The Valley of the Moon 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

/>   redwoods without fog. They go together. The redwoods grow only in

  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