1913

1913, though it yielded a measure of good fortune, Jack was wont to name his "bad year." It did seem as if almost everything that could hurt befell him. First, there was the death of a woman friend, an invalid, whom for years he had seen seldom. Never had I observed him so stirred by the passing of any adult person. That this one, so bright, so brave, should have ceased, for once made his philosophy waver.

"I did something last night I never did before," he confessed. "I concentrated every thought and actually tried to call that girl back. If any one could, I think it would be myself. . . . Of course," he smiled half-foolishly, "there was no answer."

His sister's boy, Irving Shepard, was nearly electrocuted while playing in a tree during school recess, and lay precariously ill for months in our house.

Jack himself had to undergo a sudden operation for appendicitis.

One of the most valuable draft brood-mares, in foal, was found dead in pasture, from a bullet.

An old man ran amuck one night and "shot up the ranch." Jack landing upon the scene, in the space of three seconds had disarmed the lunatic, who, in retaliation, haled him into court for "choking an old man into insensibility." "Me, choking an old man into insensibility!" Jack fumed. "Can't you see me?"

Then, there was serious want of early rains, and a "false spring" brought out blossom and young fruit untimely, only to be frosted after belated showers. On top of that, the valleys of California were visited by a plague of grasshoppers. They fastened even upon Jack's baby eucalyptus trees, which were supposedly immune from pest and blight. Nature's beneficence, in his view, was more than counter balanced by nature's cruelty. "Certainly," he would groan in unison with his harassed sister, "God doesn't love the farmer! Look at that beautiful half -grown cornfield scorched and withered by sun and north wind!"

One of the bitterest mischances was an attack upon him, in court, by a moving-picture promoter whose name enemies metamorphosed into "Porchclimber." The suit was brought to establish whether or not Jack London owned any copyright in his work. A noted eastern attorney was retained, one whom we heard had had a hand in the drafting of copyright law, to take charge of the infamous prosecution. The whole affair was so baldly pernicious that the Los Angeles judge threw it out of court.

Jack had gone into the fight with every atom of his energy, and, since his downfall would mean that of all American authors, he was backed, should he lose, by the Authors' League of America, in the determination to carry the fight into the highest courts of the Union. Very quietly the noted lawyer returned whence he came, and it has never come to my ears that he boasted of the part for which he had been cast.

Later on, as an outcome of the controversy, two film-versions of "The Sea Wolf" were being shown on opposite sides of the same street in Los Angeles. Of Hobart Bosworth's depiction of the hero Jack said:

"When I wrote 'The Sea Wolf,' the physical image of Larsen that took shape in my mind was more or less vague in outline and detail. Nevertheless, it was there, in my mind, and I carried it with me for years, until it was

almost real to me. But it fled, like a ghost at daybreak, when I saw on the screen Mr. Hobart Bosworth, the real, three dimension, flesh-and-blood Sea Wolf. Until I die the image of the Sea Wolf will be Mr. Bosworth as I saw him on the screen."

There were moments, during the preparation for the copyright fight, when Jack became so enraged that I was alarmed about him. But one morning, after an untoward outbreak of "catastrophic red wrath" the preceding night, he came to me with a face of humility:

"I'm all right now, Mate. You needn't be afraid for me any more. I'll be good from now on.—Only, you know, it's awfully hard to sit by quietly and let these sons of toads try to take the earnings of your whole life's work away from you!"

"If they get me," he said one gloomy day when I had cheered him with the reminder that I shared his trouble equally, and that we must endure everything shoulder to shoulder, "If they get me, you might as well know that we'll lose everything we have—the Ranch, even; everything. But I've still my earning capacity, and we'll buy a big ship outright, one of those we were looking at last winter in the Alameda Basin. And we'll put in a fireplace, like Lord and Lady Brassey's on the Sunbeam, and take your grand piano, and be quit forever of a country where a man's life-work can be cheated out of him by a lot of theatrical sharks and their crooked copyright lawyers—and we'll tell them all to go to hell!" he wound up out of breath. And later, "Why, we could even pick up odd freights here and there over the world," he became interested in spite of his righteous wrath, and make the old tub pay for herself! What do you say?"

Ranch guests can attest the incredulous delight my attitude afforded him in this dark period. "Would you believe it!" he was never tired of acclaiming, "I actually think she wanted me to ride to my fall! I rather thought the idea

did not shock her much. By next morning she had got well under way with cabin-plans—and as the days went by and my troubles and my moods smoothed out, she seemed disappointed that I was not to be driven to embarking upon the endless voyage."

Perhaps I was disappointed—why not? Had he not always proved a calmer, happier soul in a sea-existence away from the warring frictions of the land?

It may be that hardest of misfortunes was the losing of Jack's "dream house" by fire. Everything else paled, however, when one day, overheated on a long walk while suffering from a bad attack of poison-oak, I fell ill. For some time Jack had been absorbed in work, ranch, and other problems; but now, faced with a human, vital consideration, all beside could go by the board. As he said:

"Mate Woman, I always suspected I had a heart, but now I know. I am the proudest man in the world—I have a heart. And when I was face to face with the possibility of losing you, that heart seemed to come right into my throat—I ate it, I tell you, and I forced it down. Truly, truly, I was near dying!"

It was about this time that he said to a man friend, who told me long afterward, "If anything should happen to Charmian, I'd kill myself. I wouldn't try to live without her."

There were strains and wounds unhealable dealt Jack in that unlucky twelve-month, trials of spirit that caused him to say in retrospect:

"My face changed forever in that year of 1913. It has never been the same since."

Still, midmost of all this, he protested having been called a pessimist by a Jewish cub reporter:

"I am not a pessimist at all. Why, I exploited to you that love is the biggest thing in the world, and held out my arms to you and to all the world in love while I was talking to you. No man who is a lover can be a pessimist.

When you have grown a few years older, you will realize that a man who disagrees with your political, economic and sociological beliefs, does not necessarily have to be a pessimist—especially if he be a self-proclaimed lover."

I was not surprised when Jack announced that he had made a gamble. Two brothers-in-law of a famous writer, with alluring credentials, had approached him with a proposition to exchange his signature for certain Mexican land stocks. Jack looked very carefully into the business, and assured me he was safe in case the project fell through. "I invest nothing, you see. They want my name in it, that is all; and I stand to win." But they got him in the end.

Then there was a so-called "fidelity" loan outfit that "trimmed" him for a similar amount. This matter was taken into court, and while the company was patently fraudulent, it won upon a technicality. Jack had chosen a youthful lawyer who had his career to make:

"Might as well give an unknown a chance! And he'll probably represent me as well as another." He was fond of saying: "A practitioner is one who practices upon his victims, anyway!"

These two ventures left Jack out of pocket about ten thousand dollars. Once I made reference to them, and he said:

"Please—I don't want to talk albout them at all." Which was unlike his usual eagerness to elucidate his affairs. It must be recorded that when he went into speculations, he labeled them frankly:

"Remember what I tell you, in case these go wrong—that they are deliberate gambles. I think they are good gambles; but sheer gambles they are. There's nothing like playing a flyer on a long chance. Pure lottery. Sometimes a chance proves a big winner. I've never won anything yet. Maybe now's my chance!"

All I had to say was that a man who "made good" as he did, in all his obligations, had a right to "take a flyer"

upon occasion. Jack smiled with pleasure; and his face bore the same expression when he told some one how, one day aboard the Roamer, lying off an inland city, I had said:

"Don't let yourself get stale aboard, if you feel like having a little recreation. Why don't you go ashore and look up a good card game of some sort. It will do you good."

He took the suggestion, but returned shortly.

Oh, I pirooted around a while, and watched some playing; but I didn't see anything that looked half so good to me as this cabin and the little wife-woman who wanted me to do as I pleased! . . . Where's that pinochle deck? I can beat you a rubber of three out of five games before Sano has that fish-chowder ready."

January aboard the Roamer saw Jack drafting his first chapter of "The Mutiny of the Elsinore"—a whacking good sea-story, true, modern; beneath the romance and action a heartfelt protest against the decayed condition of the American merchant marine. It was finished in August, and serial publication, under title of "The Gangsters," begun in Hearst Magazine for November. For once, he was touched with his creation. This from my diary: "Mate has a great moment in creating the character of Captain West. Stopped me as I went by, to read me morning's work; and his eyes were shining with joy in our mutual appreciation of what he had done." In my gift-copy is written, dated September 21, 1914:

"Lying on the beach at Waikiki," wrote a Honolulu newspaperman, "I learned that 'The Mutiny of the Elsi-

nore' was written to illustrate how the blond white man from the Northern countries of Europe is rapidly being crowded out of America, and that as he disappears, he will go down fighting to the last, but that he will go down beneath the weight of the Latin, the Slav, and other Southern European races that are pouring into America, whom he can rule as long as he lives, but with whom he cannot successfully compete in the continual struggle for existence."

Home from our blissful river-drifting, Jack plunged deeper than ever into ranch development, the while we honeymooned amidst all the quickening farm activities. A "frosty honeymoon," Jack laughed, for ice was in the ground, and there was an unwonted snowfall. In March he gave me "The Night-Born," with this in its fly-leaf:

In a new edition of "The Call of the Wild," illustrated by Paul Bransom, he wrote:

It was all a part of his yearning to escape from the world at large. Several times, without self-consciousness, even before others, he held out his arms to me when I came into the living room—as if he must clasp something, some one that came nearest to understanding his need.

To facilitate his heavy correspondence, a dictaphone was added to our office equipment—a spring machine, in anticipation of the installation of electricity. I was seriously concerned at this innovation, realizing its threat toward the old intimacy of working hours.

"But think, my dear," Jack explained, justly indeed, "I don't have to wait for you; I can dictate to the damned thing any moment, in bed, even, if I please, while you pursue your precious beauty sleep!"

After which he practised on the "damned thing" for an uninterrupted afternoon, reeling off half a hundred neglected letters. When I came to transcribe them, at the end of each cylinder I was greeted with a love message in a fair imitation of my husband's voice: "Her master's voice!" giggled he. How could any one try to obstruct the progress of such a being!

In April, he went to Los Angeles on moving-picture business, but was back in three days: "I never stay very long where you are not," he said upon returning.

In May "The Abysmal Brute," that "brief for the purification of the prize-fight game," came from the Century Company, catching its author in a darker phase than even I had guessed; for when he put the little book into my hands, I found this inside:

And here is something about love:

A portion of Jack's hypochondria might be laid to the bodily distemper that was leading up to an acute attack of appendicitis. I think he was subsequently in lighter humor. The history of his recovery from the knife, against illustrating that magnificent physical endownment, might be written down as "uneventful" in the annals of surgery, except for its astonishing rapidity.

On July 6, we rushed him to Oakland and into hospital. On the 8th, Dr. William S. Porter operated. Four days later, an important moving-picture conference was held in Jack's room. Other afternoons were filled with callers, and his room was banked in flowers. "Only," the bed-ridden one grumbled sheepishly, "I wish men wouldn't bring me flowers—somehow it makes me feel silly." Frolich, the sculptor, unwittingly mitigated the situation by contributing an absurd corbel, a cowled monk in the ultimate throes of seasickness, and Jack racked himself with mirth. Newspaper men and women came and went, and headlines featuring "The Call of the Wild Appendix," and "Jack London Takes the Count," beguiled his morning tray.

On the seventh day, the patient stood on his feet, then inspected the building from a wheeled chair. Next morning, Dr. Porter, in his own car, conveyed Jack London to the house on Twenty-seventh Street. The obstreperous convalescent insisted upon going out to dine the following night, as well as to the theater, enjoyed a Turkish bath and a café dinner on the tenth day after the operation; and on the twelfth he left for Los Angeles to jump into "the hot test, hardest business fight" of his life with the wily but ingratiating Hebrew, Mr. "Porchclimber." The twentieth day beheld him at home and in the saddle—another tribute to his own vitality and to the cunning of his surgeon friend.

Jack could not abide ether as an anaesthetic. This time

he was first given chloroform, and when, once unconscious, ether was substituted, he resisted so violently that chloroform again had to be resorted to.

With that prescience of the Builder that brooks no delay, Jack mortgaged everything in sight, even our cottage and the new one he had erected for Eliza, to obtain funds needful for his big aims. On August 18, with but $300 in bank, and large obligations pressing, he negotiated another mortgage in order to complete the Wolf House before winter. But I always knew, beyond questioning, that no matter what hazards he seemed to be taking, he divined the way out.

The Bank placed an insurance on the Hill Ranch covering half the amount loaned. There was no other insurance on the huge purple-red pile, since every one agreed that rock and concrete, massive beams and redwood logs with the bark on, were practically fireproof unless ignited in a dozen places, owing to the quadrangular construction and cement partitions.

Nevertheless, three nights later, August 22, the entire inflammable part of the high stone shell was destroyed. I was awakened by voices from Jack's porch. Tiptoeing out, I saw Eliza, by his bedside, point in the direction of the Wolf House half a mile away, where flames and smoke rose straight into the windless, star-drifted sky.

Teams were harnessed, and leaving the Japanese to keep an eye on things at home, if incendiarism was in the air, we drove leisurely across the Ranch. "What's the use of hurry?" Jack demanded. "If that is the Big House burning, nothing can stop it now!"

All the countryside, that had come to feel a personal pride and ownership in "Jack's House," had gathered or was arriving. Public sentiment ran high: and I think, had the criminal or criminals who fired it been detected that night, there would have been a stringing-up to the nearest limbs, in lusty frontier fashion.

Already the beautiful red-tile roof had clattered down inside the glowing walls, and the only care that need be exercised was in regard to the adjacent forest. "Promise me," I said to Jack, so lately out of hospital, "that you won't forget yourself, and overdo." He made the pledge and kept it, very quietly walking about and directing the men.

"Why don't you cry, or get excited, or something, you two?" asked a neighbor. "You don't seem to realize what's happened to you!"

"What's the use?" Jack repeated his thought. "It won't rebuild the house.—Though it can be rebuilt!" he swore cheerfully, purpose in his eye.

But uneraseably beneath our contained exterior lay the vision of it six hours before, palpitating in the mid-summer sunset light, when we had emerged on horseback from the ravine Jack called his house-garden. He had burst out:

"How beautiful—Our House, Mate Woman! Did I tell you that Harrison Fisher, after I brought him home from the Jinks two weeks ago, told some one it was the most beautiful house in the West?"

Yes, Jack laughed and buoyed up the spirits of the Ranch while his dream castle ascended in lurid smoke that hot August night. But when at four in the dawn, the tension relaxed, and uppermost in his mind loomed the wicked, cruel, senseless destruction of the only home he had ever made for himself, he lay in my pitying arms and shook like a child. After a few moments he stilled, and said:

"It isn't the money loss—though that is grave enough just at this time. The main hurt comes from the wanton despoiling of so much beauty."

A long pause, and then, referring to the recent death of the bridegroom of a young friend:

"Do you know—thinking it all over, I'd be willing to go through this whole night again, and many times, if it could bring Tom back!

We never did learn whose hand applied the torch. I had all but written assassin. For the razing of his house killed something in Jack, and he never ceased to feel the tragic inner sense of loss. To this day the ruins of amethystine stone, arch beyond arch, tower above tower, stand mute yet appealing. Total strangers, not all of them women, have wept before them, have cried out, "Poor Jack!"

From his immediate actions, however, none but Eliza and I guessed the extent of his repining. Something had to be done, and quickly. Forni, the master-mason, must be taken in hand. He was like a father who had lost a child, and in danger of losing his reason. Two of his men, the big, blue-eyed Martinelli brothers, wandered around the unapproachably hot ruins like spirits suddenly bereft of Paradise, crossing their breasts and murmuring, "Mary!" "Christ!" Even Jack had to turn away when the man who had nailed the last Spanish tile before the conflagration, said with wet eyes: "Well, my roof never leaked, anyway!"

The fire was on Friday. On Monday, Jack had the entire crew putting up a splendid retaining-wall of mossy gray stone, that had long been in his eye, on the right of a driveway to the smoking walls which came to be known simply as The Ruins. Eliza was scarred to the soul by the sudden wiping out of her work—she had superintended the building from start to finish; but she met Jack whole heartedly in showing the workmen and the country round about that the end of the world had not come. It was when we came to readjust that the loss became most evident.

My diary calls it up:

"We lay aside notes and samples, and plans drawn for this and that, and feel as if the bottom had fallen out of everything—light, queer, unreal.

I have been asked why Jack London, socialist, friend of the common man, built so large a house. And I have been glad that there were those who asked, for it has ever been

my suspicion that some one who waited not to ask, set the brand to that house.

How shall I say? Jack could not traffic in small things, any more than he could deftly handle trifling objects with his fingers. All he did was in a large way. His boyish memories were of moving from one small, inadequate wooden domicile to another. Being what he could not help being, and remaining true to himself, lover of large and enduring things, he must invite spaciousness and solidity—room to breathe in, and for others to breathe in. The ancient frame cottage in which on the ranch he lived and worked and received all men at his table, was entirely disproportionate to his needs. Being so indefatigable and systematic a worker and thinker he required everything to his hand. A smoothly running domestic menage made for efficiency in other matters. Here, where he had to live during the three years while the Wolf House building went on intermittently, the rooms were crammed and jammed and spilling over with the very implements of his many branches of endeavor. Only the combined efforts of the two of us, and later a third, a secretary, made it anything less than distracting for Jack to function in the cramped apartments. Three-quarters of his library was packed away molding in the big stone barn half a mile away, and many the time he could not lay his hand upon some volume especially needed.

Wanderer, yet deeply fond of his own home, a place for the permanence of his treasures—curios, blankets, books, "gear"—he sighed with content knowing that in the big house there would be a story in one wing devoted to the library; above that, his roomy work-den; on the first floor, dining room and kitchen. The middle story of the opposing wing was to be mine—a place where I might retreat to rest and call my soul my own when the outside world was too much within our walls. Above, Jack's sleeping tower reared. Beneath mine were the guest chambers, and, still

below, servants quarters and the like. The connecting link of these two wings formed a two-story living-room, partially flanked by a gallery; and underneath this high hall lay what Jack termed the "stag room," where no female might venture except by especial ukase from the lords of creation who might lounge and play billiards and otherwise disport themselves therein. The house foundation measured roughly eighty feet from corner to corner.

It should be thought of, that house, in relation to Jack, not as a mansion, but as a big cabin, a lofty lodge, a hospitable tepee, where he, simple and generous despite all his baffling intricacy, could stietch himself and beam upon you and me and all the world that gathered by his log-fires. I know a friend who appreciated this largeness of the man, and who with man's tenderness calls him the Big Chief.

To one who suggests that this house would have been a recreation place for guests acquired by the sole reason of Jack's fame and prosperity," I am able to protest that it would have been the contrary in the Wolf House as in the rickety cottage, our transient household would have been made up mostly of the wanderers, the intellectual (and otherwise) hoboes, sometimes washed, sometimes not, while the master drove his pen for the multitude without. As always, these would have come to sit with us, and furnish grist for Jack's unsleeping brain-mill. That was the sort of "inspiration," to quote my inquirer, he would have continued to draw about him "within such walls of stone." Why, the very form of the rough rock hacienda was an invitation, with its embracing wings, its sunny pool between the wide, arched corridors and grape-gnarled pergola! The reason that seekers after the truth about Jack London find more reminder of him in the simple red boulder that lies upon his ashes than in the aching ruins of his great house, is because they do not know the all of Jack London. He

was a man before all else—big and solid, and spacious, and unvaryingly true to himself.

And so with his ranching. There, too, he wrought largely: "No picayune methods for me," he would vow. "When I go into the silence, I want to know that I have left behind me a plot of land which, after the pitiful failures of others, I have made productive.  . . . Can't you see? Oh, try to see!—In the solution of the great economic problems of the present age, I see a return to the soil. I go into farming because my philosophy and research have taught me to recognize the fact that a return to the soil is the basis of economics . . . I see my farm in terms of the world, and the world in terms of my farm . . . Do you realize that I devote two hours a day to writing and ten to farming?—my thought-work, my preparation, at night, and when I am out-of-doors."

Similar revelation of himself he gave on the witness stand only a few days before his death, when suit had been brought to restrain him from using his share of the waters of a creek boundary much needed in his scheme of agriculture. But in the whole sad affair, which contributed its weight toward his break-down, not one iota of understanding was accorded him by the prosecutors, among whom were some near and dear to him.

From time to time I would ask: "When, in the years to come, do you think you will ever pull even, financially, with your ranch project?" And it was always with a laugh that he would return: "Never, my dear—at least, I want and expect to have the place eventually sustain itself. That would be the natural object. But it will never make money for me, because there is so much developing I want to keep on doing, endless experiments I want to make."

A noted socialist lecturer, with misapprehension and prejudice in his eye, spent a day or two on the ranch. "At last I see," said he. "I was wrong. In your work here, as you unfold it to me, I see a social creation!"

Once more, let me impress: temperamentally Jack London was a Builder of books, of houses, of roads, of soil, of things that would outlast merely temporary uses. My house will be standing, act of God permitting, for a thousand years. My boat, act of God permitting, will be intact and afloat a hundred years or five hundred years hence. Little call to point out that he did not build for himself alone.

"Who will come after us, Mate Woman!" he looked into the distances. "Who will reap what I have sown here in this almighty sweet land? You and I will be forgotten. Others will come and go; these, too, shall pass, as you and I shall pass, and others take their places, each telling his love, as I tell you, that life is sweet!"

He was fond, at this time, of having me play Arthur Foote's Rubaiyat Suite, particularly the section illustrating

And Macdowell's "Sea Pieces" swept him out upon the tide of his dreams.

True to his determination not to be downcast over the houseburning, Jack redoubled ranch operations. "I am the sailor on horseback!" chanted he. "Watch my dust! . . . Oh, I shall make mistakes a-many; but watch my dream come true." And, as he loved the name of Sailor, Skipper, Captain, for the love he bore the sea, so he now loved as well to be greeted Farmer, what of his overmastering desire to make blossom the exhausted wilderness. Beauty, in his precincts, began to reveal itself more and more in the light of tillable soil, of food-getting efficiency. "Don't grieve about the clearing of that field, or that little clump of scrubby redwoods," he would say. "We get used to a certain view, and the idea of altering it is untenable. But when it is altered, we are surprised how soon we adjust, and even forget. Remember, there is endless wildwood

farther back—it isn't as if I were depriving you of it. Try to dream with me my dreams of fruitful acres. Do not be a slave to an old conception. Try to realize what I am after."

In step with the day-dream went the visions of his slumber, and he loved them: "I am a keen dreamer, and I love to dream. It seems to me that my life is doubled by the amount of dreaming I do every night. Often he recounted to me a story of long hours spent in a verdant land where he seemed to be proprietor, rolling country where, just beyond each hill, great schemes of agricultural betterment were flourishing. Many times, he said, I was by his side: but for the most part he would be instructing intelligent foremen how to carry out his ideas. This trend in his unconscious mind increased until the day of his death.

The former quiet of the ranch gave place to a pervasive hum of important matters afoot. Rending blasts of dynamite far afield spoke of a new era in the somnolent order of the old land of the Spaniards. Jack founded his pure bred English Shire stable by the purchase of nothing less than Neuadd Hillside, grand champion of California, and once prize-winner in England. He weighed a ton, and was wondrously shaped withal. Cockerington Princess, champion of her own sex, also came to gladden our eyes, while the converting into stables of theretofore unused stone winery buildings went on apace. Into each barn, for the men to scan and heed, was posted a long list of rules borrowed from a great western express corporation for the care and use of the horses.

"Although the tails of these imported horses are docked, we won't dock their colts," Jack remarked on the day the two grand beasts, pranked out show-fashion in colored worsted, were unloaded from the stock "palace car" amidst much comment in Glen Ellen. "Do you know," he asked me, "why horses like those aren't common sights on the country roads of the United States? I'll tell you: because

our farmers are so stupidly wasteful about saving feed! I mean just that. Instead of crowding the development of a colt, particularly the first year, by care and feeding, he turns it out to grub for itself in pasture. That first year is like the first year of any other baby. It's what so vitally counts."

Six days before his voice was silenced, Jack said something like the following to an interviewer:

"What is the difference between this good team and that team of scrubs? Man alive! What is the difference between that field, as it is now, and the same field as it was two years ago? What is the difference between anything that is strong and fine and well arranged—be it words or stones or trees or ideas or what not—and the same elements as they were in their unorganized weakness? Man—the brain of man, the effort that man had put into man's supreme task—organizing! That is the work of man, work that is worth a man's doing—to take something second-rate and chaotic and to put himself into it until it becomes orderly and first-rate and fine."

He was, in short, really far more interested in introducing better farming into Sonoma, County and the country at large than he was in leaving behind masterpieces of literature.

As usual, for him to think out a thing was to see it done; and early he had learned, with his instinct for teaching and for effort-saving, to instruct others now to act upon what he thought out. Thus, he was pressing his sister hard and ever harder, firing her with the depth and breadth of his outlook. There were long, grilling hours of discussion—he trying to inculcate his principles, she giving him the benefit of what her practical judgment, regardless of books, prompted her to do.

Here are two loose notes among his many:

Discussion but infrequently took place between Jack and the workmen, for lie was fond of learning by argument. Little they could teach him. And so for the most part he kept from contact with them. "Eliza is the captain I have picked out to run this particular ship of mine," he would say to me, repository of his deductions upon each situation as it unfolded, "and you know how much I interfere between captain and man!" But there was often the irk of those who knew less than Jack, who tried to hold him back: "You can't make it work, Mr. London. We have never done it this way."

"Why not?" he would blaze. "Why can't I make it work? Do you think that I learn nothing from the greatest specialists in your profession, when I put in whole nights, month upon month, studying them? What do you know about government bulletins, government deductions based upon scientific principles that have been put to work?"

I take the following from a transcript of evidence in the water-suit before referred to:

"Aren't you a good enough agriculturist to estimate an acre of ground?" was the question put by opposing counsel.

"No," drawled Jack. "We all have our weaknesses. I never could master an acre, by looking at it. I always send somebody out to measure it for me." And to the question, "Have you ever acted as a farmer, practically tilling the soil yourself?" he explained as below:

"I have never had my hands on the handles of a plow in my life, but I know more about plowing than any plowman who ever worked for me. I have acquired practically every bit of my knowledge from the books. I never was a graduate of an university; I never finished the first half of my freshman year at a university; yet I have thought it nothing to face a group of thirty or forty professors hammer-and-tongs on philosophy, sociology, and all the other ologies the group including David Starr Jordan and others of the same high intellectual caliber. I was able to do that and hold a table of debate I, who had never been through a university because I had gotten my knowledge from the same books they had got their knowledge from. The same with plowing and other branches of farm knowledge. I state that I am eminently fitted from my knowledge of the books."

He went on: "My knowledge of agriculture and farming is also derived from actual contact with the soil—looking at it, on occasion hiring experts to come and tell me their diagnoses of these thick soils or bad soils or wrong soils. I find very often that they disagree with one another; then I go back to my books arid find the right clue, applying it, making my experiments year after year, whether in fertilizer or in methods of cultivation or drainage or the thousand factors that enter into successful tillage."

His aloof supervision was expressed in notes to be passed on. "But see that they are returned and preserved, so that I may refer to them at any time."

From a sheaf I choose almost at random:

And first, last, and always, stood his creed:

"What we do must be adequate and permanent."

His plaint to me, aside, when confronted with the obstinate wall of farmer-brains smaller than his own, was like this:

"The reason a man works for me, is because he cannot work for himself. Stupid boobs, most of them, who do not wake up to avail themselves of the fund of knowledge ready for the asking. In the matter of government reports, over and above the price of a postcard of inquiry, knowledge is as free as air."

Out of his despair with the incapacity of employes, their unwillingness to be educated, he coined the phrase "Down the hill," which meant the discharge of those who could neither learn nor take orders. "The more I see of men," he would apostrophize, "the more I turn to the land; yet, in order to manipulate that land, I must deal with those very men who hurt me so with their blind ineffectiveness and lack of foresight. And they try to teach me, who spend my nights with the books. My work on this land, and my message to America, go hand in hand!" And he would

ride away, waving his cowboy quirt, bent upon appraising a worn-out plot of ground with the intention of reclaiming it.

Of course, his experiment was being advertised far and wide by the press. He had, as one farm magazine declared, "ideas on the profession of farming that will do the world more good than all the stories he ever could write."

"When I bought one hundred and twenty-nine acres near Glen Ellen nine years ago I knew nothing of farming," Jack gave out. "I bought the place mostly for its beauty, as a place to live and write in.

"About forty acres was cleared and I tried to raise hay for my horses, but soon found I could scarcely get the seed back. The soil had been worn out; it had been farmed for years by old-fashioned methods of taking everything off and putting nothing back.

"The region was a back-water district. Most of the ranchers were poor and hopeless; no one could make any money ranching there, they told me. They had worked the land out and their only hope was to move on somewhere else and start to work new land out and destroy its value.

I began to study the problem, wondering why the fertility of this land had been destroyed in forty or fifty years when land in China has been tilled for thousands of years, and is still fertile.

"My neighbors were typified by the man who said: "You can't teach me anything about farming; I've worked three farms out! Which is as wise as the remark of the woman who said she guessed she knew all there was to know about raising children—hadn't she buried five?

"I adopted the policy of taking nothing off the ranch. I raised stuff and fed it to the stock. I got the first manure spreader ever seen up there, and so put the fertilizer back on the land before its strength had leaked out. I began to get registered stock, and now I sell a blooded cow at nine months for $40 and an old-fashioned rancher comes along

and wonders why he has to feed a scrub cow for two years and sell her for less than $40.

"An old-fashioned farmer has thirty milch cows and works eighteen hours a day taking care of them and milking them and can make no money. An up-to-date man comes along, buys the place, pays $10 for a Babcock tester and buys milk scales. Eight away he gets rid of ten of the cows as non-productive, and he makes more with two-thirds of the work."

Jack's disappointment that so much of his main "punch" in "The Valley of the Moon" had been lost by wholesale deletion, in serial publication, was mended by the way the published book was received by the agricultural magazines. One of them declared that it "ought to be adopted for a text book by our 'back to the farm,' missionaries. Besides being a firstrate love-story, it is replete with knowledge of rural conditions. "With that familiar universal touch of Jack London's, this book, while essentially Californian, applies and appeals to America, at large. We wonder that it has not been made a part of the curriculum at the agricultural colleges. It is worth dozens of lectures some times delivered to students."

"Why isn't 'The Valley of the Moon' the 'Great American Novel'?" a correspondent wanted to know. "It lets light in upon the question of why the old American stock is dying out. The ignorant, unlettered foreigners, Italians, Japanese, Scandinavian, and the rest, crowd out the good old American, because the American will not, for one thing, if he can help it, live the way the foreigner does. And because, also, the American will not use his head for the improvement of the land. Result, the carcass of the good old superior American fertilizes his own land for the crowding, thrifty, crafty foreigner."

That one man is more fit than another to become a law giver, Jack London has laid down in "The Bones of Kahekili," written five months before he died, one of seven

stories in "On the Makaloa Mat." The old Hawaiian commoner asks:

"Here is something stronger than life, stronger than woman, but what is it—and why?" And Jack, over and above his personal desire and sacrifices toward the masses, speaks his unwilling but inevitable conclusion through the mouth of Hardman Pool:

"It is because most men are fools, and therefore must be taken care of by the few men who are wise. Such is the secret of chiefship. In all the world are chiefs over men. In all the world that has been have there ever been chiefs, who must say to the many fool men: Do this; do not do that. Work, and work as we tell you, or your bellies will remain empty and you will perish.  . . . You must be peace-abiding and decent, and blow your noses. You must be early to bed of nights, and up early in the morning to work if you would have beds to sleep in and not roost in trees like the silly fowls. This is the reason for the yam-planting and you must plant now. We say now, to-day, and not picnicking and hulaing to-day and yam-planting to-morrow or some other day of the many careless days. . . . All this is life for you, because you think but one day at a time, while we, your chiefs, think for you all days and far days ahead."

And the old man: "Yes, it is sad that I should be born a common man and live all my days a common man."

To which Hardman Pool: "That is because you were of yourself common. When a man is born common, and is by nature uncommon, he rises up and overthrows the chiefs and makes himself chief over the chiefs. Why do you not run my ranch, with its many thousands of cattle, and shift the pastures by the rainfall, and pick the bulls, and arrange the bargaining and selling of the meat to the sailing ships and war vessels and the people who live in the Honolulu houses, and fight with lawyers, and help make laws, and even tell the King what is wise for him to do and what is

dangerous? Why does not any man do this that I do? Any man of all the men who work for me, feed out of my hand, and let me do their thinking for them?—me, who works harder than any of them, who eats no more than any of them, and who can sleep on no more than one lauhala mat at a time like any of them?"

"I am out of the cloud . . ." the old man says. "We are the careless ones of the careless days who will not plant the yam in season if our alii does not compel us, who will not think one day for ourselves. . . .

There were timely trips into the interior—Sacramento, Modesto, and to the University of California stock farm at Davis. Eliza Shepard went along further to imbibe and abet the game her brother wanted to play; and Jack came speedily to accept her judgment in the selection of livestock, for her choices came to be the prize-winners at State and County fairs.

A concrete-block silo, twelve feet in diameter, the first of two, and the first of their kind in California, was rising half a hundred feet into the air near the old cowbarns. Jack put his own and his neighbors corn into the first silo that was finished, and neglected his writing to take a hand in the fascinating work of feeding the cutter. Houseguests and servants alike were unable to keep out of the busy scene, and remained to help. Their host boasted: "No material comes up the hill except cement. My own machinery has done the crushing of the rock that my own tools and dynamite have got out of my own land, and that my own draft animals have hauled. My own mixer has made the mortar. My ten-inch drain-tile for the alfalfa fields yonder, has been made right here on the ground. And all this paraphernalia will build a dam at the mouth of that natural sink up-mountain, to impound 7,000,000 gallons of water for irrigation. And think of the pressure for fire protection!"

The "piggery" which Jack invented, and which was built during our fall Roamer cruise, became famous the

world over, not only among farmers but with curious lay men as well. Entirely of rock and concrete, it is on a circular plan, surrounding, with graveled driveway between, a handsome tower wherein feed is mixed and distributed to the "suites" of apartments, with their individual runways, that came to house, first, the white Ohio Improved Chester hogs, and later, Jack's choice of what he deemed a sturdier breed for our climate, the red Duroc Jerseys. A system of flushing and antiseptizing both here and in the barns, rendered premises and vicinity "sweet as a nut," to quote an English visitor who lately registered in the tower guest-book. Crowning a knoll for perfect drainage, surrounded by blossomy madroño trees with bark like Korean red lacquer and glossy leaves so resembling the magnolia, this farm yard "sermon in stone" is an object of distinct beauty.

Jack had conceived the idea of demonstrating that he could restore exhausted grainfields by a system of terracing on a large scale—in his own words, "farming on the level."

"You increase the organic content by levelling, preventing the destructive erosive effects that draw from it the organic content—so that instead of one-tenth of one meager crop a year you can grow three rich crops a year.

"The hillsides are first ploughed along contour lines, and at intervals, depending on the slope of the land, balks, or small ridges, are thrown up. The process is slow, but its advantages from the start are great. Rains are held back to sink into the soil instead of rushing down the hillsides, tearing out great gullies and carrying rich soil down the streams to the ocean.  . . . We have been letting our rich hillsides go to waste, and by ignorant cultivation have increased erosion rather than prevented it. The method I have outlined will restore even impoverished hillsides and turn them into productive fields."

A dozen acres of old French prune trees were brought up to standard; vineyards, once famous, that had gone too

long neglected, were uprooted and given over to barley; and the barley was planted with inoculated vetch.

Beehives, likewise ducks, pigeons, geese, chickens, and a few pheasants, made their appearance on the Hill place as a side issue.

I heard Jack say that "the best blocks of vineyard did not have more than seventy-five percent, of the vines standing when I took over the ranch. In some cases three out of every five vines were missing." But in time he had those "best blocks" yielding as formerly.

And here are his intentions with regard to fertilizing:

"The Chinese have farmed for forty centuries without using commercial fertilizer. I am rebuilding worn-out hillside lands that were worked out and destroyed by our wasteful California pioneer farmers. I am not using commercial fertilizer. I believe the soil is our one indestructible asset, and by green manures, nitrogen-gathering cover crops, animal manures, rotation of crops, proper tillage and draining, I am getting results which the Chinese have demonstrated for forty centuries.

"We are just beginning to farm in the United States. The Chinese knew the how but not the why. We know the why, but we're dreadfully slow getting around to the how."

Before long this modern husbandman had revolutionized the sleepy neighborhood, to say nothing of his employes upon whom he sprung timesheets, rigorously insisting that these be properly filled in each night. "Any man who isn't willing to give an account of his work and time, is welcome to go down hill," was Jack's ultimatum.

A blacksmith in the village went out of business. Jack relieved him of the entire establishment, which was in stalled in one of our cool winery buildings, pleasantly shaded by a "spreading chestnut tree," while a horseshoer and general blacksmith was added to the payroll. The village thought little about the transaction until a paper in a rival community came out with:

"Good boy, Jack! Why not make another trip with your wagon and take the rest of Glen Ellen up to the ranch?"

Then and always, when asked "What do you call your place?" the owner replied, "The Ranch of Good Intentions." Develop it as he might, it seemed to remain only in its merest beginning, in view of his ultimate hopes.

An old neighbor, whose boundaries carve sharply into our property, often suggested that Jack buy him out, lock, stock, and barrel. "But there are too many buildings on your place, for one thing," Jack would object. "It would cost too much to demolish them!" But once he said: "If I ever do buy the Wegener place, I'll turn it over, buildings and all, to my intellectual hobo friends. The community would wax, and oh, my!" As he had written to Anna:

"Some day I shall build an establishment, invite them all, and turn them loose upon one another. Such a mingling of castes and creeds and characters could not be duplicated. The destruction would be great!"

It has always been a sadness to me how, as before hinted, Jack's most intimate acquaintances, given every opportunity to view the magnitude of his interest in agriculture, without exception discounted the importance of it to him, and vice versa. In all the memorial gatherings met so generously after his passing, it never entered the mind of a single friend to whom Jack had expounded his dear ambition, to make mention of the great book he had begun to write upon the mountain fields. I, aghast at the vital omission, protested, and appealed to the lovers of his memory not to forget. The explanation dawned upon me before ever it was put in words by one, a sociologist, who had no inkling of the bearing of agronomy upon economics:

"You see, Jack's agriculture did not impress me as it should have done—probably because I have no interest in agriculture."

In September we made our first visit to the State Fair at Sacramento. Jack was averse to showing his own stock,

holding that putting an animal in "show condition" was a harmful process. His presence at the Fair was for the purpose of getting in touch with "the other fellow" to see what he was doing in the matter of raising draft horses, beef cattle and hogs.

It was during this absence Jack told me that at intervals for months past he had had warning flutters in the region of the heart that gave him sudden moments of foreboding. "Haven't you noticed that I have got into the habit of laying my palm over my heart!" he asked. "I didn't realize I was, until I happened to catch myself at it." He also told me that there had been no report, after an examination by their physician, from a certain life insurance firm to whom he had applied some time back for an additional policy. I, to offset the tremor of my own heart at his intelligence, eliminated one reason after another for his condition, and finally asked if it might be laid to his excessive cigarette inhaling. But he did not take to the diagnosis. After a couple of years the symptoms disappeared.

In mid-October we "joy-sailed on the good, old, dear, and forever dear Roamer," to quote her skipper, spending one of our most care-free seasons, with the resilience that fortunate souls exhibit after an excess of work and emotional endurance. From my diary: "Let's look at the chart we've sailed off," says Jack at two p. m., after our exciting run in a howling norther. Things broke; we missed stays twice on one tack, and went aground in the glistening tules, that were laid flat by the wind. Spouting surf on lee shores. A big scow aground. Ducks flying low. Sierras white with snow, and Mt. Diablo and its range clear-cut sapphire. We did not have a ribbon of canvas on the Roamer except three-reefed spanker and our dandy jib. She eats right up into the wind with that big jib.

In spite of all that has happened this year, Jack reviewed, surveying water and sky with calm, sure eyes, "somehow it seems now as if it has been one of my hap

piest—at least, when I think what I have started on the Beauty Ranch!—At any rate, he finished, pulling the old Tam over his fore-top, "there has been no boredom in it all—no danger of rusting."

One morning in the midst of his work he burst out:

"I'm going to live a hundred years!"

"Yes? Why?"

"Because I want to!"

"It's a good reason—couldn't be bettered. But let me remind you that you're likely to become a widower!"

That is a consideration, reaching for me. "I'll have to think it over!"

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