The Man behind the Legend: Memoirs, Autobiographical Novels & Essays of Jack London. Jack London
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not going to get a job,” Martin said with a smile. “And you can tell him so from me. I don’t need a job, and there’s the proof of it.”
He emptied the hundred gold pieces into her lap in a glinting, tinkling stream.
“You remember that fiver you gave me the time I didn’t have carfare? Well, there it is, with ninety-nine brothers of different ages but all of the same size.”
If Gertrude had been frightened when she arrived, she was now in a panic of fear. Her fear was such that it was certitude. She was not suspicious. She was convinced. She looked at Martin in horror, and her heavy limbs shrank under the golden stream as though it were burning her.
“It’s yours,” he laughed.
She burst into tears, and began to moan, “My poor boy, my poor boy!”
He was puzzled for a moment. Then he divined the cause of her agitation and handed her the Meredith-Lowell letter which had accompanied the check. She stumbled through it, pausing now and again to wipe her eyes, and when she had finished, said:-
“An’ does it mean that you come by the money honestly?”
“More honestly than if I’d won it in a lottery. I earned it.”
Slowly faith came back to her, and she reread the letter carefully. It took him long to explain to her the nature of the transaction which had put the money into his possession, and longer still to get her to understand that the money was really hers and that he did not need it.
“I’ll put it in the bank for you,” she said finally.
“You’ll do nothing of the sort. It’s yours, to do with as you please, and if you won’t take it, I’ll give it to Maria. She’ll know what to do with it. I’d suggest, though, that you hire a servant and take a good long rest.”
“I’m goin’ to tell Bernard all about it,” she announced, when she was leaving.
Martin winced, then grinned.
“Yes, do,” he said. “And then, maybe, he’ll invite me to dinner again.”
“Yes, he will—I’m sure he will!” she exclaimed fervently, as she drew him to her and kissed and hugged him.
Chapter XLII
One day Martin became aware that he was lonely. He was healthy and strong, and had nothing to do. The cessation from writing and studying, the death of Brissenden, and the estrangement from Ruth had made a big hole in his life; and his life refused to be pinned down to good living in cafés and the smoking of Egyptian cigarettes. It was true the South Seas were calling to him, but he had a feeling that the game was not yet played out in the United States. Two books were soon to be published, and he had more books that might find publication. Money could be made out of them, and he would wait and take a sackful of it into the South Seas. He knew a valley and a bay in the Marquesas that he could buy for a thousand Chili dollars. The valley ran from the horseshoe, land-locked bay to the tops of the dizzy, cloud-capped peaks and contained perhaps ten thousand acres. It was filled with tropical fruits, wild chickens, and wild pigs, with an occasional herd of wild cattle, while high up among the peaks were herds of wild goats harried by packs of wild dogs. The whole place was wild. Not a human lived in it. And he could buy it and the bay for a thousand Chili dollars.
The bay, as he remembered it, was magnificent, with water deep enough to accommodate the largest vessel afloat, and so safe that the South Pacific Directory recommended it to the best careening place for ships for hundreds of miles around. He would buy a schooner—one of those yacht-like, coppered crafts that sailed like witches—and go trading copra and pearling among the islands. He would make the valley and the bay his headquarters. He would build a patriarchal grass house like Tati’s, and have it and the valley and the schooner filled with dark-skinned servitors. He would entertain there the factor of Taiohae, captains of wandering traders, and all the best of the South Pacific riffraff. He would keep open house and entertain like a prince. And he would forget the books he had opened and the world that had proved an illusion.
To do all this he must wait in California to fill the sack with money. Already it was beginning to flow in. If one of the books made a strike, it might enable him to sell the whole heap of manuscripts. Also he could collect the stories and the poems into books, and make sure of the valley and the bay and the schooner. He would never write again. Upon that he was resolved. But in the meantime, awaiting the publication of the books, he must do something more than live dazed and stupid in the sort of uncaring trance into which he had fallen.
He noted, one Sunday morning, that the Bricklayers’ Picnic took place that day at Shell Mound Park, and to Shell Mound Park he went. He had been to the working-class picnics too often in his earlier life not to know what they were like, and as he entered the park he experienced a recrudescence of all the old sensations. After all, they were his kind, these working people. He had been born among them, he had lived among them, and though he had strayed for a time, it was well to come back among them.
“If it ain’t Mart!” he heard some one say, and the next moment a hearty hand was on his shoulder. “Where you ben all the time? Off to sea? Come on an’ have a drink.”
It was the old crowd in which he found himself—the old crowd, with here and there a gap, and here and there a new face. The fellows were not bricklayers, but, as in the old days, they attended all Sunday picnics for the dancing, and the fighting, and the fun. Martin drank with them, and began to feel really human once more. He was a fool to have ever left them, he thought; and he was very certain that his sum of happiness would have been greater had he remained with them and let alone the books and the people who sat in the high places. Yet the beer seemed not so good as of yore. It didn’t taste as it used to taste. Brissenden had spoiled him for steam beer, he concluded, and wondered if, after all, the books had spoiled him for companionship with these friends of his youth. He resolved that he would not be so spoiled, and he went on to the dancing pavilion. Jimmy, the plumber, he met there, in the company of a tall, blond girl who promptly forsook him for Martin.
“Gee, it’s like old times,” Jimmy explained to the gang that gave him the laugh as Martin and the blonde whirled away in a waltz. “An’ I don’t give a rap. I’m too damned glad to see ’m back. Watch ’m waltz, eh? It’s like silk. Who’d blame any girl?”
But Martin restored the blonde to Jimmy, and the three of them, with half a dozen friends, watched the revolving couples and laughed and joked with one another. Everybody was glad to see Martin back. No book of his been published; he carried no fictitious value in their eyes. They liked him for himself. He felt like a prince returned from excile, and his lonely heart burgeoned in the geniality in which it bathed. He made a mad day of it, and was at his best. Also, he had money in his pockets, and, as in the old days when he returned from sea with a pay-day, he made the money fly.
Once, on the dancing-floor, he saw Lizzie Connolly go by in the arms of a young workingman; and, later, when he made the round of the pavilion, he came upon her sitting by a refreshment table. Surprise and greetings over, he led her away into the grounds, where they could talk without shouting down the music. From the instant he spoke to her, she was his. He knew it. She showed it in the proud humility of her eyes, in every caressing movement of her proudly carried body, and in the way she hung upon his speech. She was not the young girl as he had known her. She was a woman, now, and Martin noted that her wild, defiant beauty had improved, losing none of its wildness, while the defiance and the fire seemed more in control. “A beauty, a perfect beauty,” he murmured admiringly under his breath. And he knew she was his, that all he had to do was to say “Come,” and she would go with him over the world wherever he led.
Even as the thought flashed through his brain he received a heavy blow on the side of his head that nearly knocked him down. It was a man’s fist, directed by a man so angry and in such haste that the fist had missed the jaw for which it was