1915

WANT to hear some of your husband's verse?" he queried with mock gravity, inking a period to his first morning's work upon "The Acorn Planter." "Come below, and listen how it runs along!"

He had much sport writing this thin little volume. But let no one mistake that he was not in dead earnest with regard to its motif. Far from attempting formal versification, he but fixed more noticeably the runic tendency in earlier work which had dealt with the Younger World. When it was done and read aloud, he passed me the last slender sheaf to copy, sighing:

"I don't know what to think of it—and yet, I don't believe it is so bad! Good or bad, however, it is done; so send it along to the Secretary of the Bohemian Club. —One thing about it, though: I'll bet the composers in the Club are going to have merry hell putting music to it. They've done Indian stuff before now; but this goes too far back into the raw beginnings of the race, I fear.  . . . Ready to cast off, Nakata?" And Jack sprang to the Roamer's wheel, and in fine disdain of wind and wave forgot "The Acorn Planter," and all its works.

It was for the very reason feared by Jack that the Grove Play was finally written by some one else. "The Acorn Planter" has never been enacted, but appeared in book-form in 1916. "And somehow, I like the little thing," he would say, passing his hand over it.

"And now," he announced at nine the morning after it was finished," now for a dog-story. I just seem to have to write one every so often."

This was "Jerry," which was followed by a companion book, "Michael," as "The Call of the Wild" had preceded "White Fang." When, Jack gone beyond consulting, I was confronted with the dilemma of issuing "Jerry" simultaneously with a book of the same name from another house, I hit upon "Jerry of the Islands," with "Michael Brother of Jerry" to balance the sequel. Jack had planned, after bringing out both volumes, eventually to combine them under the title of "Jerry and Michael." I remember how he reveled in creating the Ancient Mariner.

"Michael," beneath its delightful romance and character portraiture, is frank propaganda for the stamping out of stage-training for animals. To this end, Jack had for years been quietly collecting data from every available source. No reader who would understand his motive should pass by the Preface of "Michael, Brother of Jerry," which states his views. Out of this book has grown a rapidly expanding, international organization known as The Jack London Club. There are no dues.

"Jerry" and "Michael" appeared duly in The Cosmopolitan Magazine, and the books were published in 1917 and 1918 respectively. "Jerry" was partly written in Hawaii.

Young friends in Stockton persuaded us to leave the yacht at anchor and join a week-end jaunt to Truckee, for the winter sports. There in the High Sierras we toboganned and went on sleighing parties. A visit to the lake where the ill-starred Donner Party had made its last stand against odds, affected Jack—that frontier tragedy, with others of the brave old days, having always stirred his imagination. The skiing, while he watched it by the hour, and ice-skating, Jack would not attempt with his "smashed" ankles, which had been cramping at night. "Getting old,

getting old," he would grit through his teeth while I manipulated the small feet. "Do you realize that your husband is in his fortieth year?"

Then he met "Scotty," otherwise Mr. J. H. Scott, champion dog-musher, with his prize teams of Malemutes and Siberian huskies, gee-pole sleds and all. Jack's pleasure knew no bounds because, forsooth, beyond all personal joy in renewing acquaintance with the trappings of a wonderful phase in his youth, he could now show me the old way of the Northland. "Scotty" appreciated the situation, and we must drive with him. Two sleds swung up to the curb, one driven by Mr. Brady, and we took the novel airing for glistening miles to a neighboring mountain town—Jack behind the eight Malemutes, I drawn by the dozen lighter dogs, little chow-like things of fluff and steel, with plumy curled tails and the brightest, merriest eyes and manners in the world, ready to stampede the outfit any moment a rabbit hove above the white horizon.

"Gee! I wish it were possible to film 'The Call of the Wild,' Jack considered. "What good materials right here! But I don't see how it could be done—a dog hero would be necessary."

"How about your stage-training for animals?" I hinted. But he thought the "cruelty" would be negligible in preparing a dog, whose part at best could be but subsidiary.

"Remember," he worked it out, "a long time, in one place, with no harsh traveling conditions, would be taken to get the dog in shape. A few performances, at most, would do the trick, which is very different from the vaudeville circuit, my dear, where the animal is obliged, fair weather and foul, to go through the same act, often of most unnatural character, from two to four times a day, year in and year out."

Right here is a good place to make clear Jack London's position with regard to a much-mooted issue, that of vivisection. He subscribed to the use, not the abuse of vivi-

section, approaching this subject, as all others, through the scientific avenue.

"No, I'll admit, I'd run a thousand miles rather than see a pet dog of mine cut up. But if it were a choice between having my dog or any dog experimented upon, and my child or any child, I'd say the dog every time."

Thus, he had little time to waste in argument with men and women who made claim that no benefit had been derived from vivisection, no human life saved by the conclusions therefrom. He considered that he knew better, what of the time he spent with the books.

"There will always be fanatics, and there will always be abuse, in any field of research," he would declare. "But the legitimate practice of vivisection should not be interfered with. It should be subject to inspection and control—but not by ignorant and prejudiced sentimentalists, who won't listen to the good features of a proposition, and who exaggerate the regretable."

There was something inimical working in Jack's blood those days. No sooner were we back on the Ranch, than the sporadic cramps were succeeded by an attack of rheumatism in one foot.

"And gaze out of that window, at the weather," he grieved, pointing from his bed to the streaming landscape. "Last winter there wasn't enough rain. This year we're swamped! God doesn't love the farmer! But the draintile is carrying off a lot of the overflow—things are working, things are working!" he cheered up.

Severe pyorrhea of long standing contributed its quota of poison; and, in his acid condition, his yachting fare of twelve-minute-roasted canvasback and mallard, and red-meated raw fish, was hazardous menu. He experimented with emetine, and had the village doctor make tri-weekly calls at the Ranch to give him intramuscular hypodermic injections. Jack's mouth altered considerably in latter years, from loss of all upper teeth and wearing a plate.

The upper lip, once full and narrowing to the deep corners, grew thinner and more straight of line. It was no less beautiful—merely different from the more youthful feature. Jack's face, at whatever age, breaking into smile of lips and eyes, was one that, once seen, was never forgotten. It is undying. It will persist as long as the life of any one who beheld it.

Before sailing for Honolulu on February 24, we made several trips to that loveliest of evanescent cities, the Pan-Pacific Exposition. Jack cared little, as a rule, for that sort of spectacle and amusement. But the sunset metropolis enfolded him in its golden embrace, charmed him into hours of unwonted idleness, through afternoon and blue twilight, listening to the fountains and watching the Tower of Jewels blossom against the starlit skies. One day I particularly recall, when we had arrived early and stepped into the human, holiday atmosphere that pervaded the vast inclosure.

"I never drove a car in my life," Jack threatened. "It's time I began. Woman, climb in!" What I was so summarily invited to climb into was one of the handy electric-driven wheel-chairs that rest many tired limbs. How we laughed; and how the morning strollers laughed with the enthusiastic, noisy boy with the cap and curls, who coaxed the feeble mechanism into doing his will, and when it would not respond, talked to it eloquently before dismounting and lifting it around. It was Jack London, any of you who joined in gayety with the exuberant boy that crisp California morning. Once, stalled momentarily in a geranium nursery behind the giant arbor that was the Horticultural Building, he stopped to admire the floral flames. He did not live to learn that one of them, a large crimson single variety, had been named for himself.

Going to Hawaii had been farthest from our thoughts that winter of 1915, and our decision was a result of the merest turn of events. Jack, beneath almost more than he

could stagger, even with his large earnings, intended to stay close at home and work out his financial salvation under double pressure of work. The Cosmopolitan had offered release from his fiction contract long enough for him to accompany the Atlantic Fleet, carrying the President, on its jaunt through the Panama Canal to the Exposition. Jack's personal desire, or lack of desire to leave home, is expressed in his telegraphic reply:

It was not for me to sail on the battleship, and while I accepted my feminine fate, I declined again to remain in California during an absence of Jack. "I shall go to Honolulu and join Beth," referring to my cousin, Beth Wiley, who was wintering here. "I can be in San Francisco for your return."

Jack, though outwardly falling in with my plan, I think was rather taken aback at the idea of his small woman going her own way, alone. It was amusing to note his restlessness. Not once but many times he would boil over.

"I don't want to go on that damned Panama trip—I want to go to Hawaii with you, and work on 'Jerry' and 'Michael!'"

Or: "Somehow, I can't be content not to see the Islands again, with you."

The exigencies of the European conflict having made it necessary to call off the Fleet's Exposition voyage, Jack's voice rang with the good news:

"Look what I've got! And now, Mate Woman, I can go to Hawaii with you!"

But when, standing on the deck of the Matsonia, we waved farewell to our friends, he confessed:

"Do you know the true reason I am aboard this ship to-day? Because I could not bear to disappoint you—and incidentally myself. I ought not to go away, with all those important things needing my attention. But I just couldn't risk the sight of your face when I should tell you that you'd have to go alone after all!"

"But I wouldn't," said I, with a great relief that our feet were on the outward-bound planking. "I should have staid home, of course, where I belonged—and beside," I put in slyly, "if you had let business keep you home, it would be the first time! You've always been able to manage things from a distance, and the mails and cable facilities are still working."

"You're right," he acknowledged.

This and our next visit, as before written, are detailed in my book "Our Hawaii." In the 1921 edition, I have included three articles written by Jack in 1916, entitled "My Hawaiian Aloha," which one of the Territory's leading men pronounced "worth millions to the Islands."

We took our own servants and set up housekeeping, in the first instance on Beach Walk, whence we came and went on inter-island travels in the group. Our daily life in the pretty cottage included the same working habits as at home; and afternoons were spent on the beach. Each day, after luncheon, saw Jack, often robed in a blue kimono of bold design, carrying a long bag of similar fabric containing reading matter and cigarettes, with a bath-towel wound

turban-wise around his head, soft-footing Kalia Road bound for the Outrigger Club. They were happy hours, lying on the shady sand among the barbaric black-and-yellow canoes, reading aloud, napping, and chatting with our friends. Later in the day we swam through and beyond the breakers and spent some of the most wonderful moments of our united lives floating in the deeper water where, in the swaying, caressing element, undisturbed betwixt sky and earth, all things lost their complicated aspect, and we talked simply and solemnly of the issues that count most in human relationship.

When "The Scarlet Plague," written just before the baby was born, had been received, in it he wrote:

In March he wrote a Preface for "The Cry for Justice," by Upton Sinclair.

The following letter, written on June 3, is interesting:

The next day, still filled with his emotion, he could not restrain himself from passing it on to the author of "Victory":

Never, before or since, have I taken such hazards with the water as during those months at Waikiki, under Jack's

tutelage. Always relying upon that sixth sense of his in matters of life and death, I followed his lead wherever he thought by direction I could go, and accomplished what I would not have deemed possible for myself. But he never led me where he feared I could not safely swim. And when once or twice we had surmounted conditions that kept shorebound the canoes and even surfriders, and returned unexhausted, his joy and pride in his "one small woman" were unlimited.

"You're so little, so frail, white woman of my own kind," he would marvel, his great eyes looking into me as if to discern the fiber of which I was made. Look at that arm, with its delicate bones—I could snap it like a clay pipestem . . . and yet, those arms never faltered in that succession of smoking combers to-day . . ." He tapped his forehead: "That's where it resides that's what makes the trivial flesh and bone able to do what it does!"

Deep thinker though he was, and worshipful of the brain stuff of others, he ever found shining things of the spirit in courageous physical endeavor. I think, in a dozen close years with him, year in and year out, "in sickness and in health," till death did us part, that never have I seen him more elated, more uplifted with delight over feat of one dear to him, than upon one April day at Waikiki.

An out-and-out Kona gale had piled up a big, quick-following surf, threshing milk-white and ominous under a leaden, low-hanging sky. At the Outrigger beach no soul was visible; but a group of young sea-gods belonging to the Club sat with bare feet outstretched on the railing of the lanai above the canoes. Joining them, Jack inquired if they were "going out." "Nothing doing," one laughed. And another, "This is no day for surfboards—and a canoe couldn't live in that mess!" "But we are going to swim out," Jack said. "You'd better not, Mr. London," the boys frowned respectfully. "You couldn't take a woman

into that water." "You watch me," Jack returned. "I could, and shall."

We went. Now, understand: it was not to be spectacular that Jack led me into the sea that day. This was not bravado. With the several weeks' training he had given me in sizable breakers, he expected as a matter of course to see me put that training to account. And I felt as one with him. The thing was, first, to get beyond the diving-stage, for a freshet had brought down the little river a tangle of thorned algaroba and other prickly vegetation, which, with a wild wrack of seaweed, made the shallow almost impassable.

Very slowly we forged outward, and at length were in position where the marching seas were forming and over-toppling. Rather stupendous they loomed, I will confess; but, remembering other and smaller ones and obeying scrupulously Jack's quiet "Don't get straight up and down—straighten out—keep flat, keep flat!" I managed not badly to breast and pass through a dozen or more smoking combers that followed fast and faster.

When I finally ventured, "I think I have had enough," immediately Jack slanted our course channelward where the tide flows out toward the reef egress. But after half an hour we found we were, despite all effort, drifting willy nilly out to sea. By now, the young sea-gods had followed with their boards, fearing we might come to grief; and upon their advice we rejoined the breaking water, and "came in strong" with our best strokes to the Beach.

Which I tell, further to point his passion for physical courage and prowess that after all are but mental. "I'd like you to write books, if you wanted to," was his final word; "but I'd rather see woman of mine win through those great seas out there than write great books!"

Jack's health was fairly good that summer, though he seemed to be on tension, and prone to argue overlong and over-intensely. Indeed, as time went on, he battled with

this and that opponent, or provoked skirmishes, with an increasing fervor and violence that ill-betokened a peaceful old age. Oh, well, I'd rather wear out than rust out!" was his verdict on the matter.

And once Jack told me a thing that will abide like a dove of peace until I die, as one of my sweetest touches with this sweetest of men:

"I never said this to you," he began; "but many years ago, before I knew you existed, I lay one afternoon on a California beach—at Santa Cruz—in one of my great disgusts . . . you know—when I have dared look Truth in the face and become blackly pessimistic about the world and the men and women in it who cannot learn, who cannot use their puny minds. It was a warm, still day; and while I lay, with my face on my arms, over and above the steady breathing of the ocean and splashing of a small surf, there came to me, from very far off, almost like skylarks in the blue, the voices of a man and a woman.

"I couldn't for the life of me figure where the voices came from. I raised my head, but no one was in sight on the beach; and at last, the nearing conversation guided me seaward where I could just barely make out the heads of two persons very leisurely coming in, talking cozily out there in deep water, as unconcerned and comfortable as if sitting in the sand.

"Something inside me suddenly yearned toward them—they were so blest, those two together. And I wondered, lying there sadly enough, if there was a woman in the world for me who so loved the water—the little woman who would be the right woman who would speak my own language—with whom I could go out to sea,, without boat or life-preserver; hours in the water holding long comradely talks on everything under the sun, with no more awareness of the means of locomotion than if walking.——I could have told you this eight years ago," he mused, "that wonderful morning we swam together across Urufaru Bay in Moorea,

while the Tahitians worried about the sharks. . . . I thought of it at the time. But we were not alone. The stage was not set for you and me."

I could see that the shame of civilization, the Great War, worked havoc in him. That any white nation, hunting for a place in the sun, should have made such a thing possible, was never out of his consciousness; and he raved in his choicest vocabulary concerning Germania. Still, he did not think the war would last long. We were on Hawaii, the "Big Island," with the 1915 Congressional junketing party from Washington, on which Jack had been made one of the entertainment committee, when the stunning intelligence came of the sinking of the Lusitania. Jack, for once, was shocked into something akin to silence. To his mind, the best characterization of that crime was the one made by I have forgotten whom: "When Germany, with paean of joy, committed suicide!"

To certain harsh comments upon a young English friend who, answering Great Britain's call, left his mother and his children in Honolulu, Jack pleaded with blazing eyes:

"You do not seem to understand: he had to go. There was no other way out, for him, than the one he chose; he could not have done other than he did . . . as well criticize the flame that burns, as criticize this royal thing of the spirit within him that drew him from success, and love of children, and fat security, half-way across the world to fling himself into the maelstrom of battle, pain and death—all for an Idea.

In the latter part of July, we bade good bye to Honolulu. Jack said: "We must go back soon. I feel as if our visit had been interrupted." For he had made many friends, conquered a few outstanding prejudices, and felt much at home in this neighboring "fleet of Islands" above the Line.

We landed into the annoyance of trouble with the grapejuice company, but it seemed as if difficulties of this

sort were all in the day's work. "What am I to think? I go into the cleanest sort of business, to make the best nonalcoholic drink known, and I get it in the neck, pronto—just like that!"

"But the lake's full of water for my alfalfa, he checked himself, "and that means more life, more abundance of butter-fat from your little Jerseys, bigger Shire colts, heavier beef cattle, and the rest!"

To our mutual rejoicing, the water was warm enough for swimming, and Jack asked his sister to shift a gang from some other section of the ranch, "run up" a log bathhouse of six rooms and lead the necessary piping for two showers. Inside of three days this convenience was a reality, as well as an appropriate accent in the scenery of the meadow. A rustic table and seats, set within a circle of redwoods, two canvas boats forgotten out of the Snark's dunnage, together with a diving float, perfected our equipment for al fresco entertaining.

Jack stocked the lakelet with catfish brought from the San Joaquin river, and these proved a great advantage, both for sport and table.

A trap-shooting outfit was purchased, but he never got around to having it installed. "I can't find a place that seems exactly right," he omplained; "nor a good spot for a tennis court. As for golf links—" he put it up to Joe Mather, "if you'll make suggestions where they can be laid out, I'll go ahead and have the work done."

There had been correspondence with Mr. Edgar Sisson, then editor of The Cosmopolitan, as to writing a "movie" novel based upon a scenario by Charles Goddard, author of "The Perils of Pauline" and other "thrillers" of the screen. Chapters of the novel were to appear in the string of Hearst newspapers, and simultaneously illustrated in the cinema theatres. Jack was not enthusiastic at first, but saw a possible way to recoup his pocketbook from his

tremendous outlay on the ranch. His suggestion being agreed upon for a lump sum running into five large figures with temporary release from his regular measure of fiction, he launched into it with glee:

"Think—it'll be sheer recreation, though I double my usual daily portion, at double my usual rate! And I don't have to do a thing but reel off the stuff, upon Goddard's scenario notes. I don't have to worry about plot, or sequence of events, or contribute a single idea if I don't want to!"

He never ceased to maintain that he hated to write—had to drive himself to it. It made him flare when this was questioned. In reply to an unknown admirer, he wrote: ". . . Let me tell you that I envy you. You delight to write. You delight in your writing. You are enamored of writing, while I, with the publication of my first book, lost all joy in writing. I go each day to my daily task as a slave would go to his task. I detest writing. On the other hand it is the best way I have ever found to make a very good living. So I continue to write. But his best work was conceived in passion for its own sake, and I think one feels his urge of self-expression, while many were his enthusiasms over what he was doing. One short piece of work gave him a great deal of pleasure—a Preface for a new edition of Dana's "Two Years Before the Mast." Because of absence from California, his manuscript did not reach Macmillans in season, and it was a keen disappointment to Jack that the book was published without his appreciation. So the most he could do was to include it in a book-collection, and it appears, under the title of "A Classic of the Sea," in "The Human Drift."

Mr. Sisson and Mr. Goddard paid us a visit to discuss ways and means, because Jack avowed his determination of taking this work to Hawaii, where Mr. Goddard would have to send his installments of scenario for the novelist's guidance. When in the spring of 1916, at Waikiki, he completed

this manuscript of what has been called "frenzied fiction" he wrote a Foreword explaining at length how he had come to lend himself to such a bizarre undertaking. "In truth," he says, "this yarn is a celebration. By its completion I celebrate my fortieth birthday, my fiftieth book, my sixteenth year in the writing game, and a new departure. I have certainly never done anything like it before; I am pretty certain never to do anything like it again. And he then goes deeper into his subject.

"Hearts of Three," they named it; and, as a sympathetic critic has suggested, it should be viewed as something of a joke—the most adventurous, high-spirited, rollicking, ridiculous, impossible stuff in the world, an outrageous thing of delightful absurdity. In this light Jack regarded it, and had the time of his life in its fabrication. He received his money, but died before the story was published in the newspapers; and for some reason it has not, up to 1921, been presented upon the screen.

Our loss of Nakata, to marriage and career, at the end of 1915, constituted more than a domestic flurry. He had nearly every prerequisite of the close and confidential servitor, and it is hard to decide which suffered more from his absence, Jack or myself. All in all, I think it was Jack. Next, our guests missed his cheery and charming service, for "Where is Nakata?" ordinarily followed greetings from our friends.

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