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    Default Jack London

    LIE-Te (Dominant subtype) [LIE-EXE]


    - from “The Economics of the Klondike” by Jack London; pp. 73-74: The Klondike

    rush placed hundreds of steamers on the Yukon, opened the navigation of its upper reaches and

    the lakes, put tramways around the unnavigable Box Canon and White Horse Rapids, and built a

    railroad from salt water at Skaguay across the White Pass to the head of steamboat traffic on

    Lake Bennett.

    With dwindling of population caused by the collapse of the rush, these transportation

    facilities will be, if anything, greater than the need of the country demands. The excessive

    profits will be cut down and only the best-equipped and most efficient companies remain in

    operation. Conditions will become normal and the Klondike just enter upon its true development.

    With the necessaries and luxuries of life cheap and plentiful, with the importation of the

    machinery which will cheapen many enterprises and render many others possible, with easy

    traveling and quick communication between it and the world and between its parts, the resources

    of the Yukon district will be opened up and developed in a steady, business-like way.

    Living expenses being normal, a moderate wage will be possible. Nor will laborers

    fail to hasten there from the congested labor markets of the older countries. This, in turn, will

    permit the employment on a large scale of much of the world’s restless capital now seeking

    investment. On the White River, eighty miles south of Dawson, great deposits of copper are to

    be found. Coal, so essential to the country’s exploitation, has already been discovered at

    various places along the Yukon, from “MacCormack’s Houses” above the Five Finger Rapids

    down to Rampart City and the Koyokuk in Alaska. There is small doubt that iron will eventually

    be unearthed, and with equal certainty the future gold-mining will be mainly in quartz.


    As to the ephemeral placers, the outlook cannot be declared bad. It is fair to suppose that many

    new ones will be discovered, but outside of this there is much else that is favorable. While there

    are very few “paying” creeks, it must be understood that nothing below a return of $10 a day

    per man under the old expensive conditions has been considered “pay.” But when a sack of flour

    may be bought for a dollar instead of fifty, and all other things in proportion, it is apparent how

    great a fall the scale of pay can sustain. In California gravel containing 5 cents of gold to the

    cubic yard is washed at a profit; but hitherto in the Klondike gravel yielding less than $10 to the

    cubic yard has been ignored as unprofitable. That is to say, the old conditions in the Klondike

    made it impossible to wash dirt which was not at least two hundred times richer than that

    washed in California. But this will not be true henceforth. There are immense quantities of these

    cheaper gravels in the Yukon Valley, and it is inevitable that they yield to the enterprise of brains

    and capital.


    In short, though many of its individuals have lost, the world will have lost nothing by the

    Klondike. The new Klondike, the Klondike of the future, will present remarkable contrasts

    with the Klondike of the past. Natural obstacles will be cleared away or surmounted, primitive

    methods abandoned, and hardship of toil and travel reduced to the smallest possible minimum.

    Exploration and transportation will be systematized. There will be no waste energy, no

    harum-scarum carrying on of industry. The frontiers-man will yield to the laborer, the

    prospector to the mining engineer, the dog-driver to the engine-driver, the trader and

    speculator to the steady-going modern man of business; for these are the men in whose

    hands the destiny of the Klondike will be intrusted.



    - from Jack London’s Martin Eden; pp. 7-13 [Introduction (by Andrew Sinclair)]: Jack

    London was a born rebel whose personality demanded the immediate gratification of his

    contradictory wants. He had a dialectic of appetites without a synthesis of satisfaction. He

    once confessed to wanting to drive forty horses abreast with the thousand strong arms of his

    mind; his ambitions in writing and ranching were as excessive as his self-discipline and vigor.

    Yet his incessant forcing of himself led to occasional nervous collapses into morbidity and

    despair. Then his horses changed masters. “Satiety and possession are Death’s horses,” he wrote;

    “they run in span.”


    Martin Eden (1909) is London’s most autobiographical novel. It describes his struggle for

    education and literary fame in his youth and his disillusion with success in his middle age. It

    mythologizes his rise from obscurity and prophesies his early death at forty. The author’s

    passionate identification with his hero, Martin Eden, creates the power and compulsion of the

    book, which remains today equaled only by Knut Hamsen’s Hunger as an archetypal

    study of the urge to write subordinating even the will to live.

    London had a hard raising, although not as hard as did Martin Eden, who mysteriously has no

    parents, only a brood of vagrant brothers and slatternly sisters. London himself was born in 1876

    in San Francisco, the only child of Flora Wellman, a spiritualist and music teacher from a

    middle-class family. His father was probably a wandering astrologer called William Henry

    Chaney. Shortly after the boy’s birth, his mother married a widower, John London, and her son

    was given his stepfather’s name.


    The boy grew up in Oakland and on neighboring small farms. To earn a few dollars, he worked

    as a newsboy and fought some of the fights Martin Eden fought with Cheese-Face. He had an

    early love of books and of sailing on San Francisco Bay. By the age of fifteen, he was a

    delinquent, gang leader, and oyster pirate. Foreseeing an early death on shore, he set off for a

    seven-month sealing voyage, on which he saw the bloody battle for life between men and beasts.

    On his return, he worked in factories before joining an army of the unemployed for a march on

    Washington. A thirty-day jail sentence for vagrancy made him determined to use his mind and

    avoid the degradation of life as a wage-slave in the Social Pit. He resolved to sell his muscle no

    more but to become a vendor of brains. Then began for him a frantic pursuit of knowledge.

    It is at a similar point in life that London chose to introduce his hero Martin Eden.

    London himself, supported by his mother and by a job as a school janitor, completed high

    school, took the entrance examinations for the University of California at Berkeley, and

    attended classes there for two semesters, grasping at knowledge with the desperation of a

    drowning man and the arrogance of the self-taught. He met a middle-class family, the

    Applegarths, and fell in love with their daughter Mabel, whose ethereal beauty embodied the

    visions of his favorite romantic poets. Browning and Swinburne on the shelves always

    signified for London a touch of class.

    Mabel Applegarth was the model for Ruth Morse in Martin Eden, observed with the

    ruthless hindsight of eleven years’ more experience of life. The episode in the novel when Ruth

    is seen as a woman because black cherry juice stains her lips is based on the moment at which

    Jack London first saw Mabel “stripping off her immortality.” As he wrote in 1900 to the second

    love of his life, Anna Strunsky, Mabel seemed very small a mere four years after he first knew

    her. “Her virtues led her nowhere. Works? She had none. Her culture was a surface smear, her

    deepest depth a singing shallow. Do you understand? Can I explain further? I awoke, and judged,

    and my puppy love was over.”

    During the time, however, when the young Jack London adored Mabel Applegarth, he was trying

    to adopt the values of her class and to leave his own. His memory of his feelings explains the

    marvel of the opening chapters of Martin Eden, when the youthful sailor rolls into the

    Morse household and soon feels like “God’s own mad lover dying on a kiss.” Eden’s reverence

    for bourgeois standards and culture mirrors London’s own rapture at his first encounter with

    them. When London described the novel as primarily an attack upon the bourgeoisie and all it

    stood for, he was not wrong; but fortunately, his artistry and awareness of his former illusions

    enable him to lurch with his hero through the bric-a-brac and deceits of the Morses’ mansions

    and see all as Camelot and Parnassus.


    The novel, London always insisted, was also an attack on individualism. “Being unaware of the

    needs of others, of the whole human collective need, Martin Eden lived only for himself, fought

    only for himself, and, if you please, died for himself.” He died because of his lack of faith in

    men. London, however, claimed to have faith in men. He was a socialist and not an individualist.

    And so he lived.


    Unfortunately, London’s character was nearer Martin Eden’s than he allowed. His individualism

    and Nietzschean belief in the strength of the will were usually more apparent than his faith in

    socialism. To reconcile his beliefs in the survival of the fittest and in the aristocracy of the

    intellect with his compassion for his fellow workers was a task as difficult as driving forty

    horses abreast. Martin Eden was more consistent, living and dying an individualist, ignoring

    the decadent poet Brissenden, who praised socialism as the answer to the death wish.


    After leaving Berkeley, London joined the Klondike gold rush, a vain quest that he equated with

    Martin Eden’s treasure hunt in the South Seas. He returned, married his first wife, Bess

    Maddern, and began to make some literary progress. After the success of his short Klondike

    stories, The Call of the Wild (1903) and The Sea-Wolf (1904) gave him an

    international reputation almost as sudden and spectacular as Martin Eden’s. Disillusioned

    with fame, he retreated from Oakland to a ranch at Glen Ellen, where he hoped to counteract

    the rape of the American earth by restoring the virgin soil and making a paradise from the land

    looted by the greed of the pioneers.

    By 1906, London’s reaction to overwork and notoriety—experiences that drove Martin Eden to

    commit suicide—plunged him into long periods of disgust. He summed it up in his drinking

    confession, the novel John Barleycorn:


    The things I had fought for and burned my midnight oil for had failed me. Success—I

    despised it. Recognition—it was dead ashes. Society, men and women above the ruck and the

    muck of the waterfront and the forecastle—I was appalled by their unlovely mental

    mediocrity. Love of woman—it was like all the rest. Money—I could sleep in only one bed at a

    time, and of what worth was an income of a hundred porterhouses a day when I could eat only

    one? Art, culture—in the face of the iron facts of biology such things were ridiculous, the

    exponents of such things only the more ridiculous.



    The way out of disgust was love of the people and escape. In 1906, London married Charmian

    Kittredge, made a lecture tour of the United States preaching revolutionary socialism, and set off

    on a self-designed ketch called the Snark to sail round the world. He had bought too much

    land at Glen Ellen and had ruined himself building the boat. His captain was incompetent, the

    ketch was inefficient, and London found himself navigating the vessel with Charmian as his

    true “mate-woman.” Only his iron determination—and the need to earn a large income to pay for

    the voyage and the ranch in California—kept him writing a thousand words a day in any

    weather.

    The book he wrote on the voyage was Martin Eden. He was only thirty-one years of age,

    yet he had already achieved too much too soon. His mental energy seemed to him at times to be

    mental sickness. He had lamed his splendid body and began to suffer from bowel diseases. The

    voyage of the Snark was meant to reassert his physical dominance, but it ended in his

    physical collapse. By the time the Snark reached Hawaii, London had to fire his captain

    for allowing the sails, ropes, and decking to rot in the sun. Penniless, he had to beg an advance

    from his publisher to refit the ketch; he beat two thousand miles in variable winds on the Pacific

    Traverse to the Marquesas, where Gauguin had found his own disillusion and death. There

    London rented the clubhouse where his boyhood idol Robert Louis Stevenson had stayed and set

    out for Melville’s paradise of Happar. Tuberculosis, leprosy, and elephantiasis had decimated

    Melville’s noble warriors. The survivors were mostly freaks and monsters.

    More disillusion was to come. There was a financial panic in the United States. London’s checks

    were being returned by the banks; the mortgages on his properties were threatened with

    foreclosure. His teeth, which were in terrible shape (unlike Martin Eden’s), were giving him

    incessant pain. He booked a passage back to California on the Mariposa so he could

    finish the novel and use the proceeds to pay his debts.

    London’s sense of disgust and despair, his physical pain, and his pressing financial problems all

    help to explain why he pushed his hero through the porthole of a boat that he was taking back to

    California. Charmian’s diary reveals London’s state of mind while he was finishing Martin

    Eden
    on the voyage home: “Jack is sick sometimes, mentally, or he wouldn’t do as he does.

    This reflection helps me through some hopeless, loveless times—seldom, thank God.” London’s

    disgust and self-destructive urges at that time were transferred to Martin Eden, but not fully

    explained. The result is that Eden’s sudden suicide by drowning appears not inevitable but

    willful—the self-dramatization of a spoiled youth, not the necessary action of a strong man. The

    published work was an immediate failure with the critics and the public—but has had long-term

    success as the parable that London always intended it to be, the parable of an individualist who

    had to die, “not because of his lack of faith in God, but because of his lack of faith in men.”


    Had London not been in a temporary slough of disgust, he might have let Martin Eden

    continue his South Seas voyage as originally intended, even if in the end he was still to drown

    splendidly in the surf. But the book was long enough, the finish fitting, if depressing. It suited

    the dark side of London: preoccupied with the struggle of all life against death, the “Noseless

    One,” he was prodigal with his own energies and physique, excessive in his eating and

    drinking, driven to die unwillingly at forty from a drug overdose, his body no longer capable of

    responding to the demands his dominant will put upon it. As a young man he had once tried

    suicide by drowning—and that is the end he wished for Martin Eden, an end when death no

    longer hurts, and at the instant of knowing the mind ceases to know.


    Unlike Socrates, who only knew that he knew nothing, and spent his life inquiring, both Martin

    Eden and Jack London thought they knew everything and therefore died from a surfeit of

    boredom. Satisfaction kills the cat, curiosity brings it back. “Work performed” was the

    ceaseless maggot in Martin Eden’s mind that led him to world-weariness and self-destruction. He

    had worked too hard and wanted to perform no more. To the self-taught American at the turn of

    this century, the facile world view of Herbert Spencer comprehended all knowledge and

    superseded all other philosophies. The paradox was never clear to London or to his surrogate

    hero: If evolution and Social Darwinism explained everything, thought could evolve no further,

    and the Social Darwinist would become bigoted and reactionary.




    - from The Best Short Stories of Jack London; pp. 10-11 (“To Build a Fire”): At the man’s

    heels trotted a dog, a big native husky, the proper wolf dog, gray-coated and without any visible

    or temperamental difference from its brother, the wild wolf. The animal was depressed by the

    tremendous cold. It knew that it was no time for travelling. Its instinct told it a truer tale than was

    told to the man by the man’s judgment. In reality, it was not merely colder than fifty below zero;

    it was colder than sixty below, than seventy below. It was seventy-five below zero. Since the

    freezing point is thirty-two above zero, it meant that one hundred and seven degrees of frost

    obtained. The dog did not know anything about thermometers. Possibly in its brain there was no

    sharp consciousness of a condition of very cold such as was in the man’s brain. But the brute had

    its instinct. It experienced a vague but menacing apprehension that subdued it and made it slink

    along at the man’s heels, and that made it question eagerly every unwonted movement of the

    man as if expecting him to go into camp or to seek shelter somewhere and build a fire. The dog

    had learned fire, and it wanted fire, or else to burrow under the snow and cuddle its warmth

    away from the air.

    The frozen moisture of its breathing had settled on its fur in a fine powder of frost, and

    especially were its jowls, muzzle, and eyelashes whitened by its crystalled breath. The man’s red

    beard and mustache were likewise frosted, but more solidly, the deposit taking the form of ice

    and increasing with every warm, moist breath he exhaled. Also, the man was chewing tobacco,

    and the muzzle of ice held his lips so rigidly that he was unable to clear his chin when he

    expelled the juice. The result was that a crystal beard of the color and solidity of amber was

    increasing its length on his chin. If he fell down it would shatter itself, like glass, into brittle

    fragments. But he did not mind the appendage. It was the penalty all tobacco chewers paid in that

    country, and he had been out before in two cold snaps. They had not been so cold as this, he

    knew, but by the spirit thermometer at Sixty Mile he knew they had been registered at fifty

    below and at fifty-five.



    - pp. 12-14: In a month no man had come up or down that silent creek. The man held steadily on.

    He was not much given to thinking, and just then particularly he had nothing to think about save

    that he would eat lunch at the forks and that at six o’clock he would be in camp with the boys.

    There was nobody to talk to and, had there been, speech would have been impossible because of

    the ice muzzle on his mouth. So he continued monotonously to chew tobacco and to increase the

    length of his amber beard.

    Once in a while the thought reiterated itself that it was very cold and that he had never

    experienced such cold. As he walked along he rubbed his cheekbones and nose with the back of

    his mittened hand. He did this automatically, now and again changing hands. But, rub as he

    would, the instant he stopped his cheekbones went numb, and the following instant the end of his

    nose went numb. He was sure to frost his cheeks; he knew that, and experienced a pang of

    regret that he had not devised a nose strap of the sort Bud wore in cold snaps. Such a strap

    passed across the cheeks, as well, and saved them. But it didn’t matter much, after all. What

    were frosted cheeks? A bit painful, that was all; they were never serious.

    Empty as the man’s mind was of thoughts, he was keenly observant, and he noticed the changes

    in the creek, the curves and bends and timber jams, and always he sharply noted where he

    placed his feet. Once, coming around a bend, he shied abruptly, like a startled horse, curved

    away from the place where he had been walking, and retreated several paces back along the

    trail. The creek he knew was frozen clear to the bottom—no creek could contain water in that

    arctic winter—but he knew also that there were springs that bubbled out from the hillsides and

    ran along under the snow and on top the ice of the creek. He knew that the coldest snaps never

    froze these springs, and he knew likewise their danger. They were traps. They hid pools of water

    under the snow that might be three inches deep, or three feet. Sometimes a skin of ice half an

    inch thick covered them, and in turn was covered by the snow. Sometimes there were alternate

    layers of water and ice skin, so that when one broke through he kept on breaking through for a

    while, sometimes wetting himself to the waist.

    That was why he had shied in such panic. He had felt the give under his feet and heard the

    crackle of a snow-hidden ice skin. And to get his feet wet in such a temperature meant

    trouble and danger. At the very least it meant delay, for he would be forced to stop and build a

    fire, and under its protection to bare his feet while he dried his socks and moccasins. He stood

    and studied the creek bed and its banks, and decided that the flow of water came from the right.

    He reflected awhile, rubbing his nose and cheeks, then skirted to the left, stepping gingerly and

    testing the footing for each step. Once clear of the danger, he took a fresh chew of tobacco and

    swung along at his four-mile gait.

    In the course of the next two hours he came upon several similar traps. Usually the snow above

    the hidden pools had a sunken, candied appearance that advertised the danger. Once again,

    however, he had a close call; and once, suspecting danger, he compelled the dog to go on in

    front. The dog did not want to go. It hung back until the man shoved it forward, and then it

    went quickly across the white, unbroken surface. Suddenly it broke through, floundered to one

    side, and got away to firmer footing. It had wet its forefeet and legs, and almost immediately the

    water that clung to it turned to ice. It made quick efforts to lick the ice off its legs, then dropped

    down in the snow and began to bite out the ice that had formed between the toes. This was

    matter of instinct. To permit the ice to remain would mean sore feet. It did not know this. It

    merely obeyed the mysterious prompting that arose from the deep crypts of its being.



    - pp. 16-32: That man from Sulphur Creek had spoken the truth when telling how cold it

    sometimes got in the country. And he had laughed at him at the time! That showed one must not

    be too sure of things. There was no mistake about it, it was cold. He strode up and down,

    stamping his feet and threshing his arms, until reassured by the returning warmth. Then he got

    out matches and proceeded to make a fire. From the undergrowth, where high water of the

    previous spring had lodged a supply of seasoned twigs, he got his firewood. Working carefully

    from a small beginning, he soon had a roaring fire, over which he thawed the ice from his face

    and in the protection of which he ate his biscuits. For the moment the cold of space was

    outwitted. The dog took satisfaction in the fire, stretching out close enough for warmth and far

    enough away to escape being singed.

    When the man had finished, he filled his pipe and took his comfortable time over a smoke. Then

    he pulled on his mittens, settled the ear flaps of his cap firmly about his ears, and took the creek

    trail up the left fork. The dog was disappointed and yearned back toward the fire. This man did

    not know cold. Possibly all the generations of his ancestry had been ignorant of cold, of real

    cold, of cold one hundred and seven degrees below freezing point. But the dog knew all its

    ancestry knew, and it had inherited the knowledge. And it knew that it was not good to walk

    abroad in such fearful cold. It was the time to lie snug in a hole in the snow and wait for a

    curtain of cloud to be drawn across the face of outer space whence this cold came. On the other

    hand, there was no keen intimacy between the dog and the man. The one was the toil slave of the

    other, and the only caresses it had ever received were the caresses of the whip lash and of harsh

    and menacing throat sounds that threatened the whip lash. So the dog made no effort to

    communicate its apprehension to the man. It was not concerned in the welfare of the man; it

    was for its own sake that it yearned back toward the fire. But the man whistled, and spoke to it

    with the sound of whip lashes, and the dog swung in at the man’s heels and followed after.


    The man took a chew of tobacco and proceeded to start a new amber beard. Also, his moist

    breath quickly powdered with white his mustache, eyebrows, and lashes. There did not seem to

    be so many springs on the left fork of the Henderson, and for half an hour the man saw no signs

    of any. And then it happened. At a place where there were no signs, where the soft, unbroken

    snow seemed to advertise solidity beneath, the man broke through. It was not deep. He wet

    himself halfway to the knees before he floundered out to the firm crust.

    He was angry, and cursed his luck aloud. He had hoped to get into camp with the boys at six

    o’clock, and this would delay him an hour, for he would have to build a fire and dry out his

    footgear. This was imperative at that low temperature—he knew that much; and he turned

    aside to the bank, which he climbed. On top, tangled in the underbrush about the trunks of

    several small spruce trees, was a highwater deposit of dry firewood—sticks and twigs,

    principally, but also larger portions of seasoned branches and fine, dry, last year’s grasses. He

    threw down several large pieces on top of the snow. This served for a foundation and prevented

    the young flame from drowning itself in the snow it otherwise would melt. The flame he got by

    touching a match to a small shred of birch bark that he took from his pocket. This burned even

    more readily than paper. Placing it on the foundation, he fed the young flame with wisps of dry

    grass and with the tiniest dry twigs.

    He worked slowly and carefully, keenly aware of his danger. Gradually, as the flame grew

    stronger, he increased the size of the twigs with which he fed it. He squatted in the snow, pulling

    the twigs out from their entanglement in the brush and feeding directly to the flame. He knew

    there must be no failure. When it is seventy-five below zero, a man must not fail in his first

    attempt to build a fire—that is, if his feet are wet. If his feet are dry, and he fails, he can run

    along the trail for half a mile and restore his circulation. But the circulation of wet and freezing

    feet cannot be restored by running when it is seventy-five below. No matter how fast he runs, the

    wet feet will freeze the harder.

    All this the man knew. The old-timer on Sulphur Creek had told him about it the previous fall,

    and now he was appreciating the advice. Already all sensation had gone out of his feet. To build

    the fire he had been forced to remove his mittens, and the fingers had quickly gone numb. His

    pace of four miles an hour had kept his heart pumping blood to the surface of his body and to

    all the extremities. But the instant he stopped, the action of the pump eased down. The cold of

    space smote the unprotected tip of the planet, and he, being on that unprotected tip, received the

    full force of the blow. The blood of his body recoiled before it. The blood was alive, like the dog,

    and like the dog it wanted to hide away and cover itself up from the fearful cold. So long as he

    walked four miles an hour, he pumped that blood, willy-nilly, to the surface; but now it ebbed

    away and sank down into the recesses of his body. The extremities were the first to feel its

    absence. His wet feet froze the faster, and his exposed fingers numbed the faster, though they

    had not yet begun to freeze. Nose and cheeks were already freezing, while the skin of all his

    body chilled as it lost its blood.


    But he was safe. Toes and nose and cheeks would be only touched by the frost, for the fire was

    beginning to burn with strength. He was feeding it with twigs the size of his finger. In another

    minute he would be able to feed it with branches the size of his wrist, and then he could remove

    his wet footgear, and, while it dried, he could keep his naked feet warm by the fire, rubbing them

    at first, of course, with snow. The fire was a success. He was safe. He remembered the advice of

    the old-timer on Sulphur Creek, and smiled. The old-timer had been very serious in laying down

    the law that no man must travel alone in the Klondike after fifty below. Well, here he was; he

    had had the accident; he was alone; and he had saved himself. Those old-timers were rather

    womanish, some of them, he thought. All a man had to do was to keep his head, and he was all

    right. Any man who was a man could travel alone. But it was surprising, the rapidity with which

    his cheeks and nose were freezing. And he had not thought his fingers could go lifeless in so

    short a time. Lifeless they were, for he could scarcely make them move together to grip a twig,

    and they seemed remote from his body and from him. When he touched a twig, he had to look

    and see whether or not he had hold of it. The wires were pretty well down between him and his

    finger ends.

    All of which counted for little. There was the fire, snapping and crackling and promising life

    with every dancing flame. He started to untie his moccasins. They were coated with ice; the

    thick German socks were like sheaths of iron halfway to the knees; and the moccasin strings

    were like rods of steel all twisted and knotted as by some conflagration. For a moment he tugged

    with his numb fingers, then, realizing the folly of it, he drew his sheath knife.


    But before he could cut the strings, it happened. It was his own fault or, rather, his mistake. He

    should not have built the fire under the spruce tree. He should have built it in the open. But it

    had been easier to pull the twigs from the brush and drop them directly on the fire. Now the tree

    under which he had done this carried a weight of snow on its boughs. No wind had blown for

    weeks, and each bough was fully freighted. Each time he had pulled a twig he had communicated

    a slight agitation to the tree—an imperceptible agitation, so far as he was concerned, but an

    agitation sufficient to bring about the disaster. High up in the tree one bough capsized its load of

    snow. This fell on the boughs beneath, capsizing them. This process continued, spreading out

    and involving the whole tree. It grew like an avalanche, and it descended without warning upon

    the man and the fire, and the fire was blotted out! Where it had burned was a mantle of fresh and

    disordered snow.


    The man was shocked. It was as though he had just heard his own sentence of death. For a

    moment he sat and stared at the spot where the fire had been. Then he grew very calm. Perhaps

    the old-timer on Sulphur Creek was right. If he had only had a trail mate he would have been in

    no danger now. The trail mate could have built the fire. Well, it was up to him to build the fire

    over again, and this second time there must be no failure. Even if he succeeded, he would most

    likely lose some toes. His feet must be badly frozen by now, and there would be some time

    before the second fire was ready.

    Such were his thoughts, but he did not sit and think them. He was busy all the time they were

    passing through his mind. He made a new foundation for a fire, this time in the open, where no

    treacherous tree could blot it out. Next he gathered dry grasses and tiny twigs from the

    high-water flotsam. He could not bring his fingers together to pull them out, but he was able to

    gather them by the handful. In this way he got many rotten twigs and bits of green moss that

    were undesirable, but it was the best he could do. He worked methodically, even collecting an

    armful of the larger branches to be used later when the fire gathered strength. And all the while

    the dog sat and watched him, a certain yearning wistfulness in its eyes, for it looked upon him as

    the fire provider, and the fire was slow in coming.

    When all was ready, the man reached in his pocket for a second piece of birch bark. He

    knew the bark was there, and, though he could not feel it with his fingers, he could hear its crisp

    rustling as he fumbled for it. Try as he would, he could not clutch hold of it. And all the time, in

    his consciousness, was the knowledge that each instant his feet were freezing. This thought

    tended to put him in a panic, but he fought against it and kept calm. He pulled on his mittens

    with his teeth, and threshed his arms back and forth, beating his hands with all his might against

    his sides. He did this sitting down, and he stood up to do it; and all the while the dog sat in the

    snow, its wolf brush of a tail curled around warmly over its forefeet, its sharp wolf ears pricked

    forward intently as it watched the man. And the man, as he beat and threshed with his arms and

    hands, felt a great surge of envy as he regarded the creature that was warm and secure in its

    natural covering.

    After a time he was aware of the first faraway signals of sensation in his beaten fingers. The faint

    tingling grew stronger till it evolved into a stinging ache that was excruciating, but which the

    man hailed with satisfaction. He stripped the mitten from his right hand and fetched forth the

    birch bark. The exposed fingers were quickly going numb again. Next he brought out his bunch

    of sulphur matches. But the tremendous cold had already driven the life out of his fingers. In his

    effort to separate one match from the others, the whole bunch fell in the snow. He tried to pick it

    out of the snow, but failed. The dead fingers could neither touch nor clutch. He was very careful.

    He drove the thought of his freezing feet, and nose, and cheeks, out of his mind, devoting his

    whole soul to the matches. He watched, using the sense of vision in place of that of touch, and

    when he saw his fingers on each side the bunch, he closed them—that is, he willed to close them,

    for the wires were down, and the fingers did not obey. He pulled the mitten on the right hand,

    and beat it fiercely against his knee. Then, with both mittened hands, he scooped the bunch of

    matches, along with much snow, into his lap. Yet he was no better off.

    After some manipulation he managed to get the bunch between the heels of his mittened

    hands. In this fashion he carried it to his mouth. The ice crackled and snapped when by a

    violent effort he opened his mouth. He drew the lower jaw in, curled the upper lip out of the

    way, and scraped the bunch with his upper teeth in order to separate a match. He succeeded in

    getting one, which he dropped on his lap. He was no better off. He could not pick it up. Then he

    devised a way. He picked it up in his teeth and scratched it on his leg. Twenty times he scratched

    before he succeeded in lighting it. As it flamed he held it with his teeth to the birch bark. But the

    burning brimstone went up his nostrils and into his lungs, causing him to cough spasmodically.

    The match fell into the snow and went out.


    The old-timer on Sulphur Creek was right, he thought in the moment of controlled despair that

    ensued: after fifty below, a man should travel with a partner. He beat his hands, but failed in

    exciting any sensation. Suddenly he bared both hands, removing the mittens with his teeth. He

    caught the whole bunch between the heels of his hands. His arm muscles not being frozen

    enabled him to press the hand heels tightly against the matches. Then he scratched the bunch

    along his leg. It flared into flame, seventy sulphur matches at once! There was no wind to blow

    them out. He kept his head to one side to escape the strangling fumes, and held the blazing bunch

    to the birch bark. As he so held it, he became aware of sensation in his hand. His flesh was

    burning. He could smell it. Deep down below the surface he could feel it. The sensation

    developed into pain that grew acute. And still he endured it, holding the flame of the matches

    clumsily to the bark that would not light readily because his own burning hands were in the way,

    absorbing most of the flame.


    At last, when he could endure no more, he jerked his hands apart. The blazing matches fell

    sizzling into the snow, but the birch bark was alight. He began laying dry grasses and the

    tiniest twigs on the flame. He could not pick and choose, for he had to lift the fuel between

    the heels of his hands. Small pieces of rotten wood and green moss clung to the twigs, and he bit

    them off as well as he could with his teeth. He cherished the flame carefully and awkwardly. It

    meant life, and it must not perish. The withdrawal of blood from the surface of his body now

    made him begin to shiver, and he grew more awkward. A large piece of green moss fell

    squarely on the little fire. He tried to poke it out with his fingers, but his shivering frame made

    him poke too far, and he disrupted the nucleus of the little fire, the burning grasses and tiny

    twigs separating and scattering. He tried to poke them together again, but in spite of the

    tenseness of the effort, his shivering got away with him, and the twigs were hopelessly

    scattered. Each twig gushed a puff of smoke and went out. The fire provider had failed. As he

    looked apathetically about him, his eyes chanced on the dog, sitting across the ruins of the

    fire from him, in the snow, making restless, hunching movements, slightly lifting one

    forefoot and then the other, shifting its weight back and forth on them with wistful eagerness.

    The sight of the dog put a wild idea into his head. He remembered the tale of the man,

    caught in a blizzard, who killed a steer and crawled inside the carcass, and so was saved. He

    would kill the dog and bury his hands in the warm body until the numbness went out of them.

    Then he could build another fire. He spoke to the dog, calling it to him; but in his voice was a

    strange note of fear that frightened the animal, who had never known the man to speak in such

    way before. Something was the matter, and its suspicious nature sensed danger—it knew not

    what danger, but somewhere, somehow, in its brain arose an apprehension of the man. It

    flattened its ears down at the sound of the man’s voice, and its restless, hunching movements

    and the liftings and shiftings of its forefeet became more pronounced; but it would not come to

    the man. He got on his hands and knees and crawled toward the dog. This unusual posture

    again excited suspicion, and the animal sidled mincingly away.

    The man sat up in the snow for a moment and struggled for calmness. Then he pulled on his

    mittens, by means of his teeth, and got upon his feet. He glanced down at first in order to assure

    himself that he was really standing up, for the absence of sensation in his feet left him unrelated

    to the earth. His erect position in itself started to drive the webs of suspicion from the dog’s

    mind; and when he spoke peremptorily, with the sound of whip lashes in his voice, the dog

    rendered its customary allegiance and came to him. As it came within reaching distance, the man

    lost his control. His arms flashed out to the dog, and he experienced genuine surprise when he

    discovered that his hands could not clutch, that there was neither bend nor feeling in the fingers.

    He had forgotten for the moment that they were frozen and that they were freezing more and

    more. All this happened quickly, and before the animal could get away, he encircled its body

    with his arms. He sat down in the snow, and in this fashion held the dog, while it snarled and

    whined and struggled.

    But it was all he could do, hold its body encircled in his arms and sit there. He realized that he

    could not kill the dog. There was no way to do it. With his helpless hands he could neither draw

    nor hold his sheath knife nor throttle the animal. He released it, and it plunged wildly away, with

    tail between its legs, and still snarling. It halted forty feet away and surveyed him curiously, with

    ears sharply pricked forward.

    The man looked down at his hands in order to locate them, and found them hanging on the ends

    of his arms. It struck him as curious that one should have to use his eyes in order to find out

    where his hands were. He began threshing his arms back and forth, beating the mittened hands

    against his sides. He did this for five minutes, violently, and his heart pumped enough blood up

    to the surface to put a stop to his shivering. But no sensation was aroused in the hands. He had an

    impression that they hung like weights on the ends of his arms, but when he tried to run the

    impression down, he could not find it.


    A certain fear of death, dull and oppressive, came to him. This fear quickly became poignant as

    he realized that it was no longer a mere matter of freezing his fingers and toes, or of losing his

    hands and feet, but that it was a matter of life and death with the chances against him. This

    threw him into a panic, and he turned and ran up the creek bed along the old, dim trail. The

    dog joined in behind and kept up with him. He ran blindly, without intention, in fear such as he

    had never known in his life. Slowly, as he plowed and floundered through the snow, he began to

    see things again—the banks of the creek, the old timber jams, the leafless aspens, and the sky.

    The running made him feel better. He did not shiver. Maybe, if he ran on, his feet would thaw

    out; and, anyway, if he ran far enough, he would reach camp and the boys. Without doubt he

    would lose some fingers and toes and some of his face; but the boys would take care of him, and

    save the rest of him when he got there. And at the same time there was another thought in his

    mind that said he would never get to the camp and the boys; that it was too many miles away,

    that the freezing had too great a start on him, and that he would soon be stiff and dead. This

    thought he kept in the background and refused to consider. Sometimes it pushed itself forward

    and demanded to be heard, but he thrust it back and strove to think of other things.


    It struck him as curious that he could run at all on feet so frozen that he could not feel them when

    they struck the earth and took the weight of his body. He seemed to himself to skim along above

    the surface, and to have no connection with the earth. Somewhere he had once seen a winged

    Mercury, and he wondered if Mercury felt as he felt when skimming over the earth.


    His theory of running until he reached camp and the boys had one flaw in it: he lacked the

    endurance. Several times he stumbled, and finally he tottered, crumpled up, and fell. When he

    tried to rise, he failed. He must sit and rest, he decided, and next time he would merely walk and

    keep on going. As he sat and regained his breath, he noted that he was feeling quite warm and

    comfortable. He was not shivering, and it even seemed that a warm glow had come to his chest

    and trunk. And yet, when he touched his nose or cheeks, there was no sensation. Running would

    not thaw them out. Nor would it thaw out his hands and feet. Then the thought came to him that

    the frozen portions of his body must be extending. He tried to keep this thought down, to forget

    it, to think of something else; he was aware of the panicky feeling that it caused, and he was

    afraid of the panic. But the thought asserted itself, and persisted, until it produced a vision of

    his body totally frozen. This was too much, and he made another wild run along the trail. Once

    he slowed down to a walk, but the thought of the freezing extending itself made him run again.

    And all the time the dog ran with him, at his heels. When he fell down a second time, it

    curled its tail over its forefeet and sat in front of him, facing him, curiously eager and intent. The

    warmth and security of the animal angered him, and he cursed it till it flattened down its ears

    appeasingly. This time the shivering came more quickly upon the man. He was losing in his

    battle with the frost. It was creeping into his body from all sides. The thought of it drove him

    on, but he ran no more than a hundred feet, when he staggered and pitched headlong. It was

    his last panic. When he had recovered his breath and control, he sat up and entertained in his

    mind the conception of meeting death with dignity. However, the conception did not come to

    him in such terms. His idea of it was that he had been making a fool of himself, running

    around like a chicken with its head cut off—such was the simile that occurred to him. Well,

    he was bound to freeze anyway, and he might as well take it decently. With this newfound

    peace of mind came the first glimmerings of drowsiness. A good idea, he thought, to sleep

    off to death. It was like taking an anesthetic. Freezing was not so bad as people thought. There

    were lots worse ways to die.

    He pictured the boys finding his body next day. Suddenly he found himself with them, coming

    along the trail and looking for himself. And, still with them, he came around a turn in the trail

    and found himself lying in the snow. He did not belong with himself any more, for even then he

    was out of himself, standing with the boys and looking at himself in the snow. It certainly was

    cold, was his thought. When he got back to the States he could tell the folks what real cold was.

    He drifted on from this to a vision of the old-timer on Sulphur Creek, He could see him quite

    clearly, warm and comfortable, and smoking a pipe.

    “You were right, old hoss; you were right,” the man mumbled to the old-timer of Sulphur Creek.

    Then the man drowsed off into what seemed to him the most comfortable and satisfying

    sleep he had ever known. The dog sat facing him and waiting. The brief day drew to a close in a

    long, slow twilight. There were no signs of a fire to be made, and, besides, never in the dog’s

    experience had it known a man to sit like that in the snow and make no fire. As the twilight

    drew on, its eager yearning for the fire mastered it, and with a great lifting and shifting of

    forefeet, it whined softly, then flattened its ears down in anticipation of being chidden by the

    man. But the man remained silent. Later the dog whined loudly. And still later it crept close to

    the man and caught the scent of death. This made the animal bristle and back away. A little

    longer it delayed, howling under the stars that leaped and danced and shone brightly in the

    cold sky. Then it turned and trotted up the trail in the direction of the camp it knew, where were

    the other food providers and fire providers.




    - pp. 134-135 (“The Heathen”): Out of all my experience I could not have believed it possible for

    the wind to blow as it did. There is no describing it. How can one describe a nightmare? It was

    the same way with that wind. It tore the clothes off our bodies. I say tore them off, and I

    mean it. I am not asking you to believe it. I am merely telling something that I saw and felt.

    There are times when I do not believe it myself. I went through it, and that is enough. One

    could not face that wind and live. It was a monstrous thing, and the most monstrous thing

    about it was that it increased and continued to increase.

    Imagine countless millions and billions of tons of sand. Imagine this sand tearing along at

    ninety, a hundred, a hundred and twenty, or any other number of miles per hour. Imagine,

    further, this sand to be invisible, impalpable, yet to retain all the weight and density of sand. Do

    all this, and you may get a vague inkling of what that wind was like.

    Perhaps sand is not the right comparison. Consider it mud, invisible, impalpable, but heavy as

    mud. Nay, it goes beyond that. Consider every molecule of air to be a mudbank in itself. Then

    try to imagine the multitudinous impact of mudbanks. No; it is beyond me. Language may be

    adequate to express the ordinary conditions of life, but it cannot possibly express any of the

    conditions of so enormous a blast of wind. It would have been better had I stuck by my original

    intention of not attempting a description.

    I will say this much: the sea, which had risen at first, was beaten down by that wind. More, it

    seemed as if the whole ocean had been sucked up in the maw of the hurricane, and hurled on

    through that portion of space which previously had been occupied by the air.



    - pp. 136-142: The situation really would have been favorable had we not been in the path of the

    storm. True, the wind itself tore our canvas out of the gaskets, jerked out our topmasts, and made

    a raffle of our running gear, but still we would have come through nicely had we not been square

    in front of the advancing storm center. That was what fixed us. I was in a state of stunned,

    numbed, paralyzed collapse from enduring the impact of the wind, and I think I was just about

    ready to give up and die when the center smote us. The blow we received was an absolute lull.

    There was not a breath of air. The effect on one was sickening. Remember that for hours we had

    been at terrific muscular tension, withstanding the awful pressure of that wind. And then,

    suddenly, the pressure was removed. I know that I felt as though I was about to expand, to fly

    apart in all directions. It seemed as if every atom composing my body was repelling every other

    atom and was on the verge of rushing off irresistibly into space. But that lasted only for a

    moment. Destruction was upon us.



    In the absence of wind and pressure the sea rose. It jumped, it leaped, it soared straight

    toward the clouds. Remember, from every point of the compass that inconceivable wind was

    blowing in toward the center of calm. The result was that the seas sprang up from every point of

    the compass. There was no wind to check them. They popped up like corks released from the

    bottom of a pail of water. There was no system to them, no stability. They were hollow, maniacal

    seas. They were eighty feet high at the least. They were not seas at all. They resembled no sea a

    man had ever seen.


    They were splashes, monstrous splashes—that is all. Splashes that were eighty feet high. Eighty!

    They were more than eighty. They went over our mastheads. They were spouts, explosions. They

    were drunken. They fell anywhere, anyhow. They jostled one another; they collided. They

    rushed together and collapsed upon one another, or fell apart like a thousand waterfalls all at

    once. It was no ocean any man had ever dreamed of, that hurricane center. It was confusion

    thrice confounded. It was anarchy. It was a hell pit of sea water gone mad.


    The Petite Jeanne? I don’t know. The heathen told me afterwards that he did not know.

    She was literally torn apart, ripped wide open, beaten into a pulp, smashed into kindling wood,

    annihilated. When I came to I was in the water, swimming automatically, though I was about two

    thirds drowned. How I got there I had no recollection. I remembered seeing the Petite

    Jeanne
    fly to pieces at what must have been the instant that my own consciousness was

    buffeted out of me. But there I was, with nothing to do but make the best of it, and in that best

    there was little promise. The wind was blowing again, the sea was much smaller and more

    regular, and I knew that I had passed through the center. Fortunately there were no sharks

    about. The hurricane had dissipated the ravenous horde that had surrounded the death ship

    and fed off the dead.

    It was about midday when the Petite Jeanne went to pieces, and it must have been two

    hours afterward when I picked up with one of her hatch covers. Thick rain was driving at the

    time and it was the merest chance that flung me and the hatch cover together. A short length of

    line was trailing from the rope handle; and I knew that I was good for a day, at least, if the

    sharks did not return. Three hours later, possibly a little longer, sticking close to the cover, and

    with closed eyes concentrating my whole soul upon the task of breathing in enough air to keep

    me going and at the same time of avoiding breathing in enough water to drown me, it seemed to

    me that I heard voices. The rain had ceased, and wind and sea were easing marvelously. Not

    twenty feet away from me, on another hatch cover, were Captain Oudouse and the heathen. They

    were fighting over the possession of the cover—at least, the Frenchman was.

    Paien noir” I heard him scream, and at the same time I saw him kick the Kanaka.

    Now Captain Oudouse had lost all his clothes except his shoes, and they were heavy

    brogans. It was a cruel blow, for it caught the heathen on the mouth and the point of the chin,

    half stunning him. I looked for him to retaliate, but he contented himself with swimming about

    forlornly a safe ten feet away. Whenever a fling of the sea threw him closer, the Frenchman,

    hanging on with his hands, kicked out at him with both feet. Also, at the moment of delivering

    each kick, he called the Kanaka a black heathen.

    “For two centimes I’d come over there and drown you, you white beast!” I yelled.

    The only reason I did not go was that I felt too tired. The very thought of the effort to swim over

    was nauseating. So I called to the Kanaka to come to me, and proceeded to share the hatch cover

    with him. Otoo, he told me his name was (pronounced o-to-o); also he told me that he was a

    native of Borabora, the most westerly of the Society group. As I learned afterward, he had got

    the hatch cover first, and, after some time, encountering Captain Oudouse, had offered to share it

    with him, and had been kicked off for his pains.


    And that was how Otoo and I first came together. He was no fighter. He was all sweetness and

    gentleness, a love creature, though he stood nearly six feet tall and was muscled like a gladiator.

    He was no fighter, but he was also no coward. He had the heart of a lion; and in the years that

    followed I have seen him run risks that I would never dream of taking. What I mean is that while

    he was no fighter, and while he always avoided precipitating a row, he never ran away from

    trouble when it started. And it was “ ’Ware shoal!” when once Otoo went into action. I shall

    never forget what he did to Bill King. It occurred in German Samoa. Bill King was hailed the

    champion heavyweight of the American Navy. He was a big brute of a man, a veritable

    gorilla, one of those hard-hitting, roughhousing chaps, and clever with his fists as well. He

    picked the quarrel, and he kicked Otoo twice and struck him once before Otoo felt it to be

    necessary to fight. I don’t think it lasted four minutes, at the end of which time Bill King was

    the unhappy possessor of four broken ribs, a broken forearm, and a dislocated shoulder blade.

    Otoo knew nothing of scientific boxing. He was merely a manhandler; and Bill King was

    something like three months in recovering from the bit of manhandling he received that

    afternoon on Apia beach.

    But I am running ahead of my yarn. We shared the hatch cover between us. We took turn and

    turn about, one lying flat on the cover and resting, while the other, submerged to the neck,

    merely held on with his hands. For two days and nights, spell and spell, on the cover and in

    the water, we drifted over the ocean. Toward the last I was delirious most of the time, and

    there were times, too, when I heard Otoo babbling and raving in his native tongue. Our

    continuous immersion prevented us from dying of thirst, though the sea water and the

    sunshine gave us the prettiest imaginable combination of salt pickle and sunburn.

    In the end Otoo saved my life; for I came to lying on the beach twenty feet from the

    water, sheltered from the sun by a couple of coconut leaves. No one but Otoo could have

    dragged me there and stuck up the leaves for shade. He was lying beside me. I went off

    again; and the next time I came round it was cool and starry night, and Otoo was pressing a

    drinking coconut to my lips.


    We were the sole survivors of the Petite Jeanne. Captain Oudouse must have succumbed to

    exhaustion, for several days later his hatch cover drifted ashore without him. Otoo and I lived

    with the natives of the atoll for a week, when we were rescued by the French cruiser and taken to

    Tahiti. In the meantime, however, we had performed the ceremony of exchanging names. In the

    South Seas such a ceremony binds two men closer together than blood brothership. The initiative

    had been mine; and Otoo was rapturously delighted when I suggested it.


    “It is well,” he said in Tahitian. “For we have been mates together for two days on the lips of

    Death.”

    “But Death stuttered.” I smiled.

    “It was a brave deed you did, master,” he replied, “and Death was not vile enough to

    speak.”


    “Why do you ‘master’ me?” I demanded with a show of hurt feelings. “We have

    exchanged names. To you I am Otoo. To me you are Charley. And between you and me, forever

    and forever, you shall be Charley, and I shall be Otoo. It is the way of the custom. And when we

    die, if it does happen that we live again somewhere beyond the stars and the sky, still shall you

    be Charley to me, and I Otoo to you.”


    “Yes, master,” he answered, his eyes luminous and soft with joy.

    “There you go!” I cried indignantly.


    “What does it matter what my lips utter?” he argued. “They are only my lips. But I shall think

    Otoo always. Whenever I think of myself, I shall think of you. Whenever men call me by name, I

    shall think of you. And beyond the sky and beyond the stars, always forever, you shall be Otoo

    to me. Is it well, master?”


    I hid my smile and answered that it was well.



    - pp. 142-151: I never had a brother; but from what I have seen of other men’s brothers, I doubt

    if any man ever had a brother that was to him what Otoo was to me. He was brother and father

    and mother as well. And this I know: I lived a straighter and better man because of Otoo. I

    cared little for other men, but I had to live straight in Otoo’s eyes. Because of him I dared not

    tarnish myself. He made me his idea, compounding me, I fear, chiefly out of his own love and

    worship; and there were times when I stood close to the steep pitch of hell, and would have

    taken the plunge had not the thought of Otoo restrained me. His pride in me entered into me

    until he became one of the major rules in my personal code to do nothing that would diminish

    that pride of his.

    Naturally I did not learn right away what his feelings were toward me. He never criticized, never

    censured; and slowly the exalted place I held in his eyes dawned upon me, and slowly I grew to

    comprehend the hurt I could inflict upon him by anything less than my best.


    For seventeen years we were together; for seventeen years he was at my shoulder, watching

    while I slept, nursing me through fever and wounds—aye, and receiving wounds in fighting for

    me. He signed on the same ships with me; and together we ranged the Pacific from Hawaii to

    Sydney Head, and from Torres Straits to the Galapagos. We blackbirded from the New Hebrides

    and the Line Islands over to the westward clear through the Louisiades, New Britain, New

    Ireland, and New Hanover. We were wrecked three times—in the Gilberts, in the Santa Cruz

    group, and in the Fijis. And he traded and salved wherever a dollar promised in the way of pearl

    and pearl shell, copra, beche-de-mer, hawkbill turtle shell, and stranded wrecks.

    It began in Papeete, immediately after his announcement that he was going with me over all the

    sea, and the islands in the midst thereof. There was a club in those days in Papeete, where the

    pearlers, traders, captains, and riffraff of South Sea adventurers forgathered. The play ran high,

    and the drink ran high; and I am very much afraid that I kept later hours than were becoming or

    proper. No matter what the hour was when I left the club, there was Otoo waiting to see me

    safely home.

    At first I smiled; next I chided him. Then I told him flatly that I stood in need of no wet-nursing.

    After that I did not see him when I came out of the club. Quite by accident, a week or so later, I

    discovered that he still saw me home, lurking across the street among the shadows of the mango

    trees. What could I do? I know what I did do.


    Insensibly I began to keep better hours. On wet and stormy nights, in the thick of the folly and

    the fun, the thought would persist in coming to me of Otoo keeping his dreary vigil under the

    dripping mangoes. Truly, he made a better man of me. Yet he was not strait-laced. And he knew

    nothing of common Christian morality. All the people on Borabora were Christians; but he was a

    heathen, the only unbeliever on the island, a gross materialist, who believed that when he died he

    was dead. He believed merely in fair play and square dealing. Petty meanness, in his code, was

    almost as serious as wanton homicide, and I do believe that he respected a murderer more than a

    man given to small practices.

    Concerning me, personally, he objected to my doing anything that was hurtful to me. Gambling

    was all right. He was an ardent gambler himself. But late hours, he explained, were bad for one’s

    health. He had seen men who did not take care of themselves die of fever. He was no teetotaler,

    and welcomed a stiff nip any time when it was wet work in the boats. On the other hand, he

    believed in liquor in moderation. He had seen many men killed or disgraced by squareface or

    scotch.

    Otoo had my welfare always at heart. He thought ahead for me, weighed my plans, and took a

    greater interest in them than I did myself. At first, when I was unaware of this interest of his in

    my affairs, he had to divine my intentions, as, for instance, at Papeete, when I contemplated

    going partners with a knavish fellow countryman on a guana venture. I did not know he was a

    knave. Nor did any white man in Papeete. Neither did Otoo know, but he saw how thick we were

    getting, and found out for me, and without asking him. Native sailors from the ends of the seas

    knock about on the beach in Tahiti; and Otoo, suspicious merely, went among them till he had

    gathered sufficient data to justify his suspicions. Oh, it was a nice history, that of Randolph

    Waters. I couldn’t believe it when Otoo first narrated it; but when I sheeted it home to Waters he

    gave in without a murmur and got away on the first steamer to Auckland.

    At first, I am free to confess, I couldn’t help resenting Otoo’s poking his nose into my business.

    But I knew that he was wholly unselfish; and soon I had to acknowledge his wisdom and

    discretion. He had his eyes open always to my main chance, and he was both keen-sighted and

    farsighted. In time he became my counselor, until he knew more of my business than I did

    myself. He really had my interest at heart more than I did. Mine was the magnificent

    carelessness of youth, for I preferred romance to dollars, and adventure to a comfortable

    billet with all night in. So it was well that I had someone to look out for me. I know that if it

    had not been for Otoo I should not be here today.

    Of numerous instances, let me give one. I had had some experience in blackbirding before I went

    pearling in the Paumotus. Otoo and I were on the beach in Samoa—we really were on the beach

    and hard aground—when my chance came to go as a recruiter on a blackbird brig. Otoo signed

    on before the mast; and for the next half-dozen years, in as many ships, we knocked about the

    wildest portions of Melanesia. Otoo saw to it that he always pulled stroke oar in my boat. Our

    custom in recruiting labor was to land the recruiter on the beach. The covering boat always lay

    on its oars several hundred feet offshore while the recruiter’s boat, also lying on its oars, kept

    afloat on the edge of the beach. When I landed with my trade goods, leaving my steering sweep

    apeak, Otoo left his stroke position and came into the stern sheets, where a Winchester lay ready

    to hand under a flap of canvas. The boat’s crew was also armed, the Sniders concealed under

    canvas flaps that ran the length of the gunwales. While I was busy arguing and persuading the

    woolly-headed cannibals to come and labor on the Queensland plantations, Otoo kept watch.

    And often and often his low voice warned me of suspicious actions and impending treachery.

    Sometimes it was the quick shot from his rifle that was the first warning I received. And in my

    rush to the boat his hand was always there to jerk me flying aboard. Once, I remember, on

    Santa Anna, the boat grounded just as the trouble began. The boat was dashing to our

    assistance, but the several savages would have wiped us out before it arrived. Otoo took a

    flying leap ashore, dug both hands into the trade goods, and scattered tobacco, beads,

    tomahawks, knives, and calicoes in all directions.

    This was too much for the woolly-heads. While they scrambled for the treasures, the boat was

    shoved clear, and we were aboard and forty feet away. And I got thirty recruits off that very

    beach in the next four hours.

    The particular instance I have in mind was on Malaita, the most savage island in the easterly

    Solomons. The natives had been remarkably friendly; and how were we to know that the whole

    village had been taking up a collection for over two years with which to buy a white man’s

    head? The beggars are all head-hunters, and they especially esteem a white man’s head. The

    fellow who captured the head would receive the whole collection. As I say, they appeared

    very friendly; and on this day I was fully a hundred yards down the beach from the boat.

    Otoo had cautioned me and, as usual when I did not heed him, I came to grief.

    The first I knew, a cloud of spears sailed out of the mangrove swamp at me. At least a dozen

    were sticking into me. I started to run, but tripped over one that was fast in my calf, and went

    down. The woolly-heads made a run for me, each with a long-handled fantail tomahawk with

    which to hack off my head. They were so eager for the prize that they got in one another’s way.

    In the confusion I avoided several hacks by throwing myself right and left on the sand.

    Then Otoo arrived—Otoo the manhandler. In some way he had got hold of a heavy war

    club, and at close quarters it was a far more efficient weapon than a rifle. He was right in the

    thick of them, so that they could not spear him, while their tomahawks seemed worse than

    useless. He was fighting for me, and he was in a true berserker rage. The way he handled that

    club was amazing. Their skulls squashed like overripe oranges. It was not until he had driven

    them back, picked me up in his arms, and started to run that he received his first wounds. He

    arrived in the boat with four spear thrusts, got his Winchester, and with it got a man for every

    shot. Then we pulled aboard the schooner and doctored up.

    Seventeen years we were together. He made me. I should today be a supercargo, a recruiter, or a

    memory, if it had not been for him.

    “You spend your money, and you go out and get more,” he said one day. “It is easy to get money

    now. But when you get old, your money will be spent, and you will not be able to go out and get

    more. I know, master. I have studied the way of white men. On the beaches are many old men

    who were young once, and who could get money just like you. Now they are old, and they have

    nothing, and they wait about for the young men like you to come ashore and buy drinks for them.

    “The black boy is a slave on the plantations. He gets twenty dollars a year. He works

    hard. The overseer does not work hard. He rides a horse and watches the black boy work. He

    gets twelve hundred dollars a year. I am a sailor on the schooner. I get fifteen dollars a month.

    That is because I am a good sailor. I work hard. The captain has a double awning and drinks

    beer out of long bottles. I have never seen him haul a rope or pull an oar. He gets one hundred

    and fifty dollars a month. I am a sailor. He is a navigator. Master, I think it would be very good

    for you to know navigation.”

    Otoo spurred me on to it. He sailed with me as second mate on my first schooner, and he

    was far prouder of my command than I was myself. Later on it was:

    “The captain is well paid, master; but the ship is in his keeping, and he is never free from the

    burden. It is the owner who is better paid—and the owner who sits ashore with many servants

    and turns his money over.”

    “True, but a schooner costs five thousand dollars—an old schooner at that,” I objected. “I

    should be an old man before I saved five thousand dollars.”

    “There be short ways for white men to make money,” he went on, pointing ashore at the

    coconut-fringed beach.

    We were in the Solomons at the time, picking up a cargo of ivory nuts along the east coast of

    Guadalcanal.

    “Between this river mouth and the next it is two miles,” he said. “The flat land runs far back. It is

    worth nothing now. Next year—who knows?—or the year after, men will pay much money for

    that land. The anchorage is good. Big steamers can lie close up. You can buy the land four miles

    deep from the old chief for ten thousand sticks of tobacco, ten bottles of squareface, and a

    Snider, which will cost you, maybe, one hundred dollars. Then you place the deed with the

    commissioner; and the next year, or the year after, you sell and become the owner of a ship.”


    I followed his lead, and his words came true, though in three years instead of two. Next

    came the grasslands deal on Guadalcanal—twenty thousand acres, on a governmental nine

    hundred and ninety-nine years’ lease at a nominal sum. I owned the lease for precisely ninety

    days, when I sold it to a company for half a fortune. Always it was Otoo who looked ahead and

    saw the opportunity. He was responsible for the salving of the Doncaster—bought in an

    auction for a hundred pounds, and clearing three thousand after every expense was paid. He led

    me into the Savaii plantation and the cocoa venture on Upolu.



    - pp. 151-157: “My people in Borabora do not like heathen—they are all Christians; and I do not

    like Borabora Christians,” he said one day, when I, with the idea of getting him to spend some of

    the money that was rightfully his, had been trying to persuade him to make a visit to his own

    island in one of our schooners—a special voyage which I had hoped to make a record breaker in

    the matter of prodigal expense.

    I say one of our schooners, though legally at the time they belonged to me. I struggled long with

    him to enter into partnership.

    “We have been partners from the day the Petite Jeanne went down,” he said at last. “But if

    your heart so wishes, then shall we become partners by the law. I have no work to do, yet are my

    expenses large. I drink and eat and smoke in plenty—it costs much, I know. I do not pay for the

    playing of billiards, for I play on your table; but still the money goes. Fishing on the reef is only

    a rich man’s pleasure. It is shocking, the cost of hooks and cotton line. Yes; it is necessary that

    we be partners by law. I need the money. I shall get it from the head clerk in the office.”

    So the papers were made out and recorded. A year later I was compelled to complain.

    “Charley,” said I, “you are a wicked old fraud, a miserly skinflint, a miserable land crab.

    Behold, your share for the year in all our partnership has been thousands of dollars. The head

    clerk has given me this paper. It says that in the year you have drawn just eighty-seven dollars

    and twenty cents.”

    “Is there any owing me?” he asked anxiously.

    “I tell you thousands and thousands,” I answered.

    His face brightened, as with an immense relief.

    “It is well,” he said. “See that the head clerk keeps good account of it. When I want it, I shall

    want it, and there must not be a cent missing.”

    “If there is,” he added fiercely, after a pause, “it must come out of the clerk’s wages.”

    And all the time, as I afterward learned, his will, drawn up by Carruthers, and making me

    sole beneficiary, lay in the American consul’s safe.

    But the end came, as the end must come to all human associations. It occurred in the Solomons,

    where our wildest work had been done in the wild young days, and where we were once more—

    principally on a holiday, incidentally to look after our holdings on Florida Island and to look

    over the pearling possibilities of the Mboli Pass. We were lying at Savu, having run in to trade

    for curios.

    Now Savu is alive with sharks. The custom of the woolly-heads of burying their dead in the sea

    did not tend to discourage the sharks from making the adjacent waters a hangout. It was my luck

    to be coming aboard in a tiny, overloaded, native canoe when the thing capsized. There were

    four woolly-heads and myself in it, or, rather hanging to it. The schooner was a hundred yards

    away. I was just hailing for a boat when one of the woolly-heads began to scream. Holding on to

    the end of the canoe, both he and that portion of the canoe were dragged under several times.

    Then he loosed his clutch and disappeared. A shark had got him.

    The three remaining woolly-heads tried to climb out of the water upon the bottom of the canoe. I

    yelled and cursed and struck at the nearest with my fist, but it was no use. They were in a blind

    funk. The canoe could barely have supported one of them. Under the three it upended and rolled

    sidewise, throwing them back into the water.

    I abandoned the canoe and started to swim toward the schooner, expecting to be picked up by the

    boat before I got there. One of the woolly-heads elected to come with me, and we swam along

    silently, side by side, now and again putting our faces into the water and peering about for

    sharks. The screams of the man who stayed by the canoe informed us that he was taken. I was

    peering into the water when I saw a big shark pass directly beneath me. He was fully

    sixteen feet in length. I saw the whole thing. He got the woolly-head by the middle, and away he

    went, the poor devil, head, shoulders, and arms out of water all the time, screeching in a

    heart-rending way. He was carried along in this fashion for several hundred feet, when he was

    dragged beneath the surface.

    I swam doggedly on, hoping that that was the last unattached shark. But there was another.

    Whether it was one that had attacked the natives earlier, or whether it was one that had made a

    good meal elsewhere, I do not know. At any rate, he was not in such haste as the others. I could

    not swim so rapidly now, for a large part of my effort was devoted to keeping track of him. I was

    watching him when he made his first attack. By good luck I got both hands on his nose, and

    though his momentum nearly shoved me under, I managed to keep him off. He veered clear and

    began circling about again. A second time I escaped him by the same maneuver. The third rush

    was a miss on both sides. He sheered at the moment my hands should have landed on his nose,

    but his sandpaper hide (I had on a sleeveless undershirt) scraped the skin off one arm from elbow

    to shoulder.

    By this time I was played out, and gave up hope. The schooner was still two hundred feet away.

    My face was in the water, and I was watching him maneuver for another attempt, when I saw a

    brown body pass between us. It was Otoo.

    “Swim for the schooner, master!” he said. And he spoke gaily, as though the affair was a mere

    lark. “I know sharks. The shark is my brother.”

    I obeyed, swimming slowly on, while Otoo swam about me, keeping always between me and the

    shark, foiling his rushes and encouraging me.

    “The davit tackle carried away, and they are rigging the falls,” he explained a minute or so later,

    and then went under to head off another attack.

    By the time the schooner was thirty feet away I was about done for. I could scarcely move. They

    were heaving lines at us from on board, but they continually fell short. The shark, finding that it

    was receiving no hurt, had become bolder. Several times it nearly got me, but each time Otoo

    was there just the moment before it was too late. Of course Otoo could have saved himself any

    time. But he stuck by me.

    “Good-by, Charley! I’m finished!” I just managed to gasp.

    I knew that the end had come, and that the next moment I should throw up my hands and go

    down.

    But Otoo laughed in my face, saying:

    “I will show you a new trick. I will make that shark feel sick!”

    He dropped in behind me, where the shark was preparing to come at me.

    “A little more to the left!” he next called out. “There is a line there on the water. To the left,

    master—to the left!”

    I changed my course and struck out blindly. I was by that time barely conscious. As my hand

    closed on the line I heard an exclamation from on board. I turned and looked. There was no

    sign of Otoo. The next instant he broke surface. Both hands were off at the wrist, the stumps

    spouting blood.

    “Otoo!” he called softly. And I could see in his gaze the love that thrilled in his voice.

    Then, and then only, at the very last of all our years, he called me by that name.

    “Good-by, Otoo!” he called.

    Then he was dragged under, and I was hauled aboard, where I fainted in the captain’s arms.


    And so passed Otoo, who saved me and made me a man, and who saved me in the end. We met

    in the maw of a hurricane and parted in the maw of a shark, with seventeen intervening years of

    comradeship, the like of which I dare to assert has never befallen two men, the one brown and

    the other white. If Jehovah be from His high place watching every sparrow fall, not least in His

    kingdom shall be Otoo, the one heathen of Borabora.





    - from Martin Eden by Jack London; pp. 33-36: He glanced around at his friend reading the

    letter and saw the books on the table. Into his eyes leaped a wistfulness and a yearning as

    promptly as the yearning leaps into the eyes of a starving man at sight of food. An impulsive

    stride, with one lurch to right and left of the shoulders, brought him to the table, where he

    began affectionately handling the books. He glanced at the titles and the authors’ names,

    read fragments of text, caressing the volumes with his eyes and hands, and, once, recognized a

    book he had read. For the rest, they were strange books and strange authors. He chanced upon a

    volume of Swinburne and began reading steadily, forgetful of where he was, his face glowing.

    Twice he closed the book on his forefinger to look at the name of the author. Swinburne! he

    would remember that name. That fellow had eyes, and he had certainly seen color and flashing

    light. But who was Swinburne? Was he dead a hundred years ago or so, like most of the poets?

    Or was he alive still, and writing? He turned to the title-page . . . yes, he had written other books;

    well, he would go to the free library the first thing in the morning and try to get hold of some of

    Swinburne’s stuff. He went back to the text and lost himself. He did not notice that a young

    woman had entered the room. The first he knew was when he heard Arthur’s voice saying:--

    “Ruth, this is Mr. Eden.”


    The book was closed on his forefinger, and before he turned he was thrilling to the first new

    impression, which was not of the girl, but of her brother’s words. Under that muscled body of

    his he was a mass of quivering sensibilities. At the slightest impact of the outside world upon

    his consciousness, his thoughts, sympathies, and emotions leapt and played like lambent flame.

    He was extraordinarily receptive and responsive, while his imagination, pitched high, was ever at

    work establishing relations of likeness and difference. “Mr. Eden,” was what he had thrilled to—

    he who had been called “Eden,” or “Martin Eden,” or just “Martin,” all his life. And

    Mister!” It was certainly going some, was his internal comment. His mind seemed to

    turn, on the instant, into a vast camera obscura, and he saw arrayed around his consciousness

    endless pictures from his life, of stokeholes and forecastles, camps and beaches, jails and

    boozing-kens, fever-hospitals and slum streets, wherein the thread of association was the fashion

    in which he had been addressed in those various situations.


    And then he turned and saw the girl. The phantasmagoria of his brain vanished at sight of her.

    She was a pale, ethereal creature, with wide, spiritual blue eyes and a wealth of golden hair. He

    did not know how she was dressed, except that the dress was as wonderful as she. He likened her

    to a pale gold flower upon a slender stem. No, she was a spirit, a divinity, a goddess; such

    sublimated beauty was not of the earth. Or perhaps the books were right, and there were many

    such as she in the upper walks of life. She might well be sung by that chap Swinburne. Perhaps

    he had had somebody like her in mind when he painted that girl, Iseult, in the book there on the

    table. All this plethora of sight, and feeling, and thought occurred on the instant. There was no

    pause of the realities wherein he moved. He saw her hand coming out to his, and she looked him

    straight in the eyes as she shook hands, frankly, like a man. The women he had known did not

    shake hands that way. For that matter, most of them did not shake hands at all. A flood of

    associations, visions of various ways he had made the acquaintance of women, rushed into his

    mind and threatened to swamp it. But he shook them aside and looked at her. Never had he

    seen such a woman. The women he had known! Immediately, beside her, on either hand, ranged

    the women he had known. For an eternal second he stood in the midst of a portrait gallery,

    wherein she occupied the central place, while about her were limned many women, all to be

    weighted and measured by a fleeting glance, herself the unit of weight and measure.



    - pp. 39-47: “This man Swineburne,” he began, attempting to put his plan into execution and

    pronouncing the i long.

    “Who?”

    “Swineburne,” he repeated, with the same mispronunciation. “The poet.”

    “Swinburne,” she corrected.

    “Yes, that’s the chap,” he stammered, his cheeks hot again. “How long since he died?”

    “Why, I haven’t heard that he was dead.” She looked at him curiously. “Where did you make his

    acquaintance?”

    “I never clapped eyes on him,” was the reply. “But I read some of his poetry out of that book

    there on the table just before you come in. How do you like his poetry?”

    And thereat she began to talk quickly and easily upon the subject he had suggested. He felt

    better, and settled back slightly from the edge of the chair, holding tightly to its arms with his

    hands, as if it might get away from him and buck him to the floor. He had succeeded in making

    her talk her talk, and while she rattled on, he strove to follow her, marveling at all the

    knowledge that was stowed away in that pretty head of hers, and drinking in the pale beauty of

    her face. Follow her he did, though bothered by unfamiliar words that fell glibly from her lips

    and by critical phrases and thought-processes that were foreign to his mind, but that nevertheless

    stimulated his mind and set it tingling. Here was intellectual life, he thought, and here was

    beauty, warm and wonderful as he had never dreamed it could be. He forgot himself and

    stared at her with hungry eyes. Here was something to live for, to win to, to fight for—ay,

    and die for. The books were true. There were such women in the world. She was one of them.

    She lent wings to his imagination, and great, luminous canvases spread themselves before him,

    whereon loomed vague, gigantic figures of love and romance, and of heroic deeds for woman’s

    sake—for a pale woman, a flower of gold. And through the swaying, palpitant vision, as

    through a fairy mirage, he stared at the real woman, sitting there and talking of literature and art.

    He listened as well, but he stared, unconscious of the fixity of his gaze or of the fact that all that

    was essentially masculine in his nature was shining in his eyes. But she, who knew little of the

    world of men, being a woman, was keenly aware of his burning eyes. She had never had men

    look at her in such fashion, and it embarrassed her. She stumbled and halted in her utterance. The

    thread of argument slipped from her. He frightened her, and at the same time it was strangely

    pleasant to be so looked upon. Her training warned her of peril and of wrong, subtle, mysterious,

    luring; while her instincts rang clarion-voiced through her being, impelling her to hurdle caste

    and place and gain to this traveler from another world, to this uncouth young fellow with

    lacerated hands and a line of raw red caused by the unaccustomed linen at his throat, who, all too

    evidently, was soiled and tainted by ungracious existence. She was clean, and her cleanness

    revolted; but she was woman, and she was just beginning to learn the paradox of woman.


    “As I was saying—what was I saying?” She broke off abruptly and laughed merrily at

    her predicament.

    “You was saying that this man Swinburne failed bein’ a great poet because—an’ that was as far

    as you got, miss,” he prompted, while to himself he seemed suddenly hungry, and delicious little

    thrills crawled up and down his spine at the sound of her laughter. Like silver, he thought to

    himself, like tinkling silver bells; and on the instant, and for an instant, he was transported to a

    far land, where under pink cherry blossoms, he smoked a cigarette and listened to the bells of the

    peaked pagoda calling straw-sandaled devotees to worship.


    “Yes, thank you,” she said. “Swinburne fails, when all is said, because he is, well, indelicate.

    There are many of his poems that should never be read. Every line of the really great poets is

    filled with beautiful truth, and calls to all that is high and noble in the human. Not a line of the

    great poets can be spared without impoverishing the world by that much.”

    “I thought it was great,” he said hesitatingly, “the little I read. I had no idea he was such a—a

    scoundrel. I guess that crops out in his other books.”

    “There are many lines that could be spared from the book you were reading,” she said, her voice

    primly firm and dogmatic.

    “I must’a’ missed ‘em,” he announced. “What I read was the real goods. It was all lighted up an’

    shining, an’ it shun right into me an’ lighted me up inside, like the sun or a searchlight. That’s

    the way it landed on me, but I guess I ain’t up much on poetry, miss.”

    He broke off lamely. He was confused, painfully conscious of his inarticulateness. He had felt

    the bigness and glow of life in what he had read, but his speech was inadequate. He could not

    express what he felt, and to himself he likened himself to a sailor, in a strange ship, on a dark

    night, groping about in the unfamiliar running rigging. Well, he decided, it was up to him to get

    acquainted in this new world. He had never seen anything that he couldn’t get the hang of when

    he wanted to and it was about time for him to want to learn to talk the things that were inside of

    him so that she could understand. She was bulking large on his horizon.

    “Now Longfellow—“ she was saying.

    “Yes, I’ve read ‘m,” he broke in impulsively, spurred on to exhibit and make the most of his

    little store of book knowledge, desirous of showing her that he was not wholly a stupid clod.

    “ ‘The Psalm of Life,’ ‘Excelsior,’ an’. . . . I guess that’s all.”

    She nodded her head and smiled, and he felt, somehow, that her smile was tolerant, pitifully

    tolerant. He was a fool to attempt to make a pretense that way. That Longfellow chap most

    likely had written countless books of poetry.

    “Excuse me, miss, for buttin’ in that way, I guess the real facts is that I don’t know nothin’

    much about such things. It ain’t in my class. But I’m goin’ to make it in my class.”

    It sounded like a threat. His voice was determined, his eyes were flashing, the lines of his

    face had grown harsh. And to her it seemed that the angle of his jaw had changed; its pitch had

    become unpleasantly aggressive. At the same time a wave of intense virility seemed to surge out

    from him and impinge upon her.

    “I think you could make it in—in your class,” she finished with a laugh. “You are very strong.”

    Her gaze rested for a moment on the muscular neck, heavy corded, almost bull-like, bronzed by

    the sun, spilling over with rugged health and strength. And though he sat there, blushing and

    humble, again she felt drawn to him. She was surprised by a wanton thought that rushed into

    her mind. It seemed to her that if she could lay her two hands upon that neck that all its strength

    and vigor would flow out to her. She was shocked by this thought. It seemed to reveal to her an

    undreamed depravity in her nature. Besides, strength to her was a gross and brutish thing. Her

    ideal of masculine beauty had always been slender gracefulness. Yet the thought still persisted. It

    bewildered her that she should desire to place her hands on that sunburned neck. In truth, she

    was far from robust, and the need of her body and mind was for strength. But she did not know

    it. She knew only that no man had ever affected her before as this one had, who shocked her

    from moment to moment with his awful grammar.

    “Yes, I ain’t no invalid,” he said. “When it comes down to hard-pan, I can digest scrap-iron. But

    just now I’ve got dyspepsia. Most of what you was sayin’ I can’t digest. Never trained that way,

    you see. I like books and poetry, and what time I’ve had I’ve read ‘em, but I’ve never thought

    about ‘em the way you have. That’s why I can’t talk about ‘em. I’m like a navigator adrift on a

    strange sea without chart or compass. Now I want to get my bearin’s. Mebbe you can put me

    right. How did you learn all this you’ve ben talkin’?”

    “By going to school, I fancy, and by studying,” she answered.

    “I went to school when I was a kid,” he began to object.

    “Yes; but I mean high school, and lectures, and the university.”

    “You’ve gone to the university?” he demanded in frank amazement. He felt that she had become

    remoter from him by at least a million miles.

    “I’m going there now. I’m taking special courses in English.”

    He did not know what “English” meant, but he made a mental note of that item of ignorance and

    passed on.

    “How long would I have to study before I could go to the university?” he asked.

    She beamed encouragement upon his desire for knowledge, and said: “That depends upon how

    much studying you have already done. You have never attended high school? Of course not. But

    did you finish grammar school?”

    “I had two years to run, when I left,” he answered. “But I was always honorably promoted at

    school.”

    The next moment, angry with himself for the boast, he had gripped the arms of the chair so

    savagely that every finger-end was stinging. At the same moment he became aware that a

    woman was entering the room. He saw the girl leave her chair and trip swiftly across the

    floor to the newcomer. They kissed each other, and, with arms around each other’s waists,

    they advanced toward him. That must be her mother, he thought. She was a tall, blonde

    woman, slender, and stately, and beautiful. Her gown was what he might expect in such a

    house. His eyes delighted in the graceful lines of it. She and her dress together reminded him of

    women on the stage. Then he remembered seeing similar grand ladies and gowns entering the

    London theatres while he stood and watched and the policemen shoved him back into the

    drizzle beyond the awning. Next his mind leaped to the Grand Hotel at Yokohama, where, too,

    from the sidewalk, he had seen grand ladies. Then the city and the harbor of Yokohama, in a

    thousand pictures, began flashing before his eyes. But he swiftly dismissed the kaleidoscope of

    memory, oppressed by the urgent need of the present. He knew that he must stand up to be

    introduced, and he struggled painfully to his feet, where he stood with trousers bagging at the

    knees, his arms loose-hanging and ludicrous, his face set hard for the impending ordeal.


    Chapter Two

    The process of getting into the dining room was a nightmare to him. Between halts and stumbles,

    jerks and lurches, locomotion had at times seemed impossible. But at last he had made it, and

    was seated alongside of Her. The array of knives and forks frightened him. They bristled with

    unknown perils, and he gazed at them, fascinated, till their dazzle became a background across

    which moved a succession of forecastle pictures, wherein he and his mates sat eating salt beef

    with sheath-knives and fingers, or scooping thick pea-soup out of pannikins by means of battered

    iron spoons. The stench of bad beef was in his nostrils, while in his ears, to the accompaniment

    of creaking timbers and groaning bulkheads, echoed the loud mouth-noises of the eaters. He

    watched them eating, and decided that they ate like pigs. Well, he would be careful here. He

    would make no noise. He would keep his mind upon it all the time.

    He glanced around the table. Opposite him was Arthur, and Arthur’s brother, Norman. They

    were her brothers, he reminded himself, and his heart warmed toward them. How they loved

    each other, the members of this family! There flashed into his mind the picture of her mother, of

    the kiss of greeting, and of the pair of them walking toward him with arms entwined. Not in his

    world were such display of affection between parents and children made. It was a revelation of

    the heights of existence that were attained in the world above. It was the finest thing yet that he

    had seen in this small glimpse of that world. He was moved deeply by appreciation of it, and his

    heart was melting with sympathetic tenderness. He had starved for love all his life. His nature

    craved love. It was an organic demand of his being. Yet he had gone without, and hardened

    himself in the process. He had not known that he needed love. Nor did he know it now. He

    merely saw it in operation, and thrilled to it, and thought it fine, and high, and splendid.


    He was glad that Mr. Morse was not there. It was difficult enough getting acquainted

    with her, and her mother, and her brother, Norman. Arthur he already knew somewhat. The

    father would have been too much for him, he felt sure. It seemed to him that he had never

    worked so hard in his life. The severest toil was child’s play compared with this. Tiny

    nodules of moisture stood out on his forehead, and his shirt was wet with sweat from the

    exertion of doing so many unaccustomed things at once. He had to eat as he had never eaten

    before, to handle strange tools, to glance surreptitiously about and learn how to accomplish

    each new thing, to receive the flood of impressions that was pouring in upon him and being

    mentally annotated and classified; to be conscious of a yearning for her that perturbed him in

    the form of a dull, aching restlessness; to feel the prod of desire to win to the walk in life

    whereon she trod, and to have his mind ever and again straying off in speculation and vague

    plans of how to reach to her. Also, when his secret glance went across to Norman opposite him,

    or to any one else, to ascertain just what knife or fork was to be used in any particular occasion,

    that person’s features were seized upon by his mind, which automatically strove to appraise them

    and to divine what they were—all in relation to her. Then he had to talk, to hear what was said to

    him and what was said back and forth, and to answer, when it was necessary, with a tongue

    prone to looseness of speech that required a constant curb. And to add confusion to confusion,

    there was the servant, an unceasing menace, that appeared noiselessly at his shoulder, a dire

    Sphinx that propounded puzzles and conundrums demanding instantaneous solution. He was

    oppressed throughout the meal by the thought of fingerbowls. Irrelevantly, insistently, scores of

    times, he wondered when they would come on and what they looked like. He had heard of such

    things, and now, sooner or later, somewhere in the next few minutes, he would see them, sit at

    table with exalted beings who used them—ay, and he would use them himself. And most

    important of all, far down and yet always at the surface of his thought, was the problem of how

    he should comport himself toward these persons. What should his attitude be? He wrestled

    continually and anxiously with the problem. There were cowardly suggestions that he should

    make believe, assume a part; and there were still more cowardly suggestions that warned him he

    would fail in such course, that his nature was not fitted to live up to it, and that he would make a

    fool of himself.


    http://www.artofmanliness.com/2013/0...5-on-the-road/







    JackLondonCredo500.jpg
    Last edited by HERO; 02-10-2014 at 03:48 AM.

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