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THE VALLEY OF THE MOON
“Somewhere up there in some valley you’ll fi nd 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 fi nd 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
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JACK LONDON
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 fl ushes
on fi ve-card draws.
“So they gobbled and gambled from the Atlantic to the Pacifi c, until they’d swined a whole continent. When they’d fi nished 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
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THE VALLEY OF THE MOON
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 fl ea, 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 with a good head like yours can win jobs anywhere. But
think of the handicaps on the fellows who lose. How many
tramps have you met along the road who could get a job driving four horses for the Carmel Livery Stable? And some of
them were as husky as you when they were young. And on top
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JACK LONDON
of it all you’ve got no shout coming. It’s a mighty big comedown from gambling for a continent to gambling for a job.”
“Just the same – ” Billy recommenced.
“Oh, you’ve got it in your blood,” Hall cut him off cavalierly. “And why not? Everybody in this country has been gambling for generations. It was in the air when you were born.
You’ve breathed it all your life. You, who ‘ve never had a white
chip in the game, still go on shouting for it and capping for it.”
“But what are all of us losers to do?” Saxon inquired.
“Call in the police and stop the game,” Hall recommended.
“It’s crooked.”
Saxon frowned.
“Do what your forefathers didn’t do,” he amplifi ed. “Go
ahead and perfect democracy.”
She remembered a remark of Mercedes. “A friend of mine
says that democracy is an enchantment.”
“It is – in a gambling joint. There are a million boys in our
public schools right now swallowing the gump of canal boy
to President, and millions of worthy citizens who sleep sound
every night in the belief that they have a say in running the
country.”
“You talk like my brother Tom,” Saxon said, failing to comprehend. “If we all get into politics and work hard for something better maybe we’ll get it after a thousand years or so. But
I want it now.” She clenched her hands passionately. “I can’t
wait; I want it now.”
“But that is just what I’ve been telling you, my dear girl.
That’s what’s the trouble with all the losers. They can’t wait.
They want it now – a stack of chips and a fl ing at the game.
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THE VALLEY OF THE MOON
Well, they won’t get it now. That’s what’s the matter with you,
chasing a valley in the moon. That’s what’s the matter with
Billy, aching right now for a chance to win ten cents from me
at Pedro cussing wind-chewing under his breath.”
“Gee! you’d make a good soap-boxer,” commented Billy.
“And I’d be a soap-boxer if I didn’t have the spending of
my father’s ill-gotten gains. It’s none of my affair. Let them rot.
They’d be just as bad if they were on top. It’s all a mess – blind
bats, hungry swine, and fi lthy buzzards – ”
Here Mrs. Hall interfered.
“Now, Mark, you stop that, or you’ll be getting the blues.”
He tossed his mop of hair and laughed with an effort.
“No I won’t,” he denied. “I’m going to get ten cents from
Billy at a game of Pedro. He won’t have a look in.”
Saxon and Billy fl ourished in the genial human atmosphere
of Carmel. They appreciated in their own estimation. Saxon felt
that she was something more than a laundry girl and the wife of
a union teamster. She was no longer pent in the narrow working class environment of a Pine street neighborhood. Life had
grown opulent. They fared better physically, materially, and
spiritually; and all this was refl ected in their features, in the
carriage of their bodies. She knew Billy had never been handsomer nor in more splendid bodily condition. He swore he had
a harem, and that she was his second wife – twice as beautiful
as the fi rst one he had married. And she demurely confessed
to him that Mrs. Hall and several others of the matrons had
enthusiastically admired her form one day when in for a cold
dip in Carmel river. They had got around her, and called her
Venus, and made her crouch and assume different poses.
495
JACK LONDON
Billy understood the Venus reference; for a marble one,
with broken arms, stood in Hall’s living room, and the poet
had told him the world worshiped it as the perfection of female form.
“I always said you had Annette Kellerman beat a mile,”
Billy said; and so proud was his air of possession that Saxon blushed and trembled, and hid her hot face against his
breast.
The men in the crowd were open in their admiration of
Saxon, in an above-board manner. But she made no mistake.
She did not lose her head. There was no chance of that, for her
love for Billy beat more strongly than ever. Nor was she guilty
of over-appraisal. She knew him for what he was, and loved
him with open eyes. He had no book learning, no art, like the
other men. His grammar was bad; she knew that, just as she
knew that he would never mend it. Yet she would not have
exchanged him for any of the others, not even for Mark Hall
with the princely heart whom she loved much in the same way
that she loved his wife.
For that matter, she found in Billy a certain health and
rightness, a certain essential integrity, which she prized more
highly than all book learning and bank accounts. It was by
virtue of this health, and rightness, and integrity, that he had
beaten Hall in argument the night the poet was on the pessimistic rampage. Billy had beaten him, not with the weapons
of learning, but just by being himself and by speaking out the
truth that was in him. Best of all, he had not even known that
he had beaten, and had taken the applause as good-natured
banter. But Saxon knew, though she could scarcely tell why;
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THE VALLEY OF THE MOON
and she would always remember how the wife of Shelley had
whispered to her afterward with shining eyes: “Oh, Saxon, you
must be so happy.”
Were Saxon driven to speech to attempt to express what
Billy meant to her, she would have done it with the simple
word “man.” Always he was that to her. Always in glowing
splendor, that was his connotation – MAN. Sometimes, by
herself, she would all but weep with joy at recollection of his
way of informing some truculent male that he was standing on
his foot. “Get off your foot. You’re standin’ on it.” It was Billy!
It was magnifi cently Billy. And it was this Billy who loved her.
She knew it. She knew it by the pulse that only a woman knows
how to gauge. He loved her less wildly, it was true; but more
fondly, more maturely. It was the love that lasted – if only they
did not go back to the city where the beautiful things of the
spirit perished and the beast bared its fangs.
In the early spring, Mark Hall and his wife went to New
York, the two Japanese servants of the bungalow were dismissed, and Saxon and Billy were installed as caretakers. Jim
Hazard, too, departed on his yearly visit to Paris; and though
Billy missed him, he continued his long swims out through the
breakers. Hall’s two saddle horses had been left in his charge,
and Saxon made herself a pretty cross-saddle riding costume
of tawny-brown corduroy that matched the glints in her hair.
Billy no longer worked at odd jobs. As extra driver at the stable
he earned more than they spent, and, in preference to cash,
he taught Saxon to ride, and was out and away with her over
the country on all-day trips. A favorite ride was around by the
coast to Monterey, where he taught her to swim in the big Del
497
JACK LONDON
Monte tank. They would come home in the evening across the
hills. Also, she took to following him on his early morning
hunts, and life seemed one long vacation.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” he said to Saxon, one day, as they
drew their horses to a halt and gazed down into Carmel Valley. “I ain’t never going to work steady for another man for
wages as long as I live.”
“Work isn’t everything,” she acknowledged.
“I should guess not. Why, look here, Saxon, what’d it mean
if I worked teamin’ in Oakland for a million dollars a day for
a million years and just had to go on stayin’ there an’ livin’ the
way we used to? It’d mean work all day, three squares, an’ movin’ pictures for recreation. Movin’ pictures! Huh! We’re livin’
movin’ pictures these days. I’d sooner have one year like what
we’re havin’ here in Carmel and then die, than a thousan’ million years like on Pine street.”
Saxon had warned the Halls by letter that she and Billy
intended starting on their search for the valley in the moon
as soon as the fi rst of summer arrived. Fortunately, the poet
was put to no inconvenience, for Bideaux, the Iron Man with
the basilisk eyes, had abandoned his dreams of priesthood and
decided to become an actor. He arrived at Carmel from the
Catholic college in time to take charge of the bungalow.
Much to Saxon’s gratifi cation, the crowd was loth to see
them depart. The owner of the Carmel stable offered to put
Billy in charge at ninety dollars a month. Also, he received
a similar offer from the stable in Pacifi c Grove.
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THE VALLEY OF THE MOON
“Whither away,” the wild Irish playwright hailed them on
the station platform at Monterey. He was just returning from
New York.
“To a valley in the moon,” Saxon answered gaily.
He regarded their business-like packs.
“By George!” he cried. “I’ll do it! By George! Let me come
along.” Then his face fell. “And I’ve signed the contract,” he
groaned. “Three acts! Say, you’re lucky. And this time of year,
too.”
CHAPTER XI
“We hiked into Monterey last winter, but we’re ridin’ out
now, b ‘gosh!” Billy said as the train pulled out and they leaned
back in their seats.
They had decided against retracing their steps over the
ground already traveled, and took the train to San Francisco.
They had been warned by Mark Hall of the enervation of the
south, and were bound north for their blanket climate. Their
intention was to cross the Bay to Sausalito and wander up
through the coast counties. Here, Hall had told them, they
would fi nd the true home of the redwood. But Billy, in the
smoking car for a cigarette, seated himself beside a man who
was destined to de fl ect them from their course. He was a keenfaced, dark-eyed man, undoubtedly a Jew; and Billy, remembering Saxon’s admonition always to ask questions, watched
his opportunity and started a conversation. It took but a little while to learn that Gunston was a commission merchant,
and to realize that the content of his talk was too valuable for
Saxon to lose. Promptly, when he saw that the other’s cigar
was fi nished, Billy invited him into the next car to meet Saxon.
Billy would have been incapable of such an act prior to his sojourn in Carmel. That much at least he had acquired of social
facility.
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