The Human Drift

Published：2026-07-30 13:42:41 Source: best animal puppets for 8 year olds under 10 dollars Author: Slime Kits

Transcribed from the 1919 Mills and quiet ocean toysBoon edition by David Price,email [email protected]

THE HUMAN DRIFT
by Jack London

Contents:

The Human Drift
Small-Boat Sailing
Four Horses and a Sailor
Nothing that Ever Came to Anything
That Dead Men Rise up Never
A Classic of the Sea
    A Wicked Woman (Curtain Raiser)
    The Birth Mark (Sketch)

THE HUMAN DRIFT

“The Revelations of Devout and Learn’d
Who rose before us, and as Prophets Burn’d,
   Are all but stories, which, awoke from Sleep,
They told their comrades, and to Sleep return’d.”

The history of civilisation is a history of wandering, sword in hand,in search of food.  In the misty younger world we catch glimpsesof phantom races, rising, slaying, finding food, building rude civilisations,decaying, falling under the swords of stronger hands, and passing utterlyaway.  Man, like any other animal, has roved over the earth seekingwhat he might devour; and not romance and adventure, but the hunger-need,has urged him on his vast adventures.  Whether a bankrupt gentlemansailing to colonise Virginia or a lean Cantonese contracting to labouron the sugar plantations of Hawaii, in each case, gentleman and coolie,it is a desperate attempt to get something to eat, to get more to eatthan he can get at home.

It has always been so, from the time of the first pre-human anthropoidcrossing a mountain-divide in quest of better berry-bushes beyond, downto the latest Slovak, arriving on our shores to-day, to go to work inthe coal-mines of Pennsylvania.  These migratory movements of peopleshave been called drifts, and the word is apposite.  Unplanned,blind, automatic, spurred on by the pain of hunger, man has literallydrifted his way around the planet.  There have been drifts in thepast, innumerable and forgotten, and so remote that no records havebeen left, or composed of such low-typed humans or pre-humans that theymade no scratchings on stone or bone and left no monuments to show thatthey had been.

These early drifts we conjecture and know must have occurred, justas we know that the first upright-walking brutes were descended fromsome kin of the quadrumana through having developed “a pair ofgreat toes out of two opposable thumbs.”  Dominated by fear,and by their very fear accelerating their development, these early ancestorsof ours, suffering hunger-pangs very like the ones we experience to-day,drifted on, hunting and being hunted, eating and being eaten, wanderingthrough thousand-year-long odysseys of screaming primordial savagery,until they left their skeletons in glacial gravels, some of them, andtheir bone-scratchings in cave-men’s lairs.

There have been drifts from east to west and west to east, from northto south and back again, drifts that have criss-crossed one another,and drifts colliding and recoiling and caroming off in new directions. From Central Europe the Aryans have drifted into Asia, and from CentralAsia the Turanians have drifted across Europe.  Asia has thrownforth great waves of hungry humans from the prehistoric “round-barrow”“broad-heads” who overran Europe and penetrated to Scandinaviaand England, down through the hordes of Attila and Tamerlane, to thepresent immigration of Chinese and Japanese that threatens America. The Phoenicians and the Greeks, with unremembered drifts behind them,colonised the Mediterranean.  Rome was engulfed in the torrentof Germanic tribes drifting down from the north before a flood of driftingAsiatics.  The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, after having driftedwhence no man knows, poured into Britain, and the English have carriedthis drift on around the world.  Retreating before stronger breeds,hungry and voracious, the Eskimo has drifted to the inhospitable polarregions, the Pigmy to the fever-rotten jungles of Africa.  Andin this day the drift of the races continues, whether it be of Chineseinto the Philippines and the Malay Peninsula, of Europeans to the UnitedStates or of Americans to the wheat-lands of Manitoba and the Northwest.

Perhaps most amazing has been the South Sea Drift.  Blind, fortuitous,precarious as no other drift has been, nevertheless the islands in thatwaste of ocean have received drift after drift of the races.  Downfrom the mainland of Asia poured an Aryan drift that built civilisationsin Ceylon, Java, and Sumatra.  Only the monuments of these Aryansremain.  They themselves have perished utterly, though not untilafter leaving evidences of their drift clear across the great SouthPacific to far Easter Island.  And on that drift they encounteredraces who had accomplished the drift before them, and they, the Aryans,passed, in turn, before the drift of other and subsequent races whomwe to-day call the Polynesian and the Melanesian.

Man early discovered death.  As soon as his evolution permitted,he made himself better devices for killing than the old natural onesof fang and claw.  He devoted himself to the invention of killingdevices before he discovered fire or manufactured for himself religion. And to this day, his finest creative energy and technical skill aredevoted to the same old task of making better and ever better killingweapons.  All his days, down all the past, have been spent in killing. And from the fear-stricken, jungle-lurking, cave-haunting creature oflong ago, he won to empery over the whole animal world because he developedinto the most terrible and awful killer of all the animals.  Hefound himself crowded.  He killed to make room, and as he maderoom ever he increased and found himself crowded, and ever he went onkilling to make more room.  Like a settler clearing land of itsweeds and forest bushes in order to plant corn, so man was compelledto clear all manner of life away in order to plant himself.  And,sword in hand, he has literally hewn his way through the vast massesof life that occupied the earth space he coveted for himself. And ever he has carried the battle wider and wider, until to-day notonly is he a far more capable killer of men and animals than ever before,but he has pressed the battle home to the infinite and invisible hostsof menacing lives in the world of micro-organisms.

It is true, that they that rose by the sword perished by the sword. And yet, not only did they not all perish, but more rose by the swordthan perished by it, else man would not to-day be over-running the worldin such huge swarms.  Also, it must not be forgotten that theywho did not rise by the sword did not rise at all.  They were not. In view of this, there is something wrong with Doctor Jordan’swar-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-bestrace, 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 breedingfrom the men who were left, and since we have done this for ten thousandmillenniums and are what we splendidly are to-day, then what unthinkablysplendid and god-like beings must have been our forebears those tenthousand millenniums ago!  Unfortunately for Doctor Jordan’stheory, those ancient forebears cannot live up to this fine reputation. We know them for what they were, and before the monkey cage of any menageriewe catch truer glimpses and hints and resemblances of what our ancestorsreally were long and long ago.  And by killing, incessant killing,by making a shambles of the planet, those ape-like creatures have developedeven into you and me.  As Henley has said in “The Song ofthe Sword”:

“The Sword Singing—

Driving the darkness,
Even as the banners
And spear of the Morning;
Sifting the nations,
The Slag from the metal,
The waste and the weak
From the fit and the strong;
Fighting the brute,
The abysmal Fecundity;
Checking the gross
Multitudinous blunders,
The groping, the purblind
Excesses in service
Of the Womb universal,
The absolute drudge.”

As time passed and man increased, he drifted ever farther afieldin search of room.  He encountered other drifts of men, and thekilling of men became prodigious.  The weak and the decadent fellunder the sword.  Nations that faltered, that waxed prosperousin fat valleys and rich river deltas, were swept away by the driftsof stronger men who were nourished on the hardships of deserts and mountainsand who were more capable with the sword.  Unknown and unnumberedbillions of men have been so destroyed in prehistoric times.  Drapersays that in the twenty years of the Gothic war, Italy lost 15,000,000of her population; “and that the wars, famines, and pestilencesof the reign of Justinian diminished the human species by the almostincredible number of 100,000,000.”  Germany, in the ThirtyYears’ War, lost 6,000,000 inhabitants.  The record of ourown American Civil War need scarcely be recalled.

And man has been destroyed in other ways than by the sword. Flood, famine, pestilence and murder are potent factors in reducingpopulation—in making room.  As Mr. Charles Woodruff, in his“Expansion of Races,” has instanced: In 1886, when the dikesof the Yellow River burst, 7,000,000 people were drowned.  Thefailure of crops in Ireland, in 1848, caused 1,000,000 deaths. The famines in India of 1896-7 and 1899-1900 lessened the populationby 21,000,000.  The T’ai’ping rebellion and the Mohammedanrebellion, combined with the famine of 1877-78, destroyed scores ofmillions of Chinese.  Europe has been swept repeatedly by greatplagues.  In India, for the period of 1903 to 1907, the plaguedeaths averaged between one and two millions a year.  Mr. Woodruffis responsible for the assertion that 10,000,000 persons now livingin the United States are doomed to die of tuberculosis.  And inthis same country ten thousand persons a year are directly murdered. In China, between three and six millions of infants are annually destroyed,while the total infanticide record of the whole world is appalling. In Africa, now, human beings are dying by millions of the sleeping sickness.

More destructive of life than war, is industry.  In all civilisedcountries great masses of people are crowded into slums and labour-ghettos,where disease festers, vice corrodes, and famine is chronic, and wherethey die more swiftly and in greater numbers than do the soldiers inour modern wars.  The very infant mortality of a slum parish inthe East End of London is three times that of a middle-class parishin the West End.  In the United States, in the last fourteen years,a total of coal-miners, greater than our entire standing army, has beenkilled and injured.  The United States Bureau of Labour statesthat during the year 1908, there were between 30,000 and 35,000 deathsof workers by accidents, while 200,000 more were injured.  In fact,the safest place for a working-man is in the army.  And even ifthat army be at the front, fighting in Cuba or South Africa, the soldierin the ranks has a better chance for life than the working-man at home.

And yet, despite this terrible roll of death, despite the enormouskilling of the past and the enormous killing of the present, there areto-day alive on the planet a billion and three quarters of human beings. Our immediate conclusion is that man is exceedingly fecund and verytough.  Never before have there been so many people in the world. In the past centuries the world’s population has been smaller;in the future centuries it is destined to be larger.  And thisbrings us to that old bugbear that has been so frequently laughed awayand that still persists in raising its grisly head—namely, thedoctrine of Malthus.  While man’s increasing efficiency offood-production, combined with colonisation of whole virgin continents,has for generations given the apparent lie to Malthus’ mathematicalstatement of the Law of Population, nevertheless the essential significanceof his doctrine remains and cannot be challenged.  Population doespress against subsistence.  And no matter how rapidly subsistenceincreases, population is certain to catch up with it.

When man was in the hunting stage of development, wide areas werenecessary for the maintenance of scant populations.  With the shepherdstages, the means of subsistence being increased, a larger populationwas supported on the same territory.  The agricultural stage gavesupport to a still larger population; and, to-day, with the increasedfood-getting efficiency of a machine civilisation, an even larger populationis made possible.  Nor is this theoretical.  The populationis here, a billion and three quarters of men, women, and children, andthis vast population is increasing on itself by leaps and bounds.

A heavy European drift to the New World has gone on and is goingon; yet Europe, whose population a century ago was 170,000,000, hasto-day 500,000,000.  At this rate of increase, provided that subsistenceis not overtaken, a century from now the population of Europe will be1,500,000,000.  And be it noted of the present rate of increasein the United States that only one-third is due to immigration, whiletwo-thirds is due to excess of births over deaths.  And at thispresent rate of increase, the population of the United States will be500,000,000 in less than a century from now.

Man, the hungry one, the killer, has always suffered for lack ofroom.  The world has been chronically overcrowded.  Belgiumwith her 572 persons to the square mile is no more crowded than wasDenmark when it supported only 500 palæolithic people.  Accordingto Mr. Woodruff, cultivated land will produce 1600 times as much foodas hunting land.  From the time of the Norman Conquest, for centuriesEurope could support no more than 25 to the square mile.  To-dayEurope supports 81 to the square mile.  The explanation of thisis that for the several centuries after the Norman Conquest her populationwas saturated.  Then, with the development of trading and capitalism,of exploration and exploitation of new lands, and with the inventionof labour-saving machinery and the discovery and application of scientificprinciples, was brought about a tremendous increase in Europe’sfood-getting efficiency.  And immediately her population sprangup.

According to the census of Ireland, of 1659, that country had a populationof 500,000.  One hundred and fifty years later, her populationwas 8,000,000.  For many centuries the population of Japan wasstationary.  There seemed no way of increasing her food-gettingefficiency.  Then, sixty years ago, came Commodore Perry, knockingdown her doors and letting in the knowledge and machinery of the superiorfood-getting efficiency of the Western world.  Immediately uponthis rise in subsistence began the rise of population; and it is onlythe other day that Japan, finding her population once again pressingagainst subsistence, embarked, sword in hand, on a westward drift insearch of more room.  And, sword in hand, killing and being killed,she has carved out for herself Formosa and Korea, and driven the vanguardof her drift far into the rich interior of Manchuria.

For an immense period of time China’s population has remainedat 400,000,000—the saturation point.  The only reason thatthe Yellow River periodically drowns millions of Chinese is that thereis no other land for those millions to farm.  And after every suchcatastrophe the wave of human life rolls up and now millions flood outupon that precarious territory.  They are driven to it, becausethey are pressed remorselessly against subsistence.  It is inevitablethat China, sooner or later, like Japan, will learn and put into applicationour own superior food-getting efficiency.  And when that time comes,it is likewise inevitable that her population will increase by unguessedmillions until it again reaches the saturation point.  And then,inoculated with Western ideas, may she not, like Japan, take sword inhand and start forth colossally on a drift of her own for more room? This is another reputed bogie—the Yellow Peril; yet the men ofChina are only men, like any other race of men, and all men, down allhistory, have drifted hungrily, here, there and everywhere over theplanet, seeking for something to eat.  What other men do, may notthe Chinese do?

But a change has long been coming in the affairs of man.  Themore recent drifts of the stronger races, carving their way throughthe lesser breeds to more earth-space, has led to peace, ever to widerand more lasting peace.  The lesser breeds, under penalty of beingkilled, have been compelled to lay down their weapons and cease killingamong themselves.  The scalp-talking Indian and the head-huntingMelanesian have been either destroyed or converted to a belief in thesuperior efficacy of civil suits and criminal prosecutions.  Theplanet is being subdued.  The wild and the hurtful are either tamedor eliminated.  From the beasts of prey and the cannibal humansdown to the death-dealing microbes, no quarter is given; and daily,wider and wider areas of hostile territory, whether of a warring desert-tribein Africa or a pestilential fever-hole like Panama, are made peaceableand habitable for mankind.  As for the great mass of stay-at-homefolk, what percentage of the present generation in the United States,England, or Germany, has seen war or knows anything of war at firsthand?  There was never so much peace in the world as there is to-day.

War itself, the old red anarch, is passing.  It is safer tobe a soldier than a working-man.  The chance for life is greaterin an active campaign than in a factory or a coal-mine.  In thematter of killing, war is growing impotent, and this in face of thefact that the machinery of war was never so expensive in the past norso dreadful.  War-equipment to-day, in time of peace, is more expensivethan of old in time of war.  A standing army costs more to maintainthan it used to cost to conquer an empire.  It is more expensiveto be ready to kill, than it used to be to do the killing.  Theprice of a Dreadnought would furnish the whole army of Xerxes with killingweapons.  And, in spite of its magnificent equipment, war no longerkills as it used to when its methods were simpler.  A bombardmentby a modern fleet has been known to result in the killing of one mule. The casualties of a twentieth century war between two world-powers aresuch as to make a worker in an iron-foundry turn green with envy. War has become a joke.  Men have made for themselves monsters ofbattle which they cannot face in battle.  Subsistence is generousthese days, life is not cheap, and it is not in the nature of fleshand blood to indulge in the carnage made possible by present-day machinery. This is not theoretical, as will be shown by a comparison of deathsin battle and men involved, in the South African War and the Spanish-AmericanWar on the one hand, and the Civil War or the Napoleonic Wars on theother.

Not only has war, by its own evolution, rendered itself futile, butman himself, with greater wisdom and higher ethics, is opposed to war. He has learned too much.  War is repugnant to his common sense. He conceives it to be wrong, to be absurd, and to be very expensive. For the damage wrought and the results accomplished, it is not worththe price.  Just as in the disputes of individuals the arbitrationof a civil court instead of a blood feud is more practical, so, mandecides, is arbitration more practical in the disputes of nations.

War is passing, disease is being conquered, and man’s food-gettingefficiency is increasing.  It is because of these factors thatthere are a billion and three quarters of people alive to-day insteadof a billion, or three-quarters of a billion.  And it is becauseof these factors that the world’s population will very soon betwo billions and climbing rapidly toward three billions.  The lifetimeof the generation is increasing steadily.  Men live longer thesedays.  Life is not so precarious.  The newborn infant hasa greater chance for survival than at any time in the past.  Surgeryand sanitation reduce the fatalities that accompany the mischances oflife and the ravages of disease.  Men and women, with deficienciesand weaknesses that in the past would have effected their rapid extinction,live to-day and father and mother a numerous progeny.  And highas the food-getting efficiency may soar, population is bound to soarafter it.  “The abysmal fecundity” of life has notaltered.  Given the food, and life will increase.  A smallpercentage of the billion and three-quarters that live to-day may hushthe clamour of life to be born, but it is only a small percentage. In this particular, the life in the man-animal is very like the lifein the other animals.

And still another change is coming in human affairs.  Thoughpoliticians gnash their teeth and cry anathema, and man, whose superficialbook-learning is vitiated by crystallised prejudice, assures us thatcivilisation will go to smash, the trend of society, to-day, the worldover, is toward socialism.  The old individualism is passing. The state interferes more and more in affairs that hitherto have beenconsidered sacredly private.  And socialism, when the last wordis said, is merely a new economic and political system whereby moremen can get food to eat.  In short, socialism is an improved food-gettingefficiency.

Furthermore, not only will socialism get food more easily and ingreater quantity, but it will achieve a more equitable distributionof that food.  Socialism promises, for a time, to give all men,women, and children all they want to eat, and to enable them to eatall they want as often as they want.  Subsistence will be pushedback, temporarily, an exceedingly long way.  In consequence, theflood of life will rise like a tidal wave.  There will be moremarriages and more children born.  The enforced sterility thatobtains to-day for many millions, will no longer obtain.  Nor willthe fecund millions in the slums and labour-ghettos, who to-day dieof all the ills due to chronic underfeeding and overcrowding, and whodie with their fecundity largely unrealised, die in that future daywhen the increased food-getting efficiency of socialism will give themall they want to eat.

It is undeniable that population will increase prodigiously-justas it has increased prodigiously during the last few centuries, followingupon the increase in food-getting efficiency.  The magnitude ofpopulation in that future day is well nigh unthinkable.  But thereis only so much land and water on the surface of the earth.  Man,despite his marvellous accomplishments, will never be able to increasethe diameter of the planet.  The old days of virgin continentswill be gone.  The habitable planet, from ice-cap to ice-cap, willbe inhabited.  And in the matter of food-getting, as in everythingelse, man is only finite.  Undreamed-of efficiencies in food-gettingmay be achieved, but, soon or late, man will find himself face to facewith Malthus’ grim law.  Not only will population catch upwith subsistence, but it will press against subsistence, and the pressurewill be pitiless and savage.  Somewhere in the future is a datewhen man will face, consciously, the bitter fact that there is not foodenough for all of him to eat.

When this day comes, what then?  Will there be a recrudescenceof old obsolete war?  In a saturated population life is alwayscheap, as it is cheap in China, in India, to-day.  Will new humandrifts take place, questing for room, carving earth-space out of crowdedlife.  Will the Sword again sing:

“Follow, O follow, then,
Heroes, my harvesters!
Where the tall grain is ripe
Thrust in your sickles!
Stripped and adust
In a stubble of empire
Scything and binding
The full sheaves of sovereignty.”

Even if, as of old, man should wander hungrily, sword in hand, slayingand being slain, the relief would be only temporary.  Even if onerace alone should hew down the last survivor of all the other races,that one race, drifting the world around, would saturate the planetwith its own life and again press against subsistence.  And inthat day, the death rate and the birth rate will have to balance. Men will have to die, or be prevented from being born.  Undoubtedlya higher quality of life will obtain, and also a slowly decreasing fecundity. But this decrease will be so slow that the pressure against subsistencewill remain.  The control of progeny will be one of the most importantproblems of man and one of the most important functions of the state. Men will simply be not permitted to be born.

Disease, from time to time, will ease the pressure.  Diseasesare parasites, and it must not be forgotten that just as there are driftsin the world of man, so are there drifts in the world of micro-organisms—hunger-questsfor food.  Little is known of the micro-organic world, but thatlittle is appalling; and no census of it will ever be taken, for thereis the true, literal “abysmal fecundity.”  Multitudinousas man is, all his totality of individuals is as nothing in comparisonwith the inconceivable vastness of numbers of the micro-organisms. In your body, or in mine, right now, are swarming more individual entitiesthan there are human beings in the world to-day.  It is to us aninvisible world.  We only guess its nearest confines.  Withour powerful microscopes and ultramicroscopes, enlarging diameters twentythousand times, we catch but the slightest glimpses of that profundityof infinitesimal life.

Little is known of that world, save in a general way.  We knowthat out of it arise diseases, new to us, that afflict and destroy man. We do not know whether these diseases are merely the drifts, in a freshdirection, of already-existing breeds of micro-organisms, or whetherthey are new, absolutely new, breeds themselves just spontaneously generated. The latter hypothesis is tenable, for we theorise that if spontaneousgeneration still occurs on the earth, it is far more likely to occurin the form of simple organisms than of complicated organisms.

Another thing we know, and that is that it is in crowded populationsthat new diseases arise.  They have done so in the past. They do so to-day.  And no matter how wise are our physicians andbacteriologists, no matter how successfully they cope with these invaders,new invaders continue to arise—new drifts of hungry life seekingto devour us.  And so we are justified in believing that in thesaturated populations of the future, when life is suffocating in thepressure against subsistence, that new, and ever new, hosts of destroyingmicro-organisms will continue to arise and fling themselves upon earth-crowdedman to give him room.  There may even be plagues of unprecedentedferocity that will depopulate great areas before the wit of man canovercome them.  And this we know: that no matter how often theseinvisible hosts may be overcome by man’s becoming immune to themthrough a cruel and terrible selection, new hosts will ever arise ofthese micro-organisms that were in the world before he came and thatwill be here after he is gone.

After he is gone?  Will he then some day be gone, and this planetknow him no more?  Is it thither that the human drift in all itstotality is trending?  God Himself is silent on this point, thoughsome of His prophets have given us vivid representations of that lastday when the earth shall pass into nothingness.  Nor does science,despite its radium speculations and its attempted analyses of the ultimatenature of matter, give us any other word than that man will pass. So far as man’s knowledge goes, law is universal.  Elementsreact under certain unchangeable conditions.  One of these conditionsis temperature.  Whether it be in the test tube of the laboratoryor the workshop of nature, all organic chemical reactions take placeonly within a restricted range of heat.  Man, the latest of theephemera, is pitifully a creature of temperature, strutting his briefday on the thermometer.  Behind him is a past wherein it was toowarm for him to exist.  Ahead of him is a future wherein it willbe too cold for him to exist.  He cannot adjust himself to thatfuture, because he cannot alter universal law, because he cannot alterhis own construction nor the molecules that compose him.

It would be well to ponder these lines of Herbert Spencer’swhich follow, and which embody, possibly, the wildest vision the scientificmind has ever achieved:

“Motion as well as Matter being fixed in quantity,it would seem that the change in the distribution of Matter which Motioneffects, coming to a limit in whichever direction it is carried, theindestructible Motion thereupon necessitates a reverse distribution. Apparently, the universally-co-existent forces of attraction and repulsion,which, as we have seen, necessitate rhythm in all minor changes throughoutthe Universe, also necessitate rhythm in the totality of its changes—producenow an immeasurable period during which the attractive forces predominating,cause universal concentration, and then an immeasurable period duringwhich the repulsive forces predominating, cause universal diffusion—alternateeras of Evolution and Dissolution.  And thus there is suggestedthe conception of a past during which there have been successive Evolutionsanalogous to that which is now going on; a future during which successiveother Evolutions may go on—ever the same in principle but neverthe same in concrete result.”

That is it—the most we know—alternate eras of evolutionand dissolution.  In the past there have been other evolutionssimilar to that one in which we live, and in the future there may beother similar evolutions—that is all.  The principle of allthese evolutions remains, but the concrete results are never twice alike. Man was not; he was; and again he will not be.  In eternity whichis beyond our comprehension, the particular evolution of that solarsatellite we call the “Earth” occupied but a slight fractionof time.  And of that fraction of time man occupies but a smallportion.  All the whole human drift, from the first ape-man tothe last savant, is but a phantom, a flash of light and a flutter ofmovement across the infinite face of the starry night.

When the thermometer drops, man ceases—with all his lusts andwrestlings and achievements; with all his race-adventures and race-tragedies;and with all his red killings, billions upon billions of human livesmultiplied by as many billions more.  This is the last word ofScience, unless there be some further, unguessed word which Sciencewill some day find and utter.  In the meantime it sees no fartherthan the starry void, where the “fleeting systems lapse like foam.” Of what ledger-account is the tiny life of man in a vastness where starssnuff out like candles and great suns blaze for a time-tick of eternityand are gone?

And for us who live, no worse can happen than has happened to theearliest drifts of man, marked to-day by ruined cities of forgottencivilisation—ruined cities, which, on excavation, are found torest on ruins of earlier cities, city upon city, and fourteen cities,down to a stratum where, still earlier, wandering herdsmen drove theirflocks, and where, even preceding them, wild hunters chased their preylong after the cave-man and the man of the squatting-place cracked theknuckle-bones of wild animals and vanished from the earth.  Thereis nothing terrible about it.  With Richard Hovey, when he facedhis death, we can say: “Behold!  I have lived!” And with another and greater one, we can lay ourselves down with a will. The one drop of living, the one taste of being, has been good; and perhapsour greatest achievement will be that we dreamed immortality, even thoughwe failed to realise it.

SMALL-BOAT SAILING

A sailor is born, not made.  And by “sailor” ismeant, not the average efficient and hopeless creature who is foundto-day in the forecastle of deepwater ships, but the man who will takea fabric compounded of wood and iron and rope and canvas and compelit to obey his will on the surface of the sea.  Barring captainsand mates of big ships, the small-boat sailor is the real sailor. He knows—he must know—how to make the wind carry his craftfrom one given point to another given point.  He must know abouttides and rips and eddies, bar and channel markings, and day and nightsignals; he must be wise in weather-lore; and he must be sympatheticallyfamiliar with the peculiar qualities of his boat which differentiateit from every other boat that was ever built and rigged.  He mustknow how to gentle her about, as one instance of a myriad, and to fillher on the other tack without deadening her way or allowing her to falloff too far.

The deepwater sailor of to-day needs know none of these things. And he doesn’t.  He pulls and hauls as he is ordered, swabsdecks, washes paint, and chips iron-rust.  He knows nothing, andcares less.  Put him in a small boat and he is helpless. He will cut an even better figure on the hurricane deck of a horse.

I shall never forget my child-astonishment when I first encounteredone of these strange beings.  He was a runaway English sailor. I was a lad of twelve, with a decked-over, fourteen-foot, centre-boardskiff which I had taught myself to sail.  I sat at his feet asat the feet of a god, while he discoursed of strange lands and peoples,deeds of violence, and hair-raising gales at sea.  Then, one day,I took him for a sail.  With all the trepidation of the veriestlittle amateur, I hoisted sail and got under way.  Here was a man,looking on critically, I was sure, who knew more in one second aboutboats and the water than I could ever know.  After an interval,in which I exceeded myself, he took the tiller and the sheet. I sat on the little thwart amidships, open-mouthed, prepared to learnwhat real sailing was.  My mouth remained open, for I learned whata real sailor was in a small boat.  He couldn’t trim thesheet to save himself, he nearly capsized several times in squalls,and, once again, by blunderingly jibing over; he didn’t know whata centre-board was for, nor did he know that in running a boat beforethe wind one must sit in the middle instead of on the side; and finally,when we came back to the wharf, he ran the skiff in full tilt, shatteringher nose and carrying away the mast-step.  And yet he was a reallytruly sailor fresh from the vasty deep.

Which points my moral.  A man can sail in the forecastles ofbig ships all his life and never know what real sailing is.  Fromthe time I was twelve, I listened to the lure of the sea.  WhenI was fifteen I was captain and owner of an oyster-pirate sloop. By the time I was sixteen I was sailing in scow-schooners, fishing salmonwith the Greeks up the Sacramento River, and serving as sailor on theFish Patrol.  And I was a good sailor, too, though all my cruisinghad been on San Francisco Bay and the rivers tributary to it. I had never been on the ocean in my life.

Then, the month I was seventeen, I signed before the mast as an ableseaman on a three-top-mast schooner bound on a seven-months’ cruiseacross the Pacific and back again.  As my shipmates promptly informedme, I had had my nerve with me to sign on as able seaman.  Yetbehold, I wasan able seaman.  I had graduated from theright school.  It took no more than minutes to learn the namesand uses of the few new ropes.  It was simple.  I did notdo things blindly.  As a small-boat sailor I had learned to reasonout and know the whyof everything.  It is true, I had tolearn how to steer by compass, which took maybe half a minute; but whenit came to steering “full-and-by” and “close-and-by,”I could beat the average of my shipmates, because that was the veryway I had always sailed.  Inside fifteen minutes I could box thecompass around and back again.  And there was little else to learnduring that seven-months’ cruise, except fancy rope-sailorising,such as the more complicated lanyard knots and the making of variouskinds of sennit and rope-mats.  The point of all of which is thatit is by means of small-boat sailing that the real sailor is best schooled.

And if a man is a born sailor, and has gone to the school of thesea, never in all his life can he get away from the sea again. The salt of it is in his bones as well as his nostrils, and the seawill call to him until he dies.  Of late years, I have found easierways of earning a living.  I have quit the forecastle for keeps,but always I come back to the sea.  In my case it is usually SanFrancisco Bay, than which no lustier, tougher, sheet of water can befound for small-boat sailing.

It really blows on San Francisco Bay.  During the winter, whichis the best cruising season, we have southeasters, southwesters, andoccasional howling northers.  Throughout the summer we have whatwe call the “sea-breeze,” an unfailing wind off the Pacificthat on most afternoons in the week blows what the Atlantic Coast yachtsmenwould name a gale.  They are always surprised by the small spreadof canvas our yachts carry.  Some of them, with schooners theyhave sailed around the Horn, have looked proudly at their own loftysticks and huge spreads, then patronisingly and even pityingly at ours. Then, perchance, they have joined in a club cruise from San Franciscoto Mare Island.  They found the morning run up the Bay delightful. In the afternoon, when the brave west wind ramped across San Pablo Bayand they faced it on the long beat home, things were somewhat different. One by one, like a flight of swallows, our more meagrely sparred andcanvassed yachts went by, leaving them wallowing and dead and shorteningdown in what they called a gale but which we called a dandy sailingbreeze.  The next time they came out, we would notice their stickscut down, their booms shortened, and their after-leeches nearer theluffs by whole cloths.

As for excitement, there is all the difference in the world betweena ship in trouble at sea, and a small boat in trouble on land-lockedwater.  Yet for genuine excitement and thrill, give me the smallboat.  Things happen so quickly, and there are always so few todo the work—and hard work, too, as the small-boat sailor knows. I have toiled all night, both watches on deck, in a typhoon off thecoast of Japan, and been less exhausted than by two hours’ workat reefing down a thirty-foot sloop and heaving up two anchors on alee shore in a screaming southeaster.

Hard work and excitement?  Let the wind baffle and drop in aheavy tide-way just as you are sailing your little sloop through a narrowdraw-bridge.  Behold your sails, upon which you are depending,flap with sudden emptiness, and then see the impish wind, with a haulof eight points, fill your jib aback with a gusty puff.  Aroundshe goes, and sweeps, not through the open draw, but broadside on againstthe solid piles.  Hear the roar of the tide, sucking through thetrestle.  And hear and see your pretty, fresh-painted boat crashagainst the piles.  Feel her stout little hull give to the impact. See the rail actually pinch in.  Hear your canvas tearing, andsee the black, square-ended timbers thrusting holes through it. Smash!  There goes your topmast stay, and the topmast reels overdrunkenly above you.  There is a ripping and crunching.  Ifit continues, your starboard shrouds will be torn out.  Grab arope—any rope—and take a turn around a pile.  But thefree end of the rope is too short.  You can’t make it fast,and you hold on and wildly yell for your one companion to get a turnwith another and longer rope.  Hold on!  You hold on tillyou are purple in the face, till it seems your arms are dragging outof their sockets, till the blood bursts from the ends of your fingers. But you hold, and your partner gets the longer rope and makes it fast. You straighten up and look at your hands.  They are ruined. You can scarcely relax the crooks of the fingers.  The pain issickening.  But there is no time.  The skiff, which is alwaysperverse, is pounding against the barnacles on the piles which threatento scrape its gunwale off.  It’s drop the peak!  Downjib!  Then you run lines, and pull and haul and heave, and exchangeunpleasant remarks with the bridge-tender who is always willing to meetyou more than half way in such repartee.  And finally, at the endof an hour, with aching back, sweat-soaked shirt, and slaughtered hands,you are through and swinging along on the placid, beneficent tide betweennarrow banks where the cattle stand knee-deep and gaze wonderingly atyou.  Excitement!  Work!  Can you beat it in a calm dayon the deep sea?

I’ve tried it both ways.  I remember labouring in a fourteendays’ gale off the coast of New Zealand.  We were a trampcollier, rusty and battered, with six thousand tons of coal in our hold. Life lines were stretched fore and aft; and on our weather side, attachedto smokestack guys and rigging, were huge rope-nettings, hung therefor the purpose of breaking the force of the seas and so saving ourmess-room doors.  But the doors were smashed and the mess-roomswashed out just the same.  And yet, out of it all, arose but theone feeling, namely, of monotony.

In contrast with the foregoing, about the liveliest eight days ofmy life were spent in a small boat on the west coast of Korea. Never mind why I was thus voyaging up the Yellow Sea during the monthof February in below-zero weather.  The point is that I was inan open boat, a sampan, on a rocky coast where there were nolight-houses and where the tides ran from thirty to sixty feet. My crew were Japanese fishermen.  We did not speak each other’slanguage.  Yet there was nothing monotonous about that trip. Never shall I forget one particular cold bitter dawn, when, in the thickof driving snow, we took in sail and dropped our small anchor. The wind was howling out of the northwest, and we were on a lee shore. Ahead and astern, all escape was cut off by rocky headlands, againstwhose bases burst the unbroken seas.  To windward a short distance,seen only between the snow-squalls, was a low rocky reef.  It wasthis that inadequately protected us from the whole Yellow Sea that thunderedin upon us.

The Japanese crawled under a communal rice mat and went to sleep. I joined them, and for several hours we dozed fitfully.  Then asea deluged us out with icy water, and we found several inches of snowon top the mat.  The reef to windward was disappearing under therising tide, and moment by moment the seas broke more strongly overthe rocks.  The fishermen studied the shore anxiously.  Sodid I, and with a sailor’s eye, though I could see little chancefor a swimmer to gain that surf-hammered line of rocks.  I madesigns toward the headlands on either flank.  The Japanese shooktheir heads.  I indicated that dreadful lee shore.  Stillthey shook their heads and did nothing.  My conclusion was thatthey were paralysed by the hopelessness of the situation.  Yetour extremity increased with every minute, for the rising tide was robbingus of the reef that served as buffer.  It soon became a case ofswamping at our anchor.  Seas were splashing on board in growingvolume, and we baled constantly.  And still my fishermen crew eyedthe surf-battered shore and did nothing.

At last, after many narrow escapes from complete swamping, the fishermengot into action.  All hands tailed on to the anchor and hove itup.  For’ard, as the boat’s head paid off, we set apatch of sail about the size of a flour-sack.  And we headed straightfor shore.  I unlaced my shoes, unbottoned my great-coat and coat,and was ready to make a quick partial strip a minute or so before westruck.  But we didn’t strike, and, as we rushed in, I sawthe beauty of the situation.  Before us opened a narrow channel,frilled at its mouth with breaking seas.  Yet, long before, whenI had scanned the shore closely, there had been no such channel. I had forgotten the thirty-foot tide.  And it was for thistide that the Japanese had so precariously waited.  We ran thefrill of breakers, curved into a tiny sheltered bay where the waterwas scarcely flawed by the gale, and landed on a beach where the saltsea of the last tide lay frozen in long curving lines.  And thiswas one gale of three in the course of those eight days in the sampan. Would it have been beaten on a ship?  I fear me the ship wouldhave gone aground on the outlying reef and that its people would havebeen incontinently and monotonously drowned.

There are enough surprises and mishaps in a three-days’ cruisein a small boat to supply a great ship on the ocean for a full year. I remember, once, taking out on her trial trip a little thirty-footerI had just bought.  In six days we had two stiff blows, and, inaddition, one proper southwester and one rip-snorting southeaster. The slight intervals between these blows were dead calms.  Also,in the six days, we were aground three times.  Then, too, we tiedup to the bank in the Sacramento River, and, grounding by an accidenton the steep slope on a falling tide, nearly turned a side somersaultdown the bank.  In a stark calm and heavy tide in the CarquinezStraits, where anchors skate on the channel-scoured bottom, we weresucked against a big dock and smashed and bumped down a quarter of amile of its length before we could get clear.  Two hours afterward,on San Pablo Bay, the wind was piping up and we were reefing down. It is no fun to pick up a skiff adrift in a heavy sea and gale. That was our next task, for our skiff, swamping, parted both towingpainters we had bent on.  Before we recovered it we had nearlykilled ourselves with exhaustion, and we certainly had strained thesloop in every part from keelson to truck.  And to cap it all,coming into our home port, beating up the narrowest part of the SanAntonio Estuary, we had a shave of inches from collision with a bigship in tow of a tug.  I have sailed the ocean in far larger crafta year at a time, in which period occurred no such chapter of movingincident.

After all, the mishaps are almost the best part of small-boat sailing. Looking back, they prove to be punctuations of joy.  At the timethey try your mettle and your vocabulary, and may make you so pessimisticas to believe that God has a grudge against you—but afterward,ah, afterward, with what pleasure you remember them and with what gustodo you relate them to your brother skippers in the fellowhood of small-boatsailing!

A narrow, winding slough; a half tide, exposing mud surfaced withgangrenous slime; the water itself filthy and discoloured by the wastefrom the vats of a near-by tannery; the marsh grass on either side mottledwith all the shades of a decaying orchid; a crazy, ramshackled, ancientwharf; and at the end of the wharf a small, white-painted sloop. Nothing romantic about it.  No hint of adventure.  A splendidpictorial argument against the alleged joys of small-boat sailing. Possibly that is what Cloudesley and I thought, that sombre, leadenmorning as we turned out to cook breakfast and wash decks.  Thelatter was my stunt, but one look at the dirty water overside and anotherat my fresh-painted deck, deterred me.  After breakfast, we starteda game of chess.  The tide continued to fall, and we felt the sloopbegin to list.  We played on until the chess men began to fallover.  The list increased, and we went on deck.  Bow-lineand stern-line were drawn taut.  As we looked the boat listed stillfarther with an abrupt jerk.  The lines were now very taut.

“As soon as her belly touches the bottom she will stop,”I said.

Cloudesley sounded with a boat-hook along the outside.

“Seven feet of water,” he announced.  “Thebank is almost up and down.  The first thing that touches willbe her mast when she turns bottom up.”

An ominous, minute snapping noise came from the stern-line. Even as we looked, we saw a strand fray and part.  Then we jumped. Scarcely had we bent another line between the stern and the wharf, whenthe original line parted.  As we bent another line for’ard,the original one there crackled and parted.  After that, it wasan inferno of work and excitement.

We ran more and more lines, and more and more lines continued topart, and more and more the pretty boat went over on her side. We bent all our spare lines; we unrove sheets and halyards; we usedour two-inch hawser; we fastened lines part way up the mast, half wayup, and everywhere else.  We toiled and sweated and enounced ourmutual and sincere conviction that God’s grudge still held againstus.  Country yokels came down on the wharf and sniggered at us. When Cloudesley let a coil of rope slip down the inclined deck intothe vile slime and fished it out with seasick countenance, the yokelssniggered louder and it was all I could do to prevent him from climbingup on the wharf and committing murder.

By the time the sloop’s deck was perpendicular, we had unbentthe boom-lift from below, made it fast to the wharf, and, with the otherend fast nearly to the mast-head, heaved it taut with block and tackle. The lift was of steel wire.  We were confident that it could standthe strain, but we doubted the holding-power of the stays that heldthe mast.

The tide had two more hours to ebb (and it was the big run-out),which meant that five hours must elapse ere the returning tide wouldgive us a chance to learn whether or not the sloop would rise to itand right herself.

The bank was almost up and down, and at the bottom, directly beneathus, the fast-ebbing tide left a pit of the vilest, illest-smelling,illest-appearing muck to be seen in many a day’s ride.  SaidCloudesley to me gazing down into it:

“I love you as a brother.  I’d fight for you. I’d face roaring lions, and sudden death by field and flood. But just the same, don’t you fall into that.”  He shudderednauseously.  “For if you do, I haven’t the grit topull you out.  I simply couldn’t.  You’d be awful. The best I could do would be to take a boat-hook and shove you downout of sight.”

We sat on the upper side-wall of the cabin, dangled our legs downthe top of the cabin, leaned our backs against the deck, and playedchess until the rising tide and the block and tackle on the boom-liftenabled us to get her on a respectable keel again.  Years afterward,down in the South Seas, on the island of Ysabel, I was caught in a similarpredicament.  In order to clean her copper, I had careened theSnarkbroadside on to the beach and outward.  When the tiderose, she refused to rise.  The water crept in through the scuppers,mounted over the rail, and the level of the ocean slowly crawled upthe slant of the deck.  We battened down the engine-room hatch,and the sea rose to it and over it and climbed perilously near to thecabin companion-way and skylight.  We were all sick with fever,but we turned out in the blazing tropic sun and toiled madly for severalhours.  We carried our heaviest lines ashore from our mast-headsand heaved with our heaviest purchase until everything crackled includingourselves.  We would spell off and lie down like dead men, thenget up and heave and crackle again.  And in the end, our lowerrail five feet under water and the wavelets lapping the companion-waycombing, the sturdy little craft shivered and shook herself and pointedher masts once more to the zenith.

There is never lack of exercise in small-boat sailing, and the hardwork is not only part of the fun of it, but it beats the doctors. San Francisco Bay is no mill pond.  It is a large and draughtyand variegated piece of water.  I remember, one winter evening,trying to enter the mouth of the Sacramento.  There was a fresheton the river, the flood tide from the bay had been beaten back intoa strong ebb, and the lusty west wind died down with the sun. It was just sunset, and with a fair to middling breeze, dead aft, westood still in the rapid current.  We were squarely in the mouthof the river; but there was no anchorage and we drifted backward, fasterand faster, and dropped anchor outside as the last breath of wind leftus.  The night came on, beautiful and warm and starry.  Myone companion cooked supper, while on deck I put everything in shapeBristol fashion.  When we turned in at nine o’clock the weather-promisewas excellent.  (If I had carried a barometer I’d have knownbetter.)  By two in the morning our shrouds were thrumming in apiping breeze, and I got up and gave her more scope on her hawser. Inside another hour there was no doubt that we were in for a southeaster.

It is not nice to leave a warm bed and get out of a bad anchoragein a black blowy night, but we arose to the occasion, put in two reefs,and started to heave up.  The winch was old, and the strain ofthe jumping head sea was too much for it.  With the winch out ofcommission, it was impossible to heave up by hand.  We knew, becausewe tried it and slaughtered our hands.  Now a sailor hates to losean anchor.  It is a matter of pride.  Of course, we couldhave buoyed ours and slipped it.  Instead, however, I gave herstill more hawser, veered her, and dropped the second anchor.

There was little sleep after that, for first one and then the otherof us would be rolled out of our bunks.  The increasing size ofthe seas told us we were dragging, and when we struck the scoured channelwe could tell by the feel of it that our two anchors were fairly skatingacross.  It was a deep channel, the farther edge of it rising steeplylike the wall of a canyon, and when our anchors started up that wallthey hit in and held.

Yet, when we fetched up, through the darkness we could hear the seasbreaking on the solid shore astern, and so near was it that we shortenedthe skiff’s painter.

Daylight showed us that between the stern of the skiff and destructionwas no more than a score of feet.  And how it did blow!  Therewere times, in the gusts, when the wind must have approached a velocityof seventy or eighty miles an hour.  But the anchors held, andso nobly that our final anxiety was that the for’ard bitts wouldbe jerked clean out of the boat.  All day the sloop alternatelyducked her nose under and sat down on her stern; and it was not tilllate afternoon that the storm broke in one last and worst mad gust. For a full five minutes an absolute dead calm prevailed, and then, withthe suddenness of a thunderclap, the wind snorted out of the southwest—ashift of eight points and a boisterous gale.  Another night ofit was too much for us, and we hove up by hand in a cross head-sea. It was not stiff work.  It was heart-breaking.  And I knowwe were both near to crying from the hurt and the exhaustion. And when we did get the first anchor up-and-down we couldn’t breakit out.  Between seas we snubbed her nose down to it, took plentyof turns, and stood clear as she jumped.  Almost everything smashedand parted except the anchor-hold.  The chocks were jerked out,the rail torn off, and the very covering-board splintered, and stillthe anchor held.  At last, hoisting the reefed mainsail and slackingoff a few of the hard-won feet of the chain, we sailed the anchor out. It was nip and tuck, though, and there were times when the boat wasknocked down flat.  We repeated the manoeuvre with the remaininganchor, and in the gathering darkness fled into the shelter of the river’smouth.

I was born so long ago that I grew up before the era of gasolene. As a result, I am old-fashioned.  I prefer a sail-boat to a motor-boat,and it is my belief that boat-sailing is a finer, more difficult, andsturdier art than running a motor.  Gasolene engines are becomingfool-proof, and while it is unfair to say that any fool can run an engine,it is fair to say that almost any one can.  Not so, when it comesto sailing a boat.  More skill, more intelligence, and a vast dealmore training are necessary.  It is the finest training in theworld for boy and youth and man.  If the boy is very small, equiphim with a small, comfortable skiff.  He will do the rest. He won’t need to be taught.  Shortly he will be setting atiny leg-of-mutton and steering with an oar.  Then he will beginto talk keels and centreboards and want to take his blankets out andstop aboard all night.

But don’t be afraid for him.  He is bound to run risksand encounter accidents.  Remember, there are accidents in thenursery as well as out on the water.  More boys have died fromhot-house culture than have died on boats large and small; and moreboys have been made into strong and reliant men by boat-sailing thanby lawn-croquet and dancing-school.

And once a sailor, always a sailor.  The savour of the saltnever stales.  The sailor never grows so old that he does not careto go back for one more wrestling bout with wind and wave.  I knowit of myself.  I have turned rancher, and live beyond sight ofthe sea.  Yet I can stay away from it only so long.  Afterseveral months have passed, I begin to grow restless.  I find myselfday-dreaming over incidents of the last cruise, or wondering if thestriped bass are running on Wingo Slough, or eagerly reading the newspapersfor reports of the first northern flights of ducks.  And then,suddenly, there is a hurried pack of suit-cases and overhauling of gear,and we are off for Vallejo where the little Roamerlies, waiting,always waiting, for the skiff to come alongside, for the lighting ofthe fire in the galley-stove, for the pulling off of gaskets, the swingingup of the mainsail, and the rat-tat-tat of the reef-points, for theheaving short and the breaking out, and for the twirling of the wheelas she fills away and heads up Bay or down.

JACK LONDON
On Board Roamer,
Sonoma Creek,
April 15, 1911

FOUR HORSES AND A SAILOR

“Huh!  Drive four horses!  I wouldn’t sit behindyou—not for a thousand dollars—over them mountain roads.”

So said Henry, and he ought to have known, for he drives four horseshimself.

Said another Glen Ellen friend: “What?  London? He drive four horses?  Can’t drive one!”

And the best of it is that he was right.  Even after managingto get a few hundred miles with my four horses, I don’t know howto drive one.  Just the other day, swinging down a steep mountainroad and rounding an abrupt turn, I came full tilt on a horse and buggybeing driven by a woman up the hill.  We could not pass on thenarrow road, where was only a foot to spare, and my horses did not knowhow to back, especially up-hill.  About two hundred yards downthe hill was a spot where we could pass.  The driver of the buggysaid she didn’t dare back down because she was not sure of thebrake.  And as I didn’t know how to tackle one horse, I didn’ttry it.  So we unhitched her horse and backed down by hand. Which was very well, till it came to hitching the horse to the buggyagain.  She didn’t know how.  I didn’t either,and I had depended on her knowledge.  It took us about half anhour, with frequent debates and consultations, though it is an absolutecertainty that never in its life was that horse hitched in that particularway.

No; I can’t harness up one horse.  But I can four, whichcompels me to back up again to get to my beginning.  Having selectedSonoma Valley for our abiding place, Charmian and I decided it was abouttime we knew what we had in our own county and the neighbouring ones. How to do it, was the first question.  Among our many weaknessesis the one of being old-fashioned.  We don’t mix with gasolenevery well.  And, as true sailors should, we naturally gravitatetoward horses.  Being one of those lucky individuals who carrieshis office under his hat, I should have to take a typewriter and a loadof books along.  This put saddle-horses out of the running. Charmian suggested driving a span.  She had faith in me; besides,she could drive a span herself.  But when I thought of the manymountains to cross, and of crossing them for three months with a poortired span, I vetoed the proposition and said we’d have to comeback to gasolene after all.  This she vetoed just as emphatically,and a deadlock obtained until I received inspiration.

“Why not drive four horses?” I said.

“But you don’t know how to drive four horses,”was her objection.

I threw my chest out and my shoulders back.  “What manhas done, I can do,” I proclaimed grandly.  “And pleasedon’t forget that when we sailed on the SnarkI knew nothingof navigation, and that I taught myself as I sailed.”

“Very well,” she said.  (And there’s faithfor you! )  “They shall be four saddle horses, and we’llstrap our saddles on behind the rig.”

It was my turn to object.  “Our saddle horses are notbroken to harness.”

“Then break them.”

And what I knew about horses, much less about breaking them, wasjust about as much as any sailor knows.  Having been kicked, buckedoff, fallen over backward upon, and thrown out and run over, on verynumerous occasions, I had a mighty vigorous respect for horses; buta wife’s faith must be lived up to, and I went at it.

King was a polo pony from St. Louis, and Prince a many-gaited love-horsefrom Pasadena.  The hardest thing was to get them to dig in andpull.  They rollicked along on the levels and galloped down thehills, but when they struck an up-grade and felt the weight of the breaking-cart,they stopped and turned around and looked at me.  But I passedthem, and my troubles began.  Milda was fourteen years old, anunadulterated broncho, and in temperament was a combination of muleand jack-rabbit blended equally.  If you pressed your hand on herflank and told her to get over, she lay down on you.  If you gother by the head and told her to back, she walked forward over you. And if you got behind her and shoved and told her to “Giddap!”she sat down on you.  Also, she wouldn’t walk.  Forendless weary miles I strove with her, but never could I get her towalk a step.  Finally, she was a manger-glutton.  No matterhow near or far from the stable, when six o’clock came aroundshe bolted for home and never missed the directest cross-road. Many times I rejected her.

The fourth and most rejected horse of all was the Outlaw.  Fromthe age of three to seven she had defied all horse-breakers and brokena number of them.  Then a long, lanky cowboy, with a fifty-poundsaddle and a Mexican bit had got her proud goat.  I was the nextowner.  She was my favourite riding horse.  Charmian saidI’d have to put her in as a wheeler where I would have more controlover her.  Now Charmian had a favourite riding mare called Maid. I suggested Maid as a substitute.  Charmian pointed out that mymare was a branded range horse, while hers was a near-thoroughbred,and that the legs of her mare would be ruined forever if she were drivenfor three months.  I acknowledged her mare’s thoroughbredness,and at the same time defied her to find any thoroughbred with as smalland delicately-viciously pointed ears as my Outlaw.  She indicatedMaid’s exquisitely thin shinbone.  I measured the Outlaw’s. It was equally thin, although, I insinuated, possibly more durable. This stabbed Charmian’s pride.  Of course her near-thoroughbredMaid, carrying the blood of “old” Lexington, Morella, anda streak of the super-enduring Morgan, could run, walk, and work myunregistered Outlaw into the ground; and that was the very precise reasonwhy such a paragon of a saddle animal should not be degraded by harness.

So it was that Charmian remained obdurate, until, one day, I gother behind the Outlaw for a forty-mile drive.  For every inch ofthose forty miles the Outlaw kicked and jumped, in between the kicksand jumps finding time and space in which to seize its team-mate bythe back of the neck and attempt to drag it to the ground.  Anothertrick the Outlaw developed during that drive was suddenly to turn atright angles in the traces and endeavour to butt its team-mate overthe grade.  Reluctantly and nobly did Charmian give in and consentto the use of Maid.  The Outlaw’s shoes were pulled off,and she was turned out on range.

Finally, the four horses were hooked to the rig—a light Studebakertrap.  With two hours and a half of practice, in which the excitementwas not abated by several jack-poles and numerous kicking matches, Iannounced myself as ready for the start.  Came the morning, andPrince, who was to have been a wheeler with Maid, showed up with a badlykicked shoulder.  He did not exactly show up; we had to find him,for he was unable to walk.  His leg swelled and continually swelledduring the several days we waited for him.  Remained only the Outlaw. In from pasture she came, shoes were nailed on, and she was harnessedinto the wheel.  Friends and relatives strove to press accidentpolicies on me, but Charmian climbed up alongside, and Nakata got intothe rear seat with the typewriter—Nakata, who sailed cabin-boyon the Snark for two years and who had shown himself afraid of nothing,not even of me and my amateur jamborees in experimenting with new modesof locomotion.  And we did very nicely, thank you, especially afterthe first hour or so, during which time the Outlaw had kicked aboutfifty various times, chiefly to the damage of her own legs and the paintwork,and after she had bitten a couple of hundred times, to the damage ofMaid’s neck and Charmian’s temper.  It was hard enoughto have her favourite mare in the harness without also enduring thespectacle of its being eaten alive.

Our leaders were joys.  King being a polo pony and Milda a rabbit,they rounded curves beautifully and darted ahead like coyotes out ofthe way of the wheelers.  Milda’s besetting weakness wasa frantic desire not to have the lead-bar strike her hocks.  Whenthis happened, one of three things occurred: either she sat down onthe lead-bar, kicked it up in the air until she got her back under it,or exploded in a straight-ahead, harness-disrupting jump.  Notuntil she carried the lead-bar clean away and danced a break-down onit and the traces, did she behave decently.  Nakata and I madethe repairs with good old-fashioned bale-rope, which is stronger thanwrought-iron any time, and we went on our way.

In the meantime I was learning—I shall not say to tool a four-in-hand—butjust simply to drive four horses.  Now it is all right enough tobegin with four work-horses pulling a load of several tons.  Butto begin with four light horses, all running, and a light rig that seemsto outrun them—well, when things happen they happen quickly. My weakness was total ignorance.  In particular, my fingers lackedtraining, and I made the mistake of depending on my eyes to handle thereins.  This brought me up against a disastrous optical illusion. The bight of the off head-line, being longer and heavier than that ofthe off wheel-line, hung lower.  In a moment requiring quick action,I invariably mistook the two lines.  Pulling on what I thoughtwas the wheel-line, in order to straighten the team, I would see theleaders swing abruptly around into a jack-pole.  Now for sensationsof sheer impotence, nothing can compare with a jack-pole, when the horrifieddriver beholds his leaders prancing gaily up the road and his wheelersjogging steadily down the road, all at the same time and all harnessedtogether and to the same rig.

I no longer jack-pole, and I don’t mind admitting how I gotout of the habit.  It was my eyes that enslaved my fingers intoill practices.  So I shut my eyes and let the fingers go it alone. To-day my fingers are independent of my eyes and work automatically. I do not see what my fingers do.  They just do it.  All Isee is the satisfactory result.

Still we managed to get over the ground that first day—downsunny Sonoma Valley to the old town of Sonoma, founded by General Vallejoas the remotest outpost on the northern frontier for the purpose ofholding back the Gentiles, as the wild Indians of those days were called. Here history was made.  Here the last Spanish mission was reared;here the Bear flag was raised; and here Kit Carson, and Fremont, andall our early adventurers came and rested in the days before the daysof gold.

We swung on over the low, rolling hills, through miles of dairy farmsand chicken ranches where every blessed hen is white, and down the slopesto Petaluma Valley.  Here, in 1776, Captain Quiros came up PetalumaCreek from San Pablo Bay in quest of an outlet to Bodega Bay on thecoast.  And here, later, the Russians, with Alaskan hunters, carriedskin boats across from Fort Ross to poach for sea-otters on the Spanishpreserve of San Francisco Bay.  Here, too, still later, GeneralVallejo built a fort, which still stands—one of the finest examplesof Spanish adobe that remain to us.  And here, at the old fort,to bring the chronicle up to date, our horses proceeded to make peculiarlypersonal history with astonishing success and dispatch.  King,our peerless, polo-pony leader, went lame.  So hopelessly lamedid he go that no expert, then and afterward, could determine whetherthe lameness was in his frogs, hoofs, legs, shoulders, or head. Maid picked up a nail and began to limp.  Milda, figuring the dayalready sufficiently spent and maniacal with manger-gluttony, beganto rabbit-jump.  All that held her was the bale-rope.  Andthe Outlaw, game to the last, exceeded all previous exhibitions of skin-removing,paint-marring, and horse-eating.

At Petaluma we rested over while King was returned to the ranch andPrince sent to us.  Now Prince had proved himself an excellentwheeler, yet he had to go into the lead and let the Outlaw retain hisold place.  There is an axiom that a good wheeler is a poor leader. I object to the last adjective.  A good wheeler makes an infinitelyworse kind of a leader than that.  I know . . . now.  I oughtto know.  Since that day I have driven Prince a few hundred milesin the lead.  He is neither any better nor any worse than the firstmile he ran in the lead; and his worst is even extremely worse thanwhat you are thinking.  Not that he is vicious.  He is merelya good-natured rogue who shakes hands for sugar, steps on your toesout of sheer excessive friendliness, and just goes on loving you inyour harshest moments.

But he won’t get out of the way.  Also, whenever he isreproved for being in the wrong, he accuses Milda of it and bites theback of her neck.  So bad has this become that whenever I yell“Prince!” in a loud voice, Milda immediately rabbit-jumpsto the side, straight ahead, or sits down on the lead-bar.  Allof which is quite disconcerting.  Picture it yourself.  Youare swinging round a sharp, down-grade, mountain curve, at a fast trot. The rock wall is the outside of the curve.  The inside of the curveis a precipice.  The continuance of the curve is a narrow, unrailedbridge.  You hit the curve, throwing the leaders in against thewall and making the polo-horse do the work.  All is lovely. The leaders are hugging the wall like nestling doves.  But themoment comes in the evolution when the leaders must shoot out ahead. They really must shoot, or else they’ll hit the wall and missthe bridge.  Also, behind them are the wheelers, and the rig, andyou have just eased the brake in order to put sufficient snap into themanoeuvre.  If ever team-work is required, now is the time. Milda tries to shoot.  She does her best, but Prince, bubblingover with roguishness, lags behind.  He knows the trick. Milda is half a length ahead of him.  He times it to the fractionof a second.  Maid, in the wheel, over-running him, naturally biteshim.  This disturbs the Outlaw, who has been behaving beautifully,and she immediately reaches across for Maid.  Simultaneously, witha fine display of firm conviction that it’s all Milda’sfault, Prince sinks his teeth into the back of Milda’s defencelessneck.  The whole thing has occurred in less than a second. Under the surprise and pain of the bite, Milda either jumps ahead tothe imminent peril of harness and lead-bar, or smashes into the wall,stops short with the lead-bar over her back, and emits a couple of hystericalkicks.  The Outlaw invariably selects this moment to remove paint. And after things are untangled and you have had time to appreciate theclose shave, you go up to Prince and reprove him with your choicestvocabulary.  And Prince, gazelle-eyed and tender, offers to shakehands with you for sugar.  I leave it to any one: a boat wouldnever act that way.

We have some history north of the Bay.  Nearly three centuriesand a half ago, that doughty pirate and explorer, Sir Francis Drake,combing the Pacific for Spanish galleons, anchored in the bight formedby Point Reyes, on which to-day is one of the richest dairy regionsin the world.  Here, less than two decades after Drake, SebastienCarmenon piled up on the rocks with a silk-laden galleon from the Philippines. And in this same bay of Drake, long afterward, the Russian fur-poachersrendezvous’d their bidarkasand stole in through the GoldenGate to the forbidden waters of San Francisco Bay.

Farther up the coast, in Sonoma County, we pilgrimaged to the sitesof the Russian settlements.  At Bodega Bay, south of what to-dayis called Russian River, was their anchorage, while north of the riverthey built their fort.  And much of Fort Ross still stands. Log-bastions, church, and stables hold their own, and so well, withrusty hinges creaking, that we warmed ourselves at the hundred-years-olddouble fireplace and slept under the hand-hewn roof beams still heldtogether by spikes of hand-wrought iron.

We went to see where history had been made, and we saw scenery aswell.  One of our stretches in a day’s drive was from beautifulInverness on Tomales Bay, down the Olema Valley to Bolinas Bay, alongthe eastern shore of that body of water to Willow Camp, and up overthe sea-bluffs, around the bastions of Tamalpais, and down to Sausalito. From the head of Bolinas Bay to Willow Camp the drive on the edge ofthe beach, and actually, for half-mile stretches, in the waters of thebay itself, was a delightful experience.  The wonderful part wasto come.  Very few San Franciscans, much less Californians, knowof that drive from Willow Camp, to the south and east, along the poppy-blowncliffs, with the sea thundering in the sheer depths hundreds of feetbelow and the Golden Gate opening up ahead, disclosing smoky San Franciscoon her many hills.  Far off, blurred on the breast of the sea,can be seen the Farallones, which Sir Francis Drake passed on a S. W.course in the thick of what he describes as a “stynking fog.” Well might he call it that, and a few other names, for it was the fogthat robbed him of the glory of discovering San Francisco Bay.

It was on this part of the drive that I decided at last I was learningreal mountain-driving.  To confess the truth, for delicious titillationof one’s nerve, I have since driven over no mountain road thatwas worse, or better, rather, than that piece.

And then the contrast!  From Sausalito, over excellent, park-likeboulevards, through the splendid redwoods and homes of Mill Valley,across the blossomed hills of Marin County, along the knoll-studdedpicturesque marshes, past San Rafael resting warmly among her hills,over the divide and up the Petaluma Valley, and on to the grassy feetof Sonoma Mountain and home.  We covered fifty-five miles thatday.  Not so bad, eh, for Prince the Rogue, the paint-removingOutlaw, the thin-shanked thoroughbred, and the rabbit-jumper? And they came in cool and dry, ready for their mangers and the straw.

Oh, we didn’t stop.  We considered we were just starting,and that was many weeks ago.  We have kept on going over six countieswhich are comfortably large, even for California, and we are still going. We have twisted and tabled, criss-crossed our tracks, made fascinatingand lengthy dives into the interior valleys in the hearts of Napa andLake Counties, travelled the coast for hundreds of miles on end, andare now in Eureka, on Humboldt Bay, which was discovered by accidentby the gold-seekers, who were trying to find their way to and from theTrinity diggings.  Even here, the white man’s history precededthem, for dim tradition says that the Russians once anchored here andhunted sea-otter before the first Yankee trader rounded the Horn, orthe first Rocky Mountain trapper thirsted across the “Great AmericanDesert” and trickled down the snowy Sierras to the sun-kissedland.  No; we are not resting our horses here on Humboldt Bay. We are writing this article, gorging on abalones and mussels, diggingclams, and catching record-breaking sea-trout and rock-cod in the intervalsin which we are not sailing, motor-boating, and swimming in the mosttemperately equable climate we have ever experienced.

These comfortably large counties!  They are veritable empires. Take Humboldt, for instance.  It is three times as large as RhodeIsland, one and a half times as large as Delaware, almost as large asConnecticut, and half as large as Massachusetts.  The pioneer hasdone his work in this north of the bay region, the foundations are laid,and all is ready for the inevitable inrush of population and adequatedevelopment of resources which so far have been no more than skimmed,and casually and carelessly skimmed at that.  This region of thesix counties alone will some day support a population of millions. In the meanwhile, O you home-seekers, you wealth-seekers, and, aboveall, you climate-seekers, now is the time to get in on the ground floor.

Robert Ingersoll once said that the genial climate of Californiawould in a fairly brief time evolve a race resembling the Mexicans,and that in two or three generations the Californians would be seenof a Sunday morning on their way to a cockfight with a rooster undereach arm.  Never was made a rasher generalisation, based on soabsolute an ignorance of facts.  It is to laugh.  Here isa climate that breeds vigour, with just sufficient geniality to preventthe expenditure of most of that vigour in fighting the elements. Here is a climate where a man can work three hundred and sixty-fivedays in the year without the slightest hint of enervation, and wherefor three hundred and sixty-five nights he must perforce sleep underblankets.  What more can one say?  I consider myself somewhatof climate expert, having adventured among most of the climates of fiveout of the six zones.  I have not yet been in the Antarctic, butwhatever climate obtains there will not deter me from drawing the conclusionthat nowhere is there a climate to compare with that of this region. Maybe I am as wrong as Ingersoll was.  Nevertheless I take my medicineby continuing to live in this climate.  Also, it is the only medicineI ever take.

But to return to the horses.  There is some improvement. Milda has actually learned to walk.  Maid has proved her thoroughbrednessby never tiring on the longest days, and, while being the strongestand highest spirited of all, by never causing any trouble save for anoccasional kick at the Outlaw.  And the Outlaw rarely gallops,no longer butts, only periodically kicks, comes in to the pole and doesher work without attempting to vivisect Maid’s medulla oblongata,and—marvel of marvels—is really and truly getting lazy. But Prince remains the same incorrigible, loving and lovable rogue hehas always been.

And the country we’ve been over!  The drives through Napaand Lake Counties!  One, from Sonoma Valley, via Santa Rosa, wecould not refrain from taking several ways, and on all the ways we foundthe roads excellent for machines as well as horses.  One route,and a more delightful one for an automobile cannot be found, is outfrom Santa Rosa, past old Altruria and Mark West Springs, then to theright and across to Calistoga in Napa Valley.  By keeping to theleft, the drive holds on up the Russian River Valley, through the milesof the noted Asti Vineyards to Cloverdale, and then by way of Pieta,Witter, and Highland Springs to Lakeport.  Still another way wetook, was down Sonoma Valley, skirting San Pablo Bay, and up the lovelyNapa Valley.  From Napa were side excursions through Pope and BerryessaValleys, on to Ætna Springs, and still on, into Lake County, crossingthe famous Langtry Ranch.

Continuing up the Napa Valley, walled on either hand by great rockpalisades and redwood forests and carpeted with endless vineyards, andcrossing the many stone bridges for which the County is noted and whichare a joy to the beauty-loving eyes as well as to the four-horse tyrodriver, past Calistoga with its old mud-baths and chicken-soup springs,with St. Helena and its giant saddle ever towering before us, we climbedthe mountains on a good grade and dropped down past the quicksilvermines to the canyon of the Geysers.  After a stop over night andan exploration of the miniature-grand volcanic scene, we pulled on acrossthe canyon and took the grade where the cicadas simmered audibly inthe noon sunshine among the hillside manzanitas.  Then, higher,came the big cattle-dotted upland pastures, and the rocky summit. And here on the summit, abruptly, we caught a vision, or what seemeda mirage.  The ocean we had left long days before, yet far downand away shimmered a blue sea, framed on the farther shore by ruggedmountains, on the near shore by fat and rolling farm lands.  ClearLake was before us, and like proper sailors we returned to our sea,going for a sail, a fish, and a swim ere the day was done and turninginto tired Lakeport blankets in the early evening.  Well has LakeCounty been called the Walled-in County.  But the railroad is coming. They say the approach we made to Clear Lake is similar to the approachto Lake Lucerne.  Be that as it may, the scenery, with its distantsnow-capped peaks, can well be called Alpine.

And what can be more exquisite than the drive out from Clear Laketo Ukiah by way of the Blue Lakes chain!—every turn bringing intoview a picture of breathless beauty; every glance backward revealingsome perfect composition in line and colour, the intense blue of thewater margined with splendid oaks, green fields, and swaths of orangepoppies.  But those side glances and backward glances were provocativeof trouble.  Charmian and I disagreed as to which way the connectingstream of water ran.  We still disagree, for at the hotel, wherewe submitted the affair to arbitration, the hotel manager and the clerklikewise disagreed.  I assume, now, that we never will know whichway that stream runs.  Charmian suggests “both ways.” I refuse such a compromise.  No stream of water I ever saw couldaccomplish that feat at one and the same time.  The greatest concessionI can make is that sometimes it may run one way and sometimes the other,and that in the meantime we should both consult an oculist.

More valley from Ukiah to Willits, and then we turned westward throughthe virgin Sherwood Forest of magnificent redwood, stopping at Alpinefor the night and continuing on through Mendocino County to Fort Braggand “salt water.”  We also came to Fort Bragg up thecoast from Fort Ross, keeping our coast journey intact from the GoldenGate.  The coast weather was cool and delightful, the coast drivingsuperb.  Especially in the Fort Ross section did we find the roadsthrilling, while all the way along we followed the sea.  At everystream, the road skirted dizzy cliff-edges, dived down into lush growthsof forest and ferns and climbed out along the cliff-edges again. The way was lined with flowers—wild lilac, wild roses, poppies,and lupins.  Such lupins!—giant clumps of them, of everylupin-shade and—colour.  And it was along the Mendocino roadsthat Charmian caused many delays by insisting on getting out to pickthe wild blackberries, strawberries, and thimble-berries which grewso profusely.  And ever we caught peeps, far down, of steam schoonersloading lumber in the rocky coves; ever we skirted the cliffs, day afterday, crossing stretches of rolling farm lands and passing through thrivingvillages and saw-mill towns.  Memorable was our launch-trip fromMendocino City up Big River, where the steering gears of the launcheswork the reverse of anywhere else in the world; where we saw a streamof logs, of six to twelve and fifteen feet in diameter, which filledthe river bed for miles to the obliteration of any sign of water; andwhere we were told of a white or albino redwood tree.  We did notsee this last, so cannot vouch for it.

All the streams were filled with trout, and more than once we sawthe side-hill salmon on the slopes.  No, side-hill salmon is nota peripatetic fish; it is a deer out of season.  But the trout! At Gualala Charmian caught her first one.  Once before in my lifeI had caught two . . . on angleworms.  On occasion I had triedfly and spinner and never got a strike, and I had come to believe thatall this talk of fly-fishing was just so much nature-faking.  Buton the Gualala River I caught trout—a lot of them—on flyand spinners; and I was beginning to feel quite an expert, until Nakata,fishing on bottom with a pellet of bread for bait, caught the biggesttrout of all.  I now affirm there is nothing in science nor inart.  Nevertheless, since that day poles and baskets have beenadded to our baggage, we tackle every stream we come to, and we no longerare able to remember the grand total of our catch.

At Usal, many hilly and picturesque miles north of Fort Bragg, weturned again into the interior of Mendocino, crossing the ranges andcoming out in Humboldt County on the south fork of Eel River at Garberville. Throughout the trip, from Marin County north, we had been warned of“bad roads ahead.”  Yet we never found those bad roads. We seemed always to be just ahead of them or behind them.  Thefarther we came the better the roads seemed, though this was probablydue to the fact that we were learning more and more what four horsesand a light rig could do on a road.  And thus do I save my facewith all the counties.  I refuse to make invidious road comparisons. I can add that while, save in rare instances on steep pitches, I havetrotted my horses down all the grades, I have never had one horse falldown nor have I had to send the rig to a blacksmith shop for repairs.

Also, I am learning to throw leather.  If any tyro thinks itis easy to take a short-handled, long-lashed whip, and throw the endof that lash just where he wants it, let him put on automobile gogglesand try it.  On reconsideration, I would suggest the substitutionof a wire fencing-mask for the goggles.  For days I looked at thatwhip.  It fascinated me, and the fascination was composed mostlyof fear.  At my first attempt, Charmian and Nakata became afflictedwith the same sort of fascination, and for a long time afterward, wheneverthey saw me reach for the whip, they closed their eyes and shieldedtheir heads with their arms.

Here’s the problem.  Instead of pulling honestly, Princeis lagging back and manoeuvring for a bite at Milda’s neck. I have four reins in my hands.  I must put these four reins intomy left hand, properly gather the whip handle and the bight of the lashin my right hand, and throw that lash past Maid without striking herand into Prince.  If the lash strikes Maid, her thoroughbrednesswill go up in the air, and I’ll have a case of horse hysteriaon my hands for the next half hour.  But follow.  The wholeproblem is not yet stated.  Suppose that I miss Maid and reachthe intended target.  The instant the lash cracks, the four horsesjump, Prince most of all, and his jump, with spread wicked teeth, isfor the back of Milda’s neck.  She jumps to escape—whichis her second jump, for the first one came when the lash exploded. The Outlaw reaches for Maid’s neck, and Maid, who has alreadyjumped and tried to bolt, tries to bolt harder.  And all this infinitesimalfraction of time I am trying to hold the four animals with my left hand,while my whip-lash, writhing through the air, is coming back to me. Three simultaneous things I must do: keep hold of the four reins withmy left hand; slam on the brake with my foot; and on the rebound catchthat flying lash in the hollow of my right arm and get the bight ofit safely into my right hand.  Then I must get two of the fourlines back into my right hand and keep the horses from running awayor going over the grade.  Try it some time.  You will findlife anything but wearisome.  Why, the first time I hit the markand made the lash go off like a revolver shot, I was so astounded anddelighted that I was paralysed.  I forgot to do any of the multitudinousother things, tangled the whip lash in Maid’s harness, and wasforced to call upon Charmian for assistance.  And now, confession. I carry a few pebbles handy.  They’re great for reachingPrince in a tight place.  But just the same I’m learningthat whip every day, and before I get home I hope to discard the pebbles. And as long as I rely on pebbles, I cannot truthfully speak of myselfas “tooling a four-in-hand.”

From Garberville, where we ate eel to repletion and got acquaintedwith the aborigines, we drove down the Eel River Valley for two daysthrough the most unthinkably glorious body of redwood timber to be seenanywhere in California.  From Dyerville on to Eureka, we caughtglimpses of railroad construction and of great concrete bridges in thecourse of building, which advertised that at least Humboldt County wasgoing to be linked to the rest of the world.

We still consider our trip is just begun.  As soon as this ismailed from Eureka, it’s heigh ho! for the horses and pull on. We shall continue up the coast, turn in for Hoopa Reservation and thegold mines, and shoot down the Trinity and Klamath rivers in Indiancanoes to Requa.  After that, we shall go on through Del NorteCounty and into Oregon.  The trip so far has justified us in takingthe attitude that we won’t go home until the winter rains driveus in.  And, finally, I am going to try the experiment of puttingthe Outlaw in the lead and relegating Prince to his old position inthe near wheel.  I won’t need any pebbles then.

NOTHING THAT EVER CAME TO ANYTHING

It was at Quito, the mountain capital of Ecuador, that the followingpassage at correspondence took place.  Having occasion to buy apair of shoes in a shop six feet by eight in size and with walls threefeet thick, I noticed a mangy leopard skin on the floor.  I hadno Spanish.  The shop-keeper had no English.  But I was anadept at sign language.  I wanted to know where I should go tobuy leopard skins.  On my scribble-pad I drew the interesting streetsof a city.  Then I drew a small shop, which, after much effort,I persuaded the proprietor into recognising as his shop.  Next,I indicated in my drawing that on the many streets there were many shops. And, finally, I made myself into a living interrogation mark, pointingall the while from the mangy leopard skin to the many shops I had sketched.

But the proprietor failed to follow me.  So did his assistant. The street came in to help—that is, as many as could crowd intothe six-by-eight shop; while those that could not force their way inheld an overflow meeting on the sidewalk.  The proprietor and therest took turns at talking to me in rapid-fire Spanish, and, from theexpressions on their faces, all concluded that I was remarkably stupid. Again I went through my programme, pointing on the sketch from the oneshop to the many shops, pointing out that in this particular shop wasone leopard skin, and then questing interrogatively with my pencil amongall the shops.  All regarded me in blank silence, until I saw comprehensionsuddenly dawn on the face of a small boy.

“Tigres montanya!” he cried.

This appealed to me as mountain tigers, namely, leopards; and intoken that he understood, the boy made signs for me to follow him, whichI obeyed.  He led me for a quarter of a mile, and paused beforethe doorway of a large building where soldiers slouched on sentry dutyand in and out of which went other soldiers.  Motioning for meto remain, he ran inside.

Fifteen minutes later he was out again, without leopard skins, butfull of information.  By means of my card, of my hotel card, ofmy watch, and of the boy’s fingers, I learned the following: thatat six o’clock that evening he would arrive at my hotel with tenleopard skins for my inspection.  Further, I learned that the skinswere the property of one Captain Ernesto Becucci.  Also, I learnedthat the boy’s name was Eliceo.

The boy was prompt.  At six o’clock he was at my room. In his hand was a small roll addressed to me.  On opening it Ifound it to be manuscript piano music, the Hora Tranquila Valse,or “Tranquil Hour Waltz,” by Ernesto Becucci.  I camefor leopard skins, thought I, and the owner sends me sheet music instead. But the boy assured me that he would have the skins at the hotel atnine next morning, and I entrusted to him the following letter of acknowledgment:

“DEAR CAPTAIN BECUCCI:

“A thousand thanks for your kind presentation of Hora TranquilaValse.  Mrs. London will play it for me this evening.

“Sincerely yours,

“Jack London.”

Next morning Eliceo was back, but without the skins.  Instead,he gave me a letter, written in Spanish, of which the following is afree translation:

“To my dearest and always appreciated friend, Isubmit myself—

“DEAR SIR:

“I sent you last night an offering by the bearer of this note,and you returned me a letter which I translated.

“Be it known to you, sir, that I am giving this waltz awayin the best society, and therefore to your honoured self.  Thereforeit is beholden to you to recognise the attention, I mean by a tangiblereturn, as this composition was made by myself.  You will thereforesend by your humble servant, the bearer, any offering, however minute,that you may be prompted to make.  Send it under cover of an envelope. The bearer may be trusted.

“I did not indulge in the pleasure of visiting your honourableself this morning, as I find my body not to be enjoying the normal exerciseof its functions.

“As regards the skins from the mountain, you shall be waitedon by a small boy at seven o’clock at night with ten skins fromwhich you may select those which most satisfy your aspirations.

“In the hope that you will look upon this in the same lightas myself, I beg to be allowed to remain,

“Your most faithful servant,

“CAPTAIN ERNESTO BECUCCI.”

Well, thought I, this Captain Ernesto Becucci has shown himself tobe such an undependable person, that, while I don’t mind rewardinghim for his composition, I fear me if I do I never shall lay eyes onthose leopard skins.  So to Eliceo I gave this letter for the Captain:

“MY DEAR CAPTAIN BECUCCI:

“Have the boy bring the skins at seven o’clock this evening,when I shall be glad to look at them.  This evening when the boybrings the skins, I shall be pleased to give him, in an envelope, foryou, a tangible return for your musical composition.

“Please put the price on each skin, and also let me know forwhat sum all the skins will sell together.

“Sincerely yours,

“JACK LONDON.”

Now, thought I, I have him.  No skins, no tangible return; andevidently he is set on receiving that tangible return.

At seven o’clock Eliceo was back, but without leopard skins. He handed me this letter:

“SEÑOR LONDON:

“I wish to instil in you the belief that I lost to-day, athalf past three in the afternoon, the key to my cubicle.  Whiledistributing rations to the soldiers I dropped it.  I see in thisloss the act of God.

“I received a letter from your honourable self, delivered bythe one who bears you this poor response of mine.  To-morrow Iwill burst open the door to permit me to keep my word with you. I feel myself eternally shamed not to be able to dominate the evilsthat afflict colonial mankind.  Please send me the trifle thatyou offered me.  Send me this proof of your appreciation by thebearer, who is to be trusted.  Also give to him a small sum ofmoney for himself, and earn the undying gratitude of

“Your most faithful servant,

“CAPTAIN ERNESTO BECUCCI.”

Also, inclosed in the foregoing letter was the following originalpoem, à propos neither of leopard skins nor tangible returns,so far as I can make out:

EFFUSION

Thou canst not weep;
Nor ask I for a year
To rid me of my woes
Or make my life more dear.

The mystic chains that bound
Thy all-fond heart to mine,
Alas! asundered are
For now and for all time.

In vain you strove to hide,
From vulgar gaze of man,
The burning glance of love
That none but Love can scan.

Go on thy starlit way
And leave me to my fate;
Our souls must needs unite—
But, God! ’twill be too late.

To all and sundry of which I replied:

“MY DEAR CAPTAIN BECUCCI:

“I regret exceedingly to hear that by act of God, at half pastthree this afternoon, you lost the key to your cubicle.  Pleasehave the boy bring the skins at seven o’clock to-morrow morning,at which time, when he brings the skins, I shall be glad to make youthat tangible return for your ‘Tranquil Hour Waltz.’

“Sincerely yours,

“JACK LONDON.”

At seven o’clock came no skins, but the following:

“SIR:

“After offering you my most sincere respects, I beg to continueby telling you that no one, up to the time of writing, has treated mewith such lack of attention.  It was a present to gentlemenwho were to retain the piece of music, and who have all, without exception,made me a present of five dollars.  It is beyond my humble capacityto believe that you, after having offered to send me money in an envelope,should fail to do so.

“Send me, I pray of you, the money to remunerate the smallboy for his repeated visits to you.  Please be discreet and sendit in an envelope by the bearer.

“Last night I came to the hotel with the boy.  You weredining.  I waited more than an hour for you and then went to thetheatre.  Give the boy some small amount, and send me a like offeringof larger proportions.

“Awaiting incessantly a slight attention on your part,

“CAPTAIN ERNESTO BECUCCI.”

And here, like one of George Moore’s realistic studies, endsthis intercourse with Captain Ernesto Becucci.  Nothing happened. Nothing ever came to anything.  He got no tangible return, andI got no leopard skins.  The tangible return he might have got,I presented to Eliceo, who promptly invested it in a pair of trousersand a ticket to the bull-fight.

(NOTE TO EDITOR.—This is a faithful narration of what actuallyhappened in Quito, Ecuador.)

THAT DEAD MEN RISE UP NEVER

The month in which my seventeenth birthday arrived I signed on beforethe mast on the Sophie Sutherland, a three-topmast schooner boundon a seven-months’ seal-hunting cruise to the coast of Japan. We sailed from San Francisco, and immediately I found confronting mea problem of no inconsiderable proportions.  There were twelvemen of us in the forecastle, ten of whom were hardened, tarry-thumbedsailors.  Not alone was I a youth and on my first voyage, but Ihad for shipmates men who had come through the hard school of the merchantservice of Europe.  As boys, they had had to perform their ship’sduty, and, in addition, by immemorial sea custom, they had had to bethe slaves of the ordinary and able-bodied seamen.  When they becameordinary seamen they were still the slaves of the able-bodied. Thus, in the forecastle, with the watch below, an able seaman, lyingin his bunk, will order an ordinary seaman to fetch him his shoes orbring him a drink of water.  Now the ordinary seaman may be lyingin hisbunk.  He is just as tired as the able seaman. Yet he must get out of his bunk and fetch and carry.  If he refuses,he will be beaten.  If, perchance, he is so strong that he canwhip the able seaman, then all the able seamen, or as many as may benecessary, pitch upon the luckless devil and administer the beating.

My problem now becomes apparent.  These hard-bit Scandinaviansailors had come through a hard school.  As boys they had servedtheir mates, and as able seamen they looked to be served by other boys. I was a boy—withal with a man’s body.  I had neverbeen to sea before—withal I was a good sailor and knew my business. It was either a case of holding my own with them or of going under. I had signed on as an equal, and an equal I must maintain myself, orelse endure seven months of hell at their hands.  And it was thisvery equality they resented.  By what right was I an equal? I had not earned that high privilege.  I had not endured the miseriesthey had endured as maltreated boys or bullied ordinaries.  Worsethan that, I was a land-lubber making his first voyage.  And yet,by the injustice of fate, on the ship’s articles I was their equal.

My method was deliberate, and simple, and drastic.  In the firstplace, I resolved to do my work, no matter how hard or dangerous itmight be, so well that no man would be called upon to do it for me. Further, I put ginger in my muscles.  I never malingered when pullingon a rope, for I knew the eagle eyes of my forecastle mates were squintingfor just such evidences of my inferiority.  I made it a point tobe among the first of the watch going on deck, among the last goingbelow, never leaving a sheet or tackle for some one else to coil overa pin.  I was always eager for the run aloft for the shifting oftopsail sheets and tacks, or for the setting or taking in of topsails;and in these matters I did more than my share.

Furthermore, I was on a hair-trigger of resentment myself. I knew better than to accept any abuse or the slightest patronizing. At the first hint of such, I went off—I exploded.  I mightbe beaten in the subsequent fight, but I left the impression that Iwas a wild-cat and that I would just as willingly fight again. My intention was to demonstrate that I would tolerate no imposition. I proved that the man who imposed on me must have a fight on his hands. And doing my work well, the innate justice of the men, assisted by theirwholesome dislike for a clawing and rending wild-cat ruction, soon ledthem to give over their hectoring.  After a bit of strife, my attitudewas accepted, and it was my pride that I was taken in as an equal inspirit as well as in fact.  From then on, everything was beautiful,and the voyage promised to be a happy one.

But there was one other man in the forecastle.  Counting theScandinavians as ten, and myself as the eleventh, this man was the twelfthand last.  We never knew his name, contenting ourselves with callinghim the “Bricklayer.”  He was from Missouri—atleast he so informed us in the one meagre confidence he was guilty ofin the early days of the voyage.  Also, at that time, we learnedseveral other things.  He was a bricklayer by trade.  He hadnever even seen salt water until the week before he joined us, at whichtime he had arrived in San Francisco and looked upon San Francisco Bay. Why he, of all men, at forty years of age, should have felt the prodto go to sea, was beyond all of us; for it was our unanimous convictionthat no man less fitted for the sea had ever embarked on it.  Butto sea he had come.  After a week’s stay in a sailors’boarding-house, he had been shoved aboard of us as an able seaman.

All hands had to do his work for him.  Not only did he knownothing, but he proved himself unable to learn anything.  Try asthey would, they could never teach him to steer.  To him the compassmust have been a profound and awful whirligig.  He never masteredits cardinal points, much less the checking and steadying of the shipon her course.  He never did come to know whether ropes shouldbe coiled from left to right or from right to left.  It was mentallyimpossible for him to learn the easy muscular trick of throwing hisweight on a rope in pulling and hauling.  The simplest knots andturns were beyond his comprehension, while he was mortally afraid ofgoing aloft.  Bullied by captain and mate, he was one day forcedaloft.  He managed to get underneath the crosstrees, and therehe froze to the ratlines.  Two sailors had to go after him to helphim down.

All of which was bad enough had there been no worse.  But hewas vicious, malignant, dirty, and without common decency.  Hewas a tall, powerful man, and he fought with everybody.  And therewas no fairness in his fighting.  His first fight on board, thefirst day out, was with me, when he, desiring to cut a plug of chewingtobacco, took my personal table-knife for the purpose, and whereupon,I, on a hair-trigger, promptly exploded.  After that he foughtwith nearly every member of the crew.  When his clothing becametoo filthy to be bearable by the rest of us, we put it to soak and stoodover him while he washed it.  In short, the Bricklayer was oneof those horrible and monstrous things that one must see in order tobe convinced that they exist.

I will only say that he was a beast, and that we treated him likea beast.  It is only by looking back through the years that I realisehow heartless we were to him.  He was without sin.  He couldnot, by the very nature of things, have been anything else than he was. He had not made himself, and for his making he was not responsible. Yet we treated him as a free agent and held him personally responsiblefor all that he was and that he should not have been.  As a result,our treatment of him was as terrible as he was himself terrible. Finally we gave him the silent treatment, and for weeks before he diedwe neither spoke to him nor did he speak to us.  And for weekshe moved among us, or lay in his bunk in our crowded house, grinningat us his hatred and malignancy.  He was a dying man, and he knewit, and we knew it.  And furthermore, he knew that we wanted himto die.  He cumbered our life with his presence, and ours was arough life that made rough men of us.  And so he died, in a smallspace crowded by twelve men and as much alone as if he had died on somedesolate mountain peak.  No kindly word, no last word, was passedbetween.  He died as he had lived, a beast, and he died hatingus and hated by us.

And now I come to the most startling moment of my life.  Nosooner was he dead than he was flung overboard.  He died in a nightof wind, drawing his last breath as the men tumbled into their oilskinsto the cry of “All hands!”  And he was flung overboard,several hours later, on a day of wind.  Not even a canvas wrappinggraced his mortal remains; nor was he deemed worthy of bars of ironat his feet.  We sewed him up in the blankets in which he diedand laid him on a hatch-cover for’ard of the main-hatch on theport side.  A gunnysack, half full of galley coal, was fastenedto his feet.

It was bitter cold.  The weather-side of every rope, spar, andstay was coated with ice, while all the rigging was a harp, singingand shouting under the fierce hand of the wind.  The schooner,hove to, lurched and floundered through the sea, rolling her scuppersunder and perpetually flooding the deck with icy salt water.  Weof the forecastle stood in sea-boots and oilskins.  Our hands weremittened, but our heads were bared in the presence of the death we didnot respect.  Our ears stung and numbed and whitened, and we yearnedfor the body to be gone.  But the interminable reading of the burialservice went on.  The captain had mistaken his place, and whilehe read on without purpose we froze our ears and resented this finalhardship thrust upon us by the helpless cadaver.  As from the beginning,so to the end, everything had gone wrong with the Bricklayer. Finally, the captain’s son, irritated beyond measure, jerked thebook from the palsied fingers of the old man and found the place. Again the quavering voice of the captain arose.  Then came thecue: “And the body shall be cast into the sea.”  Weelevated one end of the hatch-cover, and the Bricklayer plunged outboardand was gone.

Back into the forecastle we cleaned house, washing out the dead man’sbunk and removing every vestige of him.  By sea law and sea custom,we should have gathered his effects together and turned them over tothe captain, who, later, would have held an auction in which we shouldhave bid for the various articles.  But no man wanted them, sowe tossed them up on deck and overboard in the wake of the departedbody—the last ill-treatment we could devise to wreak upon theone we had hated so.  Oh, it was raw, believe me; but the lifewe lived was raw, and we were as raw as the life.

The Bricklayer’s bunk was better than mine.  Less seawater leaked down through the deck into it, and the light was betterfor lying in bed and reading.  Partly for this reason I proceededto move into his bunk.  My other reason was pride.  I sawthe sailors were superstitious, and by this act I determined to showthat I was braver than they.  I would cap my proved equality bya deed that would compel their recognition of my superiority. Oh, the arrogance of youth!  But let that pass.  The sailorswere appalled by my intention.  One and all, they warned me thatin the history of the sea no man had taken a dead man’s bunk andlived to the end of the voyage.  They instanced case after casein their personal experience.  I was obdurate.  Then theybegged and pleaded with me, and my pride was tickled in that they showedthey really liked me and were concerned about me.  This but servedto confirm me in my madness.  I moved in, and, lying in the deadman’s bunk, all afternoon and evening listened to dire propheciesof my future.  Also were told stories of awful deaths and gruesomeghosts that secretly shivered the hearts of all of us.  Saturatedwith this, yet scoffing at it, I rolled over at the end of the seconddog-watch and went to sleep.

At ten minutes to twelve I was called, and at twelve I was dressedand on deck, relieving the man who had called me.  On the sealinggrounds, when hove to, a watch of only a single man is kept throughthe night, each man holding the deck for an hour.  It was a darknight, though not a black one.  The gale was breaking up, and theclouds were thinning.  There should have been a moon, and, thoughinvisible, in some way a dim, suffused radiance came from it. I paced back and forth across the deck amidships.  My mind wasfilled with the event of the day and with the horrible tales my shipmateshad told, and yet I dare to say, here and now, that I was not afraid. I was a healthy animal, and furthermore, intellectually, I agreed withSwinburne that dead men rise up never.  The Bricklayer was dead,and that was the end of it.  He would rise up never—at least,never on the deck of the Sophie Sutherland.  Even then hewas in the ocean depths miles to windward of our leeward drift, andthe likelihood was that he was already portioned out in the maws ofmany sharks.  Still, my mind pondered on the tales of the ghostsof dead men I had heard, and I speculated on the spirit world. My conclusion was that if the spirits of the dead still roamed the worldthey carried the goodness or the malignancy of the earth-life with them. Therefore, granting the hypothesis (which I didn’t grant at all),the ghost of the Bricklayer was bound to be as hateful and malignantas he in life had been.  But there wasn’t any Bricklayer’sghost—that I insisted upon.

A few minutes, thinking thus, I paced up and down.  Then, glancingcasually for’ard, along the port side, I leaped like a startleddeer and in a blind madness of terror rushed aft along the poop, headingfor the cabin.  Gone was all my arrogance of youth and my intellectualcalm.  I had seen a ghost.  There, in the dim light, wherewe had flung the dead man overboard, I had seen a faint and waveringform.  Six-feet in length it was, slender, and of substance soattenuated that I had distinctly seen through it the tracery of thefore-rigging.

As for me, I was as panic-stricken as a frightened horse.  I,as I, had ceased to exist.  Through me were vibrating the fibre-instinctsof ten thousand generations of superstitious forebears who had beenafraid of the dark and the things of the dark.  I was not I. I was, in truth, those ten thousand forebears.  I was the race,the whole human race, in its superstitious infancy.  Not untilpart way down the cabin-companionway did my identity return to me. I checked my flight and clung to the steep ladder, suffocating, trembling,and dizzy.  Never, before nor since, have I had such a shock. I clung to the ladder and considered.  I could not doubt my senses. That I had seen something there was no discussion.  But what wasit?  Either a ghost or a joke.  There could be nothing else. If a ghost, the question was: would it appear again?  If it didnot, and I aroused the ship’s officers, I would make myself thelaughing stock of all on board.  And by the same token, if it werea joke, my position would be still more ridiculous.  If I wereto retain my hard-won place of equality, it would never do to arouseany one until I ascertained the nature of the thing.

I am a brave man.  I dare to say so; for in fear and tremblingI crept up the companion-way and went back to the spot from which Ihad first seen the thing.  It had vanished.  My bravery wasqualified, however.  Though I could see nothing, I was afraid togo for’ard to the spot where I had seen the thing.  I resumedmy pacing up and down, and though I cast many an anxious glance towardthe dread spot, nothing manifested itself.  As my equanimity returnedto me, I concluded that the whole affair had been a trick of the imaginationand that I had got what I deserved for allowing my mind to dwell onsuch matters.

Once more my glances for’ard were casual, and not anxious;and then, suddenly, I was a madman, rushing wildly aft.  I hadseen the thing again, the long, wavering attenuated substance throughwhich could be seen the fore-rigging.  This time I had reachedonly the break of the poop when I checked myself.  Again I reasonedover the situation, and it was pride that counselled strongest. I could not afford to make myself a laughing-stock.  This thing,whatever it was, I must face alone.  I must work it out myself. I looked back to the spot where we had tilted the Bricklayer. It was vacant.  Nothing moved.  And for a third time I resumedmy amidships pacing.

In the absence of the thing my fear died away and my intellectualpoise returned.  Of course it was not a ghost.  Dead men didnot rise up.  It was a joke, a cruel joke.  My mates of theforecastle, by some unknown means, were frightening me.  Twicealready must they have seen me run aft.  My cheeks burned withshame.  In fancy I could hear the smothered chuckling and laughtereven then going on in the forecastle.  I began to grow angry. Jokes were all very well, but this was carrying the thing too far. I was the youngest on board, only a youth, and they had no right toplay tricks on me of the order that I well knew in the past had maderaving maniacs of men and women.  I grew angrier and angrier, andresolved to show them that I was made of sterner stuff and at the sametime to wreak my resentment upon them.  If the thing appeared again,I made my mind up that I would go up to it—furthermore, that Iwould go up to it knife in hand.  When within striking distance,I would strike.  If a man, he would get the knife-thrust he deserved. If a ghost, well, it wouldn’t hurt the ghost any, while I wouldhave learned that dead men did rise up.

Now I was very angry, and I was quite sure the thing was a trick;but when the thing appeared a third time, in the same spot, long, attenuated,and wavering, fear surged up in me and drove most of my anger away. But I did not run.  Nor did I take my eyes from the thing. Both times before, it had vanished while I was running away, so I hadnot seen the manner of its going.  I drew my sheath-knife frommy belt and began my advance.  Step by step, nearer and nearer,the effort to control myself grew more severe.  The struggle wasbetween my will, my identity, my very self, on the one hand, and onthe other, the ten thousand ancestors who were twisted into the fibresof me and whose ghostly voices were whispering of the dark and the fearof the dark that had been theirs in the time when the world was darkand full of terror.

I advanced more slowly, and still the thing wavered and flitted withstrange eerie lurches.  And then, right before my eyes, it vanished. I saw it vanish.  Neither to the right nor left did it go, norbackward.  Right there, while I gazed upon it, it faded away, ceasedto be.  I didn’t die, but I swear, from what I experiencedin those few succeeding moments, that I know full well that men candie of fright.  I stood there, knife in hand, swaying automaticallyto the roll of the ship, paralysed with fear.  Had the Bricklayersuddenly seized my throat with corporeal fingers and proceeded to throttleme, it would have been no more than I expected.  Dead men did riseup, and that would be the most likely thing the malignant Bricklayerwould do.

But he didn’t seize my throat.  Nothing happened. And, since nature abhors a status, I could not remain there in the oneplace forever paralysed.  I turned and started aft.  I didnot run.  What was the use?  What chance had I against themalevolent world of ghosts?  Flight, with me, was the swiftnessof my legs.  The pursuit, with a ghost, was the swiftness of thought. And there were ghosts.  I had seen one.

And so, stumbling slowly aft, I discovered the explanation of theseeming.  I saw the mizzen topmast lurching across a faint radianceof cloud behind which was the moon.  The idea leaped in my brain. I extended the line between the cloudy radiance and the mizzen-topmastand found that it must strike somewhere near the fore-rigging on theport side.  Even as I did this, the radiance vanished.  Thedriving clouds of the breaking gale were alternately thickening andthinning before the face of the moon, but never exposing the face ofthe moon.  And when the clouds were at their thinnest, it was avery dim radiance that the moon was able to make.  I watched andwaited.  The next time the clouds thinned I looked for’ard,and there was the shadow of the topmast, long and attenuated, waveringand lurching on the deck and against the rigging.

This was my first ghost.  Once again have I seen a ghost. It proved to be a Newfoundland dog, and I don’t know which ofus was the more frightened, for I hit that Newfoundland a full right-armswing to the jaw.  Regarding the Bricklayer’s ghost, I willsay that I never mentioned it to a soul on board.  Also, I willsay that in all my life I never went through more torment and mentalsuffering than on that lonely night-watch on the Sophie Sutherland.

(TO THE EDITOR.—This is not a fiction.  It is a true pageout of my life.)

A CLASSIC OF THE SEA

Introduction to “Two Years before the Mast.”

Once in a hundred years is a book written that lives not alone forits own century but which becomes a document for the future centuries. Such a book is Dana’s.  When Marryat’s and Cooper’ssea novels are gone to dust, stimulating and joyful as they have beento generations of men, still will remain “Two Years Before theMast.”

Paradoxical as it may seem, Dana’s book is the classic of thesea, not because there was anything extraordinary about Dana, but forthe precise contrary reason that he was just an ordinary, normal man,clear-seeing, hard-headed, controlled, fitted with adequate educationto go about the work.  He brought a trained mind to put down withuntroubled vision what he saw of a certain phase of work-a-day life. There was nothing brilliant nor fly-away about him.  He was nota genius.  His heart never rode his head.  He was neitheroverlorded by sentiment nor hag-ridden by imagination.  Otherwisehe might have been guilty of the beautiful exaggerations in Melville’s“Typee” or the imaginative orgies in the latter’s“Moby Dick.”  It was Dana’s cool poise that savedhim from being spread-eagled and flogged when two of his mates wereso treated; it was his lack of abandon that prevented him from takingup permanently with the sea, that prevented him from seeing more thanone poetical spot, and more than one romantic spot on all the coastof Old California.  Yet these apparent defects were his strength. They enabled him magnificently to write, and for all time, the pictureof the sea-life of his time.

Written close to the middle of the last century, such has been therevolution worked in man’s method of trafficking with the sea,that the life and conditions described in Dana’s book have passedutterly away.  Gone are the crack clippers, the driving captains,the hard-bitten but efficient foremast hands.  Remain only crawlingcargo tanks, dirty tramps, greyhound liners, and a sombre, sordid typeof sailing ship.  The only records broken to-day by sailing vesselsare those for slowness.  They are no longer built for speed, norare they manned before the mast by as sturdy a sailor stock, nor aftthe mast are they officered by sail-carrying captains and driving mates.

Speed is left to the liners, who run the silk, and tea, and spices. Admiralty courts, boards of trade, and underwriters frown upon drivingand sail-carrying.  No more are the free-and-easy, dare-devil days,when fortunes were made in fast runs and lucky ventures, not alone forowners, but for captains as well.  Nothing is ventured now. The risks of swift passages cannot be abided.  Freights are calculatedto the last least fraction of per cent.  The captains do no speculating,no bargain-making for the owners.  The latter attend to all this,and by wire and cable rake the ports of the seven seas in quest of cargoes,and through their agents make all business arrangements.

It has been learned that small crews only, and large carriers only,can return a decent interest on the investment.  The inevitablecorollary is that speed and spirit are at a discount.  There isno discussion of the fact that in the sailing merchant marine the seamen,as a class, have sadly deteriorated.  Men no longer sell farmsto go to sea.  But the time of which Dana writes was the heydayof fortune-making and adventure on the sea—with the full connotationof hardship and peril always attendant.

It was Dana’s fortune, for the sake of the picture, that thePilgrimwas an average ship, with an average crew and officers,and managed with average discipline.  Even the hazingthattook place after the California coast was reached, was of the averagesort.  The Pilgrimsavoured not in any way of a hell-ship. The captain, while not the sweetest-natured man in the world, was onlyan average down-east driver, neither brilliant nor slovenly in his seamanship,neither cruel nor sentimental in the treatment of his men.  While,on the one hand, there were no extra liberty days, no delicacies addedto the meagre forecastle fare, nor grog or hot coffee on double watches,on the other hand the crew were not chronically crippled by the continualplay of knuckle-dusters and belaying pins.  Once, and once only,were men flogged or ironed—a very fair average for the year 1834,for at that time flogging on board merchant vessels was already wellon the decline.

The difference between the sea-life then and now can be no betterepitomised than in Dana’s description of the dress of the sailorof his day:

“The trousers tight around the hips, and thence hanging longand loose around the feet, a superabundance of checked shirt, a low-crowned,well-varnished black hat, worn on the back of the head, with half afathom of black ribbon hanging over the left eye, and a peculiar tieto the black silk neckerchief.”

Though Dana sailed from Boston only three-quarters of a century ago,much that is at present obsolete was then in full sway.  For instance,the old word larboardwas still in use.  He was a memberof the larboardwatch.  The vessel was on the larboardtack.  It was only the other day, because of its similarity insound to starboard, that larboardwas changed to port. Try to imagine “All larboard bowlines on deck!” being shouteddown into the forecastle of a present day ship.  Yet that was thecall used on the Pilgrimto fetch Dana and the rest of his watchon deck.

The chronometer, which is merely the least imperfect time-piece manhas devised, makes possible the surest and easiest method by far ofascertaining longitude.  Yet the Pilgrimsailed in a daywhen the chronometer was just coming into general use.  So littlewas it depended upon that the Pilgrimcarried only one, and thatone, going wrong at the outset, was never used again.  A navigatorof the present would be aghast if asked to voyage for two years, fromBoston, around the Horn to California, and back again, without a chronometer. In those days such a proceeding was a matter of course, for those werethe days when dead reckoning was indeed something to reckon on, whenrunning down the latitude was a common way of finding a place, and whenlunar observations were direly necessary.  It may be fairly assertedthat very few merchant officers of to-day ever make a lunar observation,and that a large percentage are unable to do it.

“Sept. 22nd., upon coming on deck at seven bells in the morningwe found the other watch aloft throwing water upon the sails, and lookingastern we saw a small, clipper-built brig with a black hull headingdirectly after us.  We went to work immediately, and put all thecanvas upon the brig which we could get upon her, rigging out oars forstudding-sail yards; and contined wetting down the sails by bucketsof water whipped up to the mast-head . . . She was armed, and full ofmen, and showed no colours.”

The foregoing sounds like a paragraph from “Midshipman Easy”or the “Water Witch,” rather than a paragraph from the soberest,faithfullest, and most literal chronicle of the sea ever written. And yet the chase by a pirate occurred, on board the brig Pilgrim,on September 22nd, 1834—something like only two generations ago.

Dana was the thorough-going type of man, not overbalanced and erratic,without quirk or quibble of temperament.  He was efficient, butnot brilliant.  His was a general all-round efficiency.  Hewas efficient at the law; he was efficient at college; he was efficientas a sailor; he was efficient in the matter of pride, when that pridewas no more than the pride of a forecastle hand, at twelve dollars amonth, in his seaman’s task well done, in the smart sailing ofhis captain, in the clearness and trimness of his ship.

There is no sailor whose cockles of the heart will not warm to Dana’sdescription of the first time he sent down a royal yard.  Onceor twice he had seen it done.  He got an old hand in the crew tocoach him.  And then, the first anchorage at Monterey, being prettythickwith the second mate, he got him to ask the mate to besent up the first time the royal yards were struck.  “Fortunately,”as Dana describes it, “I got through without any word from theofficer; and heard the ‘well done’ of the mate, when theyard reached the deck, with as much satisfaction as I ever felt at Cambridgeon seeing a ‘bene’ at the foot of a Latin exercise.”

“This was the first time I had taken a weather ear-ring, andI felt not a little proud to sit astride of the weather yard-arm, pastthe ear-ring, and sing out ‘Haul out to leeward!’” He had been over a year at sea before he essayed this able seaman’stask, but he did it, and he did it with pride.  And with pride,he went down a four-hundred foot cliff, on a pair of top-gallant studding-sailhalyards bent together, to dislodge several dollars worth of strandedbullock hides, though all the acclaim he got from his mates was: “Whata d-d fool you were to risk your life for half a dozen hides!”

In brief, it was just this efficiency in pride, as well as work,that enabled Dana to set down, not merely the photograph detail of lifebefore the mast and hide-droghing on the coast of California, but ofthe untarnished simple psychology and ethics of the forecastle handswho droghed the hides, stood at the wheel, made and took in sail, tarreddown the rigging, holystoned the decks, turned in all-standing, grumbledas they cut about the kid, criticised the seamanship of their officers,and estimated the duration of their exile from the cubic space of thehide-house.

JACK LONDON
Glen Ellen, California,
August 13, 1911.

A WICKED WOMAN
(Curtain Raiser)
BY JACK LONDON

Scene—California.

Time—Afternoon of a summer day.

CHARACTERS

LORETTA, A sweet, young thing.  Frightfully innocent. About nineteen years old.  Slender, delicate, a fragile flower. Ingenuous.

NED BASHFORD, A jaded young man of the world, who has philosophisedhis experiences and who is without faith in the veracity or purity ofwomen.

BILLY MARSH, A boy from a country town who is just about as innocentas Loretta.  Awkward.  Positive.  Raw and callow youth.

ALICE HEMINGWAY, A society woman, good-hearted, and a match-maker.

JACK HEMINGWAY, Her husband.

MAID.

A WICKED WOMAN

[Curtain rises on a conventional living room of a country house inCalifornia.  It is the Hemingway house at Santa Clara.  Theroom is remarkable for magnificent stone fireplace at rear centre. On either side of fireplace are generous, diamond-paned windows. Wide, curtained doorways to right and left.  To left, front, table,with vase of flowers and chairs.  To right, front, grand piano.]

[Curtain discovers LORETTA seated at piano, not playing, her backto it, facing NED BASHFORD, who is standing.]

LORETTA.  [Petulantly, fanning herself with sheet of music.] No, I won’t go fishing.  It’s too warm.  Besides,the fish won’t bite so early in the afternoon.

NED.  Oh, come on.  It’s not warm at all.  Andanyway, we won’t really fish.  I want to tell you something.

LORETTA.  [Still petulantly.]  You are always wanting totell me something.

NED.  Yes, but only in fun.  This is different.  Thisis serious.  Our . . . my happiness depends upon it.

LORETTA.  [Speaking eagerly, no longer petulant, looking, seriousand delighted, divining a proposal.]  Then don’t wait. Tell me right here.

NED.  [Almost threateningly.]  Shall I?

LORETTA.  [Challenging.]  Yes.

[He looks around apprehensively as though fearing interruption, clearshis throat, takes resolution, also takes LORETTA’s hand.]

[LORETTA is startled, timid, yet willing to hear, naïvely unableto conceal her love for him.]

NED.  [Speaking softly.]  Loretta  . . . I, . . .ever since I met you I have—

[JACK HEMINGWAY appears in the doorway to the left, just entering.]

[NED suddenly drops LORETTA’s hand.  He shows exasperation.]

[LORETTA shows disappointment at interruption.]

NED.  Confound it

LORETTA.  [Shocked.]  Ned!  Why will you swear so?

NED.  [Testily.]  That isn’t swearing.

LORETTA.  What is it, pray?

NED.  Displeasuring.

JACK HEMINGWAY.  [Who is crossing over to right.]  Squabblingagain?

LORETTA.  [Indignantly and with dignity.]  No, we’renot.

NED.  [Gruffly.]  What do you want now?

JACK HEMINGWAY.  [Enthusiastically.]  Come on fishing.

NED.  [Snappily.]  No.  It’s too warm.

JACK HEMINGWAY.  [Resignedly, going out right.]  You needn’ttake a fellow’s head off.

LORETTA.  I thought you wanted to go fishing.

NED.  Not with Jack.

LORETTA.  [Accusingly, fanning herself vigorously.]  Andyou told me it wasn’t warm at all.

NED.  [Speaking softly.]  That isn’t what I wantedto tell you, Loretta.  [He takes her hand.]  Dear Loretta—

[Enter abruptly ALICE HEMINGWAY from right.]

[LORETTA sharply jerks her hand away, and looks put out.]

[NED tries not to look awkward.]

ALICE HEMINGWAY.  Goodness!  I thought you’d bothgone fishing!

LORETTA.  [Sweetly.]  Is there anything you want, Alice?

NED.  [Trying to be courteous.]  Anything I can do?

ALICE HEMINGWAY.  [Speaking quickly, and trying to withdraw.] No, no.  I only came to see if the mail had arrived.

LORETTA AND NED

[Speaking together.]  No, it hasn’t arrived.

LORETTA.  [Suddenly moving toward door to right.]  I amgoing to see.

[NED looks at her reproachfully.]

[LORETTA looks back tantalisingly from doorway and disappears.]

[NED flings himself disgustedly into Morris chair.]

ALICE HEMINGWAY.  [Moving over and standing in front of him. Speaks accusingly.]  What have you been saying to her?

NED.  [Disgruntled.]  Nothing.

ALICE HEMINGWAY.  [Threateningly.]  Now listen to me, Ned.

NED.  [Earnestly.]  On my word, Alice, I’ve beensaying nothing to her.

ALICE HEMINGWAY.  [With sudden change of front.]  Thenyou ought to have been saying something to her.

NED.  [Irritably.  Getting chair for her, seating her,and seating himself again.]  Look here, Alice, I know your game. You invited me down here to make a fool of me.

ALICE HEMINGWAY.  Nothing of the sort, sir.  I asked youdown to meet a sweet and unsullied girl—the sweetest, most innocentand ingenuous girl in the world.

NED.  [Dryly.]  That’s what you said in your letter.

ALICE HEMINGWAY.  And that’s why you came.  Jackhad been trying for a year to get you to come.  He did not knowwhat kind of a letter to write.

NED.  If you think I came because of a line in a letter abouta girl I’d never seen—

ALICE HEMINGWAY.  [Mockingly.]  The poor, jaded, world-wornman, who is no longer interested in women . . . and girls!  Thepoor, tired pessimist who has lost all faith in the goodness of women—

NED.  For which you are responsible.

ALICE HEMINGWAY.  [Incredulously.]  I?

NED.  You are responsible.  Why did you throw me over andmarry Jack?

ALICE HEMINGWAY.  Do you want to know?

NED.  Yes.

ALICE HEMINGWAY.  [Judiciously.]  First, because I didnot love you.  Second, because you did not love me.  [Shesmiles at his protesting hand and at the protesting expression on hisface.]  And third, because there were just about twenty-seven otherwomen at that time that you loved, or thought you loved.  Thatis why I married Jack.  And that is why you lost faith in the goodnessof women.  You have only yourself to blame.

NED.  [Admiringly.]  You talk so convincingly.  Ialmost believe you as I listen to you.  And yet I know all thetime that you are like all the rest of your sex—faithless, unveracious,and . . .

[He glares at her, but does not proceed.]

ALICE HEMINGWAY.  Go on.  I’m not afraid.

NED.  [With finality.]  And immoral.

ALICE HEMINGWAY.  Oh!  You wretch!

NED.  [Gloatingly.]  That’s right.  Get angry. You may break the furniture if you wish.  I don’t mind.

ALICE HEMINGWAY.  [With sudden change of front, softly.] And how about Loretta?

[NED gasps and remains silent.]

ALICE HEMINGWAY.  The depths of duplicity that must lurk underthat sweet and innocent exterior . . . according to your philosophy!

NED.  [Earnestly.]  Loretta is an exception, I confess. She is all that you said in your letter.  She is a little fairy,an angel.  I never dreamed of anything like her.  It is remarkableto find such a woman in this age.

ALICE HEMINGWAY.  [Encouragingly.]  She is so naive.

NED.  [Taking the bait.]  Yes, isn’t she?  Herface and her tongue betray all her secrets.

ALICE HEMINGWAY.  [Nodding her head.]  Yes, I have noticedit.

NED.  [Delightedly.]  Have you?

ALICE HEMINGWAY.  She cannot conceal anything.  Do youknow that she loves you?

NED.  [Falling into the trap, eagerly.]  Do you think so?

ALICE HEMINGWAY.  [Laughing and rising.]  And to thinkI once permitted you to make love to me for three weeks!

[NED rises.]

[MAID enters from left with letters, which she brings to ALICE HEMINGWAY.]

ALICE HEMINGWAY.  [Running over letters.]  None for you,Ned.  [Selecting two letters for herself.]  Tradesmen. [Handing remainder of letters to MAID.]  And three for Loretta. [Speaking to MAID.]  Put them on the table, Josie.

[MAID puts letters on table to left front, and makes exit to left.]

NED.  [With shade of jealousy.]  Loretta seems to havequite a correspondence.

ALICE HEMINGWAY.  [With a sigh.]  Yes, as I used to whenI was a girl.

NED.  But hers are family letters.

ALICE HEMINGWAY.  Yes, I did not notice any from Billy.

NED.  [Faintly.]  Billy?

ALICE HEMINGWAY.  [Nodding.]  Of course she has told youabout him?

NED.  [Gasping.]  She has had lovers . . . already?

ALICE HEMINGWAY.  And why not?  She is nineteen.

NED.  [Haltingly.]  This . . . er . . . this Billy . .. ?

ALICE HEMINGWAY.  [Laughing and putting her hand reassuringlyon his arm.]  Now don’t be alarmed, poor, tired philosopher. She doesn’t love Billy at all.

[LORETTA enters from right.]

ALICE HEMINGWAY.  [To LORETTA, nodding toward table.] Three letters for you.

LORETTA.  [Delightedly.]  Oh!  Thank you.

[LORETTA trips swiftly across to table, looks at letters, sits down,opens letters, and begins to read.]

NED.  [Suspiciously.]  But Billy?

ALICE HEMINGWAY.  I am afraid he loves her very hard. That is why she is here.  They had to send her away.  Billywas making life miserable for her.  They were little children together—playmates. And Billy has been, well, importunate.  And Loretta, poor child,does not know anything about marriage.  That is all.

NED.  [Reassured.]  Oh, I see.

[ALICE HEMINGWAY starts slowly toward right exit, continuing conversationand accompanied by NED.]

ALICE HEMINGWAY.  [Calling to LORETTA.]  Are you goingfishing, Loretta?

[LORETTA looks up from letter and shakes head.]

ALICE HEMINGWAY.  [To NED.]  Then you’re not, I suppose?

NED.  No, it’s too warm.

ALICE HEMINGWAY.  Then I know the place for you.

NED.  Where?

ALICE HEMINGWAY.  Right here.  [Looks significantly indirection of LORETTA.]  Now is your opportunity to say what youought to say.

[ALICE HEMINGWAY laughs teasingly and goes out to right.]

[NED hesitates, starts to follow her, looks at LORETTA, and stops. He twists his moustache and continues to look at her meditatively.]

[LORETTA is unaware of his presence and goes on reading.  Finishesletter, folds it, replaces in envelope, looks up, and discovers NED.]

LORETTA.  [Startled.]  Oh!  I thought you were gone.

NED.  [Walking across to her.]  I thought I’d stayand finish our conversation.

LORETTA.  [Willingly, settling herself to listen.]  Yes,you were going to . . . [Drops eyes and ceases talking.]

NED.  [Taking her hand, tenderly.]  I little dreamed whenI came down here visiting that I was to meet my destiny in—[Abruptlyreleases LORETTA’s hand.]

[MAID enters from left with tray.]

[LORETTA glances into tray and discovers that it is empty. She looks inquiringly at MAID.]

MAID.  A gentleman to see you.  He hasn’t any card. He said for me to tell you that it was Billy.

LORETTA.  [Starting, looking with dismay and appeal to NED.] Oh! . . . Ned!

NED  [Gracefully and courteously, rising to his feet and preparingto go.]  If you’ll excuse me now, I’ll wait till afterwardto tell you what I wanted.

LORETTA.  [In dismay.]  What shall I do?

NED.  [Pausing.]  Don’t you want to see him? [LORETTA shakes her head.]  Then don’t.

LORETTA.  [Slowly.]  I can’t do that.  We areold friends.  We . . . were children together.  [To the MAID.] Send him in.  [To NED, who has started to go out toward right.] Don’t go, Ned.

[MAID makes exit to left.]

NED.  [Hesitating a moment.]  I’ll come back.

[NED makes exit to right.]

[LORETTA, left alone on stage, shows perturbation and dismay.]

[BILLY enters from left.  Stands in doorway a moment. His shoes are dusty.  He looks overheated.  His eyes and facebrighten at sight of LORETTA.]

BILLY.  [Stepping forward, ardently.]  Loretta!

LORETTA.  [Not exactly enthusiastic in her reception, goingslowly to meet him.]  You never said you were coming.

[BILLY shows that he expects to kiss her, but she merely shakes hishand.]

BILLY.  [Looking down at his very dusty shoes.]  I walkedfrom the station.

LORETTA.  If you had let me know, the carriage would have beensent for you.

BILLY.  [With expression of shrewdness.]  If I had letyou know, you wouldn’t have let me come.

[BILLY looks around stage cautiously, then tries to kiss her.]

LORETTA.  [Refusing to be kissed. ]  Won’t you sitdown?

BILLY.  [Coaxingly.]  Go on, just one.  [LORETTA shakeshead and holds him off.]  Why not?  We’re engaged.

LORETTA.  [With decision. ]  We’re not.  Youknow we’re not.  You know I broke it off the day before Icame away.  And . . . and . . . you’d better sit down.

[BILLY sits down on edge of chair.  LORETTA seats herself bytable.  Billy, without rising, jerks his chair forward till theyare facing each other, his knees touching hers.  He yearns towardher.  She moves back her chair slightly.]

BILLY.  [With supreme confidence.]  That’s what Icame to see you for—to get engaged over again.

[BILLY hudges chair forward and tries to take her hand.]

[LORETTA hudges her chair back.]

BILLY.  [Drawing out large silver watch and looking at it.] Now look here, Loretta, I haven’t any time to lose.  I’vegot to leave for that train in ten minutes.  And I want you toset the day.

LORETTA.  But we’re not engaged, Billy.  So therecan’t be any setting of the day.

BILLY.  [With confidence.]  But we’re going to be. [Suddenly breaking out.]  Oh, Loretta, if you only knew how I’vesuffered.  That first night I didn’t sleep a wink. I haven’t slept much ever since.  [Hudges chair forward.] I walk the floor all night.  [Solemnly.]  Loretta, I don’teat enough to keep a canary bird alive.  Loretta . . . [Hudgeschair forward.]

LORETTA.  [Hudging her chair back maternally.]  Billy,what you need is a tonic.  Have you seen Doctor Haskins?

BILLY.  [Looking at watch and evincing signs of haste.] Loretta, when a girl kisses a man, it means she is going to marry him.

LORETTA.  I know it, Billy.  But . . . [She glances towardletters on table.]  Captain Kitt doesn’t want me to marryyou.  He says . . . [She takes letter and begins to open it.]

BILLY.  Never mind what Captain Kitt says.  He wants youto stay and be company for your sister.  He doesn’t wantyou to marry me because he knows she wants to keep you.

LORETTA.  Daisy doesn’t want to keep me.  She wantsnothing but my own happiness.  She says—[She takes secondletter from table and begins to open it.]

BILLY.  Never mind what Daisy says—

LORETTA.  [Taking third letter from table and beginning to openit.]  And Martha says—

BILLY.  [Angrily.]  Darn Martha and the whole boiling ofthem!

LORETTA.  [Reprovingly.]  Oh, Billy!

BILLY.  [Defensively.]  Darn isn’t swearing, andyou know it isn’t.

[There is an awkward pause.  Billy has lost the thread of theconversation and has vacant expression.]

BILLY.  [Suddenly recollecting.]  Never mind Captain Kitt,and Daisy, and Martha, and what they want.  The question is, whatdo you want?

LORETTA.  [Appealingly.]  Oh, Billy, I’m so unhappy.

BILLY.  [Ignoring the appeal and pressing home the point.] The thing is, do you want to marry me?  [He looks at his watch.] Just answer that.

LORETTA.  Aren’t you afraid you’ll miss that train?

BILLY.  Darn the train!

LORETTA.  [Reprovingly.]  Oh, Billy!

BILLY.  [Most irascibly.]  Darn isn’t swearing. [Plaintively.]  That’s the way you always put me off. I didn’t come all the way here for a train.  I came for you. Now just answer me one thing.  Do you want to marry me?

LORETTA.  [Firmly.]  No, I don’t want to marry you.

BILLY.  [With assurance.]  But you’ve got to, justthe same.

LORETTA.  [With defiance.]  Got to?

BILLY.  [With unshaken assurance.]  That’s what Isaid—got to.  And I’ll see that you do.

LORETTA.  [Blazing with anger.]  I am no longer a child. You can’t bully me, Billy Marsh!

BILLY.  [Coolly.]  I’m not trying to bully you. I’m trying to save your reputation.

LORETTA.  [Faintly.]  Reputation?

BILLY.  [Nodding.]  Yes, reputation.  [He pauses fora moment, then speaks very solemnly.]  Loretta, when a woman kissesa man, she’s got to marry him.

LORETTA.  [Appalled, faintly.]  Got to?

BILLY.  [Dogmatically.]  It is the custom.

LORETTA.  [Brokenly.]  And when . . . a . . . a woman kissesa man and doesn’t . . . marry him . . . ?

BILLY.  Then there is a scandal.  That’s where allthe scandals you see in the papers come from.

[BILLY looks at watch.]

[LORETTA in silent despair.]

LORETTA.  [In abasement.]  You are a good man, Billy. [Billy shows that he believes it.]  And I am a very wicked woman.

BILLY.  No, you’re not, Loretta.  You just didn’tknow.

LORETTA.  [With a gleam of hope.]  But you kissed me first.

BILLY.  It doesn’t matter.  You let me kiss you.

LORETTA.  [Hope dying down.]  But not at first.

BILLY.  But you did afterward and that’s what counts. You let me you in the grape-arbour.  You let me—

LORETTA.  [With anguish]  Don’t!  Don’t!

BILLY.  [Relentlessly.]—kiss you when you were playingthe piano.  You let me kiss you that day of the picnic.  AndI can’t remember all the times you let me kiss you good night.

LORETTA.  [Beginning to weep.]  Not more than five.

BILLY.  [With conviction.]  Eight at least.

LORETTA.  [Reproachfully, still weeping.]  You told meit was all right.

BILLY.  [Emphatically.]  So it was all right—untilyou said you wouldn’t marry me after all.  Then it was ascandal—only no one knows it yet.  If you marry me no oneever will know it.  [Looks at watch.]  I’ve got to go. [Stands up.]  Where’s my hat?

LORETTA.  [Sobbing.]  This is awful.

BILLY.  [Approvingly.]  You bet it’s awful. And there’s only one way out.  [Looks anxiously about forhat.]  What do you say?

LORETTA.  [Brokenly.]  I must think.  I’ll writeto you.  [Faintly.]  The train?  Your hat’s inthe hall.

BILLY.  [Looks at watch, hastily tries to kiss her, succeedsonly in shaking hand, starts across stage toward left.]  All right. You write to me.  Write to-morrow.  [Stops for a moment indoorway and speaks very solemnly.]  Remember, Loretta, there mustbe no scandal.

[Billy goes out.]

[LORETTA sits in chair quietly weeping.  Slowly dries eyes,rises from chair, and stands, undecided as to what she will do next.]

[NED enters from right, peeping.  Discovers that LORETTA isalone, and comes quietly across stage to her.  When NED comes upto her she begins weeping again and tries to turn her head away. NED catches both her hands in his and compels her to look at him. She weeps harder.]

NED.  [Putting one arm protectingly around her shoulder anddrawing her toward him.]  There, there, little one, don’tcry.

LORETTA.  [Turning her face to his shoulder like a tired child,sobbing.]  Oh, Ned, if you only knew how wicked I am.

NED.  [Smiling indulgently.]  What is the matter, littleone?  Has your dearly beloved sister failed to write to you? [LORETTA shakes head.]  Has Hemingway been bullying you? [LORETTA shakes head.]  Then it must have been that caller of yours? [Long pause, during which LORETTA’s weeping grows more violent.] Tell me what’s the matter, and we’ll see what I can do. [He lightly kisses her hair—so lightly that she does not know.]

LORETTA.  [Sobbing.]  I can’t.  You will despiseme.  Oh, Ned, I am so ashamed.

NED.  [Laughing incredulously.]  Let us forget all aboutit.  I want to tell you something that may make me very happy. My fondest hope is that it will make you happy, too.  Loretta,I love you—

LORETTA.  [Uttering a sharp cry of delight, then moaning.] Too late!

NED.  [Surprised.]  Too late?

LORETTA.  [Still moaning.]  Oh, why did I?  [NED somewhatstiffens.]  I was so young.  I did not know the world then.

NED.  What is it all about anyway?

LORETTA.  Oh, I . . . he . . . Billy . . . I am a wicked woman,Ned.  I know you will never speak to me again.

NED.  This . . . er . . . this Billy—what has he beendoing?

LORETTA.  I . . . he . . . I didn’t know.  I wasso young.  I could not help it.  Oh, I shall go mad, I shallgo mad!

[NED’s encircling arm goes limp.  He gently disengagesher and deposits her in big chair.]

[LORETTA buries her face and sobs afresh.]

NED.  [Twisting moustache fiercely, regarding her dubiously,hesitating a moment, then drawing up chair and sitting down.] I . . . I do not understand.

LORETTA.  [Wailing.]  I am so unhappy!

NED.  [Inquisitorially.]  Why unhappy?

LORETTA.  Because . . . he . . . he wants to marry me.

NED.  [His face brightening instantly, leaning forward and layinga hand soothingly on hers.]  That should not make any girl unhappy. Because you don’t love him is no reason—[Abruptly breakingoff.]  Of course you don’t love him?  [LORETTA shakesher head and shoulders vigorously.]  What?

LORETTA.  [Explosively.]  No, I don’t love Billy! I don’t want to love Billy!

NED.  [With confidence.]  Because you don’t lovehim is no reason that you should be unhappy just because he has proposedto you.

LORETTA.  [Sobbing.]  That’s the trouble.  Iwish I did love him.  Oh, I wish I were dead.

NED.  [Growing complacent.]  Now my dear child, you areworrying yourself over trifles.  [His second hand joins the firstin holding her hands.]  Women do it every day.  Because youhave changed your mind, or did not know you mind, because you have—touse an unnecessarily harsh word—jilted a man—

LORETTA.  [Interrupting, raising her head and looking at him.] Jilted?  Oh Ned, if that were a all!

NED.  [Hollow voice.]  All!

[NED’s hands slowly retreat from hers.  He opens his mouthas though to speak further, then changes his mind and remains silent.]

LORETTA.  [Protestingly.]  But I don’t want to marryhim!

NED.  Then I shouldn’t.

LORETTA.  But I ought to marry him.

NED.  Oughtto marry him?  [LORETTA nods.] That is a strong word.

LORETTA.  [Nodding.]  I know it is.  [Her lips aretrembling, but she strives for control and manages to speak more calmly.] I am a wicked woman.  A terrible wicked woman.  No one knowshow wicked I am . . . except Billy.

NED.  [Starting, looking at her queerly.]  He . . . Billyknows?  [LORETTA nods.  He debates with himself a moment.] Tell me about it.  You must tell me all of it.

LORETTA.  [Faintly, as though about to weep again.]  Allof it?

NED.  [Firmly.]  Yes, all of it.

LORETTA.  [Haltingly.]  And . . . will . . . you . . .ever . . . forgive . . . me?

NED.  [Drawing a long, breath, desperately.]  Yes, I’llforgive you.  Go ahead.

LORETTA.  There was no one to tell me.  We were with eachother so much.  I did not know anything of the world . . . then. [Pauses.]

NED.  [Impatiently.]  Go on.

LORETTA.  If I had only known.  [Pauses.]

NED.  [Biting his lip and clenching his hands.]  Yes, yes. Go on.

LORETTA.  We were together almost every evening.

NED.  [Savagely.]  Billy?

LORETTA.  Yes, of course, Billy.  We were with each otherso much . . . If I had only known . . . There was no one to tell me. . . I was so young . . . [Breaks down crying.]

NED.  [Leaping to his feet, explosively.]  The scoundrel!

LORETTA.  [Lifting her head.]  Billy is not a scoundrel. . . He . . . he . . . is a good man.

NED.  [Sarcastically.]  I suppose you’ll be tellingme next that it was all your fault.  [LORETTA nods.]  What!

LORETTA.  [Steadily.]  It was all my fault.  I shouldnever have let him.  I was to blame.

NED.  [Paces up and down for a minute, stops in front of her,and speaks with resignation.]  All right.  I don’t blameyou in the least, Loretta.  And you have been very honest. It is . . . er . . . commendable.  But Billy is right, and youare wrong.  You must get married.

LORETTA.  [In dim, far-away voice.]  To Billy?

NED.  Yes, to Billy.  I’ll see to it.  Wheredoes he live?  I’ll make him.  If he won’t I’ll. . . I’ll shoot him!

LORETTA.  [Crying out with alarm.]  Oh, Ned, you won’tdo that?

NED.  [Sternly.]  I shall.

LORETTA.  But I don’t want to marry Billy.

NED.  [Sternly.]  You must.  And Billy must. Do you understand?  It is the only thing.

LORETTA.  That’s what Billy said.

NED.  [Triumphantly.]  You see, I am right.

LORETTA.  And if . . . if I don’t marry him . . . therewill be . . . scandal?

NED.  [Calmly.]  Yes, there will be scandal.

LORETTA.  That’s what Billy said.  Oh, I am so unhappy!

[LORETTA breaks down into violent weeping.]

[NED paces grimly up and down, now and again fiercely twisting hismoustache.]

LORETTA.  [Face buried, sobbing and crying all the time.]

I don’t want to leave Daisy!  I don’t want to leaveDaisy!  What shall I do?  What shall I do?  How was Ito know?  He didn’t tell me.  Nobody else ever kissedme.  [NED stops curiously to listen.  As he listens his facebrightens.]  I never dreamed a kiss could be so terrible . . .until . . . until he told me.  He only told me this morning.

NED.  [Abruptly.]  Is that what you are crying about?

LORETTA.  [Reluctantly.]  N-no.

NED.  [In hopeless voice, the brightness gone out of his face,about to begin pacing again.]  Then what are you crying about?

LORETTA.  Because you said I had to marry Billy.  I don’twant to marry Billy.  I don’t want to leave Daisy. I don’t know what I want.  I wish I were dead.

NED.  [Nerving himself for another effort.]  Now look here,Loretta, be sensible.  What is this about kisses?  You haven’ttold me everything after all.

LORETTA.  I . . . I don’t want to tell you everything.

NED.  [Imperatively.]  You must.

LORETTA.  [Surrendering.]  Well, then . . . must I?

NED.  You must.

LORETTA.  [Floundering.]  He . . . I . . . we . . . I lethim, and he kissed me.

NED.  [Desperately, controlling himself.]  Go on.

LORETTA.  He says eight, but I can’t think of more thanfive times.

NED.  Yes, go on.

LORETTA.  That’s all.

NED.  [With vast incredulity.]  All?

LORETTA.  [Puzzled.]  All?

NED.  [Awkwardly.]  I mean . . . er . . . nothing worse?

LORETTA.  [Puzzled.]  Worse?  As though there couldbe.  Billy said—

NED.  [Interrupting.]  When?

LORETTA.  This afternoon.  Just now.  Billy said thatmy . . . our . . . our . . . our kisses were terrible if we didn’tget married.

NED.  What else did he say?

LORETTA.  He said that when a woman permitted a man to kissher she always married him.  That it was awful if she didn’t. It was the custom, he said; and I say it is a bad, wicked custom, andit has broken my heart.  I shall never be happy again.  Iknow I am terrible, but I can’t help it.  I must have beenborn wicked.

NED.  [Absent-mindedly bringing out a cigarette and strikinga match.]  Do you mind if I smoke?  [Coming to himself again,and flinging away match and cigarette.]  I beg your pardon. I don’t want to smoke.  I didn’t mean that at all. What I mean is . . . [He bends over LORETTA, catches her hands in his,then sits on arm of chair, softly puts one arm around her, and is aboutto kiss her.]

LORETTA.  [With horror, repulsing him.]  No!  No!

NED.  [Surprised.]  What’s the matter?

LORETTA.  [Agitatedly.]  Would you make me a wickeder womanthan I am?

NED.  A kiss?

LORETTA.  There will be another scandal.  That would maketwo scandals.

NED.  To kiss the woman I love . . . a scandal?

LORETTA.  Billy loves me, and he said so.

NED.  Billy is a joker . . . or else he is as innocent as you.

LORETTA.  But you said so yourself.

NED.  [Taken aback.]  I?

LORETTA.  Yes, you said it yourself, with your own lips, notten minutes ago.  I shall never believe you again.

NED.  [Masterfully putting arm around her and drawing her towardhim.]  And I am a joker, too, and a very wicked man.  Nevertheless,you must trust me.  There will be nothing wrong.

LORETTA.  [Preparing to yield.]  And no . . . scandal?

NED.  Scandal fiddlesticks.  Loretta, I want you to bemy wife.  [He waits anxiously.]

[JACK HEMINGWAY, in fishing costume, appears in doorway to rightand looks on.]

NED.  You might say something.

LORETTA.  I will . . . if . . .

[ALICE HEMINGWAY appears in doorway to left and looks on.]

NED.  [In suspense.]  Yes, go on.

LORETTA.  If I don’t have to marry Billy.

NED.  [Almost shouting.]  You can’t marry both ofus!

LORETTA.  [Sadly, repulsing him with her hands.]  Then,Ned, I cannot marry you.

NED.  [Dumbfounded.]  W-what?

LORETTA.  [Sadly.]  Because I can’t marry both ofyou.

NED.  Bosh and nonsense!

LORETTA.  I’d like to marry you, but . . .

NED.  There is nothing to prevent you.

LORETTA.  [With sad conviction.]  Oh, yes, there is. You said yourself that I had to marry Billy.  You said you woulds-s-shoot him if he didn’t.

NED.  [Drawing her toward him.]  Nevertheless . . .

LORETTA.  [Slightly holding him off.]  And it isn’tthe custom . . . what . . . Billy said?

NED.  No, it isn’t the custom.  Now, Loretta, willyou marry me?

LORETTA.  [Pouting demurely.]  Don’t be angry withme, Ned.  [He gathers her into his arms and kisses her.  Shepartially frees herself, gasping.]  I wish it were the custom,because now I’d have to marry you, Ned, wouldn’t I?

[NED and LORETTA kiss a second time and profoundly.]

[JACK HEMINGWAY chuckles.]

[NED and LORETTA, startled, but still in each other’s arms,look around.  NED looks sillily at ALICE HEMINGWAY.  LORETTAlooks at JACK HEMINGWAY.]

LORETTA.  I don’t care.

CURTAIN

THE BIRTH MARK
SKETCH BY JACK LONDON written for Robert and Julia Fitzsimmons

SCENE—One of the club rooms of the West Bay Athletic Club. Near centre front is a large table covered with newspapers and magazines. At left a punching-bag apparatus.  At right, against wall, a desk,on which rests a desk-telephone.  Door at rear toward left. On walls are framed pictures of pugilists, conspicuous among which isone of Robert Fitzsimmons.  Appropriate furnishings, etc., suchas foils, clubs, dumb-bells and trophies.

[Enter MAUD SYLVESTER.]

[She is dressed as a man, in evening clothes, preferably a Tuxedo. In her hand is a card, and under her arm a paper-wrapped parcel. She peeps about curiously and advances to table.  She is timorousand excited, elated and at the same time frightened.  Her eyesare dancing with excitement.]

MAUD.  [Pausing by table.]  Not a soul saw me.  Iwonder where everybody is.  And that big brother of mine said Icould not get in.  [She reads back of card.]  “Hereis my card, Maudie.  If you can use it, go ahead.  But youwill never get inside the door.  I consider my bet as good as won.” [Looking up, triumphantly.]  You do, do you?  Oh, if you couldsee your little sister now.  Here she is, inside.  [Pauses,and looks about.]  So this is the West Bay Athletic Club. No women allowed.  Well, here I am, if I don’t look likeone.  [Stretches out one leg and then the other, and looks at them. Leaving card and parcel on table, she struts around like a man, looksat pictures of pugilists on walls, reading aloud their names and makingappropriate remarks.  But she stops before the portrait of Fitzsimmonsand reads aloud.]  “Robert Fitzsimmons, the greatest warriorof them all.”  [Clasps hands, and looking up at portraitmurmurs.]  Oh, you dear!

[Continues strutting around, imitating what she considers are a man’sstride and swagger, returns to table and proceeds to unwrap parcel.] Well, I’ll go out like a girl, if I did come in like a man. [Drops wrapping paper on table and holds up a woman’s long automobilecloak and a motor bonnet.  Is suddenly startled by sound of approachingfootsteps and glances in a frightened way toward door.]  Mercy! Here comes somebody now!  [Glances about her in alarm, drops cloakand bonnet on floor close to table, seizes a handful of newspapers,and runs to large leather chair to right of table, where she seats herselfhurriedly.  One paper she holds up before her, hiding her faceas she pretends to read.  Unfortunately the paper is upside down. The other papers lie on her lap.]

[Enter ROBERT FITZSIMMONS.]

[He looks about, advances to table, takes out cigarette case andis about to select one, when he notices motor cloak and bonnet on floor. He lays cigarette case on table and picks them up.  They strikehim as profoundly curious things to be in a club room.  He looksat MAUD, then sees card on table.  He picks it up and reach itto himself, then looks at her with comprehension.  Hidden by hernewspaper, she sees nothing.  He looks at card again and readsand speaks in an aside.]

FITZSIMMONS.  “Maudie.  John H. Sylvester.” That must be Jack Sylvester’s sister Maud.  [FITZSIMMONSshows by his expression that he is going to play a joke.  Tossingcloak and bonnet under the table he places card in his vest pocket,selects a chair, sits down, and looks at MAUD.  He notes paperis upside down, is hugely tickled, and laughs silently.]  Hello! [Newspaper is agitated by slight tremor.  He speaks more loudly.] Hello!  [Newspaper shakes badly.  He speaks very loudly.] Hello!

MAUD.  [Peeping at him over top of paper and speaking hesitatingly.] H-h-hello!

FITZSIMMONS.  [Gruffly.]  You are a queer one, readinga paper upside down.

MAUD.  [Lowering newspaper and trying to appear at ease.] It’s quite a trick, isn’t it?  I often practise it. I’m real clever at it, you know.

FITZSIMMONS.  [Grunts, then adds.]  Seems to me I haveseen you before.

MAUD.  [Glancing quickly from his face to portrait and backagain.]  Yes, and I know you—You are Robert Fitzsimmons.

FITZSIMMONS.  I thought I knew you.

MAUD.  Yes, it was out in San Francisco.  My people stilllive there.  I’m just—ahem—doing New York.

FITZSIMMONS.  But I don’t quite remember the name.

MAUD.  Jones—Harry Jones.

FITZSIMMONS.  [Hugely delighted, leaping from chair and stridingover to her.]  Sure.  [Slaps her resoundingly on shoulder.]

[She is nearly crushed by the weight of the blow, and at the sametime shocked.  She scrambles to her feet.]

FITZSIMMONS.  Glad to see you, Harry.  [He wrings her hand,so that it hurts.]  Glad to see you again, Harry.  [He continueswringing her hand and pumping her arm.]

MAUD.  [Struggling to withdraw her hand and finally succeeding. Her voice is rather faint.]  Ye-es, er . . . Bob . . . er . . .glad to see you again.  [She looks ruefully at her bruised fingersand sinks into chair.  Then, recollecting her part, she crossesher legs in a mannish way.]

FITZSIMMONS.  [Crossing to desk at right, against which he leans,facing her.]  You were a wild young rascal in those San Franciscodays.  [Chuckling.]  Lord, Lord, how it all comes back tome.

MAUD.  [Boastfully.]  I was wild—some.

FITZSIMMONS.  [Grinning.]  I should say!  Rememberthat night I put you to bed?

MAUD.  [Forgetting herself, indignantly.]  Sir!

FITZSIMMONS.  You were . . . er . . . drunk.

MAUD.  I never was!

FITZSIMMONS.  Surely you haven’t forgotten that night! You began with dropping champagne bottles out of the club windows onthe heads of the people on the sidewalk, and you wound up by assaultinga cabman.  And let me tell you I saved you from a good lickingright there, and squared it with the police.  Don’t you remember?

MAUD.  [Nodding hesitatingly.]  Yes, it is beginning tocome back to me.  I was a bit tight that night.

FITZSIMMONS.  [Exultantly.]  A bit tight!  Why, beforeI could get you to bed you insisted on telling me the story of yourlife.

MAUD.  Did I?  I don’t remember that.

FITZSIMMONS.  I should say not.  You were past rememberinganything by that time.  You had your arms around my neck—

MAUD.  [Interrupting.]  Oh!

FITZSIMMONS.  And you kept repeating over and over, “Bob,dear Bob.”

MAUD.  [Springing to her feet.]  Oh!  I never did! [Recollecting herself.]  Perhaps I must have.  I was a triflewild in those days, I admit.  But I’m wise now.  I’vesowed my wild oats and steadied down.

FITZSIMMONS.  I’m glad to hear that, Harry.  Youwere tearing off a pretty fast pace in those days.  [Pause, inwhich MAUD nods.]  Still punch the bag?

MAUD.  [In quick alarm, glancing at punching bag.]  No,I’ve got out of the hang of it.

FITZSIMMONS.  [Reproachfully.]  You haven’t forgottenthat right-and-left, arm, elbow and shoulder movement I taught you?

MAUD.  [With hesitation.]  N-o-o.

FITZSIMMONS.  [Moving toward bag to left.]  Then, comeon.

MAUD.  [Rising reluctantly and following.]  I’d rathersee you punch the bag.  I’d just love to.

FITZSIMMONS.  I will, afterward.  You go to it first.

MAUD.  [Eyeing the bag in alarm.]  No; you.  I’mout of practice.

FITZSIMMONS.  [Looking at her sharply.]  How many drinkshave you had to-night?

MAUD.  Not a one.  I don’t drink—that is—er—onlyoccasionally.

FITZSIMMONS.  [Indicating bag.]  Then go to it.

MAUD.  No; I tell you I am out of practice.  I’veforgotten it all.  You see, I made a discovery.

[Pauses.]

FITZSIMMONS.  Yes?

MAUD.  I—I—you remember what a light voice I alwayshad—almost soprano?

[FITZSIMMONS nods.]

MAUD.  Well, I discovered it was a perfect falsetto.

[FITZSIMMONS nods.]

MAUD.  I’ve been practising it ever since.  Experts,in another room, would swear it was a woman’s voice.  Sowould you, if you turned your back and I sang.

FITZSIMMONS.  [Who has been laughing incredulously, now becomessuspicious.]  Look here, kid, I think you are an impostor. You are not Harry Jones at all.

MAUD.  I am, too.

FITZSIMMONS.  I don’t believe it.  He was heavierthan you.

MAUD.  I had the fever last summer and lost a lot of weight.

FITZSIMMONS.  You are the Harry Jones that got sousesd and hadto be put to bed?

MAUD.  Y-e-s.

FITZSIMMONS.  There is one thing I remember very distinctly. Harry Jones had a birth mark on his knee.  [He looks at her legssearchingly.]

MAUD.  [Embarrassed, then resolving to carry it out.] Yes, right here.  [She advances right leg and touches it.]

FITZSIMMONS.  [Triumphantly.]  Wrong.  It was theother knee.

MAUD.  I ought to know.

FITZSIMMONS.  You haven’t any birth mark at all.

MAUD.  I have, too.

FITZSIMMONS.  [Suddenly springing to her and attempting to seizeher leg.]  Then we’ll prove it.  Let me see.

MAUD.  [In a panic backs away from him and resists his attempts,until grinning in an aside to the audience, he gives over.  She,in an aside to audience.]  Fancy his wanting to see my birth mark.

FITZSIMMONS.  [Bullying.]  Then take a go at the bag. [She shakes her head.]  You’re not Harry Jones.

MAUD.  [Approaching punching bag.]  I am, too.

FITZSIMMONS.  Then hit it.

MAUD.  [Resolving to attempt it, hits bag several nice blows,and then is struck on the nose by it.]  Oh!

[Recovering herself and rubbing her nose.]  I told you I wasout of practice.  You punch the bag, Bob.

FITZSIMMONS.  I will, if you will show me what you can do withthat wonderful soprano voice of yours.

MAUD.  I don’t dare.  Everybody would think therewas a woman in the club.

FITZSIMMONS.  [Shaking his head.]  No, they won’t. They’ve all gone to the fight.  There’s not a soulin the building.

MAUD.  [Alarmed, in a weak voice.]  Not—a—soul—in—thebuilding?

FITZSIMMONS.  Not a soul.  Only you and I.

MAUD.  [Starting hurriedly toward door.]  Then I must go.

FITZSIMMONS.  What’s your hurry?  Sing.

MAUD.  [Turning back with new resolve.]  Let me see youpunch the bag,—er—Bob.

FITZSIMMONS.  You sing first.

MAUD.  No; you punch first.

FITZSIMMONS.  I don’t believe you are Harry—

MAUD.  [Hastily.]  All right, I’ll sing.  Yousit down over there and turn your back.

[FITZSIMMONS obeys.]

[MAUD walks over to the table toward right.  She is about tosing, when she notices FITZSIMMONS’ cigarette case, picks it up,and in an aside reads his name on it and speaks.]

MAUD.  “Robert Fitzsimmons.”  That will proveto my brother that I have been here.

FITZSIMMONS.  Hurry up.

[MAUD hastily puts cigarette case in her pocket and begins to sing.]

SONG

[During the song FITZSIMMONS turns his head slowly and looks at herwith growing admiration.]

MAUD.  How did you like it?

FITZSIMMONS.  [Gruffly.]  Rotten.  Anybody could tellit was a boy’s voice—

MAUD.  Oh!

FITZSIMMONS.  It is rough and coarse and it cracked on everyhigh note.

MAUD.  Oh!  Oh!

[Recollecting herself and shrugging her shoulders.]  Oh, verywell.  Now let’s see if you can do any better with the bag.

[FITZSIMMONS takes off coat and gives exhibition.]

[MAUD looks on in an ecstasy of admiration.]

MAUD.  [As he finishes.]  Beautiful!  Beautiful!

[FITZSIMMONS puts on coat and goes over and sits down near table.] Nothing like the bag to limber one up.  I feel like a fightingcock.  Harry, let’s go out on a toot, you and I.

MAUD.  Wh-a-a-t?

FITZSIMMONS.  A toot.  You know—one of those rip-snortingnights you used to make.

MAUD.  [Emphatically, as she picks up newspapers from leatherchair, sits down, and places them on her lap.]  I’ll do nothingof the sort.  I’ve—I’ve reformed.

FITZSIMMONS.  You used to joy-ride like the very devil.

MAUD.  I know it.

FITZSIMMONS.  And you always had a pretty girl or two along.

MAUD.  [Boastfully, in mannish, fashion.]  Oh, I stillhave my fling.  Do you know any—well,—er,—nicegirls?

FITZSIMMONS.  Sure.

MAUD.  Put me wise.

FITZSIMMONS.  Sure.  You know Jack Sylvester?

MAUD.  [Forgetting herself.]  He’s my brother—

FITZSIMMONS.  [Exploding.]  What!

MAUD.—In-law’s first cousin.

FITZSIMMONS.  Oh!

MAUD.  So you see I don’t know him very well.  Ionly met him once—at the club.  We had a drink together.

FITZSIMMONS.  Then you don’t know his sister?

MAUD.  [Starting.]  His sister?  I—I didn’tknow he had a sister.

FITZSIMMONS.  [Enthusiastically.]  She’s a peach. A queen.  A little bit of all right.  A—a loo-loo.

MAUD.  [Flattered.]  She is, is she?

FITZSIMMONS.  She’s a scream.  You ought to get acquaintedwith her.

MAUD.  [Slyly.]  You know her, then?

FITZSIMMONS.  You bet.

MAUD.  [Aside.]  Oh, ho!  [To FITZSIMMONS.] Know her very well?

FITZSIMMONS.  I’ve taken her out more times than I canremember.  You’ll like her, I’m sure.

MAUD.  Thanks.  Tell me some more about her.

FITZSIMMONS.  She dresses a bit loud.  But you won’tmind that.  And whatever you do, don’t take her to eat.

MAUD.  [Hiding her chagrin.]  Why not?

FITZSIMMONS.  I never saw such an appetite—

MAUD.  Oh!

FITZSIMMONS.  It’s fair sickening.  She must havea tapeworm.  And she thinks she can sing.

MAUD.  Yes?

FITZSIMMONS.  Rotten.  You can do better yourself, andthat’s not saying much.  She’s a nice girl, reallyshe is, but she is the black sheep of the family.  Funny, isn’tit?

MAUD.  [Weak voice.]  Yes, funny.

FITZSIMMONS.  Her brother Jack is all right.  But he can’tdo anything with her.  She’s a—a—

MAUD.  [Grimly.]  Yes.  Go on.

FITZSIMMONS.  A holy terror.  She ought to be in a reformschool.

MAUD.  [Springing to her feet and slamming newspapers in hisface.]  Oh!  Oh!  Oh!  You liar!  She isn’tanything of the sort!

FITZSIMMONS.  [Recovering from the onslaught and making believehe is angry, advancing threateningly on her.]  Now I’m goingto put a head on you.  You young hoodlum.

MAUD.  [All alarm and contrition, backing away from him.] Don’t!  Please don’t!  I’m sorry! I apologise.  I—I beg your pardon, Bob.  Only I don’tlike to hear girls talked about that way, even—even if it is true. And you ought to know.

FITZSIMMONS.  [Subsiding and resuming seat.]  You’vechanged a lot, I must say.

MAUD.  [Sitting down in leather chair.]  I told you I’dreformed.  Let us talk about something else.  Why is it girlslike prize-fighters?  I should think—ahem—I mean itseems to me that girls would think prize-fighters horrid.

FITZSIMMONS.  They are men.

MAUD.  But there is so much crookedness in the game.  Onehears about it all the time.

FITZSIMMONS.  There are crooked men in every business and profession. The best fighters are not crooked.

MAUD.  I—er—I thought they all faked fights whenthere was enough in it.

FITZSIMMONS.  Not the best ones.

MAUD.  Did you—er—ever fake a fight?

FITZSIMMONS.  [Looking at her sharply, then speaking solemnly.] Yes.  Once.

MAUD.  [Shocked, speaking sadly.]  And I always heard ofyou and thought of you as the one clean champion who never faked.

FITZSIMMONS.  [Gently and seriously.]  Let me tell youabout it.  It was down in Australia.  I had just begun tofight my way up.  It was with old Bill Hobart out at RushcuttersBay.  I threw the fight to him.

MAUD.  [Repelled, disgusted.]  Oh!  I could not havebelieved it of you.

FITZSIMMONS.  Let me tell you about it.  Bill was an oldfighter.  Not an old man, you know, but he’d been in thefighting game a long time.  He was about thirty-eight and a gamerman never entered the ring.  But he was in hard luck.  Youngerfighters were coming up, and he was being crowded out.  At thattime it wasn’t often he got a fight and the purses were small. Besides it was a drought year in Australia.  You don’t knowwhat that means.  It means that the rangers are starved. It means that the sheep are starved and die by the millions.  Itmeans that there is no money and no work, and that the men and womenand kiddies starve.

Bill Hobart had a missus and three kids and at the time of his fightwith me they were all starving.  They did not have enough to eat. Do you understand?  They did not have enough to eat.  AndBill did not have enough to eat.  He trained on an empty stomach,which is no way to train you’ll admit.  During that droughtyear there was little enough money in the ring, but he had failed toget any fights.  He had worked at long-shoring, ditch-digging,coal-shovelling—anything, to keep the life in the missus and thekiddies.  The trouble was the jobs didn’t hold out. And there he was, matched to fight with me, behind in his rent, a toughold chopping-block, but weak from lack of food.  If he did notwin the fight, the landlord was going to put them into the street.

MAUD.  But why would you want to fight with him in such weakcondition?

FITZSIMMONS.  I did not know.  I did not learn till atthe ringside just before the fight.  It was in the dressing rooms,waiting our turn to go on.  Bill came out of his room, ready forthe ring.  “Bill,” I said—in fun, you know. “Bill, I’ve got to do you to-night.”  He saidnothing, but he looked at me with the saddest and most pitiful faceI have ever seen.  He went back into his dressing room and satdown.

“Poor Bill!” one of my seconds said.  “He’sbeen fair starving these last weeks.  And I’ve got it straight,the landlord chucks him out if he loses to-night.”

Then the call came and we went into the ring.  Bill was desperate. He fought like a tiger, a madman.  He was fair crazy.  Hewas fighting for more than I was fighting for.  I was a risingfighter, and I was fighting for the money and the recognition. But Bill was fighting for life—for the life of his loved ones.

Well, condition told.  The strength went out of him, and I wasfresh as a daisy.  “What’s the matter, Bill?”I said to him in a clinch.   “You’re weak.” “I ain’t had a bit to eat this day,” he answered. That was all.

By the seventh round he was about all in, hanging on and pantingand sobbing for breath in the clinches, and I knew I could put him outany time.  I drew back my right for the short-arm jab that woulddo the business.  He knew it was coming, and he was powerless toprevent it.

“For the love of God, Bob,” he said; and—[Pause.]

MAUD.  Yes?  Yes?

FITZSIMMONS.  I held back the blow.  We were in a clinch.

“For the love of God, Bob,” he said again, “themisses and the kiddies!”

And right there I saw and knew it all.  I saw the hungry childrenasleep, and the missus sitting up and waiting for Bill to come home,waiting to know whether they were to have food to eat or be thrown outin the street.

“Bill,” I said, in the next clinch, so low only he couldhear.  “Bill, remember the La Blanche swing.  Give itto me, hard.”

We broke away, and he was tottering and groggy.  He staggeredaway and started to whirl the swing.  I saw it coming.  Imade believe I didn’t and started after him in a rush.  Biff! It caught me on the jaw, and I went down.  I was young and strong. I could eat punishment.  I could have got up the first second. But I lay there and let them count me out.  And making believeI was still dazed, I let them carry me to my corner and work to bringme to.  [Pause.]

Well, I faked that fight.

MAUD.  [Springing to him and shaking his hand.]  ThankGod!  Oh!  You are a man!  A—a—a hero!

FITZSIMMONS.  [Dryly, feeling in his pocket.]  Let’shave a smoke.  [He fails to find cigarette case.]

MAUD.  I can’t tell you how glad I am you told me that.

FITZSIMMONS.  [Gruffly.]  Forget it.  [He looks ontable, and fails to find cigarette case.  Looks at her suspiciously,then crosses to desk at right and reaches for telephone.]

MAUD.  [Curiously.]  What are you going to do?

FITZSIMMONS.  Call the police.

MAUD.  What for?

FITZSIMMONS.  For you.

MAUD.  For me?

FITZSIMMONS.  You are not Harry Jones.  And not only areyou an impostor, but you are a thief.

MAUD.  [Indignantly.]  How dare you?

FITZSIMMONS.  You have stolen my cigarette case.

MAUD.  [Remembering and taken aback, pulls out cigarette case.] Here it is.

FITZSIMMONS.  Too late.  It won’t save you. This club must be kept respectable.  Thieves cannot be tolerated.

MAUD.  [Growing alarm.]  But you won’t have me arrested?

FITZSIMMONS.  I certainly will.

MAUD.  [Pleadingly.]  Please!  Please!

FITZSIMMONS.  [Obdurately.]  I see no reason why I shouldnot.

MAUD.  [Hurriedly, in a panic.]  I’ll give you areason—a—a good one.  I—I—am not HarryJones.

FITZSIMMONS.  [Grimly.]  A good reason in itself to callin the police.

MAUD.  That isn’t the reason.  I’m—a—Oh! I’m so ashamed.

FITZSIMMONS.  [Sternly.]  I should say you ought to be. [Reaches for telephone receiver.]

MAUD.  [In rush of desperation.]  Stop!  I’ma—I’m a—a girl.  There!  [Sinks down inchair, burying her face in her hands.]

[FITZSIMMONS, hanging up receiver, grunts.]

[MAUD removes hands and looks at him indignantly.  As she speaksher indignation grows.]

MAUD.  I only wanted your cigarette case to prove to my brotherthat I had been here.  I—I’m Maud Sylvester, and younever took me out once.  And I’m not a black sheep. And I don’t dress loudly, and I haven’t a—a tapeworm.

FITZSIMMONS.  [Grinning and pulling out card from vest pocket.] I knew you were Miss Sylvester all the time.

MAUD.  Oh!  You brute!  I’ll never speak toyou again.

FITZSIMMONS.  [Gently.]  You’ll let me see you safelyout of here.

MAUD.  [Relenting.]  Ye-e-s.  [She rises, crossesto table, and is about to stoop for motor cloak and bonnet, but he forestallher, holds cloak and helps her into it.]  Thank you.  [Shetakes off wig, fluffs her own hair becomingly, and puts on bonnet, lookingevery inch a pretty young girl, ready for an automobile ride.]

FITZSIMMONS.  [Who, all the time, watching her transformation,has been growing bashful, now handing her the cigarette case.] Here’s the cigarette case.  You may k-k-keep it.

MAUD.  [Looking at him, hesitates, then takes it.]  I thankyou—er—Bob.  I shall treasure it all my life. [He is very embarrassed.]  Why, I do believe you’re bashful. What is the matter?

FITZSIMMONS.  [Stammering.]  Why—I—you—Youare a girl—and—a—a—deuced pretty one.

MAUD.  [Taking his arm, ready to start for door.]  Butyou knew it all along.

FITZSIMMONS.  But it’s somehow different now when you’vegot your girl’s clothes on.

MAUD.  But you weren’t a bit bashful—or nice, when—you—you—[Blurtingit out.]  Were so anxious about birth marks.

[They start to make exit.]

CURTAIN

Related articles