He, who by understanding becomes converted to the gospel of service, will serve truth to confute liars and make them truth-tellers; will serve kindness so that brutality will perish; will serve beauty to the erasement of all that is not beautiful. And he who is strong will serve the weak that they may become strong. He will devote his strength not to the debasement and defilement of his weaker fellows, but to the making of opportunity for them to make themselves into men rather than into slaves and beasts. These words are from “The Cry for Justice,” “this humanist Holy Book,” as London called it. Such words, and actions based upon them, make precious his memory, and will preserve it as long as anything in American literature is preserved. Perhaps the best thing I can add to this chapter is a statement of what I personally owed to him--the utmost one writer can owe to another. When he was at the height of his fame, and I was unknown, I sent him proofs of “The Jungle,” explaining that I had been unable to find a publisher, and wished to raise money to publish the book myself. There are many jealousies in the literary world; some who win its laurels by bitter struggle are not eager to raise up rivals. But Jack was not one of these; he wrote a letter about the book, hailing it as “The ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ of Wage Slavery,” and rallying the Socialist movement as by a bugle-call to its support. If that book went all over the world, it was Jack London’s push that started it; and I am only one of a score of authors who might tell the same story of generous and eager support. CHAPTER CIX THE STEALTHY NEMESIS While I am writing this book death swings his scythe, and two more artists enter the ghostly marathon of Fame. The first of them is Joseph Conrad. Away back in my early days someone sent me from England a copy of his first novel, “Almayer’s Folly,” and after that I kept watch, and managed somehow to get hold of “Heart of Darkness” and “Lord Jim” and “Youth.” I used to rave about these books to everyone I knew; but when at last Conrad became famous I had a secret resentment--he had been mine for so long that I did not like to give him up to those who did not understand him! In his later writings he deteriorated, as many old men do, and I saw the critics giving to these inferior books the praise which belonged to the earlier ones. Conrad’s death has been the occasion for much discussion of the “romanticism” of his novels. The fact is that he was as realistic as he knew how to be. The reason he seems “romantic” is because the scenes and characters of his stories are remote and strange to us. But they were not at all strange to Conrad; he had sailed these Eastern seas and met these people, and their tragic fates were as commonplace to him as street-car traffic to us.