1916

AND now I come to the last and most difficult movement in my undertaking. The mere narrative is nothing that in March, with our Japanese, we sailed on the Great Northern for Honolulu, rented a spreading old bungalow at 2201 Kalia Road, Waikiki, and lived the gay life of the subtropic city, breaking the round with wonderful inter-island explorations, and returning to California after seven months.

What is so difficult is the developing of this last earthly phase of Jack London, so that all who run may read and not wonder overmuch why, through sheer neglect, he cut himself off, or caused himself to be cut off from the larger fulfilment of himself. For I truly believe that his best work was yet to come. That he believed it, I am equally convinced. "Just wait, wait until I've got everything going ahead smoothly, and don't have to consider the wherewithal any more, and then I am going to write some real books!"

Jack's life is the story of a princely ego that struggled for full expression, and realized it only in a small degree. There were so few to heed his deeper self-manifestations. As a mere lad, he was conscious of that superiority and of its environmental discrepancy, and all the while fought for the congenial environment. As he grew in mental stature, he recognized himself as part of the whole ego-substance, and proceeded to fight for the proper environment for egos

other than his own. Hence, Jack the Individualist, and Jack the Socialist.

The result of his individual struggle for expression, when young, was Success, Recognition. Yet, as I have already written, such was the universal quality of his mind that he would have reached success, as the world regards it, by way of any medium of expression he had selected under ceaseless urge of that princely ego. Perhaps, as the years lapsed, if the world had demanded more, he might have been forced into an expression somewhere nearly adequate to his inner demand. But the world acclaimed what he did do, and the money that same world paid enabled him to search for happiness—a goal in itself. Yet happiness, as he saw it, was endeavor, always endeavor, the accumulation of knowledge, and to no small end. He created an environment which bade fair to balance in extent his royal requirement—the wide-reaching acres with their herds of the best, the lavish hospitality, the great house. Yet throughout he preserved the collective ideal, gave to others the unselfish help of his brain and time and money, impelled by an incorruptible ideal of making the world a better place for his having lived in it—of "causing two blades of grass to grow where one grew before."

But with all this in his grasp, the instinct to search still drove him on. He was doomed to remain unsatisfied, and unsatisfied he remained. The ultimate aim could not be fame, nor money, nor anything the world had in its gift. I had almost said that Love itself left him empty; but insofar as he loved Love, and could not live without Love and what understanding and ease of spirit Love could vouchsafe in his unguarded moments of despair, Love, I say, given and returned, kept him alive for many a year. This I know.

He had tried during his life all the ways known to man for getting away from an insatiable ego. And all he had really succeeded in was to obscure the demands that he had by his white logic interpreted, and had striven so hard to

placate. It may be he sensed this long before he came face to face with and acknowledged it; and this probably led him more or less consciously to greater emphasis upon all the things with which he drugged his perception of futility—his work, his amusements, and the dream of scientific husbandry into which his unquenchable pioneering spirit had led him. And when, once in a while, he brought up and staggered before a flash of insight to the way he was bound, he called upon all the artifices of a superb intellect to prove he was right in defying the vision. It was a regal battle, and he lost—at least, so far as concerns the perceptions of most of us who are left. No man with his capacity could ever really bury the melancholy heritage that is coincident with the brain that seeks and scans too closely the fearful face of Truth. "My mistake in opening the books," he would repeat. "Sometimes I wish I had never opened the books." Still, except as he was warped by sickness, at any time he was glad to quote, " 'E liked it all." The game was worth the candle.

The conflict shows in the caliber of literature that first earned him renown, and the caliber of that which served his chosen end, preaching the things which filled his brain and hands with work that waided off the final capitulation he made to his fate. The first is distinguished by the impersonal note; the second marked equally by the personal. Had the human clay of him been equal to his mental capacity and urge, he might in time have stood out grand and free and his gift to the ages been of unequaled value. As note:

For months Jack had been reading, in his intensive method, in conjunction with the works of all the best alienists, upon the subject of Psychoanalysis—Freud, Prince, and, most of all, Jung. Much he read aloud, calling me to him, or following me about to instil certain passages. But it was one utterance, in that summer of 1916, that made me realize, distinct from the excitement that the conquest of

Knowledge always produced in him, that he had at last come upon something commensurate with his highest powers of penetration. His eyes like stars, his face still with a high solemnity I had never before seen upon it, in a voice so prophetic that my soul has been listening ever since, he said:

"Mate Woman, I tell you I am standing on the edge of a world so new, so terrible, so wonderful, that I am almost afraid to look over into it."

As I came to look with him over that brink into the possibilities of that new world which is as old as Time, I began to see what it was beginning to mean to him who had sensed its abysses as long ago as when he wrote "The Call of the Wild," ay, and before that. With his synthetic mind, he would have been a splendid exponent of what bids fair to be the limitless scope and application of the principles of Psychoanalysis. At times, when he expounded his hopes of what he would be able to accomplish in this research I was caught up into his vision. But so terrific was the marvel of what he dared dream he might do, that one's every-day senses reeled away from the contemplation. I have no words, no skill, with which to transfer to my reader this look into the gulf. But why, Jack thought, if he could learn to analyze the secret soul-stuff of the individual and bring it up to the light of foreconsciousness, could not he analyze the soul of the race, back and back, ever farther into the shadows, to its murky beginnings? His eyes, when he thus speculated, were those, not in the least of a fanatic, but of a seer, deep as the ages. He walked on air, yet the actual material practically of it appealed before all.

While he laid aside the heavy volumes read and annotated, until such time—say on a voyage to Japan in 1917—as he could review them with me, Jack applied their principle more than was entirely safe for the complacency of those with whom he came in contact. If he had ever before used

the world and its inhabitants to keep him interested in the game of life, he now employed them in ways they never guessed in casual association with him. Applying his new system of approach, all in the way of social intercourse he was delving into the soul-stuff of men and women as they never would have dared analyze the significance of their own repressions. He went to startling lengths in this risky game of "playing with souls." Old curiosities, long since laid, were resurrected, to be dipped in the alembic of psychoanalysis, and he experimented with his own caprices in the most unexpected ways.

Perhaps the majority of the minds which he laid bare were not of a quality to make his investigation profitable. However that may be, it brought to him—and this was my greatest fear—yet more disillusion with the human element that had already suffered much in his regard. When the measure of a thinker s associates steadily shrinks in his estimate, that thinker, maddened by their immobility to ideas, is facing annihilation. The situation becomes insupportable. The "will to live" weakens and breaks down, no matter how fair the world nor Love how sweet. Jack's conclusions were saddening in the extreme. A paragraph from H. G. Wells's "The Discovery of the Future" so appositely expresses Jack's attitude from time to time, that I shall quote it instead of trying to reconstruct his own words:

Wells goes on to say that the pain of the world is also shot with promise; but Jack at this stage was grudging of this expectation.

I was too close to it all to see the full drift of his fall; or, better, in my characteristic way, while doing my best in a given set of circumstances, I would not admit what I shrank from facing. The test of my endurance was severe, for Jack required so greatly of me in the capacities of wife, lover, friend, even confessor, for he withheld nothing— nothing, I repeat—of what he was passing through; and my responsibility, it may be guessed, was almost more than I could bear and preserve a cheerful poise. That he missed little of this, I am assured. More than thrice he suddenly remarked: "You are the only one in the world who could live with me!" Which was with direct reference to his intellectual vagaries, and not to any personal difficulties. It is all an inexpressibly dear heritage—the memory of that with which he entrusted me. I might think I had failed in many particulars, except for the continuance of his confidence and his almost childlike dependence upon me when his burden was too great. A generous friend, talking with him shortly before his death, has given me Jack's declaration, speaking of myself: "She has never failed me. I have had the comfort of her stedfastness, and have gained strength from it. She is always ready to act with and for me at any moment."

No matter how strange he seemed at times, nor how isolate, I learned I must stand by, night and day, for his instant need. There would be, say, a tirade against the infinitesimal natures of folk, or an argument, and he might work himself into a frenzy wherein I accused him of intellectual unfairness; or, we might disagree vitally upon some personal matter. Once, twice, I withdrew and left him to work out his humor by himself. But he could not, or would not. I found myself not daring to pursue this course; and thereafter, in the Islands and later at home, when the impulsion was upon him, I did my best to maintain my end in discussion, into the small hours if necessary, until he was exhausted, when, suddenly, in his fighting-face there would

dawn the sweetness that disarmed anger and criticism alike in friend and foe. He would fall asleep in my arms, awakening penitent for the pallor of my cheeks that no smile could camouflage, and gratitude for the smile. A conversation something like this would ensue:

"Bear with me, Mate Woman—you're all I've got."

"I do. I do."

"Then, do more than that!"

"I will! I will!"

Any chiding that he was not taking sufficient nourishment, and neglecting his exercise, elicited the time-honored response:

"I'm all right—don't bother. And you're never up in time to see the huge breakfast I tuck away—three cups of coffee, with heavy cream, two soft-boiled eggs, half of a big papaia!"

But it was months before I learned that every morning the ample bedside repast, which he so enjoyed with his morning Pacific Commercial Advertiser, was completely lost. That abiding pride in his "cast-iron stomach" had suffered an eclipse; and with it his God-given ability to sleep whensoever he elected. This was indeed a desperate case, and I was frightened, because from birth on I myself had bedded with insomnia, and feared its consequences upon one of Jack's temperament. Only three times did he tamper with a narcotic, for he realized its peril. "Oh, have no fear, my dear," he reassured me more than once, "I'll never go that way. I want to live a hundred years!"

It being an unwritten rule that I was never to be disturbed from sleep, I awoke in swift terror one morning in Honolulu to find Jack, his face working with pain, at my door:

"I had to call you, Mate I am sorry but you must get a doctor. I don't know what it is, but it is awful!" And he crept back to his sleeping-porch. His friend Dr. Walters

was out, and Dr. Herbert responded, as best he could helping Jack through the agony, diagnosing the cause as a calculus.

I suppose it is a wise wife who, rather than make marriage hideous by nagging, lets her husband destroy himself in his own uncaring way! Even with the excruciating omen of worse to come, Jack made little or no effort to put off his day of dissolution. The friendly physicians exhorted in vain: he clung to his diet of raw aku (bonita), and, aside from the breakfast fruit and occasional poi, which he termed a "beneficent food," quite neglected the vegetable nutriment his malady demanded, while the cramping of his ankles did not lessen.

As for exercise, save for the most desultory and infrequent dips off-shore, he took none. My question, "Are you going to swim with me to-day?" was oftenest met with:

"Yes—believe I will . . . No, I'm right in the thick of this new box of reading-matter from home. Oh, I don't know—the water looks so good . . . But no; I'll go out in the hammock where I can read and watch you." And his bodily inertia won out.

But it would strike me, looking back across the seawall to where, in blue kimono, he swung under the ancient hau tree, that he read little; whenever I waved back to him there was an immediate response that bridged the jade and turquoise space. But the arm stretched out to me was all too white from seeking the shadows. If I did not ask him to go out, then, the same day or another, he would remind me of it, with a mild reproach.

Not a block would he walk to the electric tram, but called an automobile three miles from town whenever he wanted to go in for a shave. If he were not going out, and expected no company, he spent the day in bathing-trunks and kimono and sandals, not only for coolness at work, but because it was too much effort to dress. This calls up an incident that occurred one day in Honolulu, though I did not come

upon the inwardness of it until long afterward. It goes to illustrate the sheep-mindedness of the mass of beings who wish to find famous men and women fashioned in the image of the quibbling, foppish, gnat-brained incarnation that is their own. Jack himself, small as was his respect for these, never failed to react to the clumsy stab of their inert yet harmful smugness—harmful because it influences and fixes the attitude of masses of humans who might, otherwise guided, attain a freer view of life.

A woman of Russian birth, passing through, wanted to meet this man Jack London, who so dominated the fancy of her countrymen. According to her story, certain tourist acquaintances warned her: But he isn't decent—he's likely as not, we hear, to receive you dressed only in a kimono!" The lady was not to be balked; and one day, unannounced, she called during Jack's working hours. In spite of his irritation at being so unceremoniously interrupted, she found him courteous and interesting, and did not stop over-long.

"What did you think of him? What is he like?" her informants asked.

"I think he is a very decent fellow," the Russian began.

But was n't he in his kimono?"

"Why, yes—I believe he was," coolly she rejoined. "And I want to say that, in his kimono, he seemed to me more fully clothed than most of the men one meets in full conventional attire."

Except that he sat through long dinners without eating, Jack was normal enough to all intents. When anxious hostesses drew his attention to the untouched plate, he would repeat that story of the large breakfast, and declare that except at a Hawaiian luau (feast), where he made a practice of banqueting shamelessly, he would rather talk than eat; and thereupon he closed the topic by taking up the thread of his discourse where it had been cut.

He drank very moderately. "Sometimes I think I'm saturated with alcohol, so that my membranes have begun to rebel," he observed upon more than one occasion. "See—how little in the glass and this is my first drink to-day!" A month before the end, in response to a telegram from Dr. W. H. Geystweit, Pastor of the First Baptist Church, San Diego, California, Jack wired:

In Hawaii for the most part he ordered "soft" drinks or "small beer" during the nights we spent in the open-air cafés, I dancing, he visiting at the tables with his friends. But ever he kept an eye upon me, as if looking for some one stable in a crashing world. Seldom, swinging near, did I fail to catch his glance and a little indulgent smile he had for the "kid woman" who, loving the dance, had gone without it for so many traveling years after marrying him.

In a côterie of excellent players among Honolulu's men and women, both American and Hawaiian, much of Jack's recreation time was at cards mostly bridge, with now and then a poker game.

To show the restlessness that was in him, I can instance

the entertaining we did. Day after day at our house it would be a luncheon, a bridge party, tea, swimming, a dinner, and theatre, or dancing either at home or on the Roof Garden or at "Heinie's," and, likely, a midnight swim before bed. Some of the luncheon guests might be included in the afternoon cards outside in the little jungle of that magnificent hau tree, but new players had also been bidden. A fresh bevy blew in for tea and bathing, and the diners would be still another party. Friends for noonday or dinner usually numbered an even dozen, since the round table accommodated just that number. We lived in a whirl; and many times, while I was at the telephone inviting for three different events for a certain day, Jack would come pattering in his straw sandals across the large palm-potted rooms, and whisper: "While you're about it, better plan the crowds for the day after."

A Honolulu neighbor, Charles Dana Wright, one day asked Jack:

"Why do you always have twelve at your table?"

"Because it won't hold any more!" was Jack's reply.

He seemed running away from himself, filling in every moment, as if uneasy with too many disengaged dates in prospect. Yet he would suddenly tire of it all, and there would be a lull. One night, after an undisturbed day when we had worked, and swam, read aloud, played pinochle, and eaten alone together, he breathed with satisfied demeanor: "Happiest day I ever spent in Hawaii!"

He had a way, at work in his cool green lanai (veranda)—a mile from where B.L.S. once wrote by Waikiki waters—of looking aside upon me as I walked about the long rooms; and when I caught him at it, his lips would frame kisses in the air. What was behind the inscrutable, star-blue eyes that were never so beautiful as that summer in his Happy Isles, when he made no attempt to retard an illness that could not be less than fatal if not checked? Was that mind that had "known the worst too young," and that

he had systematically overworked, now longing for surcease, "restless for rest," as William Herbert Carruth so aptly put it? Does that account for the apparently deliberate want of resistance? He, the eternal fighter, patently refused to fight for the reconstruction of a failing body, or to exert his powerful will to conserve his physical strength. On the contrary, it would seem as if the longing, at least of his unconscious mind, for cessation of effort to continue existence, swung him into a non-resistance which made for destruction. When he looked at me as he would look, was he hiding something he knew would fill me with terror—did he have an intuition that I would be unthinkably alone with the falling of the autumn leaves? One late after noon, in the hammock, he read me "In Autumn," from George Sterling's "The Caged Eagle," just received from the poet. His voice broke at the last, and the eyes he raised to mine in a long, long gaze, were deep pools in which I felt us both drowning. But when at length he spoke, it was of the wonder of the man who had written the poem.

I shall never know. All I do know is that he was upon the night ward slope of living, and that all I had to cling to was what sometimes fell from his lips when I had thought him absorbed in book or writing—abruptly, as if wrung from him:

"God!—Woman, if you knew how I love you!"

And again, his eyes burning:

"Child, child—you don't know what love is!"

Or he would murmur in a golden voice, across the length of the house, so that I must harken closely to hear:

"I love you . . . I love you."

Once:

"Take my heart in both your hands, My Woman."

To me, who asked nothing from fate but to serve, he said one day:

"I can refuse you nothing. Anything you ask for, in seriousness, you may have. I am so entirely yours; you

can have anything you want of me. I'd do anything for you—actually, I believe I'd murder, if you asked me?" He added: "Some day, when we are seventy, you and I, in the autumn of our long years together, I'll tell you some things about myself—how I have come to know how unthinkably I love you."

All this intensity was part of the raw state in which he was, dying, the dear heart, and how were we to know? One morning, it seems he thought I had told him a deliberate falsehood in a vital connotation, and I was at a loss to account for his alarming recklessness throughout the day. That night, worried, for once I eavesdropped, and heard him with his own soul: "To think of it! To think of it!" he wrestled with despair. The next day, quite as unwittingly as I had dealt the erroneous impression, I undid the same. Then it all came out, with boyish jubilance in his relief, how he had agonized that "All I've got in the world" had thrown him down!

When he heard that the old bungalow, whispering of romance, was on the market, he came to me, his eyes dilating with the pleasure of giving :

"Do you want me to buy it for you, or do you prefer to wait till the war is done, and then get a sweet three-topmast schooner, fit her out, throw aboard your grand piano, a big launch, and a touring car, and start around the world for years!"

Naturally I chose the schooner, and told him that if for only selfish reasons, the war could not terminate any too soon to please me!—There he was, at it again—his "crowded hour of glorious life" all too short for the large plans for work, thought, play! I finger the sun-tanned notepad upon which he scribbled expense calculations for that post-bellum voyage: Six men, so much; Captain, so much; Engineer, Mate, Cook, Servants, Doctor—with loose margins for his figures. "But, Mate," I objected, "that means no letup for you—harder work than ever." "What of it?"

cheerily he laughed it off. "I make my work easy—I've got 'em all skinned to death!"

Those little note-pads of Jack's—I find them at every turn. "Always carry a notebook," he advised. "Travel with it. Eat with it. Sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain. Cheap paper is less perishable than gray matter, and lead pencil markings endure longer than memory."

Certain photographs, one of himself and me in the garden, and one of myself on Neuadd Hillside, he kept near his work-table, and often looked at them. And at home afterward, "Charmian, Charmian . . ." he would murmur as he had murmured the day we first met, "I love your name. You've no idea how I stop all work and reading, and lie here just looking at your face in the frame."

There were six weeks on end in Hawaii that Jack seemed quite his healthy, hearty self. This was during what can best be termed a "royal progress" upon which, in company with Miss Mary Low, a part-Hawaiian friend, diamond-trove of information and imagination, who made it possible at that time, we encircled the "Big Island." The details of this journey I have related in "Our Hawaii." It was a passage of unalloyed pleasure, fraught with plans for the future when we should return to do the thousand things that this time must be left undone. In my hand at this moment is one of Jack's yellow note-pad leaves, scribbled with the most fragmentary penciled items:

"How not to know Hawaii . . . How the Tourist does—it the tourist route—never dreams.

"How to know Hawaii. Wait—under that surface excess of hospitality—the deeps of a remarkable people—really exclusive . . . Make no quick judgments. Come back, and come back, and then, some day, you will begin to find yourselves not only in their homes but in their hearts. And you will be well beloved . . ."

"I almost think," he said in retrospect, "that this has been the happiest month and a half I ever knew!"

On that trip, having finished "Michael Brother of Jerry," he wrote his last gift to the Islands, the three articles which were published in The Cosmopolitan Magazine, "My Hawaiian Aloha." A few short months there after one of the Territory's most distinguished mouthpieces said of him. "In the death of Jack London Hawaii suffered an irreparable loss. . . . Among our most lasting memories of him will be his earnest and enthusiastic assistance in the organization of the Pan-Pacific Union. There was nothing that he disliked more than making speeches; but at meeting after meeting his voice was heard advocating the principle of the brotherhood of mankind and the recognition of that principle as the guiding star of the peoples of the Pacific."

Next, Jack produced a short story, "The Hussy," dating the end of the manuscript at "Kohala, Hawaii, May 5, 1916." "The Hussy" is in book entitled "The Red One," issued posthumously. Followed the short story, "The Red One," in which is evidenced the author's profound meditation upon the reaching out of the most primordial toward the most cosmic—all in stride with his study in race consciousness. Sometimes I wonder if it can be possible, in the ponderings of the dying scientist, Bassett, that Jack London revealed more of himself than he would have been willing to admit—or else, who knows? more of himself than he himself realized. His ultimate discouragement with the endless strife of humanity even unto the modern horrors of the Great War, are in the mouth of his puppet, speculating upon the inhabitants of other planets, and playing square with the old cannibal, Ngurn, because, forsooth, the old man had, according to his lights, "played squarer than square," and "was in himself a forerunner of ethics and contract, of consideration, and gentleness in man."

"Had they won Brotherhood? Or had they learned that the law of love imposed the penalty of weakness and decay? Was strife, life! Was the rule of the universe the pitiless rule of natural selection?"

Some one has written of Jack London: "This Lord of Life was never far from the consciousness that he held a brief and uncertain sovereignty. He himself has said:

"Man, the latest of the ephemera, is pitifully a creature of temperature, strutting out his brief day on the thermometer." And: "All the human drift, from the first apeman to the last savant, is but a phantom, a flash and a flutter of movement across the infinite sky of the starry night." He thrilled to George Sterling's line, "The fleeting Systems lapse like foam."

A couple of months before the "royal progress," Jack had sent in his resignation from the Socialist party, the reasons given surprising some of his radical acquaintances who had scoffed that he was becoming "soft."

"Radical!" he would snort, lurching about in his chair, "next time I go to New York, I m going to live right down in the camp of these people who call themselves radicals. I m going to tell them a few things, and make their radicalism look like thirty cents in a fog! I'll show them what radicalism is!"

Among his equipment of notes are the following addresses:

The Liberal Club, The Greenwich Village Inn (Polly's Restaurant) The Hotel Brevoort, James Donald Corley, Hippolyte Havel, Sadakichi Hartmann, Charles and Albert Boni, John Rampapas, Hutchins Hapgood, II Proletario, J. J. Ettor and Iva Shuster, Carlo Tresca, Arturo Giovannitti, McSorley's Saloon.

Jack's action in resigning, though it had been gathering momentum for some time, was precipitated by the withdrawal of a friend whose reasons were based upon the prevalent "roughneck" methods of other than the "well-

balanced radicals." I can still hear Jack's battle-tread, somewhat muffled by straw slippers, as he marched toward my door, and his peremptory voice: "Take a letter please!" I can see him plant himself on the edge of my bed, curls towsled, wide eyes black with purpose under the brows that were like a sea-bird's wings, his full chest half-exposed by the blue kimono, and one perfect leg thrust forth to steady himself. And here is what he rapped out, as fast as I could click the keys:

The foregoing, published in the Socialist press, caused much comment. Jack's grim amusement can be pictured when it was reported that a distinguished member of the Party, upon reading it remarked: "I'd have done the same long ago, for the same reasons, if I had not been so prominent a figure in the movement."

"And now," I queried, when Jack had got the letter off his mind and cooled down, "what will you call yourself henceforth—Revolutionist, Socialist, what?"

"I am not anything, I fear," he said quietly. "I am all these things. Individuals disappoint me more and more, and more and more I turn to the land. . . . Well," he reconsidered, "I might call myself a Syndicalist. It does seem as if class solidarity, expressed in terms of the general strike, would be the one means of the workers tying up the world and getting what they want. It would raise Cain, of course, but nothing ever seems to be accomplished without raising Cain. A world-wide strike would produce inconceivable results.—But they won't stick together—there is too much selfishness and too much inertia."

Surely, surely, Jack's experience with the "inertia of the masses was not unique in the annals of reform movements. In Doctor William J. Robinson's "The Medical Critic and Guide," I come across this sentence: "It is not the slave that rebels against his slavery; it is the free man who sees the injustice of slavery who starts the fight for its abolition." Other social seers had suffered unto death. I could not but pray that the healthier side of Jack's philosophy of life might preserve him from despair.

Concerning sabotage, he stood somewhat like this: Peaceful methods having failed, and with his views on the

frightfulness of capitalist exploitation of labor, he would not hesitate, were he an underpaid wage-slave, insidiously to wreck the machinery of production by the means of which he had become the underpaid, underfed, overworked, exploited tool and fool of his economic masters. But when confronted with the futile, desultory methods of bombing innocent persons by mistake, his impatience knew no bounds. Following one such mishap that had shaken the country, I asked him what he thought of it; and he used a word I had never heard in seriousness from his lips:

"I think it is wicked."

Many resignations followed Jack's—quite an avalanche, in fact, when the Socialist Party at the St. Louis Convention in 1917 pledged itself to oppose, by every means within its power, the prosecution of the war against Germany.

When James Howard Moore, because of heartbreak over the world, had put a bullet through his brain, Jack was deeply moved. In his handwriting, at the head of a printed address delivered by Clarence S. Darrow at the funeral services, I find this:

"Disappointment like what made Wayland (Appeal to Reason) kill himself and many like me resign."

Reading over the mass of material for this Biography, I am struck anew by Jack's old faith in the workingman, and anew saddened by his ultimate disillusion. Let me quote a letter, written several years before he died, stating the nobilities upon which he had founded his hope:

That Jack London expected no glory nor even lasting appreciation from his comrades for his life-long work in the interests of Socialism, was evident to me early in our association. It was with utter absence of bitterness that he said:

"In a few years the crowd I have worked for and with,

the Socialists, will have entirely forgotten that a fellow named Jack London ever did a stroke to help along. I shall be entirely forgotten, or counted out, or, at best, merely mentioned."

And when, even in his own short time he had proved his own words, in spite of a cool intellectual attitude he showed the hurt to his affections. There is bitterness and to spare, though essentially toward the race of men who had dis appointed his warm confidence, in the following, already referred to in part, written in his last months for a Socialist publication:

There are some of Jack's compeers who do not forget, who give him his place, and a high place. And there are

others who, perceiving him nurse his efficiency by decent living after his too-lean years, became fearful that he might lose his head through worldly success, but held judgment and were rewarded for their openmindedness. One socialist, not fussing as to whether Jack belonged to the Socialist Party, or any party, had this to say: "He was one of us. A genuine, strenuous American, he fought a good fight in the sacred cause of human progress. Against the predatory Big Interests' attempt to enslave the workers and the Booze Interests' attempt to degrade the workers, his pen was a mighty weapon. Like a true comrade he died fighting. Alas, my Comrade!" But sadly enough I note that only too often his name is missing from the roster that includes his intellectual friends such as Walling, Spargo, Hunter, Stokes, Heron.

Jack's especial bête noir was the type of socialist, of either sex, who heckled him because he declined to lecture before small groups. Wasted upon these hecklers was his argument that with a stroke of his pen, while following temperamental bents in manner of living, he could reach millions, whereas his voice could be heard by but a few. This being so, he did not see why he should misapply energy by speaking to a few, when he so disliked public appearances. Further, reports of his speeches were almost invariably garbled. His gospel as propounded in his books was not garbled. Ergo, and finally, he would write rather than talk. Incidentally, his voice had gone back on him, so that it became husky at any attempt to project it into large spaces. Far from regretting this break-down in his anatomy, he hailed it with frank delight as another excuse from lecturing. The failure of his throat was precipitated, happily enough, by an excess of laughter at the Bohemian Jinks. He had returned unable for a while to speak above a faint wheeze, the vocal cords ruptured forever.

He would add that he had done his share of platform

work, and why not step out and let the younger generation have a chance. Here is his somewhat impatient reply to a suppliant who had tried sarcasm upon him:

Much earlier than that, in answer to a call that he could not afford, he had written:

It is not remarkable, however, that Jack London was much misinterpreted by the general run of men lost in

pettifogging. He would not even be circumscribed by his broadest conceptions, if I may be allowed a paradox. And there was where he invited trouble with economists, who wanted him to be what they called consistent. The many sparkling facets of his mind dazzled and befuddled merely average thought processes. I speak with feeling. Sometimes we would battle for hours, he and I, earnestly, hotly, because, although I was doing the best I knew how, he was thinking so far beyond the logic of ordinary mortals who think they think. "Don't you see? Can't you get it?" he would almost wail in ardor and onrush to convince. And we would metaphorically roll up our sleeves and go at it hammer and tongs. To me, who was more "kin" to him than the rest, he declined to "mute his trumpets. His own woman must speak his language. And then, suddenly, out would slip some little key-word he had unwittingly left unsaid, the door would fly open, and I would seem to drop a thousand light-years in space, alighting softly, happily, yet excessively puzzled at last by the cosmic simplicity of his reasoning.

In logic he bowed to no one. His supple mind that never stiffened from disuse was of a clarity that allowed of no master. He but grasped and applied the conclusions of Master-minds, used them in the mosaic of his own. Yet here is a curious thing: In his dreams, at widely separated intervals, appeared the Man who would contest Jack's self-mastership, to whom he would eventually bend a vanquished intelligence. He never met such an one in the flesh, yet that entity stalked through more than the hallucinations of sleep. It was long ago he first told me of this ominous figure in his consciousness. The last manifestation was within a very few years of his death. The man, imperial, inexorable with destiny, yet strangely human, descended, alone, a vast cascade of stairways, and Jack, at the foot, looked up and waited as imperially for the meeting that was to be his unknown fate. But the Nemesis never, in that form at least,

overtook him. Was it Death? Or may it have been a reflection of his own most exalted self that he came face to face with at these times? There showed a certain pathos in his accounts. I do not think he had yet brought his inklings of psychoanalysis to bear upon his interpretations.

What gifts Jack had for all who could see and hear! But the world is prone to look askance at gifts that are tendered freely, without price. And what he offered was so open-handed, so open-hearted. He never wore nor waved a flag—his flags, his colors, were in his eyes, streamed from his pen, and waved from his printed page. Every one who tried to understand him was better for it. When persons say, "I never met him," I can only return, "I am sorry." If it was a privilege to know his work, it was a greater privilege to know himself, if ever so slightly, for he was greater than his work. He had few enemies among those who came into personal contact with him. With all his self-knowledge, for the most part in social dealings he preserved that unconsciousness of self which is above modesty, yet which spells modesty to the casual observer. And no matter how firmly he believed himself right, fought for it, shouted it, he also respected a similar belief existing in his opponent. This charity, however, had been sorely taxed during earlier years, by dark and helpless souls incapable alike of clear reasoning or appreciating his superiority; hence his impatience with inconsequential minds. But with the majority of acquaintances, no frown of his, no stern word, ever out weighed the morning of his smile, that beautiful smile that lured the bitterest antagonist under his charm.

Much non-understanding arose from the misleading habit of others in quoting his isolated opinions without context, deleting them of the vital connotations that his catholicity brought to ripe consideration of any theme. Only a few of his fellows could anticipate or supply the thousand factors embodied in his thought. Myself, I learned to hesitate before leaping to conclusions, to wait for the

full drift. Just about the time, say, that Jack would begin to sink into lowest disheartenment over the abysmal significance of the War, and our failure to bear a hand, all at once he would flame anew to the undying wonder of the human. A case in point arose when Hall Caine wrote him from London, asking a contribution for the "King Albert Book. Jack responded:

Yet the very sending of the foregoing from Oakland brought him face to face again with human smallness. He thought to see if the cable company would share in the tribute by standing half the expense of the message. They politely declined, and Jack shrugged his habitual "Cheap at the price to learn them," under such circumstances.

The murder of Edith Cavell,

". . . a simple English nurse,
Slaughtered between a challenge and a curse,"

snapped something in Jack. Eyes and soul full of this and the rest of the mad slaughter, he became more and more furious with the brutal stupidity of the Hun. He lingered in almost speechless wonder over the monstrous bestiality of German cartoons, in nearly all of which lay a boomerang unguessed by that same bungling stupidity.

He did not believe this to be a capitalistic war, but that it was being waged for a principle at its best, and must be

fought to the death. He would have stamped his approval, I know, upon the "irreduceable minimum" of peace terms, and Mr. Balfour's deliverance: "Next to being enslaved by Germany, there is no worse thing than being liberated by her."

Jack would refer to Germany as the "Mad Dog of Europe."

"I am with the allies life and death. Germany to-day is a paranoiac. She has the mad person s idea of her own ego, and the delusion of persecution she thinks all nations are against her. She possesses also the religious mania—she thinks God is on her side. These are the very commonest forms of insanity, but never before in history has a whole nation gone insane."

"God help them when the British turn savage!" he cried at the first rumor of hostilities. His opinion of the country has been very adequately expressed by one who fought in France: "Germany has no honor, no chivalry, no mercy. Germany is a bad sportsman. Germans fight like wolves in a pack, and without initiative or resource if compelled to fight singly."

A hundred times I have heard Jack say: "It will be a war of attrition." He saw no abrupt termination, no brilliant, decisive victory. But for the Armistice, he might have been proven right. He was also heard to say that he believed the nations would eventually repudiate their war debts.

The Pathé Exchange wrote on June 16, asking his views upon the meaning of the World War, and this was his reply:

Another of his public utterances:

That none may misconstrue the central paragraph, but may know upon what the assertion was based, I append this item from the Scientific American:

It is interesting, while on the War, to quote his disagreement, when a youth, with David Starr Jordan:

"There is something wrong with Dr. Jordan's war theory, which is to the effect that, the best being sent out to war, only the second best, the men who are left, remain to breed a second-best race, and that, therefore, the human race deteriorates under war. If this be so, if we have sent forth the best we bred and gone on breeding from the men who were left, and since we have done this for ten thousand

milleniums and are what we splendidly are to-day, then what unthinkably splendid and god-like beings must have been our forebears those ten thousand milleniums ago. Unfortunately for Dr. Jordan's theory, these forebears can not live up to this fine reputation."

His full emotions toward the United States in with holding help from

". . . the embattled hosts that kept
Their pact with freedom while we slept!"

are expressed in a telegram sent in reply to a New York daily asking his choice at election time, and of which I have no record that the paper dared print it:

To Henry Meade Bland, a month before his death Jack wrote:

The theory of alternate eras of Evolution and Dissolution fought with his work for the human. Yet, casting back into the hopelessness of the ages, citing fourteen cities built one atop another, and all lapsed, gone, with their pomp and circumstance—yet, I say, Jack suffered unendurably over the Great War, and perished in the midst of his deepest of all Great Disgusts because of America's "Safety First" policy that held us from protesting even the Belgian atrocities. We blunder along. The times blunder along. History-making blunders along. And he saw the blundering way of the race.

His main comfort throughout that Armageddon was his Anglo-Saxonism, his pride in England in the conduct of her "popular" war. How he would have rejoiced in the invincible combination of American man-power and British seapower! I am exasperated all the time, consciously and unconsciously, that he is not alive and quick, to function in the gigantic tangle of world events growing out of the war—to see his own prognostications taking shape, and to lend a hand in the reconstruction. Indeed, it is hard to write calmly of this creature who strove so manfully for the great and simple integrities of human intercourse, looking as he did far through and beyond the small, petty thing of the moment. Always, while responding to the little tragical affairs of men, he could but compare these with the big, cosmic facts and dreams that lured him on. This verse, by I know not whom, so well envisages the Jack London whom I knew:

"Your stark vision and cold fire,
Your singing truth, your vehement desire
To cut through lies to life.
These move behind the printed echoes here,
The paper strife,
The scurry of small pens about your name,
Measuring, praising, blaming by the same
Tight rule of thumb that makes their own
Inadequacy known."

How often I start up to share with him the very things he so missed and would love to know from the lips of fellow authors. "He was an honest writer," says an Englishman. That would have pleased him above all things. And another: "A strong and virile writer of clean prose—robust, honest, straightforward, and an artist." Berton Braley's "He never struck a ribald note," calls to mind a conversation in Honolulu. Alexander Hume Ford exclaimed:

"But, Jack, you have never written anything smutty—you've done almost everything else!" He had meant to be facetious, but in a flash Jack was all gravity:

"No!—and I never shall. I have never yet written a line for print that I would be ashamed for my two little girls who are growing up to see and read, and I never shall!"

To me he would say: "When I swear my worst, I really don't mean it—only words, letting off steam. But when you say 'Damn!' you are positively evil in your ferocity! Wicked woman!"

Never shall I forget his indignation, too vast for any expletives at his command, when a minister of the Gospel wrote him that his novel "The Little Lady of the Big House" was unclean, unfit for the youth of America to read. "Show me!" he raged, "where there is a line in that book 'unfit' for any young man or woman to read!" Hard upon this accusation came a book-review in a conservative New England monthly, employing the most extraordinary nomenclature to interpret the alleged pruriency of the book. Jack could not contain his ire, but started a battle royal with the sons of Adam who had in his opinion so degenerated as not to know clean frankness when they saw

it. There is no telling where the controversy might have fetched up, had he lived. "I've given over sitting back and listening to gross misinterpretation of my clean and healthy motives," he said with smoldering eyes. "It is like malicious slander, and whenever it appears I am going after it and knock off its ugly head in the open!"

How does the foregoing comport with this: "He was an uplift to the young. The world is better and purer for his having lived—an inspiration to thousands of men and women to work and keep on working, to create and keep on creating, to live the full life wherever they are or whatever may be their work."

My copy of "The Little Lady of the Big House," dated three months before Jack died, carries this inscription:

In the last weeks of his life, that was often the burden of his talk with me—the firm foundation of the house of love we had builded in the decade of our close companionship. So, in my memories of that year of unusual vicissitudes in our fortunes, the warm and deathless love-message in his hand in "The Little Lady of the Big House" is a rock of ages, made yet more immovable by the declaration in Jack's next volume. "The Turtles of Tasman," the last he ever was to hold in his fingers:

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