[adapted]

by
Jack London

It was in the old Alta-Inyo Club—a warm night for San Francisco—and through the open windows, quiet and far, came the noise of the streets. The talk had moved on from the Graft Prosecution and the new signs that the town was to be run without strict rules, down through all the ugly dirtiness and rottenness of hate and meanness in people, until the name of O’Brien was mentioned—O’Brien, the promising young boxer who had been killed in the boxing ring the night before. At once the air had seemed to freshen. O’Brien had been a clean-living young man with good values. He neither drank, smoked, nor swore, and he had the body of a beautiful young god. He had even carried his prayer book to the ringside. They found it in his coat pocket in the changing room... afterward.

Here was Youth, clean and healthy, untouched—the thing of greatness and wonder for men to dream about... after it has been lost to them and they have become middle-aged. And we dreamed so well that Romance came and for an hour led us far from the man-city and its angry roar. Bardwell, in a way, started it by quoting from Thoreau; but it was old Trefethan, bald-headed and with loose skin under his chin, who took up the quote and for the hour to come was Romance in person. At first we wondered how many glasses of Scotch he had drunk since dinner, but very soon all that was forgotten.

“It was in 1898—I was thirty-five then,” he said. “Yes, I know you are adding it up. You’re right. I’m forty-seven now; I look ten years older; and the doctors say—damn the doctors anyway!”

He lifted the long glass to his lips and drank a little of it slowly to make his anger go away.

“But I was young... once. I was young twelve years ago, and I had hair on top of my head, and my stomach was as thin as a runner’s, and the longest day was not too long for me. I was a strong man back there in ‘98. You remember me, Milner. You knew me then. Wasn’t I pretty good?”

Milner nodded and agreed. Like Trefethan, he was another mining engineer who had made a lot of money in the Klondike.

“You sure were, old man,” Milner said. “I’ll never forget when you beat those woodcutters in the M. & M. that night that little reporter started the fight. Slavin was in the country at the time,”—this to us—“and his manager wanted to set up a match with Trefethan.”

“Well, look at me now,” Trefethan said angrily. “That’s what the Goldstead did to me—God knows how many millions, but nothing left in my soul... or in my veins. The good red blood is gone. I am a jellyfish, a huge, disgusting mass of shaking jelly, a—a...”

But he could not find words, and he took comfort from the tall glass.

“Women looked at me then; and turned their heads to look a second time. Strange that I never married. But the girl. That’s what I started to tell you about. I met her a thousand miles from anywhere, and even more. And she repeated to me those same words of Thoreau that Bardwell repeated a moment ago—the ones about the day-born gods and the night-born.”

“It was after I had made my claims on Goldstead—and didn’t know what a very rich place that that trip creek was going to be—that I made that trip east over the Rockies, going across to the Great Up North where the Rockies are something more than a backbone. They are a border, a dividing line, a wall that cannot be broken or climbed. There is no travel across them, though, sometimes, from the early days, wandering trappers have crossed them, though more were lost on the way than ever came through. And that was exactly why I took the job. It was a trip across any man would be proud to make. I am prouder of it right now than anything else I have ever done.

“It is an unknown land. Large areas of it have never been visited. There are big valleys there where the white man has never been, and Indian tribes as simple as people ten thousand years ago... almost, for they have had some contact with the whites. Groups of them come out sometimes to trade, and that is all. Even the Hudson Bay Company failed to find them and farm them.

“And now the girl. I was coming up a stream—you’d call it a river in California—not on any map—and unnamed. It was a great valley, now closed in by high canyon walls, and again opening out into beautiful stretches, wide and long, with grass shoulder-high in the low places, meadows dotted with flowers, and with clumps of spruce trees—untouched and magnificent. The dogs were carrying packs on their backs, and had sore feet and were worn out; while I was looking for any bunch of Indians to get sleds and drivers from and go on with the first snow. It was late fall, but the way those flowers kept on surprised me. I was supposed to be in the far north of America, and high up among the ridges of the Rockies, and yet there was that never-ending spread of flowers. Some day the white settlers will be in there and growing wheat down all that valley.

“And then I saw smoke, and heard the barking of the dogs—Indian dogs—and came into camp. There must have been five hundred of them, real Indians too, and I could see by the drying frames for meat that the autumn hunting had been good. And then I met her—Lucy. That was her name. Sign language—that was the only way we could talk, till they led me to a big fly—you know, half a tent, open on one side where a campfire burned. It was all of moose skins, this fly—moose skins, smoked and rubbed by hand, and golden brown. Under it everything was very neat and tidy, more than any Indian camp ever was. The bed was made on fresh spruce branches. There were many furs, and on top of all was a robe of swan skins—white swan skins—I have never seen anything like that robe. And on top of it, sitting cross-legged, was Lucy. She was brown like a nut. I have called her a girl. But she was not. She was a woman, a nut-brown woman, a very strong woman, a strong and full-figured woman, and fully grown. And her eyes were blue.

“That’s what amazed me—her eyes—blue, not China blue, but deep blue, like the sea and sky all mixed into one, and very wise. More than that, they had laughter in them—warm laughter, sun-warm and human, very human, and... shall I say womanly? They were. They were a woman’s eyes, a real woman’s eyes. You know what that means. Can I say more? Also, in those blue eyes were, at the same time, a wild nervousness, a sad wanting, and a rest, a perfect rest, a kind of calm that knew everything.”

Trefethan stopped suddenly.

“You guys think I am drunk. I’m not. This is only my fifth since dinner. I am completely sober. I am serious. I sit here now side by side with my dear youth. It is not me—‘old’ Trefethan—talking; it is my youth, and it is my youth that says those were the most wonderful eyes I have ever seen—so very calm, so very nervous; so very wise, so very curious; so very old, so very young; so satisfied and yet wanting so sadly. Boys, I can’t describe them. When I have told you about her, you may understand better for yourselves.”

“She did not stand up. But she held out her hand.”

“‘Stranger,’ she said, ‘I’m very glad to see you.’

“I leave it to you—that sharp, far Western way of speaking. Imagine how I felt. It was a woman, a white woman, but that way of speaking! It was amazing that it was a white woman, here, beyond the last edge of the world—but that way of speaking. I tell you, it hurt. It was like the sting of a wrong note. And yet, let me tell you, that woman was a poet. You will see.”

“She sent the Indians away. And, really, they went. They did what she said and followed her without asking why. She was a very strong chief. She told the men to make a camp for me and to take care of my dogs. And they did, too. And they were smart enough not to take even a moccasin-lace from my things. She was a real She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, and I want to tell you it made me cold to the bone, sent those little shivers racing up and down my spine, meeting a white woman out there as the leader of a tribe of savages a thousand miles beyond No Man’s Land.

“‘Stranger,” she said, ‘I think you are really the first white person to ever step into this valley. Sit down and talk a while, and then we will have something to eat. Which way are you coming?’

“There it was, that sharp smell again. But from now to the end of the story I want you to forget it. I tell you I forgot it, sitting there on the edge of that swan-skin robe and listening and looking at the most wonderful woman that ever came out of the pages of Thoreau or of any other man’s book.

“I stayed on there a week. It was because she invited me. She promised to give me dogs and sleds, and Indians who would take me across the best pass of the Rockies for five hundred miles. Her tent was set up apart from the others, on the high bank by the river, and a couple of Indian girls did her cooking for her and the camp work. And so we talked and talked, while the first snow fell and kept falling and made a surface for my sleds. And this was her story.

“She was born on the frontier, of poor settlers, and you know what that means—work, work, always work, plenty of work and without end.

“‘I never saw the beauty of the world,’ she said. ‘I had no time. I knew it was right out there, anywhere, all around the cabin, but there was always the bread to make, the scrubbing and the washing and the work that was never done. I used to be very sick at times, just to get out into it all, especially in the spring when the songs of the birds drove me almost crazy. I wanted to run out through the long field grass, wetting my legs with the dew, and to climb the rail fence, and keep on through the woods and up and up over the ridge to get a look around. Oh, I had all kinds of strong wishes—to follow the canyon bottoms and splash around from pool to pool, making friends with the water lizards and the spotted trout; to look in secret and watch the squirrels and rabbits and small furry things and see what they were doing and learn the secrets of how they live. It seemed to me, if I had time, I could crawl among the flowers, and, if I was good and quiet, catch them whispering to each other, telling all kinds of smart things that just humans never know.’”

Trefethan stopped to make sure his glass was filled again.

“Another time she said: ‘I wanted to run nights like a wild thing, just to run through the moonlight and under the stars, to run white and naked in the darkness that I knew must feel like cool velvet, and to run and run and keep on running. One evening, very tired—it had been a very hard hot day, and the bread wouldn’t rise and the churning had gone wrong, and I was all annoyed and shaky—well, that evening I told dad about this wish to run of mine. He looked at me curious and a bit scared. And then he gave me two pills to take. Said to go to bed and get a good sleep and I’d be all right in the morning. So I never mentioned my wants to him, or any one any more.’

“The mountain home fell apart—ran out of food, I think—and the family came to Seattle to live. There she worked in a factory—long hours, you know, and all the rest, very hard work. And after a year of that she became a waitress in a cheap restaurant—hash-slinger, she called it. She said to me once, ‘Romance I guess was what I wanted. But there wasn’t no romance floating around in dishpans and washtubs, or in factories and cheap restaurants.’

“When she was eighteen she married—a man who was going up to Juneau to start a restaurant. He had a few dollars saved, and seemed to have money. She didn’t love him—she was very clear about that, but she was all tired out, and she wanted to get away from the never-ending hard work. Besides, Juneau was in Alaska, and her deep wish turned into wanting to see that wonderland. But she saw little of it. He started the restaurant, a little cheap one, and she quickly learned what he had married her for... to save paying workers. She almost ran the place and did all the work from waiting to dishwashing. She cooked most of the time as well. And she had four years of it.

“Can’t you picture her, this wild woods creature, quick with every old simple instinct, wanting the open air, and shut up in a nasty little cheap restaurant and working and struggling for four long years?

“‘There was no meaning in anything,’ she said. ‘What was it all about! Why was I born! Was that all the meaning of life—just to work and work and be always tired!—to go to bed tired and to wake up tired, with every day like every other day except when it was harder?’ She had heard talk of life that never ends from the preachers, she said, but she could not think that what she was doing was a good way to get ready for living forever.

“But she still had her dreams, though not so often. She had read a few books—what, it is hard to guess, Seaside Library novels most likely; yet they had been food for her imagination. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘when I was that dizzy from the heat of the cooking that if I didn’t take a breath of fresh air I’d faint, I’d stick my head out of the kitchen window, and close my eyes and see most wonderful things. All of a sudden I’d be traveling down a country road, and everything clean and quiet, no dust, no dirt; just streams rippling down sweet meadows, and lambs playing, breezes blowing the smell of flowers, and soft sunshine over everything; and lovely cows lazing knee-deep in quiet pools, and young girls bathing in a curve of stream all white and slim and natural—and I’d know I was in Arcady. I’d read about that country once, in a book. And maybe knights, all flashing in the sun, would come riding around a bend in the road, or a lady on a milk-white horse, and in the distance I could see the towers of a castle rising, or I just knew, on the next turn, that I’d find some palace, all white and light and fairy-like, with fountains playing, and flowers all over everything, and peacocks on the lawn... and then I’d open my eyes, and the heat of the stove would hit me, and I’d hear Jake sayin’—he was my husband—I’d hear Jake sayin’, “Why ain’t you served them beans? Think I can wait here all day!” Romance!—I guess the nearest I ever come to it was when a drunken Armenian cook got the shakes and tried to cut my throat with a potato knife and I got my arm burned on the stove before I could knock him out with the potato masher.

“‘I wanted easy ways, and lovely things, and romance and all that; but it just seemed I had no luck at all and was only and specially born for cooking and dishwashing. There was a wild crowd in Juneau those days, but I looked at the other women, and their way of life didn’t interest me. I think I wanted to be clean. I don’t know why; I just wanted to, I guess; and I thought I might as well die dishwashing as die their way.”

Trefethan stopped in his story for a moment, finishing a thought in his mind.

“And this is the woman I met up there in the Arctic, leading a tribe of wild Indians and a few thousand square miles of hunting land. And it happened, simply enough, though, in fact, she might have lived and died among the pots and pans. But ‘The whisper came, the vision came.’ That was all she needed, and she got it.

“‘I woke up one day,’ she said. ‘Just found it by chance in a small piece of newspaper. I remember every word of it, and I can give it to you.’ And then she repeated Thoreau’s Cry of the Human:

“‘The young pines growing up, in the corn field from year to year are to me a good thing. We talk of teaching the Indian our ways, but that is not the right word for his improvement. By the careful being on his own and keeping apart in his dark forest life, he keeps his contact with his native gods and is allowed from time to time into a rare and special company with nature. He has looks of understanding from the stars, which our bars do not know. The steady light of his mind, only weak because it is far away, is like the weak but enough light of the stars compared with the very bright but not useful and soon over fire of candles. The Society Islanders had their gods born in the day, but they were not thought to be as old as the... night-born gods.’

“That’s what she did, repeated it word for word, and I forgot the sharp taste, because it was serious, a statement of religion—pagan, if you like; and clothed in the living clothing of herself.

“‘And the rest of it was torn away,’ she added, and her voice sounded very empty. ‘It was only a scrap of newspaper. But that Thoreau was a wise man. I wish I knew more about him.’ She stopped a moment, and I promise her face looked very holy as she said, ‘I could have made him a good wife.’

“And then she went on. ‘I knew right away, as soon as I read that, what was wrong with me. I was a night-born. I, who had lived all my life with the day-born, was a night-born. That was why I had never been happy with cooking and dishwashing; that was why I had wanted to run naked in the moonlight. And I knew that this dirty little Juneau diner was no place for me. And right there and then I said, “I quit.” I packed up my few old clothes, and started. Jake saw me and tried to stop me.

“What are you doing?” he says.

“‘Breaking you and me up,’ I says. ‘I’m going to the forest and where I belong.’”

“‘No you don’t,’ he says, reaching for me to stop me. ‘The cooking has made you silly. You listen to me talk before you suddenly do anything silly.’

“But I took out a gun—a small Colt .44—and says, ‘This does my talking for me.’

“And I left.”

Trefethan finished his drink and asked for another.

Boys, do you know what that girl did? She was twenty-two. She had spent her life washing dishes and she knew almost nothing about the world, as little as I know about the fourth dimension, or the fifth. Everything led to what she wanted. No; she didn’t go to the dance-halls. On the Alaskan Pan-handle it is better to travel by water. She went down to the beach. An Indian canoe was leaving for Dyea—you know the kind, carved from a single tree, narrow and deep and sixty feet long. She gave them a couple of dollars and got on board.

“‘Romance?’ she told me. ‘It was Romance from the start. There were three families altogether in that canoe, and that crowded there wasn’t room to turn around, with dogs and Indian babies lying all over everything, and everybody dipping a paddle and making that canoe go.’ And all around the great quiet mountains, and mixed clouds and sunshine. And oh, the silence! the great wonderful silence! And, once, the smoke of a hunter’s camp, far off in the distance, going through the trees. It was like a picnic, a big picnic, and I could see my dreams coming true, and I was ready for something to happen almost any time. And it did.

“‘And that first camp, on the island! And the boys catching fish with spears at the place where the creek comes out, and the big deer one of the men shot just around the point of land. And there were flowers everywhere, and back from the beach the grass was thick and green and neck-high. And some of the girls came with me, and we climbed the hill behind and picked berries and roots that tasted sour and were good to eat. And we saw a big bear in the berry bushes eating his supper, and he said “Oof!” and ran away as scared as we were. And then the camp, and the camp smoke, and the smell of fresh deer meat cooking. It was beautiful. I was with the night-born at last, and I knew that was where I belonged. And for the first time in my life, it seemed to me, I went to bed happy that night, looking out from under a corner of the canvas at the stars cut off by a big black side of the mountain, and listening to the night-noises, and knowing that the same thing would go on next day and forever and ever, for I wasn’t going back. And I never did go back.’

“‘Adventure! I got it next day. We had to cross a big part of the ocean—twelve or fifteen miles, at least; and it started to blow hard when we were in the middle. That night I was along on shore, with one wolf-dog, and I was the only one left alive.

“Imagine it yourself,” Trefethan stopped to say. “The canoe was broken and lost, and everyone was killed on the rocks except her. She reached the shore hanging on to a dog’s tail, avoiding the rocks and was washed up on a small beach, the only one for miles.

“‘Lucky for me it was the main land,’ she said. ‘So I went back at once, through the woods and over the mountains and straight on anywhere. Seemed I was looking for something and knew I’d find it. I wasn’t afraid. I was night-born, and the big forest couldn’t kill me. And on the second day I found it. I came to a small open place and an old broken cabin. Nobody had been there for years and years. The roof had fallen in. Rotten blankets lay on the beds, and pots and pans were on the stove. But that was not the strangest thing. Outside, along the edge of the trees, you can’t guess what I found. The bones of eight horses, each tied to a tree. They had starved to death, I think, and left only little piles of bones scattered here and there. And each horse had had a load on its back. There the loads lay, among the bones—painted canvas sacks, and inside moose skin sacks, and inside the moose skin sacks—what do you think?’”

She stopped, reached under a corner of the bed among the spruce branches, and pulled out a leather sack. She untied the opening and ran out into my hand as pretty a stream of gold as I have ever seen—rough gold, river gold, some large dust, but mostly lumps, and it was so new and rough that it hardly showed any marks of washing by water.

“‘You say you are a mining engineer,’ she said, ‘and you know this country. Can you name a creek with gold that has the color of that gold!’