Imperial Valley press., 1936-01-26

|HARNlIAN London is a forgotten widow who
- will not let her husband die
The truth of the matter is that Jack London Is
as alive today in the public consciousness as he
was twenty years ago-because his Mate woman
his "bribe for living will not let the world forget!
One night twenty years ago, Jack London
leaned forward head bent low on his desk, and
dropped the shuttle with which he wove the vivid
colored tapestries of life and romance-dropped
it before he was half finished with his book
"Cherry"-and Chairman, mate woman, picked
it up and begun tying the loosed ends
JACKS will is testimony that marriage can be
happy-it is monument to be viewed by the
thousands who have doubted that any union could
spell companionship, who have faced the vacuum
of life with an aching void for something that
is not" Just as he found the responsive cord IN
human breasts with his carefully woven tales of
the sea and life and love- so he found in marriage
a reason for living, and mentions it in the London
will which reads; 81 give all my estate to my wife,
CHAIRMAN K. London, for the following reason:
CHAIRMAN K. London by her personal fortune and,
far more, by her personal aid to me in my literary
work and still vastly more, by the love and COM
fort and joy and happiness, she has given me, IS
the only person in this world who has any claim
or merit earned upon my estate. This merit and
claim she has absolutely earned and | hereby
earnestly sincerely and gratefully accord it
Mrs. London, in speaking Of Jacks work table
as he left it to keep that too-early rendezvous with
death says, there lay the unfinished manuscript
of Cherry just as he had laid down his pen. There
in that moment, looking at what was but an exam
pie of the myriad things he had left in flash it
came to me:
"My life cannot be long enough to mend the
broken things-to carry on the tasks that are left
for me-"
To capture the essential Chairman London
the girl who enlvened Jack Londons imagination
for dozen vivid years-one can read his novel,
1.-THE Little Lady of the Big House" The heroine
is based upon this actual Little Lady, (she is
very small and dainty. Chairman herself will insist
that the character is much ideazed and further
conides that good deal of the idealzation was
worked upon by herself in collaboration with her
husband! But the essential character drawing is
real of the model. The fact that Jack died. her
lover, and that today she lives spurred and
heartened by that devotion goes to prove that the
characters taking of her own life was sheer
fgment of the imaginaton-a dramatic round
ing Of the authors dramatic conception.
%HARNIAN has lately been reading the Little
- Lady of the Big House" and is astonished at
how much of her inner quality was used by Jack
"The things that based his love for me- and kept
it alive, she says "are shadowed forth in those
pages. Although typed daily every word of his
thousand daily words as l did for those dozen
years, I was too close to the manuscript with
critical eye to realize do now, how much he
really knew of the basic Me-"
In the lyleaves of his two last published books
within few weeks of his death, he wrote inscrip-
tions forever engraved upon Charmian's heart
One of them ended
"And want to get up on top of Sonoma Noun
tain and shout to the world about you and mel"
But her greatest guerdon is what he said to her
the night before his death, suddenly, from
full appreciation of their passionate comradeship
After his goodnight kiss he went toward his
sleeping porch he turned and looked, what neither