1912

FOUR of us sailed around Cape Horn, from Baltimore to Seattle Jack London, wife, Nakata, and an engaging fox terrier puppy, three months foolish, who was destined to play an important part in Jack's household till the end of life. "Possum" we named him, in memory of a rough-coated little Irish gentleman we had known in the South Seas—brother to dear Peggy of the Snark, immortal in our hearts. The fox Possum figures in "The Valley of the Moon," which was resumed and completed on the Cape Horn voyage, and also in "The Mutiny of the Elsinore," this book being an out-growth of that experience on a wind jammer. Besides "The Valley of the Moon," Jack made copious notes for "John Barleycorn," and wrote a short sea story, "The Tar Pot," published serially as "The Captain of the Susan Drew," and not yet collected in book form.

It was a very subdued, much-himself Jack London who stopped over with me in Philadelphia enroute to Baltimore to take ship. And Philadelphia unconsciously perpetrated a classic joke on itself: without knowing, it entertained for three days at the leading hotel "America's most advertised writer." It seemed so strange that I had no accustomed duties to perform in the way of answering telephone calls from reporters in the lobby! For not one ever discovered the sprawling signature in the hotel register. The silence of the brotherhood of scribes was certainly not due to any

boycott on Jack London, for they had hitherto appeared unanimously kind to his work.

The morning of our sailing from Baltimore, on March 2, 1912, as I sat alone writing my farewell letters home, the door opened and I heard Jack in colloquy with Nakata. I caught the words, in a giggly whisper, "Wait till Mrs. London sees me!" Something told me what I should behold, and I refrained from raising my eyes until obliged to do so. He had long threatened to do it, but until then had withheld the act because of my pleading. His head was as naked as a billiard ball. I looked him over with assumed poise, and resumed my writing. Jack tittered. I said "Yes, I see; but it isn't funny. Jack tittered again. "But it isn't funny," I repeated, beginning to lose hold of myself. "Oh, now, don't feel badly, Mate Woman," he began, for my voice was becoming unsteady, I know. "It is such a good rest for my head—I often did it in the old days, at sea and around."

It was the last straw in a hard winter, to mix a metaphor. I wept uncontrolledly for nearly three hours. There is a photograph of the pair of us, taken that day beside Edgar Allen Poe's monument, in which a very heavily coated Jack London, hat pulled down most unbecomingly over a chill scalp, stands with a woman who tries to hide swollen eyes and forlorn mouth in a new set of very handsome red fox. Jack looked apprehensive when I remarked that my own head needed a rest, and started for the scissors. But I only sheared off eight inches. I did not again look directly at Jack until there was at least half an inch of hair on his head.

The Dirigo, 3000 tons net registered, seventeen years old, had been the first steel ship launched by the famous Sewalls of Bath, Maine. She was technically a four-masted barque. Jack chose the Dirigo over a much newer clipper for the reason that she carried skysails—fast becoming obso-

lete. "And how I'd like to take you around the Horn on a ship with moonsails!" he lamented the impossibility.

Captain Omar Chapman, of Newcastle, Maine, was one of the fast disappearing type of lean New England aristocrat, who always presented himself on deck immaculately attired, his especial hobbies fine hats and cravats. His quiet Yankee humor extended to these little foibles and a frank contempt for the common clay of modern deep-water sailors. The calm kingliness of his character was in cool contrast to that of the Mate, Fred Mortimer, hot-hearted, determined, all-around efficient driver of a crew that was composed, with a few exceptions well along in years, of landlubbers and weaklings.

Imagine our surprise to learn that Captain Warren, of the Snark, had applied for the berth of second officer, although in ignorance of our presence in the ship. As surprising was the fact that the man who was accepted bore the same name!

We paid $1000.00 for our passage, and, since such vessels carry no passenger license, had to sign on the articles, Jack as third mate, myself as stewardess, and Nakata as cabin-boy. It must have been attributable to Yankee thrift that, when it became known we traveled with a man, no cabin boy was taken along. Therefore many duties aft fell to our private servant, over and above his service to Jack and me, and Nakata put up with the gratuitous injustice with good grace rather than create unpleasantness.

The Dirigo stood out to sea in an abating icy gale that had held her bound for exasperating weeks. Rough and bitter cold it was, but nothing mattered to me except the fact that land was left behind, in prospect long months of blissful sea life with its cleansing simplicities.

In all the one hundred and forty-eight days, our eyes rested on land but once—or in one brief period of two or three days—literally land's-end, the end of the earth, the island of Cape Horn itself, with the continuous mainland

and islands. Even Diego Ramirez, sinister finger of stone to the south of the Continent, became visible in the war of water and cloud.

"Cape Horn on the starboard bow!" on May 10, was the most exciting tocsin, next to a savage war conch, I had ever awakened to.

"Gee—you folks are lucky!" Mr. Mortimer exclaimed, as, wrapped in heavy coats, we clung to the poop-rail and actually gazed upon the Cape. "I tell you, I've made this passage more times than I can remember, and I haven't laid eyes on that there island since 1882! The fog has never raised." And the day before, conditions being favorable for the risky feat, the Captain had been able to reduce time by passing through the Straits of Lemaire, instead of going around Staten Island. It was exciting business, made more breathless by sight of a great wreck, standing stark upright in her doom of shallow water off the mainland.

Our farthest south was Lat. 57° 32', Lon. 67° 28'. And though we had some little difficulty "making westing" and were driven back time and again, our traverse "from 50 to 50" was but fifteen days, which is almost better than a master mariner dare hope.

"How could you endure such a life!" women a-many have said to me. There was no single moment of wearisomeness to either Jack or me. Think of the industrious working hours—even I, suddenly inspired by one of the anecdotes from Captain or officers, wrote a sea yarn, "The Wheel," afterwards published at a round price by a newspaper syndicate. He had been much surprised and delighted when, without warning or comment, I laid my manuscript with his night-reading. And after I had benefited by suggestions from him: "It's quite good enough for you to go ahead and market!" he advised to my astonishment.

For at least three hours daily, on deck in fine weather,

otherwise sitting below on his high bunk with a bright "angle-lamp" at either end, Jack read aloud while I embroidered a new supply of fine lingerie. We read everything from Chinese lore to Robert W. Chambers. "And for once, my companion grinned, "I've time to read Sue's 'Wandering Jew.' I never could 'see' the time for it before."

Oh, the vivifying salt air, and the sea-food—good old "salt horse" and beef tongue, and the cook's inspired concoctions of tinned dainties! Captain Chapman had brought along a well-stocked hencoop solely because there was to be a woman aboard; but after he had been taken mysteriously ill the day before sighting the Horn, the fresh eggs had been a boon. Indeed, he lived many weeks because of the whites of eggs I was able to serve him; but he died two days after arriving at Seattle—and alas, before his wife could come to him from Maine. Cancer of the stomach, the doctors diagnosed. I spent a whole night, in the hotel, sadly enough, but glad of my detailed notes, writing Mrs. Chapman a log of the voyage from the day her husband was stricken.

So placidly and promptly his old self was Jack at sea, that I, slowly recuperating from acute nerve-strain, contemplated him with the amazement women must ever feel toward certain phases of their menfolk. My diary exclaims in wonder: "I do believe the man has utterly forgotten New York and its abominations!" But later, when I had hurt a finger, and developed a "runaround" that held me sleepless through nights of pain, his devotion seemed to carry a new note, and there were moments when I saw float up through the deeps of his eyes a knowledge of all that those weary eight weeks had meant to me.

The Master and Jack gathered fuel for everlasting fun at my expense. Two long connecting staterooms had been fitted up for us, that we might have separate bunks. It was to general systemic upset that I attributed an annoy-

ing attack of hives that followed sailing. With tin upon tin of cream of tartar from the ship s galley my offended stomach was dosed; I tried sleeping all over the vessel aft—in the main cabin, and even in the chart-room, where I seemed to rest the best. And the consumption of cream of tartar and sympathy in the cabin went on apace. Then a suspicion began to dawn in the Captain, which precipitated an investigation of my freshly painted wooden bunk. The secret was out. All the scrubbing and painting and fumigation had failed to dislodge the last of a nest of the ubiquitous bed-bug that a ship is never able quite to eradicate. A broad grin was evident from stem to stern of the Dirigo the day a young sailor had finally eradicated the pest, and I never heard the last of my "hives."

Would you pursue beauty indescribable, go to sea on a wind-jammer. I know no more exalted moments than when, a hundred miles off the coast of Brazil I have set my face to the four quarters of the heavens, upon which were painted as many astounding sunsets, with a heavy moon lifting to spill thick silver in a fading copper sea; or have clung in the eyes of her, the great steel body of the ship plunging enormously onward among the night-green rollers of her moonlit highway, her orderly forest of masts swaying, swerving, to the weight of full sails—gargantuan pearls, hard and bright, strung to the loftiest spars of the golden masts, white-gleaming in the very witchery of moonlight that transfigures all their majesty into the immateriality of a vision. Masefield knows it all:

"I have heard the song of the blossoms and the old chant of the sea,

And seen strange lands from under the arched white sails of ships."

How could I live such a life? Woe is me—how can I live without it!

Night after night, fair weather or foul—and it was all

of a magnificence, dead calm or great guns blowing—I took a note-book and pencil to the poop hatch, and painted, as well as I could in words, the sunsets and their mirrored reflections on the vast dome. Bits of these "sketches" are in "The Mutiny of the Elsinore." On a day I may come upon the rest among Jack's own notes, and drop an hour from a busy dozen to find my feet again treading the deck or the fore-and-aft bridge of the Dirigo, stately and beautiful moving house of ocean, now, along with our old friend the Tymeric, at one with the slime. For the Huns got them both. I would that mermen and mermaids could people them for ay!

For exercise we boxed lustily, trained and played with the puppy, and climbed into the "top" of the mainmast—the first foot-hold of the same above deck, reached by precarious, lurching way of the shrouds from the rail. In Jack's pocket was a book, in mine my embroidery. Here, remote, ecstatic, above the "wrinkled sea" and the slender fabric of steel, we lived some of our finest hours, enthralled by the recurrent miracle of unbored days, love ever regenerate, and contemplation of our unwasted years.

Once around the Horn, Jack took to hooking albatross, catching quite a number. Some were liberated, but several he kept. I still have the skins—twelve feet from tip to tip, if I remember aright.

One of his activities was pulling teeth for the crew—to say nothing of assisting Possum to shed her puppy-molars which, in lack of normal food and bones, were troublesome in letting go. For Jack had not forgotten to bring along his Snark dentistry case.

The first news of an almost forgotten world in five months was of the Titanic disaster, and, next, that our old acquaintance, President Alfaro of Ecuador, and his son (a West Point man) had been murdered in Quito and their headless bodies dragged through the streets.

And would any one know what Jack London thought

of "enduring such a life," half a year away from the land spaces of the world:

"Mate," he said in all earnestness, as the dear, gray, battered hull towed up Puget Sound, looking pensively at the sailors aloft making all snug, I wish it had been a year, or years!—You remember, don't you? how happy I was stocking up inexhaustible reading matter, in case we got driven back from the Horn and had to double the Cape of Good Hope, and on around the world that way!"

There had been one shadow upon me. One evening about three months out, at table, the Mate, Fred Mortimer, remarked:

"I never drink on duty. I drink very little anyway; just a glass now and again on shore with the fellows." Jack replied, to my dismay:

"That is what I am now working toward. I have, by putting myself, for the first time in my life, where I am absolutely free for months of alcohol, with alcohol entirely purged from my system—in a position, also for the first time in my life, to review the whole question of alcohol with reference to myself and that system, and my brain. I have learned, to my absolute satisfaction, that I am not an alcoholic in any sense of the word. Therefore, when I am on land again, I shall drink, as you drink, occasionally, deliberately, not because I have to have alcohol in the economy of my physical system, but because I want to, we'll say for social purposes. I never have been so happy in my life concerning alcohol with reference to myself, as I am right now this minute. It has never mastered me, I now know; it never shall. There is no danger of it mastering me."

Although I knew he was giving us the honest content of his best conclusions in the matter, I also felt that I knew he would fail of the perfection of such a plan. He did. But what counts in the end—is the end, and near that end he drank but little.

Four days in Seattle were spent, if the newspapers were to be trusted, in a lavender satin-lined suite, Jack attired exquisitely in pink silk pajamas and reveling in perfumed ablutions.

It was the old Puebla that carried us down the coast. There were two reasons for this voyage: one, we were not wearied of the sea; the other, it was feasible for us to have Possum with us more than would have been allowed by rail. The evening of August second we sat in the front row at the Oakland Orpheum, our seats ordered by wireless from "outside" the previous day. And it was one of our happiest homecomings, as will be seen.

For, the long voyage ended, we looked for another child in March—a child love-beckoned, to fill a heart's desire once bereft. But owing solely to the ignorance in which we had been left of certain conditions that should have been corrected before another birth was to be thought of, a second blighting disappointment was suffered within a month of our return.

Jack was sadly cast down, though he said little. But his somber state cropped out indirectly in a letter to me. He was entertaining a houseful of guests who had been with us when I was obliged to go into hospital for a few days. Some criticisms had been made of his supporting a trio or more of his pet hobo philosophers so picturesquely and sympathetically delineated in "The Little Lady of the Big House" as "the seven sages of the Madroño Grove." The title was a reminiscence of his delving into Chinese Legend on the Dirigo. He wrote me in a strain that showed a cumulative discouragement with human things that had led him to take agriculture so seriously:

Yet right near this time, returning from a week's absence, he brought home with him a false friend of his early writing days, an old beneficiary who, for some fancied slight, had kept away from Jack for years and talked bitterly against him. I, at sight of Jack with this man in tow, was inwardly as mad as a much dampened mother-hen, although it was incumbent upon me to be courteous in my own house. Jack had taken me aside at first opportunity:

"The poor devil," he said, "—Mate Woman, be good to him; I know you will. It gave me pleasure to bring him. After all, he's only hypersensitive—I don't know what about, in my case; but at any rate, I decided to forget his silly treatment of me—it was only silly, after all."

Home from the Bohemian Club's High Jinks, Jack settled into his stride on the new book, "John Barleycorn," by some reviewers jocosely dubbed his "alcoholic memoirs" and "a bibulous epic." But the work, containing so much autobiographical material of serious portent, was far from humorous. Despite the author's sense of artistry that made it read like fiction and placed certain exaggerations to best advantage, during my typing, as it unfolded day by day, I was conscious of shock upon shock at the content of Jack's mind. Not only with regard to his past, far and near, was I impressed; but also by a realization of the restlessness and deep-reaching melancholy he suffered from the frustration

of his dearest ambition—victorious fatherhood of my children. But our days together were happy, and here is what he wrote in my copy of "Smoke Bellew":

Four hundred acres known as the Freund Ranch, had been annexed to the upper reaches of the Kohler, though Jack had to mortgage. The "Wolf House" was slowly mounting, story by story, Jack's big draft horses laboring four and four, from a quarry three miles across the valley and up our mountain, with the great volcanic boulders that were the same red-amethystine hue of the redwood logs also to be used in construction. "We gloat over the growing red arches," my diary reads; and to me, in Oakland, Jack wrote:

And he goes on in the same letter:

In early November, I went again into hospital for an overhauling that included a minor operation. We made it up that Jack should hold my hand during the taking of the ether, so that we might "keep up the lines" to the end of

consciousness. I seemed to come to the Edge of Things, when another moment would yield me the Riddle of the Universe. Poised on the brink, I hung in an agony of desire to fix firmly what I should grasp, in order to pass the priceless gift to Jack—possessed by an overwhelming knowledge of what it would mean to his brain. Then something snapped, and I knew nothing until I heard:

"She's gone, Mr. London," and I felt him relax his clasp.

"Oh, no, I'm not, Mate!" protested I. But that was the last thought until I came out.

Jack's daily calls, with their tea-parties for two, were a source of joy to me; and one day, blowing into my room full of news of the day, laden with magazines and books, he burst forth:

"I simply cannot tell you what these afternoons mean to me—how I look forward to them from day to day!"

Then he went on to tell how he had signed a five-year serial contract with The Cosmopolitan, for all his fiction. This, so long as he delivered the pledged amount of fiction, was not to interfere with any non-fiction he might write and sell to other periodicals. Hence, when the semi-autobiographical "John Barleycorn" appeared serially, it was in the Saturday Evemng Post. This work, while it created a sensation, had no phenomenal book-sale. Jack laid the fact to the Post's enormous circulation, and vowed that the next time he sold anything to that weekly it must pay him a larger rate to offset the diminished book-royalties. As to the Post itself, he said:

"I hate the sight of it—because, forsooth, when I open a number I can't lay it down, and it takes too much time from my other reading!"

Once, at a dance in a Honolulu hotel, Cyrus Curtis, standing alone, was pointed out to Jack. "I'm going to have some fun—watch me!" he whispered. Stepping over to the great publisher, he said:

"Mr. Curtis, I believe?—I've done some work for you now and again."

The older man, little dreaming that this was the author of two of his most successful serials, "The Call of the Wild" and "John Barleycorn," looked politely inquiring, probably thinking the modest-voiced, soft-collared man might be a typesetter.

"Jack London is my name."

"Jack London!—Man, do get me out of this!" And the two, arms linked, disappeared into a veranda and were seen no more until time to go home.

Recalling those afternoon teas in my hospital room, a very sweet thing happened one day. Somewhere I have referred to Jack's regret that he had never learned the soft, pretty ways of social intercourse. "I never bought flowers for a woman in my life," I had heard him say. One afternoon, lying and gazing into the sunny tree-tops, I caught myself wondering how Jack would look entering with a big bunch of double-violets. I turned to see whom the door was admitting, and there was he, red and flustering with an armful of flowers, and my double-violets a bunch as large as his head! "These are yours, Mate Woman and these others are for Joan." His elder girl was ill at her mother's home. Jack proceeded:

"Curious coincidence—I've just got your doctor-bill and Joan's nurse-bill. And they're identical—$125 each!"

"I'll tell you something queerer than that," I answered, handing him a New York check for the same amount. "This is in payment for my one and only story, 'The Wheel,' and I mean for you to put it into the family pot to pay Joan's nurse!"

"I'll do it, I'll do it!" Jack looked at me steadily a moment, an odd expression in the eyes that were as blue at the moment as my violets.

But what could be sweeter than the tale of an incident

that came from his lips one day when he had slipped into the bedside chair and taken my hand—looking with affection upon where it lay, idle for once, in his palm:

"I'm a silly fool, I suppose—I don't know what ever made me do it; but down in the Forum Cigar Store this noon, matching for cigarettes, the men got to talking about adventure, and women, and what not. I don't know how it came about; but I found myself telling those fellows—I can't even remember their names—how I had once nearly signed on to go to the Marquesas; how I longed to see those and all the isles of the South Seas, with, in my eyes, more especially the romance of conquest among the brown maidens sung by poet and sailor. . . . All very well, my dear; but I didn't stop with that; I went on, the proudest, happiest man you ever saw, and bragged, positively bragged to those city men that when I had at last gone into those same South Seas, with the memory of an old longing, it was with my small white woman by my side. And that, co-adventurers, we lived our own faithful romance of the South Seas."

When I was able to leave hospital and sail on the Roamer, he brought her from Vallejo to Oakland, accompanied by a house-guest, Laurence Godfrey Smith, a concert pianist whom he had known in Australia, To him Jack declared:

"We chose a boat as small as this so that we could flee from even our best friends once in a while; but we re going to make an exception of you, Laurie. Though, I'm afraid, dubiously, "that we'll have to put you to bed on the floor beside the centerboard, with the aid of a shoe-horn!" And when, months afterward, we saw "Laurie" off to Australia, Jack, contemplating the silent grand piano, said: "It seems as if some one had died!"

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