from his teeth—this last, of course, being nothing unusual. I marvel to think of his eternal patience with pain; probably he was never, for years at a time, free from pain or at least discomfort. And there was his ever present joy in my own good teeth—"Woman!" he would cry, "you don't know how lucky you are!"

Before launching out for the coast on our northern

trek, Jack asked me, what I had been anticipating for some time:

"Do you think we could fix up that old cottage on the Kohler, to live in until the Wolf House is done?"

It was a six-room, one-story frame house once occupied by the heads of the winery, and now in a shocking state. Subsequent Italian lessees of the vineyard had made a veritable dump of it and its old garden of foreign trees and shrubbery. I was dubious enough to reply:

"Honestly, I don't think we can."

But my partner had, for once, evidently made up his mind before consulting me, and presently I entered into the spirit of making the place as attractive as possible. Besides, it was, at worst, a consummation of our mutual desire to live in the very center of the Ranch activities now afoot.

The cottage came to be our sleeping and working quarters, including two guest-rooms, while in one side of the enormous winery were built others; workmen's family quarters being created on the other, and a new roof shingled over all.

Quite a ceremonial it was with the Japanese, getting ready Jack's bedside table for the night. Sharp pencils there must be plenty, scratch pads, big and little; many packages of "Imperiales," and fine Korean brass ashtray; his ubiquitous little red-velvet pin-cushion with pins driven in to their heads; files of papers and magazines neatly arranged on a lower section of the table, according to dates, the latest on top; a dish of fruit, or, lacking fruit, of some favorite dried fish or other "dainty." And finally, there were no less than three bottles of liquid of one sort or another. For Jack always maintained that it was a mercy, with his almost uninterrupted smoking, the alcohol he consumed, and certain sedentary spells when he took little exercise, that he "breathed through the skin"—by which he meant free perspiring. Therefore, he drank

almost excessive quantities of this and that favorite beverage—grapejuice, buttermilk, and endless draughts of water. These, according to the whim, in cool thermos bottles, stood in an inviting row on the bedside table, and were always empty in the morning.

Papers and magazines, ravished of whatever in the way of information he wished to file as notes, were flung upon the floor; letters, envelopes, all small matter that was finished with, he carefully crumpled lest Nakata or the house-boy should put them back where he would have to handle them again. Sometimes, dropping off to sleep, cigarette between his lips, he singed his curls, exploded a celluloid eyeshade, or burned small round holes in sheet or pillow. As for pillows, he liked them large, three of them, with a very small one for that left elbow which supported him so many, many hours.

This dwelling was the only one of his very own in which Jack London ever lived—and in which he continued to live until he died within its old book-lined walls. It was into this house we moved upon our return from the four-horse adventure, which began in early June and ended in early September, 1911.

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