Jack was a marvelous conversationalist, as one might expect of a famous adventure writer, and the words flowed out of him in a wild torrent. He had sailed before the mast on the last of the seal-hunters to leave San Francisco Bay, he said, and felt “absolutely exalted” when he stood at the wheel of the wildly careering schooner, guiding it through a maelstrom of waves. “When I have done such a thing,” he said expansively, “I glow all over. Every fiber of me thrills with it.”
Nellie started to say that she felt exactly the same way when she was on the stage, but he was hurrying on to tell her about how he had nearly lost his life among the icebergs of the Bering Sea, and while she was still gasping at the brutal dangers of that desolate scene, he began to describe the harrowing winters he had spent searching for gold in the Klondike, where he had learned to love the loud, clear call of wolves in the echoing wilderness. She had barely transformed him in her mind from sailor and seal-hunter to gold-seeker, when he was describing how he had hitched his way right across the United States in a railway boxcar, and then had only just missed being elected Mayor of Oakland, California-in fact, he would have been elected if he hadn’t run on the Socialist ticket, because Socialists weren’t quite the thing in America just yet.
But they would be, he insisted, stubbing out his cigarette in his coffee cup. There would be a revolution, it was absolutely inevitable, and then the millions of people (like himself) whose birthrights had been denied would rise up and reclaim them from the capitalists who had stolen them. That Jack London was a Socialist and spoke so warmly against the destructive powers of capitalism was somewhat surprising to Nellie, because she had thought-naively, it seemed-that only capitalists could afford to eat roast duck at the Carlton.
Over their liqueurs, the conversation turned to another event that seemed to have caught Jack’s fancy, for he told the story with an amusing panache. He was walking down Hampstead Road when a bird’s nest fell out of the sky and onto the pavement in front of him. Looking up, he saw to his great surprise a woman scrambling across a roof, and then, to his delight, descending straight down an iron fire-ladder and practically into his arms, while on the street at his very elbow, the police were bustling three men into a police van. Questioning those around him, he learned that the woman who jumped off the ladder and disappeared into the crowd was none other than the editor of the Clarion, an Anarchist newspaper, and that she was escaping from a raid. He seemed to find this whole affair wonderfully amusing and stimulating.
“That would be Charlotte Conway,” Nellie said, glad that she was at last able to contribute something to the conversation, which up to that point had been mainly his. “I know her quite well, actually. In fact, I’ve already heard all about her narrow escape. She told me herself.”
Jack’s dark eyes glinted with excitement. “She told you? You mean, you know where she is?”
Nellie frowned. Things might be a bit blurry from everything she’d had to drink, but she still had her wits about her. “I know where she was,” she said cautiously. “She’s not there now.”
“Then where is she?”
Feeling that there was an odd urgency about the question, Nellie put on a mysterious smile. “Why, she could be anywhere,” she said lightly. “Those Anarchists, you know. Always so independent, never wanting to ask for anything.”
“Somehow I guessed that about her,” Jack said, half to himself. “A free spirit, nothing held back, nothing denied. Mate woman.”
Nellie frowned, puzzled by the phrase mate woman. In her experience, men (especially sailors and Aussies) considered one another as mates, and animal pairs were thought of as mates, and sometimes married people spoke of their spouses as mates. Mate woman didn’t make much sense, if Jack was thinking of Lottie.
Still, she didn’t want him to suspect that she herself was withholding something, so she only smiled and said, “That’s Lottie, a free spirit,” adding, “The last time I saw her, she had cut her hair short and disguised herself as a young man.”
“The hell you say!” Jack exploded into a raucous laugh. “A man, huh? What a woman!” Catching her curious glance, he said, still chuckling, “Well, then, if you see her, let her know I’m looking for her. I’m dying to interview her-get her opinion about the East End and what’s going on there. I’ll wager she knows more than most about what I’m interested in. As an Anarchist, that is.”
With a twinge of jealousy, Nellie thought that there might be more to it than that, but she just shrugged. “I’m sure she does,” she said, tossing her head carelessly. “Well, if I happen to run into her again, I’ll see if she wants to talk to you.”
His face darkened, and for an instant, she thought he was going to say something. But then he smiled, glanced at his watch, and hoisted himself off the settee. “Say, it’s still early, Nell. I’ve been hearing about Earl’s Court, and I want to see it. Let’s go have some fun.” And without waiting for her to reply that she was actually a little tired and would prefer to end the evening now, he was striding toward the door.
The rest of the evening-the night, really-was a blur. Nellie was more tired than she had thought, but she tried to put her weariness aside and match Jack’s boundless, boisterous energy. She had been many times to Earl’s Court, but always found it most enticing in the evening, when darkness threw a mysterious cloak of illusion and fantasy over the scene. In the center of the Court was a lake rimmed with colored lights that cast shimmering pools of color across the surface. There was an exotic stone grotto at one end and a bridge across the middle, where one could stand and watch little electric launches designed to look like gliding swans. At one side of the lake, boats full of people swept down a tall water-chute and into the water with a giant splash. From beyond the bridge Nellie could hear the sprightly sound of a German band playing a polka, and a Chinese dragon railway puffed real steam as it ran around the lake, its miniature cars filled with squealing passengers. And then there was the Exhibition Court, in which all sorts of side-shows were offered, and there was champagne to drink.
During the day Earl’s Court was always crowded with children and their nannies, but at night it attracted people of all classes: wide-eyed servant girls in their Sunday best strolling on the arms of their gawking beaux; and top-hatted men of the world squiring velvet-clad ladies decked with glittering jewelry. If any of these lovely ladies were no better than they should be, it would have been exceedingly difficult to pick them out from the others, for the multihued gaslights cast a shimmering veil over all, softening sharp features, sweetening sour tempers, and disguising illicit intentions.
With so many other well-dressed ladies around her, Nellie did not feel at all out of place in her velvet finery, although she was not entirely comfortable when Jack insisted that they tour the India Exhibit. This was a circus-like coterie of snake-charmers, jugglers, exotic (and smelly) leopards, and veiled women dancers with bare navels and bare feet, the latter much applauded by a great crowd of drunken men. In fact, by now Nellie had rather got the idea that Jack preferred the gaudy excitement and bawdy silliness of Earl’s Court to the earlier elegance of the Carlton. But perhaps that was simply the American in him. She had not known many Americans, but she had the idea that they thrived on excitement, as Jack certainly seemed to do.
She decided that this was definitely the case when he bought more champagne, and then tickets on the Big Wheel, and they found themselves sailing up and up into the cool dark night, the bright lights and sparkling music wafting eerily up out of the fog below.