Picnicking sandwiches and much more food play an important part in the courtship of Billy Roberts, a wagon driver, and Saxon Brown, a laundress, in Jack London’s Valley of the Moon. Intending to propose marriage, Billy and Saxon drive into the hills beyond Oakland until, at last. they stop. “Here’s where we eat,” Billy announced. “I thought it’d be better to have a lunch by ourselves than stop at one of these roadside dinner counters. An’ now, just to make everything safe an’ comfortable, I’m goin’ to unharness the horses. We got lots of time. You can get the lunch basket out an’ spread it on the lap-robe. As Saxon unpacked the basket she was appalled at his extravagance. She spread an amazing array of ham and chicken sandwiches, crab salad, hard-boiled eggs, pickled pigs’ feet, ripe olives and dill pickles, Swiss cheese, salted almonds, oranges and bananas, and severa
l pint bottles of beer. It was the quantity as well as the variety that bothered her. It had the appearance of a reckless attempt to buy out a whole delicatessen shop.
“You oughtn’t to blow yourself that way,” she reproved him as he sat down beside her. “Why it’s enough for half a dozen bricklayers.”
“It’s all right, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she acknowledged. “But that’s the trouble. It’s too much so.”
“Then it’s all right,” he concluded. “I always believe in havin’ plenty. Have some beer to wash the dust away before we begin? Watch out for the glasses. I gotta return them.”
On the way home, Saxon reminds Billy that he ought to ask her to marry; he is too embarrassed to ask. “For half an hour he had given no recognition of her existence save once, when the chill evening wind caused him to tuck the robe tightly about her and himself. Half a dozen times, Saxon found herself on the verge of the remark, “What’s on your mind?” but each time let it remain unuttered. She sat very close to him. The warmth of their bodies intermingled, and she was aware of a great restfulness and content.” At last, Billy says, “Say, Saxon, it’s no use my holdin’ it in any longer. It’s ben in my mouth all day, ever since lunch. What’s the matter with you an’ me gettin’ married?”
*Valley of the Moon is a euphemism for the Sonoma Valley.
Featured Image: Hobart Bosworth filmed four London novels from 1913-1914. Only The Valley of the Moon is the only film lost. The cast: Myrtle Stedman as Saxon Brown; Jack Conway as Billy Roberts.
See Jack London. Valley of the Moon (1913); Hobart Bosworth. Valley of the Moon (1914). Screenplay by Hettie Grey Baker based on Jack London’s novel (1913).