JACK LONDON (1876–1916)

Few lives of American authors have been so filled with picturesque and paradoxical elements as the life of Jack London. Born in California, the son of a restless race of American pioneers and adventurers, he spent his early years in poverty and isolation upon various small ranches in his native State. Later, in Oakland, he was newsboy and street gamin, then member of a lawless gang of harbor outlaws. At seventeen he had become, in his own words, a drunken bum.' A voyage on the Pacific with wild adventures among the seal herds had a sobering effect upon him, and, returning to San Francisco, he made feverish attempts at self-education. Then came a tour of America as a tramp, and in 1897 an excited rush to the new gold fields of the Klondike. In his later years he toured the Pacific in his own boat and finally settled upon a ranch in the California valley which figures in his last fiction as The Valley of the Moon.

His advent as an author was Bret Harte-like in its sensational suddenness. In 1900 appeared in the Overland Monthly The Son of the Wolf' and other vivid tales of the Klondike gold regions, soon to be issued in a volume as successful as Harte's Luck of Roaring Camp. The Call of the Wild in 1903 established his fame. From that time until his death he continued to pour out an amazing amount of material, the greater part of it short stories and novels. In sixteen years he wrote what is now published in fifty-one volumes, not to mention a large amount of uncollected newspaper material. His influence upon his period was considerable. He was the leader of the later school of fiction writers who depend for their effects upon vigor of treatment, upon impressionistic and unusual backgrounds and characters, and upon first-hand knowledge on the part of the writer.

THE NIGHT-BORN 1

5

It was in the old Alta-Inyo Club- -a warm night for San Francisco- and through the open windows, hushed and far. came the brawl of the streets. The talk had led on from the Graft Prosecution and the latest signs that the town was to be run wide open, down through all the grotesque sordidness and rotten- 10 ness of man-hate and man-meanness, until the name of O'Brien was mentioned O'Brien, the promising young pugilist who had been killed in the prize-ring the night before. At once the air had seemed 15 to freshen. O'Brien had been a cleanliving young man with ideals. He neither drank, smoked, nor swore, and his had been the body of a beautiful young god. He had even carried his prayer-book to 20 the ringside. They found it in his coat pocket in the dressing-room. . . afterward.

Here was Youth, clean and wholesome, unsullied the thing of glory and won- 25 1 Copyright by the Century Co.

der for men to conjure with . . . after it has been lost to them and they have turned middle-aged. And so well did we conjure, that Romance came and for an hour led us far from the man-city and its snarling roar. Bardwell, in a way, started it by quoting from Thoreau; but it was old Trefethan, bald-headed and dewlapped, who took up the quotation and for the hour to come was Romance incarnate. At first we might have wondered how many Scotches he had consumed since dinner, but very soon all that was forgotten.

'It was in 1898-I was thirty-five then,' he said. 'Yes, I know you are adding it up. You're right. I'm forty-even now; look ten years more; and the doctors say - damn the doctors anyway!'

He lifted the long glass to his lips and sipped it slowly to soothe away his irritation.

But I was young. once. I was young twelve years ago, and I had hair on top of my head, and my stomach was lean as a runner's, and the longest day was none too long for me. I was a husky

back there in '98. You remember me, Milner. You knew me then. Wasn't I a pretty good bit of all right?'

Milner nodded and agreed. Like Trefethan, he was another mining engineer who had cleaned up a fortune in the Klondike.

5

You certainly were, old man,' Milner said. 'I'll never forget when you cleaned out those lumberjacks in the M. 10 & M. that night that little newspaper man started the row. Slavin was in the country at the time,'- this to us and his manager wanted to get up a match with Trefethan.'

with the whites. Parties of them come out once in a while to trade, and that is all. Even the Hudson Bay Company failed to find them and farm them.

And now the girl. I was coming up a stream you'd call it a river in California - uncharted and unnamed. It was a nobie valley, now shut in by high canyon walls, and again opening out into beautiful stretches, wide and long, with pasture shoulder-high in the bottoms, meadows dotted with flowers, and with clumps of timber spruce · virgin and magnifi

cent. The dogs were packing on their 15 backs, and were sore-footed and played out; while I was looking for any bunch of Indians to get sleds and drivers from and go on with the first snow. It was late fall, but the way those flowers per

'Well, look at me now,' Trefethan commanded angrily. That's what the Goldstead did to me - - God knows how many millions, but nothing left in my soul . . . nor in my veins. The good red blood is 20 sisted surprised me. I was supposed to gone. I am a jellyfish, huge, gross mass of oscillating protoplasm, a-a...'

be in sub-arctic America, and high up among the buttresses of the Rockies, and yet there was that everlasting spread of flowers. Some day the white settlers will be in there and growing wheat down all that valley.

And then I lifted a smoke, and heard the barking of the dogs Indian dogs — and came into camp. There must have been five hundred of them, proper Indians at that, and I could see by the jerkingframes that the fall hunting had been good. And then I met her- Lucy. That was her name. Sign language that was all we could talk with, till they led me to a big fly-you know, half a tent, open on the one side where a campfire burned. It was all of moose-skins, this fly-moose-skins, smoke-cured, handrubbed, and golden-brown. Under it everything was neat and orderly, as no Indian camp ever was. The bed was laid on fresh spruce boughs. There were furs galore, and on top of all was a robe

'It was after I had made my locations 35 on Goldstead and did n't know what a treasure-pot that creek was going to prove that I made that trip east over the Rockies, angling across to the Great Slave. Up North there the Rockies are 40 something more than a back-bone. They are a boundary, a dividing line, a wall impregnable and unscalable. There is no intercourse across them, though, on OCcasion, from the early days, wandering 45 of swan-skins white swan-skins I

trappers have crossed them, though more were lost by the way than ever came through. And that was precisely why I tackled the job. It was a traverse any man would be proud to make. I am 50 prouder of it right now than anything else I have ever done.

'It is an unknown land. Great stretches of it have never been explored. There are big valleys there where the white man 55 has never set foot, and Indian tribes as primitive as ten thousand years . . . almost, for they have had some contact

have never seen anything like that robe. And on top of it, sitting cross-legged, was Lucy. She was nut-brown. I have called her a girl. But she was not. She was a woman, a nut-brown woman, an Amazon, a full-blooded, full-bodied woman, and royal ripe. And her eyes were blue.

'That's what took me off my feether eyes blue, not China blue, but deep blue, like the sea and sky all melted into one, and very wise. More than that, they had laughter in them warm laughter,

sun-warm and human, very human, and

shall I say feminine? They were. They were a woman's eyes, a proper woman's eyes. You know what that means. Can I say more? Also, in those blue eyes were, at the same time, a wild unrest, a wistful yearning, and a repose, an absolute repose, a sort of all-wise and philosophical calm.'

Trefethan broke off abruptly.

'There it was, that tang again. But from now to the end of the yarn I want 5 you to forget it. I tell you I forgot it, sitting there on the edge of that swan-skin robe and listening and looking at the most wonderful woman that ever stepped out of the pages of Thoreau or of any other 10 man's book.

'I stayed on there a week. It was on her invitation. She promised to fit me out with dogs and sleds and with Indians that would put me across the best pass of 15 the Rockies in five hundred miles. Her fly was pitched apart from the others, on the high bank by the river, and a couple of Indian girls did her cooking for her and the camp work. And so we talked and talked, while the first snow fell and continued to fall and make a surface for my sleds. And this was her story.

'You fellows think I am screwed. I'm not. This is only my fifth since dinner. I am dead sober. I am solemn. I sit here now side by side with my sacred youth. It is not I-"old" Trefethan that talks; it is my youth, and it is my youth that says those were the most wonderful eyes I have ever seen so very calm, so very restless; so very wise, so very curious; so very old, so very young; 20 so satisfied and yet yearning so wistfully. Boys, I can't describe them. When I have told you about her, you may know better for yourselves.

'She did not stand up. But she put 25 out her hand.

to see you.'"

She was frontier-born, of poor settlers, and you know what that means- work, work, always work, work in plenty and without end.

"I never seen the glory of the world.” she said. "I had no time. I knew it was right out there, anywhere, all around the cabin, but there was always the bread to set, the scrubbin' and the washin' and the work that was never done. I used to be plumb sick at times, jes' to get out into it all, especially in the spring when the

'I leave it to you · that sharp, frontier, Western tang of speech. Picture my sen- 30 sations. It was a woman, a white woman, but that tang! It was amazing that it should be a white woman, here, beyond the last boundary of the world but the tang. I tell you, it hurt. It was like the 35 songs of the birds drove me most clean stab of a flatted note. And yet, let me tell you, that woman was a poet. You shall

see.

She dismissed the Indians. And, by Jove, they went. They took her orders 40 and followed her blind. She was hi-yu skookum chief. She told the bucks to make a camp for me and to take care of my dogs. And they did, too. And they knew enough not to get away with as 45 much as a moccasin-lace of my outfit. She was a regular She-Who-Must-BeObeyed, and I want to tell you it chilled me to the marrow, sent those little thrills Marathoning up and down my spinal col- 50 umn, meeting a white woman out there at the head of a tribe of savages a thousand miles the other side of No Man's Land.

""Stranger," she said, "I reckon 55 you're sure the first white that ever set foot in this valley. Set down an' talk

a spell, and then we'll have a bite to

crazy. I wanted to run out through the long pasture grass, wetting my legs with the dew of it, and to climb the rail fence, and keep on through the timber and up and up over the divide so as to get a look around. Oh, I had all kinds of hankerings to follow up the canyon beds and slosh around from pool to pool, making friends with the water-dogs and the speckly trout; to peep on the sly and watch the squirrels and rabbits and small furry things and see what they was doing and learn the secrets of their ways. Seemed to me, if I had time, I could crawi among the flowers, and, if I was good and quiet, catch them whispering with themselves, telling all kinds of wise things that mere humans never know."'

Trefethan paused to see that his glass had been refilled.

Another time she said: "I wanted to run nights like a wild thing, just to run through the moonshine and under the

other day unless it was harder?" She had heard talk of immortal life from the gospel sharps, she said, but she could not reckon that what she was doing

stars, to run white and naked in the darkness that I knew must feel like cool velvet, and to run and run and keep on running. One evening, plumb tuckered out -it had been a dreadful hard hot day, 5 was a likely preparation for her immor

and the bread would n't raise and the churning had gone wrong, and I was all irritated and jerky well, that evening I made mention to dad of this wanting to run of mine. He looked at me curious- 10 some and a bit scared. And then he gave me two pills to take. Said to go to bed and get a good sleep and I'd be all hunkydory in the morning. So I never mentioned my hankerings to him, or any one any more."

་ང

The mountain home broke upstarved out, I imagine - and the family came to Seattle to live. There she worked in a factory-long hours, you 20 know, and all the rest, deadly work. And after a year of that she became waitress in a cheap restaurant — hash-slinger, she called it.

tality.

'But she still had her dreams, though more rarely. She had read a few books what, it is pretty hard to imagine, Seaside Library novels most likely; yet they had been food for fancy. Sometimes," she said, "when I was that dizzy from the heat of the cooking that if I did n't take a breath of fresh air I'd faint, I'd stick my head out of the kitchen window and close my eyes and see most wonderful things. All of a sudden I'd be traveling down a country road, and everything clean and quiet, no dust, no dirt; just streams ripplin' down sweet meadows, and lambs playing, breezes blowing the breath of flowers, and soft sunshine over everything; and lovely cows lazying knee-deep in quiet pools, and young girls bathing

She said to me once, "Romance I 25 in a curve of stream all white and slim guess was what I wanted. But there wa'n't no romance floating around in dishpans and washtubs, or in factories and hash-joints."

and natural — and I'd know I was in Arcady. I'd read about that country once, in a book. And maybe knights, all flashing in the sun, would come riding 30 around a bend in the road, or a lady on a milk-white mare, and in the distance I could see the towers of a castle rising, or I just knew, on the next turn, that I'd come upon some palace, all white and airy and fairy-like, with fountains playing, and flowers all over everything, and peacocks on the lawn. . and then I'd open my eyes, and the heat of the cooking range would strike on me, and I'd hear Jake sayin'- he was my husband — I'd hear Jake sayin', 'Why ain't you served them beans? Think I can wait here all day!' Romance! - I reckon the nearest I ever come to it was when a drunken Armenian cook got the snakes and tried to cut my throat with a potato knife and I got my arm burned on the stove before I could lay him out with the potato stomper.

'When she was eighteen she married a man who was going up to Juneau to start a restaurant. He had a few dollars saved, and appeared prosperous. She did n't love him. she was emphatic about that; but she was all tired out, and she 35 wanted to get away from the unending drudgery. Besides, Juneau was in Alaska, and her yearning took the form of a desire to see that wonderland. But little she saw of it. He started the restaurant. 40 a little cheap one, and she quickly learned what he had married her for . . . to save paying wages. She came pretty close to running the joint and doing all the work from waiting to dishwashing. She cooked 45 most of the time as well. And she had four years of it.

Can't you picture her, this wild woods creature, quick with every old primitive instinct, yearning for the free open, and 50 mowed up in a vile little hash-joint and toiling and moiling for four mortal years?

"There was no meaning in anything," she said. What was it all about? Why was I born? Was that all the meaning of 55 life just to work and work and be always tired?to go to bed tired and to wake up tired, with every day like every

"I wanted easy ways, and lovely things, and Romance and all that; but it just seemed I had no luck nohow and was only and expressly born for cooking and dishwashing. There was a wild crowd in Juneau them days, but I looked at the other women, and their way of life did n't excite me. I reckon I wanted to be clean. I don't know why; I just wanted to. I