Chapter XVIII

by Jack London

　　My infatuation for the Oakland water-front was quite dead. Ididn't like the looks of it, nor the life. I didn't care for thedrinking, nor the vagrancy of it, and I wandered back to theOakland Free Library and read the books with greaterunderstanding. Then, too, my mother said I had sown my wild oatsand it was time I settled down to a regular job. Also, the familyneeded the money. So I got a job at the jute mills--a ten-hourday at ten cents an hour. Despite my increase in strength andgeneral efficiency, I was receiving no more than when I worked inthe cannery several years before. But, then, there was a promiseof a rise to a dollar and a quarter a day after a few months. Andhere, so far as John Barleycorn is concerned, began a period ofinnocence. I did not know what it was to take a drink from monthend to month end. Not yet eighteen years old, healthy and withlabour-hardened but unhurt muscles, like any young animal I neededdiversion, excitement, something beyond the books and themechanical toil.

　　I strayed into Young Men's Christian Associations. The life therewas healthful and athletic, but too juvenile. For me it was toolate. I was not boy, nor youth, despite my paucity of years. Ihad bucked big with men. I knew mysterious and violent things. Iwas from the other side of life so far as concerned the young menI encountered in the Y.M.C.A. I spoke another language, possesseda sadder and more terrible wisdom. (When I come to think it over,I realise now that I have never had a boyhood.) At any rate, theY.M.C.A. young men were too juvenile for me, too unsophisticated.This I would not have minded, could they have met me and helped mementally. But I had got more out of the books than they. Theirmeagre physical experiences, plus their meagre intellectualexperiences, made a negative sum so vast that it overbalancedtheir wholesome morality and healthful sports.

　　In short, I couldn't play with the pupils of a lower grade. Allthe clean splendid young life that was theirs was denied me--thanks to my earlier tutelage under John Barleycorn. I knew toomuch too young. And yet, in the good time coming when alcohol iseliminated from the needs and the institutions of men, it will bethe Y.M.C.A., and similar unthinkably better and wiser and morevirile congregating-places, that will receive the men who now goto saloons to find themselves and one another. In the meantime,we live to-day, here and now, and we discuss to-day, here and now.

　　I was working ten hours a day in the jute mills. It was hum-drummachine toil. I wanted life. I wanted to realise myself in otherways than at a machine for ten cents an hour. And yet I had hadmy fill of saloons. I wanted something new. I was growing up. Iwas developing unguessed and troubling potencies and proclivities.And at this very stage, fortunately, I met Louis Shattuck and webecame chums.

　　Louis Shattuck, without one vicious trait, was a real innocentlydevilish young fellow, who was quite convinced that he was asophisticated town boy. And I wasn't a town boy at all. Louiswas handsome, and graceful, and filled with love for the girls.With him it was an exciting and all-absorbing pursuit. I didn'tknow anything about girls. I had been too busy being a man. Thiswas an entirely new phase of existence which had escaped me. Andwhen I saw Louis say good-bye to me, raise his hat to a girl ofhis acquaintance, and walk on with her side by side down thesidewalk, I was made excited and envious. I, too, wanted to playthis game.

　　"Well, there's only one thing to do," said Louis, "and that is,you must get a girl."

　　Which is more difficult than it sounds. Let me show you, at theexpense of a slight going aside. Louis did not know girls intheir home life. He had the entree to no girl's home. And ofcourse, I, a stranger in this new world, was similarlycircumstanced. But, further, Louis and I were unable to go todancing-schools, or to public dances, which were very good placesfor getting acquainted. We didn't have the money. He was ablacksmith's apprentice, and was earning but slightly more than I.We both lived at home and paid our way. When we had done this,and bought our cigarettes, and the inevitable clothes and shoes,there remained to each of us, for personal spending, a sum thatvaried between seventy cents and a dollar for the week. Wewhacked this up, shared it, and sometimes loaned all of what wasleft of it when one of us needed it for some more gorgeous girl-adventure, such as car-fare out to Blair's Park and back--twentycents, bang, just like that; and ice-cream for two--thirty cents;or tamales in a tamale-parlour, which came cheaper and which fortwo cost only twenty cents.

　　I did not mind this money meagreness. The disdain I had learnedfor money from the oyster pirates had never left me. I didn'tcare over-weeningly for it for personal gratification; and in myphilosophy I completed the circle, finding myself as equable withthe lack of a ten-cent piece as I was with the squandering ofscores of dollars in calling all men and hangers-on up to the barto drink with me.

　　But how to get a girl? There was no girl's home to which Louiscould take me and where I might be introduced to girls. I knewnone. And Louis' several girls he wanted for himself; and anyway,in the very human nature of boys' and girls' ways, he couldn'tturn any of them over to me. He did persuade them to bring girl-friends for me; but I found them weak sisters, pale andineffectual alongside the choice specimens he had.

　　"You'll have to do like I did," he said finally. "I got these bygetting them. You'll have to get one the same way."

　　And he initiated me. It must be remembered that Louis and I werehard situated. We really had to struggle to pay our board andmaintain a decent appearance. We met each other in the evening,after the day's work, on the street corner, or in a little candystore on a side street, our sole frequenting-place. Here webought our cigarettes, and, occasionally, a nickel's worth of"red-hots." (Oh, yes; Louis and I unblushingly ate candy--all wecould get. Neither of us drank. Neither of us ever went into asaloon.)

　　But the girl. In quite primitive fashion, as Louis advised me, Iwas to select her and make myself acquainted with her. Westrolled the streets in the early evenings. The girls, like us,strolled in pairs. And strolling girls will look at strollingboys who look. (And to this day, in any town, city, or village,in which I, in my middle age, find myself, I look on with the eyetrained of old experience, and watch the sweet innocent gameplayed by the strolling boys and girls who just must stroll whenthe spring and summer evenings call.)

　　The trouble was that in this Arcadian phase of my history, I, whohad come through, case-hardened, from the other side of life, wastimid and bashful. Again and again Louis nerved me up. But Ididn't know girls. They were strange and wonderful to me after myprecocious man's life. I failed of the bold front and thenecessary forwardness when the crucial moment came.

　　Then Louis would show me how--a certain, eloquent glance of eye, asmile, a daring, a lifted hat, a spoken word, hesitancies,giggles, coy nervousnesses--and, behold, Louis acquainted andnodding me up to be introduced. But when we paired off to strollalong boy and girl together, I noted that Louis had invariablypicked the good-looker and left to me the little lame sister.

　　I improved, of course, after experiences too numerous to enterupon, so that there were divers girls to whom I could lift my hatand who would walk beside me in the early evenings. But girl'slove did not immediately come to me. I was excited, interested,and I pursued the quest. And the thought of drink never enteredmy mind. Some of Louis' and my adventures have since given meserious pause when casting sociological generalisations. But itwas all good and innocently youthful, and I learned onegeneralisation, biological rather than sociological, namely, thatthe "Colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters under theirskins."

　　And before long I learned girl's love, all the dear fonddeliciousness of it, all the glory and the wonder. I shall callher Haydee. She was between fifteen and sixteen. Her littleskirt reached her shoe-tops. We sat side by side in a SalvationArmy meeting. She was not a convert, nor was her aunt who sat onthe other side of her, and who, visiting from the country where atthat time the Salvation Army was not, had dropped in to themeeting for half an hour out of curiosity. And Louis sat besideme and observed--I do believe he did no more than observe, becauseHaydee was not his style of girl.

　　We did not speak, but in that great half-hour we glanced shyly ateach other, and shyly avoided or as shyly returned and met eachother's glances more than several times. She had a slender ovalface. Her brown eyes were beautiful. Her nose was a dream, aswas her sweet-lipped, petulant-hinting mouth. She wore a tam-o'-shanter, and I thought her brown hair the prettiest shade of brownI had ever seen. And from that single experience of half an hourI have ever since been convinced of the reality of love at firstsight.

　　All too soon the aunt and Haydee departed. (This is permissibleat any stage of a Salvation Army meeting.) I was no longerinterested in the meeting, and, after an appropriate interval of acouple of minutes or less, started to leave with Louis. As wepassed out, at the back of the hall a woman recognised me with hereyes, arose, and followed me. I shall not describe her. She wasof my own kind and friendship of the old time on the water-front.When Nelson was shot, he had died in her arms, and she knew me ashis one comrade. And she must tell me how Nelson had died, and Idid want to know; so I went with her across the width of life fromdawning boy's love for a brown-haired girl in a tam-o'-shanterback to the old sad savagery I had known.

　　And when I had heard the tale, I hurried away to find Louis,fearing that I had lost my first love with the first glimpse ofher. But Louis was dependable. Her name was--Haydee. He knewwhere she lived. Each day she passed the blacksmith's shop wherehe worked, going to or from the Lafayette School. Further, he hadseen her on occasion with Ruth, another schoolgirl, and, stillfurther, Nita, who sold us red-hots at the candy store, was afriend of Ruth. The thing to do was to go around to the candystore and see if we could get Nita to give a note to Ruth to giveto Haydee. If this could be arranged, all I had to do was writethe note.

　　And it so happened. And in stolen half-hours of meeting I came toknow all the sweet madness of boy's love and girl's love. So faras it goes it is not the biggest love in the world, but I do dareto assert that it is the sweetest. Oh, as I look back on it!Never did girl have more innocent boy-lover than I who had been sowicked-wise and violent beyond my years. I didn't know the firstthing about girls. I, who had been hailed Prince of the OysterPirates, who could go anywhere in the world as a man amongst men;who could sail boats, lay aloft in black and storm, or go into thetoughest hang-outs in sailor town and play my part in any rough-house that started or call all hands to the bar--I didn't know thefirst thing I might say or do with this slender little chit of agirl-woman whose scant skirt just reached her shoe-tops and whowas as abysmally ignorant of life as I was, or thought I was,profoundly wise.

　　I remember we sat on a bench in the starlight. There was fully afoot of space between us. We slightly faced each other, our nearelbows on the back of the bench; and once or twice our elbows justtouched. And all the time, deliriously happy, talking in thegentlest and most delicate terms that might not offend hersensitive ears, I was cudgelling my brains in an effort to divinewhat I was expected to do. What did girls expect of boys, sittingon a bench and tentatively striving to find out what love was?What did she expect me to do? Was I expected to kiss her? Did sheexpect me to try? And if she did expect me, and I didn't whatwould she think of me?

　　Ah, she was wiser than I--I know it now--the little innocent girl-woman in her shoe-top skirt. She had known boys all her life.She encouraged me in the ways a girl may. Her gloves were off andin one hand, and I remember, lightly and daringly, in mock reprooffor something I had said, how she tapped my lips with a tiny flirtof those gloves. I was like to swoon with delight. It was themost wonderful thing that had ever happened to me. And I rememberyet the faint scent that clung to those gloves and that I breathedin the moment they touched my lips.

　　Then came the agony of apprehension and doubt. Should I imprisonin my hand that little hand with the dangling, scented gloveswhich had just tapped my lips? Should I dare to kiss her there andthen, or slip my arm around her waist? Or dared I even sit closer?

　　Well, I didn't dare. I did nothing. I merely continued to sitthere and love with all my soul. And when we parted that eveningI had not kissed her. I do remember the first time I kissed her,on another evening, at parting--a mighty moment, when I took allmy heart of courage and dared. We never succeeded in managingmore than a dozen stolen meetings, and we kissed perhaps a dozentimes--as boys and girls kiss, briefly and innocently, andwonderingly. We never went anywhere--not even to a matinee. Weonce shared together five cents worth of red-hots. But I havealways fondly believed that she loved me. I know I loved her; andI dreamed day-dreams of her for a year and more, and the memory ofher is very dear.