An Autobiography of Jack London Read Free Page B

for me. I shook my head.
    â€œYou can see it from all over the harbor,” he informed me. “You don’t need shore-leave to see that temple.”
    I never loathed a temple so in my life. But I fixed that particular temple at Rangoon.
    â€œYou can’t see it from the harbor,” I contradicted. “You can’t see it from the town. You can’t see it from the top of the stairway. Because—” I paused for the effect. “Because there isn’t any temple there.”
    â€œBut I saw it with my own eyes!” he cried. “That was in—?” I queried. “Seventy-one.”
    â€œIt was destroyed in the great earthquake of 1887,” I explained. “It was very old.”
    There was a pause. He was busy reconstructing in his old eyes the youthful vision of that fair temple by the sea.
    â€œThe stairway is still there,” I aided him. “You can see it from all over the harbor. And you remember that little island on the right-hand side coming into the harbor?” I guess there must have been one there (I was prepared to shift it over to the left-hand side), for he nodded. “Gone,” I said. “Seven fathoms of water there now.”
    I had gained a moment for breath. While he pondered on time’s changes, I prepared the finishing touches of my story.
    â€œYou remember the custom-house at Bombay?”
    He remembered it.
    â€œBurned to the ground,” I announced. “Do you remember Jim Wan?” he came back at me. “Dead,” I said; but who the devil Jim Wan was I hadn’t the slightest idea.
    I was on thin ice again.
    â€œDo you remember Billy Harper, at Shanghai?” I queried back at him quickly.
    That aged sailorman worked hard to recollect, but the Billy Harper of my imagination was beyond his faded memory.
    â€œOf course you remember Billy Harper,” I insisted. “Everybody knows him. He’s been there forty years. Well, he’s still there, that’s all.”
    And then the miracle happened. The sailorman remembered Billy Harper. Perhaps there was a Billy Harper, and perhaps he had been in Shanghai for forty years and was still there; but it was news to me.
    For fully half an hour longer, the sailorman and I talked on in similar fashion. In the end he told the policemen that I was what I represented myself to be, and after a night’s lodging and a breakfast I was released to wander on westward to my married sister in San Francisco.
    But to return to the woman in Reno who opened her door to me in the deepening twilight. At the first glimpse of her kindly face I took my cue. I became a sweet, innocent, unfortunate lad. I couldn’t speak. I opened my mouth and closed it again. Never in my life before had I asked any one for food. My embarrassment was painful, extreme. I was ashamed. I, who looked upon begging as a delightful whimsicality, thumbed myself over into a true son of Mrs. Grundy, burdened with all her bourgeois morality. Only the harsh pangs of the belly-need could compel me to do so degraded and ignoble a thing as beg for food. And into my face I strove to throw all the wan wistfulness of famished and ingenuous youth unused to mendicancy.
    â€œYou are hungry, my poor boy,” she said.
    I had made her speak first.
    I nodded my head and gulped.
    â€œIt is the first time I have ever . . . asked,” I faltered.
    â€œCome right in.” The door swung open. “We have already fin-ished eating, but the fire is burning and I can get something up for you.”
    She looked at me closely when she got me into the light.
    â€œI wish my boy were as healthy and strong as you,” she said. “But he is not strong. He sometimes falls down. He just fell down this afternoon and hurt himself badly, the poor dear.”
    She mothered him with her voice, with an ineffable tenderness in it that I yearned to appropriate. I glanced at him. He sat across the table, slender and pale, his