



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