by Jack London
Hazard's house, rub each other down in training camp style, and
be ready for the noon meal. In the afternoon Hazard returned to
his desk, and Billy to his outdoor work, although, still later,
they often met for a few miles' run over the hills. Training was
a matter of habit to both men. Hazard, when he had finished with
seven years of football, knowing the dire death that awaits the
big-muscled athlete who ceases training abruptly, had been
compelled to keep it up. Not only was it a necessity, but he had
grown to like it. Billy also liked it, for he took great delight
in the silk of his body.
Often, in the early morning, gun in hand, he was off with Mark
Hall, who taught him to shoot and hunt. Hall had dragged a
shotgun around from the days when he wore knee pants, and his
keen observing eyes and knowledge of the habits of wild life were
a revelation to Billy. This part of the country was too settled
for large game, but Billy kept Saxon supplied with squirrels and
quail, cottontails and jackrabbits, snipe and wild ducks. And
they learned to eat roasted mallard and canvasback in the
California style of sixteen minutes in a hot oven. As he became
expert with shotgun and rifle, he began to regret the deer and
the mountain lion he had missed down below the Sur; and to
the requirements of the farm he and Saxon sought he added plenty
of game.
But it was not all play in Carmel. That portion of the community
which Saxon and Billy came to know, "the crowd," was
hard-working. Some worked regularly, in the morning or late at
night. Others worked spasmodically, like the wild Irish
playwright, who would shut himself up for a week at a time, then
emerge, pale and drawn, to play like a madman against the time of
his next retirement. The pale and youthful father of a family,
with the face of Shelley, who wrote vaudeville turns for a living
and blank verse tragedies and sonnet cycles for the despair of
managers and publishers, hid himself in a concrete cell with
three-foot walls, so piped, that, by turning a lever, the whole
structure spouted water upon the impending intruder. But in the
main, they respected each other's work-time. They drifted into
one another's houses as the spirit prompted, but if they found a
man at work they went their way. This obtained to all except Mark
Hall, who did not have to work for a living; and he climbed trees
to get away from popularity and compose in peace.
The crowd was unique in its democracy and solidarity. It had
little intercourse with the sober and conventional part of
Carmel. This section constituted the aristocracy of art and
letters, and was sneered at as bourgeois. In return, it looked
askance at the crowd with its rampant bohemianism. The taboo
extended to Billy and Saxon. Billy took up the attitude of the
clan and sought no work from the other camp. Nor was work offered
him.
Hall kept open house. The big living room, with its huge
fireplace, divans, shelves and tables of books and magazines, was
the center of things. Here, Billy and Saxon were expected to be,
and in truth found themselves to be, as much at home as anybody.
Here, when wordy discussions on all subjects under the sun were
not being waged, Billy played at cut-throat Pedro, horrible
fives, bridge, and pinochle. Saxon, a favorite of the young
women, sewed with them, teaching them pretties and being taught
in fair measure in return.
It was Billy, before they had been in Carmel a week, who said
shyly to Saxon:
"Say, you can't guess how I'm missin' all your nice things.
What's the matter with writin' Tom to express 'm down? When we
start trampin' again, we'll express 'm back."
Saxon wrote the letter, and all that day her heart was singing.
Her man was still her lover. And there were in his eyes all the
old lights which had been blotted out during the nightmare period
of the strike.
"Some pretty nifty skirts around here, but you've got 'em all
beat, or I'm no judge," he told her. And again: "Oh, I love you
to death anyway. But if them things ain't shipped down there'll
be a funeral."
Hall and his wife owned a pair of saddle horses which were kept
at the livery stable, and here Billy naturally gravitated. The
stable operated the stage and carried the mails between Carmel
and Monterey. Also, it rented out carriages and mountain wagons
that seated nine persons. With carriages and wagons a driver was
furnished The stable often found itself short a driver, and Billy
was quickly called upon. He became an extra man at the stable. He
received three dollars a day at such times, and drove many
parties around the Seventeen Mile Drive, up Carmel Valley, and
down the coast to the various points and beaches.
"But they're a pretty uppish sort, most of 'em," he said to
Saxon, referring to the persons he drove. "Always MISTER Roberts
this, an' MISTER Roberts that--all kinds of ceremony so as to
make me not forget they consider themselves better 'n me. You
see, I ain't exactly a servant, an' yet I ain't good enough for
them. I'm the driver--something half way between a hired man and
a chauffeur. Huh! When they eat they give me my lunch off to one
side, or afterward. No family party like with Hall an' HIS kind.
An' that crowd to-day, why, they just naturally didn't have no
lunch for me at all. After this, always, you make me up my own
lunch. I won't be be holdin' to 'em for nothin', the damned
geezers. An' you'd a-died to seen one of 'em try to give me a
tip. I didn't say nothin'. I just looked at 'm like I didn't see
'm, an' turned away casual-like after a moment, leavin' him as
embarrassed as hell."
Nevertheless, Billy enjoyed the driving, never more so than when
he held the reins, not of four plodding workhorses, but of four
fast driving animals, his foot on the powerful brake, and swung
around curves and along dizzy cliff-rims to a frightened chorus
of women passengers. And when it came to horse judgment and
treatment of sick and injured horses even the owner of the stable
yielded place to Billy.
"I could get a regular job there any time," he boasted quietly to
Saxon. "Why, the country's just sproutin' with jobs for any so-so
sort of a fellow. I bet anything, right now, if I said to the
boss that I'd take sixty dollars an' work regular, he'd jump for
me. He's hinted as much.--And, say! Are you onta the fact that
yours truly has learnt a new trade. Well he has. He could take a
job stage-drivin' anywheres. They drive six on some of the stages
up in Lake County. If we ever get there, I'll get thick with some
driver, just to get the reins of six in my hands. An' I'll have
you on the box beside me. Some goin' that! Some goin'!"
Billy took little interest in the many discussions waged in
Hall's big living room. "Wind-chewin'," was his term for it. To
him it was so much good time wasted that might be employed at a
game of
Pedro, or going swimming, or wrestling in the sand.
Saxon, on the contrary, delighted in the logomachy, though little
enough she understood of it, following mainly by feeling, and
once in a while catching a high light.
But what she could never comprehend was the pessimism that so
often cropped up. The wild Irish playwright had terrible spells
of depression. Shelley, who wrote vaudeville turns in the
concrete cell, was a chronic pessimist. St. John, a young
magazine writer, was an anarchic disciple of Nietzsche. Masson, a
painter, held to a doctrine of eternal recurrence that was
petrifying. And Hall, usually so merry, could outfoot them all
when he once got started on the cosmic pathos of religion and the
gibbering anthropomorphisms of those who loved not to die. At
such times Saxon was oppressed by these sad children of art. It
was inconceivable that they, of all people, should be so forlorn.
One night Hall turned suddenly upon Billy, who had been following
dimly and who only comprehended that to them everything in life
was rotten and wrong.
"Here, you pagan, you, you stolid and flesh-fettered ox, you
monstrosity of over-weening and perennial health and joy, what do
you think of it?" Hall demanded.
"Oh, I've had my troubles," Billy answered, speaking in his
wonted slow way. "I've had my hard times, an' fought a losin'
strike, an' soaked my watch, an' ben unable to pay my rent or
buy grub, an' slugged scabs, an' ben slugged, and ben thrown
into jail for makin' a fool of myself. If I get you, I'd be a
whole lot better to be a swell hog fattenin' for market an'
nothin' worryin', than to be a guy sick to his stomach from not
savvyin' how the world is made or from wonderin' what's the good
of anything."
"That's good, that prize hog," the poet laughed. "Least
irritation, least effort--a compromise of Nirvana and life.
Least irritation, least effort, the ideal existence: a jellyfish
floating in a tideless, tepid, twilight sea."
"But you're missin' all the good things," Billy objected.
"Name them," came the challenge.
Billy was silent a moment. To him life seemed a large and
generous thing. He felt as if his arms ached from inability to
compass it all, and he began, haltingly at first, to put his
feeling into speech.
"If you'd ever stood up in the ring an' out-gamed an' out-fought
a man as good as yourself for twenty rounds, you'd get what I'm
drivin' at. Jim Hazard an' I get it when we swim out through the
surf an' laugh in the teeth of the biggest breakers that ever
pounded the beach, an' when we come out from the shower, rubbed
down and dressed, our skin an' muscles like silk, our bodies an'
brains all a-tinglin' like silk. . . ."
He paused and gave up from sheer inability to express ideas that
were nebulous at best and that in reality were remembered
sensations.
"Silk of the body, can you beat it?" he concluded lamely, feeling
that he had failed to make his point, embarrassed by the circle
of listeners.
"We know all that," Hall retorted. "The lies of the flesh.
Afterward come rheumatism and diabetes. The wine of life is
heady, but all too quickly it turns to--"
"Uric acid," interpolated the wild Irish playwright.
"They's plenty more of the good things," Billy took up with a
sudden rush of words. "Good things all the way up from juicy
porterhouse and the kind of coffee Mrs. Hall makes to. . . ." He
hesitated at what he was about to say, then took it at a plunge.
"To a woman you can love an' that loves you. Just take a look at
Saxon there with the ukulele in her lap. There's where I got the
jellyfish in the dishwater an' the prize hog skinned to death."
A shout of applause and great hand-clapping went up from the
girls, and Billy looked painfully uncomfortable.
"But suppose the silk goes out of your body till you creak like a
rusty wheelbarrow?" Hall pursued. "Suppose, just suppose, Saxon
went away with another man. What then?"
Billy considered a space.
"Then it'd be me for the dishwater an' the jellyfish, I guess."
He straightened up in his chair and threw back his shoulders
unconsciously as he ran a hand over his biceps and swelled it.
Then he took another look at Saxon. "But thank the Lord I still
got a wallop in both my arms an' a wife to fill 'em with love."
Again the girls applauded, and Mrs. Hall cried:
"Look at Saxon! She blushing! What have you to say for yourself?"
"That no woman could be happier," she stammered, "and no queen as
proud. And that--"
She completed the thought by strumming on the ukulele and
singing:
"De Lawd move in or mischievous way
His blunders to perform."
"I give you best," Hall grinned to Billy.
"Oh, I don't know," Billy disclaimed modestly. "You've read so
much I guess you know more about everything than I do."
"Oh! Oh!" "Traitor!" "Taking it all back!" the girls cried
variously.
Billy took heart of courage, reassured them with a slow smile,
and said:
"Just the same I'd sooner be myself than have book indigestion.
An' as for Saxon, why, one kiss of her lips is worth more'n all
the libraries in the world."
CHAPTER X
"There be hills and valleys, and rich land, and streams of clear
water, good wagon roads and a railroad not too far away, plenty
of sunshine, and cold enough at night to need blankets, and not
only pines but plenty of other kinds of trees, with open spaces
to pasture Billy's horses and cattle, and deer and rabbits for
him to shoot, and lots and lots of redwood trees, and . . .
and . . . well, and no fog," Saxon concluded the description of
the farm she and Billy sought.
Mark Hall laughed delightedly.
"And nightingales roosting in all the trees," he cried; "flowers
that neither fail nor fade, bees without stings, honey dew every
morning, showers of manna betweenwhiles, fountains of youth and
quarries of philosopher's stones--why, I know the very place. Let
me show you."
She waited while he pored over road-maps of the state. Failing in
them, he got out a big atlas, and, though all the countries of
the world were in it, he could not find what he was after.
"Never mind," he said. "Come over to-night and I'll be able to
show you."
That evening he led her out on the veranda to the telescope, and
she found herself looking through it at the full moon.
"Somewhere up there in some valley you'll find that farm," he
teased.
Mrs. Hall looked inquiringly at them as they returned inside.
"I've been showing her a valley in the moon where she expects to
go farming," he laughed.
"We started out prepared to go any distance," Saxon said. "And if
it's to the moon, I expect we can make it."
"But my dear child, you can't expect to find such a paradise on
the earth," Hall continued. "For instance, you can't have
the fog belt."
Saxon debated a while.
"Well, we could put up with a little fog," she conceded, "--
almost anything to have redwoods. I don't know what a quarry of
philosopher's stones is like, but if it's anything like Mr.
Hafler's marble quarry, and there's a railroad handy, I guess we
could manage to worry along. And you don't have to go to the moon
for honey dew. They scrape it off of the leaves of the bushes up
in Nevada County. I know that for a fact, because my father told
my mother about it, and she told me."
A little later in the evening, the subject of farming having
remained uppermost, Hall swept off into a diatribe against the
"gambler's paradise," which was his epithet for the United
States.
"When you think of the glorious chance," he said. "A new country,
bounded by the oceans, situated just right in latitude, with the
richest land and vastest natural resources of any country in the
world, settled by immigrants who had thrown off all the leading
strings of the Old World and were in the humor for democracy.
There was only one thing to stop them from perfecting the
democracy they started, and that thing was greediness.
"They started gobbling everything in sight like a lot of swine,
and while they gobbled democracy went to smash. Gobbling became
gambling. It was a nation of tin horns. Whenever a man lost his
stake, all he had to do was to chase the frontier west a few
miles and get another stake. They moved over the face of the land
like so many locusts. They destroyed everything--the Indians, the
soil, the forests, just as they destroyed the buffalo and the
passenger pigeon. Their morality in business and politics was
gambler morality. Their laws were gambling laws--how to play the
game. Everybody played. Therefore, hurrah for the game. Nobody
objected, because nobody was unable to play. As I said, the
losers chased the frontier for fresh stakes. The winner of
to-day, broke to-morrow, on the day following might be riding his
luck to royal flushes on five-card draws.
"So they gobbled and gambled from the Atlantic to the Pacific,
until they'd swined a whole continent. When they'd finished with
the lands and forests and mines, they turned back, gambling for
any little stakes they'd overlooked, gambling for franchises and
monopolies, using politics to protect their crooked deals and
brace games. And democracy gone clean to smash.
"And then was the funniest time of all. The losers couldn't get
any more stakes, while the winners went on gambling among
themselves. The losers could only stand around with their hands
in their pockets and look on. When they got hungry, they went,
hat in hand, and begged the successful gamblers for a job. The
losers went to work for the winners, and they've been working for
them ever since, and democracy side-tracked up Salt Creek. You,
Billy Roberts, have never had a hand in the game in your life.
That's because your people were among the also-rans."
"How about yourself?" Billy asked. "I ain't seen you holdin' any
hands."
"I don't have to. I don't count. I am a parasite."
"What's that?"
"A flea, a woodtick, anything that gets something for nothing. I
batten on the mangy hides of the workingmen. I don't have to
gamble. I don't have to work. My father left me enough of his
winnings.--Oh, don't preen yourself, my boy. Your folks were just
as bad as mine. But yours lost, and mine won, and so you plow in
my potato patch."
"I don't see it," Billy contended stoutly. "A man with gumption
can win out to-day--"
"On government land?" Hall asked quickly.
Billy swallowed and acknowledged the stab.
"Just the same he can win out," he reiterated.
"Surely--he can win a job from some other fellow? A young husky