Novels and Social Writings by Jack London

Author:Jack London [London, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Fiction, Literary Collections, Literary, Literature, American, Essays, Authors; American
ISBN: 9780940450066
Publisher: Library of America
Published: 1903-10-15T16:52:30+00:00

thanks to my earlier tutelage under John Barleycorn. I knew too

much too young. And yet, in the good time coming when alcohol is

eliminated from the needs and the institutions of men, it will be

the Y.M.C.A., and similar unthinkably better and wiser and more

virile congregating-places, that will receive the men who now go

to 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-drum

machine toil. I wanted life. I wanted to realise myself in other

ways than at a machine for ten cents an hour. And yet I had had

my fill of saloons. I wanted something new. I was growing up. I

was developing unguessed and troubling potencies and proclivities.

And at this very stage, fortunately, I met Louis Shattuck and we

became chums.

Louis Shattuck, without one vicious trait, was a real innocently

devilish young fellow, who was quite convinced that he was a

sophisticated town boy. And I wasn't a town boy at all. Louis

was handsome, and graceful, and filled with love for the girls.

John Barleycorn

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61

With him it was an exciting and all-absorbing pursuit. I didn't

know anything about girls. I had been too busy being a man. This

was an entirely new phase of existence which had escaped me. And

when I saw Louis say good-bye to me, raise his hat to a girl of

his acquaintance, and walk on with her side by side down the

sidewalk, I was made excited and envious. I, too, wanted to play

this 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 the

expense of a slight going aside. Louis did not know girls in

their home life. He had the entree to no girl's home. And of

course, I, a stranger in this new world, was similarly

circumstanced. But, further, Louis and I were unable to go to

dancing-schools, or to public dances, which were very good places

for getting acquainted. We didn't have the money. He was a

blacksmith'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 that

varied between seventy cents and a dollar for the week. We

whacked this up, shared it, and sometimes loaned all of what was

left 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--twenty

cents, bang, just like that; and ice-cream for two--thirty cents;

or tamales in a tamale-parlour, which came cheaper and which for

two cost only twenty cents.

I did not mind this money meagreness. The disdain I had learned

for money from the oyster pirates had never left me. I didn't

care over-weeningly for it for personal gratification; and in my

philosophy I completed the circle, finding myself as equable with

the lack of a ten-cent

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