Life and Jack London

HE was unhappy. Although he was so small, so unacquainted with the world outside the farmhouse yard, that his imagination could not tell him what he wanted, he was unhappy. A sensation like hunger gnawed at him, but it was not hunger. It was like an ache, but he could not find it anywhere in his little body.

Because he did not know what it was, he could not tell anyone. This loneliness was harder to bear than the vague misery itself. It is hard to be alone when one is only five years old. Perhaps if his mother could have taken him on her lap and held him quietly, with her arms softly about him in the twilight, she would have understood without words. But his mother was always busy.

He could hear her steps going back and forth in the kitchen. The stove rattled. She was raking out the ashes. In a minute she would be getting supper.

Sitting on a log beside the woodpile, with his chin propped in his hands, he stared gravely at the gray sky. He could see her standing beside the stove, slicing cold boiled potatoes into the iron frying pan, a wisp of straight fair hair straying across her cheek. Her hands moved with quick, nervous energy.

His mind strayed away from the picture. He thought of his Mammy Jennie, in Oakland. She was fat and jolly. Her lap was soft. He heard her low, chuckling laugh, saw the flash of white teeth in her dear black face. She called him "mah baby." But he sat up very straight in her lap, because he was five years old, and not a baby. She laughed again.

GRAY fog drifted in over the flat Alameda farming country. A frog croaked in a ditch beside the road. It was a lonesome sound. Unhappiness engulfed him like a wave.

From the black depths of it he heard the heavy plodding of the farm horses on the earth floor of the barn. Their harness jingled. His father and Tom, sodden with fatigue, were silently unbuckling straps, slipping halters over the horses' heads, pitchforking hay into the mangers.

In the house his half-sister Eliza was humming. He visualized her calico apron, her tight pig-tails, her serious fourteen-year-old face. He could hear the thump of plates as she set them on the red tablecloth. The sound of her humming made him still more miserable. She seemed so far away. They all seemed so far away. He was quite alone, and very small and cold.

Suddenly his mind found the picture he wanted. It was an old friend, that picture. For longer than he could remember it had comforted him in his darkest moments. It was something to look forward to, something that beyond doubt he would have some day. All his vague longings settled upon that golden vision. It was a dish of floating island.

He imagined again all the delicious details. It would be yellow, and sweet, with a flavor beyond imagining, and it would have small white bits of frosting floating upon it. He had never tasted frosting, but his mother had told him about it. Once when he was sick she had spent a whole twilight hour telling him about that dish of floating island.

She had often eaten it when she was a girl in Ohio. Some day, she had promised, when they could afford the eggs, and the sugar, she would make some for him. It would take six eggs, and a cupful of sugar. Milk, too. Perhaps, in the spring, when the interest on the mortgage was paid, they could have it.

He had reminded her of it in the spring. But she had said no, not yet. Some day, some day surely, they should have it. For a long time he had kept his heart warm with that promise. Floating island was his dream, his highest imaginable pinnacle of luxury, his dearest desire. With his mind fixed upon that he was happy, lost in a vision of the bright future.

"Jack! Jack! where are you? I want some wood." His mother's voice brought him back with a jerk to reality. The farmyard was dark. He groped for the heavy sticks, piled them on his arm until he staggered under their weight. He lugged them into the kitchen and dumped them into the woodbox behind the stove.

The kitchen was warm, and full of the smell of cooking. He blinked in the light of the oil-lamp. His father was sitting by the window, taking off his shoes. He stood in awe of his father, who was a man of few words, strictly just and not unkind, but stern in holding his small son to a rigid standard of conduct.

"Son," said his father, "I don't want your mother should find the woodbox empty again."

"Yessir," said Jack. He gulped, and hurried out to the woodpile.

He detested that exacting woodbox. All day long, it seemed to him, he staggered from woodpile to kitchen and back again, and still the box was never filled. He slammed the sticks into it, his burning resentment eased by the crash of them.

Eliza, passing him between table and stove, hugged him quickly with one thin, calico-covered arm. "Honey! What do you s'pose?" He looked up, startled. He saw her round, flushed face, her smiling lips, the freckles on her nose, her shining eyes. She whispered. "Floating island for supper!"

HE was dizzy. He could not believe it. Had he suddenly found himself twenty years old the shock could have been no greater. The future telescoped into the present too abruptly. His dream was no longer a dream. It was reality. His mind struggled to grasp it, and failed.

In a daze he finished filling the woodbox. In a kind of ecstatic stupor he climbed to his chair by the table. From a great distance he heard the others talking as usual. He ate mechanically the potatoes and bread his father set before him, clearing the plate without comment according to his father's established rule. The thumping of his heart shook him; a quivering ran along his veins.

The moment arrived. His mother set the floating island on the table. It was yellow, with small white bits of frosting floating upon it. It was real. With a spoon she dished out portions, dividing the custard carefully into small equal shares. She was flushed a little, laughing with pleasure.

"There Jack! There's your floating island!" she said. She set it before him. He could not speak. He sat gazing at his dream, there on the table, within his reach.

At last, with an effort, he took his eyes from it, and looked at the others. They were eating the precious custard with ordinary, hurried gulps. Tom's big shoulders, in their sweat-stained shirt, were hunched over the table. He shoveled the last huge spoonful into his mouth, wiped his lips with the back of his hairy hand. "Great stuff!" he said, in hearty approbation. "Go on, Kid, eat it, why don't you?"

Jack quivered. His soul curled in upon itself like the leaves of a sensitive-plant. He knew passionately that he must be alone. He must have solitude in which to learn the first ineffable taste of floating island. No alien eye must be upon him when he realized that precious dream.

Without a word he slipped down from his chair. He took the saucer, and a spoon. With his family's astonished gaze upon him, he crossed the kitchen and went out into darkness. Alone, on the other side of the house, in the light from the kitchen window, he would eat floating island at last.

He held the saucer very carefully. His eyes, dazzled by the sudden dark, did not see the dog until it was too late. The friendly beast leaped upon him. A paw struck the saucer. The floating island splashed upon the ground.

For a terrible second the boy stood still. Then he flung the saucer from him with all his strength. His mind caught at the most blasphemous word he knew. "Damn!" he shrieked to the heedless sky, and ran blindly away from the house.

Eliza found him an hour later, calling vainly through the darkness until she stumbled upon him sitting hunched on the wagon tongue behind the barn. His mother, busy putting the clothes to soak for next day's washing, had sent her to find him.

"What's the matter? Why don't you come to bed?" Eliza demanded.

"Nothing," he answered. She sat down beside him and put an arm around his shoulders. He cuddled his head against her sleeve. "What makes you act so queer? Don't you feel good?" she asked.

"'Liza, when I grow up I'm going to have a big house all by myself," he said. "You can keep house for me, and I will have a pony, and you can ride him sometimes. A brown pony, with white spots, and a long tail, and I will have a red saddle. There won't be anybody else there at all, just you and me and the pony. That's what I'm going to have when I grow up."

"All right. It's bedtime now, and mama wants you to come in," she said.

Long afterward, when Jack London was known around the world, and all that money or fame could give him was his for the taking, he was to tell the story, lying in the sun-warmed grass of the old Dingee place in the Piedmont hills with his closest friends around him.

"And so I never got the floating island," he ended, with his quick, sweet smile at the memory of the wistful little boy he had been. "Oh, well, I went on to another dream. Lies, all of them. The lies Life uses to trick us into living."

JACK LONDON began his forty-year-long encounter with life on the morning of the twelfth of January, 1876.

It was a gray, cold morning. All night the San Francisco winter rain had fallen drearily on the weather-worn, huddled tenements of Tar Flat. At Fourth and Brannan streets the gutters brimmed full, and the light of the flickering street lamp glistened on sluggish pools spreading slowly over old, uneven wooden pavements. Water dripped from the rickety back stairways of the ramshackle houses on Brannan street and splashed on the roof of John London's shabby rented cottage in the alley. Rain filmed the windows.

John London sat in the kitchen, waiting. The bedroom door was open, so that the fire in the cookstove could fight the dampness in both rooms. The tea-kettle steamed. Blankets and towels were draped over chairs, warming in the heat from the oven. He had tramped out through the rain and brought the Irish midwife early in the evening. She was in charge now. There was nothing more he could do, but wait.

He was an old man, many years older than his wife, who was thirty-eight. The best of his life, the promise of his youth and the years of his early manhood, had been burned up in the Civil war. It was because he had spent those years marching and fighting and suffering in the army of the North that he had come at last to this muddy alley in Tar Flat.

His comrades had given their lives for their country, and died. He had given his, and lived. He had come back from the battlefields and camps unfitted by all the experiences of those hectic days for the slow, fierce economic struggle in which he must live the long years ahead. He was a hero. A bookkeeper drew better wages.

The war had trained his muscles. He went to work. The war had also left a bullet wound through his lungs. He coughed. Sometimes, because of the coughing, he could not work very hard. A bullet wound through the lungs may be carried proudly by a hero, but it does not add to the efficiency of a common laborer.

He was married. He came home to a starving and penniless family. More children were born to him, eleven children in all. He worked, and fed them. Books have been written about heroes of war, but the life of a laborer who works and feeds a family of thirteen is not dramatic. However, the men who desert from the ranks in that fight are more numerous than the deserters from an army. John London did not desert.

When his wife died he held the family together as well as he could. The boys scattered. Neighbors kept an eye on the younger children while he was at work. Mary was old enough to do the cooking.

THEN, in the spring of 1869, in San Francisco, he met and wooed and married Flora Wellman.

Perhaps some of Flora Wellman's girlhood friends, back in Massillon, Ohio, wondered why she should have married a man much older than herself, a common laborer, with eleven children. She was a healthy, good-looking woman of thirty-one, with snapping blue eyes and a quick tongue. She might have done better for herself, no doubt they thought. Probably she herself had expected, in some vague way, to do better for herself when she came to San Francisco. But she married John London.

They were both of good American pioneer blood, the sap of a nation which never flowered, blighted as it was by the Civil war, and ground under the heel of industrialism which followed. They lived among the shanty Irish, the shiftless, good-humored, dirty, warm-hearted people who crowded the tenements south of Market. Flora Wellman London despised them, liked them, endured them with distaste. For seven years, in bitter poverty, she had cooked and washed and scrubbed and mended, struggling, with ceaseless and defeated effort, to hold John London's family life above the standard of their neighbors.

Now he sat by the kitchen stove waiting for her child to be born. In the poor cottage in Tar Flat alley, in the mire to which the slow decay of his own hopes had brought him, another life was beginning.

The rain drizzled on the roof. Dampness crept in around loose window sashes. He tried not to hear the sounds in the bedroom.

At intervals he opened the stove door and thrust in another stick of wood. When the rain soaked through decayed shingles he rose stiffly and set a pan to catch the drip. The night wore away, and morning came gray against the windowpanes. In a fearful silence the dull splash of water in puddles under the eaves sounded loud.

Suddenly there rose a tiny, feeble wail. It was the baby's first protest against life.

The Irish midwife hurried into the kitchen with a small shapeless bundle. She held it on one arm while she poured steaming water into a tin pan, testing its heat with her bare elbow. "Tis a bye, Misther London, as foine a baby as ever I saw," she said cheerfully. She sat down before the open oven and began to dress him.

Warm-hearted Irish neighbor women were laughing and talking in the bedroom. One came out and began to stir gruel in a tin cup on the stove. The night was over, and Jack London's life had begun.

IT was a life which burned low, flickered, almost went out. Flora London recovered slowly. She was not able to nurse the baby. He lay wrapped in blankets, wailing feebly. His anxious half-sisters fed him gruel with a spoon, coaxed him to suck the corner of a handkerchief dipped in hot milk. He grew thinner, his eyelids and his lips were faintly blue.

The kitchen filled with relays of neighbor women who came in with shawls over their heads and babies in their own arms, to look at him and suggest new expedients. Beef-tea was poured drop by drop into his mouth. "Hot wather, now, wit' a wee drop of whiskey," was suggested. "'Twud give him strength, bless his little sowl!" His mother set her face sternly against whiskey. The women went out, shaking their heads.

The baby ceased to wail and lay scarcely breathing. Word went through the alley that he would not live. Women gossiping on their doorsteps mentioned it, and wiped their eyes with their aprons, holding their own babies tighter, and forgot it, and talked with their heads together about poor Jenny, the negro girl on the corner, who'd lost her own baby, God comfort her, and perhaps she was the better off for that.

Jenny had married a white man. When the baby was coming, he had told her it was no marriage at all, at all, and gone his way, the devil fly off wit' his black soul. And Jenny's baby had died.

Flora London's baby was two weeks old when she heard about Jenny. She rose from her bed and dressed herself. The baby lay still, with waxen cheeks and blue-lidded, closed eyes. His limp body was light in her arms. She carried him down to the cottage where Jenny lived.

It was a clean, neat cottage with geraniums in tin cans on the windowsills. Floors and tables were scrubbed to the splintered grain of the wood. Jenny, a silent negro girl in a calico dress, opened the door and set a chair for her visitor. There were sullen, somber lights in her brown eyes.

Yes, she would nurse the baby, she said listlessly. She took the limp bundle from his mother! "There, there, mah baby!" Her empty arms closed around him. His eager lips were soft against her throbbing breast. "There, there, mah blue-eyed baby!" When he fell asleep in her arms she would not let him go.

"You jus' leave him here with me, Mis' London. Jus' leave him here—mah sweet baby-boy! There, there, his mammy loves him! Don' you tak him away. I'll tend him lak he was mah own daid chile come back to me."

Mrs. London left him with her.

HE lay in Jenny's arms all day and slept in her bed at night. He thrived on the milk of her warm breasts, and learned to laugh up at her close black face. Color came into his rounding cheeks, and he grew plump and gurgling. He cried when his own mother took him from Jenny's arms.

Psycho-analysis is beginning now to give great importance to the earliest impressions on the plastic baby mind. Biologists, working on germ-plasm theories, scout the lay-woman's idea of prenatal influence. Are acquired characteristics transmissible? Are mental tendencies inherent in the structure of the brain-cell, or will Freud and Jung find the roots of them all in complexes arising from sense-impressions? We wander in a region of mists which rise slowly, and settle again.

No one can say how much of Jack London's strength and bitter rebellion against life he drew from his mother's seven years of defeated effort among the shanty Irish, how much of his light-hearted gaiety and underlying fatalistic melancholy he learned in his first year of life with his black Mammy Jenny.

When he was a year old he returned to the crowded cottage with his own people. His first year had left no conscious impression on his mind.

Through the fogs of oblivion which hide childhood memories he saw vaguely, in later years, a few unrelated pictures. A drunken man fallen in a gutter; a group of excited women wrangling in the alley; a terrifying uproar of blows and curses and breaking wood behind a swinging saloon door; a corner of the kitchen where he sat forgotten while his mother sobbed, for some terrible, unknown reason, with her head in her arms on the table; nights when he went to bed hungry. The fog lifted clearly to show him himself, a small, lonely child, on a farm near Hayward.

There was always work. It rested like a never-lifted weight on his mind; work unfinished, for which he would be punished, more work to be done, new work which cheated him of his hope of play.

His father worked, tramping wearily out to the field in the mornings, cursing the horses that jerked the plowhandles in his calloused hands and made him cough, trudging stiffly back at night to do the barnwork and into sodden sleep as soon as he had eaten supper. His mother worked, washing his father's heavy farm-clothes, scrubbing the sagging floors of the old house, hoeing the hard, sunbaked soil in the garden.

A HEALTHY five-year-old boy was big enough to work, too, if he was worth his salt, his father said. He set Jack his tasks at the breakfast table; he held him account for them at night and added new ones while he did the chores.

Jack picked up chips, brought in wood, pumped water for his mother while she did the washing, lugged pails of dirty soapsuds from tubs to dump them in the back yard. He weeded the onion bed, and dug potatoes for dinner. He staggered barefooted across rutted fields in glaring sunshine, carrying his father a pail of beer. His shoulders ached when he came back, but the woodbox was empty again. "Here, Jack, get me some water. Hurry. And see if you can find any ripe tomatoes on the vines."

In the evening, when the sun's scorching rays had sunk into long level streaks of light across the yellow plains, he must pump innumerable pails of water and pour them on the thirsty soil between rows of wilting vegetables. He must open the barndoor for the horses, and bring the pitchfork to his father, and remember too late that he had forgotten to clean out the mangers.

At times there was work that he could do in the fields. He hurried then to fill the woodbox before breakfast, and walked down the lane with his father and Tom behind the plodding horses. A cool breeze ruffled dewy grass beside the fences. The eastern hills were still green from the winter rains. The sky was a pale, shimmering blue. White wisps of fog, melting in morning sunshine, trailed long gray shadows over the hayfields. A meadow-lark's clear call rose from the grass, and faint in the distance the liquid silver notes of her mate sent the answer. Happiness so keen that it was pain ran along the boy's nerves. His throat felt queer. He longed for something he could not describe. He wanted to run, to jump, to sing, to lie for endless lazy hours in the grass, watching those floating clouds.

"What're you gaping at, son?" his father said sharply.

"Nothing," he replied, and added dutifully, "Sir." He must hurry to keep up with the horses. The day's work lay ahead of him.

In the field he fastened a pouch full of corn about his waist and trudged up and down the crumbling furrows of gray dry earth. Every three feet he stopped and dropped three grains through his fingers. Tom followed, covering them with a hoe. He must hurry to keep ahead of Tom. He did not like Tom, who was rough and ill-tempered when he was working, rough and full of coarse horse-play at other times.

THE sunshine grew hot. It burned his shoulders through the thin shirt. Sweat ran down his forehead under the straw hat and caked in the dust on his cheeks. His head ached. His bare feet slipped in the soft hot earth. Every three feet he stopped and dropped three grains through his fingers.

The dog barked excitedly. He had started a rabbit. The boy saw him leaping high, wild with the chase, off and across the fields. The rabbit fled before him, a gray blur with flapping ears. "Hi! Hi!" Jack yelled shrilly. "Sic 'em! Sic 'em, Rover!"

"Here, get along, kid, get along," Tom growled at his heels. Jack dipped his hand into the corn and trudged on down the row. As he went, he followed the picture of a stream, cool and rippling, splashing over gray rocks and sliding into pools shaded by thick bushes. He was alone, deep in a trackless forest, hunting. He wore high leather boots and carried a shining gun in his hands. He walked fearlessly, confident, master of himself and of all the lurking perils around him, for was he not the greatest hunter in the world? he came to a narrow canyon, where fallen logs lay rotting, tangled among underbrush at the roots of giant trees. Sheer cliffs towered high on either hand. What was that he saw? A huge furry black creature barred his way. A bear! His blood leaped. He swung the gun to his shoulder—

"Bang!" he cried aloud, in the dusty corn-rows. The bear fell dead. Mechanically he dropped three grains of corn through his automatically moving fingers. Was that another bear, there in the shadows among trees?

He was a strange child, his parents agreed. They did not understand him. At times he sat very still, with his chin in his hands, and did not answer their first call. He came out of these reveries to fierce, inexplicable revolt against some small, accustomed thing. He wore a patched and faded little shirt for weeks without complaint, and then suddenly announced passionately that he hated it. Sternly commanded to put it on, he did so obediently, and wore it out with no further protest.

His nature lay like a slowly-forming continent under the sea, hidden by indifference and lack of comprehension from the commonplace minds around him. His occasional attempts to make himself understood were to his work-jaded, poverty-fighting mother only freaks, uncharted islands to be sailed past and ignored. She had no time to study the submerged land beneath, or to consider what might be taking shape there.

He was left alone. He had no toys. He had no playmates. He was driven to find whatever companionship or pleasure he might in the dim, half-hearted world of his childish imagination. There he created for himself the life he desired, building it on fragments of his real life. He came back to the sordid facts about him with a distaste so strong that his mind was bitter with it.

His father and mother were elderly, alien persons who ruled him. Tom was a large, uncouth, disturbing influence, to be avoided and escaped from. Eliza was sympathetic; she was warm and friendly, but she worked hard, and all winter she went to school. He sometimes took Eliza with him in his dreams.

ONLY one real joy relieved the gray monotony of his days. Once in a long while his Mammy Jenny came from Oakland to take him back with her for a visit.

He rushed into her arms with a cry that was almost a sob. His heart expanded and glowed in the warmth of her love. She hugged him, she kissed him, she called him pet names, "mah honey-chile, mah blessed baby-boy, his mammy's little man." She held him in her lap while she sat in the kitchen talking to his mother. She had brought him candy. He might handle the shining watch-chain that hung around her neck, slipping the little jeweled slide up and down the glittering links. It was all a delirium of happiness.

In the afternoon she dressed him in his neatest clothes. His mother wrapped a change of underwear and a comb in a bundle. He and his Mammy Jenny set off together for Oakland. They rode on the train, sitting on plush-covered seats. She bought him peanuts.

His Mammy Jenny lived in a neat little cottage, the prettiest, cleanest place in a close row of other little cottages. Black babies sprawled on doorsteps, crowds of little black boys tumbled and shouted at play in the dusty street. He played too. He did not have to work at all. He played all day long.

In the morning Mammy Jenny went to work, dressed in a neat blue dress, and carrying a white apron in a roll under her arm. She was a nurse. Her husband worked too. He was a big, jolly, black man, who told Jack long, delightfully terrifying stories of ghosts and voodoos. He was a janitor. Nursing and janitoring were not like farming. When Jack grew up he would be a janitor too.

All day he played in the street with Mammy Jenny's two children, Will and Annie. They were younger than he, and he must look out for them. With what importance he pulled Annie to her feet when she tumbled, and tied her sunbonnet under her chin! She was a fat, laughing little thing, who gurgled even when she bumped her head.

All the boys in the neighborhood deferred to him. He was a white boy. What play they had! He invented their games. Sticks were horses, woodsheds were forts, and pointed fingers were guns. All the battles of the Civil war raged up and down the street, where the thick dust was warm on bare feet, and around the little unpainted cottages. Spies crouched behind the bean vines running on strings up weathered, battened walls. Jack, the brave commander, stood high on a woodpile hill, waving his lath sword, and striking down the attacking foe.

When they were hungry there was bread and molasses and cold pork on Mammy Jenny's kitchen table. When she came home at night to find the cupboard raided and the cake gone, she only laughed. Nothing was too good for her white chile. There were pancakes and pork-chops and pie for supper.

Later, in the cool twilight on the back porch, Mammy Jenny sat in a wide rocking chair, cuddling Annie to sleep in her arms. Jack crowded in beside her, his head on her shoulder. Her husband sat on the steps, with Will nodding in the crook of his arm, and his pipe glowing red through the gathering dusk. Mammy Jenny sang.

Swing low, sweet cha'iot, comin' foh to cai'y me home,
Swing low, sweet cha'iot, comin' foh to cai'y me home—

The boy's heart swelled with a happiness that was pain. His throat ached. All the world was mysteriously, sorrowfully beautiful.

Swing low, sweet cha'iot, swing low, sweet cha'iot,
Comin' foh—to cai'y me—ho-o-o-me.

HE woke in the small white bed beside Will. Morning sunshine, dappled with leafy shadows from the vine-covered window, fell across his pillow. Before him shone another happy day.

They were all too few. The time when he must go home came on swift wings. He went back to the farm, to his days of drudgery and loneliness.

From one of these brief excursions of delight he returned to find Tom gone. Tom had run away to sea. His imagination fired at the thought. "What was the sea like?" he asked his mother. "What did Tom do on a ship?" "Where was he going?"

He was going to Japan. "Where was Japan?" "Was it like Oakland?" "How big was it?" "How long did it take to go there?" He plied his mother with questions, following her from kitchen to bedroom and back again. She told him about the little yellow men, about their heathen idols, and their paper houses, and their unholy ways. She filled his mind with fear and wonder and wild dreams.

He would go to Japan. He would steal away some night, with bread in his pocket, and explore for himself the strange great world. This was a new and fearfully delightful thought with which to play. He lost himself in it. His father, more silent, working harder now that Tom was gone, must speak sharply to wake him from it. "Answer me when I speak to you, Jack!"

John London's theories of child-up-bringing were those of his class and generation. He demanded quick obedience, outward respect, and hard work. His was a simple, kindly, brute-nature, never subtle, and set long before in a stern mold. He did his duty by the boy as he saw it. He fed him as well as he could, clothed him, and when he was six sent him to school.

A new world opened before the boy's imagination then. He learned to read. Dreams faded before that engrossing occupation. His mind fell avidly upon those small crooked marks on a white page which open the door between mind and mind. He sat absorbed, mastering page after page of the primer. He borrowed a first reader and plunged into that.

It was a small country school, heated in winter by a round iron stove, for which the big boys brought in wood. There were a score of ink-stained desks, notched on the edges by mischievous jack-knives. The teacher sat on a raised platform, with a long wooden pointer at his hand.

He was an old man, with grizzled hair and beard. He wore large spectacles, through which his weary eyes looked out sternly. His cheeks were flabby, and his threadbare coat had spots on the front. He marched his pupils grimly from seats to blackboard and back again, drilled them grimly through reader and arithmetic, and dismissed them at night with a tired sigh of relief. His solace lay in a brown bottle waiting in his bedroom at the nearest farmhouse. When he drank too heavily there was no school next day. The big boys hoped every evening that he would drink too much that night.

SITTING in that dingy schoolroom watched by the teacher, Jack London learned to read. He read all the schoolbooks there, dog-eared geographies, American histories with steel engravings of Lincoln and Washington, readers filled with baffling scraps from Irving and Hawthorne and Bryant. He became acquainted with the boys in the yard at recess, and talked them into lending him lurid books in paper covers, which he smuggled between the covers of an arithmetic and read clandestinely under the eye of the teacher. He was fond of school.

In the mornings, his chores done, the woodbox piled high, the waterpail filled, he set out gladly to walk with Eliza the three miles to the little schoolhouse. In those long walks he learned to adore Eliza. She sympathized with his unrest and rebellion. She understood the dreams he shyly shared with her. They grew close to each other, walking slowly down the narrow yellow road, smelling the sweet odors distilled by dew and sun from the country fields, stopping to pick flowers, startling a bird from a fence post and standing together to watch its flight. As they went they talked, discussing all the hopes with which children face the unguessed future.

ELIZA listened to his vague plans. He would be great some day, he would be rich. They would live together, just they two, in a large house, and she should have beautiful dresses and take piano lessons, and he would read, and they would have good times together.

"Just us two? Not mama, or daddy, or anyone?"

"No one at all but just you and me. You're the only one I want. We won't ever get married. I won't, anyway. You'll keep house for me, won't you, when I'm grown up, and have lots of money? You won't marry anybody else, will you?"

Eliza hesitated. "We-ell, maybe not." She was sixteen now, one of the big girls at school, and her pig-tails had disappeared. She wore bangs, and wound her braids in a knot at the back of her head. She had beaux. One of them, a grown man, came all the way from Oakland to see her.

"Oh, I don't know what you want to go thinking about him for!" Jack protested resentfully. "I want you to live with me. I don't want anyone else but just you. If you'll just wait, I'll have a big house for you. I will." His jaw set, and his hands clenched. His wide blue eyes were stormy.

"All right, dear," Eliza hastened to say. "Tell me some more."

During all that winter he clung to her passionately. He spelled out again the stories of Washington and Lincoln. He revolved large, vague plans in his mind. At last he had set his heart on something real, something that he meant to get, money, and a big house, and Eliza to live with him in it. He fiercely resented Mr. Shepard's visits to the farm.

In the spring Eliza explained to him as gently as she could that she intended to marry Mr. Shepard. They were going to live in Oakland. Jack could visit them often, she would not forget him, she loved him just as much as ever. Her protestations did not convince him. Eliza meant to leave him. He was to be alone again.

Crashing upon the blow of this fact came the news that his father and mother were going to move. They would live on a farm across the bay, near Colma. Jack was big enough now to work in the potato fields, his father said casually.

In the next installment of this biography (in the November number) Mrs. Lane traces the beginnings of that fierce pride which was developed in Jack London to an unusual degree by the circumstances of his being of blood which his mother thought superior to that of the people about him; that pride which became an obsession with him because it was constantly thwarted.