



Produced by Les Bowler





WHEN GOD LAUGHS, AND OTHER STORIES

By Jack London


1911 Mills and Boon edition


Contents:

     When God Laughs
     The Apostate
     A Wicked Woman
     Just Meat
     Created He Them
     The Chinago
     Make Westing
     Semper Idem
     A Nose For The King
     The "Francis Spaight"
     A Curious Fragment
     A Piece Of Steak




WHEN GOD LAUGHS (with compliments to Harry Cowell)

     "The gods, the gods are stronger; time
      Falls down before them, all men's knees
      Bow, all men's prayers and sorrows climb
      Like incense toward them; yea, for these
          Are gods, Felise."

Carquinez had relaxed finally. He stole a glance at the rattling
windows, looked upward at the beamed roof, and listened for a moment
to the savage roar of the south-easter as it caught the bungalow in
its bellowing jaws. Then he held his glass between him and the fire and
laughed for joy through the golden wine.

"It is beautiful," he said. "It is sweetly sweet. It is a woman's wine,
and it was made for gray-robed saints to drink."

"We grow it on our own warm hills," I said, with pardonable California
pride. "You rode up yesterday through the vines from which it was made."

It was worth while to get Carquinez to loosen up. Nor was he ever really
himself until he felt the mellow warmth of the vine singing in his
blood. He was an artist, it is true, always an artist; but somehow,
sober, the high pitch and lilt went out of his thought-processes and he
was prone to be as deadly dull as a British Sunday--not dull as other
men are dull, but dull when measured by the sprightly wight that Monte
Carquinez was when he was really himself.

From all this it must not be inferred that Carquinez, who is my dear
friend and dearer comrade, was a sot. Far from it. He rarely erred. As
I have said, he was an artist. He knew when he had enough, and enough,
with him, was equilibrium--the equilibrium that is yours and mine when
we are sober.

His was a wise and instinctive temperateness that savoured of the Greek.
Yet he was far from Greek. "I am Aztec, I am Inca, I am Spaniard," I
have heard him say. And in truth he looked it, a compound of strange
and ancient races, what with his swarthy skin and the asymmetry and
primitiveness of his features. His eyes, under massively arched brows,
were wide apart and black with the blackness that is barbaric, while
before them was perpetually falling down a great black mop of hair
through which he gazed like a roguish satyr from a thicket. He
invariably wore a soft flannel shirt under his velvet-corduroy jacket,
and his necktie was red. This latter stood for the red flag (he had once
lived with the socialists of Paris), and it symbolized the blood and
brotherhood of man. Also, he had never been known to wear anything on
his head save a leather-banded sombrero. It was even rumoured that
he had been born with this particular piece of headgear. And in my
experience it was provocative of nothing short of sheer delight to see
that Mexican sombrero hailing a cab in Piccadilly or storm-tossed in the
crush for the New York Elevated.

As I have said, Carquinez was made quick by wine--"as the clay was made
quick when God breathed the breath of life into it," was his way of
saying it. I confess that he was blasphemously intimate with God; and I
must add that there was no blasphemy in him. He was at all times honest,
and, because he was compounded of paradoxes, greatly misunderstood by
those who did not know him. He could be as elementally raw at times as a
screaming savage; and at other times as delicate as a maid, as subtle as
a Spaniard. And--well, was he not Aztec? Inca? Spaniard?

And now I must ask pardon for the space I have given him. (He is my
friend, and I love him.) The house was shaking to the storm, as he drew
closer to the fire and laughed at it through his wine. He looked at me,
and by the added lustre of his eye, and by the alertness of it, I knew
that at last he was pitched in his proper key.

"And so you think you've won out against the gods?" he demanded.

"Why the gods?"

"Whose will but theirs has put satiety upon man?" he cried.

"And whence the will in me to escape satiety?" I asked triumphantly.

"Again the gods," he laughed. "It is their game we play. They deal and
shuffle all the cards... and take the stakes. Think not that you have
escaped by fleeing from the mad cities. You with your vine-clad hills,
your sunsets and your sunrises, your homely fare and simple round of
living!

"I've watched you ever since I came. You have not won. You have
surrendered. You have made terms with the enemy. You have made
confession that you are tired. You have flown the white flag of fatigue.
You have nailed up a notice to the effect that life is ebbing down in
you. You have run away from life. You have played a trick, shabby trick.
You have balked at the game. You refuse to play. You have thrown your
cards under the table and run away to hide, here amongst your hills."

He tossed his straight hair back from his flashing eyes, and scarcely
interrupted to roll a long, brown, Mexican cigarette.

"But the gods know. It is an old trick. All the generations of man have
tried it... and lost. The gods know how to deal with such as you. To
pursue is to possess, and to possess is to be sated. And so you, in your
wisdom, have refused any longer to pursue. You have elected surcease.
Very well. You will become sated with surcease. You say you have escaped
satiety! You have merely bartered it for senility. And senility is
another name for satiety. It is satiety's masquerade. Bah!"

"But look at me!" I cried.

Carquinez was ever a demon for haling ones soul out and making rags and
tatters of it.

He looked me witheringly up and down.

"You see no signs," I challenged.

"Decay is insidious," he retorted. "You are rotten ripe."

I laughed and forgave him for his very deviltry. But he refused to be
forgiven.

"Do I not know?" he asked. "The gods always win. I have watched men play
for years what seemed a winning game. In the end they lost."

"Don't you ever make mistakes?" I asked.

He blew many meditative rings of smoke before replying.

"Yes, I was nearly fooled, once. Let me tell you. There was Marvin
Fiske. You remember him? And his Dantesque face and poet's soul, singing
his chant of the flesh, the very priest of Love? And there was Ethel
Baird, whom also you must remember."

"A warm saint," I said.

"That is she! Holy as Love, and sweeter! Just a woman, made for love;
and yet--how shall I say?--drenched through with holiness as your own
air here is with the perfume of flowers. Well, they married. They played
a hand with the gods--"

"And they won, they gloriously won!" I broke in.

Carquinez looked at me pityingly, and his voice was like a funeral bell.

"They lost. They supremely, colossally lost."

"But the world believes otherwise," I ventured coldly.

"The world conjectures. The world sees only the face of things. But I
know. Has it ever entered your mind to wonder why she took the veil,
buried herself in that dolorous convent of the living dead?"

"Because she loved him so, and when he died..."

Speech was frozen on my lips by Carquinez's sneer.

"A pat answer," he said, "machine-made like a piece of cotton-drill. The
world's judgment! And much the world knows about it. Like you, she fled
from life. She was beaten. She flung out the white flag of fatigue. And
no beleaguered city ever flew that flag in such bitterness and tears.

"Now I shall tell you the whole tale, and you must believe me, for I
know. They had pondered the problem of satiety. They loved Love. They
knew to the uttermost farthing the value of Love. They loved him so
well that they were fain to keep him always, warm and a-thrill in their
hearts. They welcomed his coming; they feared to have him depart.

"Love was desire, they held, a delicious pain. He was ever seeking
easement, and when he found that for which he sought, he died. Love
denied was Love alive; Love granted was Love deceased. Do you follow me?
They saw it was not the way of life to be hungry for what it has. To eat
and still be hungry--man has never accomplished that feat. The problem
of satiety. That is it. To have and to keep the sharp famine-edge of
appetite at the groaning board. This was their problem, for they loved
Love. Often did they discuss it, with all Love's sweet ardours brimming
in their eyes; his ruddy blood spraying their cheeks; his voice playing
in and out with their voices, now hiding as a tremolo in their throats,
and again shading a tone with that ineffable tenderness which he alone
can utter.

"How do I know all this? I saw--much. More I learned from her diary.
This I found in it, from Fiona Macleod: 'For, truly, that wandering
voice, that twilight-whisper, that breath so dewy-sweet, that
flame-winged lute-player whom none sees but for a moment, in a
rainbow-shimmer of joy, or a sudden lightning-flare of passion, this
exquisite mystery we call Amor, comes, to some rapt visionaries at
least, not with a song upon the lips that all may hear, or with blithe
viol of public music, but as one wrought by ecstasy, dumbly eloquent
with desire.'

"How to keep the flame-winged lute-player with his dumb eloquence of
desire? To feast him was to lose him. Their love for each other was a
great love. Their granaries were overflowing with plenitude; yet they
wanted to keep the sharp famine-edge of their love undulled.

"Nor were they lean little fledglings theorizing on the threshold of
Love. They were robust and realized souls. They had loved before,
with others, in the days before they met; and in those days they had
throttled Love with caresses, and killed him with kisses, and buried him
in the pit of satiety.

"They were not cold wraiths, this man and woman. They were warm human.
They had no Saxon soberness in their blood. The colour of it was
sunset-red. They glowed with it. Temperamentally theirs was the French
joy in the flesh. They were idealists, but their idealism was Gallic.
It was not tempered by the chill and sombre fluid that for the English
serves as blood. There was no stoicism about them. They were Americans,
descended out of the English, and yet the refraining and self-denying of
the English spirit-groping were not theirs.

"They were all this that I have said, and they were made for joy, only
they achieved a concept. A curse on concepts! They played with logic,
and this was their logic.--But first let me tell you of a talk we had
one night. It was of Gautier's Madeline de Maupin. You remember the
maid? She kissed once, and once only, and kisses she would have no
more. Not that she found kisses were not sweet, but that she feared with
repetition they would cloy. Satiety again! She tried to play without
stakes against the gods. Now this is contrary to a rule of the game the
gods themselves have made. Only the rules are not posted over the table.
Mortals must play in order to learn the rules.

"Well, to the logic. The man and the woman argued thus: Why kiss once
only? If to kiss once were wise, was it not wiser to kiss not at all?
Thus could they keep Love alive. Fasting, he would knock forever at
their hearts.

"Perhaps it was out of their heredity that they achieved this unholy
concept. The breed will out and sometimes most fantastically. Thus
in them did cursed Albion array herself a scheming wanton, a bold,
cold-calculating, and artful hussy. After all, I do not know. But this
I know: it was out of their inordinate desire for joy that they forewent
joy.

"As he said (I read it long afterward in one of his letters to her):
'To hold you in my arms, close, and yet not close. To yearn for you, and
never to have you, and so always to have you.' And she: 'For you to be
always just beyond my reach. To be ever attaining you, and yet never
attaining you, and for this to last forever, always fresh and new, and
always with the first flush upon us.

"That is not the way they said it. On my lips their love-philosophy is
mangled. And who am I to delve into their soul-stuff? I am a frog, on
the dank edge of a great darkness, gazing goggle-eyed at the mystery and
wonder of their flaming souls.

"And they were right, as far as they went. Everything is good... as long
as it is unpossessed. Satiety and possession are Death's horses; they
run in span.

     "'And time could only tutor us to eke
       Our rapture's warmth with custom's afterglow.'

"They got that from a sonnet of Alfred Austin's. It was called 'Love's
Wisdom.' It was the one kiss of Madeline de Maupin. How did it run?

     "'Kiss we and part; no further can we go;
       And better death than we from high to low
   Should dwindle, or decline from strong to weak.'

"But they were wiser. They would not kiss and part. They would not
kiss at all, and thus they planned to stay at Love's topmost peak. They
married. You were in England at the time. And never was there such a
marriage. They kept their secret to themselves. I did not know, then.
Their rapture's warmth did not cool. Their love burned with increasing
brightness. Never was there anything like it. The time passed, the
months, the years, and ever the flame-winged lute-player grew more
resplendent.

"Everybody marvelled. They became the wonderful lovers, and they were
greatly envied. Sometimes women pitied her because she was childless; it
is the form the envy of such creatures takes.

"And I did not know their secret. I pondered and I marvelled. As first I
had expected, subconsciously I imagine, the passing of their love. Then
I became aware that it was Time that passed and Love that remained. Then
I became curious. What was their secret? What were the magic fetters
with which they bound Love to them? How did they hold the graceless elf?
What elixir of eternal love had they drunk together as had Tristram and
Iseult of old time? And whose hand had brewed the fairy drink?

"As I say, I was curious, and I watched them. They were love-mad. They
lived in an unending revel of Love. They made a pomp and ceremonial of
it. They saturated themselves in the art and poetry of Love. No, they
were not neurotics. They were sane and healthy, and they were artists.
But they had accomplished the impossible. They had achieved deathless
desire.

"And I? I saw much of them and their everlasting miracle of Love. I
puzzled and wondered, and then one day--"

Carquinez broke off abruptly and asked, "Have you ever read, 'Love's
Waiting Time'?"

I shook my head.

"Page wrote it--Curtis Hidden Page, I think. Well, it was that bit of
verse that gave me the clue. One day, in the window-seat near the big
piano--you remember how she could play? She used to laugh, sometimes,
and doubt whether it was for them I came, or for the music. She called
me a'music-sot' once, a'sound-debauchee.' What a voice he had! When
he sang I believed in immortality, my regard for the gods grew almost
patronizing and I devised ways and means whereby I surely could outwit
them and their tricks.

"It was a spectacle for God, that man and woman, years married, and
singing love-songs with a freshness virginal as new-born Love himself,
with a ripeness and wealth of ardour that young lovers can never know.
Young lovers were pale and anaemic beside that long-married pair. To
see them, all fire and flame and tenderness, at a trembling distance,
lavishing caresses of eye and voice with every action, through every
silence--their love driving them toward each other, and they withholding
like fluttering moths, each to the other a candle-flame, and revolving
each about the other in the mad gyrations of an amazing orbit-flight!
It seemed, in obedience to some great law of physics, more potent than
gravitation and more subtle, that they must corporeally melt each
into each there before my very eyes. Small wonder they were called the
wonderful lovers.

"I have wandered. Now to the clue. One day in the window-seat I found
a book of verse. It opened of itself, betraying long habit, to 'Love's
Waiting Time.' The page was thumbed and limp with overhandling, and
there I read:--

     "'So sweet it is to stand but just